This summer has been different.
During the last two/three summers, I’ve been a reading machine — six to eight books devoured by September, then more scattered throughout the year. Between 2002 and 2005 I must have read and added 50 books to my personal library, ranging from novels to historical explorations to political shenanigans.
But this summer…I have stopped. I have been listless, lazy, unambitious. It’s as if the massive energy that propelled me through the last two years has dried up, leaving me floating in a strange, grey limbo of gloomy uninterest.
I think I’m simply spent. The last three years have been the most intense of my professional and personal life, and this last year in particular saw more ups and downs in my life (especially at work) than I care to remember clearly — 2004/2005 wiped the floor with me, leaving me uninspired, unmotivated, and dead tired. Road kill on life’s highway.
Then I discovered New Rules, by Bill Maher…and the old taste of life began to return.
New Rules is an litany of recommendations and exhortations, in alphabetical order, by that master of left-wing, progressive, fearless comedy Bill Maher, who was fired from his gorgeous late night talk show, Politically Incorrect, because he had the audacity to wonder out loud whether American might have brought 9/11 upon itself.
Now, he’s created an entire book of such wisdom: outrageous, often foul-mouthed, but always prescient: a damning picture of American life, and a call for the catharsis it needs, before it slips into a right-wing, nightmarish world of modern-day puritanism. It is both wisdom & warning.
Here’s a brilliant (and less racy) example from the “H” section:
Have It Yahweh
NEW RULE
God is a waffler. Pat Robertson said God told him that Iraq would be a bloody disaster. But the same God told George Bush it wouldn’t, which so surprised Robinson, he almost dropped the pennies he was stealing off a dead woman’s eyes. But why is God talking out of two sides of his mouth? Flip-flop. God told us to beat our swords into plowshares. God: Wrong on defense, wrong for America.
I’ve made it to “S”, and I’ve been howling throughout the entire book. It stabs mercilessly at everything that is vacuous in America, and the world in general. It takes no prisoners, it’s not at all self-conscious, and it’s Ann (“Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.”) Coulter’s worst nightmare. Buy this! Read this! Then contemplate for hours how it makes you feel.
For weeks, I’ve waited for some form of catharsis to bring me out of my deep summer funk. My trip to London next week is half of this catharsis…discovering this glorious book is the other half. I highly recommend that you share in this particular act of catharsis with me…
