Customer Reviews

Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

First of all, let me lay my cards on the table. I am a social liberal and a registered democrat, thus any conservative heart to heart on this book is lost in my analysis. Although, I did, amazingly, embark upon this book with an, how do I say, open mind to George W. Bush's leadership. To the meat of the review; I found Professor Miller's book on Bush/Cheney's New World Order fascinating and enlightening. I particulary enjoyed the comparison of President Clinton with current President Bush. The outlash against President Clinton, according to Miller, was a bit excess in comparison to the virtual silence of the press concerning G.W.'s unstatesmanlike antics. If Professor Miller is correct in his observations and factual analysis, then I fear for the direction of our great country. I only hope his use of this book is to offer a stump speech to his coalition of liberal backers, more so than it is an accurate account of our time at hand. Unfortunately, I would have to go with the latter. To offer dissent is patriotic; which, according to Professor Miller, G.W. does not tolerate well. Seemingly, Professor Miller is highly accurate in his studies and highly correct in his regurgitations of prominent news articles, albeit the small amount of press that G.W. has generated in his 4 years in office. I would recommend this book to anyone concerned about the direction of our great democracy and the future under George W. Bush or to anyone who would enjoy an excellent structured political argument against Mr. Bush.

So, do you really need another anti-Bush book in your collection? Even if Kerry had won the election, the answer would be yes. Miller's bleak thesis reaches well beyond George And Dick's Excellent Adventure, into a future of across the board right-wing dominance that we can expect to continue until progressives begin fighting back effectively. The first step is to appreciate just how one-sided the debate is in America today, and although Miller's book can be downright infurating in that respect, it gets the job done.

Miller does a great job of illustrating the distinction between Republican rhetoric about honor, decency and "values" and the reality of 30 years of win-at-all-costs politicking, rife with character assassinations and demagoguery. He also makes a more than convincing case that the media, with its increasingly clear conservative bias, has been complicit in allowing their hypocrisy to succeed for so long. In the most unique part of Miller's assessment, he drives it all home with an analysis of Bill Clinton's record in office and that of his right-wing detractors.

He argues along the way that the right's vilification of Clinton amounted to their projection of their own dark sides onto a politically expedient target. Appropriately, Miller refers to Clinton, the mushy-middle president of reality, and "Clinton," the viciously unethical left-wing radical so often depicted in the media, as two all but completely different entities. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of the false accusations against Clinton have proven to be true of Bush, with no apparent political fallout resulting for the latter; Miller's list is probably incomplete, but it more than makes his point. Conservatives could (and surely will) accuse Miller of cherrypicking and argue that "both sides do it." But he also makes the point that legitimate examples of liberals being as vicious and untruthful against conservatives as we see every day in reverse are genuinely rare; and he provides several examples of arguments made to that effect and why they're wrong.

The one serious flaw I can find in the book is Miller's obvious rage. I dislike Bush and what he's doing to America just as much as Miller does, and yes, we should be angry about it all. But there is a limit to how angry one can sound and still be able to present a coherent argument, and Miller crosses that line on occasion. Also, I'm not convinced that he is truly qualified to make some of the more technical psychological arguments he does regarding right-wingers' rage at differences of opinion or their "projections" onto Clinton.

Still, for those of us who thirst for a more elaborate explanation for the motivations of the right than "because they're mean," Miller does make a strong case. He also provides dozens of examples of that meanness, some of which will probably be new to you no matter how many other anti-Bush books you've read. When battling 30+ years of experience in gutter-politics, you can never have too much evidence on your side!

Read it, be angry, and do something about it.

I like the way Mark Crispin Miller writes. I couldn't
put down "The Bush Dyslexicon" after I bought it, and
"Cruel and Unusual" is even better. We have been
inundated, for many good reasons, with anti-Bush books
in the last few years, but a few of them, however
well-intentioned and well-researched, are simply too
maddening to read. I bought "The Best Democracy Money
Can Buy" by Greg Palast and even though he is a great
reporter whose work anyone interested in marginalized
news stories should read, his journalistic style and
the litany of past crimes he details made me feel
helpless and angry and made the book difficult to read
in its entirety. "Cruel and Unusual," however
terrifying its conclusions, is, on the other hand,
empowering. As I read it I felt like I was coming
across my own thoughts and feelings articulated more
powerfully than I might have done. I recommend it to
anyone on the left looking for a book about the whole
picture - civil rights issues, the Iraq war,
terrorism, religion, Bush's personality, as well as
the origins and workings of the mechanisms that
undergird the current administration.

