ss.portl!

[ecdysone at eusocial.com]

 > From: Dan Clore <clore at columbia-center.org>
 > Date: Wed Aug 21, 2002  09:56:15 PM US/Central
 > To: "smygo at egroups.com" <smygo at yahoogroups.com>
 > Subject: [smygo] Angry White Men
 > Reply-To: smygo at yahoogroups.com
 >
 > News for Anarchists & Activists:
 > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
 >
 > Village Voice
 >
 > Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Greg Palast Hit Bestseller
 > List With Incendiary Books
 >
 > Angry White Men
 >
 > by Eric Demby
 > August 21 - 27, 2002
 >
 > The success of a handful of books that assail the Bush
 > administration as hypocritical, incompetent, and corrupt has
 > demarcated a groundswell of Americans who desire truth about
 > their leaders amid the dearth of critical and official
 > information that is today's mainstream media. It's a
 > demographic large enough that any politician or pollster
 > would identify it as pivotal in an election: Stupid White
 > Men by Michael Moore now has 500,000 copies in print and is
 > still number five on the New York Times Top 10; 9-11 by Noam
 > Chomsky has 205,000 in print; and The Best Democracy Money
 > Can Buy by investigative journalist Greg Palast, published
 > by an indie British press, just sold its paperback rights to
 > American publisher Penguin Putnam for an undisclosed amount.
 >
 > After griping extensively during interviews with the Voice
 > about a media blackout of the viewpoints expressed in their
 > books, each of these authors arrived at a similar
 > conclusion: Their popularity as "dissenting" authors has
 > extended beyond the liberal fringes and represents the fruit
 > of a grassroots movement that corporate America, and
 > potentially the government, can no longer ignore.
 >
 > On Michael Moore's recent lecture tour, he became convinced
 > that he was no longer just preaching to the converted. "I
 > look out at the auditorium or gymnasium, and I don't see the
 > tree huggers and the granola heads," he told the Voice. "I
 > see Mr. and Mrs. Middle America who voted for George W.
 > Bush, who just lost $60,000 because their 401(k) is gone.
 > And they believed in the American Dream as it was designed
 > by the Bushes and Wall Street, and then they woke up to
 > realize it was just that, a dream."
 >
 > In a September 19 interview collected in his latest book,
 > 9-11, Noam Chomsky called America "a leading terrorist
 > state," and he explained how September 11 will "accelerate
 > the agenda of militarization, regimentation, reversal of
 > social democratic programs [and] transfer of wealth to
 > narrow sectors." This mix of unsettling and prescient
 > commentary helped ignite the sales of 9-11, a paperback
 > collection of interviews with Chomsky, in which he catalogs
 > questionable U.S. government actions (the boycott of Iraq
 > and the vengeful "terrorist attack" on Nicaragua in the
 > '80s, for example) that have sullied its reputation around
 > the world. The 205,000 copies in print place it among the
 > bestselling titles of Chomsky's more than 30 books. It's
 > worth recalling that Chomsky's early books criticizing U.S.
 > policy in southeast Asia were bibles of the Vietnam anti-war
 > movement.
 >
 > Although its views are in many ways the most incendiary of
 > the three books, 9-11 followed the most conventional
 > promotional path. Chomsky's small but influential New
 > York-based publisher, Seven Stories Press, took out
 > full-page ads in liberal publications like The Nation, In
 > These Times, and The Progressive; the book also received
 > prominent placement in bookstores upon its release. When it
 > started selling, the mainstream media came calling on the
 > iconoclastic Chomsky. After profiles ran in The New York
 > Times and The Washington Post in May 2002, he faced off with
 > arch-conservative Bill Bennett on CNN's American Morning
 > With Paula Zahn, an appearance that created a definite spike
 > in sales, according to Greg Ruggiero, Chomsky's editor.
 >
 > The public's hunger for an alternative analysis of America's
 > role in inciting terrorism drove sales beyond expectations,
 > surprising even Chomsky himself. He believes 9-11's strong
 > sales suggest that, "for many people, the 9-11 atrocities
 > were a kind of 'wake-up call,' which has led to considerable
 > openness, concern, skepticism, and dissidence." For the
 > September 11 "anniversary," Barnes & Noble has elected to
 > display the book prominently, with no prodding from the
 > publisher.
 >
 > Skepticism and dissent have fueled the runaway sales of
 > Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. But according to Moore,
 > his publisher, HarperCollins's ReganBooks, saw these
 > qualities as a liability after the WTC attacks. In the
 > months following September 11, the book's original release
 > date, Moore claims the publisher pressured him to revise
 > Stupid White Men, threatening to pulp the book if he did not
 > change the section that refers to Bush as a "threat to our
 > national security" in a letter calling for his resignation.
 > The book also calls Bush's election a "coup," making him a
 > "trespasser on federal land, a squatter in the Oval Office."
 > Moore said he was told by an executive, at a particularly
 > contentious meeting, "We're united-we-stand behind George W.
 > Bush . . . and we are asking you to tone down your dissent."
 >
 > HarperCollins wouldn't comment on its discussions with
 > Moore, but Lisa Herling, director of corporate
 > communications, explained the publisher's revision request:
 > "As with any political book, you want to make sure it hasn't
 > become outdated or need any adjustment based on the events
 > of 9-11." At a time when Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer was
 > telling people to "watch what they say" such adjustments
 > seemed Ashcroftian. But after steadfastly refusing to alter
 > the content of Stupid White Men, Moore claims he was faced
 > with the sole option of censoring himself and then paying
 > for the reprint costs. He dropped the gloves--the book was
 > finished.
