Author: Mitt Romney

St. Martins Press, 2010

Filed under: Nonfiction, Memoirs

[Reviewer's note: As with my previous review of a political book, I want to be honest. I am not blind to the fact that my opinions of this book are skewed by my political beliefs.]

I wanted to like this book.

No Apology is Mitt Romney’s attempt to express who he is politically, and he makes that intention clear in the second paragraph of his introduction. Of his three political campaigns he writes:

each time, when the campaign was over, I felt that I hadn’t done an adequate job communicating all that I had intended to say…. This book gives me a chance to say more than I did during my campaign.

And the truth is, I believe him. It’s impossible to deny this guy’s qualifications. In 1994, he came points away from stealing a MA Senate seat from Ted Kennedy. As the CEO for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, he inherited a financially and politically disastrous situation and turned it into a success. And he more or less did the same as Governor of Massachusetts, turning Jane Swift’s mess into a successful, one-term tenure. Had he not decided to forgo a second term in order to make a serious run at the ’08 presidency, he’d probably still be governor. Politically, he had something special. He was Scott Brown back when Scott Brown was just some dude in the state chambers who once dangled balls for a Cosmo spread.

But that Mitt Romney isn’t the one who showed up to the ’08 primary. Instead, he came across as stiff GOP avatar who couldn’t distinguish himself from a pack of surefire also rans.

So I was rooting for No Apology, rooting for the likable and charismatic Mitt to resurrect himself. Instead, I got the ’08 stiff.

No Apology is not really a memoir. It’s not a personal account of running for office. It’s not very personal in any way. It is a Manifesto, and I’m sure the well-educated Romney would have labeled it as such if that word was not so closely linked to the word “communist.” It’s about as exciting as chewing on a dry rag, and you probably already know everything this book says. Its table of contents reads as a list of current hot-button political topics. Each chapter reads as you would expect it—the same stale GOP rhetoric with a few personal memories in between. And honestly, even the memories are stock and stale.

It’s clear that Romney wrote his book while making several assumptions about its readership. If you’re reading, he assumes that you are on his side. He assumes that you are anti-bailout, and anti-health-care, and pro-current-military-engagement, and anti-bowing-to-other-world-leaders. He assumes that you are unhappy with the current administration and Congress, that you see their policies as threatening to American Life, and even more threatening to American Sovereignty. He assumes that you see America getting weaker, and that you won’t stand for it.

Like Romney, I believe that a strong America is essential to world stability. But I think we have different opinions of what it means for America to be strong. It would be possible to provide counterpoints for each Romney chapter, but doing so just mimics the political ping-pong happening daily on Capitol hill, and that’s not necessary in a book review. But it is nice to highlight how one’s political differences might affect one’s enjoyment of the book.

Take, for instance, Romney’s view of diplomacy. Both Romney and I see diplomacy as an essential component to American strength and security. However, that is about the only thing our viewpoints on diplomacy have in common. Romney refers to diplomacy as “soft power,” and sees it as an offshoot of military strength.  He writes:

It is, of course, hard power—military might—that concentrates the minds of our adversaries. Nations with substantial hard power are generally the most able to influence the actions of others.

While I’m sure some diplomatic negotiations need an iron fist to force them through, I don’t think that is  good approach to all diplomatic relations. Think about it: the class bully used hard power to negotiate your lunch money from you. And you hated that time the teacher assigned the two of you to work together on a science project because you ended up doing most of the work. You spent all of your elementary years building up resentment towards that lardass, so much resentment that it delights you that he now smokes crack and lives under an overpass (or is that just me?).

I also don’t think a hard-power-guided diplomacy is what George Washington had in mind when he created the Departments of State and War (now Defense). In fact, as a baby nation with tiny military juevos, we used diplomacy to keep us out of war. It saddens me that our defense budget since 2000 drove us from surplus into deficit and yet every employee of the State Department can fit on one aircraft carrier.