All political books preach to the choir, but only a
few move the choir to sing in such a way that draws
others to the song. This is such a book. Don't try to
get your conservative Republican brother-in-law to
read it. Just buy it yourself, read it, and tell your
conservative Republican brother-in-law the things that
the Bush administration is doing to his country while
betraying his trust.

As an author and professor of media communications and culture at NYU, Mark has an impressive track record of examining the media power-of-suggestion stranglehold on individuated and collective reality. Or, "unreality." The work he did in one of his earlier books, "Boxed In," regarding television-induced culture, is brilliant, and in some ways reminds me of author Harlan Ellison's scathing critiques of TV-lunatic reality which were essembled in two volumes as "The Glass Teat," the title devilishly makes the perverse comparison of the nutritional intake of suckling infants and an uncritical, desensitized populace feeding off of the lies and razzle-dazzle of television. Ellison quickly found his way to Reagan/Bush's list of "subversives."

That aside, however, Mark's book, "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's NWO" gets to the true heart of the matter and does so in with a clarity that apparently isn't easily accepted by many, including those who see themselves camped in the 'left'.

The crux of fully understanding the dilemma of the right wing strains which now menace not only our country but the entire planet, rests in avoiding or denying the magnitude of the threat. Mark correctly points out how those who comprise the mainline media are complicit to what has happened in as much as it is through those very institutions which has come an intentional and strategically foisted Orwellian false consciousness which enshrouds the collective perceptions of what the true right wing agenda is.

The right wing movement is, in psychological terms, projective, meaning, if you took away the movement's need and desire of imputation, attack ad homonym, shout down and hate others, nothing would remain. Naturally such a radically venomous movement needs to cloak itself within seemingly morally upright guises of patriotism and "God is on OUR side!" [Although, I should add, Mark's book is NOT an attack on religion, religious beiefs, or liberal Christians]

It's helpful to bear in mind that, often times, spiritually and mentally ill people[who just as often may appear 'normal' and healthy to those likewise afflicted with similar defiencies]can not and will not be capable of empathy, sympathy, humility, or contrition. Sound familiar of the Christ-o-fascist Bushies?
In simplistic terms, crazy people don't know they're crazy. They'll often never question their sanity, and are, by nature of their illness, unable to even fathom the idea.

This is why the right wing has spent vast sums of money for ideological, cultural/institutional warfare since the early 1970s; to ensure that nothing like what happened in the counter-culture era ever happens again. Power, be as ill and spiritually deficient as it is, given how unconscionablity, hostility and aggression become exalted properties to and for power/belief structures which define success and the intrinsic worth of existence in cold, materialistic terms, only seeks to exert itself; to make everything and everyone think, appear, value and behave as it does.

That way, even in sickness, power 'wins'[which has greater value than does harmony and compassion for sick people] as it has fewer and fewer opponents i.e. "enemies." This is why this right wing projective movement has long refered to itself as "compassionate." As they've secured more of the "reality" sold via media[through corporate consolidation]the framework has shifted further to the right, enabling for fewer people to discern propagandistic "compassion" and true, actual deeds, actions and acts of compassion. It's so grotesquely perverse now that there are people who can see the murder and rape of others as being "compassionate," of paving the way for even further acts of liberation, altruism and "democracy."

Another example, notice how the word "liberal" and the basic tenets of human liberation have been so effectivly maligned, how this perversion has been fostered within and taken root within the collective psyche. Amazing.

Mark's book offers an excellent starting point in defining the process, of being familiar with the modes of thinking outside of the media-induced unreality, of finding the common language to acknowledge and properly address. Afterall, much of the problem, or, the lack of concern to address the problem in all due emphasis, isn't that people are generally stupid or in favor of deceptive rhetoric that disguises evil deeds, but that they exist within a social climate that has been poisoned by media, which is basically man-made atmosphere/weather.

It's an oversimplistic hypothesis, but think of the collective conscious/unconscious as a computer program, okay, ..now, concede that someone IS quite capable of introducing a virus into that program. Who stands to benefit?

