Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America [Hardcover]

John Powers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 2004

The dollars are green. The terror level is orange. And everybody’s seeing red. Welcome to Bush World.

Rich, scary, and insanely polarized, America is living through one of the wildest eras in its history. In this delicious hybrid of pop mythology and political commentary, John Powers offers an irreverent guided tour of what he dubs “Bush World”—with its terror attacks and obsession with Martha Stewart, its preemptive wars and celebrations of shopping. Sore Winners takes a fresh new look at the multiple personas of the Real Slim Shady, George W. Bush, the gloating Social Darwinism of shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, and the right-wing triumph of Fox News and the ranting “Id Conservatives.” Whether pondering our two greatest white rappers, Eminem and Donald Rumsfeld, or the amazing rise of Gubna Schwarzenegger, the book paints a freewheeling portrait of a society in which racial politics are symbolized by the “Colin and Condi Show,” gay-marriage opponents battle with Queer Eye’s Fab Five, and religious fundamentalism is everywhere—from Mel Gibson’s Passion to America’s bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. As he charts the sometimes comic tale of the left’s attempts to escape from Bush World—Michael Moore and Paul Krugman leading the charge—Powers explores the need for liberals to reclaim virtue from sanctimonious conservatives and take back the political agenda.

Witty and wide-ranging rather than narrowly political, Sore Winners is one of the smartest, most enjoyable books on American culture in years.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

L.A. Weekly editor/columnist John Powers surveys the landscape of George W. Bush's America and finds it littered with frothing liberals, sneering conservatives, sluggish reporters, and mindless commentators. From reality TV to the "embedded media," Powers dissects the post-9/11 milieu with something bordering on glee. Brooks can't help but be repulsed by journalists who are as incompetent and slothful as they are ideologically driven. True, our leaders are failing us at our time of greatest need. But, hey, he gets to write about this stuff! With sharp, snappy, self-confident prose, Powers delights in devastating the likes of Ann Coulter (engaging in debate with the strident right-winger "can only make you dumber"), Bill O’Reilly (pegged as a man who pens "short books with very large print"), and "serial bigot" Michael Savage. Not that the left escapes unscathed. The progressive mag The Nation is "profoundly dreary" and Fox's opposition voice Alan Colmes is dismissed as a "quasiliberal munchkin." Still, it's the incessantly wronged right (despite holding the White House, Congress, Supreme Court) that defines this era of "sore winners"--and for them the sometime NPR commentator reserves his bitterest bon mots. Powers is an adept essayist who, in contrast to, say, David Brooks, is as surefooted writing about culture as he is about politics. His breadth of interests and store of on-target epithets make for provocative reading for those on both sides of the great divide. --Steven Stolder

From Publishers Weekly

From Bush's infamous "how dare you ask Chirac a question in French" press conference to Colin and Condi as tokenism writ large, L.A. Weekly deputy editor Powers marshals a host of sometimes obvious, media-based critiques in portraying Bush & co. as "sore winners," the products of a populist, social Darwinist culture where doing what you want because you can is OK. Episodic chapters veer in too many directions, incorporating pre-cooked chunks of presidential media history, myriad literary and pop culture allusions (everything from Robert Musil and Preston Sturges to Alice Sebold and Courtney Love) and even Powers's decidedly layman's assessment of what he deems (sore winner) Rumsfeld's lack of planning for postwar Iraq. But Powers's deconstructions of Bush-era political coverage, though too predictable when dealing with the right, have marked range and subtlety when discussing the left's attempts at fighting back. He's best, though, on the sore winner–effect writ large, describing a kind of flip side of the late '90s Bobos in Paradise: a mean-spirited, you-deserve-it mentality that Powers finds in everything from American Splendor to American Idol. Powers can be very funny (as when advocating an "irony enema" for commentator Roger Rosenblatt), but scion Bush as sore winner isn't news, and the book is too thick with kitchen-sink ruminations to work as a whole.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1ST edition (July 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385511876
• ISBN-13: 978-0385511872
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,493,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Bush is just the tip of the cultural iceberg, August 4, 2004

By 

Vikramtej - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America (Hardcover)

For most of the last two decades, I've ran to pick up each LA Weekly just to read John Powers amazing, righteous, witty and truthful columns about movies, the arts, politics and culture. Finally the world outside LA can read his brilliant work, with this book - which is all new, not a collection of his prior work! And he's taken on the most important issue of all for us right now. Not the obvious - which is to beat the crap out of Bush, something already being done early and often elsewhere - though Powers does it brilliantly here. But the more important work, which few others are doing, of analyzing why we have Bush, and how what's really frightening about him is that he is merely an extension of the zeitgeist - the trends in our mass culture which his presidency is the product of. Powers incisively surveys the cultural world around us, and he makes hilarious - and terrifying - sense. In ways that don't just preach to the converted. Every point he makes hits home, and you find yourself looking around you with new eyes, knowing now you should have seen this coming. On Bush World, even if you've tried the rest - now read the best!

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powers Takes On . . . Bush World, August 13, 2004

By 

Helen Knode - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America (Hardcover)

John Powers is a reasonable person. Reason has virtually disappeared from American political life, replaced by screaming and Bible-thumping and blind partisanship; much like special effects have replaced dialogue in Hollywood movies. As a movie critic for L.A. Weekly, Vogue and NPR -- and one of the best critics in the country -- Powers is familiar with the big loud bangs that distract from the nonsense of a script. It's not so different with American culture today: lots of noise, very little sense. And nobody diagnoses that problem like Powers.
"Sore Winners" is entertaining and consistently hilarious. It is ambitious. It is dense and it's lucid. It's local and global. It treats small things and large things. It's confessional and philosophical; it's factual and intelligent and broadly informed. It is also supremely reasonable. Powers' complicated liberal-left leanings are clear, but his main platform is Reason. The American right and the left are both praised and kicked. Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore get their dues and boos. He quotes Lyndon Johnson and Che Guevara. Nothing is sacred, except the things that should be, like truth, progressive change, and a national conscience -- and a few other things that've been drowned out by the screaming.
"Sore Winners" is an unusual book, and an important one. Run out and read it now.
-- Helen Knode

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lucid look at a culture in crisis, August 24, 2004

By 

Glen Helfand (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America (Hardcover)

It's easy to pen a diatribe against the Bush regime, but John Powers does something different. His witty, opinionated (yet even-handed) and amazingly wide ranging critique of political and popular culture during this dark patch of American history is a remarkable acheivement. It's a heartening book that contextualizes not only the president and his cronies, but reality TV, Michael Moore, dour leftists, and various other seemingly unhinged aspects of American media. Powers pulls his material together seamlessly, creating an important book of our moment.