This is alternately boring and depressing and I don't want to fucking read it anymore.

Americans dislike politics; we take every opportunity to denounce politicians and government bureaucrats even as we pay elaborate homage to the transcendent virtue of the American system of government. One reason for this political schizophrenia is no doubt the substantial gap between the mundane realities of our hopelessly corrupt political system and our ideological image of it. Every political regime, no matter how debased, has its sacred narratives, its myths, dogmas, and tales of glory that are designed to reproduce loyal subjects. America's mythological narrative concerns democracy, and that narrative is as distant from reality as it is from James Madison's vision of the republic he helped to establish. Our scriptures are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and a loose canon of essays and letters by the founding fathers our national saints, who are treated by the faithful as if they acted and spoke with one mind. As with the Bible and the New Testament, of course, most Americans revere our sacred texts without bothering to study them or to achieve basic competence in their interpretation.

Former Harper's Magazine editor Roger Hodge offers in his opus a sweeping critique of the Obama administration and its profound efforts on behalf of corporate partners (bosses?) to continue the tradition of the recent few decades of selling our nation, piecemeal, to moneyed interests and greedy power-mongers. He dissects the policies and talking points of the Obama White House to demonstrate just how much of a shadow dance Obama has been performing for his huge support base among the American left, while continuing to pander to the corporate interests which his rhetoric condemns.

The factual content of Hodge's exposition is well-researched and damning. I would call it heart-breaking for those liberals in the U.S. who truly thought Barack Obama was bringing with him a new generation of "change." On the other hand, Hodge's organization of the material is sloppy at best, and the narrative often slips into what seem like personal rants on the part of the author. Although I share his anger and disappointment, his tendency towards snide or backhanded allusions and heavy reliance on rhetoric did a lot to undermine his greater argument. If he had devoted more time to presenting the material in a manner that made the connections between the facts he was offering and the conclusions he wished the reader to reach more explicit, and less time to perfecting his sarcasm, this book would have been a great deal more powerful, and therefore, more valuable. I've got Chris Hedge's Death of the Liberal Class on ice, and from what I've heard it perhaps does a better job of presenting similar material. ( )