I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Contents

Contents Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad Thoughts Bruce Sterling xiii Introduction 1 american magic, american dread Dead Man Walking What Do Zombies Mean? 1i Gun Play An American Tragedy in Three Acts 18 Mysterious Stranger Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side 27 Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back. On Lady Gaga 35 Jocko Homo How Gay Is the Super Bowl? 48 Wimps, Wussies, and W. Masculinity, American Style 57 Stardust Memories How David Bowie Killed the ’60s, Ushered in the ’70s, and, for One Brief Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip 64 When Animals Attack! An Aesop’s Fable about Anthropomorphism 71 Toe Fou Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe 81 Shoah Business 87 The Triumph of the Shill Fascist Branding 94 Endtime for Hitler On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglorious Return of Der Führer 101 myths of the near future Making Sense of the Digital Age World Wide Wonder Closet On Blogging 115 (Face)Book of the Dead 122 Straight, Gay, or Binary? HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet 135 Word Salad Surgery Spam, Deconstructed 146 Slashing the Borg Resistance Is Fertile 151 Things to Come Xtreme Kink and the Future of Porn 159 tripe soup for the soul Religion and All Its Works and Ways Tripe Soup for the Soul The Daily Affirmation 169 Pontification On the Death of the Pope 175 The Prophet Margin Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse 182 2012 Carnival of Bunkum 188 The Vast Santanic Conspiracy 193 anatomy lesson The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters Open Wide Dental Horror 205 Gray Matter The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries 212 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head 219 Been There, Pierced That Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation of Subcultural Hostilities 234 Death to All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal 240 Great Caesar’s Ghost On the Crypt of the Capuchins 245 Aphrodites of the Operating Theater On La Specola’s Anatomical Venuses 252 Goodbye, Cruel Words On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre 260 Cortex Envy Bringing Up Baby Einstein 265 Acknowledgments 279 Notes 281 Publication History 315 This page intentionally left blank ...