Commodify your Dissent!

Thomas Frank is the editor of The Baffler, a journal of cultural criticism, which he co-founded ten years ago as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Frank has been a contributing reporter to The Washington Post, The Nation, In These Times, and other periodicals. He received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1994, with his dissertation, "The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism," becoming a national bestseller. Of "The Conquest of Cool," Geoff Pevere, of Toronto Globe and Mail writes, "Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit." Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland co-edited "Commodify Your Dissent," with a foreword by Lewis Lapham (1997).

Emphasis mine, from the foreward to an interview with the man: Voice In The Neon Wilderness. via Caleb Stegall at the tNP forums.

Looks like he has written for The Nation. From what I read in the interview, I'd rather conservatives cite this guy rather than that former Nation writer they like to promote for some unfathomable reason, Christopher Hitchens. Or if that's too much to hope for, the Dems could take his suggestions and run with them.

Here he is on labor:

It was a standard reporter's beat—every newspaper had a labor correspondent. Now, it exists only in a handful of papers, mainly business newspapers that want to keep an eye on labor. As a subject of general social importance, it has completely vanished. I have a friend who works for a major newspaper. He was in an editorial meeting in which they were going over their reader demographics. All newspapers in the country are fretting over declining readerships, and particularly among certain demographic groups. They noticed that working class people have basically stopped reading their newspaper. He recommended hiring a labor reporter, and they laughed him out; they looked to better sports coverage.

Addendum 5/17/05
Ugh, just learned this guy is the "What's the matter with Kansas" fellow. I hereby invoke the stopped-clock rule--even those things are right twice a day.