Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism


Book Description

They are the cheated, they are the crushed, they are the cursed. They pray for the Day of the Locust when the Swarm will deliver them. The sirens are sounding. The locusts are coming. Where will you hide? The world is full of the cheated. That's why the world is about to blow up. Nearly everyone belongs to the cheated. Who's doing the cheating? It's the 1%. Why do the 99% endure it? They always have. That's the great mystery. Get out of the way of the Swarm. No one gets out of this alive. When the Swarm arrives, judgment is delivered and the sentence carried out. The locusts are heading to Hollywood to destroy it. That's where the myths are created that keep the 1% in power. That's the laboratory of fraud, the factory of illusions. The locusts will turn it into a Valley of Ashes. Tinseltown will be set on fire. They're gonna burn it down. Shall we all cheer? Locusts start off as individuals before they join the collective. That's when they become powerful, an unstoppable force of nature. Hollywood is the home of liberalism, but is it liberal at all? Isn't it devoted to a narcissistic, super-rich cabal trying to get inside everyone's heads and convert them to the strange religion of celebrity worship? The Beatles said they were more famous than Jesus Christ. Celebrities have displaced the old gods and become the new gods, just as the Olympians pushed the Titans off Mount Olympus and became the new rulers of the world. Come inside and explore the strangest of worlds – the one where you join with the locusts to devour Tinseltown, and, with hope in your heart and a smile on your face, march through the Valley of Ashes.




American Stutter: 2019-2021


Book Description

As Jonathan Lethem put, Steve Erickson's journal of the last 18 months of the Trump Presidency "sears the page." Erickson, one of our finest novelists, has long been an astute political observer, and American Stutter, part political declaration, part humorous account of more personal matters, offers a particularly moving reminder of the democratic ideals that we are currently struggling to preserve. Written with wit, eloquence, and a controlled fury as event unfold, Erickson has left us with an essential record of our recent history, a book to be read with our collective breath held.* Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels and two books about American culture. For 12 years he was founding editor of the national literary journal Black Clock. Currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement award.




All that is Solid Melts Into Air


Book Description

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.




The Armageddon Conspiracy


Book Description

King Solomon is one of the Bible's most famous figures, responsible for building the Holy Temple that housed the Ark of the Covenant. Yet Solomon died as an apostate. How could a man fabled for his wisdom reach the conclusion that God was false? The Armageddon Conspiracy reveals the answer to this greatest Biblical mystery. The Temple of Solomon was not the house of God at all but a special chamber designed to contain a unique weapon, for which Solomon had the most astounding purpose in mind. Solomon, a man obsessed with witchcraft and magic, believed he had found the key to the supreme mystery of life, but he died before he could complete his mission. The world's oldest secret society, of which Solomon was the Grand Master, still exists and now its members are about to perform the final cataclysmic ceremony Solomon had planned for so long.




Costs of War


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Critical Crossings


Book Description

"I did not think it was possible to say something new about the New York intellectuals. I was wrong. Jumonville takes a unique approach: he shows why their ideas mattered--and still do. This book rekindles one's faith in the intellectual enterprise."--Alan Wolfe, author of Whose Keeper? "So much has been written on the New York intellectuals they may someday attain the historiographical status of Perry Miller's Puritans and F. O. Matthiessen's Transcendentalists. Jumonville's excellent book demonstrates why the subject deserves fresh study. . . . Rises above ideological rancor to achieve empathy and thoughtful, judicious reflection."--John Patrick Diggins, author of The American Left in the Twentieth Century




In Defense of Lost Causes


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No Marketing Blurb




As a City on a Hill


Book Description

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill," John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop's text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since. As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop's words--from Winthrop's own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln's haunting reference to this "almost chosen people," to the "city on a hill" that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump. As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop's words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of "timeless" texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.