Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures) by Robert Hughes

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures) Reviews

• 
  Dfordoom

  Hughes takes aim at political correctness and at our modern culture of whining. Great book. Annoy your leftist friends by buying it for them.
• 
  Phil Smith

  An outstanding book about American culture by Australian art critic Robert Hughes. I like his gritty, in-your-face assessment of the American animal. He loves his Australian heritage, to be sure, but also has a deep love for the United States. For Hughes, Australia and the United States are kindred spirits, brothers in a silly world. Put another way, this book is about tough love - showing us how ridiculous we've become but how we still have what it takes to straighten up.
• 
  Roger

  When this book was released in the early 1990s, during the height of the "cultural wars" of that time, it made quite a splash. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, much of what Hughes wrote seems to the current reader to be prophecy. The "culture of complaint" now seems to be dominant; turbo-driven by the advent of social media.
  
  Hughes' book came out of a series of lectures he gave in New York, in which he discussed in turn politics, multiculturalism, and morality in art. One of the themes that weaves throughout the book describes the way in which both the Left and Right of the political spectrum are driving the breakup of US society into its constituent parts, creating ghettos of race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.
  
  What Hughes does so well is punch holes in the idea that creating these ghettos actually "empowers" those who chose to identify with them in any meaningful way. While not for a moment suggesting that there hasn't been a hegemony of the "White West" for many centuries, the solution is not to retreat into a self-reflective circle of your own kind, or, conversly, to claim genius for works or ideas that don't deserve to be given that label. Hughes also exposes, in withering fashion, how those that would denigrate what has happened in the past use the same methods now to push their own barrows.
  
  Unfortunately we have seen, since this book was written, an increase in the acceptance of the ideas that one can't criticise if you are not part of the "group" from which the work or history eminates, or that the idea of quality when it comes to art is a suspect notion that smacks of old-fashioned imperialism. We have now entered a world that Hughes predicted in this book: groups of artists and politicians speaking only to themselves, in a language only they understand, and blaming the "other" - whoever that might be - for their lack of success.
  
  Hughes goes on to explain that this "culture of complaint" has also had an effect on those institutions that exhibit. Caught between the faux moral and religious outrage of the Right, and the equally prudish theorising of the Left, museums and galleries have played it safe with what they exhibit.
  
  As one would expect from Hughes, it is the section on visual art that has the most meat. Hughes gives us a potted history of how art has been absorbed in America, and why it is in that place in particular that art is seen as something that should be morally uplifiting and therapeutic. Hughes doubts that art can ever have those properties, in fact he believes that art is justified by its beauty alone, and that any other claims it might make - particularly political claims - are tendentious. Art doesn't change history.
  
  His final few pages explain the irony that, at the moment in history when the West has never been more open to accepting great art without any baggage of racism, sexism or homophobia, many of these previously repressed groups have retreated from the idea of entering a mainstream of cultural life. The Balkanisation of American political and cultural life does no-one any good, least of all those who were in the past marginalised.
  
  As Hughes writes, we happily accept, in the world of sport, that there are players of genius and that a rigorous selection process leaves the best at the top. The same should occur in art: new art should always be compared to the best, and strive to be the best.
  
  For those who wonder how we got to where we are today, this book is worth reading. It has aged well.
  
  Check out my other reviews at
  http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
• 
  Victorward

  Lungimirante e profetico, soprattutto se pensiamo all'anno in cui è stato scritto.
  Da far leggere a tutti gli amici radical chic, nazi-femministi, attivisti di stoc*zzo fissati con sessismo, fascismo, razzismo, omofobia e asterischi vari. Superbo.
• 
  Huma Rashid

  This book was written in the early to mid 90s. It takes shots at liberals and the religious right and conservatives, and is actually kind of funny. The author talks about wars and crippling debt and the growing power of the religious right and the fight to defund public broadcasting, but it seems tinged with hope, like things will get better.
  
  I was nearly sick to my stomach the whole time I read it because it's 15 years later and things are WORSE.
  
