{"id":67,"date":"2002-03-13T19:51:57","date_gmt":"2002-03-14T00:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/shocking_the_bourgeois"},"modified":"2002-03-13T19:51:57","modified_gmt":"2002-03-14T00:51:57","slug":"shocking_the_bourgeois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/03\/shocking_the_bourgeois.html","title":{"rendered":"Shocking the Bourgeois"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nToday M’ris<\/a> comments on an article
\nin Salon about Charles Bowden’s, “Blues for Cannibals”. The Salon article’s author
\nis
\nunimpressed with the book’s rhetorical tactics<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nBowden tells us that he’s telling us things people don’t want to know, suggesting there’s something
\ntransgressive about what he’s doing. In the book’s long section about this three years as a reporter
\ncovering sex crimes, he repeats a sentence that for him distills the widespread attitude toward his grisly
\nsubject — “Don’t talk about it, no one wants to hear these things.”\n<\/p>\n

I don’t think this is true. If people didn’t want to hear these things then JonBenet wouldn’t sell
\nnewspapers and we wouldn’t have “Law and Order Special Victims Unit,” an entire prime time television
\nshow showcasing a new sex crime every week.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nI feel a bit sorry for Bowden… he’s trying so hard to shock us out of our bourgeois
\nstupor, but in this day and age, we bourgeois are pretty hard to shock. Oh, every once
\nin a while we get a case like the Texas woman who
\nran
\ninto a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck in her windshield, and let him bleed to death while
\nshe went inside and had sex with her boyfriend<\/a>. But for the most part, I agree,
\nshock tactics are not the way to go.\n<\/p>\n

\nListen, I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. I have an idea for a novel that I got
\na few months ago, after listening to Jonathan Franzen on the radio. This idea
\nis so radical, so transgressive<\/em>, that it will be beyond the pedestrian tastes of
\nthe Booker prize and the National Book Award. Yes, I’ll be talked-about, vilified,
\nand made rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Are you ready? Think you can handle it?
\nHere it is: I’m going to write a novel that says, “Suburbia is just swell!”\n<\/p>\n

\nYeah, I bet you wish you had thought of it.\n<\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile, back at the ranch… for the last three years at work, I’ve been stuck with
\nNetscape 4. But in just a month or two, the company is switching us all over to Netscape 6.2.1
\n(cue angelic music). Yes, our intranet (i.e. my entire client base) will be using a browser
\nwith pretty darn good CSS2 support and a standards-compliant XML processor. Do you know what
\nthat means? It means I can do client-side XSLT, and you can’t.<\/em> Nyah, nyah!<\/b>\n<\/p>\n

Edit, April 2003: My bragging was premature. As of November 2002, the company had still not switched over from Netscape 4.7, and there was no publicly-announced date for the changeover either.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, I’ll be talked-about, vilified, and made rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Are you ready? Think you can handle it? Here it is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}