Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Frank

Frank is doing what he does best: taking a piece of mass entertainment and using it like a flashlight under the chin of power. The detail that matters is his choice of reference point. A late-era James Bond villain is never just a bad guy; he is an anxiety in a tailored suit. By noting that the villain is a "culture captain" and "tycoon of culture", Frank points to a shift in what mainstream stories now treat as legitimately dangerous. Not missiles, not secret labs, but narrative control: the person who buys megaphones, sets the agenda, and decides what counts as reality.

The Murdoch name is a shortcut with teeth. It evokes tabloid sensationalism, political kingmaking, and the particular alchemy of turning outrage into profit. Frank's subtext is that this isn't fringe critique anymore. When a Bond movie - the most global, corporate, focus-grouped kind of mythmaking - codes the media mogul as the villain, it suggests a broad cultural recognition that information empires can be more destabilizing than old-school superweapons.

"It's not as if people don't know what is going on" is the barb. Frank isn't accusing the public of ignorance; he's accusing institutions of bad faith. We recognize the pattern, we even enjoy it as spectacle, yet we treat it as fiction rather than a description of the operating system. The intent is to collapse that comfortable distance: if the blockbuster can name the threat, then our politics has no excuse for pretending it can't see it.