Irregular Books

I looked at a certain section of my library this afternoon and was struck by a difference between two sorts of progressive political books I saw on the shelf. Some had been very timely when they were published, but were not at all enduring in value, whereas others had not achieved much initial acclaim, but have been valuable to me for quite a long time.

Al Franken’s book, Lying Liars and the Lies they Tell, is amongst the first group. It had a great public relations event to start it out, with Bill O’Reilly’s hyperventilating lawsuit against Franken, and so it soon reached the New York Times bestseller list.

Satanic Panic, a more philosophical book about the patterns of mass paranoia about satanic plots to kill babies, is a book that I continue to pick up and look at every year, even though it’s ten years older than Al Franken’s book.

Al Franken wrote about timely events, but didn’t have much vision beyond the next year or two in his material. Satanic Panic was about events in the 1980s, but it was describing a cultural phenomenon that dates back to the Salem witch trials, and far beyond that.

I discussed these differences in the following video, but was interrupted by my three-year old bouncing daughter, who had an assessment quite unlike mine.