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Americans are as safe, well fed, securely sheltered,

long-lived, free, and healthy as any human beings who have ever

lived on the planet. But we are down on America. So why do we hate

us? According to Dick Meyer, the following items on this (much

abbreviated) list are some of the contributors to our deep

disenchantment with our own culture:

Cell-phone talkers broadcasting the intimate details of their lives

in public spaces

Worship of self-awareness, self-realization, and

self-fulfillment

T-shirts that read, “Eat Me”

Facebook, MySpace, and kids being taught to market themselves

High-level cheating in business and sports

Reality television and the cosmetic surgery boom

Multinational corporations that claim, “We care about you.”

The decline of organic communities

A line of cosmetics called “S.L.U.T.”

The phony red state–blue state divide

The penetration of OmniMarketing into OmniMedia and the insinuation

of both into every facet of our lives

You undoubtedly could add to the list with hardly a moment’s

thought. In Why We Hate Us, Meyer absolutely nails America’s

early-twenty-first-century mood disorder. He points out the most

widespread carriers of the why-we-hate-us germs, including the

belligerence of partisan politics that perverts our democracy, the

decline of once common manners, the vulgarity of Hollywood

entertainment, the superficiality and untrustworthiness of the news

media, the cult of celebrity, and the disappearance of authentic

neighborhoods and voluntary organizations (the kind that have

actual meetings where one can hobnob instead of just clicking in an

online contribution).

Meyer argues—with biting wit and observations that make you want to

shout, “Yes! I hate that too!”—that when the social, spiritual, and

political turmoil that followed the sixties collided with the

technological and media revolution at the turn of the century,

something inside us hit overload. American culture no longer

reflects our own values. As a result, we are now morally and

existentially tired, disoriented, anchorless, and defensive. We

hate us and we wonder why.

Why We Hate Us reveals why we do and also offers a

thoughtful and uplifting pre*ion for breaking out of our

current morass and learning how to hate us less. It is a

penetrating but always accessible Culture of Narcissism for a new

generation, and it carries forward ideas that resounded with

readers in bestsellers such as On Bullshit and Bowling Alone.

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DICK MEYER was a reporter, producer, online editor, and

columnist at CBS News in Washington for more than twenty-three

years. He is now an executive editor at National Public

Radio.

From the Hardcover edition.

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编辑推荐

In the 1976 movie "Network," Howard Beale, a veteran news anchor

played by Peter Finch, becomes psychotic after being told he's too

old to anchor the newscast. On what is supposed to be his final

broadcast, he breaks out into a rant about the problems of the day,

imploring viewers to "get up right now ... go to your windows, open

them, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'm as mad as hell and

I'm not going to take this anymore.' "

Viewers nationwide respond by shouting out their windows en masse.

The impromptu segment is a ratings hit, and the lunatic broadcaster

is given time on future broadcasts for his tirades.

That satire reflected the insanity of popular culture, particularly

television, that reflects a misplaced anger and confused values in

society. Those are all themes that inspire Dick Meyer's incisive

cultural critique of modern society in "Why We Hate Us."

The book's central argument is that Americans are dissatisfied with

their own society. Meyer points, with a wealth of supporting

evidence at his fingertips - the vulgarity of the marketing

industry, the media's fascination with Paris Hilton, even people

who talk loudly on their cell phones - to what he calls the "toxic"

cultural environment, which is rife with disingenuousness. Our

resulting self-hate is illustrated, he says, by polls showing

declining faith in institutions.

"Americans don't trust our institutions or one another," he writes.

"Without trust, without a shared vocabulary, without community, we

feel endangered."

The author, a former CBS News producer and columnist for the

network's Web site who now works for NPR, draws on sources as

disparate as existentialism, books on American suburbanization and

interviews with an evangelical pastor to generate a book that goes

a long way in making sense out of the zeitgeist. The success of the

book is less in its de*ion of the cultural climate than in the

way he draws together seemingly unconnected experiences to explain

with Occam's-razor logic a complex society that is drawn to its

culture and also repulsed by it…

After his critique of society, which synthesizes many recent

academic and popular assessments of modern life, Meyer offers a

solution to the problems of the world: a return to some traditions

that predate the '60s. "[I]t is necessary to find and nurture

authentic commitments in private and community life," he writes.

"In making thoughtful choices, it is necessary to cultivate a

guiding 'moral temperament' - a philosophic perspective."

