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Is there
anything more solipsistic than books written by politicians?
It's like buying pretty stationery and a scented pen and writing
a long, luscious, beautiful love letter to yourself. Would
a normal person do such a thing? All right, maybe the letters
are not so beautiful. These politician-penned tomes tend towards
the cliché-riddled. It would be quite a feat if a book called
Never Give In by Arlen Specter or The Good Fight
by Harry Reid wasn't full of clichés.
I also
can't figure out why publishers shell out big money for these
books either—it's not like they sell. Nielsen BookScan,
which tracks these sorts of things, has combined sales
for Reid's and Nancy Pelosi's books at less than 6500 copies.
I know most of you aren't in publishing, but that's not too
many copies—that's a flop for major publishers like Doubleday
and Putnam. Also irksome is the unmitigated hubris of these
so-called statesmen who seem to think we don't know how to
do things on our own. Pelosi deigns to tell young women how
to live, in Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters.
Hillary Clinton was kind enough to extend her advice to the
rearing of all children, not just the ones who wear frilly
party dresses, in It Takes A Village. The women-folk,
they know about the home stuff. It's a shame that we don't
have a book of household hints from Betty Ford that would
tell us how much cleaning solvent we could safely drink before
we got alcohol poisoning. (What, too soon?)
 Presidential
hopeful Barack Obama had the audacity to write about his African
racial inheritance, almost completely ignoring the white mother
and grandparent who raised him, in Dreams from My Father.
I know, Obama is always too black or not black enough. And
I, too, know the annoyance of being followed around a store
because of skin color and prejudice. I'm sure The Tyra
Banks Show has covered this if you haven't been blessed
enough to experience it yourself. If a person, especially
a guy, looks black, he's treated a certain way, no matter
how upper-middle-class his upbringing, or how white his mom.
Obama had to confront his racial identity in a way that most
white Americans do not. Still, there is no doubt in my mind
that Dreams from My Father, and his other book, The
Audacity of Hope, were written as extended love-letters
to himself. There is not much in Dreams from My Father
to which the average person could relate. The typical child
of a single parent does not have the luxury of living a comfortable
life in Hawaii. And what sort of memoir doesn't include bloody
fistfights, malicious gossip or humorous anecdotes about siblings
with borderline personality disorder?
As for
Audacity, yeah, it's pretty audacious that this guy
thinks we should read close to 400 pages of barely fleshed
out ideas. Thank goodness his staff has a supplement coming
out in mid-September, Change We Can Believe In: Barack
Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise. Don't even get
me started on that title. Can a country make a promise? And
can it be expected to keep it? Countries are notoriously capricious.
And it seems a little messianic, too. I can picture those
fresh-faced youths who litter the streets, begging for 20
bucks to give to the Obama campaign, now accosting me and
telling me that Obama has a plan for me! Hopefully, they'll
have pamphlets that outline the plan with bullet points so
I don't have to read the whole book.
 Sometimes,
even being related to a politician makes you want to write
a love letter to yourself. Early on, the evilest queen in
the land, Barbara Bush, was content to ghost-write books by
her pets. By "books" I mean two. TWO! Millie's Book
is probably the better known of the pair, being penned by
a White House dog and all, but in 1984 she also wrote C
Fred's Story: A Dog's Life, about some older dog they
had who wasn't important enough to have correct punctuation
in his name. Is there any doubt whence our current stupid
president gets his inadequate brain, when his mother can't
even be bothered to give her dog a period after the C? No
use in having punctuation—the "help" will just steal
it. After the dog stories, she wrote a memoir that I cannot
bring myself to read, but hopefully it has some pearls like
the one she deigned to drop when talking to reporters about
the victims of Hurricane Katrina who were shoved into the
AstroDome in Texas: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary,
is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed
by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena
here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this
(chuckles) is working very well for them."
Lucky
for us, our illustrious president—he who wants gynecologists
to be able to share their love and wants us to put food on
our families—is considering penning his memoir after
he leaves the White House. No doubt the book will be pubbed
by his buddy Rupert Murdoch who owns HarperCollins. Hopefully
it will also be full of crazy Bushisms like "Our enemies are
innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop
thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people,
and neither do we." But for some strange reason, I have this
Throw Momma From The Train scenario in my head—do
you remember when Billy Crystal got really mad when he found
out Danny DeVito was publishing a book about what happened,
but then it turned out it was a picture book? I'm thinking
Bush could get whoever illustrated The Pet Goat to
do the drawings.
(September,
2008)
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