You can judge a book by its cover. Take the following books:
Perez Hilton and Jared Shapiro's Red Carpet Suicide
The Huffington Post's Complete Guide To Blogging
Russ Kick's You Are Still Being Lied To
Starting with the last one, you’re greeted with a host of names, many great ones such as Russ Kick, Stan Goff, Russell Banks, Noam Chomsky. You also get a few of the losers: Jeff Cohen, for example. And losers like Jeffy just underscore that a wide-ranging conversation will be taking place inside.
And you are not disappointed as you flip through the book encountering, for example, Jim Martin's essay entitled "What I Didn't Know About the Communist Conspiracy" which includes:
The House Un-American Activities Committee -- brought to us by an agent of Soviet Intelligence. Samuel Dickstein, who served as a US Congressman from New York from 1923 until 1944, was a paid informant and "agent of influence" whose code-name was "Crook" in view of his incessant demands for money from his Soviet handlers. In 1934 he drafted a proposal for Congressional inquiries into subversive activities, and became the vice chairman of what became known as "The Committee" investigating pro-Naxi elements rather than communist subversion, in America. It was Dickstein who introduced the concept of ongoing congressional investigations into what he called "slanderous or libelous un-American propaganda."
So apparently the current US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are just touching on historical roots when they call citizens "unAmerican" today.
You also get Peter Laufer's "Mission Rejected: Clifton Hicks" about Iraq War resister Clifton Hicks:
We're sitting at the Holiday Inn in Heidelberg, Germany, just before the Heidelberg Volksfest, and Clifton Hicks is telling me some horrific tales from his time in Iraq. The son and grandson of soldiers, Clifton was not yet nineteen when he found himself working as a gunner on a Humvee on the dusty roads of Baghdad. "The first time that I really saw some s**t go down that really freaked me out, we were driving around at night," he begins to tell me. "They were all these packs of wild dogs all over Baghdad, they chased the Humvees, and they yipped and yapped. This one night the headlights went over a pack of dogs and they're eating something. They were eating a couple of dead people that had been picked down to the rib cage. I was eighteen and a half, had never even been to a funeral before, had never killed anything other than a raccoon or a possum, get grossed out going to a butcher's market or a fish store.
"And here I'm seeing a rib cage, bare. And a bunch of dogs eating it."
Peter Laufer is the author of Mission Rejected (which we recommend) about war resisters. You Are Still Being Lied to is the follow up to 2001's You Are Being Lied To which has become a publishing evergreen and remains in print. Russ Kick is the person behind the volumes and his other books include two volumes of 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know and The Disinformation Book of Lists. He also runs the website The Memory Hole. You Are Still Being Lied To is not another printing of You Are Being Lied To. Kick explains in the introduction:
Originally, there was to be a smattering of new articles in this volume, but because of my insatiable need to stuff more more more into every anthology, around half of this edition is compromised of material that wasn't in the original. (And elven of the pieces making a second appearance have been updated by their authors.)
Could anything have been ditched?
If you have a computer, you've read Jeffy Cohen and Norman Solomon's "The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV."
Many times.
And while we do know the hardships Norman Solomon is enduring currently as an unwed mother-to-be, we do feel that the space could have been better utilized for something that does not show up each year at CounterPunch, FAIR, Common Dreams, etc. Other than that, we have no negative criticism of the book and highly recommend it.
Perez's book screams "Live! Life! Strife!" as this decades' Rona Barrett, in shocking pink hair and with chin stubble, is mauled on the cover by a stiletto heel. We turn the book over to Ava and C.I.
The heel is a signifier because it informs you of Perez Hilton's lurid fascination with women. Outside of drag queens, we've never seen a male so obsessed with women. Perez, who is gay, made a name for himself (again) recently when he spewed homophobia. What the book spews is misogyny.
