SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010
POLITICS REVIEW BY DAVID OSHINSKY
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Entertaining conspiracies
ll right, America, a show of hands: How many of you are tired of hearing your country torndown by a “big-nosed, cross- eyed freak” like Barbra Strei-
sand? Okay. And how many share my fanta- sies about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, shoot- ing Michael Moore and bashing in Charlie Rangel’s head with a shovel? Thank you. I’m humbled! And how many think your government may be planning concentra- tion camps to handle political dissidents and death panels to dispose of Grandma when she gets the sniffles? Right on! And how many have truly prepared for Arma- geddon by snapping up the gold coins and non-hybrid seeds that I’m pitching on my programs? You know why you need to buy these things? Because Barack Obama and his communist-Nazi-progressive gorillas don’t want you to have them, that’s why!
TEARS OF A CLOWN Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America By Dana Milbank
Doubleday. 261 pp. $24.95
Such is the loony world of Glenn Beck, as described by Dana Milbank, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, in his droll, take-no-prisoners account of the na- tion’s most audacious conspiracy-spinner. The book’s title, “Tears of a Clown,” is also its hypothesis. Beck cries a lot in public. He can’t help himself. He’s just an emotional guy who loves his country too darned much to keep things bottled up inside. He cries about his family, and your family, and the daily perils we all face. He cries one day be- cause America’s on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany, the next day because it’s morphing into Stalinist Russia, the follow- ing day because it’s behaving suspiciously like (we’ve hit rock bottom here) France. “On this sea of tears,” says Milbank, “Beck’s boat has floated to the top of cable news and talk radio, and put him at the head of a mass an- tigovernment conservative movement.” But is he a clown? About this, Milbank is a bit less certain. Wrestling briefly with the idea that Beck may be a true believer — a kook honestly devoted to his cause — Mil- bank dismisses him as a cynical entertainer whose only goal is self-promotion. There is ample evidence to support this view, much of it supplied by the subject himself. Asked by his Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly why he does so much “whacked out stuff,” Beck, who attracts about 2 million television view- ers to his late-afternoon program, replied: “[You] don’t get those ratings at 5 p.m. by be- ing Charlie Rose.” Whether this makes him a clown is a matter of interpretation. If so, he’s in a class by himself — the Emmett Kelly, so to speak, of modern broadcasting. Milbank is pitch-perfect in describing a
typical Beck performance. He has watched and listened to more Beck programs than I believed possible for the human mind to ab- sorb. Listening to a Beck rant about Amer- ican history, Milbank reminds us, is remi- niscent of Bluto Blutarsky’s legendary pep talk in “Animal House.” “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” Bluto bellows. “Hell, no!” Milbank also is superb in describing how Beck manipulates his lis- teners by dredging up the nuttiest whoppers from the blogosphere, presenting them as serious alternatives to conventional truths and then taking a perfectly neutral pose, a la “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking questions.” In Beck’s “all is possible” world, viewers learn that Obama may (or may not) have a secret “enemies list” and that his health-care bill may (or may not) extend coverage to house pets. In looking for comparative historical fig-
ures, Milbank likens Beck to Father Charles Coughlin, the fiery “radio priest” whose pop- ulist (and increasingly anti-Semitic) ha- rangues during the Great Depression reached into millions of American homes. It’s a stretch, to say the least. Coughlin, born and raised in Canada, led a movement call- ing for the redistribution of wealth and a looser money supply based on silver cur- rency. Beck’s sympathies are almost exactly the reverse. A better comparison, I suspect, is to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Red- hunter, who is one of Beck’s heroes. Both men created a highly suspect back story to their early lives — McCarthy as a bogus war hero, Beck with disputed tales of pain and redemption. Both men mastered the art of conspiracy, both learned that bad publicity is far better than no publicity, and both pro- duced the perfect enemy for their times: the shadowy liberal elites who “run” the govern- ment, the corporations and the media. Missing from Milbank’s book is how, ex-
actly, the groundwork was laid for a charac- ter like Beck. When and why did our culture become so coarse? And who else is respon- sible for this dumbed-down blood sport we see daily on TV? Glenn Beck didn’t arrive in a vacuum, and he’s hardly alone. Watching him masquerade as Tom Paine, a leading revolutionary-era patriot, may make one queasy, but it’s no worse, really, than watch- ing Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s leading blowhard, masquerade as Edward R. Mur- row. Sadly, where cable news is concerned, there are plenty of tears to go around.
bookworld@washpost.com
David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, teaches at the University of Texas and New York University.
