Index

Contents

Foreword: I Must Not Read Bad Thoughts Bruce Sterling  xi

Introduction  1

AMERICAN MAGIC, AMERICAN DREAD

Dead Man Walking What Do Zombies Mean?  11

Gun Play An American Tragedy in Three Acts  18

Mysterious Stranger Grandpa Twain’s Dark Side  27

Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back.
On Lady Gaga  35

Jocko Homo How Gay Is the Super Bowl  48

Wimps, Wussies, and W. Masculinity, American Style  57

Stardust Memories How David Bowie Killed the ’6os and Ushered in
the '70s and, for One Brief Shining Moment, Made the Mullet Hip  64

When Animals Attack! An Aesop’s Fable about Anthropomorphism  71

Toe Fou How I Was Subliminally Seduced by Madonna’s Big Toe  81

Shoah Business  87

The Triumph of the Shill Fascist Branding  94

Endtime for Hitler On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglorious
Return of Der Fuhrer  101

MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE Making Sense of the Digital Age  113

World Wide Wonder Closet On Blogging  115

(Face)Book of the Dead	00 Straight, Gay, or Binary?  122

HAL Comes out of the Cybernetic Closet  135

Word Salad Surgery Spam, Deconstructed  146

Slashing the Borg Resistance Is Fertile  151

Things to Come Xtreme Kink and the Future of Pom  159

TRIPE SOUP FOR THE SOUL  167

Religion and all Its Works and Ways   
Tripe Soup for the Soul The Daily Affirmation  169

Pontification On the Death of the Pope  175

The Prophet Margin Jack Chick's Comic-Book Apocalypse  182

2012 Carnival of Bunkum  188

The Vast Santanic Conspiracy  193

ANATOMY LESSON 
The Grotesque, the Gothic, and Other Dark Matters  203

Open Wide Dental Horror  205

Gray Matter The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries  212

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head  219

Been There, Pierced That Apocalypse Culture and the Escalation
of Subcultural Hostilities  234

Death to All Humans! The Church of Euthanasia’s Modest Proposal  240

Great Caesar’s Ghost On the Crypt of the Capuchins  245

Aphrodites of the Operating Theater On La Specola’s
Anatomical Venuses  252

Goodbye, Cruel Words On the Suicide Note as a Literary Genre 260

Cortex Envy Bringing Up Baby Einstein  265

Acknowledgments  279
Notes  281
Publication History  315