  I have many thoughts about and excerpts from this book. I am still updating the tag, obviously, nad have a lot left to add to it. All of that can be found
  here at my book journal.
• 
  Juan

  Read it twice. It's a great, great book. Hughes writes in a powerful way to tell the tale of PC culture gone haywire - and that was 30 years ago already!
• 
  Davide Di Tullio

  Robert Huges è un saggista e critico d'arte australiano trapiantato negli States.
  In questo brillante saggio scritto nel 1993 delinea le tendenze socio-politiche della società americana, tratteggiando un inquietante panoramica del tutto analoga a quella vissuta nell'ormai decadente e odierna cultura europea.
  Lungi dal imbastire una critica sterile, Huges porta argomenti solidi contro un certo politicamente corretto ormai imperante nella società americana. E lo fa ricordando come il multiculturalismo, da sempre fonte di ricchezza culturale per una società complessa come quella americana, sia diventata ormai sinonimo della cultura del "piagnisteo", la tendenza a difende l'orticello da parte di ciascuna minoranza (che sia essa di matrice razziale, religiosa o di orientamento sessuale), senza la ben che minima voltontà di dialogo. Il linguaggio del politicamente corretto, lungi dall'avere un fine educativo, ha trasformato le parole in eufemismi che mentono continuamente, giungendo al paradosso di fornire ai conservatori e a certa destra estremista di natura religiosa gli strumenti ideali per imporre con la retorica le peggiori scelte idelogiche, proprio quelle contro le quali la sinistra progressista si è sempre battuta.
  Questo e molto altro in un saggio a tratti complesso, ma che ci lascia qualche bagaglio in più per interpretare con razionalità certi fenomeni in atto nella nostra società.
• 
  Johnny

  Although written during the Clinton Administration, this compilation of three very seminal essays is as relevant today as when they were first published. Hughes is a historian and art critic, but Culture of Complaint qualifies as a philosophical counterbalance to Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind To be sure, there are some points where Bloom and Hughes might find agreement. Both would agree that our current culture has sold out to some inconsistent ideals of multicultural idealism, but they would have very different means of righting the ship of culture. Bloom would have us return to a purely classical monoculture, what the apostles of multiculturalism call Eurocentric. Hughes would have us celebrate our multiplicity of backgrounds without neglecting our foundation of western tradition.
  
  “In society as in farming, monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil.” (p. 14) But Hughes doesn’t follow the fetishists of ethnicity and pseudo-nationalism, recognizing much of the academic talk around multiculturalism for what it is—hot air (p. 15). As he notes: “A student can be punished under academic law for verbal offences and breaches of etiquette which carry no penalty off-campus, under the real law of the land. …But in practice it may impede the student’s progress from protected childhood to capable adulthood.” (p. 26).
  
  One of the things I enjoyed about the book was that Hughes spent equal time between cautioning concerning the PCs of political correctness and the PCs of patriotic correctness (p. 28). But the most horrifying part of the book and the most topical was how he demonstrated what prostitutes the media has become since the era of Reagan.
  
  “In the 80s, as never before in America, we saw statecraft fuse with image-management. Too many things in this supposedly open republic got done out of sight of the citizens. Or they were presented in terms that mocked public intelligence by their brevity and cartoon-like simplicity. This was known as ‘Letting Reagan be Reagan,’ and it accorded perfectly with the dictates of TV.” (p. 40) He went on to call Reagan “the world’s most successful anchorman.” (p. 41) He noted how Reagan “educated America down to his level” and “left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980,” as well as “a lot more tolerant of lies, because his style of image presentation cut the connective tissue of argument between ideas and hence fostered the defeat of thought itself.” (p. 41)
  “Celebrity politics for an age of celebrity journalism.” (p. 42)
  
  Well, that’s what we had in the 80s and it seems to have reappeared on the other side of the aisle in the 00s. Personally, I despised it then—calling Reagan the Anti-Christ (supporting my illogical rhetoric with the 6 letters in each of his names)—and I despise it now, finding myself emotionally resonating with Rush Limbaugh for the first time as he refers to the current President-Elect as “The Chosen.”
  
  I enjoyed a lot of Hughes’ metaphorical riffs in the book. He quotes Dinesh D’Souza as describing academic leftists as “Visigoths in tweed.” (p. 58) and waxes eloquently when he states that “Marxism is dead; …Its carcass will continue to make sounds and smells, as fluids drain and pockets of gas expand; …” (p. 73) Or check out this terrific bit of wisdom, “In the literary zero-sum game of Canon talk, if you read X it means that you don’t read Y.” (p. 104) Or quoting Baudelaire: “We have all of us got the republican spirit in our veins, a we have the pox in our bones: we are democratized and syphilized.” (p. 106) He really pounded the point home with “The first trouble with a rigid, exclusionary canon of Great Writing is that it can never be complete: it is always in some sense a prosthetic device, …” (p. 107).
  