The book’s most interesting chapter, and the chapter that will undoubtedly be most scrutinized during Romney’s next run at the White House, is the chapter on health care. It is essentially a political tap dance—Romney pointing out the differences between the Commonwealth Care for which he is responsible, and the health bill that passed this past winter. The differences aren’t as apparent as Romney pretends, and if anti-health-care sentiment carries all the way to the next presidential primaries, Romney’s opponents are going to use Mitt Care to run him into the ground. Romney needs to start practicing a refrain, one he more or less already employs a few time in the health care chapter: “It should be up to the states…” The health care chapter is also the most personal chapter; it’s interesting to read how Mitt’s health care plan came to fruition. I wish the rest of the book followed the same mold.

But I’m not trying to say that he doesn’t have some valid arguments. He’s probably right about some things. This book shows that Romney not only knows what he believes, he also knows why he holds those beliefs. I respect that most about No Apology. I may not agree with Mitt’s viewpoints on many things, but at least I know he’s willing to participate in the conversation, which is not true for many politicians in the “party of no.” In that way, this book is hopeful, because political conversation forged the constitution and passed amendments, created laws and strengthened democracy. So thank you, Mitt, for being proof that some in your party remember how to be part of the conversation.

Ultimately, I think the success of this book will be determined by another Romney assumption: the assumption that, in two years, the Obama administration will be viewed as an absolute failure. If that comes true—if financial regulation and the jobs bill don’t pass, and if Wall Street tanks again, and if swine flu kills a few thousand, and the BP spill ruins the Gulf Coast and all of the Caribbean nations, if Venezuela invades Colombia, and Russia invades the Czech Republic, if Iran goes nuclear and sells the technology to Al-Qaeda—and Obama’s approval rating dips below 25%, No Apology could be the cornerstone for a successful 2012 run. If all that happens, Romney won’t even need to regain his political star; the stiff will be enough.

Similar books: Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin

Author: Sarah Palin

HarperCollins, 2009

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoirs

This book was very tough to review. I have to be honest, I’ve started this review several times, and each time—after indulging fitful rants and political diatribes—I’ve had to delete the incoherent blather from my computer’s memory. It’s embarrassing, really, some of the emotions this book has elicited from me. I used to think I stood closer to the center of the political spectrum than to either of its poles. I used to badmouth elitists, and I used to believe that all of their derisive commoner-hating was just a mirror image of the populist movement that made Going Rogue possible. Yes, I used to believe that liberal elitists were just as bad for our collective progress as, say, the Tea Partiers. Then I saw some of the things I wrote, some of the hateful, bilious criticism of both Sarah Palin and her followers, and I realized that I sound like (gasp) an elitist asshole.

Has there ever been a more polarizing political figure than Sarah Palin? Not only do we all have an opinion of her, we all have a very strong opinion. She’s either the best thing to happen to this country, or the worst. So how, then, does one go about reviewing her book—a book that will only further calcify one’s strong opinion of its author?

Going Rogue is shit. It sucks. It is both literarily and politically a steaming pile of moose excrement.

That’s the main thing I want to say about it—that’s really all I can say about it before I start to get mean, almost violent. And then, well, and then I have to delete this review and start over. If I continue on that tangent, we’ll have a bunch of Fox News loyalists accusing C4 of being a biased, left-wing media outlet. Now we would never claim not to have bias; in fact, if you peruse the site for a few minutes, you’ll see that we are a highly biased bunch of motherfuckers. However, our bias is not political, but literary.

For the sake of this review (I’ve already gotten so much further than the last attempt) let’s practice a bit of transparency. I hold both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree from private, east coast colleges. Although I mostly drink beer, I enjoy an occasional Manhattan or glass of Pinot Noir. I own a tailored suit. Last week, I went to the symphony. I am a registered Massachusetts Democrat. Even though I believed Scott Brown was the more qualified and more deserving Senatorial candidate, I voted for Martha Coakley solely because of Brown’s stance on health care (it was close though, didn’t make the decision until I was actually standing in the booth). And, if you can’t tell by this point, I’m not a fan a Sarah Palin. That more than likely affects my opinion of Going Rogue, and I want you to know that up front.

