Not many can doubt that Al Gore is on a crusade to affect change in the world. He has been tirelessly calling for a worldwide awakening to global warming and has written two books addressing the matter. His film, An Inconvenient Truth, was, as Stephen Colbert quipped, “the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history,” and won him an Academy Award. His new book, The Assault on Reason, addresses a larger concern: “Why do reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” (1). Gore is angry and distraught, arguing that the marketplace of ideas is becoming polluted with tiresome stories of Britney and K-Fed, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. Celebrity gossip, once relegated to shows like Access Hollywood, can now be seen on CNN. The “politics of fear” has also taken over American politics. According to Gore, the decision to invade Iraq “could have been made only at a moment in time when reason was playing a sharply diminished role in our national deliberations” (39). Gore rails against the Bush administration's fear-mongering, irrationality and bullying. As he states, “It claims divine guidance. It feels it already knows the truth and isn't very curious to learn about any facts that might contradict it” (58).
Gore saves his most virulent words for the war on Iraq:
If Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, and had no connection to the organization that launched the attack, then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have to and that over three thousand American service members have been killed and thousands more have been wounded and many thousands of Iraqis have been killed and wounded – unnecessarily. (112)
Many other familiar issues are dealt with in the book, such as the failure of the press in the post-9/11 period, the increased surveillance of individuals, the poor treatment of prisoners, the increasingly unilateral nature of US foreign policy, the threat of nuclear proliferation and global warming, alternative energy sources, the potential of the Internet for rejuvenating public discourse and the tragedy at New Orleans, as well as an inspiring closing discussion of the future of democracy in the United States. To read The Assault on Reason, then, is to get an angry but hopeful portrait of contemporary politics by one of America's most important public figures.
