Thursday, April 27, 2006
Go read Thomas Frank ripping apart Joe Klein's new book ... too good to excerpt.
I've always liked Thomas Frank. In the nineties I used to often buy political journals at random. Sometimes they would turn out to be rightwing which is how I became fascinated with the neoconservative movement, but sometimes they would turn out to be great things like Thomas Frank's The Baffler, alas, apparently no longer around. The Baffler was a wonderful creation; full of pieces you'd never read anywhere else, laments for Nelson Algren's Chicago at a time in which its bobo-ization was becoming complete and other antidotes to the pro-market hysteria of the mid-nineties.
Anyway, Thomas Frank's fortune has changed. He's no longer the editor of an obscure journal, because What's the Matter with Kansas? was released at a lucky moment, a moment of Democratic self-doubt and navel-gazing about the blue state/red state divide. Frank has become a bigtime second- or third-tier pundit, but make no mistake he's one of us -- it's just that because of a historical accident he hasn't been quite relegated to the shabby little hard leftist table of the media universe.
I've always liked Thomas Frank. In the nineties I used to often buy political journals at random. Sometimes they would turn out to be rightwing which is how I became fascinated with the neoconservative movement, but sometimes they would turn out to be great things like Thomas Frank's The Baffler, alas, apparently no longer around. The Baffler was a wonderful creation; full of pieces you'd never read anywhere else, laments for Nelson Algren's Chicago at a time in which its bobo-ization was becoming complete and other antidotes to the pro-market hysteria of the mid-nineties.
Anyway, Thomas Frank's fortune has changed. He's no longer the editor of an obscure journal, because What's the Matter with Kansas? was released at a lucky moment, a moment of Democratic self-doubt and navel-gazing about the blue state/red state divide. Frank has become a bigtime second- or third-tier pundit, but make no mistake he's one of us -- it's just that because of a historical accident he hasn't been quite relegated to the shabby little hard leftist table of the media universe.
