America the Beautiful is a lie, and the American dream is a
nightmare for all but the rich. So argues leftist journalist
Parenti (Land of Idols, 1993, etc.) in this scattershot collection.
As the long subtitle suggests, this book gathers occasional pieces
- sometimes only a couple of pages long - on subjects connected
only by the author's insistent Marxist analysis, "the other great
paradigm that haunts the bourgeois scholarly world like a specter."
One out of every six Americans regularly uses emotion-controlling
medical drugs; 150,000 young people are reported missing every
year; 16 million Americans have diabetes, thanks in part to a diet
of sugary junk food; and 12 million Americans are chronically
malnourished due to poverty. This is so, Parenti maintains, because
"the goal of ruling interests is to keep this society and the
entire world open for maximum profitability regardless of the human
and environmental costs." None of this is new, of course; any
number of similarly inclined social critics have been pressing the
argument for years. Parenti has a penchant for flogging long-dead
horses: "The Nazi invasion of Poland is fascism in action; the
American invasion of Vietnam is a 'blunder' or at worst an 'immoral
application' of power." He also has a maddening habit of refusing
to get down to cases; he may well be right, but he never sticks
around long enough to argue his point, instead firing a volley and
dashing to the next target: the JFK assassination, global warming.
When he does settle in for an extended discussion, he often scores
points, as when he examines the role of the corporate media in
stifling left journalistic criticism. And Parenti's memoir of
growing up in a working-class Italian family is warm and fully
realized while keeping a radical edge, a real contribution to the
ethnic-studies literature. Still, Parenti is mostly content to
offer propaganda in the place of closely argued advocacy. (Kirkus
Reviews)
This eye-opening and entertaining collection of essays
investigates media and culture, conspiracy and state power,
ideology and political consciousness. Parenti ranges over such
crucial issues as free speech, the rise of neofascism, the
relationship between wealth and poverty, the "terrorism" hype, the
continuing mystifications about the Kennedy assassination, and the
deceptions and injustices of U.S. corporate global domination.
Moving from the political to the personal, Parenti shows the
links between seemingly disparate social and political forces.
Dirty Truths also contains three poems and moving accounts of his
own ethnic family life and the political intolerance he encountered
in academia.
This book is a rich buffet, an enlightening and provocative
feast for the mind and heart.
Author of Against Empire, Democracy for the Few, Land of Idols:
Political Mythology in America, and many other books, Michael
Parenti is one of the country's most astute and engaging political
analysts. He has taught at a number of universities and now lives
in Berkeley, California.
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