|
Navigate Books of the Month: Drawing
from Life Red
Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America A
Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency Half
and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural Split:
a Countercultural Childhood Previous Books of
the Month: |
PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE Red
Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America
by Joe Queenan
America's popular culture is often shockingly bad, but some people just can't accept that. All-around critic Joe Queenan, a man who hates everything that isn't obscurely elite, embarked upon a harrowing journey into the bowels of populism to discover just how low our culture can go. There he found such terrifying examples as movie sequels, John Tesh, Cats, Joan Collins novels and the salad bar at Sizzler. He recorded his trip in Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon. Instead of shaking his head at the awfulness of the middle masses, Queenan becomes annoyed, even incensed, by the mediocrity. "At a certain level," he writes, "I had now begun to hope that everything I encountered would suck in a megasucky way and was honestly disappointed when some proved merely cruddy." To his surprise, he happens upon cultural disasters that he expects to despise yet ends up enjoying. He is bowled over by Barry Manilow. He devours novels by Martin Cruz Smith and Ken Follett. The Sizzler is a big hit with his family, "particularly with my two children, who are fast tiring of impaling themselves on Dad's Catherine wheel of mordant irony." Eventually, Queenan's greatest fear is realized: He shakes Geraldo Rivera's hand and catches the communicable disease of bad taste. He quickly spirals downward into the cultural pits-- at about the same time, coincidentally, he's writing reviews for TV Guide. At first he dives into his addiction, eating at Taco Bell, reveling at Renaissance fairs and gorging on B movies, bad books, boring Broadway shows and barfy television. When he hits bottom, he travels to France in an attempt to purge himself of American pop culture. The result is predictable; even Lourdes can't wash him clean. He then wallows in New-Age healing books, obsessing upon Deepak Chopra for a while but never achieving true enlightenment. Even pilgrimages to Las Vegas and Branson, Mo., can't break the hideous spell. Queenan is nearly smart enough to pull off his übersnob routine--he makes one wonder why he has the right to be so judgmental--but he is certainly funny enough. His biting sense of humor conveys every frustration a normal person has ever felt toward modern baseline Americana. He embraces the fact that crap is the United States' greatest natural resource, our biggest worldwide export. He hates pop culture; he loves pop culture. His journey will certainly speak to those other conflicted people who buy People magazine secretly and then ridicule it publicly. And it's much better to read Queenan's attack in small dose than listen to these rants coming from the stool next to you at T.G.I.Friday's cocktail lounge. --Susan Wickstrom |
originally published July 29, 1998