His solution may sound like a old-timey bromide, but it's a

refreshing alternative.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Hasn’t something like this happened to all of us? Don’t you hate

it? Ever wondered why Americans feel like this kind of behavior is

acceptable and justified?

In Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium, Dick

Meyer shares countless examples that illustrate his thesis that

Americans have grown to hate us–not America, and not each other,

but the culture we have created and in which we actively

participate. We have private conversations in public places, we are

constantly attached to electronic devices and often choose them

over in-person contact with the people that are right in front of

us, and we are suffering from a “lack of social self-respect.”

Meyer diagnoses America with a chronic case of low self-esteem and

concludes that we are acting out. He couldn’t be more right.

Meyer’s central thesis is that we hate us because phoniness—-that

bane of Holden Caulfield’s existence—-has become “the emblematic

malady of our times,” along with a lack of manners and “the decline

of organic community.” He explores the irony in the fact that

Americans are inundated with phoniness and know how to recognize

spin—-basically, we know when we’re being bullshitted—-but we have

become so steeped in it that our lives have begun to reflect the

very things we hate…

I loved this book for being so smart when it would have been very

easy for Meyer to dumb things down. I’m so proud of him for

resisting the temptation to go the route of trying to entertain the

reader rather than asking difficult questions and forcing us to

reflect on our own behavior and our role in perpetuating and now

fighting against a culture that is sick and in need of help. I saw

myself in many of the things he described, and I didn’t like it. I

felt inspired to reexamine my ethics, my consumption of media and

products, and my social conduct and relationships.

Though there are many chuckle-inducing statements in this book,

Why We Hate Us is definitely not a light read, and that is a

very good thing. This is a sociological analysis of modern culture,

a rallying cry, and a call for social change. It is a rather

balanced look at how things are and why they are that way, and

Meyer is not afraid to lay blame where it is due. The bad news is

that we are all guilty. The good news is that “it is not a sign of

terminal social disease that we do hate us,” because we can all

participate in rebuilding our culture and repairing our national

self-esteem.

And we can start by not clipping our toenails in public.

I give Why We Hate Us a very happy 5 out of 5... There’s a

lot of information in this book, and there’s a lot that I couldn’t

fit into my review. You should read it. Everyone should read it. We

should make Why We Hate Us required reading for all

Americans. It would be a good start.

—The Book Lady's Blog

"Dick Meyer has done the impossible -- he diagnoses the

self-loathing, moral confusion and ennui that infect supersized

America without hectoring us and badgering us, and without tiresome

self-righteousness or smugness. Why We Hate Us takes us on a

rollicking, laugh-out-loud ride across the brittle American

landscape, and by 'us' I mean all of us -- liberal and

conservative, black and white, city-dwellers, suburbanites and

farmers. Dick Meyer understands that our national culture is on

life-support, and he has thought long and hard about how to

resuscitate it. Read this book, if not for you, than for your

children, and for the America they will inherit."

—Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent

and author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and

Terror

“A widely respected player in national politics, Dick Meyer has

transcended the game most Americans hate to describe a larger

context of relentless marketing, omnipresent pseudo-events and

above all the enshrinement of phoniness that pollute the public

square. Mixing original research, a keen, analytic mind and

mordant, wicked wit, Why We Hate Us should be the bible for

the vast majority of Americans who tell pollsters the country is on

the wrong track but aren't clear why.”

—Thomas Oliphant, journalist and bestselling author of Praying

for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One

Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers

“This is a serious, thought provoking discourse on America in the

age of instant communication and a reminder that our new

ability to know everything about everybody all the time may not be

all good.”

—Bob Schieffer, Chief Washington Correspondent, CBS

News 

“Meyer has written a deeply informed critique of those ‘toxic and

menacing’ aspects of American culture in which individuals,

families, and communities have suffered as ‘self-awareness,

self-realization and self-actualization became the measure of

emotional and existential health.’ Meyer has put into words the

tensions and anxieties that grip all Americans as they go about the

difficult task of achieving happiness while struggling to ‘find a

compass’ to give their lives moral legitimacy and purpose. If you

are aiming for one guide to the well-lived life, buy this

book.”

—Thomas B. Edsall, Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore

Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Political

Editor of the Huffington Post, and author of Building Red

America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent

Power

From the Hardcover edition.