The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium : American Culture on the Brink

A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that "marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit" ( The New York Times Book Review ). 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 Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety--a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic 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: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes." "Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name." -- Wired 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 Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety-a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the 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: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes." America is out of Control. It's a place where celebrity worship takes on a religious fervor; where cult prophets lead their followers to take up arms or sacrifice themselves in mass suicides; where the media are churned up by one feeding frenzy after another; where antigovernment extremists talk of secession from the union and worse. From the far left to the far right, talk radio to the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling, that democracy is profoundly imperiled. Are we on the eve of an Age of Unreason? Or are the premonitions of doom haunting America at the end of the twentieth century just millennial fever - the same mania that swept across Western civilization a thousand years ago? In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery brilliantly elucidates the method to our madness. One of our most astute cultural critics, he takes his pointed wit to American culture, revealing its deeper meanings **A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that "marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit" (__The New York Times Book Review__).**__The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium____The Atlantic__ __Wired__