Can a nation so energized by the promise of success through advertising and attendance at prestigious schools be suffering angst just below the surface?

Dick Meyer, who has been one of our e-mail buddies for some time, argues yes, yes, yes! And we would agree.

Money can't buy you love (although it can buy you sex), and a credit card can't ensure your happiness. Whatever exotic promise a Visa commercial holds out to you, you'll pay for it in the end -- and your basic life challenges will not have changed.

The underlying assumption of Meyer's book is that we are a nation that has largely traded the authentic experiences of life for the superficial promise of consumerism and prestige. It's hard to argue with that.

When we interviewed Dick, he mentioned that one of his personal solutions to this allure of surface pressures is to buy his lunch from snack shops or restaurants where he has gotten to know the owners and waiters and can engage in personal conversation. Call it the "Cheers" solution, but it sure beats the impersonal chow line at McDonald's.

-- BuzzFlash

"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

“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 Publishers Weekly:

In this study of American social self-loathing Meyer addresses why Americans have come to hate themselves (and each other) at a time of national prosperity and relative peace. In compelling, wonderfully cranky and comic prose, the author contends that the radical social changes of the 1960s and the recent technological revolution have drastically altered the pace of life, leaving Americans morally and existentially tired, disoriented, anchorless, and defensive. In arguments familiar to any sociology student, Meyer describes how the rise of freedom of choice in nearly every aspect of American life has been accompanied by the enervation of traditional social institutions (Our communities have been neutered, and our traditional, inherited moral, religious, and aesthetic sensibilities have been discredited). Pointed critiques of political theater, celebrity culture, the rise of marketing and media conglomerates and the decline of manners elaborate on the growing trends of bullshit, belligerence, and boorishness. Meyer is gleefully critical and very sincere in his concern for the state of American life; his practical suggestions urging readers to turn the tide of self-hate and phoniness are a must-read for anyone fed up with modern life.