Check out Mark's blog: http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

I'm also looking foward to reading his latest book, "Fooled Again: How the right stole the 2004 election..."
Also watch for his off Broadway play[now on DVD]"A Patriot Act."
Here's an interview with Mark at Buzzflash:
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/07/int04037.html

Crestfallen over the upcoming election? Bummed out because there's no anti-war candidate to pull the lever for? Feeling . . . disenfranchised?
Cheer up. This new book will make you feel positively giddy about trooping to the polls Nov. 3 and voting Democratic.
With hardly a mention of the disheatening John Kerry, media critic Mark Crispin Miller has penned a book that will fire up your enthusiasm for the dreary Dem--or, for that matter, anyone to the left of the ayatollahs or Jerry Falwell.
Yes, the prospect of a second Bush term is that bad, the NYU professor writes.
"Our unprecedented problem is that Bush & Co. is intent not just on fortifying the presidency, as did, say, FDR," Miller writes. "The regime's goal is to abort American democracy and to impose on the United States another kind of government entirely."
To put it another way: For all his considerable faults, at least John Kerry won't ditch the Constitution.
At a recent booksigning, Miller put the election in perspective: "I'll be happy if we come out of this with the right to free speech and free assembly."
You can't say you weren't warned after reading this compelling book by one of our leading intellectuals.

I have read a number of books in the recent flood of anti-Bush literature and found some too blithe, some unconvincing, and some hysterical. At first glance Miller's work would seem to fit into the last category; he reaches some gravely serious verdicts.

However, if you read this book carefully and with an open mind you will find it an entirely rational and convincing critique---not just of Bush/Cheney but of the media, the animating forces of Bush Republicanism, and the direction of the country.

Most people throw around Nazi comparisons and words like 'fascist' just as general epithets, without really understanding what they mean. If anything, I hope this book will separate the hysterical far-left from the rational liberals, like Miller, who really do see and balk at the authoratarian and extreme tendencies in our current leadership, enabled by a cowed and uncritical media.

Reviewers who flay Mark Crispin Miller's "Cruel AND Unusual" do so, I believe, because Miller's exposé comes at us in tidalwaves, crashing through our denial(my own included)of the gravity of the consequences of the stolen election of 2000. Profoundly unsettled by Miller's documented contention that Bush and Co conduct themselves like Fascists, the book's detractors veer from sloughing off the danger to labeling Miller a loose-brained liberal. But none of Miller's critics has dared to call "Cruel AND Unusual" a pack of lies.--Daniel Birnbaum, Paris

In some places Miller infers a little too much nefarious intent on the neocon/Recons's part from offhand remarks, such as using Bush's clumsy speech to mean Freudian slips (who can really know?), but it is overall a good portrait and analysis of the mind of the neurotic right: always feeling they are persecuted, angry to the depth of their being, and consumed by hate for liberals who do not get in line. The most salient point is that the right is dominated by media and messages that involve hate and extreme emotion. While you can find any number of irrational hate diatribes on the left, they just do not get the same airtime or market share, and are frankly antithetical to what the liberal or moderate philosophies want to accomplish in preserving our great Republic. Bush and Co, however, are firmly in bed with the zealots of their side. Liberalism is not about destroying those whose philosophies are different. To quote Miller:
"Obsessed with wiping out bad people, such hunters [right-wing anti-communists and anti-left zealots] are quite blind to the true greatness of our country. For the spirit of American democracy is, finally, not vindictive, cynical, or punitive, but generous and tolerant: inclined to work things out, and let folks be, and try to make the best of it. Democracy does not believe in demons."
This is not to say that we should be tolerant of terrorism, for terrorism is not a philosophy, but a destructive methodology. The underlying fundamentalism, of radical Islam, is no different than the radical Christianity that we tolerate here at home, and is, as Miller documents, not averse to unethical methodologies. Miller makes a good argument that this Administration and its fold are more interested in destroying terrorists than destroying the means and causes of it. They think a war or taking out certain leaders and factions by military force will end it. It may curb it, obstruct it, but if the root causes remain...
I liked the book because I need and our democracy needs more thoughtful people in print and media who can quote and document and show evidence of the corruptive ideologies responsible for the success of the Right.

A gripping assessment of the current culture wars and how the Bush Administration has hijacked the Constitution, replacing it with an extremist evangelical agenda...fueled by a lock-step patriotism.If you want a clear picture as to the direction our Nation is moving in, this book is a must read.

Ben Mercadante

Once again Miller has shown his ability to see past the spin machine and get to the truth. His courage in shining the light on the current administration's ineptness and malevolent indifference to those who are not supporters is refreshing in today's climate of self-serviing media who serve as megaphones for the powerful and forget their responsibility to the people. A must read!