John Avlon: The Scott Brown of the Center Left?
It’s obviously time for centrists to make their carefully crafted moves. These moments have to be seized; they don’t necessarily last. Political moods are fickle as March winds. Fed-up independents may be ready for some stirring rhetoric of their own — common sense need not be bland and wishy-washy — and just as Scott Brown played it perfectly (he almost had me!) and got himself elected to the Senate, John Avlon, author of Independent Nation, is coming out with his well-timed new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.
Right out of the gate I question the title, because Avlon must know that “wingnuts” is generally used to traduce the fringe on the right; he means his brush to tar both “wings” equally, but it won’t be taken that way. That makes me think it’s a center-left book. If it just plays into liberals gleefully bashing “birthers” and the like, that’s nothing new. I hope the book overcomes that impression and at least gives the center left a strong, sane voice, as Brown has the center right. I’ve met Avlon once, he’s a smart guy, and I’m happy to see him making his well-timed bid for influence.
I’m going to post his press release and go back to work. That way, while we’re waiting for the book, we can review the press release. :)
Friends:
My new book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, is now available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. It is also available in e-book and audio-book format. It will be available in book stores next week.
What’s a Wingnut? It’s someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum – the professional partisans and the unhinged activists, the hardcore haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They’re the people who always try to divide us instead of unite us.
The book looks at the outbreak of extremism in the opening of the Obama administration — from the unprecedented government spending that spurred the Tea-Party protests to the onset of Obama Derangement Syndrome. The book explains how hate-fueled rumors take hold (one section is called “How Obama Became Hitler, a Communist and the Antichrist”), examines the “hunt for heretics” that is taking place inside both parties, looks at the growth of the “Hatriot” movement and details the rise of increasingly hyper-partisan media. It compares current merchants of political paranoia with past
fear-mongers and finds that we’ve heard much of this hate-filled snake oil before. But the increased polarization of the two parties and the echo-chamber of the internet are helping the fringe blur with the base, making the Wingnuts more powerful than ever before. Not to fear, though — more Americans are declaring their Independence from extremes on both sides, and the book ends with “How to Take America Back from the Lunatic Fringe.”Buy a copy and please pass this email on to friends who would enjoy the book — we need to show that there is an untapped market for books [that] take on extremes from both sides. It’s also the debut book from BeastBooks. Below are the links to Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as Audible.com — and feel
free to write a review if you feel so inspired.Amazon:
Barnes & Noble:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Wingnuts/John-Avlon/e/9780984295111/?itm=1&USRI=wingnuts
Audible.com:
Sometimes Nothing Says It Like 140 Characters.
Nobody knows anymore what an unimproved 60+-year-old looks like. “Everybody” dyes their hair, does a little Botox, a snip–and no wonder!
Given a choice, who w/a smidgen of vanity would stay the course? Last week I got mistaken for my 86-yr-old mom’s sister & 53-yr-old bro’s ma
You can look salt&pepa distinguished in 50s, in 60s you just look old–if yr Caucasian & fried the bejesus out of yrself in the sun as a kid
It could be worse–it’s only genetic luck that nobody in my family’s dead of melanoma. In the 1950s & ’60s we fried ourselves yearly in FL
Remember Sea&Ski? Little coconut-oil droplets acted as lenses actually magnifying UV rays. My nose peeled so much I shouldn’t have a nose.
We were such savages–we fried ourselves ritually in the sun. & we killed anything that moved. Buckets of live shells, fat stringers of fish
There were like 1/3 as many people in the world. Nature still had the upper hand & nature seemed inexhaustible. If you shelled & fished (c)
(c) like that today, you’d be in jail. *sigh* It’s worth being old to have memories of those days.
Valentine’s Day Proposition. [UPDATED]
(No, no, not that kind of proposition.)
Consider this:
The world is roughly divided into lovers and beloveds. Those who send valentines, metaphorically and literally, and those who receive them.
Which are you?
Why is this?
UPDATE: Full disclosure: I wrote this post after seeing my parents. My mother is so clearly one of the beloved — love just rolls downhill towards her. She’s irresistibly adorable. Also temperamental, mercurial, and when she was young, narcissistic. (She’s actually outgrown it. Some never do.) My father once said to me (I was seventeen), “There’s only room for one like that in a family.” That turned out not to be true: at least two of my sisters are “beloveds” in the same vein, although perhaps they could not unfold their wings till they got out of her house and into their own families. I turned out a lover like my father.
Another way to think of it is in terms of gifts. The ratio of the number of times I have thought of the exact right gift for someone to the number of times anyone has done this for me is, I don’t know, maybe 30 to 1. This does not make me virtuous. It makes me pathetic. (See the comments.)
Witness
That title’s rather memorably taken, but it’s one of the ones I wish I could use for the book I imagine someday writing about J. Others: Titanic, Lesser Lives (namely mine), and, obviously, The Book of J.
It’s my contention that one of the purposes of marriage, maybe the main purpose, is to be an intimate witness to another person’s existence; to see one other human being, as far as is humanly possible, as God does. (You know I am an agnoptimist and use the word “God” in a manner of speaking, for a surmised supremity of being that keeps us reaching, regardless of whether we postulate it or it postulated us.)
Of course, J has written his own book, of another order entirely, “I-witness news” that renders any book “about” him superfluous or worse. I often say to myself, “Leave well enough alone. It’s done.” Anything I wrote could only detract from the inspiring starkness of his testimony — if it touched it at all. My 38 years of living with him have often seemed like a very long, very pale shadow of his two-year imprisonment — like being imprisoned within a shadow, so forceless yet spellbinding that you could walk right out of it, but you don’t. Surviving is simple, living is complicated. The survivor must forever after feel both envy and contempt for us heedless drama queens who have the luxury of just living. One of his flagship quotes was from Céline: “Experience is a muffled lantern that sheds light only upon the bearer.”
So what would he need with a witness who can’t see into the heart of his experience? The answer that comes (just now) is surprising: he’s more than just a survivor. While nobody but he (and the others who were there, almost of all of whom he’s outlived) could witness what happened to him, nobody but I could witness so close up, like a little tiny corner of God, the piece of work he became through that and so much else. That takes a long time, it takes not only earning trust but also getting over your own issues, to the very limited extent that that’s even possible — rubbing a clear spot in a dirty window — but (as anyone long married and paying attention could tell you) it’s quite a privilege to have a ringside seat on another soul. Much less such a capacious and contradictory one. Anything you make a lifelong study of and record as best you can, even in your own heart, is a little bit of the Creation that did not pass unwitnessed. Every long-married person has a witness, and is one.
Of course, marriage isn’t the only place this happens. A close friend is a witness, too. And these thoughts were originally provoked by a beautiful piece of journalism as witnessing. A one-time, short-work opponent of Muhammad Ali named Sweet Jimmy Robinson had fallen off the human map. When you finish this long and riveting piece by ESPN’s Wright Thompson, you realize he has been put back on it.
Ambiance 