On the other hand, I spent money on Going Rogue, faced public shame by purchasing it in a downtown Boston bookstore. Though I struggled, I read it all, even the acknowledgments. I took on this herculean trial mostly because I was curious, but also partly because I wanted to believe it wasn’t possible for me to dislike a public figure so much. The amount of dislike I have for Sarah Palin cannot be healthy, and a small part of me wanted to dislike her much less (I wouldn’t go as far as saying I wanted to like her). I wanted to see the real Sarah Palin, the one that so many people love. I wanted her to convince me that maybe she isn’t the political version of the antichrist.

Unfortunately for me, or for anyone else who read this book for the reasons I did, there is no attempt at convincing in Going Rogue, not even so much as a feigned interest in convincing. There were no surprises in this book, nothing that you couldn’t piece together from her campaign sound bites, and her post campaign interviews, and her post gubernatorial YouTube clips, and her recent Fox News commentary. I wasn’t expecting her to confess that she smoked ice with Agassi, but I did expect her to be a bit more candid, a bit more human, one who makes mistakes and has faults.

None of that in Going Rogue, just the same straight shootin’, finger pointin’, mavericky maverickin’, maverick politician we’ve come to either love or hate[i]. And why would she want to become anything different? She’s already branded herself quite well: the common, hardworking American who cares about common, hardworking Americans. She’s a Main-Streeter willing to take on both Wall Street fat cats and politics-as-usual politicians. Going Rogue never strays too far from that description of Sarah Palin, and for some reason, it’s working on a large portion of the voting public.

You know her because she’s just like us, and her life is just like ours. You know her because we all live in the great northern wilderness, where a snowmobile is just as good as a pickup, and winter nights last forever. You know her because we all married our high school sweethearts in a courtroom without telling our parents because, no big deal. You know her because we all have spouses who work thousands of miles from home, spouses who spend months away earning a living and then come home and ride snowmobiles over the far horizon. You know her because we all had a clan of children, and in a show of that true Alaska independent spirit named them after things like airplanes and sporting events and the hometown of ESPN. She’s just like us.

Did you catch the sarcasm? I know; it was a little thick. But don’t let the snarky attitude of the last paragraph subtract from its point: Sarah Palin’s life has been far from common. And that is okay. In fact, it’s the best part of the book. I know very little about life in Alaska, but I imagine it is very different from life in the rest of this country. I loved reading White Fang and Call of the Wild because the world in which they are set is so different from my own. Honestly, governing that state must take a special person. I’m not being a jackass; I mean that. A book about growing up in, and becoming the governor of, Alaska could be damn good. Unfortunately, Sarah Palin undercuts all of those interesting parts by trying to position herself politically as just another ordinary commoner.

Undercutting is actually a major trend throughout Going Rogue. Palin undercuts a police officer for stopping her and her brother as they rode snowmobiles down a road. She says the officer was harassing them and that he was a perfect example of wasted taxpayer dollars. There is no mention of whether Palin was breaking the law, or if the officer was simply doing his job. I’ve been pulled over by cops before. I’m not dumb enough to blame it on them.

Palin undercuts a few of her critics by lampooning their jobs. One she mocks for being a limousine driver, and the other for selling falafel on the street. I’m not sure how you can champion hard work and then mock someone else’s occupation for petty reasons.

Sometimes she uses language to backhand the other side of the aisle. If her supporters are “good patriots,” what does that make those who don’t support her? If her policies are “common sense politics,” what does that make those who disagree?

And sometimes, Sarah Palin undercuts herself. Of the media she writes, “Perhaps national press outlets just don’t have the resources any more to devote to fair and balanced coverage… the time has come to acknowledge that it is counterfeit objectivity the liberal media try to sell consumers.”If it weren’t for the term “liberal media,” I’d say she had a valid point, but because she threw the word liberal in there, I can see where she’s going. She continues, “Thank God there are still a few credible broadcasters on cable news plus informative talk radio, common sense blogs and some fine fact-based print publications.”

In case you were wondering, in her acknowledgments she thanks some of the following “fair and balanced” media personalities: Ann, Bill(s), Glenn, Greta, Rush, and Sean among others. Clearly, there is no “counterfeit objectivity” in that group.

Reading Sarah Palin’s defense of her poor performance in the Katie Couric interviews is a bit uncomfortable, like watching an injured, cornered animal trying to squirm its way to safety. Palin’s defense boils down to claiming Couric was out to get her. In a response to botching the “what publications do you read?” question, Palin wonders whether Katie Couric happened to read Palin’s Op Ed in the Times. There is no mention of the Bush doctrine.

Of the individuals who eventually filed a string of ethics charges against her, Palin writes, “you are going to believe unsubstantiated rumors and then report them to other people? It would be a few years before I learned that some people make a living and earn prestigious awards for doing that.” I wonder, when she wrote those sentences, if she thought about the time she started the “Death Panel” rumor that created a massive amount of unwarranted fear and sparked a string of pointless town hall meetings.

Death Panels and the Bush Doctrine question are just two of the omissions I found glaring. There is no mention of the Ted Stevens scandal. The bridge to nowhere is mentioned only once—jokingly and in passing, as if it were something liberals cooked up to give her trouble. I wasn’t looking for a smoking gun, but I did expect her to be more candid about these issues, or at least to acknowledge that they happened. (Then again, if Katie Couric asked me which publications I read, and I answered “all of ‘em,” and that was one of my better answers, I’d probably want to pretend the other stuff didn’t happen, too.)

But let’s again practice a bit of transparency. Because I don’t like Sarah Palin, I was probably most likely looking for a way to knock her down. Take for instance her language score. I gave her a three because, well because it reads exactly like she sounds. I guess if I liked Sarah Palin, I’d probably employ the literary term “voice” and give her a higher score. However, I’m not going to do that. Doing so would pain me. I mean how the hell could I ever be lenient to someone who, in all seriousness, wrote of 9-11, “The terrorist had struck at our military and financial center, and had meant to hit another seat of power in Washington. Officials thought the Trans-Alaska Pipeline could be on the list of possible targets”? Really? Are you kidding me? How long would that fucking list have to be? Who are these officials? What is their blog URL? How am I supposed to take you seriously?

Whoa, deep breath.

I need to say nice things:

All evidence shows that Sarah Palin is an excellent mother, and especially Bristol, in her single motherhood, is lucky to have her.

That cliché about the road to Hell aside, Sarah Palin seems to be genuinely well intentioned, and seems to want the best for her state and her country.

She was candid about her fears and doubts when she learned Trig had Downs Syndrome. She comes across as a real and genuine person when she writes about that moment. I respected that.

She is a shrewd politician. She knows how to talk and relate to droves of people. I may not be one of them, but she has convinced millions of people to believe in her.

That last part scares me most.

[i] To be fair, Mrs. Palin actually doesn’t use the word “maverick” all that often in Going Rogue. Not sure if the buzzword’s absence was the work of ghostwriter Lynn Vincent or of Mrs. Palin herself. When I started reading, I was borderline giddy wondering which nouns would earn maverick-as-adjective status. Maverick politicking? Maverick legislative veto? Maverick resignation? Maverick moose chili recipe? I was disappointed. However, Mrs. Palin uses “Alaska” as an adjective quite often. I’m okay with “Alaska salmon” and “Alaska Airlines,” but did she need to write things like “Alaska spirit” and “Alaska work ethic?” Is Alaska work ethic different from the work ethic in any other state? Shouldn’t it be “Alaskan”? Am I being too elitist?

Author: Daniel Pinchbeck

Tarcher, 2007

Best ebook deal: eBooks.com

The title of Pinchbeck’s 2012 is an archeological artifact written literally in stone by the Mayans about a thousand years ago. In 2012—specifically, on December 21—the rising sun will mark the end of the 5125-year Mayan Long Count Calendar by achieving conjunction with the center of the axis of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Mayan prophecy on the completion of the Long Count is the return of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatal, translated as “Sovereign Plumed Serpent.” Quetzalcoatal is a supreme deity responsible for civilization and time itself. The Mayans believed that the end of the Long Count will mark the end of our present world civilization, when Quetzalcoatal will intervene to hand down another.

2012 is the high-energy, complex, fascinating tale of Pinchbeck’s personal pursuit of this prophecy. It’s a fun read, simultaneously a global treasure hunt, a mystical inner quest, and a personal redemption following the death of his father. It also has the ambition and scale of mythological revelation.

The only summary possible is that Pinchbeck has set out on a present day Grail Legend hero journey. The Grail hero was Parsifal, a brilliant young knight of the 12th century who lost his father in the Crusades. He is heir to the Grail Castle, which is the mystical, spiritual version of Camelot, and he’s on a quest to redeem the spiritual well-being of Europe. Parsifal leaves the pragmatic matter of a splintered Europe in the Middle Ages to King Arthur.

Like Parsifal, Pinchbeck leaves the work of political and economic change to others. Instead, his hypothesis is that “the completion of the Great Cycle and the return of Quetzalcoatl are archetypes, and their underlying meaning points toward a shift in the nature of the psyche.” The mythic Parsifal sought the Holy Grail, the elusive completion of wisdom and enlightenment. Pinchbeck declares his own quest to be of equal mythical proportions.

That structural similarity ends when we discover his method. 2012 has no chivalrous knighthood or Grail King or other boring cultural artifacts. Pinchbeck instead adopts the postmodern individual manifesto: “I follow my own process of discovery.” Nevertheless, his method is that of stalwart predecessors like Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith.

Namely, Pinchbeck uses hallucinogens.

He doesn’t have the wit and cynicism of William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac. He reports tripping like he really thinks the answers might be there. His substance preference is thoroughly contemporary: he likes “yage,” slang for ayahuasca, sometimes distilled into DMT, and he especially goes for the deep Amazon jungle version called Daime. He seeks out the worldwide brotherhood of iboga shamans and Amazon upriver practitioners to indulge in the days-long, stomach-convulsing, vision-blasting, soul-baring yage pilgrimages to the depths of psyche. He takes the expense and trouble to screen bona fide shamans, and they happen to be attractive young priestesses. All in all, Pinchbeck shows us an enviable “process of discovery.”

2012 is arguably the best primer on current shamanic approaches used by those who seriously follow a certain quest, the gonzo crew we could call practitioners of “Extreme Spirituality.” We learn about shamanic mutations, new age seekers of ultimate truth, extraterrestrial drop-ins, and happenings like Burning Man.

Boldly, Pinchbeck includes the darker side, like details of erotic explorations that bring him face to face with Kali, the malevolent cult goddess of cataclysm. He admits memories of his neglected girlfriend and their daughter back home. But there is also humor. When he is high one night and bails out of a ceremony that bores him, his confrontation by other nervous disciples that culminates with a 300 pound Samoan promising “serious consequences” is hilarious.

The Pinchbeck project finally delves directly into Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan deity. He invokes, without overt acknowledgment, ancient Tibetan traditions of the “terton.” Tibetan terton are retrievers of “terma,” which are the buried treasure of ancient spiritual texts. In modern times, long after the literally buried terma have been discovered, the tradition continues with the adept retrieving lost texts through direct transmission in trance or dream.

Pinchbeck’s version is to load up on Daime and move into an extended personal encounter with Quetzalcoatl. The climax of his quest is to face directly the raw archetype. The result is clearly intended to be a sutra, or gospel, that is a verbatim transcription of the revelation.

Alongside my enthusiasm, and as a practitioner of less extreme shamanic spirituality, I must report that there is an elusive, almost mysterious thread woven into the text. As the work veers tout de suite from personal journal into postmodern metagonzo, you must give vast permission for a naive journalist like Pinchbeck to launch an expensive global quest into the psychical resonance of a vague prophecy. He flirts with your credulity until it is impossible to decide if this is powerful cultural myth on the level of a Grail Legend or if it’s merely back-of-the-napkin Harry Potter.

Similar book: The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley

Similar DVDs: 2012: Science or Superstition, featuring Daniel Pinchbeck; Timewave 2013: The Future is Now, by Sharron Rose