  Perhaps, one of the most profound sections in the book was when he explained the development of Western Civilization as a college course by starting during WWI as a course in “war issues” designed to turn young students into “thinking bayonets.” (p. 61) After the war was over, the course was adapted into Contemporary Civilization for the purpose, not of making “thinking bayonets,” but of making students “safe for democracy.” In short, one of the courses considered foundational for college students was designed as propaganda. (p. 61)
  
  I was also intrigued by another section where he touched on a supreme irony regarding the Portland Baseline Essays. Here, Afro-centric “scholars” actually states that black children are “impelled by their genetic heritage to ‘process information differently’ from white ones—a claim which white supremacists, from their side of the fence, have been making since before the Civil War.” (p. 148) Another provocative section was when he demythologized Mapplethorpe as an artist (p. 159) , the Helms amendment (on the NEA appropriations bill) as ludicrous (p. 162), and how neo-conservatives attacked the NEA on moral grounds because, “Having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden.” (p. 171).
  
  What was most appreciated was the fact that Hughes deflates the egotistical posturing on both sides of the multicultural politically correct versus patriotically correct issue. What was saddest about the book was that he tends to blame evangelicals of all stripes, not just right-wing extremists, as adding to the polarization of the U.S. Regardless, Culture of Complaint is a fascinating work that is as relevant today as when it was initially published.
  
• 
  Federico

  Hughes’s conferences aged very poorly
• 
  Svalbard

  C’è stato un tempo felice in cui, se una persona pronunciava pubblicamente parole come “negro” o “mongoloide” nessuno aveva niente da eccepire, perché erano normali sostantivi privi di significato offensivo. Poi un bel giorno arrivarono i fanatici del politicamente corretto e decisero per conto terzi che queste, e molte altre parole, non si potevano più usare, perché erano scorrette, razziste, irrispettose. Così io, e probabilmente non solo io, quando parlo sono spesso costretto a reingoiare parole che hanno sempre fatto parte del mio vocabolario e di cui mi sento ingiustamente deprivato. Poi saltano fuori gli intelligentoni che ci vengono a spiegare che la lingua si evolve e cambia anche nei significati delle parole, e magari è anche vero, ma allora bisognerebbe epurare tutti i libri in cui la parola “negro”, per dire, è usata correntemente, e ristamparli sostituendola con “nero”, comprese evidentemente le opere di quella infame razzistona di Simone de Beauvoir pubblicate dalla famigerata casa editrice di estrema destra Giulio Einaudi. E anche questo volume, che peraltro risale solo a metà degli anni Novanta. Volume che sono corso a procurarmi non appena ho saputo della sua esistenza, con l’evidente speranza di trovare solidarietà e sollievo per il disagio e il senso di deprivazione che mi prende ogni volta che sono costretto a pronunciare parole come “nero” o “trisomico”. In effetti li ho trovati, ma ho trovato anche molto di più. Hughes è uno scrittore e critico d’arte australiano, che ha praticamente vissuto sempre negli Stati Uniti e verso i quali ha quindi potuto praticare un’opportuna visione “dall’esterno”, arrivando a percepire, anche grazie alla sua peculiare vicenda biografica, tutte le assurdità di un universo sociale e politico che si suddivide fondamentalmente tra due estremismi, quello conservatore in cui ogni aspetto della cultura deve essere accuratamente censurato e pilotato in ossequio ai sani valori della società americana, della famiglia e della religione, e quello “liberal” nell’ambito del quale al contrario nel nome della libertà d’espressione ogni cosa è legittima, arrivando a giustificare, tra l’altro proprio nel campo artistico e letterario che sono quelli che Hughes conosce meglio, le più aberranti degenerazioni, comprese quelle linguistiche del “politicamente corretto” che spesso equivale, nei fatti, a spingere la polvere sotto il tappeto e far finta che non esista, o pensare che l’eliminazione del sintomo porti alla rimozione della causa (divieto di usare la parola “nigger” - che, occorre specificarlo a beneficio dei “liberals” nostrani, non ha niente a che vedere col nostro “negro” = fine del razzismo, eccetera). Alcuni degli esempi citati è difficile spiegare se suscitino più pena o ilarità. L’aspetto grottesco sta nel fatto che - come dimostra agevolmente Hughes - negli esiti le censure di destra e di sinistra, la prima agita nel nome dei Sacri Valori Americani, la seconda in quello di un malinteso “politicamente corretto”, non sono così dissimili e producono uguale incapacità critica ed analitica, e dissesto del sistema educativo. La prima parte del libro - che, probabilmente, risulta dalla collazione di una serie di articoli pubblicati su varie riviste, o di relazioni congressuali - è più accentrata sulle vicende politiche, sociali e, va da sé, culturali e linguistiche. Gli ultimi capitoli si occupano specificamente invece di arte, e in particolare di artisti che a Hughes evidentemente non piacciono né li considera particolarmente di rottura o di importanza epocale (e spiega anche perché) ma che evidentemente hanno trovato uno spazio di mercato e di successo probabilmente proprio in funzione del loro essere rappresentativi di minoranze bisognose di riconoscimento e tutela (Mapplethorpe in quanto gay, o Basquiat in quanto negro - pardon, nero - e tossicodipendente). In conclusione un libro assolutamente da leggere (è anche scritto con un linguaggio comprensibile e fluido, molto consequenziale nei ragionamenti). Rigorosamente consigliato, anzi obbligatorio, a tutte le testine sedicenti di sinistra del PD e dintorni, giusto perché si rendano conto su che china rischiano di scivolare, ammesso che non sia troppo tardi.
• 
  RAFAEL VILLEGAS

