Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Anger

Anger’s line lands like a sneer and a diagnosis at once: the country that mass-produces stories has, in his view, forgotten how to read the stories that made it human in the first place. Coming from Kenneth Anger, that complaint isn’t conservative nostalgia for dusty classics. It’s an occult filmmaker-author calling out a culture that treats myth as raw material for spectacle but not as a serious operating system for meaning.

The phrase “in America” is doing accusatory work. It suggests a place uniquely good at replacing inherited symbolism with branded fantasy, swapping ritual for consumption. “Modern generation” narrows the blame to postwar media saturation: television, advertising, Hollywood’s endless recycling of archetypes without admitting they’re archetypes. Anger’s subtext is that Americans still live inside mythology, they just encounter it as entertainment they don’t recognize as sacred or psychologically binding. Superheroes, celebrity, conspiracy, and national destiny become the new pantheon; the tragedy is the illiteracy, not the absence.

“Read” matters too. He’s not only talking about books; he’s talking about interpretation, initiation, the ability to decode recurring patterns - sacrifice, transformation, hubris - and notice when a society is reenacting them blindly. In Anger’s world, to be mythologically illiterate is to be easy to manipulate, because images and narratives will still govern you, just without your consent.

It’s also a self-justifying provocation: a manifesto for his own project of forcing myth back into view, dragging the repressed symbols of American life (sex, power, violence, glamour) into the light and daring the audience to admit they’ve been worshipping all along.