I initially found out about this book last year by reading an excerpt of the book on commondreams.org. The excerpt talked about a lot of issues that I was interested in regarding society and democracy. I even posted an entry here about it.
I got the book as a present this past Christmas and only got around to reading last week. Here's a list of the contents:
i. Introduction
1. The Politics of Fear
2. Blinding the Faithful
3. The Politics of Wealth
4. Convenient Untruths
5. The Assault on the Individual
6. National Insecurity
7. The Carbon Crisis
8. Democracy in the Balance
9. A Well-Connected Citizenry
10. The Rebirth of Democracy
The book starts out fairly well. In his introduction, Mr. Gore talks about different areas of the brain that are activated while one is reading versus the areas that are activated while one is watching tv. The main idea is that reading is an active process where the reader processes symbols on a page and mentally creates images and abstract concepts. Watching tv, on the other hand is a more passive activity and the brain activity is mostly focused around the visual centres. He doesn't get too technical, but manages to convey the message fairly well.
There are some unexpected nuggets of information here and there like how to hypnotize a chicken, but overall a lot of the content dealt with stuff that I already knew about. He mentions Edward Bernays and the BBC documentary "Why We Fight", topics that I wrote about in my previous post.
I found the middle sections of the book tiresome to read. It seemed like he was blaming everything that went wrong with America on Bush, Cheney, and their cohorts. I agree that it seems a little surreal that so many Americans were duped into agreeing to the Iraq war, but the blame doesn't entirely rest on Bush and company. In a democracy, the people rule. It's up to the citizenry to stay well informed and hold their elected officials accountable. The American citizens have to shoulder some of the blame for being so apathetic to what's happening to their government and country and buying into all the false information that was thrown at them (e.g. Saddam Hussein/ Al Qaeda link, Saddam Hussein playing a part in WTC bombings, WMDs in Iraq, unexpected levy collapse in New Orleans with hurricane Katrina, etc.). We have the same problem here in Canada, but the repercussions of the apathy of Canadian citizens don't have such a massive global effect.
In any case, Mr. Gore's book was long on blame and short on solutions. He tries to explain that the internet will be key in re-activating the populations' interest in their government, but doesn't really offer up any ideas on how exactly that could happen. He draws a parallel between the advent of the printing press and the current development of the internet in that almost anyone can publish something online at very little cost without having to pay huge sums of money for a national newspaper ad or a 30 second commercial. I understand that logic, but people surfing on the internet have to be interested in a topic before they can search for information about it. I think most people will be just as disinterested as they were before the internet, but instead of watching tv, they'll spend their time on facebook, youtube, and albinoblacksheep, among other places. (By the way, Mr. Gore sits on Apple's board of directors and is a senior advisor to Google).
I was hoping that Al Gore would have some brilliant insights into how people can combat the massive marketing and propaganda type campaigns being thrown at them, but the book didn't offer much in that area. So while I'm fairly disappointed with the book, I still recommend reading it. There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from it and if Canadians are aware of how the current situation in Iraq came about, maybe that will help us gain some clarity on what exactly we are doing in Afghanistan.
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