{"id":10077,"date":"2005-12-15T11:41:16","date_gmt":"2005-12-15T16:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/15\/10077.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:45","slug":"beginning-of-a-very-long-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/15\/beginning-of-a-very-long-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Beginning of a Very Long Book Report: Is the American Dream Killing You?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Paul Stiles: Is the American Dream Killing You?<\/a>\n

This is another book that Your Humble Blogger obtained, pre-publication, through HarperCollins nifty FirstLook program. It’s a shame this one is so bad. I feel bad. It was free, and all. But it stinks on ice, and it made me cranky, and that’s too high a price. So, what else should I do but go on about it at great length?\n

[Ten thousand words and five weeks later: great length indeed. Here’s the thing: I started writing this up as I was reading it, and before I realized where the book was heading. My plan was to make notes for the eventual report I would give both to you, Gentle Reader, and to HarperCollins. Soon, though, I discovered that I had written four thousand words, and was only halfway through the book. I’m like that, as you know by now. The question, then, was what to do. I decided to (a) make a series of entries for this Tohu Bohu, and (b) wait to begin posting them until I had finished writing them all. This was a mistake. Still, I stuck to my mistake (it’s a thing I do), and now I have finished the damned thing. It turns out that the book wasn’t worth finishing, much less writing about in such detail. Still, I have written about it, and I think (saying so m’self) that some of what Mr. Stiles has inspired me to say is interesting in the context of our greater national conversation, not just in the context of one terrible book. So, you know, bear with me. And, please, comment. Most of all, I’m curious whether the author is just crazy, or if he is speaking for a largish section of America, whether these ideas can be dismissed, or whether we need to take them into account in our national rhetoric. And, of course, I’d like to think this isn’t all wasted pixels.]<\/I>\n

See, the really annoying thing is that on the whole, I agree with Mr. Stiles. The American Dream is killing me. It is actually shortening my life, in part by opening up choices that encourage a lazy-ass blogger like myself to do things that fuck up my chemistry, and in part by eliminated some choices that would, on the whole, be healthier than the choices that remain. I agree that we have, as a society, handed over moral agency to The Market, and that we then pretend that there is no moral cost to sticking with the choices that The Market provides us, and we have allowed ourselves to become so complacent that we hardly notice or complain about the secondary and tertiary messages with which we disagree. I agree that there are better choices, and that not only do we not make them, but we are in some cases prevented from making them. So, yes, I agree with Mr. Stiles.\nThe problem is that Mr. Stiles argues a fundamentally conservative case for all that, a case that dishonestly pretends that things Once Were Better, and that fails to take into account either the possibility for progress (rather than regress) or the fundamental fact of the universe: that it is more complex than we think it is. Mr. Stiles wants us to think that there is something new under the sun, and there is, there always is, but neither is it ever entirely new. It’s ... more complicated than that.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\nEdited to Add: I could do a search for Stiles\/Market to get all the entries on one screen, but just to get them here and stable and all, here they are:\n
A note on The Market<\/a>
\nPrologue and Introduction<\/a>
\nBurnout<\/a>
\nMeltdown<\/a>
\nThe Bubble<\/a>
\nFlatland<\/a>
\nJolts Per Minute<\/a>
\nBorrowed Time<\/a>
\nThe Ozone Hole<\/a>
\nThe Modern Gd<\/a>
\nThe Modern Gd (part the second)<\/a>
\nThe Market Curve<\/a>
\nThe Market Cross<\/a>
\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Stiles: Is the American Dream Killing You? This is another book that Your Humble Blogger obtained, pre-publication, through HarperCollins nifty FirstLook program. It\u2019s a shame this one is so bad. I feel bad. It was free, and all. But…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17619,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10077\/revisions\/17619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}