Don't Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards by P. J. O'Rourke

I can remember being quite young and looking for books by Dave Barry in my local library. Invariably, I happened upon large collections by such venerated humorists as Lewis Grizzard and P.J. O’Rourke, who even in the early 90s had a large œuvre. I never got into O’Rourke at the time, because I was concerned more with Barry’s slapstick and sometime scatological approach to humor, as opposed to O’Rourke’s which was more straightforward political satire.

When I learned sometime about a decade ago that Barry was a Libertarian, I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant (I was probably about 14), other than he apparently disliked government. This is no surprise, given that a large portion of his work was dedicated to criticizing people in authority, especially the government, which was a fair target for lampooning not just by Libertarian humorists, but just about anybody. Let’s face it: the government is a big dumb ox of a target, and even dyed-in-the-wool liberals have little trouble lambasting it for wasteful spending and making jokes about Congress being the opposite of Progress.

One of the big differences between a straightforward humorist like Dave Barry (who just happens to be a Libertarian) and a pundit-cum-political-satirist like P.J. O’Rourke (who just happens to be a Libertarian) is that Barry goes for the laughs approximately 99.8% of the time; O’Rourke, by comparison, inhabits a grey area intermediate of yuks and real political commentary. He’s joined in this space by Al Franken (whose books, though not particularly funny, fall back on the “I’m a comedian” defense too often) and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame, and it hurts him for a number of reasons.

Let’s say that you’re a reader, like me, who considers himself something of a Leftist Libertarian, and you’re reading O’Rourke’s book. On his basic belief that, w.r.t. government, less is more, you are in theoretical (if not necessarily practical) agreement; you quibble with him on some fine points when he’s rearticulating some report from the Cato Institute. Yet you can’t help but be annoyed that whenever he feels his text is getting too turgid, he shoots his clay pigeons, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. As often as not, these aren’t even political jokes as much as they are jokes about old hags; as a common substitute, enter Bill Clinton as befuddled cocksman. It’s a startling and unnerving contrast, and one can just hear it coming out of Thomas Jefferson’s mouth: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it [and isn't Nancy Pelosi a stupid, wrinkled Bitch?]“. Or not.

Therein lies the danger of political satire: it’s not particular funny. O’Rourke is a seasoned veteran of the field, and should know better than to peddle such easy, cheesy ad hominem blows, even if they are merely a cheap façade for his more principled political objections. The Daily Show manages to avoid a lot of this by (a) avoiding lengthy political discourse altogether and (b) doing less blatant ad hominem jokes in favor of ad argumentum jokes. For better or worse, The Daily Show doesn’t positively stand for much (recent Zadroga Bill activism excepted), and so avoids much of this problem. It’s a problem especially for O’Rourke because although he’s generally considered a satirist/humorist, he’s a very smart guy; we need conservative voices who aren’t greasy douchbags (Sean Hannity), complete nincompoops (Bill O’Reilly), or batshit-crazy caricatures (Ann Coulter). What’s more, we know he’s capable of serious journalism (or at least genuine activism); try saying that about today’s talking heads or weekly columnists squeezing out their quotidian partisan bitch.

O’Rourke is at his best when, like Franken, he isn’t going for the punchline, per-se, but rather sounding out his argument in meaningful—if flippant—way. Whether he’s right or wrong isn’t necessarily a debate for the book review; Franken has too much faith in government, and O’Rourke has too much faith in self-governance, and wherever the twain shall meet is a source of conflict. Needless to say, O’Rourke is bright, relatively amusing (especially during pieces when he’s not being overtly political—e.g. his transplanted magazine article about cars), full of genuinely good points about small government, and a talented writer in his own right. It’s easy to see why he’s become a part of the cultural landscape (he’s a frequent contributer to many magazines, a fixture on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…, &c.), though he’s likely put better compendia than Don’t Vote.

Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart et al

Think back to the heady days of 2004-2005, when the entire country was embroiled in (pre- and post-) election politics, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had suddenly become an important political and cultural entity, due in no small part to Stewart’s very public flogging of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire. Stewart and Colbert’s recent Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew just under a quarter-million attendees, so one can hardly say that the entity has diminished in the intervening years, but there was something particularly novel about Jon Stewart et al. at that point that made their leap from TV to print easy and popular. America (The Book) was a wild success, and so it should have been: it was a well-executed parody of a children’s American history textbook, pointedly satirical and wickedly funny.

