Also in the San Francisco Chronicle, literary aesthete Mike Davis dons his tin foil beanie and gets the Angstfest back on message. He says the recall was all the fault of talk radio:
The mainstream media has done a poor job of documenting the organization of the recall at the grassroots level where AM radio voices like Roger's, or his counterpart Eric Hogue's in Sacramento, rouse thousands of mini- Terminators.Ruh Oh! And Mikey tries his hand at pop psychology too:
Arnold Schwarzenegger does add something genuinely novel to the mix. He is not just another actor in politics but an extraordinary lightning rod, both in his movie persona and in real life, for dark, sexualized fantasies about omnipotence.Woohoo!
But the best part? Mikey establishes his literary street cred by dragging in terminally morose author Nathanael West:
In his classic novel "The Day of the Locust" (1939), he clearly foresaw that fandom was an incipient version of fascism. On the edge of Hollywood's neon plains, he envisioned the unassuageable hungers of California's petty bourgeoisie.Whine on, dude!
But it does make me wonder. In Mikey's world can every racial, economic, and social group be angry except the middle class? I guess that in Mikeyworld it is the job of the middle class to just suck it up and pay for socialist fantasies. The bad news for Mikey and his pals is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are middle class.
