'The Witches Are Coming' is Lindy West's bracing follow-up to 'Shrill.'
In her latest collection, “The Witches Are Coming,” she covers much of the same territory, but, here, West is more overtly political and angrier. The result is bracing: The essays consider such varied topics as Grumpy Cat, climate change and the on-screen depiction of abortion. But they cohere as a unit, bound by West’s humor, outrage and — in the end — hope.
Hope isn’t in abundant supply these days. As West points out in the book’s introduction, the Obama years may not have been perfect, but many then shared a sense of “palpable momentum, an undeniable feeling that progress had the upper hand.” Then came the 2016 election, when, as she writes, “white American voters and the electoral college and a few Russian troll farms shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.
Her essay on the nihilistic cool of “South Park” is particularly astute, if also witty . The show’s creators identify as Republican and argue that the far right wing and the far left wing are essentially equivalent, and their studied neutrality is “a neat trap, which certainly does not sound like indoctrination at all,” she writes. And yet, she adds, “to believe in nothing is to change nothing. It means you’re endorsing the present, and the present is a horror.
West is sharp too on the complicated nature of heroes and fandom. “There are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get older,” she writes. “Then there are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get better.” Then there are comics such as Adam Carolla,
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