it never gets old

I’m speaking of the notice on the back page of zerO’s books. Here’s my favorite part:

“Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing.”

“cheerled by expensively educated hacks” is one of the phrases of the decade, as far as I’m concerned. Heck, even “expensively educated hacks” as a standalone concept is one that opens up numerous mental possibilities.