Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, was released today. AlterNet has a good look at the book, with lots of links. Time has an excerpt from the book. The New York Times reviewed the book, as did the LA Times, among many others.
From the LA Times review:
In his introduction, the former vice president acknowledges that while assessing our contemporary ills, it would be "too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes." Yet although he clearly identifies other culprits, placing special emphasis on the baneful hypnotic power of television and the irresponsibility of the networks, he provides in this book one of the most comprehensive indictments of the Bush administration that has ever appeared in print. He goes so far as to hint that, in their abject service to power and their quest for dominance both at home and abroad, the president and his associates have imperiled their souls.
Gore generally prefers facts and analysis to metaphysics, however. Characteristically, he reviews anew the history of duplicity and incompetence that led to the administration's downfall in both the Iraq war and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He refuses to assume that we already know what we ought to know (and what most of his readers in fact almost certainly do know). He is more compelling when he brings to bear his experience and knowledge on crucial issues that rarely receive sufficient coverage, such as nuclear proliferation and media concentration.
His insistence on detail and thoroughness, which may seem like a personal tic in an era of sound bites, is rooted in his conviction that most Americans have little understanding of the world in which they live. He worries that mass alienation from politics and immersion in the entertainment culture along with poor civic education have created a population that is woefully uninformed.
From the NY Times review:
This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy — low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape — and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of “An Inconvenient Truth” so bluntly effective.
Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.
This is a must-read for me -- I've always liked Gore the thinker much more than Gore the politician. It's nice to see that he has put aside any concerns about being "political" in favor of speaking the truth as he -- and so many of us -- sees it.
1 comment:
Just bought my copy...
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