(No...although it'd be easy to do, this web site will not celebrate Black History Month by featuring 28 books by Black authors all month long! You're welcome! We may roll out a list of books by Black authors, though. We have featured several in the past and will feature more in the future.)
Title: An Inconvenient Book
Author: Glenn Beck et al.
Date: 2007
Publisher: Threshold Editions / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5219-2
Length: 295 pages, most including graphics
Illustrations: drawings by Paul Nunn, and computer graphics
Quote: “There is literally an entire industry now set up through big-named Democratic financiers to force me and others with a conservative point of view off the air.”
I wouldn’t be surprised. If there is any limit to the illiberality of what’s left of the twentieth-century left wing, I wouldn’t know where it is. If the twentieth-century left wing ever was liberal in the sense of free-spirited, generous, tolerant, with malice toward none and charity toward all, it’s not now.
Those who really are liberal-minded, of course, will read people like Beck. At least we’ll try. I wouldn’t blame readers for being turned off by all the annoying little self-interruptions in this book, the way charts and illustrations can be plopped in between pieces of a hyphenated word as well as the tangential jokes titled “A..D.D. Moments”; I already complained about this, recently, in a review of Beck’s more recent book, Arguing with Idiots
.Arguing with Idiots is a better book, because it contains all those footnotes you can use for fact-checking or rebuttals or writing your own book, or term paper. An Inconvenient Book is inconveniently short on footnotes. I think most of Beck’s facts are true, as far as they go, but only a few quotes and statistics in this book are referenced in such a way that I could look them up.
This is a pity, because the way the legitimate game is played involves challenging people who disagree with you on facts. That’s called a fair debate. A fair debate can and should be entertaining, and should be enlightening. And in fact, when the first conservative news commentary show hit the big time, left-wingers actually organized a group of young, dedicated writers to spend their time checking Rush Limbaugh’s facts. I liked that.
But of course—especially if you’re defending a position that’s basically become untenable, as left-wingers often are—checking five hundred substantial facts a day, and, on days when you don’t catch Limbaugh basing anti-environmentalist arguments on the well-known errors of Dixie Lee Ray, often finding no interesting mistakes, is much more tiring and discouraging than merely bashing the person. Hence we have Beck positively advertising his book with hostile blurbs from his philosophical opponents. Beck’s intended audience were supposed to want to read anything written by anybody who Al Franken said shouldn’t be on the air.
Actually, the spin going on in this book is much more confusing than the idea of a book being advertised by unfavorable comments. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., really sums it up when he says that Beck is “CNN’s chief corporate-fascism advocate.” Toward the end of the book, this may become true.
Of course, some of Beck’s proposals are intended as jokes, as when he attempts to solve the problem of being a well-travelled, socially active, semi-famous person who can’t possibly remember all the names of all the socially inert people who remember meeting him: “At birth, we all would have our full names permanently tattooed just above our eyebrows. There would be no exceptions...the actual procedure would be incredibly painful, and yes, if you ever decided to change your name, it would create immeasurable complications, but I think the convenience outweighs the problems...[Or] maybe we should all just use basic telephone etiquette in everyday life.” Most of us tell people who we are on the telephone, despite the existence of people (like this reviewer) who are more likely to remember voices than faces, so seriously, why don’t we re-introduce ourselves to the people we might have seen fifteen years ago if we see them again.
In much of this book, I think Beck is playing with the same general principle on which my "Fascist Fantasies" AC article was based. When social problems bother people, it’s easy to slip into the kind of thinking that characterized Benito Mussolini, inventor of fascism. I can do it; you can do it. Everybody wants trains to run on time; Mussolini may or may not be the only person who's ever wanted that badly enough to kill the conductors of trains that run late. All it takes to be an armchair fascist is a mental attitude of “This problem needs to be solved by any means necessary! How can we make people...” Since most of us do not wield the fasces, an ancient symbol of totalitarian power, most of us either keep any fascist fantasies we might have to ourselves, or else tell or write about them as jokes. And they can even sound harmless and funny, as jokes: the basic principle of “we force them to do what we think they ought to do” embraces proposals like slapping an extra “sin tax” on “anyone who thinks he is so much more important than other people that he has to wear a tie to work,” as well as proposals that involve tattooing babies.
Beck admits, in this book, that he’s not made any effort to censor his live, ad-lib performances for that harmless and funny feelings. He scolds people who may not have noticed what he considers to be evidence of comic intentions when he wisecracked about “nuking” anybody who disagreed with him. I'll give him credit for comic intentions since I doubt that he owns any nuclear weapons, but does that make it funny?
But some of his very worst ideas seem to be ideas he and his audience take seriously. “We need to start taking advantage of our massive coal reserves...we have 100 to 250 years of coal reserves.” Sure we have. And I’ll bet Glenn Beck wants to be the one to go down two miles underground and dig’em out. Of course, even if Beck’s digging up the coal, you and I might not want to breathe the smog. Beck does not discuss any thoughts on filtering technology in An Inconvenient Book.
The final chapter of An Inconvenient Book is the one Kennedy nailed. Actually, in that chapter, Beck calls out a group of people—several by name—and accuses them of planning, one might almost say conspiring, to construct a North American Economic Union. These people are not government officials, but leaders of corporations like Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Wal-Mart, Chevron, and so forth, who allegedly want their coalition to remove obstacles to international trade. Beck’s claims are plausible, although I’d like to check the facts before accepting them as true...because Beck reveals himself, in this chapter, to be an unreliable narrator. Not necessarily unreliable because of evil intentions. More likely, unreliable because of hasty judgments formed from incomplete data. Beck assumes that a North American Economic Union would be a totalitarian state, and anguishes about prospects like a superhighway running from Dallas to Winnipeg, or a sombrero being put on the Statue of Liberty. He even trifles with the unlikely idea of Celine Dion becoming Secretary of the Treasury, which seems so ridiculous that I actually catch myself wondering whether anybody thinks she’d be interested in that sort of job. To avert these catastrophes, Beck thinks we need double layers of fence along both borders, “crippling fines” for employers “caught knowingly hiring illegal workers,” and in what may or may not be the last paragraph of the book, “we’ve got to know the identity of each and every person in the country.” And the scary part is, he doesn’t seem to realize that this is a fascist idea, a totalitarian idea...an idea that, if it could be implemented, would allow people like Franken to arrange accidents or set up "crimes" for people like Beck.
To whom can An Inconvenient Book be recommended? Well...if you like news stories seasoned with jokes, there are lots of chuckles in this book. Some chapters attempt to address serious social problems, and some are comedy routines, like the chapter about Beck’s not remembering fans’ names. If you’re a Beck fan and don't already own this book, you should. If you're proud of being a liberal and don’t want mere left-wingers telling you what you should or should not be able to read, watch, or listen to, you should read this book in the interests of defying censorship.
Two types of readers might be tempted to overlook An Inconvenient Book, and doing so might be a mistake. Don’t overlook this book merely because the news stories aren’t new; they’re the back-story behind a lot of today's news stories. Also, don’t overlook this book because you’ve heard that Beck disagrees with you on something. He’s not a party-line thinker; he probably disagrees with everybody on something.
One type of reader should not read An Inconvenient Book: anyone with a literal mind, who tends to be confused and offended by joking. Beck is a comedian whose favorite topic is politics, not a politician with a sense of humor. After reading his book we think we know his opinions on some issues, but we could be wrong; he reserves the right to speak or write “in character.” We know also that some of his facts are true, but we can’t be sure about all of them. If this bothers you, you won’t enjoy An Inconvenient Book. Read Arguing with Idiots instead.
Both are widely available, now in paperback form, and even new paperback copies may be available at a lower price in a bookstore near you...but if you want to buy them in support of this web site, send $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. (For An Inconvenient Book and Arguing with Idiots, together, you'd send a total of $15 to Boxholder at P.O. Box 322, or $16 to the Paypal address you get from the e-mail address at the bottom of the screen.) We will then send $1 per Beck book sold to Beck or his charity, Mercury One.
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