Looking at the 2004 book Sore Winners (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America, I'm fairly certain that the author, John Powers, and not the publisher, chose the title. It isn't just a catchy title; it captures the book's central theme. Here is a book that runs through discussions of the Bush Administration, FOX News, Enron, Michael Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, American Idol, reality TV, Harry Potter, Eminem, and a range of other topics and personalities too numerous to list here. What's a little incredible is that he sticks to a coherent message the whole time. That message is: the essence of Bush-era culture is being a sore winner, or winning without dignity.
I'm wondering how many people here remember the book. I greatly enjoyed it when it first came out, and I've never read anything quite like it before or since. Powers approaches the relationship between politics and entertainment in an intellectual, but still witty and lively, manner. Here is a representative passage:
With rare exceptions, a president's relationship to the broader American culture is a matter of aura and metaphor, counterpoint and parody--like the way that charges of voter fraud on American Idol 2 became a parody of Al Gore's defeat in Florida. During the Bush years, there has been no spectacular cultural flowering as there was during the Gay Nineties, the Jazz Age, or the Swinging Sixties. In fact, the most striking cultural development has been the one that didn't happen. It was predicted--and sometimes prescribed--that the bracing slap in the face of September 11 would get a country stoned on frivolity to sober up, remove its party hat, and get down to the hard business of being the last great hope of mankind. We would once again become patriotic, unified, serious--the Second-Greatest Generation. (p. 245)
Though Powers sees in contemporary show biz a reflection of what happens on the political stage, he is not attacking the products but praising them. He defends some of reality TV as "superbly contrived works of pop culture" (p. 257). He even regards icons like Harry Potter and Spider-Man as representative of the era: "What makes today's superhero yarns distinctive is that they have very little to do with their protagonists' superpowers and everything to do with their neuroses, discomfort with their gifts, and need to learn how to handle their supremely unconventional talents" (p. 167).
While Powers hails unabashedly from the left of the political spectrum (he voted for Nader in 2000 and lived to regret it), he is not a simplistic brow-beater of Michael Moore's ilk, an approach that has become all too common these days. He recognizes that many of the issues the left feels most passionately about are not black-and-white. While no fan of Bush, he worries that many Bush-bashers, despite repeated denials, have become a mirror image of the Clinton-haters of yesteryear.
[P]age by page, the anti-Bush bestsellers were vastly better documented and less delusional than those still-coming screeds that paint Clinton as a raping, drug-dealing, Osama-coddling traitor who murdered his friend (and Hillary's putative lover) Vincent Foster. At the same time, the Bush-bashing fiesta took us all one step deeper into a Good vs. Evil political universe in which the left, like the fundamentalist right, feels obliged to believe in demons. (p. 56)
As to the suggestion that Michael Moore speaks for the left, Powers asserts, "I suddenly grasped how irked and embarrassed countless African-Americans must be when Al Sharpton is both presumed and assumed to represent their point of view" (p. 295). But he also has some praise for Moore: "The left has no need to cut Moore loose, whose work offers no call to violence or explosion of anger. On the contrary, he performed two valuable services. He put class politics back on the table and provided an antidote to what has so long bedeviled the left: its tendency to think and act like a humorless elite still feeding on memories of the sixties" (p. 297).
Powers laments that right-wing media is generally glitzier and sexier and overall better at staying on message than its left-wing counterparts, who have come to seem sour and almost prudish in their attacks on American consumerism. In his words, "Today, it's the right that offers freedom, fun, and authenticity.... [The left] failed to create its own book of virtues that includes compassion for the poor, fairness to workers, honesty toward the public. Who cares if Dubya only has sex with Laura if he's in bed with every CEO in the country?" (pp. 346-8).
One of my favorite passages from the book comes when he considers the Democratic candidates from the 2004 presidential election:
I sometimes fantasized about the ideal Frankenstein candidate one could stitch together from the contenders. He would have the passion of Dean, the good looks and trial-lawyer eloquence of Edwards, the physical stature and gravitas of Kerry, the brains and records of Wesley Clark, and the left-wing dreams of Kucinich--topped off by the sharp wit, and incomparable hairdo, of Al Sharpton. But such daydreams all too easily turned into nightmares: I kept picturing Kerry's yard-long face atop Dean's ham of a neck, framed by Kucinich's hairline and Wesley Clark's sweaters, and talking about Tawana Brawley with all the moral smugness of Joe Lieberman. The scariest thing was, I thought even this second jerry-built Democrat would be a better president than George W. Bush. And I surely wouldn't have been the only one. (pp. 350-1)
The prescience is striking. Did the Democrats find, in Barack Obama, their ideal Frankenstein candidate? Has Obama truly ended the era of sore winners rather than become one himself? And have those sore winners been exposed for what they really are after they stopped being winners? It sure looks like it to me. But you may disagree.