Culture of Complaint: Fraying of America - Hardcover

Hughes, Robert.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002730022 ISBN 13: 9780002730020

Publisher: Harvill, 1994

Synopsis

The best-selling author of The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, and Barcelona here delivers a withering polemic aimed at the heart of recent American politics and culture.
Culture of Complaint is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America--a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies"). To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theory ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell"). PC censoriousness and "family-values" rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present--and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War.
In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80s, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core"--a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism." It resembles "late Rome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives."
Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth." And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defence of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world--and other Americans.
Here, then, is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1938, Robert Hughes has been the art critic of Time since he moved from Europe to the United States in 1970. His books--The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, Nothing if Not Critical, Barcelona--have won many awards in Australia, America, and Europe, most recently (1992) the international El Brusi prize for literature and communications given by the Olimpiada Cultural in Barcelona.

Review

"Perhaps the most sensible book that has been written on the vexed subjects of multiculturalism and 'political correctness.'....Culture of Complaint is a wonderful handheld-camera tour of the Dumb Zones of American life, and as such provides more than enough intelligent
pleasure."--Artforum

"Focusing on the contemporary art world, university censorship controversies, the politics of grants, pop culture, and the mostly contrived and contradictory uproar about the Western canon, Hughes--in language free of theory and academic duckspeak--not only criticises and condemns, but offers
solutions as well....In his independence of mind he reminds one of other writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Stanley Crouch, Christopher Lasch and Henry Louis Gates, Jr."--The Portland Alliance

"Hughes has the ability to antagonize everyone while bringing fresh angles of vision to the discussion."--Christian Century

"Hughes has proven himself a remarkably thorough historian and cosmopolitan social analyst....Hughes here offers a prickly, sarcastic precis of the country where he's happily resided for the last 22 years."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hughes brings to the currently white-hot topic of U.S. cultural values an outsider's appprehension of what is distinctly American and a domestic reporter's knowledge of U.S. cultural particulars....Never deserted by his rapier wit, Hughes delivers the most enjoyable, most sensible
contribution to date of the American cultural debate."--Booklist

"It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughs offers here."--Kirkus Reviews

"Thoughtful, passionate, witty, closely argued attack on American extremism and its consequences....A provocative and compelling piece of social commentary."--Newport News Daily Press

"An inescapably quotable bible of intellectual common sense."--David Denby in The New Republic

"Robert Hughes is mad as hell. And as anyone remotely familiar with his art reviews in Time magazine knows, when Hughes gets angry he is at his best....He is characteristically eloquent in Culture of Complaint."--The San Diego Union

"Hughes deftly illustrates the inadequacy of our current responses to perceived social and political problems."--The Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0002730022
• ISBN 13: 9780002730020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224