 >
 > Were it not for librarians, the story would have ended
 > there, with a book by one of America's most popular liberals
 > essentially suppressed by the publishing division of Rupert
 > Murdoch's News Corp. However, on December 1, Ann Sparanese,
 > an Englewood, New Jersey, librarian, heard Moore complain
 > about Stupid White Men's untimely end in a speech to the
 > annual New Jersey Citizens Action conference. Within days,
 > librarian chat rooms and listservs were ablaze with rumors
 > of censorship, and, according to Moore, HarperCollins was
 > deluged with angry e-mails from librarians calling them
 > censors and book-banners. Herling said the publisher was
 > "not aware of [HarperCollins] receiving a large number of
 > e-mails from librarians." Spectacularly, by December's end
 > HarperCollins agreed to release the book without change in
 > February.
 >
 > "If I seem to have this kinda weird optimism in the people
 > of this country," Moore said, "it's because I know that
 > they're the ones responsible for the success of this book."
 > Stupid White Men has since reached number one on bestseller
 > lists in the U.S., Canada, and England, and has remained in
 > the New York Times Top 10 for all 25 weeks since its
 > release, placing it among the top-selling nonfiction books
 > of 2002 thus far.
 >
 > Following a four-city book tour organized by HarperCollins
 > (the tour was increased to 12 cities once the book took
 > off), Moore sensed an expanding chink in Bush's
 > unanimous-support armor. Soon after, Moore embarked on a
 > 47-city American tour that he had assembled with his two
 > sisters. In March, he addressed 7000 potential readers at
 > the Austin launch of populist writer and radio commentator
 > Jim Hightower's Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour; in
 > April, he spoke to 5000 people at a Ralph Nader rally at
 > Tampa's Sun Dome; and he attracted 3500 people to a solo
 > lecture at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
 > In May, Moore had bounced publishers to Warner Books,
 > garnering a $3 million deal for his next two books. Last
 > week, Variety reported that he was negotiating to make an
 > animated movie based on Stupid White Men. Just a year after
 > a sea of flags virtually drowned it out, political dissent
 > is now a bankable commodity.
 >
 > "My appearance in their towns gave them the opportunity to
 > not be afraid to speak their minds, and to be there with
 > thousands of other people who felt the same way," Moore
 > explained. "It was a great emotional and morale boost to
 > those who believe that the strength of a democracy is built
 > upon the willingness of the citizens to question what's
 > going on."
 >
 > It's this sort of questioning that has turned Greg Palast's
 > The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a collection of his most
 > explosive articles about everything from what he calls the
 > "Bush family cartel" to the purging of African American
 > felons from Florida's voter rolls by Republicans during the
 > 2000 Presidential election, into a hot-selling book as well.
 > Published in February by the small, London-based Pluto
 > Press, the book has more than 40,000 copies in print,
 > despite spotty U.S. distribution and scant mainstream review
 > coverage. Nevertheless, in June, it managed to crack the Top
 > 10 of the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle
 > bestseller lists.
 >
 > Palast, an American journalist who publishes mainly in The
 > Guardian and reports for BBC TV's Newsnight, told the Voice
 > that many of his book's sales have been driven by
 > non-traditional media outlets. He credits Pacifica Radio
 > Network, for instance, for plugging the book, as well as his
 > appearances at places like Washington, D.C.'s Politics &
 > Prose bookstore. Like Moore, but without the benefit of his
 > name recognition, Palast cobbled together his own reading
 > tour through 20 American cities, drawing crowds of more than
 > 1000 over two March nights in Berkeley and 350 to Walker
 > Studios in Tribeca in April. "What I'm happy about is that
 > with no money, no marketing, and a completely amateur
 > operation, you can get 40,000 copies sold in the U.S.,"
 > Palast said, "if you've got something to say." The Best
 > Democracy Money Can Buy has now been translated into
 > Spanish, Japanese, Croatian, Turkish, Italian, Korean, and
 > Bulgarian.
 >
 > His underground success caught the eye of Kelly Notaras, an
 > editor at Penguin Putnam's Plume imprint, which recently
 > purchased the U.S. paperback rights to The Best Democracy
 > Money Can Buy. "The way this book did so well in hardcover
 > was almost exclusively through Greg's events," she told the
 > Voice. The paperback will be updated with new information
 > about Bush's Enron connections for its February 2003
 > release. "It's not the kind of book you have to be
 > ultra-liberal to be interested in," said Notaras, "because
 > the things that he's discovered are appalling, and there's
 > nobody out there right now doing the same thing."
 >
 > The rise of Palast's media star--he's putting his Observer
 > column on hold to work on films and books, and will be
 > contributing to Harper's--is coinciding with the expanding
 > of America's appetite for unsanctioned perspectives. After
 > joining the NAACP's Voter Empowerment Tour through Florida
 > in September (where he'll also be filming Jeb and Kate
 > Bush), he's hooking up with People for the American Way in
 > October, then Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader's "democracy"
 > tours in November. He is also scheduled to speak at the
 > Apollo Theater in October (date to be announced). Palast
 > responded to this explosion of attention and his jump from
 > an indie press to a mainstream publisher by way of
 > complimenting Michael Moore: "Apparently, this is the moment
 > for the awful truth. No one wants to miss the next Stupid
 > White Men."
 >
 > Stupid White Men
 > By Michael Moore
 > ReganBooks, 224 pp., $24.95
 >
 > 9-11
 > By Noam Chomsky
 > MBS Textbook Dist, Trade Paper., $8.95
 >
 > The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
 > By Greg Palast
 > Pluto Press (UK), 224 pp., $25.00