Sonderbooks Book Review of Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken

Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

Review posted August 5, 2017.
Twelve (Hachette), 2017. 404 pages.

Okay, I'm going to stop being embarrassed for liking Al Franken's books so much. Years ago, I read Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and enjoyed it, but I didn't post a review because I wasn't ready to admit how much I enjoyed it. (Though to be fair, he included more "jokes" in that one, and I thought went a little too far in spots.)

This book has a lot more restraint - and he talks about how difficult it was to learn that restraint! Yes, I also liked that he left out foul language. There's a note right at the beginning of the book:

Throughought this volume, whenever you see a very mild oath like "Fiddlesticks!" (or some gentle name-calling like "numbskull" or "dimwit," or some old-timey synonym for "bull----" like "poppycock" or "flim-flummery"), followed by the letters "USS" in superscript, that means I've replaced something far more plainspoken with a less offensive phrase or expression. The "USS" stands for "United States Senate," the body in which I now serve. I feel I have a duty to both my colleagues and my constituents to make at least a token effort to preserve its dignity and decorum. I wish I could say the same for that dunderhead [USS] Ted Cruz.

Call me a prude, but I found the result much more pleasant reading - and more creative language - than his earlier books where he didn't show that restraint. (Though I did think the note was really funny!)

This book tells the story of how Al Franken got into politics and what he's trying to do in the Senate (represent the people of Minnesota).

He's a Progressive, and so am I, so that's partly why I enjoyed his book so much. But it's also an entertaining story (He does know how to write and how to entertain.) of politics in America today.

It's funny, though - He does tell a lot of stories about jokes his staff wouldn't let him tell! Way to get back at them! And most of them are quite funny. And the context tells the reader that they are, in fact, jokes. In almost all cases, you can see that his staff was right and he shouldn't have told the jokes when he was initially tempted to.

The chapter on Health Care was enlightening - and timely. I also like the chapters where he shows that it is still possible to do good work on things both parties can agree on. And I like the chapters with stories of Minnesotans. These show why Al Franken is doing the work he does.

But I think my favorite chapter was the one on "Lies and the Lying Liar Who Got Himself Elected President." He explains at the beginning that maybe it's a little weird, but dishonesty has always gotten under his skin. I guess that rang true because I've always felt the same way. I feel like catching someone in a lie should be their utter disgrace.

But he goes on to say:

Back in the good old days, fact-checking politicians was a different ball game. Looking back now, it seems almost adorable that I made a decent living writing books about catching right-wing Republicans in their lies. What I did was effective, I realize now, mainly because a lot of their lies had the veneer of plausibility, and because at least some of the liars liked to pretend that they were telling the truth - which was of course a lie, but which was also part of the fun.

But now we seem to have entered an era where getting caught lying openly and shamelessly, lying in a manner that insults the intelligence of both your friends and foes, lying about lying, and lying for the sake of lying have all lost their power to damage a politician. In fact, the "Trump Effect" yields the opposite result: Trump supporters seem to approve of the fact that he lies constantly, including to them. Like a movie that is loosely based on a true story, Trump's fans seem to feel that he is making the dull reality of politics more fun and interesting by augmenting it with gross exaggeration, and often utter fantasy.

He goes on to explain why this is important.

I really think that if we don't start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it's going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can't have a real debate about anything....

I've always believed that it's possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it's critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don't. It's a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way.

That's why my Global Jihad on Factual Inaccuracy will continue. I cling to the hope that national gullibility is a cyclical phenomenon, and that in a few short years we may find ourselves in an era of Neo-Sticklerism. And a glorious era it shall be.

One can only hope!