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umans are pretty conciliatory beings," says George Saunders. "If you say to me, 'That rock is my personal lord and savior,' I'm going to think, 'Whoa, what a nut,' But I'm also going to say, 'Well I'm not going to step on that rock then.'"

For more than ten years, the storyteller most often compared to Kurt Vonnegut has been trafficking in nuts, creating fantastical, distinctly American characters in his surreal short stories. But a respect and even reverence for this country's lunatics is clear, which spells the difference between Saunders and cultural critics like Hal Niedzviecki, who glare humorlessly down their noses at the mainstream. Until now, Saunders has stuck mainly to absurdist fiction — In The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, a paranoid Seussian character's brain keeps falling off as he struggles to save his tiny nation-state from immigrants. An In Persuasion Nation story concerns a reality TV show that kills a group of college students' parents, then serves

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the deceased to the unwitting kids at a fine Italian restaurant. Until now, Saunders' only nonfiction forays have been magazine features, in which he has profiled subjects such as the Minutemen — American archetypes who, comically and horrifyingly, often resemble the characters in his fiction.

So it's with no small amount of fanfare that The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders' first collection of nonfiction, arrives on the scene. Happily, his incisive wit survived the transition intact. The book opens with the titular essay, a commentary on the twenty-four-hour news cycle in which Saunders manages a fresh take on a topic that's been rehashed a million times before. Other stories depict the insane concentration of wealth in Dubai and the total minimalism of a Nepalese boy who's been meditating under a tree for six months. But the central theme of media coverage — its ridiculous relentlessness, its relentless ridiculousness — recurs as an amplified squawk that gives the collection its name. Saunders spoke to Hooksexup about listening to it for a living. — Will Doig

You've said that as a culture, we've "stupidized" ourselves. One of the things you cite is that we cared so much about Monica Lewinsky's sperm-covered dress, simply because the media told us to. But isn't an attraction to that sort of thing natural? If CNN were constantly hyping trade tariffs, would we really get obsessed with that?
I think if you put Shakespeare on TV twenty-four/seven, on every television station, people would love it. If every time you opened up AOL News it said, Shocking Revelations About Macbeth Characterization! I think people would grow up into it. TV is basically an addictive medium, and people have a wider range of things they'll accept than we give them credit for. Sex is big — it includes everything that you are. But when you talk about the Lewinsky dress, you're using such a tiny lens that it's just porn. It's a caricature fucking a caricature, and ultimately that can be kind of fun, but not twenty-four hours a day.

You're saying that instead of us just laughing at a snapshot of Britney's vagina getting out of a car, we should blow it up into something more intelligent.
Yeah, exactly. I was self-Googling the other day and somebody had described me as a "young fogy," which was

"You don't need to have an opinion as much as you think you do."

kind of funny, because I'm not young. But let me feed that fire a little bit: the thing about Britney is it's a nightmare, really, to think about being in that situation when you're only nineteen. Obviously you don't know that much — you know certain things they taught you on The Mickey Mouse Club. And now grown men and women are trying to get pictures of you making the mistakes that a nineteen year old could easily make, and then celebrating when they get it. It's one of the things that you see in our culture that's cruel, and cruel in the simplest of ways, like kicking a cat. That's what our culture sometimes does, and I think sometimes we disguise it as a sort of hipness. So I don't know — like I said, I'm ready for the old folks' home.

Why do you think nice people who would never kick a cat are okay with that kind of cruelty?
I think it's possible for us to hide behind our electronic media in some ways. We think just because a person manifests to us electronically there's not a real person behind it, or the real person behind it is so different from us that it invalidates the basic courtesy we would normally implement if we were talking on the phone. If you blog anonymously, you can call somebody a name, no problem. But I don't know, I may be an optimist, but most times when I get a random email that's mean, when I actually respond they blush and say, "Sorry, I kind of forgot I was emailing a real person."

I read that you love advertising. What do you love about it?
I love that it's a perversion of literature. It uses all the gifts and energy of literature, but with the distortion that it has an agenda. Let me tell you this story. It's Tolstoy and Gorky. They're in Moscow, and these Cossacks come walking up — beautiful young guys, they've got their boots up to their hips and their sabers and they're talking loudly. Tolstoy says, "That will be the death of Mother Russia, this arrogant, militaristic attitude." So then these two guys pass — all cologne, the smell of leather, huge chests — and little Tolstoy, ninety years old, turns on his heels and says, "On the other hand, that's everything that's wonderful about Russia, that change is possible, the responsibility for changing the world."

That's what I aspire toward. Advertising — it's so beautiful, it's the best minds in the country working energetically with huge budgets to make beautiful things that will convince people to do things they don't want to do. Now, you could just say, "What a goiter on the culture, that we have the best minds sell shit. They should be writing novels." But the goal for me is to hate both those ideas and let them resonate with each other. You don't need to have an opinion as much as you think you do.

It seems to me that the advertising maxim "sex sells" is falling out of favor. These days I see a lot of TV ads that are self-consciously asexual, like three office workers standing in a room of cubicles while they talk in monotone about the new BK Broiler. I'm watching this and thinking, whatever happened to the women who used to ski in bikinis while chewing Juicy Fruit?
I was just looking through a couple of glossies, and I'm not sure that's disappeared. But what's interesting about advertisers, they're really smart, and they know when we're getting worn out with something. No matter what technique you come up with to fight it, it's going to assimilate to that technique. And I think that BK Broiler thing you're talking about is exactly that.

In In Persuasion Nation, I used commercial vignettes to tell a short story, and in the process found that I'm kind of good at making up commercials. At some point you're using the means of the enemy to satirize the enemy. Yet in a weird twist, I found out that that Geico caveman ad, they got [the idea for] that from my story in Pastoralia. It said so in Entertainment Weekly this week.

Wow. Do you get any credit for that?
No. Except for that article in EW.

My favorite of your books is The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I just read yesterday. I think my favorite thing about it was it made me think about how upset Americans get when things don't work correctly, whereas in most countries, most things don't work correctly and everyone just accepts it. Why do you think that sort of thing upsets Americans so much?
If you had a special machine that got up every morning and gave you a massage and plucked your nose hairs and flattered you, if one day the flattery was a little less effusive, you'd say, "What the fuck! Why doesn't anything work around here?" It's kind of a beautiful phenomenon that the more you have, the more you accept that level of luxury as the status quo. We've had it so good for so long. It's that beautiful human tendency to adapt.  

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To order The Braindead Megaphone , click here.

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