  entre rants trasnochados ("antes teníamos a howlin'wolf ¿y ahora qué? a michael jackson) y excesos de blancocentrismo, robert hughes anota varios puntos chonchos y se anticipa (críticamente y generalmente con acierto) por un par de décadas a la exacerbación de la cultura de la queja y por lo menos por una década a la de "lo políticamente correcto". es un libro incómodo pero también cargado de un humor muy fino que habría que leer antes de que desaparezca en la hoguera de la intolerancia y el buenismo acéfalo.
• 
  Eric_W

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reviewed Robert Hughes' (author of Fatal Shore) new book, The Culture of Complaint in the April 19, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. Hughes takes aim at both the Right and the Left who are both involved with politicizing culture: "If someone agrees with us on the aims and uses of culture, we think him objective; if not, we accuse him of politicizing the debate. In fact, political agendas are everywhere and the American conservatives' ritual claim that their own cultural or scholarly positions are apolitical is patently untrue."
  But Hughes has little time for the "hoary Victorian notions" about how art and literature can be uplifting. For example, the most universally recognized painting of the century, "Guernica" had no effect whatsoever on the conduct of the Spanish Civil War nor on Franco in particular. (One could even speculate that watching the Brady Bunch might have been more formative socially to larger numbers of people given the pervasiveness of visual media.)
  "Joe Sixpack isn't looking at the virtuous feminist knockoffs of John Heartfield on the Whitney wall -- he's got a Playmate taped on the sheetrock next to the band saw, and all the Barbara Krugers in the world aren't going to get him to mend his ways."
  Hughes does worry about the fragmentation of American life; the "us" vs. "them" rhetoric that "John Mitchell called 'positive Polarization.'" We are in deep trouble when "'sensitivity' gets more attention than social justice. Behind our propensity for offering lexical redress to political grievances, [Robert Hughes] suspects, is the hope of creating 'a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.'"
  Ironically, he suggests the cry from the right that Afrocentrism is a political movement is backwards. "The trick of Afrocentrism is to have supplanted real politics with a kind of group therapy. It seeks to redress the problem of poor self-esteem [borrowing language from the ubiquitous self-therapeutic movement] rather than the problem of poor life chances....Afrocentric education is presented [by its proponents] as a technique of social control, one that will contain what white America fears most -- black violence --...culture as therapy....self-love makes the world go round." The problem, of course, is that self-esteem is not just difficult to measure; it doesn't correlate with the behavior it's supposed to support. As sociologist Neil Smelser reported in a 1989 survey "The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent...even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two."
  Hughes is a proponent of multiculturalism. "...monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil. The social richness of America ... comes from the diversity of its tribes. Its capacity for cohesion, for some spirit of common agreement on what is to be done, comes from the willingness of those tribes not to elevate their differences into impassable barriers and ramparts."
  The reviewer suggests that "diversity" is something of a "distraction from the more serious issues of racial immiseration [you won't find this in your little Webster's, at least I didn't -- It means a state of making miserable, great word] and economic inequality." Gates contends that the ubiquitous media or "Coca[cola]-culturalism is far more significant for the destruction of diversity -- that in Nepal ancient Hindu religious practices have been disrupted by the BBC World Service and Michael Jackson more than indigenous social fragmentation and the same thing has happened in the United States -- a kind of corporate culturalism -- which will destroy the individuality of diverse cultures.
• 
  Daniel Benshana