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I don’t believe the president got the book in the end.” — Ed Donovan, spokesman for the Secret Service, after an audience member hurled a book at President Obama during a rally in Philadelphia last week
TARA TODRAS-WHITEHILL/REUTERS
TRAVEL REVIEW BY TAHIR SHAH Adventures along a watery trail
THE BLACK NILE One Man’s Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World’s Longest River By Dan Morrison Viking. 307 pp. $26.95
I
t was during the mid-’80s that I first got Africa under my skin. I was studying African dictator- ships in Kenya, spending every spare moment hitchhiking through some of Africa’s most dysfunctional lands. The lure
was a place starkly at odds with the Occi- dental world I knew, a realm whose rule- book had been ripped up long before. In the years since those first heady days of close calls with vigilantes and stoned- out soldiers, with gold-smugglers and gun-runners, I have returned time and again to the place I hold so dear. What I find so tragic, but in some ways
wonderful, is that Africa doesn’t change. I was reminded of this while reading Dan Morrison’s new book, “The Black Nile.” It’s packed with narrow scrapes, humor and brazen feats of sheer adven- ture, all set against a brilliantly de-
scribed backdrop. Reading it, I found myself slipping into the world of a good Rider Haggard novel because, after all, Africa is the continent par excellence of rip-roaring adventure.
Overladen with questionable and un- necessary gear (including “a Wal-Mart tent the size of a surface-to-air missile”), Morrison and his best friend, a California bartender named Schon, set out on an epic journey. Their aim was to travel from the supposed source of the Nile at Jinja on Lake Victoria to the dazzling waters of the Mediterranean, almost 4,000 miles to the north. From the outset, there’s an im- plicit homage to Alan Moorehead’s clas- sic narratives of historical travel, “The White Nile” and “The Blue Nile,” both published half a century ago. But unlike Moorehead, Morrison trains his eye on the history of the moment. Having wait- ed weeks for a plank-boat to be built, he and Schon finally take to the water, stop- starting their way up the first few miles of the longest river on Earth. The descrip- tion of the resulting journey is interwo- ven with recent history, gritty, no-non- sense observations and a cast of vivid characters. Traveling northward through Uganda,
Sudan and then Upper Egypt, Morrison skillfully shows us the Africa we rarely glimpse in the mass media. “The Black Nile” gives a snapshot of ordinary life in the hamlets and villages along the water- way, lives shaped by hardship. The true value of the book is the way it reveals fragments of close-up reality, the micro rather than the macro. Morrison’s experience as a journalist shines through, as does his use of humor, which frames subjects of utter horror. These include intertribal conflict, pesti- lence, and the dams and deforestation that have destroyed swaths of East Afri- ca’s ancient habitat. In the southern Su- danese town of Juba, Schon cooked up his last plates of oily spaghetti and came clean about not wanting to go on, espe- cially since “on” was into the “malarial tinderbox” of the Sudd swampland, where “the war wasn’t quite finished in Upper Nile state — antagonistic militias stewed in camps while their leaders grappled for political power.” After his childhood buddy leaves, Morrison con- tinues alone, and, now that the author can turn his full attention to the land- scape around him, the travelogue steps up a notch. What’s impressive is how well
he describes without judging. The Africa he depicts is a place where tribal rivalry complements religious and political fric- tion; where illness, diseaseand utter pov- erty shape the lives of the majority, who lack the safety nets that so often catch Westerners when we fall. As the journey progresses, it becomes much less of a whimsical jaunt and much more of a hard-edged report. This is Morri- son at his best, lean and hungry in wild wastelands of Africa’s Sahel. His descrip- tion of the Sudanese capital is memorable : “A dense static of orange grit came scream- ing from the desert; it filled the sky and trapped Khartoum’s eight million souls in a suffocating and radiant silica heat.” “The Black Nile,” which will resonate with old Africa hands the world over, de- serves praise for the way it considers the ordinary on a continent so often forgot- ten by the world at large. May it inspire the next generation of adventurers, lur- ing them to the journey that is out there ready and awaiting them.
bookworld@washpost.com
Tahir Shah’s latest travel book is “In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams.”
