Gore, angry and lucid, attacks White House as cruel and corrupt
By Charles Taylor - BLOOMBERG NEWS
Article Last Updated: 05/27/2007 06:51:58 AM PDT
Despite winning both houses of Congress, the Democrats still seem to believe they can deal reasonably with a reckless, intransigent president. And the coverage of President Bush by the Washington press corps reminds you why it took two police reporters to break Watergate.
Al Gore isn't having any of that in his attack on the Bush presidency, "The Assault on Reason." The book — devastating precisely because Gore has been so close to the pinnacle of American politics — is a carefully considered elucidation of the Bush administration's misdeeds:
- "The current White House has engaged in an unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception — especially where its policies in Iraq are concerned."
- "The appointment of industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former employers results in a kind of institutionalized corruption and the abandonment of law enforcement and regulations."
- "The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority."
- "We were told by the president that war was his last choice. But it is now clear that it was always his first preference."
Bush's "theory of his own power is so vast that, in practice, it ... is so obviously unconstitutional — a power to simply declare what provisions of law he will and will not comply with."
One of Gore's themes is how fear overwhelms reason. The Bush administration, fulfilling Walter Lippman's prophecy of the manufacture of consent, has manipulated the public's fear to push its agenda.
Yet Gore also shows what anger — held in check and supported by facts — can do to support reason. There's an eloquent urgency here and a concomitant absence of the hysterical invective that has poisoned public discourse.
When Gore hews to this passion, the book commands attention. His occasional brief forays into the history of science, though always germane, verge on the pedantic and recall the stiff public image he banished with his performance in "An Inconvenient Truth."
And it has to be said that the premise of the book is at fault. Gore contends the demise of print culture and the rise of television have turned political discourse into a one-way conversation, with the immediacy of TV obliterating nuance and, through incessant repetition, giving lies the force of truth.
Of course, he's right that treating news as entertainment has corrupted it and that conglomerate control of the media has made the situation worse. In essence, though, he's selling the old saw that reading is active and viewing is passive.
That argument doesn't acknowledge that reading is a visual experience. Gore's contention that "words are composed of abstract symbols ... that have no intrinsic meaning until they are strung together into recognizable sequences" fails to acknowledge that they become recognizable via our eyes. His description of the way words attain meaning also describes the way filmed images are edited into a sequence.
It's not the medium but its content that dumbs down the culture. Nightly network reports from Vietnam didn't distort America's perception of that war; "An Inconvenient Truth" didn't damage anybody's understanding of climate change. Conversely, if you read the tabloid press, your critical faculties probably won't be enhanced.
While "The Assault on Reason" focuses on the radical right (a term Gore is scrupulous about using in place of "conservative"), his argument implicitly points to another culprit as well: If the right has shown itself willing to accommodate any debasement of our national values, the left has been too willing to embrace the belief that America at its worst is America revealed.
Gore's faith that torture and warrantless eavesdropping are a betrayal of ourselves is a rejection of this self-hatred. He won't countenance the notion that all we see when we look in the mirror is this country's nightmare image.
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"The Assault on Reason" is published by the Penguin Press (308 pages, $24.95). |
