There's an
article at Democratic Underground which looks at the response to various liberal/leftist books being at the top of the NY Times bestseller list -- the response has been, essentially, "now the left is peddling their hate the way the right peddled theirs", a response which is lazy and misguided. It's a good article, but misses some major points which are worth looking at...
I agree with Gil Christner, the author of the article, when he writes:
One could hope that grown-ups would stop labeling opposing viewpoints as "Hatred," and actually debate the merits. But even if that is asking too much, there is no denying the reality that Lefty thought is making a strong appearance on the best seller lists. Call it Hatred, call it Vitriol, call it a cab for a ride to the airport, but it is a reality that a huge amount of Americans want to consider another side of the story.
Debating the merits is what we really should be doing -- looking, for instance, at the information presented by people such as Al Franken, Michael Moore, Joe Conason, Molly Ivins, and others to see if it holds up to scrutiny.
The thing about the right-wing books by people like Ann Coulter is that they might as well be classified as fiction. It's great that the left is now getting heard, but it would be a shame if, in the name of mass popularity, our writers have been as cavalier with the facts as the righty writers have been.
The challenge is particularly difficult when books such as Moore's and Franken's are not merely informational, but satirical. I love satire, but it's a low form of rhetoric, and can lead to genuine and important ideas being lost.
For instance, Franken's book works wonderfully as a parody of Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc. He uses their own style and form to attack them, which is great fun for some of us to read, but it's difficult to mix satire and parody with real information. Jonathan Swift was a brilliant satirist, and we acknowledge him today as one of the great practitioners of the form, because he used satire to dig into universal truths and skewer pompous hypocrisy, but he seldom tried to convey a lot of specific information through his satire. Both Franken and Moore have touted their armies of fact checkers, but since when did satire require fact checking?
What we have, then, is a new form: informational works dressed in the rhetoric of satire. I'm all for new forms, but it's important to realize that such things often give critics and naive readers numerous challenges, leaving the authors open to criticism they wouldn't be subject to were they to write works which were purely satirical or purely informational.
Personally, I've enjoyed Franken's and Moore's books, mostly because of their tone of righteous indignation. And they need the facts to fuel the indignation -- anyone who has studied the Bush administration for more than an hour should be horrified and indignant, and using a moderate tone to deal with the lies and manipulations of the Bush junta is, it seems to me, a moral failing.
But a lot of responsibility goes along with righteous indignation, and the primary responsibility is not to use rhetoric to obscure important issues. The best way to look at these books might be to have a bunch of self-proclaimed moderates act as objective readers, to research the claims and techniques of the books, and then have a round-table discussion of what they've found.
My hunch is that they would discover the current leftist books on the bestseller lists are, despite some errors and generalities, far more truthful in their representation of statistics and events than books such as Ann Coulter's and Rush Limbaugh's.
But I'm neither objective nor moderate, so perhaps my hunch is wrong.