Tag: Derek Brahney

Is it possible that anger qualifies, at this point, as a national pastime? The next it may be social media users enraged by changes to their favorite platforms. We can’t all be fighting the prevailing orthodoxy, can we? There are obvious differences in the types of power each side of this conflict could credibly suggest the other possessed. Each side looks at the world around it and sees, for the most part, the flourishing of the other. It’s less a culture war than a war over who’s already winning. “It is a pop-culture law that everything generates a backlash,” The Ringer observed earlier this year, before pointing out that the ensuing cycles of opinion — from initial hype to stubborn critiques to indignant defenses — were now so familiar they could be predicted with almost scientific precision. This is the landscape of our broader political wars. What’s fascinating is that it’s also the landscape of our innocuous pop-culture battles, over which films are underrated and which celebrities overappreciated. Questions of taste and aesthetics have always been intimately bound up with questions of status and character and overarching cultural values.