Five years later, the same crew (more or less) gives us Earth (The Book), evidently a scaled-up version of the same concept, written as a communique to an alien race that stumbles onto our planet long after we’ve obliterated ourselves.

One cannot talk about satirical works of this sort without inevitably mentioning The Onion, or more specifically its books like Our Dumb World. The latter is more free with its tone, and also has higher production values—I noticed no fewer than two typos in Earth (The Book), which I suppose sounds pedantic until you remember that it’s only 256 pages and most of them are pictures. What’s more, Our Dumb World knew its purpose—i.e. a satirical atlas—and to some extent, so did America (The Book)—i.e. a satirical social studies textbook—but Earth (The Book) is suddenly a book not directly satirizing a known form, and therefore its execution is somewhat more vague and correspondingly less funny. Covering topics from continents to human sexuality to television, the book reminds me of a pinball machine, loud and noisy with bright flashes and distracting noises and so much apparently unrelated sensory output that it prevents you from watching the ball itself; one wouldn’t imagine a lack of focus to be a killer problem in a slapstick comedy book, but such is the case.

Part of the issue may be that its authors forget how smart they really are. Earth (The Book) is a discontinuous series of vignettes, covering disparate topics, and there didn’t seem to be much drive for consistency: some humor is low-brow, some is up to Daily Show standards, and some simply isn’t very funny. Nor is the narrator represented reliably; sometimes he’s perched on a soapbox, sometimes he’s skewering himself, and sometimes he’s replaced himself with Photoshopped images. Perhaps the problem simply stems from the fact that these are Daily Show writers, and the show is a largely political show, and so the pairing worked well in the first book, but led to a sloppy mess in the sequel. I’m not particularly funny, myself, and I sympathize: being told to write a book about everything on Earth that is consistently funny—and not just funny, but funny to a standard which people have come to expect from The Daily Show or its imprimatur—is not simply daunting, but probably impossible. The book could have used a narrowing of its scope, in the same way that The Onion so successfully writes relatively specific books using specific forms.

I appear to be savaging Earth (The Book), which I may be relative to its predecessor; the disparity is apparent for reasons I have already explained. Does this make the book bad or unreadable? Hardly. Commercially, will the book be a success? Yes: Jon Stewart is still a hot commodity and the book features his face and some fraction of his authorship (I think). Is the book fun to read? Sure, though the abundance of caption text can be a bit difficult on old eyes. Does it have the same je ne sais quoi as America (The Book)? I don’t think so, and I don’t believe it will be remembered with quite the same reverence, on the day when such things are documented.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has accomplish a lot in a relatively short period of time. His first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001, and in the 9 years since, he has published an additional seven novels, with announced plans for 4 more. I liked The Eyre Affair when I read it three years ago, and at the time I criticized it for being a bit short on plot and long on context. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that Fforde writes series more than he writes books, and that the world-building in Book #1 always pays dividends later on.

I should have been smarter, then, in my initial disappointment with Shades of Grey—not with the plot, which was fascinating, but with the ending, which was frustrating in the extreme; it was only after I finished and fumed a bit did I do some research and find out that Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron is only the first in a planned trilogy. This makes me feel better, though I am now emotionally-invested enough in the characters to be required to (wait for and) read the forthcoming sequels.

The world of Shades of Grey is, without a doubt, a dystopia, though no character ever seems to come to that conclusion. The parallels with 1984 are so obvious as to preclude the need for explanation, but for those that haven’t read it, the situation is this: after a disastrous “Something That Happened,” a human-like civilization either far in our future or more likely in an alternate history is divided into distinct social castes based upon what part of the visible spectrum they can see. The Greys, a menial servant class, is entirely colorblind. Reds can see varying degrees of red, Yellows can see yellow, and so on up the scale, with Purples being the most prestigious and Ultraviolets being superlative class which is rarely mentioned. In Fforde’s invented universe, genetics function similar to additive color, so that a Purple who find themselves too high on blue and low on red will want to marry and procreate with a strong Red in order to produce a solidly Purple offspring. Much energy, attention, and time is spent on this caste system, since its various implications form the basis for several plots and subplots. It reminds me most of India’s caste system, and with the Greys of Fforde’s version acting as the “untouchable” (Dalits) class; but there are also other groups, including the apocryphal persons (more on this later) as will as the “riffraff,” who are feral humans who live outside of populated areas.