  Robert Hughes The Culture of Complaint
  
  Thoughts 20 years after publication
  
  
  Hughes' assumption that because we worshipped readily in the past we are always seeking to worship something – supported by a quote from Auden - is a paradigm I do not accept. Even when worshipping gods the 'mystery' in religion was a strong force and just because people want to believe in mysteries now now does not mean they worship them. The conspiracy theories we see everywhere are the banal ravings of people who have no political power and have not learned that this not the only or the strongest, power available to individuals.
  
  He states at the outset he is not a citizen of the USA. That and his age make it useful to him to comment upon American culture as he has one foot in history. He then denigrates modern society, its loss of focus on anything much but victim-hood as an excuse never to take blame for one's own actions. To this we can quote Tacitus Histories, 'and how should it be otherwise, if the father ceases to give a laudable example?' (Book 2 chapter 4, paragraph 52. Trans Arthur Murphy) Throughout his book I did have problems wondering if anything he said was new or different from what commentators upon society have said for two thousand years.
  
  He is right though that political correctness in its attempts to change language without changing education and therefore the foundations where ignorance grows, has done nothing but create a mass of new euphemisms. Words do matter, they will hurt, but it is ignorance that kills.
  
  His important, unspoken, critique of American politics is true of all politics in democratic society; there will always be an element of fascism in any and all laws and mores.
  
  On the other hand seeing multiculturalism as a new form of communism because it seeks to bring everyone under one umbrella society goes too far because acceptance in order to stem bigotry and ignorance, is not the same as demanding conformity.
  
  Andrew Riemer's quote on 'cultural nationalism' is where these lectures really begin because multiculturalism is not a call for nations to be inclusive but a challenge to live in the world as we have colonised it. He is right that revisiting history has destroyed many national myths – and rightly so.
  
  Yet his argument that everything in America devolves into the kitsch is ultimately searing. That museums and art galleries are locked into funding rounds that nod towards public morality. That Modernism is, in fact, a euphemism for 'publicly funded' (my deduction not his).
  
  He claims there is a war for culture. That political prestige from cultural good works is mixed with the vision of public morality within the governments of States. Art, he says, is another therapy in a therapy culture.
  
  His final comments, on how awed American were when they toured Europe in the 1850s goes to the heart of of his critique of the avant guarde in the USA. America has not produced an artist on a par with the best in Europe. Maybe she hasn't had the time. Maybe she hasn't had enough wars on her soil to get the grit into the consciousness of artists that makes the pearls. Or maybe she doesn't want them.
  
  The point of Hughes' lectures is to inspire debate. He makes many good points. He may be angry but his anger has its own strength of character. He isn't looking to define art or aesthetics but he does demand that no one's narrow minded political opinion rule a whole country.
• 
  Kevin Tole

  The late Robert Hughes was never a dull read and quite often an inspired critic. There are those that would say that Hughes was the conservative of the pack. For sure there was a lot more insight in the criticism coming from his pen as opposed to the pretty-pretty world of all the Graham-Dixon's. This book comes out of three lectures that Hughes gave in either 1988 or the early 90s.
  
  Hughes berates the populist Right of Amerika as well as the left/liberal side which can only come up with rampant PCisms to fight the drag-down into the gutter of uniformity which the right wants to proceed with.It’s what might be termed these days as Issue Politics –v- Neoliberalism. Its a wonderful three episode polemic full of finely turned pieces of prose and acerbic quotations. Hughes has little time for the kultural midgets of the museum, the right-on brigade, and he takes that further with a look at the emasculated and dumbed-down world in general. Remember this was all delivered way back in the early 90s so there was still a looooonnnngggggggggggg way to go. But Hughes was as upset enough at what he saw as the dragging down of American society into petty debates, that he produced some real quality rants.
  
