Books like Bad, or the Dumbing of America

This has been on my 'want to read' list for quite a few years. I was somewhat fascinated by Fussell's book, "Class" (and still have a hardcover copy on one of my home shelves), so how could I possibly resist another that was subtitled 'the dumbing of America'? And the book is twenty years old exactly (written in post-Reagan 1991), so of course I was curious. Would Fussell turn out to be a prophet? Or, would this turn out to be like the other books I've read recently from the early 90's--just a quaint relic? In truth, it's a bit of both.Fussell defines BAD as "...something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating. For a thing to be really BAD, it must exhibit elements of the pretentious, the overwrought, or the fraudulent. Being alert to this destinction is a large part of the fun of being alive today, in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash."Mr. Fussell? Wait'll you get a load of 2011. And that ended up being the problem for me reading this twenty years later. Every one of the 1991 examples of BAD he cites (Advertising, Behavior, Food, Ideas, Language, People, etc.) seems almost quaint and sweet compared to how things have blown up and spiraled out of control by 2011. So much so that it made for a depressing read. His BAD now sounds like a sort of utopia, and that is bad indeed.