Seven Oaks Magazine.

The increasingly harsh moral policing going on in the United States has a startlingly hypocritical air. While violence on television or in films becomes more extensive and more realistic, it is sexuality and nudity that has excited the most panic among America’s craziest conservatives. One particularly amusing example is the recent furor over America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, a funny but certainly not pornographic political satire created as if as an introductory political science textbook.

The core of the debate about America is a two-page spread featuring disrobed Supreme Court judges, whom readers are invited to match to their respective robes. The joke is the literal reflection of what is clearly one of the central themes of the book: An approach that focuses on showing that the emperor has no clothes. Conservatives in the US have largely missed the point, however, and have been far more concerned about the nudity than the emperor. And so, the director of the Jackson-George Regional Library system in Mississippi, which banned and then unbanned the book in the last two weeks, commented “I’ve been a librarian for 40 years and this is the only book I’ve objected to so strongly that I wouldn’t allow it to circulate.”[1]

Sadly, a conservative librarian in the US (nudity notwithstanding) has little to fear from this book. To its credit, the book does better what The Daily Show does well. It is very funny, and contains both political satire and random flights into absurdity. By retaining the absurdist streak that serves Stewart’s comedy so nicely, the book avoids sounding shrill, and remains a funny book trying to discuss politics, as opposed to the other way around (an overabundant genre in the age of Al Franken and Michael Moore).

But, just as is true of the show, America’s political critique remains scattered, soft and above all shallow. It evinces a passion for an American liberalism that treasures the tenets of the country’s founding documents, even while it mocks them viciously. The overall political agenda, where one can be recognized, reflects the program’s attempts to reinvigorate the political process among average Americans, particularly as voters but also as critical thinkers. Unfortunately, it is clear that the book’s authors firmly believe that this reinvigoration is an end unto itself – that with the arrival of more voters at the polls will come a system that is more rational and reflects the interests of the average (read: working-class) American more clearly. This viewpoint fails to recognize, and thus fails to challenge, the enormous structural obstacles integral to the American political system. Therefore, the book’s political message is corrupted by a familiar refrain on the American left: that a legitimate American revolutionary tradition can be found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and that America as it is today is a perversion of what America was intended to be, as opposed to the historical result of the America that has existed to this point.

An important exception can be found to the superficial critique present in most of the book. The exception, as many would likely expect, is in the book’s treatment of the media, and its role in modern American governance. Here the gloves come off, and the authors not only discuss and demonstrate the material reasons for the media’s total inability to play a legitimate role in a modern democracy, but they do it in a hilariously abusive fashion. The chapter opens with expletive-laden paragraph that refers to “the media” as “spineless,” “weak-willed,” and “indecent piles of shit”(131). It continues with the longest chapter in the book, outlining the role of corporations and underqualified pundits in determining the content of news. Perhaps their only failure in this section was the authors’ unwillingness to acknowledge the irony of a book banking on its television show ties while simultaneously cursing broadcast news. Altogether, America’s treatment of the media is more accurate and thorough than any other section.

In the past year or so, it has become increasingly apparent that Jon Stewart and The Daily Show are becoming an important part of America’s political landscape. With the publication of a book that has excited so much debate (admittedly, for the wrong reasons), the show has only increased its prestige. On a comedic level, the attention is well deserved; the book, like the show, is often hilarious. On a political level, however, the book fails to push the envelope, and as a result will continue to evoke responses for its depictions of nude geriatrics rather than for its contribution to American political discourse.