  Hughes isn't always right or even right-on (which is why he was dubbed The Conservative Critic by the liberal arts community). And he would be the last one to set himself up as the demagogue with all the answers. He has as many attacks against the liberal PC right-on-ers as well as the Pro-Life body-and-mind fascists. But that’s where the reader comes in. You pays yer money, reads and makes yer choices. Or like me you write addenda, remarks, asterisks lines, underlines and notes and references all over the book.
  
  I think its a brilliant piece of mind exercise.
• 
  K.

  Among the most rewarding of recent rereads, given its startling prescience. Based on a series of lectures given in New York a little over a quarter-century ago, collected and adapted as “Culture of Complaint,” the acerbic Australian art critic Robert Hughes located and illuminated a “ground zero” of cultural moments in his adopted country that have since burgeoned into what we’re witnessing today, with certain extremes now in play that even Hughes, had he lived to see it, might not have thought possible. Assuming for the moment that “commonsense diatribe” is workable, that’s the best description of Hughes’ whip-smart, wide-ranging criticisms, most of which are hard to argue with. It also has the benefit of containing a little something for everyone, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum, while never coming off as muddled or equivocal.
• 
  Procyon Lotor

  Imprescindibile aiuto contro i sensi di colpa Robert H. affronta la saga del (ugh!) politically correct in tre conferenze acute e ficcanti. Sarebbe stato pi� Bastard Contrario con qualche digressione in meno � un po' di ferocia in pi�. (ecco il perch� della stella in meno). Il Politically Correct � una peste non un raffreddore per cui caro - Mr Hughes - il DDT � mooolto meglio dello uno spray nasale... Con qualche piccolissimo adattamento � un libro totalmente accostabile alla corrente situazione AKA "pantano" socioculturale nel nostro paese. [Mi vanto di cercare personalmente i miei tartufi ma qui avevo mancato completamente: il libro era stato debitamente tradotto poco dopo la comparsa ma io ne ho avuto notizia solo nel gennaio 2007!]
• 
  Louis

  3.5/5
  
  A clinical and enjoyable look at the American academic system's descent into theory and identitiy politics, which seems rather prophetic (considering it was written in the early 90's). Hughes is even more critical of the Republican party and its extreme Puritan views, Reagan gets the sharp end for making US politics so image based and ruining the traditional way of business. He also dismantles the the claim that University courses (Western Civ) have been "neutral" or apolitical until now.
• 
  Evan

  I've had this on my shelf for years. Its targets seem varied and no party line appears safe. I think I bought it because I somehow believed it espoused the conservative line (this was when I was more sympathetic to that brand of viewpoint). Luckily, it's not something Rush's crowd can trot out in its defense. I hope to give this book a read soon.
• 
  Tim

  
  
  I would LOVE to get hold of this book again, given the reading I have done on America and art since then. At the time (late 90s) I loved it, but as an artist trained in a more modernist environment, I was suspicious of postmodernism in the art world, sometimes justifiably so, but I realise now, also often out of ignorance.
• 
  Richard

  A dated collection of lectures in which the author spends 244 pages complaining. Disclaimer: I skimmed.
• 
  Brian

  One of my favorite books of all time.
• 
  Benjamin

  This book is certainly a worthwhile read, not least because it shows that the debates that currently permeate the Western cultural and academic spheres are not some recent phenomena.
  
  Not knowing anything about the author, I was somewhat afraid by the title and blurb of this book as it led me to suspect that it was going to be a rather one-sided sneer at 'those crazy lefties'. Now, whilst there is certainly plenty of grievance levelled at 'PC', for Hughes this is an acronym applied to both the Left and Right (political and patriotic correctness respectively) and throughout the three lectures that make up the text he raises various examples that, mostly, highlight the hypocrisy found in the arguments conscripted by two dogmatic, irreconcilable factions.
  
  Some of these examples are a little dated, with many of the contemporary (1992) names raised going straight over the head of a British twenty-something such as myself. Indeed, the terminology he uses on occasion might strike the younger reader as a relic of a bygone age, though it would be, perhaps, to miss the point of some of Hughes' more salient arguments if we judge him too harshly for this.
  
  Reassuringly, I found myself alternating between agreement and disagreement throughout (it is always depressing to discover that a book has caused no conflict within you). In both instances, however, Hughes argues with great clarity (dated references not withstanding) and wit and I enjoyed the ride as a result.
  
  In short, this is a well-written and still relevant piece of critical literature that cannot help but enrich its readers' perspective through either acceptance or refutation. Naturally, this comes with the advisory note that America is not the world entire.
• 
  Alessandra

  È un’analisi della situazione politica e sociale degli Stati Uniti, e di un po’ tutto il mondo occidentale, degli anni Novanta ma, superato il “fastidio” di leggere qualcosa relativo a venti anni fa (quasi trenta, perché l’anno delle conferenze di Hughes è il ‘92), si trovano spunti molto interessanti e sorprendentemente attuali. Brevi esempi:
  
  “Le trasmissioni delle reti televisive americane sono per lo più robaccia destinata a produrre carenza di realtà”; “...sono mutate proprio le parole che descrivono la comprensione degli avvenimenti: una delle vittime, tra le decine, e stata la “percezione”, che una volta denotava una visione delle cose aderente alla realtà, mentre negli anni Ottanta è venuta a significare “opinione” e infine “illusione” o “cantonata”.”
  
  “Ma la promessa basilare del marxismo, un’Internazionale di lavoratori uniti da interessi comuni in quanto forza transnazionale, si è rivelata un’assoluta chimera. Il nazionalismo sopravvive. Mezzo secolo dopo la morte di Hitler, le bande neonaziste tedesche fanno manifestazioni, tengono concerti di “rock dell’odio” e bruciano immigrati turchi nei loro letti; in Italia una nipote di Mussolini è in politica. Invece, quarant’anni dopo la morte di Stalin non c’è in nessuna parte d’Europa uno schietto credente marxista al potere o vicino al potere.”
  
  “La sinistra accademica è molto più interessata a questioni di sesso e razza che non di classe; (...) Ciò permette ai suoi luminari di sentirsi all’avanguardia del cambiamento sociale senza doversi affannare in ricerche sul campo; e la “sinistra tradizionale” è rimasta un bel tratto indietro, impelagata nei dimessi e rifritti discorsi sugli operai”.
  
  E tanto, tanto altro.
• 
  Mike

  This collection of three essays – updated from three lectures, according to Hughes in the Introduction – is an insightful and incisive understanding of a nation that could only have been written by an emigrant who grew up elsewhere but has lived in (and loved) the States for decades. Hughes pulls no punches as he describes the twin forced pulling apart the fabric of the nation: political correctness and patriotic correctness.
  
  The former was a hot buzzword when this book was published in 1992, referring to an American culture that tried a noble attempt at inclusivity and social equity, but ultimately overcorrected to the point of creating the left’s version of McCarthyism: censorship, blacklisting, and banishment from the public discourse if one happened to espouse the wrong view. It went beyond holding people accountable for horrid actions and views to become a kind of retribution for merely not holding the correct opinion of the day. All nuance was lost. The latter (“patriotic correctness”) may very well have been coined by Hughes, for all I know. He uses it to describe the extreme right holdovers from that very McCarthy era who ironically used P.C. culture as a straw man excuse to continue spewing their vile racism, homophobia, and xenophobia under the guise of religious purity or moral sanctity, even though it was neither. Hughes targets, in particular, Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan.
  
  If this sounds like he was writing about our very era, then you will understand the prophecy of this book, as the battle lines seem to have become even more entrenched over the last three decades.
• 
  Kristin Harley

  It's haunting to reread this now in the context of the current culture wars - not only between the left (where I still locate myself) and the right, but also between rationalism and irrationalism, which is no longer the sole province of either side.
  The specter of activists finding toxic masculinity (it was called "phallocentrism" then) in Little Dorit while the world changes in ways these backward-looking activists cannot imagine especially rings true to me today, in which ostensive "freethinkers" and science-literate atheists engage in the same eyeballing, logical fallacies, and emotional appeals we derided in creationists and intelligent design theorists.
  Another salient point by Hughes is the puritanical, simplistic, and psychologically illiterate idea that literature and art must be "good for us" and teach moral lessons, not an expansive and experiential realm in which one can explore even the most uncomfortable monsters in one's self. Hughes derides the vulgar use of literature by new-fangled Carrie Nations to either enact trendy societal platitudes and behaviors, or to ban and disappear "dangerous" works outright.
  The language, terminology, and situations are dated, but that is an advantage, since this collective hysteria comes around every 20-30 years or so, and the book being grounded in its time effectively makes that point.