Book Review: Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

[Guest guest]

http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/06/02/pre06034.html

 

Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

(Hardcover)

by Lewis Lapham

 

Lewis Lapham has been the Editor of " Harper's " magazine for 30 years

(retiring as Editor Emeritus this spring). In the March issue (not

available online), Lapham calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush

in that venerable publication. Have we got your attention yet?

 

Lapham concludes his impeachment call with these trenchant words: " It

is the business of the Congress to prevent the President from doing

more damage than he's already done to the people, interests, health,

well-being, safety, good name, and reputation of the United States--to

cauterize the wound and stem the flows of money, stupidity and blood. "

 

" Gag Rule " is a book Lapham wrote during these dark hours of

Bushevism, a book that details his scorn for how the Republican Party

has laid waste to democracy.

 

As one reviewer noted of " Gag Rule " : If " dissent is Democracy. [Then]

Democracy is in Trouble. Never before, Lewis Lapham argues, have

voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream conversation,

so marginalized and muted by a government that recklessly disregards

civil liberties, and by an ever more concentrated and profit-driven

media in which the safe and the salable sweep all uncomfortable truths

from view.

 

" In the midst of the 'war on terror' - which makes the hunt for

Communists in the 1950s look, in its clarity of aim and purpose, like

the Normandy landings on D-Day - we face a crisis of democracy as

serious as any in our history. The Bush administration makes no secret

of its contempt for a cowed and largely silenced electorate, and

without bothering to conceal its purpose the government coordinates

'not the defense of the American citizenry against a foreign enemy but

the protection of the American plutocracy from the American democracy.'

 

" Gag Rule is a rousing and necessary call to action in defense of one

of our most important liberties, the right to raise our voices in

dissent and have those voices heard. "

 

A review awhile back in " The Nation " notes of " Gag Rule " : " One hundred

years ago, in the wake of England's ruinous victory in the Boer War, a

young Liberal politician excoriated the ruling Conservative Party and

its imperial scam: 'A party of great vested interests, banded together

in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover

it up abroad ... sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the

imperial pint, the open hand at the public exchequer, the open door at

the public house, dear food for the millions, cheap labor for the

millionaire.' As Lewis Lapham points out in Gag Rule, where this and a

great many other nuggets of historically apposite and rhetorically

scintillating prose are marshaled, these words of Winston Churchill

fairly describe the Bush II Administration as well. (Substitute

" church " for 'public house,' of course.) If only a few Democratic

voices could find the young Churchill's register.

 

" ...the Congress have joined the attack on democratic accountability

and popular sovereignty. Executive-branch decision-making is

increasingly insulated from public scrutiny and comment; more and more

important documents are unavailable or unaffordable; the prerogatives

of law-enforcement agencies are steadily expanded in the

national-security area, though narrowed in respect of tax and

securities fraud, air and water pollution, violations of labor law and

occupational safety rules, and other constraints on profitability.

Harper's has done stellar work in showing how the claims of the Reagan

and Gingrich revolutions to " get government off the backs of the

American people " merely camouflaged their sustained effort to keep the

American people off the backs of the government and its corporate

principals. "

 

Lapham is an erudite writer and superb stylist of the old school,

capable of penning sentences that are witheringly sardonic and

painfully prophetic. He is a practitioner of the art of literacy and

the power of the words to illuminate and lead us back to a civil society.

 

The challenge we face is that the Lewis Laphams of the world have been

replaced by plasma television screens everywhere from supermarkets, to

restaturants, to airports -- and, of course, to our homes.

 

America is increasingly a nation of people who develop their beliefs

based on the passing images and advertising/news soundbites of the

most mind-altering narcotic of our time: TV.

 

In " Gag Rule, " Lapham rages valiantly against the dumbing down of our

civil discourse into the sloganeering of demagoguery aided and abetted

by the merger of entertainment and news. Is Lapham a supernumerary, a

phantom reminder of the golden hope of democracy?

 

Or do we yet have time to drive the barbarians who betray our

Constitution and our American heritage of justice and inclusiveness

out of the White House, Congress, and off of the Supreme Court?

 

Due to a special purchase of " Gag Rule, " we are able to offer it at

below the original retail price (including shipping).

 

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS