But, my god, I do love Al Franken.
I have loved Franken ever since his Comedy Central coverage of the 1992 election. I loved him even more when Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot came busting out. (Until Limbaugh apologizes sincerely for calling Chelsea Clinton a dog and thus recognizes his contribution to the negative, off-track tone of modern politics, he gets no ear from me.)
And I loved Franken as Stuart Smalley, because 12-step program culture (not the programs themselves) gives me the willies. However, I do not recommend the movie.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is brilliant because, instead of broad posturing with certain assumed values (whatever the hell I mean by that), it takes individual incidents and examines them fully.
It reminds me of high school when I found out about line item vetoes. I thought I'd be really good at line item vetoing, picking apart a bill one sentence at a time. It's also why I'm terrified of having to testify in court. Have you seen how, on TV, the lawyers never let you finish your sentences? Or you get cut off right after answering "Yes" or "No"? It's frustrating -- maybe even more frustrating than Meet the Parents. Being able to fully deconstruct elements one at a time turns me on.
What Franken does is select some important taken-as-fact statement of the extreme right wing and investigate it. Like, suppose Ann Coulter wrote in a book (and she didn't, but I already returned this book to the library, sorry Al), "Mr. Jones said in the New York Times that 75,000 somethings somethinged."
Franken will check her "footnotes" (p.s. don't miss the endnote section of Lies...) and (oh my god) -- look up the source. That's really good right there, because often the source doesn't match the "fact." He will then discover all of the possible facts -- in writing, with sources -- that may have led to the blurry original "fact." Like, he will find out that Mr. Jones, a writer for the New York Times, quoted someone else as saying that 25,000 somethins somethinged, and then Mr. Jones went on to discredit this statement.
My example is clumsy, but the book is full of real ones. I like all of the bits where Franken, being the jovial (but well-researched and serious) guy that he is, gets a "fuck you" response out of the gate from whichever politico he questions. (Not just figuratively, either.)
And I really liked learning about how Acts (in the Bible) is full of communism. (I don't normally give a rip about what Acts says, and I like to think it has no bearing on how we govern, but it is funny that Bush made a big hoohah about spending all of that time studying Acts.)
Franken tells it much better than I do. The chapter on pig shit geysers (his term) reminded me of why I am a vegetarian. Any regular reader here knows I don't tell people how to eat. (If only because I don't want anyone to peel the chocolate from my own bloated hand.) However, most people seem to have this belief that their bacon comes from, if not Farmer Bob's fifth-generation farm, then Mom and Pop's small scale factory farm where pigs being housed in small quarters for life isn't too bad, since Mom and Pop have worked hard and people gotsta eat da meat.
But that's not where most bacon comes from. Most bacon comes from megaconglomerate factory empires that, due to lax or abandoned environmental regulations (due to people gotsta eating da meat, or just politics), result in pig shit geysers and lagoons seeping into local rivers and giving the water authority workers ongoing skin sores, to say nothing of the dead fish. (I figure that, if you don't care about the pigs, you probably don't care about the fish.)
Or maybe that's all extremist lefty environmental talk. I don't know. Would it make you feel better if I told you that I don't even recycle anymore unless I'm living somewhere with curbside recycling (and I'm not)?
But I do know that Franken patiently looks at mega-lies from the sensationalistic right (who, unfortunately, seem to be providing a certain level of showy wankery that sensible and probably frustrated rightwingers can't resist enjoying), and he carefully documents why it's a lie, the original speaker/writer's reaction to his findings, and why that's a lie, assuming the person didn't say something like, "Oh no, you're right, I'll fix that later" (and then never call back).
It would be very interesting to see an equally careful analysis of this book from the right, followed by Franken's response, and so on and so on. In each book, I think the primary source material should also be reprinted. We are a nation that, despite the Information Age, still does not insist on seeing sources. Our favourite talking head says, "So and so says this!" and we trust the talking head not to be lying because, my goodness, are we really in a world where people get on television and make outright lies? (Well, yes, since each party believes the other party does it, doesn't it stand to reason that anyone could do it?)
I didn't have to trust just-Franken too much because he does show excerpts from primary source material, but I'd still like to see Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly calmly, rationally, say, "Well, he says this, but he's misquoting this source here (show source)" and so on.
I guess what I want is accountability, and we can only get that through a scholarly back and forth. Which does not make good showbiz. Franken, at least, started out in entertainment, and is silly and self-effacing enough to make excellent showbiz. And to make me feel weird that this "comedian" seems to know more about what's really going on than either the leftwing or the rightwing media.
Depressed now. Pushing all political thought out of my mind again, as I have learned to do when visiting my parents' house (where Fox News plays 24/7, when my mother doesn't get bold and switch it over to a Lifetime movie).
P.S. I read the hardcover. I'd love to see the bits added to the paperback.
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