For Tony Soprano, contemporary suburban life breeds middle class ennui. The boredom and anxiety of this life are mitigated by the patriarchal culture of violent rule and fear-induced respect he experiences in the Mob. Tony’s ongoing dilemma is that this sort of power has very limited currency in a culture of conspicuous consumption and progressive social changes.

Having heard several of the stories on Speed, however, I've come to the somewhat cynical conclusion that if it's a phenomenon on which Marketplace is reporting, it's going to be the very phenomenon that is packaged and sold to us. And, in fact, it already is. Spas and "get away from it all" weekends are how we are exhorted to retreat from this frenetic pace. Body products, pop psychology books and tapes, and exercise regimes promise us rejuvenation. What's next? A trip to the moon to get away from it all?

Because William Pierce’s novels use conspiracy narratives to imagine white identity as a field of political contention, they conceive of a defensive discourse that demands revolution—militant or ideological—as its end. These texts project racial revolution as a means of politicizing and policing the eroding boundaries of racial identity as national identity.

Popular culture—particularly the stories we tell ourselves in popular forms—assumes varying levels of cultural literacy, from recognition of brand names to the history of creatures in horror films. While ignorance of any particular narrative, such as Star Wars, is not socially debilitating, ignorance of the implications of a narrative can be a gap in one's knowledge and perception of the contemporary world, and such a gap potentially impoverishes one's relation to that world. Knowing that Star Wars is but part of a greater body of science fiction that explores, among many issues, the interrelation of man and technology is a kind of cultural knowledge.