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Article: Consuming culture: when our critics won't turn off the TV.('Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan' and 'The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right')(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- September 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Discussed in this essay:
Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan, by Paul Krugman. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 128 pages. $17.
The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right, by Richard Goldstein. Verso, 2002. 108 pages. $22.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that we inhabit a true democracy, though I have no idea what a true democracy would look like. In this democracy of ours, every particular event gets inflated into a symbolic event, because the only way to make sense of big, tumultuous, yet atomized America is to construct large meanings that everyone can share. So everything that happens is commented upon, analyzed, ...