Everything is based upon color. The towns are named after colors: East Carmine, Jade-Under-Lime, High Saffron; the people are named after colors: Eddie Russet’s father replaces East Carmine’s old doctor, Robin Ochre. The most prized job is with a pseudo-governmental entity known as Nation Color, which is responsible for producing fake color—the distinction between a natural green, which a Red like Eddie cannot see, and a fake green, various shades of which are used as a painkiller, is never quite made clear, and I don’t know if Fforde simply won’t flesh out the technological context of his world, or if he’s saving it for later books. Perhaps you were confused when I said that shades of green are used as painkillers; remember that everything is based upon color, and the relation of the eyeballs to the brain is very different to the people of the novel; green shades are narcotic, a certain unnamed color will induce ovulation, and others have the potential to help or harm in varying measures.

On the political side, the story more closely resembles typical dystopias: after some sort of societal collapse five centuries before the book takes place, a historical figure named Munsell apparently creates a New World Order which lives by his specific, innumerable, and inviolable Rules, which are enforced by a rigid hierarchy which begins at Head Office, runs to individual towns and their prefects, and then down through the chromatic hierarchy. The rules specify everything from the typically moral (no sex before marriage) to the chromatic (complimentary colors marrying would carry approximately the same moral opprobrium as incest) to the logistical (everyone must eat at least one meal per day in the communal mess hall) to the hierarchical (the chromatic hierarchy must be obeyed at all times) to the jingoistic (Munsell’s motto is “Apart we are together”). Fforde’s dystopia, in other words, is less frightening and offensive that Orwell’s, but in many ways just as onerous, since it reaches so far and attempts to regulate and control so much; the Two-Minute Hate has given way to the Great Leap(s) Back, which are occasional decrees from Head Office that such-and-such a piece of technology has been outlawed. Since Ford Flatheads were outlawed, for instance, people may only drive Model T’s on the rare occasions that they drive anywhere. On the other hand, there are remnants of very advanced technology left from before the Something That Happened, including a semi-intelligent organic polymer roadway that is smart enough to clear any debris which lands on it. The technology is so mixed that it’s difficult to get a bead on where Fforde’s universe would lay in comparison to our own, and I spent perhaps more time than was necessary trying to understand it—ultimately, I think it’s an arbitrary collection of the bits that the author found interesting, and would elude any attempts to systematize it.

As with most tales of dystopias, the main character is a somewhat feckless hero who begins to distrust the system. In Eddie’s case, it’s spurred by his early meeting with a Grey named Jane, who has the prettiest nose in the village and threatens to break his jaw (the impudence of which is, technically, a very serious matter), and with whom Eddie falls in love immediately, despite his semi-betrothal to conceited daughter of a rich Red string magnate and her apparent loathing for both him and the ridiculous society of which he is a part. This is the juncture of the political satire which brings 1984 to mind and the social satire which reminds us of India’s jātis, and for the most part, Fforde does a good job with it. Some of it is kind of predictable, such the reader’s ironic knowledge that the foundation of this new society and the forces which sustain it must necessarily differ from the accepted knowledge about it (i.e. something is rotten in the state of Denmark). Occasionally, Fforde’s treatment of the color-caste goes to ridiculous lengths, and I feel as though I’m watching an episode of The Flintstones, but instead of working “rock” or “stone” into everything, it’s now “hue” or “chrom-”; the chromogentsia rather than the intelligentsia; a swatchman instead of a corpsman (a town doctor, basically). The point seems a little belabored in order for the reader to appreciate how deeply color is embedded into society, which I suppose we can’t blame Fforde for.

Small flaws aside, Fforde has created a fascinating universe here, which engaged me quickly and completely. The proof of the story’s quality will be in how he completes the series; Shades of Grey has a lot of potential, but so did The Matrix, and the Wachowskis managed to screw that one up by the end, so I’m not holding my breath.

