I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams
Mark Dery (April, 2011)
University of Minnesota Press, 304 pages

“I do believe it's the political business of the cultural critic to poke the sharp end of his pen into the buried truths and dirty secrets, fringe subcultures and borderline personalities that often reveal more about the American scene and our cultural psyche than the mainstream does,” says Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams.

No critic delves into the dark recesses of American consciousness quite like Dery. And perhaps at no time in recent history has national disillusionment been so primed for such critique.

Consider, as examples, the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the housing foreclosures that spread like rolling blackouts in the years that followed; the Occupy movement’s sick-of-it-all civil disobedience or the hacktivism of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec. In so many ways, the public’s once-idyllic vision of personal prosperity achieved through blood and sweat has eroded, leaving a hard truth in its wake: The American dream is not all it’s cracked up to be.

That theme is a dominant refrain in nearly all of Dery’s work, which lends itself well to his hybrid role as a sharp-witted writer with the mind of a highly attuned scholar — a reality which often leaves him straddling the line between mass-market author and full-fledged academic.