| Subject: Fwd: do you want to write a book |
| From: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 11/20/08, 17:24 |
| To: "Metropol Literary" <drewn@metlit.com> |
Cold, Fat, and Alone: Friedman, Bennett, Kristol, Krauthammer, and Other Intelligence Failures
Overview
How does one become a pundit? More importantly, how does one unbecome a pundit?
Let us start with a brief thought experiment. You have been forced at gunpoint to serve as a member of the national chattering class. Your captor, for whatever reason, provides you with a newspaper column, a book deal or two, and steady flow of invitations to appear on the various cable news shows. And you, for whatever reason, are disinclined to do all of this, perhaps because you are shy or rich. But you can't alert the FBI to your odd predicament, because, again, this fellow has a gun to your head, and did I mention that the gun is invisible and that so is he? No one would believe you. I sure as hell don't. Just kidding. I believe you, man. We'll get through this together.
Now, if you're the clever sort, which you are, then you might come up with a suitably clever plan, or perhaps a stupid one if you are in fact not clever, in which case I apologize for leading you on. You might decide, for instance, that the best way to get out of your role as a slave-pundit would be to fail at your job to such an extent that the media would stop providing you with a forum. For instance, if it's 2003, you could tell the nation, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all." That might work, because anyone could come along and point out that, yeah, there's plenty of "evidence of that," such as the no-fly zone the U.S. had been enforcing in Iraq for a decade lest the Sunni minority continue to launch attacks on the Shiite majority. At the very least, one might expect that, after a few years of Sunni-Shiite civil war that leaves tens of thousands dead and perhaps two million displaced, such a pundit as you (and you should be ashamed of yourself, by the way) might very well lose some influence. But you'd be wrong, as William Kristol did the exact same thing that you did, and not only remains as editor of The Weekly Standard and a recurring Fox News analyst, but has also since been rewarded with his very own column in the New York Times.
As for you well, there never was any gunman. We were simply using our imaginations. You're free to go.
One becomes a pundit by engaging in punditry. One prospers as a pundit by appealing to publishers, producers, and the public. One does not unbecome a pundit. Once made, a pundit remains a pundit. No matter how foolish the predictions one makes, no matter how many bizarre and violent utterances crosses one's lips, no matter how many strange contradictions one creates by accident in the process of trying to score some point, and no matter how many demonstrable errors may be found by way of a brief glance at one's past writings, a pundit who has reached a certain degree of notoriety is free to fail forever. And thus it is that the nation's central nervous system serves not to provide the citizenry with reasoned and well-informed commentary from those who have been proven correct in the past, but rather with whatever nonsense it is that a certain producer or newspaper publisher believes will get the most attention in the future. It is the era of name recognition and inertia; it is a failure of information in an age that is defined by information.
Cold, Fat, and Alone will serve as a thorough examination of the manner in which incompetent "intellectuals" obtain and retain the ear of the nation despite their increasingly obvious inability to predict the future, understand the past, or portray the present. Much of the book will consist of attacks on some of the nation's longest-serving and most prominent opinion makers such as Thomas Friedman, William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Joe Stein, Hugh Hewitt, Peggy Noonan, and many others. Just as in Flock of Dodos, the attacks will be based on the writings and utterances of the subjects in question; columns, books, and transcripts from television appearances will serve as grist for the mill. By the end of the book, any honest reader will have come to the conclusion that something is very, very wrong with the our national punditry. But any reader, honest or not, will have been thoroughly entertained.
Marketing
Aside from the obvious marketing benefits inherent to my authorship of Flock of Dodos, there are a number of ways in which the next book could be promoted aside from the traditional marketing avenues. For one thing, I'm now somewhat well-known at Daily Kos, where I occasionally make the recommended diary section and where I could post a diary announcing the book's publication, a common practice over there among those regulars who also write for a living, and quite effective insomuch as that the readership of that blog loves to support insurgent authors. And because the Kos crowd holds the mainstream punditocracy in an understandably high degree of contempt, a book written by one of their own in opposition to its natural enemies in the media would do quite well. Meanwhile, there are dozens of prominent bloggers, Duncan Black of Atrios being chief among them, for whom the failures of the nation's key pundits is a major and recurring theme; many of them could be counted upon to provide blurbs, good reviews, or even just a passing mention on blogs for which the target demographic is also our target demographic.
We have some other advantages this time around as well. I was recently named director of communications for Enlighten the Vote, a PAC that advocates for separation of church and state and which was previously known as GAMPAC. The PAC is led by Ellen Johnson, who took over American Atheists upon the murder of founder Madalyn Murray O'Haire in 1995 and who has since been a fairly frequent guest on both cable and network news programs like . Now, she wants me to start handling those sorts of media appearances on behalf of the organization, which obviously puts me in a good position to market both Dodos and our new book. Additionally, I now serve as a book reviewer for Fortean Times and nthposition.com, which are both out of London but which have American readerships as well, and could obviously count on an announcement from them and a few other publications I'm writing for. And, of course, we have the Amazon messaging application with which I could announce the new book to everyone who purchased Dodos from that venue.
Looks like Friedman is retiring and admitting that he's an idiot. Want to gear the book against pundits in general? Wasn't too keen on having to read his crappy books anyway. Give me a ring.http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/13/122927/56/611/660433
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Sterling & Ross Publishers <drew@sterlingandross.com> wrote:
That's great. I'll add that to the website.
Drew Nederpelt
Sterling & Ross Publishers
115 W. 29th St., New York, NY 10001
212 244 2084, ex.114
www.SterlingandRoss.com
From: Barrett Brown [mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:05 PM
To: Sterling & Ross Publishers
Subject: Re: do you want to write a book
I'll get on that proposal today. By the way, did you ever see this?
http://www.stthomasrichmond.org/node/3050
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Sterling & Ross Publishers <drew@sterlingandross.com> wrote:
Titled Thomas Friedman Is Cold, Limp and Alone.
Sterling & Ross Publishers
115 W. 29th St., New York, NY 10001
212 244 2084, ex.114