100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is #37)

This book is pretty funny. I have to ask why it even exists.

Actually, I don’t have to ask that; it exists because people love a hero. They love someone to fight their battles and attack people they don’t like in their stead.

What’s interesting is that this book was published in 2005. I’d like to think that what is now a mainstay of American politics was perhaps a little more rare back then?

I don’t exactly remember how I got the book – I think when Annie asked people to donate books for my 50th birthday, someone (no idea who) put this in the pile. I pulled it off the shelf because I knew I would just skim it, so I could get through it in a weekend. And that’s exactly what happened.

The book is written by a conservative author, and it really serves no purpose. If you bought the book, you don’t need to be convinced of its contents. And if you disagreed with its contents, you wouldn’t have bought the book. But I do remember the book being being discussed a bit 20 years ago, so maybe it broke new ground in personal attacks? Maybe this was the book that started it all?

The author starts with some categories of people he doesn’t like (parentheticals are mine):

1. American Bashers
2. Hollywood Blowhards
3. TV Schlockmeisters (TV talk show hosts?)
4. TV Schlockmeisters – News Division
5. I’m Your Pimp, You My Bitch – and Other Great American Love Songs (rappers)
6. American Jackals (lawyers, essentially)
7. I’m Offended, Therefore I Am
8. Racial Enforcers
9. White-Collar Thugs (greedy CEOs, weirdly)
10. Sex Warriors (feminists?)
11. Reading, Writing, and Radicals (academics)

He has a little essay on each of these, with examples.

And then we get to the list, which is not surprising. It’s a Who’s Who of pop culture and Democratic politics from 20 years ago.

What it highlighted for me is how fast politics and outrage (the “Politics of Outrage”?) moves. A lot of the people were initially unknown to me, and then I read a few paragraphs to figure out who they were, and I vaguely remembered them from some random instant of fame in a news cycle two decades back and how I hadn’t heard anything about them since then. They had no staying power, and therefore no real significance or impact in the long run.

I skipped the entires for the usual suspects: Barbra Streisand, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Springer, and the #1 placeholder, Michael Moore. What could he even say about these people that would be interesting?

(Back to my point above – what has Michael Moore done since 2005? I haven’t even heard his name for years.)

What I did read for these was a rehashing of common complaints, or some cherry-picking of specific things he didn’t like. Some of them were just easy softball targets (I mean … Anna Nicole Smith? She’s “screwing up America”? Really?)

He does throw in the occasional conservative, which was interesting. Radio host Michael Savage (he’s too mean, and gives conservatives a bad name), the CEOs of Enron and Tyco (they were a big deal back then), and even Judge Roy Moore. He was annoyed with Moore for ignoring a ruling about the Ten Commandments back in 2003. Who would know that 14 years later, Moore would be accused of sexual misconduct during a Senate campaign? He was someone barely anyone knew back then. (But even seven years further on – how many people remember Roy Moore now?)

He also quotes Bill Cosby’s comments about Black culture at length (Cosby doesn’t get an entry – he quoted Cosby to justify an attack on someone else) . Cosby wouldn’t be publicly accused of rape until 2014.

In a couple of entries, he tries to be funny. For Courtney Love he just writes:

Ho.

I had to think for a second to remember who Courtney Love even was. She’s utterly irrelevant 19 years down the road. Also, her status as “ho” is relatively light by today’s standards (and maybe even back then? I remember her mostly for bad music, not for any attempt at sexual revolution.).

But the most interesting entry, by far, is the one sentence he writes for Michael Jackson at #90:

If I have to explain it to you, you shouldn’t be reading this book!

That’s really fascinating when you think about it.

It raises the question: who did he write the book for?

In that one sentence, he’s effectively saying, “This book was for readers who already hate all these people.” So, by his own admission, he’s not trying to convince anyone of anything. He’s not trying to further political or cultural discourse in any way. He literally wrote the book just to attack people in front of an audience that would agree with him.

And that, folks, is American politics in a nutshell.