I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) [Kindle Edition] Author: Chuck Klosterman | Language: English | ISBN:
B00A28JID0 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Posts about Download The Book I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains Epub Free for everyone book with Mediafire Link Download Link Chuck Klosterman has walked into the darkness. As a boy, he related to the cultural figures who represented goodness—but as an adult, he found himself unconsciously aligning with their enemies. This was not because he necessarily liked what they were doing; it was because they were doing it on purpose (and they were doing it better). They wanted to be evil. And what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? How does the culture of deliberate malevolence operate?
In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the modern understanding of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O. J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985?
Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny. Klosterman continues to be the only writer doing whatever it is he’s doing. Books with free ebook downloads available I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) [Kindle Edition] Epub Free
- File Size: 1519 KB
- Print Length: 225 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1439184496
- Publisher: Scribner (July 9, 2013)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00A28JID0
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,114 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Media Studies - #25
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays - #35
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Popular Culture
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Media Studies - #25
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Essays & Correspondence > Essays - #35
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Popular Culture
Reading Klosterman's book I found myself thinking about the old adage about opinions, that everyone has one and well you know the rest.
As a new Klosterman reader perhaps I came to the book expecting the wrong thing. I expected a cogent thoughtful treatise on what causes us to identify some people or characters as villanous while giving others the pass. And while Klosterman starts off his first chapter in this direction with a discussion of why Machiavelli is widely reviled, he quickly dissembles into some serious navel gazing.
Klosterman opens his second chapter with an extended discussion of bands he has disliked. I'll admit that I didn't care much about Klosterman's taste in music, however the discussion might have been justified had it fed some larger reasoned conclusion. However, even after re-reading his discussion twice I could not make out exactly what his larger point was. While he wrote in exacting detail about his personal taste he definitely phoned it in when it came to drawing conclusions.
From there Klosterman launched into a discussion of why some mysoginist music from decades passed has come to be thought of as mostly harmless while a similarly sexist comedian is still reviled. Again Klosterman doesn't draw any strongly reasoned conclusions, and it's even the conclusions that he does draw seem suspect given that he offers up no support other than his own opinions and no additional examples beyond the two he has discussed.
And to be honest even though Klosterman was clearly working to paint his sexist comedian as a sympatheitc victim of political correctness, it was difficult to find much to sympathize about a man who made millions calling women dirty names on stage.
Chuck Klosterman looks at the character type of the villain, both in real world figures and imagined, and surmises that a villain is someone who knows the most and cares the least. It sounds like a simple idea but becomes more complex as you think about it. He uses a number of examples to highlight his point and one of the first is Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli, if you know him at all, is famous for writing The Prince, a book about political theory. The Prince is controversial as it makes Machiavelli appear not just incredibly cynical but evil too in the way he advocates ruthless domination for a ruler over every other form of governance. Klosterman argues, convincingly, that Machiavelli wasn't saying that this was his preference but that this was his observation of how the real world worked having spent his career as a diplomat seeing how politics actually operated. That his book was used and influenced any number of shady characters is not his fault and yet we have his name as a term describing a backstabbing, conniving person today. Machiavelli was not Machiavellian.
In this way he argues that George W Bush was not a villain (gasp!) because he didn't know the most (that would be Dick Cheney) and he seemed to care at least a bit (unlike Cheney), whereas Joe Paterno will be remembered as a villain because he knew about Jerry Sandusky's sick life but chose not to do anything about it, ie. caring the least.
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