"...the trivialization of politics and art as forms of celebrity spectacle."
The merging of DC and Hollywood smacks of the clintonian milieu. The shallow, plastic, narcissistic self-aware. Trivial indeed.
Sounds like it would be an interesting topic if they didn't intellectualize it so much as to make it so obscure and inaccessible. That is the the fatal flaw in most academically written books; they're written for an audience of five -- to impress, rather than to share information as peers in society. That is the distinctively academic style of writing -- this implied elitism -- while this guy actually discusses this false notion of superiority in society causing isolation and alienation. The reviewer and the author seem to know the words but I don't see their lips moving:
"The recent cult of ironic detachment struck Lasch as an especially notable example of the narcissistic trend. He attributed this phenomenon to the degradation of work. "As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday discourse," he observed. People coped with lousy jobs by affecting knowing superiority over them. Popular culture increasingly deflected their boredom and despair by adopting the same trope of ironic detachment. "Many forms of popular art appeal to this sense of knowingness and thereby reinforce it," Lasch noted. "They parody familiar roles and themes, inviting the audience to consider itself superior to its surroundings."
The degradation of work is this very notion that work is beneath them -- that is propagated by the unions, schools, and pseudo-sophisticated people of this ilk who think their lot in life is to get a cushy job doing nothing but pontificating as proof of how important they are. Meanwhile, they constantly knock the people working hard to earn an honest living -- and make them out to be fools for working so hard. Then they turn into these bloated parodies of self-important people with faces contorted into hideous masks and wonder why all the self-serving contradictions and hypocrisy of their lives have not made them happy.
It doesn't take a Ph.D.
"Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turm him into a dull, sluggish creature, scarcely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rationale or too serious to be tempted by baubles."