The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink

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From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium", Mark Dory says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dory elucidates thc meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like thc Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety -- a combination of thc social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and thc paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through thc extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, "Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: thc best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes".