Tim Bossard teaches writing at Penn State Berks. He lives in Emmaus with his wife, three cats and a lot of books.

Part One

If it has crossed your mind that the policies of the Bush presidency make little rational sense, then you are not alone. Al Gore agrees with you, and he has written a book that traces the course of the current administration, already deeply embroiled in disaster and perhaps laying the groundwork for generations of misrule, to a shadowy side-effect of modernity, technology and the information revolution. At heart, The Assault on Reason is a critique of Bush and his wayward policies, and so, in this election year, it is already somewhat dated, even though it was only published in the spring of last year. Yet it is worth reading for its analysis of the fundamental cultural problems that have allowed a president like Bush, whom Gore believes to be ruining our constitutional democracy, to be elected and to claim for himself increasing amounts of power. This book works best when it diagnoses the larger, more embracing cultural malaise that is crippling us.

Looking at the list of topics Gore discusses, it is hard not to feel that, like Alice, we have all tumbled down the rabbit hole into a topsy-turvey universe. Consider the roles played by deception, misinformation, arm-twisting and emotional manipulation in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Although he ought to have known better (and probably did), President Bush managed to persuade 70% of the American people that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda. To this day, according to Gore, as much as 40% of Americans still think this is true.

Bush also deceived Americans into thinking that Iraq stood ready with an arsenal of gas and bacteria, and that it was working on acquiring nuclear weapons as well. Of course, the invasion showed that Iraq had nothing of the kind, but by that time the invasion was an accomplished fact. According to Gore, The president has chosen to ignore and indeed often to suppress studies, reports, and facts that were contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of fostering in the minds of the American people (pp. 103-104).

The invasion itself was mishandled, despite warnings and protests from the Pentagon and military experts. The invasion force was too small and underequipped; the people of Iraq, far from greeting their invaders with cheers and garlands of flowers, as Donald Rumsfeld et al predicted, responded with chaos, popular resentment and a growing insurgent resistance; and it turned out that the administration had literally no plan at all for the postwar period (p.116 Gore s emphasis).

Bush s tactics often cross the line from the merely unethical to the outright illegal and unconstitutional. His treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo and the administration s endorsement of torture violates international law in general and the Geneva Convention in particular. The atrocities perpetrated at Abu Ghraib were more than the aberrant behavior of a few bad apples, says Gore. They were the direct result of a culture of impunity encouraged, authorized, and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva conventions did not apply.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush has claimed for the presidency the right to arrest and imprison American citizens deemed to be unlawful enemy combatants. Such a person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the president wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment (132). The prisoner is given no access to legal counsel, and indeed has no right to be informed of the crimes he or she is being charged with.

The president s efforts to eavesdrop and spy on American citizens through warrant-less wiretapping and email surveillance are well known. The Patriot Act also makes it easy for federal agents to sneak and peak in non-terrorism cases as well, allowing secret searches of private residences of American citizens without the knowledge or consent of the occupants.
And there is the environmental crisis, a subject about which Gore has made himself into a sort of lay expert. He insists that the energy crisis and the climate crisis are the same thing two sides of the same coin. Since virtually all of the world s scientific community are in agreement that the earth is warming up (That debate, says Gore, is over.), and that humans are responsible for the change, we need to change our behavior in order to sustain our lives.

Of course, Gore has written and lectured extensively on this topic, and for a more detailed presentation, one can turn to An Inconvenient Truth, book or film. Here he is mainly interested in the inadequate response the Bush administration has given to the problem. As one might expect, he finds the president guilty of deception, of ignoring pertinent fact-finding research, of legislative bullying and ideological manipulation. The Bush administration, Gore says, has abandoned its responsibility to protect the environment . . . and has essentially given control of environmental policy to the largest polluters and other special interests, many of whom have tried for decades to weaken or gut environmental standards (197). Take, for example, the sleight-of-hand by which he bypasses legitimate scientific inquiry and allows the Exxon-Mobile oil company to manage information and research findings.

Bush has publicly demeaned scientists within the administration who have seriously tried to explain the dangerous consequences of mishandling natural resources. He has censored part of an EPA report on global warming and substituted language from an official government report financed by Exxon-Mobile a report that Gore calls self-interested and deeply flawed (200). Exxon-Mobile, is in fact, behind a massive campaign to disseminate disinformation through the funding of psuedo-scientific, non-peer-reviewed studies challenging the findings of he scientific community. Their purpose, says Gore, is to confuse the public and foster doubt about the reality of global warming. Protests from the U.S. State senators, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Royal Society, and numerous organizations devoted to scientific integrity have thus far met with little response. The consequences of accepting Exxon-Mobil’s advice, says Gore, to do nothing to counter global warming — are almost unthinkable (201).

These discussions of the Iraq war, of the President s efforts to bend the rule of law and the Constitution to suit his national security policies, of his handling of the environmental crisis make up the middle third of Gore s book, and in their broad outlines, if not their details, there is a great deal here that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the news for the past six years. Inevitably, for a book written on time-sensitive topics, this one already shows signs of dating. Gore does not cover the resignations of Rumsfeld, Rove or Gonzales, nor can he assess the troop surge as a partial solution to our military problems in Iraq.
Neither is this book a balanced presentation of the situation. To get a full view of both sides, one must turn to a book written from within the administration itself, or for an equally well-informed apologist for it. But this does not mean the book is an irresponsible rant. Gore presents evidence and conclusions, and he certainly wants to get across his points, but he rarely displays his outrage directly or openly; mostly he lets the facts speak for themselves. Even so, the cumulative effect of all this information is astonishing. In the large perspectives of foreign policy, national security, and environmental health, so little of what has been going on in this administration makes sense that after a while the mind numbs and the eyes glaze over. Not only has Congress failed to discuss seriously the impeachment of such a man, but they have been largely complicit in his policies and designs. Not only have the American people failed to grasp the truth behind the headlines, but they have actually reelected this man. None of this makes sense. What s going on here?

Part 2

American democracy, says Gore, needs three things in order to work. It needs the rule of law as established in the Constitution, it needs a well-informed citizenry to choose the best-qualified and most able representatives to administer the needs of the country, and it needs a medium through which that information is communicated in a clear and unbiased manner to the public.
It is law, and not men, says Gore, that holds the country together. The Constitution sets up the instrumentality of government (the executive, legislative and judicial branches) and provides for a system of checks and balances so that no one branch can hold too much power. This system of government and of law was fashioned by a group of men (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, etc.), all children of the Age of Enlightenment, which held the rule of reason (not power, not wealth, not heredity) as central to the conduct of human affairs. They all studied law and science, logic and philosophy, and they believed that a working representative democracy could only function insofar as its participants knowledge and clear thinking would permit.
In the history of human intellect, this is already an extremely advanced idea, one that very few civilizations in the world have ever attempted and been able to sustain, and it is easy to see why. We see before us a president, a congress, an army of courts and judges, but these people are always changing. What remains is a collection of laws and concepts, abstract principles that exist only in the understanding of the people who share them. This understanding must be relearned by each new generation, and it is always subject to reinterpretation in the light of the progress of civilization. Thus, for example, the concept of freedom of speech has been tested throughout the last century, and the laws protecting it and defining its limits have undergone rigorous review and modification. But the concept itself exists as a reality only in some nonphysical world of ideas that Americans share and must understand.

It is the job of our elected officials, says Gore, to make and enforce the laws of the country in accordance with this and other principles. No one person can step outside of the constitutional framework and proclaim more than his or her share of power.

Since a constitutional democracy exists as a set of concepts in the mind, and since it is the citizens themselves who decide who can best apply them, knowledge becomes absolutely central to the success of the entire enterprise. Thus we have universal, mandatory education to ensure literacy.

Once again, the Founders, those paragons of the Age of Reason, relied on a free press to distribute information about current affairs and governmental candidates. Newspapers early on became important parts of this distribution process, but, crucially, the printed culture they created operated in two directions. Anyone could take part in the public discussion. If you had an idea, an opinion, an argument, a quarrel with city council (or the King of England), you could write and publish a pamphlet of your own. This is in fact exactly what Thomas Paine did. In the early Republic, readers of newspapers and political pamphlets were not simply on the receiving end of information and governmental pronouncements. Everyone who was able to read and write could take part in the public discussion about democracy, because access to the printing press (and thus to the public officials themselves) was easy and open to all.

The age of mass communications and the information revolution have changed this situation in more than one important way. Nowadays we rely mostly on electronic media, mostly television, to supply us with information, and because of these and the Internet, print media, newspapers and magazine circulation has declined. Virtually every household has at least one TV, and this has become the principal means by which politicians communicate with their constituents. Presidential campaigns remain prohibitively expensive to all but a very few candidates, largely, Gore tells us, because of the cost of television advertising time. The thirty-second sound byte does not leave a great deal of time for substantive discussion of important issues, and by the time of national party conventions and the televised presidential debates, the less wealthy contenders have pretty much left the field to those who have been able to campaign more extensively because they have bought more television time. Most Americans, most of the time, do not know a great deal about their elected representatives.

The system of electronic communications also hinders the democratic process in another way: it is entirely one-directional. The television audience can receive, but they cannot send. Gone are the days when the country s legislators and executives had to rely on the same inexpensive media, newspapers and privately printed pamphlets, that ordinary citizens used to carry on the public conversation that is so important to the democratic process. The relationship between the governed to the governors within the culture of the printed word was two-directional: anyone who could read and write could participate. Today the cost of television time keeps most of the audience out of the conversation altogether. One result, says Gore, is a pervasive sense of lost empowerment, particularly among the young. What s the use of voting when your voice is not going to be heard?

The ongoing public conversation about democracy is what Gore calls reasoned discourse. Participation must be open to all, and participants are given a chance to voice their own points of view and to listen to the views of others. Ideally the process becomes self-correcting, as stronger, more reasonable positions gain a larger consensus than weaker ones. Gore calls this the meritocracy of ideas. In this way, democracy grows from the bottom up, not from the top down. But when public discussion is limited to the few who can afford TV air time, democracy is in danger of becoming plutocracy, and the rule of reasoned discourse gives way to money-driven ideology. The governmental process gets turned on its head: information (and therefore policy) flows from the top down. How else to explain, for example, the lack of serious interest the U.S. Congress has shown in providing universal health care to American citizens? Indeed, says Gore, the felt need to eliminate inheritance taxes on the wealthiest 1/100 of 1 percent of the families in America . . . has been treated as a much more important priority than the need to provide at least minimal access to health care for tens of millions of families who currently have no access to health care coverage at all (76 Gore s emphasis). Displaced priorities like these come about when those who can pay the price of admission [to the public forum] automatically become more influential (76).

Who can be surprised, then, that presidents and members of Congress who are heavily financed by insurance and pharmaceutical companies fail to institute adequate and sweeping changes in a failing system? Or that Bush placed consideration of the chemical, hazardous materials, and nuclear industries, all of whom had contributed heavily to his election, ahead of the recommendations of anti-terrorism experts to increase national security? Or that important positions in the Environmental Protection Agency have been filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries, ensuring that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive pollution (79)? Gore calls all of these policies corruption, and states furthermore that they would not be possible if the public, whose interests are being corrupted, were less deceived, better informed and empowered to participate more actively in the democratic process.

Part 3

In his public appearances, Gore has been careful not to indict the abuses of the Bush administration too forcefully. His restraint is understandable. It s easy to come across as an immoderate crank in front of a television audience, and Gore doesn t want to alienate even the most casual viewer. Gore s evenness and reasonable tone have always made him a somewhat flat public speaker. His presence is not exciting, and I ve always thought I ve detected a certain condescension in his manner of speaking. These qualities are not altogether absent from The Assault on Reason. Gore never forgets that he is addressing a popular audience, and while he peppers his discussion with quotations from Franz Kafka, Thomas Pynchon and Jurgen Habermas, he is always somewhat apologetic for doing so, as though evidence of his literacy marked him out as some sort of elitist. To this reader, anyway, it is not the learned references but rather his faintly patronizing tone toward his audience that rings untrue.

More crucial, though, is the determined and occasionally pedantic reasonableness with which he writes. The pedantry has mostly to do with his discussions of the Founding Fathers, whom he clearly idolizes, and the Constitution. Gore s purpose, of course, is to contrast the current administration with the intentions of the creators of American democracy, and so a fair amount of lecture-style exposition is necessary, if only to remind the audience that a knowledge of intellectual history can still provide the best path through our current troubles. Like any good writer, though, Gore works hard to match style to content. He sees the Constitution as a product of the Age of Reason, and as such it represents a high water mark in the evolution of Western civilization. As an heir to the Age of Reason, Gore takes care to ground his arguments in fact and solid evidence. So if he wants to say, for example, that President Bush is out of touch with reality (62), he needs to demonstrate through reasonable means that this is true, so that his reasonable readers will come along with him. This is the sort of thing that Gore is very good at, and this is the part of himself that he typically presents in his appearances before the media audience.

But those who take the trouble to read books on current politics like The Assault on Reason, make up a smaller, more select audience willing to follow an author s thought in more expansive detail. To this audience, Gore allows his arguments to take on a fierceness that we have not often seen from him. Exposition often gives way to accusation, and with the accusation comes a sense of anger that occasionally boils over into outrage. Yet Gore never loses control of his authorial poise. He shows himself the true classicist in his determination to balance reason and feeling, and this is what gives his book its power. Taken as a whole, it is as damning an indictment of a presidential administration as any I ve seen.

Part 4

What is to be done about our situation? If Gore s implications are correct, then it is not enough simply to allow Bush s term in office to run out and then hope for someone better. The problems Gore points to go beyond the abuses of a single administration; they are part the emerging modernity of our culture. We are coming into an age where the media savvy of our leaders makes it easier for them to control the flow of information, to lie, to cover up corruption and subvert the workings of the Constitution, while all the while creating a pleasing but deceiving image of themselves and seeming to tell the captive audience what they want to hear. While global communications have made information more available to all of us, the media s ability to hypnotize us, coupled with the ability of those who know how to use them to manipulate our thinking, make them dangerous.

All of the mass deception is predicated upon an ignorant public that is, a public that cannot see through officially created fog, that feels disenfranchised and unable to help shape governmental processes, that no longer cares who their leaders are or what they do. And so it follows that this public needs to be better informed, not only about the corrupt machinations of power-hungry politicians but about the tools and techniques that enable the corruption in the first place. It is a characteristic of ignorance that it does not recognize itself, even when it is pointed out. The way out of the black hole of ignorance, according to Gore, is for Americans to once again involve themselves passionately in the ongoing public discussion about democracy.
If there is to be a renewal of democracy, the best place to begin the process is not in an abandonment of the resources we have developed, but in their full and conscious utilization. For Gore, the Internet holds the brightest promise. It is, he says, that medium s rapid growth in importance . . . in consumer markets for goods and services and the rapid adoption of Internet-advertising strategies by business clearly imply that it may be only a matter of time before the Internet plays a much larger role in fostering the conversation of democracy (261). It is still a truly democratic medium, owned by no one, open to all. Access to it is not prohibitively expensive, and participants, rather than just passively receiving information, can actively take part in the conversation. A true meritocracy of ideas can once again emerge, and the search for truth can once again be more than a naive and cynically laughable notion. The interactive power of the Internet, coupled with the programming capabilities of television, can, Gore insists, breathe new life into our national life.

The process is already well under way, and it is necessary to maintain the conditions under which it may flourish, beginning with the Internet s freedom from regulation. The Internet is not owned by a corporation or a conglomerate not yet but Gore warns us against those who want to enact legislation to bring it under the same kind of control the corporations now exert in the other mass media, especially television. Under this style of management, content providers will pay to place advertisement, information, entertainment, opinions everything on the net. Naturally, the ones who can pay the most will get the broadest distribution. By effectively eliminating, or at least seriously limiting, the input of citizens who cannot afford space on the Internet, a set-up such as this will effectively flatten whatever potential for two-way participation in the democratic process the Net holds. In the closing pages of his book, Gore argues strongly in favor of net neutrality. We must, he says, ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the World Wide Web (261).

Change, as our current candidates keep telling us, is imminent and necessary, but so is a clear vision of the kinds of change we see ourselves headed toward. With so much media attention devoted to the horse race aspects of the presidential campaigns, it is up to ordinary citizens those of us who do not pay for advertising time on television to carry on the conversation of democracy. Gore s book is about the price our inattentiveness has already cost us in the face of deception, misinformation and outright lies. Those who hold power and wealth will not willingly give it up. Perhaps it is time for the rest of us to think about a Second American Revolution one not based on guns, but on reason and the rule of law. The first step is not to take arms but to wake ourselves up from our media-induced trance and start talking once again about the course our country needs to take.

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