That is very clear throughout but Perez and Jared helpfully illustrate that point for any who might miss the subtext on page 55 where they serve up an illustration of a nude woman (from just below the breasts) in heels flashing her vagina. There is something really unsettling about men turning vaginas into 'jokes' to begin with but even more so when the writers wouldn't go near a vagina if you held a gun to their head.
And it is a hatred of women and their body parts that threads throughout the book. Take for example the inspirational chapter "Be A Skinny Bitch" which attacks one woman after another for surgery, eating disorders and what have you. Curiously missing from the chapter are . . . Men.
Let's see Kelsey Grammar's weight issues are well known and were Kirstie Alley not also a former Cheers cast member, his issues would be loudly remarked upon. Then there's the I-Just-Returned-To-ABC non-hunk who destroyed his career with a thong and man boobs -- man boobs that, yes, he had plastic surgery last summer to reduce. That male we'll leave unnamed but note that Perez is obsessed with him online so we found it very strange that he and all other men were vanished from the chapter -- including the bulimic actor who's part of an attempted TV supercouple but continues to falter in one failed show after another. How bad were things on the set of his last show? A female co-star was a major coke head and the show runner said it was easier to work around her than it was to work around the unnamed actor because his face didn't match up from one shot to the next.
The apparent book end to "Be A Skinny Bitch" is the chapter entitled "Get Some Work Done" which finds Perez and Jared addressing plastic surgery -- at least alleged plastic surgery famous women have had. Flip through in vain for details about the various men who've had hair plugs or face lifts, Apparently the book publisher noticed a problem so while attacking various women at length, Kenny Rogers and Lance Bass’ names are tossed in (neither man rates even a full sentence from the authors).
Red Carpet Suicide is an ugly little book by two ugly little men and grasp that, for the size queens they chase after, being little men is the cruelest cut of all. But, as the song says, the first cut is the deepest . . .
And finally there is The Huffington Post's Complete Guide To Blogging. The cover informs you that to be a blogger you need to be someone who had a career once -- preferably in the entertainment industry but you can also be a failed and faded politician (hello, Gary Hart!) provided you had a sex scandal once upon a time. Take Steven Weber who emerges from one failed audition after another and whose only real credit is the sub-standard sitcom Wings. Wings went off the air in the 90s and Weber has nothing to brag about since then so he calls up Arianna and she purrs, "Dahling, for no money at all, I will make you a blog star."
It never takes so maybe, as in the past, these failed starlets kept under contract despite being unable to produce at least become party girls and boys. Arianna's trippy life is already so wild and vulgar (that weird 'religion,' the decades married to the gay man, the reshaped face, etc.) that it's not hard to imagine her calling up Weber and snarling, "Steveo, get your ass over here! Mama needs to sample some goodies!"
Flipping through the book, it was obvious that Arianna was so distracted by her D-list friends and by her incessant whoring, she forgot to write a book. So we'll present a basic outline of the Arianna way.
1) Kiss ass.
2) But only to online bloggers.
3) Attack big media.
4) It will get you links from online bloggers and ease any guilt you feel about repeatedly stealing their works (such as your 'interview' with George Clooney).
5) Present your friends as 'talented' and 'successful' even if the last time a director, for example, saw success was in the late 90s by creating a barren retread of her only hit.
6) Always remember the topic is you and how great you are.
That really is the key to Arianna's blogging career and it’s a real shame that her 228-page 'book' couldn't acknowledge that. And speaking of "Acknowledgments," Arianna's such a whore. Despite having two pages to give 'shout-outs' note that she doesn't . . . to her bloggers. This is a book, baby, and Whore Mama wants to write more of them! So she kisses the asses of real media but as for the 'new' media? Arianna winds down her thanks "And last, but not least" -- whatever "we want to thank all the members of the Huffington Post team." How sweet. And who are they? Whore Rule Number One, never credit others, it reduces your own abilities to appropriate credit. Which is why she quickly instructs, "Please go to HuffPost's About Us section for all their names and titles."
Ending on that note, Arianna makes it clear that The Complete Guide To Blogging can be boiled down to one sentence: “It’s all about me.”