NYTimes has a good review of Gore’s new book.  I had said earlier,  just as people had begun reacting to the book upon its release,  that it doesn’t require “political aspirations”  to be sufficiently offended at the Bush administration enough to write a book.

And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, “The Assault on Reason” turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports — a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.

This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy — low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape — and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of “An Inconvenient Truth” so bluntly effective.

As I start in on the book,  I am immediately grabbed by Gore’s initial argument about the use of fear to bypass our normal defenses, reasonings,  and I would add,  theological implications and issues surrounding the reaction to danger by appealing to fear.  I believe that Bush and Co. have done a number on millions of Christians, thus clouding the use of whatever you want to call what it is that we use to do theological thinking about what we should be saying, thinking and doing about national issues.  It seems like Gore has a handle on something here.  I don’t know (and I doubt he will, in this book) that he will offer any insight on what American Christians ought to be doing to combat this fear manipulation,  or what they should be doing if they do succeed in “blocking” the fear mechanism and instead invoke “reason”.  My problem with some of this language about “reason” vs “fear” is that it almost seems synonymous in some people’s minds with “faith-based” vs “reality-based” dualities that seem to be a favorite invocation of progressive politics.  Often,  the implications of such dualities is that Christians “faith-based” response is associated with “fear” (you know,  “irrational”), and “reason” is just what normal, healthy, “reality-based” people do.   As I said above,  this is not hard to understand how this association has been built up,  considering how easily church folk in this country have gone with the flow of fear and enthusiastically backed the Bush administration,  and bestowed almost “papal” authority to the Bush administration.  Gore hasn’t made such direct associations as of yet (I’m still in chapter 1),  but I anticipate his approaching the subject (partly because I feel that Gore has a keen sense of offense at the way religious people have been manipulated and cynically used in this process).  Stay tuned to more ahead.  And also ,  I hope I can keep myself “located” in this discussion in the church as a means of “resisting the culture”,  which in this case is faced with the elements of the “fear response” and resisting the call of the powers that be to “give them permission” to expand their “responses” by invoking the fear response.  Gore points out how Hitler was a master at that.

The Assault on Reason – Al Gore – Book – Review – New York Times