Freddie deBoer is back, and I didn't even know I missed him, but Lord, I think I did. Not only is he just about the Only True Liberal (I'll let you poke around on his blog for that one), but he's also a borderline disaffected academic humanist. Unabashed support for unions and unapologetically intelligent cultural criticism. Tally ho.
Like today's screed, about how "everything is not a remix." He takes a lot of good swipes at a lot of good targets, and I'll let you discover most of them for yourself. One of the less obvious, despite the title, is the insecurity of the aging intellectual who knows perfectly damn well that there's nothing really new about "remixes" or "mashups" as manifestations of intertextuality, but who goes along with the techno-utopian claims on their behalf made by the young, for fear of looking superannuated. 'Cause there's nothing worse, in 2011, than looking like a cranky old man, I guess.
Life is complicated. Human beings are complicated. To understand them takes work, and time. (Even pop culture is complicated - it seems to be deBoer's blind spot in this article, but hey: we all have our synchronic idiocies.) But we don't want to know that anymore.
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