Books I'm reading

I admit it’s rather quaint for one still to be reading those things printed on paper and sold at bookstores (or through Amazon), but I am after all a rather quaint old antiquarian (which is not redundant, because many antiquarians aren’t old, they just deal in old things). Among several I’m reading concurrently right now are Michael Moore’s _Stupid white men … and other sorry excuses for the state of the nation_ (2001) and Al Franken’s _Lies, and the lying liars who tell them_ (2003). Both have the subject heading “U. S. Politics and government—2001—Humor,” LC call no. E 902 (I’m a closet librarian—fittingly, since my library would fit in a large closet), so there are obviously many similarities between them, but also some interesting differences. Since the similarities _are_ obvious, let’s start with the differences.

First the authors. Moore seems to cultivate an almost precious image as a humble, working-class dude who is rarely seen in anything but blue denim and often has an unkempt, if not slightly slovenly, ambience. Although evidently intelligent, he makes sure that nobody could possibly mistake him for an intellectual—maybe not overtly anti-intellectual, but close to it. His humor, consistent with his working-class image, tends to be a bit earthy, as in his admonition to men not to “place the bar of soap in body cavities to ‘get them extra clean’ [because] someone else has to use that bar of soap on her face.” Franken, by contrast, is impeccably dressed and unabashedly intellectual, having written the above book while a fellow at a Harvard think tank. His tone is much more urbane, and his humor has what I see as a distinctly Jewish flavor of snide sarcasm which appeals to me a bit more than Moore’s, which tends to get a little strident when he’s pissed off.

Then the books. Each of the terms in the title _Stupid white men_ is dealt with in one of the chapters of that book. “Stupid” is the subject of “Idiot nation,” which bewails the appalling, staggering ignorance of the American people regarding anything in the world outside the U.S. and even most of the history and polity of their own country; or, for that matter, regarding anything other than sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, and the witless drivel fed to them by the simpering clowns who do “newsertainment” on the mainstream TV networks. “White” is discussed in “Kill Whitey,” about racism, bigotry, and racial discrimination. “Men” are dealt with in “The end of men,” in which he admits that women really are superior to men in many respects, and men are such stupid slobs that they’re lucky women put up with them. Other subjects dealt with include environmental pollution (“Nice planet, nobody home”), our scandalously high rate of incarceration of minorities (“One big happy prison”), the many reasons why our arrogant jingoism is totally inappropriate and misplaced (“We’re Number One!”), and of course, in the first chapter (“A very American coup”), the process by which the Mad Emperor either stole the presidency in 2000 or had it handed to him by the Supreme Court, depending on your viewpoint. So the book basically consists of discussions of a number of separate issues (“sorry excuses”), not all of them overtly political. I will save till later his bludgeoning of the Democratic Party, and particularly Bill Clinton, in “Democrats, DOA.”

Franken’s book, subtitled “A fair and balanced look at the Right,” is basically a rebuttal of the right-wing pundits who had called him, among other things not nearly as civil, a liar, and the subtitle is an obvious parody of the motto of Fox News, which most people with any sense realize is anything but fair and balanced. In order to preclude any possibility of said pundits saying this book is full of lies, he has painstakingly and meticulously researched and documented every statement, with the help of his “Team Franken,” a group of fourteen Harvard students. The rebuttals consist of taking the previous statements of himself and others which his critics had said were lies and documenting their truth, and then taking the statements of the critics and documenting _them_ as lies (told by lying liars). Several of the chapters deal with individual liars: Ann Coulter (who gets two chapters because she’s not only a notorious, psychopathic liar but also an entertaining lunatic), Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Bernard Goldberg, and the entire Fox News Channel. Other chapters discuss such things as Shrub’s environmental record (“Vast lagoons of pig feces”); Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (whom Franken thanks for being, like Coulter, entertaining lunatics who essentially destroy any credibility for the Right); the craven cowardice of the Righties regarding real battle, satirized in a dramatic skit (“Operation Chickenhawk”) parodying a scene from _Apocalypse now_; his attendance at a Weisshaus Correspondents dinner where he manages to alienate so many of the Righties that he almost starts a fight (Wolfowitz tells him to fuck himself); and his notorious visit to Bob Jones University under the pretext of wanting to enroll his son there (his own son refused to take part in the charade, so one of the Team Franken members stood in as surrogate), but with the real purpose of ridiculing them for their weird beliefs and practices.

