Five Authors Critique Bush, Media

Five noted writers threw the book at President Bush and the media in a panel at the First Parish Church on Monday.

Under the title “Books, Politics and the Culture War,” Toni Morrison, Al Franken ’73, Sidney Blumenthal, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Joe Conason spoke to a packed house of over 700 on the ways in which books could turn the political tide.

The panel was organized by the Harvard Bookstore in conjunction with the Progressive Book Club, a web-based group that opened Friday to create a forum for progressive voices in a way similar to the conservative book clubs that have existed for decades.

Elizabeth Wagley, founder and CEO of the club, said that the panel was meant as a “soft launch,” with the official start in the fall. However, she said she has been overwhelmed by the interest expressed despite the lack of publicity.

“We didn’t expect people to learn about it so quickly,” she said, “but they were really yearning for it.”

The event, which sold out several days in advance, “provides a cross section of writers to represent the kinds of books our constituency would be interested in,” Wagley said. Each author had recently released a hardcover or paperback book that was available for purchase and signing.

“Books serve as tools and even weapons in the political struggles of every era,” Conason said in his opening remarks. “Today, buying books is a form of political activism,” and the Progressive Book Club aims to create a community in which that activism can be expressed.

The club hopes to use meet-up technology eventually to create panels on- and offline for the public, each with an author to contribute.

Four different kinds of writers were chosen for the panel, to reflect the fact that a variety of styles can lead to cultural change. Morrison was the novelist, Franken the polemicist, Blumenthal the journalist and Kennedy the advocate.

“Great artists may not write to change the world, but they cannot help but do it,” Conason said. Books that represent “our shared American values” will promote lasting change, he said.

One point repeated by all the panelists was the media’s failure to provide balanced coverage.

“The United States is the only country that establishes a place in our democracy for books, for press, for expression, for freedom of expression,” Blumenthal said. “[The press] has failed in its constitutional role of providing checks and balances to an overwhelming executive.”

The solution, then, is books.

“It was a book after all that helped sustain the Revolution,” Blumenthal pointed out.

“A kind of urgency informs [books],” Morrison said. “An urgency that can lift the veil that has descended over honest informative public debate.”

Morrison also spoke of the importance of print and culture in terms of conflict. Race, she said, “has exposed the obvious and inevitable conflicts between empire and democracy, between cannibalism and democracy. These have unfolded into culture war.”

Morrison said the culture war was safer than those of previous generations, being fought with rhetoric rather than artillery, but said that if the country continued to use “medieval solutions to 20th-century problems,” the conflict would never be sufficiently addressed.

Wagley mentioned that she was somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of a war.

“Balance is what we strive for,” she said. She said the tenor created by the right, however, which “has actually institutionalized since the ’60s to dominate our media sphere,” meant that battle lines were clearly and inextricably drawn.

The battle that often follows such confrontation was addressed by Franken.

“I didn’t prepare any remarks because I hate writing,” he began.

Amid escalating laughter, Franken told of the lawsuit brought by Fox against his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, on behalf of Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly, who objected to being called a liar.

The suit was eventually dismissed because “satire is a protected form of public speech, even if the object of satire doesn’t get it,” Franken said.

Franken was a favorite for the audience, later blacklisted by “Billionaires for Bush,” a satirical protest group (see story, page 4), and given a collection of songs from the “Bush on Mars” campaign.

When one questioner frustratingly asked, “What am I going to do,” Franken rejoined, “You’re going to vote for Kerry.”

But the standing ovation was reserved for Robert Kennedy Jr., who spoke passionately about what he called the Bush administration’s systematic undermining of environmental legislation.

For example, Kennedy said, because of previously illegal coal burning corporations in the Ohio Valley, asthma has reached an unprecedented level in newborns.

“Without my resources I would be hard pressed to keep my children alive,” Kennedy said.

“It has taken 300 years [for our country] to get the world’s respect, and three and a half years for this president to destroy it,” Kennedy said.

He therefore supports presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., but warns “you will have to make him do the things you want him to do.”

—Staff writer Jayme J. Herschkopf can be reached at herschk@fas.harvard.edu.