“Recommended Reading” sidebar
I edited the “Recommended Reading” category down a ways on the sidebar.
Deleted the Pinkwater book Picture of Morty and Ray. I do recommend little book — a delightful smograsboard of cultural references, bemusing insults, and quirky pictures. But it has nothing to do with electoral politics. So I replaced it with the only Pinkwater book I can think of that deals in some way with the world of politics: Young Adults…
All three novellas that make up the book feature references to electoral politics. First we see the outcast psuedo-intellectual Dada Ducks of Himmler High School (ahem) oh-so-ironically bring to power a hitofore unremarkable dullard (exposing the sham of the school’s Student Body elections in the process), who immediately surrounds himself with a gestapo-like group of kids adorned in silly Donald Duck sailor outfits, eliminates the arts (or whatever it is that the Dada Ducks practice), and throw their power toward the persecution of the Dada Ducks (the manifestation of which is… I won’t divulge, but I will point out that it is rather silly)…
The next novella opens up with this cold rumination of who the power elite are… which is a similar sentiment to that which pretty much all of human civilization had after World War II, when looking back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Holocaust (or, if you will, the rather silly fate that greeted the Dada Ducks at the end of the first novella).
And the third novella? The Dada Ducks in College? Note who the ASB officials are in their university… so much overlap exists between the Student Body Government and the Campus Crusade for Christ that eventually the two bodies simply… merge together into one rather vindictive, and hypocritical, force of power. (What is Pinkwater saying here?)
I also replaced Walter Karp’s book Indespensible Enemies: the Politics of Misrule in America with his Liberty Under Siege: American Politics 1976-1988. I have not read the former; I have read the latter — which has a gripping narrative. They seem to share pretty similar theses. I can pretty easily quote sections of Liberty Under Siege, change a few names of some of the actors, and we’d have current commentary on the politics of the present day… history truly does regurgitate itself forward.
And I added Michael Moore’s first book, simply a written catalouge of the best of his first network tv show, Adventures in a TV Nation. Moore has since devolved into a bit of a self-parody and charicature of himself. Dude, Where’s My Country? is decent enough I suppose — though probably unremarkable in the current glut of anti-Bush books; Stupid White Men is a stupid book not worth reading.
I’ll add books of relevance as they come to me. Suggestions welcome, I suppose.