Posts Tagged ‘Marty Beckerman’

For Your Political Junkie Gift List: Dumbocracy

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to recommend Marty Beckerman’s Dumbocracy for a few months now. But little things like presidential elections and a very sick mother have distracted me.

Beckerman has a well-developed distaste for extremists, as you tell from Dumbocracy’s subtitle: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right and Other American Idiots. But he somehow managed to spend lots of time with a wide variety of political lunatics and has some very funny (and often obscene) things to say about his experiences.

This book isn’t for the prudish or the faint-hearted. (Hunter Thompson once described Beckerman as a “morbid little bastard.” And a couple of Dumbocracy passages did make me cringe.) Nonetheless, it’s a very entertaining, informative, and unusual political read.