Al Gore is best known these days for his work on the environment. A lot of people missed the fact that his recent book
The Assault on Reason
is about a wholly different kind of environment: the place of political ideas and discussion.
Although Gore certainly offers a critique of current political leaders in the United States, his main point is more about the way we--a country founded with a commitment to democracy-- can find ourselves not only in these current crises, but also with an opposition party pretty much unable to mount any sort of defense.
Gore blames the enormous role of corporate television--and I'm with him. It was the development of print that helped lead the world to democracy, and it is the increasing rejection of print that makes democracy much less viable. Visual media elicits emotional responses versus the intellectual engagement elicited by print. And when television becomes so expensive to produce and so dependent on corporate advertising, our emotions can be quite easily co-opted by the highest bidder. Television brainwashes us, he argues persuasively. And because "the consent of the governed" can now be a"a commodity to be purchased," rigorous thought and reasoned debate are no longer at the core of this country. Instead we're all obsessed with the latest bombshell-gone-bad or the current celebrity criminal du jour.
Most people who criticized Gore's book when it came out last year were conservative pundits irritated by
Assault's "scathing critique" of the Bush administration. I
live for scathing critiques of conservatives and found the majority of Gore's "skewers" to be pretty much old hat statements of fact, not radical assaults on Dubya.
Many in the media who reviewed the book or interviewed its author disparaged the book indirectly by pretty much ignoring everything except the then-possibility of Gore running for president. Just as Gore argues in this very book, media often latches on to a dramatic distracting story rather than engages in a true exchange of ideas. The treatment of his book was yet another example to prove his point.
So I'm in agreement with most of Gore's political ideas. I'm irritated by a lot of the reviews it received. I'm more anti-TV than he is, I suspect.
So why did I dislike this book so much?
I was set off by the way-too-easy solution he posits at the end: a partially interactive television station (kind of youtube posted to the boob tube) that he and his partner have developed. "I believe
Current TV is demonstrating that democratizing television can facilitate widespread participation in our national discourse," writes Gore.
Of course, he does acknowledge that blogs and wikis might be relevant to his efforts to bring democracy back to the United States.
Gore is just asking to be mocked. He created the Internet, he is creating a radical shift in television, he alone is saving the world from evil.
Rather than acknowledging the deep problems this country faces--that this world faces--and then making us sit with that pain and try together to develop approaches that might lead us forward, Gore abandons his tack and is suddenly adamant that there is nothing to worry about. He writes with what sounds like pure jingoism about how wonderful the US is and how he is "more confident than ever before that democracy will prevail and that the American people are rising to the challenge of reinvigorating self-government."
You know, Al--I was convinced by what came before your conclusion: that things here were in the process of going to hell in a handbasket and that we're going to get pretty darn hot pretty darn soon if we aren't really vigilant and ready for action. (Is global warming just because our handbasket is getting closer to hell?)
Now I read that the answer is just another kind of
TELEVISION?
horror of the story without ending on a note that made it all seem like something other than an incitement to severe depression. We tried and we tried to figure out that redemptive ending. What we came up with--which personally I think only partially works--is a call for us as a society to try to come to grips with the difficulties of both our past and present, and a plea that we take this understanding forward to craft our politics and our activism.
and other eat local challenges
. PTF’s homegrown revolutionaries are upping the ante by reducing the mileage to a few steps—to right outside your back or front door.
. I was all set to take the book, my medium hook, and some random yarn and see if I could finally figure out that alien craft.
, with 11 pattern repeats
