| THE TROUBLE WITH REALITY A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time Brooke Gladstone New York: Workman Publishing, May 2017 |
Rating: 3.5 Fair |
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| 978-1-5235-0238-7 | ||||
| ISBN 1-5235-0238-X | 92pp. | SC | $8.95 | |
Brooke Gladstone (co-host of WNYC's On the Media) has released a rumination on the relative realness of Republicans' rhetorical reality... I read it as a reliably referenced reflection on how to deal with their all-too-frequent, reprehensible rejection of established facts.
Donald Trump is currently the foremost employer of this tactic, and he is accomplished at using it. But it is not a new tactic; any good salesman depends on it to some degree, as do many politicians — primarily those of the GOP persuasion, in recent years. It consists in the confident assertion of claims intended to advance the asserter's agenda. Is there support for the claims? It is often hard to tell; and when there is not, the success of the tactic depends on it being as hard to tell as the asserter can make it.
The matter is complicated by the differing thought processes of Republicans and Democrats. As Chris Mooney explains in The Republican Brain, Republicans tend to rely more on dogmatic assurances from authority figures, while Democrats tend to consider alternatives and look for supporting evidence. But neither tribe — and no one — can claim to be entirely free of misconceptions.
That said, it is true that, over the past 30 years or so, politicians of the Republican tribe have depended more and more on spurious assertions, stubbornly repeated, to advance their agenda — an agenda that consists mainly of staying in office and shifting as much of the nation's wealth as possible to their donors: the plutocrats. As such, it presents a clear and present danger to the long-term interests of our American democracy. Trump, a man with no interest in learning how the world works except insofar as it benefits him personally, is the natural result.
Brooke Gladstone's book is a well-intentioned attempt to describe countermeasures. But while it is well-intentioned, erudite, and well-researched, it rambles and never arrives at clear descriptions. That is all right; it is still worth reading for its historical references. But I must mark it down into the "fair" category. For, truly, what more is needed to counter Trump's risible rodomontade and the general GOP gibberish than to pay attention and vote accordingly?
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