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Full Description
With radical candor and sardonic wit, Randolph Lewis offers an autopsy of the recent past, looking for glimmers of hope and redemption among the detritus strewn about by neo-Gilded Age billionaires, Big Tech, and political extremes during the first Trump administration and the pandemic era. American life took a weird turn in June 2015, when an aging reality star descended a golden escalator to announce his bid for the White House. From there, Lewis watched from his longtime home in the Lone Star State as the country slipped into an endless fever dream churning with chaos, uncertainty, and fear.
Wanting to decipher how things went sideways in such a hurry, Lewis drove all over the Sunbelt and beyond, trying to make sense of what was happening. He sojourns to an apocalyptic slab of the Mojave Desert; the rugged mountains under assault near Colorado Springs; the epic sprawl of Las Vegas, Austin, and Houston; the expat communities of central Mexico; the hotbeds of racism in the Deep South; and the fjords of Norway, from which, surreally, Lewis watched the unfolding news of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and decided to go there. In a register mournful, meditative, and darkly comic, Lewis offers a portrait of modern American life under a system whose democratic norms have been stretched to the limit.
Lewis, an American studies professor for three decades, examines the trajectories of cultural burnout that have ushered us into a new Gilded Age of fear, hustle, and hype. In this passionate critique of the anxious new world we inhabit, Lewis offers sketches of where we've ended up, why it feels so wrong, and how we might find our way out of Bummerland.
Contents
Introduction
1. The Super-Hyped, Ultra-Rich Technopolis of Despair
2. Into the Wasteland
3. Waiting for Elon
4. Plastic Passion
5. Healing Inc.
6. Testosterone
7. White Lies
8. Jewel Thieves
9. Our Degraded Chaplin
10. The Aging Process
11. Subdivision
12. Selma
13. Pigeons
14. Sensitive Man
15. Killing Us Softly
16. Behind the Pine Curtain
17. Civil War
18. Big-Box Blues
19. Under the Violet Crown
20. Rage Lava
21. The F-Word
22. Naked Lunch 2020
23. Obscene Delirium
24. Animal People
25. Dreams Never End
26. Lowered Expectations
27. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Reflux
28. Sweatshop Barbie
29. Stress Test
30. Walmart Salvation 2021
31. Norway/Uvalde
32. Vegas Loopy
33. Exile
34. Sway
35. Unobtanium
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
