I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams
Mark Dery
Abstract
Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—this book aims to make sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century. The book includes chapters on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Adolf Hitler’s afterlife on ... More
Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self—the gothic, the grotesque, and the carnivalesque—this book aims to make sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century. The book includes chapters on the pornographic fantasies of Star Trek fans, Facebook as Limbo of the Lost, George W. Bush’s fear of his inner queer, the theme-parking of the Holocaust, the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the hidden agendas of IQ tests, Santa’s secret kinship with Satan, the sadism of dentists, Adolf Hitler’s afterlife on YouTube, the sexual identity of 2001’s HAL, the suicide note considered as a literary genre, the surrealist poetry of robot spam, the zombie apocalypse, Lady Gaga, the Church of Euthanasia, toy guns in the dream lives of American boys, and the polymorphous perversity of Madonna’s big toe. The book casts a critical eye on the accepted order of things, boldly crossing into the intellectual no-fly zones demarcated by cultural warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide: controversy-phobic corporate media, blinkered academic elites, and middlebrow tastemakers.
Keywords:
self,
Star Trek,
Facebook,
George W. Bush,
Super Bowl,
IQ tests,
YouTube,
HAL,
robot spam,
big toe
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816677733 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816677733.001.0001 |
