Pop-cult critic Alyssa Rosenberg, at the Washington Post:
… I want to take a moment to acknowledge an area where conservatives have show particular talent and dedication: performance art.
By this I am thinking less of black box theaters and slam poetry and more of the latest provocation from Ann Coulter, who with impeccable timing and flair has declared that “Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”…
David Roth, at SB Nation:
The good thing about getting older, which is so good that it just about evens out the newly excruciating hangovers and the noisy joints and various existential conundrums, is that you no longer care quite so much about being swaddled in the right signifiers. We still notice, because we’ve been taught to notice, but eventually it begins to matter less, and then even less than that. It starts to seem like a sort of imprisonment to hide yourself away inside various branded costumes, to be reduced to the sum of your consumer preferences…
It’s different, in mostly sad ways, for those public people who are strident for a living. It is their job to be neater, louder, not-quite-themselves versions of themselves. This pays well, in many cases, but all this relentless playing to type seems awfully heavy, and awfully limiting, and awfully awful. To always be one way tends to kind of hollow out and robotize a person; pundits that have done their jobs for too long can seem to have more in common with a defective Teddy Ruxpin than with other humans.
I want to stress, here, that I am not asking you to feel any sympathy for Ann Coulter. But consider for a moment Ann Coulter’s job. It is to find the most rightmost public position on whatever is trending on Google News and then to declaim, through progressively smaller megaphones and in increasingly desperate tones, a position slightly to the right of that. Naturally, she’d need to write a column about the World Cup…
The game is to tell a bullied readership what they can and cannot like, buy and be, and then to sell them things that prove those allegiances. This is dreary work, this process of turning every aspect of public life into a campaign-style wedge issue. Still, it’s hard to argue with its success; the wary smugness and hair-trigger desperation of our popular culture is a testament to how well it works…
This is a lousy way to be, mostly, and one that seems sillier and sadder still amid these great games and all this cheering. All that self-conscious signifying that I Am Not Like Those People is, generally, a petty and self-thwarting thing. But here and now, in the middle of this brilliant, batshit World Cup, it just seems like such a waste, like a good time missed for bad and badly understood reasons…
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Apart from looking forward to enjoying what we enjoy, fashionable or not, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
Friday Evening Open Thread: Grifting as ‘Performance Art’Post + Comments (174)