Some highlights:

42. Arianna Huffington

Charges: HuffPo’s health coverage is like a horny chimp with a switch blade: dumb and dangerous. Arrianna’s “Wellness Editor” holds a “PhD” in homeopathy, the fake science of diluting medicine in water to increase its healing power—the higher the dilution, the more potent. In fact, she and other homeopathic quacks sell “medicine,” which is indistinguishable from Evian. Last summer, Arianna’s “internet newspaper” advised people to protect themselves from swine flu with a deep-cleansing enema. Seriously. Every woo-age celebrity with a vaccination conspiracy or snake oil remedy and a laptop is given column space at HuffPo. It hurts to read Dan Akroyd speculate about the existence of ghosts; it’s agonizing to read Deepak Chopra’s shoddy metaphysics, and it may actually kill to publish Bill Maher’s Luddite rants. Apparently, the only thing Huffington won’t let her writers do is get paid.

Exhibit A: “When it comes to health and wellness issues, our goal is to provide a diverse forum for a reasoned discussion of issues of interest and importance to our readers.”

Sentence: AIDS, one of Magic Johnson’s pills, Lake Michigan and a crazy straw.

27. Barack Obama

Charges: At the end of his first year as president, Obama’s major accomplishment is still having been elected in the first place. Since then, it’s all been Reaganesque speechifying, Clintonesque triangulation, and Bushian spin. His cabinet is packed with the deregulation-mad bankers who created our recession and then “fixed” it by heaving palettes of cash at their former employers. His penchant for bipartisanship, once a quaint campaign pretense, has become an agenda-hobbling obsession. He buzzed still-edgy New Yorkers with a few airplanes to snap a $300,000 promo pic any kid could’ve photoshopped in five minutes. Obama campaigned for a “robust public option” and importing cheaper drugs, closing Gitmo, ending no-bid contracts and backroom deals with corporate lobbyists—and he was going to do it on CSPAN. But he’s done none of those things, and his policies on extraordinary rendition, illegal wiretapping and state secrets are pure Bush. Socialist? We should be so lucky.

Exhibit A: “The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system.”

Sentence: A second term of crazed right-wing abuse.

1. Glenn Beck

Charges: As the Sybil of cable punditry and graduate of the prestigious University of I Don’t Remember, Beck’s bipolar professor routine is hands down the funniest thing on TV. When he gets out the chalkboard and starts drawing trees and playing misspelled word association games with a comically grave demeanor, Beck makes Stephen Colbert look like a piker. The fact that millions of Americans think he knows what he’s talking about, however, is not funny at all. If this simpering boob, blubbering the same old reds-under-the-bed melodrama from the ’50s with a sophomoric Da Vinci Code twist, is the face of the people’s rebellion, sign us up for the empire.

Exhibit A: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture— I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.”

Sentence: Drowned in crocodile tears; eaten by crocodile.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

First, a preamble. If you’ve been hiding in a cave with your eyes closed and cotton in your ears, you might not be aware that zombies are in. Though at one point nothing more than one entry in a pantheon of ghouls (which also included mummies and vampires), they have quickly worked their way into popular culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than the internet, where they have become a meme along with such colorful characters as pirates, ninjas, pirates vs. ninjas, lolcats, raptors, &c..

Zombies in particular have proved fodder for both cursory reference and more substantial fare: be it books such as World War Z or Breathers, films such as 28 Days Later, or video games such as Resident Evil or Left4Dead, zombies have begun to infiltrate our niche media.

It was from this laundry list of internet memes that Grahame-Smith chose his topic (this isn’t speculation; it’s from his mouth). Rather than simply write another book about killing zombies, however, he decided to pair the crass and referential nature of the zombie meme with a paragon of Victorian elegance and eloquent English: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Austen is listed (first) as a co-author, and for good reason: her original text, abridged, makes up the bulk of this satirical version. The superstructure of the plot is largely the same, including the same characters we know and love, seeking love, fighting against the vagaries of 18th-century British economies, and bumbling around comically against the walls of their own vanity and misunderstandings. But now, zombies roam the countryside, occasionally crashing parties in their hunger for brains; the Bennet girls themselves are consumed by the “deadly arts,” Elizabeth in particular being skilled with both the musket and the sword.

The humor inherent, as you have already guessed, is the incongruity of the base novel and the additions which have been bolted on. A section of florid Victorian prose turns on its head when it ends with a Bennet girl beheading a shuffling zombie. Here’s the problem: it’s really the same joke, repeated ad nauseam. There are only so many times that the sudden shift from “Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances” to “[Elizabeth] saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut” can induce either mirth or a high-minded sort of appreciation.

