SORE WINNERS

A bittersweet, breezy, smart look at current politics in the larger context of American culture—or what passes for it.

“If Bill Clinton was the classical analog president—eager to hug the whole world and make everyone love him—Bush is our first fully digital model.” So observes LA Weekly editor and media columnist Powers, who bravely admits that he reads books, doesn’t have anything in particular against the French, and reckons that even if Bush supporters are fundamentally and irrevocably wrong, “they are ordinary people who want a safe, orderly life for themselves and their kids and fear that American culture has lost its moral bearing.” As perhaps it has. Certainly it’s lost any sense of manners, which explains why we’re now overrun by “bad winners,” “bragging, sneering, lording it over the losers, and promoting themselves with a crassness that would leave Duddy Kravitz blushing.” Thus Bill O’Reilly gloats over how many books he sells, Dennis Miller crows that Americans ought to be kicking ass wherever we go, and Ann Coulter fills the air with cryptofascist bleatings about how liberals are traitors. Bush, Powers suggests, is the worst of the bad losers, behaving as if he has some sort of mandate from the American people when he squeaked—some might even say stole—into office. Powers takes brilliant turns, as when he carefully compares-and-contrasts Osama bin Laden and Dubya (both trust-fund kids, both veterans of heavy partying in their youth who discovered religion and, worse, now think in “the glossy black-and-white of the faithful”). If his arguments get a little diffuse when his gaze shifts from Bush to the larger culture, Powers sneaks in enough right-on digs at current icons—Schwarzenegger, Reagan, and even, in a nice bit of table-turning, Michael Moore (“thanks to a president he thoroughly detests, his share of the Ownership Society keeps getting bigger”)—to cover the price of admission.

Solid work from a cultural critic who merits a broader audience.