Disch, the Tea Parties, and the City

Here’s a good essay on Thomas Disch, the acclaimed (and slightly crazed) science fiction author. Disch is was an interesting character for all sorts of reasons, but his disdain for rural populism and cosmopolitan liberalism is what I found most appealing:

George Wallace and Adolf Eichmann are two figures who recur in Disch’s work, early and late, and they symbolize the two halves of America that now appear in far sharper relief than they did at the time Disch started writing: town and city, one rural, populist, and xenophobic, the other liberal, technocratic, and heartless. Disch frequently treated them in isolation, but they reinforce one another, antagonists that form a unified system. Together, they constitute the American success story, by which Disch means its inhumanity.