At its most entertaining, The morning after the revolution focuses on this void. In an episode in which Bowles attends a multi-day course called The Toxic Tendencies of Whiteness, where participants are encouraged to ridicule each other for inadvertently making racist comments, Bowles captures ridiculous details such as being asked to massage feet until I can physically feel the whiteness that infects them. Toe. (The instructor then tries to sell participants on an additional two-day workshop.)
However, the writing in The next morning Too often it’s just not good enough. Bowles strives for wry affect, but the result is often flat or irritatingly blogger-voiced. She describes a police officer who killed George Floyd as a person who “does what sure looks like murder.”
Perhaps he could get away with it if the prose were more entertaining, but as it is, Bowles’s arguments often don’t stand up to scrutiny and there are no stylistic victories to distract from how confusing his theses are. “It sounded wild. It sounded like pie in the sky. But cities actually passed resolutions to defund or, in some cases, abolish their police departments. “It was all really happening,” he writes in a chapter about how absurd and harmful he considers the Defund the Police movement. It’s the opening of a section that suggests American cities are increasingly confused by crime because the Defund movement led to drastic reductions in police presence. In it, Bowles describes how she was so terrified of crime while pregnant that she went to the store to buy a gun, implying that the progressive movement against police brutality has left her in a position where she has no choice but to act. as a watchman. (She sums up her view of her progressive argument like this: “True white supremacy is not buying a gun.”)
The chapter is one of the most revealing in the book, because it omits facts in favor of an orderly narrative. Crime is a valid concern for Angelenos, now as it has been throughout the city’s history, but the premise that the 2020 protests led to rapid reductions in law enforcement that then led to rapid spikes in violence and Chaos is too obvious.
While some major U.S. cities reduced police spending, many others actually increased spending. No city abolished its police force following the 2020 protest movement. In Los Angeles, where Bowles describes herself as worried about rapists jumping out the windows of her Echo Park home, police budget increase more than 9 percent between 2019 and 2022. While the LAPD shrank in size, it did not evaporate. Statewide, the drop in law enforcement personnel in 2021 was 2 percent, for example, which is worth mentioning. (Recruitment efforts have been concentrated to bolster those numbers.) But he also makes Bowles, describing how he pays private security guards so he can “live as if there were police,” remarkably hyperbolic. Also: notably rude to the police!
Misleading anecdotes occur throughout the book. In his introduction, Bowles rattles off a list of silly repercussions of the new progressivism. “Pepe le Pew was excluded from the space jam Movie to normalize rape culture,” he writes. Of course, this would be absurd… if it were true. The rumor that the horny cartoon skunk Pepe le Pew was considered too troublesome for the space jam The sequel took off on social media in 2021, after New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote about how looney tunes The character, along with several other popular children’s cartoons of yesteryear, was problematic. But as a deadline report As noted, the Pepe le Pew scenes had actually been cut when the film changed directors, long before Blow’s column went viral. It is easy to verify this type of data, and Bowles, opening his book with a manipulated example like this, talks about The next morningThe biggest failure. It is not the work of a skeptic who attacks conventions. It is a book intended to confirm prejudices rather than complicate them.
The morning after the revolution jumps through familiar Intellectual Dark Web talking points this way, mixing first-person written reports with carelessly collected data and mixing them together until the narrative sounds plausible enough if you don’t stop to check Google: DEI is stupid, the “gender ideology” is a dangerous fad, calls to defund the police are naïve, kids today are overly sensitive, asexuals are fake and just want attention. Any reader who has even a slight familiarity with these conversation topics does not need to read this book to gain new information. But I suspect this book is not intended to persuade the uncommitted. An enchiridion for an internal group, The morning after the revolution It will surely comfort those who are already comfortable. Is Chicken soup for the soul that won’t wake up.