Perhaps one of the most interesting contrasts between the two is their respective opinions of Bill Clinton. Moore has the most withering scorn and contempt for Clinton and, after a two-page list (in “Democrats, DOA”) of all the terrible things he did while in office, calls him “one of the best Republican Presidents we’ve ever had.” Not surprisingly, he has withering scorn and contempt for the entire Democratic Party, and suggests that, since there’s no important difference between them and the Republicans, the two parties merge into one, perhaps letting the Donkey and Elephant mascots mate to produce some unimaginably hideous hybrid. The _real_ second party would then be, by implication, the Greens, led by his hero Ralph Nader, for whom he once worked and whom he still clearly idolizes. The Green Party did not “hand Bush the presidency” in 2000 by drawing voters away from the Democratic Party; the Democrats themselves handed it to him by _driving_ voters away from the party. I heartily agree that Nader has and had a lot of good ideas and has done a lot of good work, and I even (I blush to admit) voted for him in 2000. But for all his virtues, I think everyone but Moore will admit that Nader would be a dreadful president, for somewhat similar reasons that the virtuous and brilliant Carter was a weak president—not a bad one, just weakly good.

Franken, on the other hand, with typically ironic humor, describes Clinton (p. 213) as “the greatest president of the twenty-first century,” because of his build-up of a good military which the Shrub then wasted and destroyed in Iraq. While he doesn’t actually say much directly about Clinton (who is not, after all, except about his blow job, a lying liar), he evidently has some respect for him, or at least sympathy because of the attacks on him by the liars on the Right.

And of course both of them deal, to a greater or lesser extent, from various standpoints, with the Burning Bush—not the bush that burns itself, as in the Mosaic story, but the Bush who burns everything and everyone around him. Moore, as I said earlier, discusses at length the process by which Shrub was made president, and Franken mentions only the tiniest fraction of the lies Shrub and his gang of thugs have told. For obvious reasons, the Mad Emperor and his psychotic shenanigans are at the center of any discussion about the sorry state of the nation, and humor is and always has been the best way to deal with such things, since the righteous anger which they deserve can too easily lead to violence which goes beyond mere rhetoric. And that’s the last thing we need.

Finally—after having rambled and blithered for far too long (one of the dangers of reading too much is the temptation to expect others to read yourself when you write too much)—I have to put in a word or two about Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, _How to talk dirty and influence people_ (1992, posthumous). Since his chief claim to fame is, not entirely fairly, for talking dirty, it is surprising to find how lyrical, almost poetic, he can be at times, and it is widely thought that the reason everybody concentrates so much on his dirty talk is because it takes their minds (_sic_?) off the impassioned social criticism which is the subject of his obscenity and his humor. He was one of the first pioneers to point out that all the four-letter words he used in his shows are not nearly as obscene as the daily news, and this is still a nation that can get more horrified about a brief glimpse of one of Janet Jackson’s tits on TV than about tens of thousands of civilians and military being injured and murdered in Iraq. One chapter has a humor skit presented as a hypothetical argument with a club owner who won’t put “Tits and Asses” on his marquee because they’re dirty, vulgar words (reminiscent of my own infamous career in the punk-rock band I mentioned in “Whence the name,” who could never get a booking in 1980 because no club owner would publicize “The Dancing Assholes”—there, I revealed the secret name!). “Tucheses and Nay-nays” would be alright because the guy isn’t anti-Semitic idiomatic, just anti-Anglo-Saxon idiomatic. Language is more important than the reality to which it points because language can be distorted to fit your particular view of reality. If you don’t call the bloodbath in Iraq a civil war, it isn’t one. If you call a blastocyst the size of a grain of sand a human being, it is one. _Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose_. (French quotes add a little class, don’t you think?)