Review This Book or Else

It's not so unusual to reward the people who tolerate you and condemn those who don't; it's just strange to write a book -- with an index, even -- in an attempt to make that attitude sound mature. The New Thought Policeis a train wreck of bad logic; it's sickening to behold, but for perverse reasons you can't stop looking. Bruce denounces Dr. Laura Schlessinger's persecution by gay activists -- who lobbied to have her television show canceled after she declared them "a biological mistake" -- but defends her campaign against Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, arguing that because she only called for a one-year boycott of Knopf as opposed to a cancellation of the book, she was not "policing" its publishing decisions.She carps bitterly about the way people treated California Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante after he accidentally uttered the word nigger, but brags gleefully about her organized telephone harassment of Ellis' agent, whose protests she quotes at length. She says she loves free speech, but hates Howard Stern, and blames "the left" for "lionizing" the rapper Eminem. She does note that the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation did in fact conduct an anti-Eminem telephone campaign against Vivendi-Universal and picketed the MTV Video Music Awards, but she complains that wasn't enough. And yet had the organization done more, it would have been guilty of thought policing, and Eminem would be Bruce's new cause.

As it happens, I have some sympathy for Bruce's central thesis, that the establishments on the left control their message a little too tightly. But it also seems pretty obvious that GLAAD and NOW aren't holding the reins of power in this country, but still fighting madly for legislation that will guarantee the rights of the groups they represent. Bruce had the misfortune of publishing her book before legislators passed the USA PATRIOT Act, expanding the surveillance powers of the federal government, but her suggestion that some looming "establishment left" poses this country's greatest threat to personal liberty is just too silly to be reprehensible. Bruce's book isn't good enough to be wrong; it reeks of such a desperate need for attention it feels churlish to slam it.

And Vincent's weird defense of Bruce's book in the Los Angeles Timessuggests an equally craven bid to attract tabloid-minded readers -- or at least to know readers exist. Perhaps editors like Vincent because she gets letters, both from astonished critics and supporters happy to be freed from the constraints of cultural sensitivity imposed by "the special-interest bureaucrat," which Vincent maintains "is almost exclusively the property of the complainant left." In this age of Enron, one might imagine a statement like that one too absurd to appear in newsprint; instead, Vincent seems to be heralded as an outrageous rebel. But rebellion takes more than blind insensitivity, and shock is a poor excuse for a genuine social critique.