Angry White Men

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.