The Fault, Dear Al, Is Not in the Media ...
MORE
Book Review
THE ASSAULT ON REASON
By Al Gore
The Penguin Press, 308 pages, $25.95
If anyone has the right to fulminate on the irrationality of American political debate, it’s Al Gore. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the national media turned him into a hapless unofficial extra from Revenge of the Nerds, a stiff who made false claims about inventing the Internet and inspiring Love Story, a wimp who consulted advisors about how to dress in a more convincingly masculine fashion. At the same time, the press corps—by rehashing G.O.P. talking points about his diabolical lust to “say anything” for the sake of winning the Presidency—led us to believe that Mr. Gore was boiling with Machiavellian ambition.
Now, seven years later—or seven years too late—Al Gore is good and mad. In The Assault on Reason, he provides a bracing account of how this country has drifted out of the orbit of the deliberative democracy envisioned by its founders—perhaps fatally so. In Mr. Gore’s telling, a shallow, celebrity-addled popular culture has conspired with the manipulative, fear-mongering agenda of the Bush administration to create a republic ruled more by tetchiness and intolerance than truth and law.
As Mr. Gore reminds us, polls show that almost half of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was instrumental in carrying out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11—an improvement over 2001, when 75 percent of us subscribed to this White House–approved delusion, but nonetheless an exceptionally poor display of collective mental prowess.
There’s a simple way to explain our befuddlement—and our mulish attachment to plutocratic measures like estate-tax abolition, and our seeming indifference as the White House pillages the Bill of Rights, and scores of other all-American errors Mr. Gore catalogues in The Assault on Reason: We, the people, are boobs. We will swallow any lie fed us, and ask for more; it’s a wonder, to borrow Bob Dylan’s line, that we still know how to breathe.
No national politician wants to make that argument. And so Al Gore blames the messenger—i.e., the media, and first and foremost, the reliably hateful medium of television: “The replacement of an easily accessible, print-based marketplace of ideas with a restricted-access, television-based realm has led to a radical transformation of the nature and operation of the marketplace of ideas in the United States.” He also suggests, leaning on some speculative-sounding research culled from former adman Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, that the act of viewing television contorts the physiology of our brains so that they become soft-pated panic centers: “The physical effects of watching trauma on television—the rise in blood pressure and heart rate—are the same as if an individual has actually experienced the traumatic event directly. Moreover, it has been documented that television can create false memories that are just as powerful as normal memories. When recalled, television-created memories have the same control over the emotional system as do real memories.”
Sorry, but no. If this were “actually” the case, as Mr. Gore insists, we would all be severely traumatized by the continually broadcast footage of the World Trade Center attacks. Or permanently scarred by the compulsive broadcast of events such as “the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy ... Anna Nicole Smith’s death, embalming, and funeral plans”—the vacuously ghoulish fare Mr. Gore justly derides as symptomatic of a terminal “strangeness of our public discourse.” TV footage can be harrowing or trivializing; Mr. Gore wants it to be both at once.
There’s another problem with the well-worn claim that TV has lobotomized a once-vigorous, civically engaged citizenry: The country’s “marketplace of ideas” has always featured lots of cut-rate demagogy and lethal propaganda. From the Salem Witch trials down through the anti-Masonic party and the Ku Klux Klan, from the McCarthy era and the War on Drugs to the invasion of Iraq, we Americans have often let ourselves be ruled by spasms of hatred and ignorance while spurning the counsels of reason.
That’s especially true in times of war. A brief sample of the manipulation of mass opinion in support of an imperial wars of conquest: The Mexican-American War burst forth only after President James Polk sent U.S. troops to cross the Mexican border with the more or less explicit instruction to loiter there until someone in uniform shot at them. During the Spanish-American War, newspapers whipped the nation into a frenzy of indignation that had very nearly nothing to do with delivering Spain’s subject colonies from the yoke of Old World oppression. All this before the cathode ray tube eroded our intelligence.
Fortunately, Mr. Gore’s assault on television abates as The Assault on Reason gathers momentum and focuses on the specific crimes, lies and delusions of Bush-era governance. Mr. Gore spares little scorn for the man who didn’t quite beat him in 2000—nor should he. Mr. Bush “is, in fact, out of touch with reality,” Mr. Gore writes, and “has such an absolute certainty in the validity of his right-wing ideology that he does not feel the same desire that many of us would in gathering facts relevant to the questions at hand.” The American far right, he argues, is little more than “a political faction disguised as a religious sect,” and its retinue of cable cheerleaders are just “propagandists pretending to be journalists.” Next Page >
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
I applaud Mr. Lehmann for being the first reviewer Ive seen for pointing out the obvious point that Mr. Gore has a lot of reasons to be mad at a national media that ridiculed and slandered him repeatedly in the lead up to the 2000 election. And I agree that those voters who bought into the MSMs scripting and name calling hold an eternal responsibility in helping elect our current failed and clueless President. But, I don't think that lets off the hook those in the press who helped delude the Nation into thinking that the electoral choice was between a friendly prep-Texan late bloomer and a pathologically ambitous liar and "serial exagerator" who was delusional enough to believe that HE invented the internet...(As if that was ever possible for one man to do...which, by itself, implied that anyone who claimed he did, ie candidate Gore - HAD to be seriously and laughingly loco) That was the press script. Basically the entire pundit and press corps bought that lie and line....and afterall, they are "experts" (political punditry being one of the few fields where one can be defined an "expert" just because one says one is)...how can we expect the average reader, viewer or voter to see through all that silly and phony bs if our own press corps is helping to spread that damaging, stupid and false message. Its time for those in the media to stop blaming others for their faults and its effect. To me, it wasnt the stars or the voters who will carry the eternal blame for what happened in 2000, it is those pampered and silly fools in the political media who did not do their jobs and instead clowned and made a disgrace of our national dialogue. Our founding fathers would be ashamed. I suggest all readers go to www.dailyhowler.com and read about what really happened back then and now and understand that the same scripts that were used to damage Gore in 2000 are being prepared to ridicule and damage whoever our nominee will be in 2008.
Heh. One delusion dingbat reviewing the other's book. What a laugh.
One thing that's too bizarre not to flag. Lehman writes: "We would all be severely traumatized by the continually broadcast footage of the World Trade Center attacks."
Continually broadcast? Tell me one time you have seen footage of the attacks in, oh, the last six years? You haven't, because the media is too delicate to risk offending our fine Muslim friends, and the 9/11 attacks have gone down the memory hole.
At any rate, Gore is as big an arrogant, self-obsessed phony as has ever been. His whole Global Warming scam -- while a brilliant way to make himself tons of money to maintain his extremely high-carbon lifestyle (eat that, you peasants) -- is precisely the kind of scare-mongering that he accuses the Bush administration of, only it's much worse because it's apocalyptic (the White House has never quite said terrorists will end the world as we know it) and the media are totally on board with this sham, as opposed to the Bush administration about which the media just lies and lies and lies.
What I find funny about the whole Bush-craziness evidenced by Gore and his fellow travelers is that there is SO much to criticize Bush for, but 90% of what they vent about endlessly is, simply, invented fantasies from the depths of their own hatred and dementia.
Yes yes, Mr. Gore. Decry Bush for not "gathering facts relevant to the questions at hand" while your little end-of-the-world Powerpoint show is nothing more than slide after slide of nonsense either based loosely on unproven conjecture or which has been entirely shown to be false (time to drop the hockey stick curve, Al, it's a lie).
Sadly, our entire political class, Left and Right, is filled with the same kind of self-important jackasses as Mr. Gore. The Left side tends to be far more sanctimonious in their insufferable self-proclaimed holiness (if Global Warming is not The Church of Al, it is nothing, and will somebody PLEASE push Laurie David off a cliff already?) and fascistic in their control-your-life tendencies, while the Right side is pretty just a bunch of sell-outs and phonies giving rim-jobs to the highest bidder.
The press does its own rim-jobs, as witness this review, to the Left side of the spectrum, hence providing no use for anybody, and if they are so trapped in their echo-chamber bubble worlds that they can't spot a faker as huge as Gore, then they are hopeless. Mr. Lehman, you are either a retard or just a corrupt hack pushing an agenda. I suspect the latter, since it would be hard for anyone to be as stupid as you look in this review. But you need to learn that it's not just about winning for your side and pushing the "bush-hitler-stupid" button (how clever you are). You really ought to read a few things that surface somewhere slightly further out than the tip of your nose, which is so firmly impacted into Al Gore's flabby ass that it's cutting off the oxygen to your brain.
This review reads like a parody of the clueless media elite. According to Mr. Lehmann, it is the collective idiocy of the American people and not the media, who are to blame for the Bush administration. While he disingenuously includes himself with the great unwashed, it is fair to say he more likely identifies with the media punditocracy he absolves. There is no doubt that the American people are to blame for much of what has happened, but there's plenty of blame to go around. Mr. Lehmann is usually a brutally frank and devastatingly analytical writer; what a shame to see him playing both sides of the fence to avoid biting the hand that feeds him.