HISTORY
BOMBER COUNTRY The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War By Daniel Swift Farrar Straus Giroux. 269 pp. $26
AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY Zeppo Marx, Groucho Marx, Chico Marx and Harpo Marx yuk it up in a scene from “Duck Soup.” CULTURE
HAIL, HAIL EUPHORIA! Presenting the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup,” the Greatest War Movie Ever Made By Roy Blount Jr. !t. 145 pp. $19.99
Roy Blount Jr., knows from humor: His books include “Camels Are Easy, Com- edy’s Hard” and “If You Only Knew How Much I Smell You,” and he is a regular panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” In this short, zippy tribute, he sets out to remedy the lack of a scene-by- scene commentary on the DVD of the Marx Brothers’ greatest movie, the sub- limely nonsensical “Duck Soup” (1933). Blount scatters such nuggets of pop culture as the testimony of one of the
boys’ co-stars, Maureen O’Sullivan, that the lead brother wouldn’t stop quipping even when the director yelled, “Cut!” “Groucho never knew how to talk normal- ly,” she said. “His life was his jokes.” Blount credits Leo McCarey, the director of “Duck Soup,” for filtering out the nods to cinematic conformity — especially the love interest — that bog down other Marx flicks. But Blount’s guess as to why McCa- rey did so is deliciously counterintuitive: “It could be that he didn’t want the Marx- es bursting in and out of his own subtle way of conveying romance. On the whole, he hated working with them.” In any case, the result, as Woody Allen once pointed out, is that of all the great movie com- edies “Duck Soup is the only one that real- ly doesn’t have a dead spot.” But Blount might have done more with
sourcing the name of the country ruled and dismembered by the brothers: Free- donia, “Land of the Spree, and the Home of the Knave.” A friend of mine swore that the name came from his hometown, Fre- donia, N.Y., borrowed at the suggestion of someone connected with the movie who had passed through and found the burg subpar. One thing we know for sure, though, is where the name of Blount’s book comes from. At the end, Gummo, one of the lesser-known brothers, makes sport with the word “euphoria.” Minnie Marx, the boys’ mother, once told them to go outside and play. “Which ones?” they wanted to know. Her answer, according to Gummo: “Euphoria.”
—Dennis Drabelle
drabelled@washpost.com
“Bomber Country,” the first book from the young British critic Daniel Swift, is best read as two books, dexterously and intelligently intertwined. On the one hand, Swift has written a piece of inves- tigative reportage on the career of his grandfather, James Eric Swift, a Royal Air Force pilot shot down and killed in the spring of 1943, roughly two years before the end of World War II. On the other, he has written a history of how aerial bombing — that most brutal and inexact of modern sciences — was inter- preted by contemporary poets and writ- ers, from W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, who saw wide swaths of London “gashed” and “dismantled.” Swift is a better scholar than a mem- oirist or journalist. The scenes involving the search for people who knew his grandfather are often overly ornate or maddeningly vague. (“The cemeteries daydream of order,” he writes of the sprawling graveyard where his grandfa- ther is buried. The line is meant to be poetic but is too fuzzy to mean much.) But Swift has an innate feel for war po- etry, and he is exceptionally good at ex- plicating the work of lesser-known lyri- cists, including John Ciardi, an Ameri- can tail gunner decorated for his service on the Pacific front. In 1946, Ciardi re- turned to the United States and prompt- ly began setting his experiences to print; as Swift notes, Ciardi, like almost every war poet, ended up writing a “dou- ble story, about surviving and never quite getting away.”
— Matthew Shaer
bookworld@washpost.com
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