A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

Argues that President Barack Obama is a dangerous radical who wants not only big government, but the Europeanization of the United States, and explains how citizens can roll back the liberal establishment and return to fundamental American values.

(Spring 2010) This historical novel finds President Reagan at odds with his daughter, Vice President, White House Staff and Cabinet as Ronnie and Nancy try to do the best acting of their lives to leave the White House, alive. (unabridged edition) Our most loved and hated President after Kennedy and before Obama, Ronnie struggles to defeat the ‘Evil Empire’ and not lose his mind to Alzheimer’s dementia. Can he still trust Bill Casey and George Bush, George Shultz, Selwa Roosevelt and Mike Deaver? Can Ronnie find out who's pulling his strings? A fervent anti-Communist and Nazi hater praised by his wife Nancy and ultra-conservatives, groomed by Bechtel Corporation since 1950 and sold StarWars by Dick Cheney and Paul Nitze during the most scandal-ridden presidency in American history, daughter Patti, college students and flower children despised Reagan for supporting the Vietnam War and Contra death squads and felt the Reagan-Bush Administration was run by Nazis. As it turns out, it was. This historical novel documents the foreign policy, national security and monetary policies of the Reagan-Bush Administration were run by Nazis thru the life of character Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s chief of Foreign Armies East intelligence, whom Dulles hired to run and train CIA as Freikorps Nazi deathsquad torturers, terrorists and assassins who then trained the Contras ...that Gehlen was later handled by Bill Casey (Ronnie's campaign manager) then George Bush (Ronnie's vice president) to fight, exaggerate and invent the Cold War in order to capture the Russian Baku oil fields. Based on autobiographies of the Reagan family, Cabinet, and White House Staff, the 650-page book includes a 250-page epilog of documentation and a 50-pg researchers' index, footnotes, and an extensive appendix including charts from: Staff Report, Committee on Banking, Currency & Housing, House of Representatives, 94th Congress, 2d session, Aug. 1976 -- Federal Reserve Directors, a Study of Corporate & Banking Influence. The charts trace from 1913 to present the family dynasties of the private owners and interlocking directorate of the Federal Reserve Bank and other G-8 central banks (the World Order and New World Order) whom Bill Casey, George Shultz, the Bushes, bin Ladens, Thyssens, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Browns, Harrimans and Reinhard Gehlen worked for and against whose family ancestors the American Revolution was fought and whose family decendents today continue to dominate the financial, political, economic, and bailout and foreclosure landscape with financial terrorism. Additionally, the historical novel follows the family dynasties of the private owners of the interlocking directorate of the Fed/G8 including Bank of England and Bundesbank and other central banks involved in the American Revolution of 1776, the American Civil War, the depressions in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the founding of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, WWI, the financing of the Bolshevik party from New York and thru Ruskombank which supplied U.S. technology and weapons and military vehicles to communist Russia who supplied them to the Viet Cong to kill Americans. Appendices also document the previously hypothesized money-issuing class that prints and owns our money that rules the upper class, middle class, working class, and unemployed classes. The appendix also includes documentation of the Clinton-era involvement with HUD corruption when Bill was Governor and Hillary was a HUD attorney. HUD sold billions of dollars of foreclosed properties in East L.A. at ten cents on the dollar to the Fed-founded Dillion-Read bank. Ronnie was advised about the marriage of the oil and illegal drug industries, and the case by the European Union and Central and South American countries against Reynolds Tobacco for laundering heroin and cocaine profits with Camel Cigarettes.

Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.

At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever. This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic of American motion pictures, heading the work of Porter, Guy-Blaché, DeMille, Capra, Sternberg, Vidor, Minnelli and Mankiewicz. More recently, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, John Landis and Edward James Olmos have made their own contributions to Hollywood's Americana. What does this national branding signify? Which versions of Americanism are valorized, and which marginalized or excluded? Out of which social and historical contexts do they emerge, and for and by whom are they constructed? Edited by Mandy Merck, the collection contains detailed analyses of such films as The Vanishing American, American Madness, An American in Paris, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, American Pie and many more.