Late last year Dumbocracy, a screamingly funny yet deadly serious book by writer Marty Beckerman, was a book whose time had come.
It offered in one delicious (sometimes adult oriented) package serious interviews with The True Believers of both parties’ bases: the pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-gay rights and anti-gay rights, pro-war and anti-war people of the far left and far right who will never compromise, expertly spiced with Beckerman’s blend of perceptive analysis, satire and laugh-out-loud comedy-club style observations and wisecracks. It was published at the tail end of the Bush presidency, one of the most polarizing presidencies in American history.
And now Bush is gone — and Dumbocracy is more important and more entertaining than ever.
With the Obama presidency and the (perhaps futile) talk about a new era of bipartisanship and consensus, and polls showing most Americans are (for now) giving centrism a chance, Beckerman’s moderate-voter-oriented perspective could enjoy a larger readership than ever.
Dumbocracy should be required reading for moderates, centrists and independent voters — those of us perplexed (and cursed) by the mega partisans and those on the far ends of the political spectrum who are so certain that they know the REAL TRUTH, and that those of us who don’t agree with them are either evil or stupid.
But, as Beckerman points out, they are among the ingredients that make “dumbocracy,” but the pendulum that periodically swings right and left eventually returns back to the center as democracy trumps dumbocracy. Eventually those dissed gray areas (aka “nuance”) are back in style.
Beckerman, by the way, should be also required reading for those looking for role model for a form of journalism not as staid as a typical (dying) newspaper’s and not as lacking in solid research as a typical (growing) blog. He does his homework and carefully-researched content. And he delivers some laughs and on-the-button observations all along the way, using a 21st century comedic style similar to The Colbert Report, South Park, or The Daily Show.
In his intro he writes: “Left-wingers crave a future that will never exist and right-wingers crave a past that never existed.” Then, in his chapter on abortion activists titled “Castration Nation VS Procreation Nation” he writes this:
Extremists on both sides refuse to compromise: you either hate women or God depending on your stance. (Personally I feel that a baby loses its right to life when it disrupts my serenity by means of crying in movie theater, airplane, restaurant, hospital delivery room, etc.)
Beckerman decries the people on the far ends of the spectrum noting in 2008 what the election later confirmed: the vast majority of Americans are in the middle. He doesn’t mince words in giving you his reaction of some of the people he interviews in depth for the book — perpetually outraged and self-righteous people (on the right and left) ready to split a gut over abortion, gay rights, porn, free speech, and what other people choose to eat. But Dumbocracy is not a rant: all offers interviews and research took him four years to compile. His zingers are often a scream. For instance, on the chapter on abortion the 25-year-old Beckerman writes:
Every man dreams of surrounding himself with a million, screaming, passionate, manipulated young women — basically the average college experience — but the March for Women’s Lives makes me want to crawl back into my mother’s uterus and close the lid forever.
In a chapter that deals with the Republican convention, he touches on the Bush administration’s security efforts in a serious passage. Then, typically, he writes this:
New airport X-ray machines reveal travelers’ genitals , to security screeners. (Fun factoid: when I fly, the screeners need to use extra-large monitors.)
A review can’t really do Beckerman’s book justice, since it is crammed with so many serious, comprehensive interviews and is most assuredly not filled with fluff.
Nor is it easy to do justice to the genius of his writing. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, this kind of writing was called The New Journalism. One legendary practitioner of the new journalism, Hunter Thompson, called Beckerman a “morbid little bastard,” which Beckerman’s publicist says “Beckerman considers the greatest compliment of his career.”
But the fact is that among the chapters containing revealing interviews on such subjects as the food police, war on drugs, war on alcohol, war on smoking, Nazi groups, and many other topics, there is the best part of the book: Beckerman’s ability to step away from reporting and even put aside humor and give it to the reader straight between the eyes, with more clarity and style that most newspaper columnists or new media bloggers.
We won’t spoil his 239-page softcover book by giving you this telling passage:
To activists of the Left and Right, the War on Terror is only one tiny facet of the larger Culture War. The venomous polarization over our foreign policy is just one more excuse for their never-ending game, only this time our lives and our world are at stake. Anyone who truly cares for freedom or peace must either accept this manufactured mirage — our national scripted soap opera, our security projected through the lens of sensational entertainment, our democracy reduced to the intellectual vacuity of World Wrestling Entertainment — as an adequate substitute for reality, or keep this silence for fear of atrocious demagoguery from both camps. You are either with the Islamo-facists or the Amerikka-fascists but you cannot be with your conscience. There is no “I” in U.S.A.
“Here the buildings fell,”…Beckerman says Bush said. “And here a nation rose.”
No, the nation fell too, and for one horrible reason: the terroists gave us an excuse to tear it down ourselves.
Beckerman has (not surprisingly) written for Playboy, Reason, Discover, The Huffington Post and the New York Times. His book contains some adult language and subject matter (think: comedy club on a Saturday night) in some of his comments.
On a scale of five stars(f, d, b, c, a) we give it this:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.