This Week in the Voice: White America Has Lost Its Mind

From Glenn Beck to Breitbart, Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, from sea to shining sea, from their mere followers to their Kool-Aid drinkers, the rage, motives, and manners all lend themselves to a certain composite picture developing quite neatly in this country, that's really, more than anything, a diagnosis: White America Has Lost Its Mind. Village Voice staff writer (and categorical clinician) Steven Thrasher got inside the insane Caucasian brain of the United States, and presents us this week with his findings.

Elsewhere this week in News, everyone else (but us) is basically fucking crazy, too:

• SHOTS FIRED: Legacy Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff is beefing with his colleague, award-winning Village Voice political columnist Tom Robbins, as he explains Why Nat Hentoff Opposes The Ground Zero Mosque (And is Breaking Tom Robbins' Heart). Readers, enjoy these dueling columns, because, uh...*takes cover*.
• Meanwhile, the aforementioned Tom Robbins is trying the case of Staten Island District Attorney and the Republican candidate for New York's upcoming Attorney General election, Dan Donovan and His Messy Backyard.
• And Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto runs down some scenes from the New York Film Festival, HBO's new season of Bored to Death, and Kristen Scott Thomas' New Movie About Hormones, which is also the name of his column this week. It doesn't quite have the same ring as "Is Black Dick Really Better?" but it'll do.

This week in Film, like almost every other week in film, everything is crazy, not just white people:

• What else do you need to know to read legendary Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman's review of the long-awaited David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin "Facebook Movie," the headline of which is According to The Social Network, You Are Definitely Not the Only Asshole on Facebook, though? Nothing. That headline is perfect enough. Read it.
• Nick Pinkerton saw another goddamn movie about teenage vampires, which are now more everywhere than they were yesterday. This one is called Let Me In.
• Dan Kois saw Freakonomics, which is basically math for crazy people. Okay, not true: it's the documentary based on the bestselling book at least one person n every flight anyone's been on in the last four years has read, Freakonomics, which is about math for crazy people, like "cool" economists. Imagine how that one worked out.
• Also, there are a bunch of other movies we reviewed this week, about crazy things and people like Nazis, facially deformed ghouls, S & M, someone who decided to name their film Douchebag, and more. More here.

In Food this week, we're crazy for crazy-awesome flavors:

• Vandaag will not kick your ass in Time Cop, you're thinking of someone else. What East Village dutch dining spot Vandaag will do, according to Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsema, is aim a little higher than its predecessors.
• "It's not Taiwanese, it's not American, it's mother fucking Dericious," chef Eddie Huang wrote on his blog of his new joint, Xiao Ye, which serves up a dish called "Poontang Potstickers," thus bringing new meaning to the term "eating out." Voice food critic Sarah DiGregorio makes the trip.

This week in Arts, like every other week in Arts, crazy people:

• Voice grand theater chair Michael Feingold saw two plays, one about wacky nuns, the other about a wacky librarian. His reviews of The Divine Sister and Alphabetical Order, right here.
• Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné sees sculptor Sarah Sze's Return of the Real and Alejandro Almanza Pereda's new exhibition.
• Voice dance writer Tom Sellar sees the Belgians of Needcompany at BAM in The Deer House, sans waffles.
• Finally, Alexis Soloski takes in playwright Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, right here, in New York City. Amazing, this town.

All that, plus more crazy ass Music, Art, Theater, Film, Books, Dance, Restaurants, Michael Musto, Free Will Astrology, and Dan Savage. And then some.

Here are the Village Voice, we try to keep ourselves barricaded in from you rabid nutbags as much as we can when we're not in the field figuring out how you work, and why you are what you are, because you genuinely terrify us. Please stop being so crazy.

[fkamer@villagevoice.com]