The truth is, this entire concept, though I may admit dreadfully clever, belongs as a 10- or 15-page story in a McSweeney’s anthology, whose readers would appreciate its many merits. But a full novel, consisting of little else than modules of zombie-killing or mortal combat strategically dropped into a Jane Austen’s text? By the time I was a third of the way in, I wanted to toss it. What a labor! It’s like having the drunk at the party slur the same joke at you every fifteen minutes.

I appear to be the minority in my opinion though, as the books has been receiving generally high marks (and has been optioned into a feature film).

If you want to read Pride and Prejudice, then read Pride and Prejudice (or, if you are more of an audio-visual person, see Joe Wright’s excellent film adaptation); if you want to kill zombies, read a Max Brooks book, or play a video game. I can’t escape the feeling that at 320 pages, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was 300 pages too long.

The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes ed. McSweeney's

I am no stranger to McSweeney’s publications. I’ve previously reviewed Mountain Man Dance Moves and Created In Darkness By Troubled Americans; I’ve also got a subscription to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, visit the website regularly, and have read numerous authors from the McSweeney’s label. Needless to say, I have at least a passing familiarity with the content and style of McSweeney’s publications.

It’s no surprise that the humor here is of the hyperliterate sort. When John Hodgman writes the introduction, you can almost guarantee it’s going to be an assortment of esotery, self-reference, and occasional strangeness.

The book is funny, but like many McSweeney’s compilations, it’s a hit and miss enterprise. Most (almost all?) of the entries consist of the following formula.

1. Take a respected literary idea or work (i.e. James Joyce)
2. Put it in a context that is unaware of its importance (i.e. a creative writing class peer review of Ulysses)

That, literally, is the form that most of the book takes. It’s the sort of self-deprecating humor that English majors like. It simultaneously allows a writer (or a reader, for that matter) to skewer literary pretensions while acknowledging that the humor isn’t funny unless you’re pretentiously literate. It’s not a new idea: Created in Darkness… was very similar, without being tied to literature in particular. Ironically, none of the pieces requires a particular depth of knowledge on the work it skewers—if you didn’t understand what’s funny, say, Gregor Samsa as a high school sports coach, you’d need to do little beyond look the character up on Wikipedia to realize that the situation described is both absurd and not particularly funny.

I say this all somewhat harshly, but of course there were plenty of items in here that were genuinely funny (there always are). I am (somewhat) hyperliterate, and I admit that it makes me laugh. That is the core of it, I suppose: like just about anything McSweeney’s puts out, it’s unavoidably high-brow, and will appeal to you if you’re similarly high-brow.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

It occurred to me recent that I’ve read and reviewed Al Franken’s 2005 The Truth (With Jokes) three times since the start of this meme (1, 2, 3), but never its predecessor, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which is arguably an even better book.

Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly hates Media Matters, a website/organization which mostly just documents lies and distortions of conservatives. It’s important to note that there are really no polemics or extended rants of the Ann Coulter variety—the site is, by and large, either transcripts or video clips of the TV appearance/radio show/etc. in question, usually followed by evidence to the contrary. Given O’Reilly’s penchant for dissembling on-air, it is little wonder that he hates them so much.

I tell you this story largely because Franken’s tack in Lies… is along the same lines. Published in 2003, the book takes some shots at the Bush presidency and its major players, but at least half the book is dedicated to notable conservative talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Bernard Goldberg. Usually, his critiques come in the form of examples from their appearances or written works which contain a lie or distortion, followed either by a factual rebuttal, or—even better—a separate instance from the same pundit where they claimed something entirely different. There is an especially good story about “Billo.”

At the very least, Franken is an excellent researcher and compelling debater. On the other hand, there are some cases in which the book falls flat. First, while it’s usually clear when Franken is joking, his tendency to lurch back and forth between the two is both distracting and detracting—sometimes, he blurs the line with a self-described “kidding on the square,” which means joking, but really meaning it. Perhaps Franken simply jokes so much so that the book doesn’t come off as 400+ pages of froth-flecked attacks. He is vicious and thorough, and didn’t want it to turn into a screed, easy though it would have been. Of course, the unmentioned side effect is it gives Franken a lot of wiggle room.

While Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot was Franken’s first major foray in punditry, I feel as though it was Lies… which really propelled him to pseudo-stardom in this regard. It was after this that he hit the radio scene with the dubious Air America Radio and followed up with another successful book and (looking successful now) Senate campaign in Minnesota. It’s doubtful that you’ll be reading Lies… if you are already left-leaning. It’s not so much a scholarly critique as it is a scathing, comedic, and surprisingly accurate lambasting of conservative pundits and conservatism generally. So, in many respects, it’s preaching to the choir here. Still, it’s an enjoyable book and I recommend it.

Brain Droppings by George Carlin

When last we saw a George Carlin book here in A Modest Construct, I was pretty harsh, but I take nothing back: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops wasn’t a very good book. It was unfortunately indicative of the George Carlin we saw in the few years before his death; gone were the elaborate jokes about language, the puns, the extended structures, the tone that manages to be both irascible and playful at the same time (try it: it’s not easy).

When George Carlin died last year, I made sure to watch a bevy of his old routines (including the classic “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”), but it wasn’t until just recently that I sat down to re-read Brain Droppings, which, apart from small clips such as the aforementioned, was my first real exposure to the man when I read it in the late 90s. It was this book that really cemented my appreciation of his comedy.

What makes Brain Droppings different in so many ways from Carlin’s recent work is that it has very few extended rants about particular subjects; neither does it have the serious I’m-joking-but-not-really kind of anger that seemed present in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops. The best parts of this book are the “short takes,” which are extended sections of small jokes, often about language, in the form of epigrams, puns, and one-liners. It’s an unadulterated show of Carlin’s appreciation for the ridiculousness and flexibility of the English language, of meaning, and double-entendre, and it’s a joy to read. Even better, it’s the sort of book that doesn’t require large blocks of time: since each section is short (usually a few pages at most), you can easy leave and come back without worrying about losing the narrative thread.

There’s a good reason this book was on the bestseller list for over almost 40 combined weeks. I think it highlights what was so great about Carlin, even though it lacks the inherent charm of his live comedy performances. What’s more, it’s largely atopical, so it doesn’t seem dated even though it’s now 10 years old. Pick it up and read it: this is what made a comedy legend.

As always, here are three of my favorites, and a link to the full article.

35. Dina Lohan

Charges: Fame isn’t the only thing that screws up child stars; it starts with self-obsessed, psychopathic parents living out their failed ambitions through their hapless offspring (Dina has been telling false stories of her days as a Rockette and Broadway actress for years). Her college-aged daughter may be a rehab veteran and serial drunk driver, but that’s no reason for mom not to televise the warping of daughter number two, a pre-rhinoplasty 14-year-old with no discernible talent or personality who calls the absent Lindsay her “role model,” and an 11-year-old boy whose future mugshot will no doubt become iconic. You may think your parents sucked, but at least they didn’t do it on TV.

Exhibit A: Rarely has a person’s life been so succinctly synopsized by real events as when Lohan’s house caught fire with her minor children alone inside while she was busy accepting—no shit—a “Mother of the Year” award.

Sentence: Age, ugliness, poverty, obscurity.

31. Stephenie Meyer

Charges: She’s the unforgivably perky Mormon mom who wrote the Twilight Series of books, currently draining IQ points from Western Civilization. This silly wank-off vampire fantasy for teenage girls has been embraced by legions of sad, middle-aged women who fight for access to their daughters’ sticky copies of the books. It’s an embarrassing spectacle for all Americans who aren’t actively participating in it. Meyer admits she can’t handle the better class of vampires and has never watched a whole vampire movie, even the more anemic kind: “I’ve seen little pieces of Interview with a Vampire when it was on TV, but I kind of always go YUCK! I don’t watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror. And I think I’ve seen a couple of pieces of The Lost Boys, which my husband liked, and he wanted me to watch it once, but I was like, ‘It’s creepy!’”

Exhibit A: The hit movie version of Twilight, featuring Meyer’s dreary characters, a tiresome teenage girl and the pathetic “vegetarian” vampire who loves her, mooning around on first base for two hours and giving vampires everywhere a bad name.

Sentence: Meyer encounters a non-vegetarian vampire, who kills her immediately and gruesomely in front of an appreciative audience of horror film fans.

17. Rod Blagojevich

Charges: Some things are worse than being bald—Blagojevic [sic] should have given that senate seat to John Edwards’s barber. A sad truth about Blago is that he’s not really in trouble for corruption, abuse of power or favor-trading, all of which are routines practices in just about every elected official’s office across the nation; he’s in trouble for being so damn rude about it, and for not being smart enough to realize what “appreciation” means to more careful favor-traders.

