Book Review: Arguing with Idiots

A Fair Trade Book



Title: Arguing with Idiots

Author: Glenn Beck

Author's web page:

Date: 2009

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 978-1-4165-9501-4

Length: 300 pages of text, 25 pages of references

Illustrations: color graphics on most pages, mostly drawings by Paul Nunn

Quote: "While not all Democrats are idiots, there are plenty of idiots who are Democrats--along with Republicans, Libertarians, Communists, Anarchists, and members of just about every other political party you can name."

Glenn Beck at least tries to avoid being a predictable party-line thinker. There are several long sections of this book during which his independent thinking happens to be right-wing, but he seems to try to be a liberal in the most accurate sense of the word...someone who tries to give everyone a fair hearing, find points of agreement as well as disagreement, support other people's right to their opinions, and form his own opinion independently of theirs. ("Liberal" and "left-wing" are two different things.) The "idiots" he has in mind are also characterized as friends...genuine liberals who also, presumably, enjoy in-your-face comedy and won't take remarks like "That's an idiotic idea" personally.

I'm not sure how many people like that there are, any more...but that's Beck's problem. Before writing this article for Associated Content, where it was a news item because Arguing with Idiots listed an AC article as a source, I searched for AC articles about Glenn Beck. There were a lot of them. Most seemed to have been written by people who hated his TV and radio shows. Nevertheless, Beck was part of the AC community, even if some ACers found him annoying.

I found some parts of An Inconvenient Book extremely annoying. I found some valuable material in Arguing with Idiots, but I have to admit that I didn't find it an enjoyable read. That's because Beck is a performance artist, like Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh, only more so. Moore and Limbaugh and other writers in their genre have preserved just enough of that spastic TV-production pace, in their books, to amuse me. Beck preserves much more of it, and I find the result annoying. Very few pages in this book are free from "text boxes" that break up the flow of the story or argument, or even of the individual sentence.

Then there's the format. Arguing with Idiots is meant to look like an old, messy, dirty scrapbook. It's printed on pre-yellowed paper with artificially imposed images of faded blue lines, dog-eared corners, tape, staples, grease, food stains (I am not making this up), and text boxes framed to look like scraps sloppily taped or pasted onto the page. I've seen similar formatting in books like The Irresistible Revolution, which is about a grungy low-budget youth group project, and in that kind of book the graphics that look like cardboard boxes and duct tape seem to fit the topic. Since Arguing with Idiots& is about a successful, high-budget, nationally broadcast show with a large research staff, I'm not sure what statement the grunge format is intended to make, but it does not work for me.

I found the format of this book so distracting that I actually sat down and retyped large parts of it, moving the annoying sidebars to the end of each section and moving the references to the bottom of each page as footnotes, in order to give it a fair reading. Sorry, copyright laws prohibit me from sharing my own personal edition of this book. But try the experiment for yourselves. I found it worth the trouble. A lot of good stuff is back in those finely printed, HTML-cluttered endnotes.

Many AC contributors were trying to be "Green," so they might have wanted to try reading-checking-decoding Chapter 4, "America's Energy Future," first. You may not agree with all of Beck's conclusions; I don't. You may not appreciate the in-your-face wisecracks: nobody is actually making every Green lifestyle change that could be made, so at what point does encouraging other people to do Green Trick #1, even though we are not personally trying Green Trick #2, make anyone a hypocrite? You might wish the Beck research team had gone deeper into Green topics of interest to you; for example, since you're reading this on a computer, you might ask how much research they've done on the environmental footprint left by computers, especially by "upgrading and recycling" computer equipment rather than reusing and maintaining it. But you need to know what the team found out about hybrid cars and alternative energy sources...and the best parts are in the notes.

That HTML clutter is what some readers will love, even though others hate it. You can actually purchase Arguing with Idiots as an e-book (separate ISBN: 978-1-4391-6683-3), load it into your computer, paste the HTML codes into your browser window, and zap straight into...well...in most cases, probably a screen notifying you that you have to buy another membership or subscription to read the source material online, and/or the site (like AC) no longer exists, but yes, in many cases, you can go straight to the sources of Beck's data. When the source is a real book, the notes provide both the information you'd need to track down the book in a library and, where possible, a web page from which you can order your very own copy of the book.

Many of the source documents for Arguing with Idiots are valuable pieces of U.S. history that ought to have been reprinted and distributed to every public library in the country, but they haven't been. They may even be hard to find. U.S. citizens have paid enough taxes to create public libraries to provide immediate access to a solid, real-world copy of everything Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, or John Adams ever wrote. Chances are that, if you complain when you can't find any complete copy of any of their books in the circulating collection, you'll even be told that the library needs that precious shelf space to stock paperback romances and video movies. So even if you disagree with most or all of the conclusions Arguing with Idiots reaches, you have to appreciate that collection of primary reference material.

Sometimes, even if you agree with Beck's conclusions, you may find the route he took to his conclusions debatable. Despite our current presidential administration, I think most reasonable people now agree that capitalism has worked better than Communism, worldwide. Beck attempts to prove this, on page 3 of Arguing with Idiots, by supplying lists of toys a guy could buy at Sears with the wages from a minimum-wage summer job in 1949 and in 2009. Yes, adult readers, if you let your 17-year-old son spend all his wages on junk from Sears, he could fill up a lot more of his room with gadgets plugged into the wall today than he could have done sixty years ago. And as I read the documentation of this indisputable truth, I did not find myself thinking, "Yes, we're better off today than my grandparents were." I found myself thinking, "I'm glad I don't have a 17-year-old son."

Moreover, as yet another bid to raise the minimum hourly wage is going around...In the 1980s I was a minimum-wage worker. I rented nice furnished rooms in nice neighborhoods, bought my own groceries, and had money left over at the end of each month for things like paying off doctors' bills and taking weekend road trips, on the minimum wage for 30 hours a week--less than $100 from the main paycheck, a little over $100 after adding cash paid for smaller odd jobs. Today the minimum wage for 30 hours a week is, in Virginia, about $200 a week. Show me any neighborhood, "nice" or otherwise, within walking distance from a Metrorail station in Virginia, Maryland, or D.C., where a minimum-wage worker can rent a room, buy groceries, and have money left over...if you can. Meanwhile, adults, who don't earn the minimum wage and who (may) have moral compunctions about doubling the amount we charge disabled senior citizens who don't earn the minimum wage either, are paying at least twice as much for everything we buy, whether we've worked up to twice the minimum wage or not. (Most retirees are living below the minimum wage for a full-time job.) It's not that I can't relate to young people trying to pay off college tuition, maybe even raise kids, on 60 hours a week at $7 per hour. It's that I've seen firsthand how minimum wage increases end up leaving young people hard pressed to live as well on $400 a week as I remember living on $400 a month, and that's what's convinced me that minimum wage increases are not what anybody needs.

And then Beck fails to provide any comparison of what grown-up minimum-wage workers actually do with their incomes in the United States versus what they do in Cuba, China, or France. There seems to be a consensus of opinion that minimum-wage workers can do more with their incomes in the United States, and Beck does not disagree with this idea, but neither does he document it.

However, no room for this kind of criticism is left by Beck's documentation of what the Second Amendment was understood and intended to mean.

Also, although Arguing with Idiots leaves room for you to make your own personal decision about whether you really want a Camry, a Prius, or a Ford, it will give you a solid, rational basis for that decision. If you still want a Prius, you'll know why. You'll also have further food for thought about whether you really want a new car at all.

Also, you'll be able to remember which of those obscure nineteenth-century Presidents was which; you may even find reasons to like or dislike some of them.

Also, you'll understand why people who would be willing to dedicate 15% of our incomes specifically to the medical care of our disabled friends still think Obamacare is an abomination.

As a bonus, you'll get a free review of the U.S. Constitution, with commentary explaining such things as why a slave was to be counted as three-fifths of a person.

In the final analysis, I have to say, Arguing with Idiots deserved its place on the bestseller list. Recommended as a challenging read for high school students, a fun read for adults, and a valuable source for those who want to write either serious analyses or comedy about either current events or U.S. history.

It's been out long enough by now that, though no longer news, it can be offered as a Fair Trade Book. Buy a copy here, if you don't already have one, for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment. Two books of this size will fit into one package. If one book is Arguing with Idiots we'll send $1 to Glenn Beck or the charity of his choice (no points for guessing, Mercury One .) If the other book is Inconvenient Book, Cowards, Liars, Control, or Agenda 21, or one of Beck's other books I've not even read, Beck or his charity get $2.