Exhibit A: “[O]ur recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ‘em the fuck out of there and get us some editorial support.”

Sentence: Flesh removed a pound at a time and used as topping on deep dish pizza, which he is force-fed while his wife spews obscenities at him and Eugene Robinson writes scathing editorials about it.

The Truth (With Jokes) by Al Franken

I read this book once in 2005 when it came out, and then again in 2006.

As this is my third time reading The Truth (With Jokes) since this meme began, it holds a record (as of now) as my most frequently-read book in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme. Why read it a third time? Well, if it wasn’t obvious enough, the recent election had something to do with it. I remembered Franken’s last chapter, modeled as a letter to his eventual grandchildren, about the 2008 election (the book was written in 2005) and how it represented a tipping point in the way the United States did business—read: the conservatives were out, the liberals were in, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Let me set the record straight: while an Obama supporter, I’d like to think that I’m not the sort of starry-eyed fool who thinks that he will sweep into office on swath of pixie dust and happy thoughts and magically right every wrong, effectively excise racism from our national collective conscience, and possibly heal leprosy. At the same time, I can’t help but feel frustrated with 8 years of increasingly cynical government by the right, which is about as two-faced on the national level as I think it’s possible for a political movement to be in the context of a valid democracy; so I’m happy for the change, and feel sprightly and excited in spite of myself. It is from this motivation that I picked up The Truth (With Jokes) again. Also, Franken’s being in the news with respect to the extraordinarily-close Senate race in Minnesota did much to rekindle my interest.

Here’s the thing you have to remember about Franken: though he is a comedian by trade (I don’t find him all that funny, actually), reading one of his books is not like reading one of Bill Maher’s books, for instance, which is a lot of opining and jokes. Franken likes to couch a lot of snarky jabs in humorous paragraphs, yes, but he is in actuality a rather devastating political writer: his facts are generally rock-solid (even his detractors often note the quality of his research, though of course they generally don’t acknowledge the validity of his conclusions). As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, The Truth finds Franken a little more cynical and angry for the events of the 2004 election. All of the grassroots movements of 2003-2004 were not quite enough for a changing of the guard in January 2005, and Franken like most liberals suffered from a general malaise for much of that year—though not enough to keep him from writing this book. It’s very topical as a result, dealing largely with all the detritus littered in a ring around the explosion of the 2004 campaign. That, for instance, the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth were anything but is not surprisingly to me, since all of this was obvious in 2004, but it’s satisfying to watch Franken leave large ragged holes in so many of these ridiculous canards that conservatives like to trot out at election time—especially Karl Rove, Bush’s own personal Mephistopheles, who still manages to take the cake for below-the-belt blows.

In brief reprieves from the proximate timeline, Franken takes us on trips to the mid-90s, when Gingrich’s tidal wave of eager conservatives swept into the legislative branch and proceeded to bust Clinton’s balls for the next six years. Special attention is paid to Jack Abramoff (this before Abramoff was formally indicted in 2006, and some of his friends with him) and the Marianas Islands, a moral black eye on the conservatives prized free-market incubator.

Like MediaMatters (which Bill O’Reilly likes to characterize as a “smear” site), Franken’s most damning passages usually come in the form of the pairing of two quotes: one in which a conservative says something asinine, and then another where they deny that they ever said such a thing. At best, it proves a fundamental dishonesty on the part of politicians in general and conservatives in particular (or so the theory goes); but the regularity and obvious crassness with which the lying is done is enough to disgust you. In comparison to, say, Anne Coulter, whose noxious screeds consist mostly of excoriating liberals and intellectuals for holding differing opinions, Franken tends to focus less on simply slinging mud across an aisle and more on underlining blatant hypocrisy, opportunism, or political cynicism wherever he sees it (granted, usually on the right, as is the thesis of the book).

I still don’t get the whole Franken qua Comedian thing, since I so rarely find his writing funny as opposed to insightful and compelling; but I do enjoy his books, and admit to being more than a little sad that writing has taken a back seat to his Senate campaign in Minnesota. Though a little angrier and (if possible) a little more partisan, The Truth (With Jokes) is a good read, and a solid piece of political journalism.