Satire: It was Mark Twain who first twinned satire and uncouth humour to expose the corrupt excesses of American public life - a national tradition carried on since by the likes of cartoonist Thomas Nash, humorist Will Rogers and comedian Lenny Bruce among others. More recently, cable TV comedic pundits Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and web-satirist Andy Borowitz have helped fill the yawning gap created by the mainstream US media's abject failure to address what is so demonstrably rotten in the US, writes Anthony Glavin
Al Franken, former Saturday Night Live stand-up comic and current talk-show host on the left-leaning radio network Air America, is another political commentator utterly untrammelled by either corporate ownership or a so-called journalistic "objectivity" that too often hamstrings any meaningful public discourse. No danger of much "objectivity" here either, as I've been a fan of Franken's since I read his unsparing lampoon of right-wing US media, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, while on the plane to Florida to volunteer for John Kerry's Presidential campaign in September 2004.
That said, I wasn't much taken with the inquest of the 2004 Presidential campaign that opens The Truth (With Jokes), Franken's full-frontal and devastating deconstruction of the Bush administration. Franken, correctly to my mind, does not blame Kerry, despite his shortcomings as a candidate, and he is also on target with his analysis of the fear tactics, smears and homophobia that persuaded enough Americans to vote against the Massachusetts senator. Nevertheless, much of this section reads like yesterday's papers, while Franken absolutely ignores, as did the mainstream press, the widespread and amply documented electoral fraud that likely cost Kerry the state of Ohio - and the Presidency.
When Franken moves on to the fast friendship between indicted, former majority whip, born-again Christian Tom Delay and indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, things pick up immeasurably. Satire often proceeds by describing folly or vice in loving detail, and Franken is especially good at marshalling such vile specifics, like the filthy living conditions, de facto slavery, and enforced prostitution that underpin the sweatshop garment industry on the American territory of Saipan, an island industry fiercely protected by Delay and Abramoff against any meddlesome Congressional efforts to bring US labour laws - never mind basic human rights - to the desperately poor Chinese and Philippine guest workers who manufacture "Made in the USA" clothes there.
The devil is also in the obscene details of born-again Bush's own intervention in the case of irreversibly brain-dead Terri Schiavo, who Franken informs us was ghoulishly subpoenaed by the Republican-controlled House Committee on Government Reform on the very day her feeding tube was removed. Elsewhere Franken delivers the promised jokes, observing wryly how "in the late 1990s politics had coalesced around one man's penis" and attacking Bush for allowing terrorists "who can breed" to wed while backing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Franken even manages to make lively reading out of the bogus insolvency arguments behind Bush's attempt to further enrich his money-management pals by privatising Social Security, but his detailed compendium of the deceptions and criminal ignorance on the tragic road to Iraq is what truly nails this administration to the mast. Reminded how Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld speculated the insurgency could last "twelve years" only weeks after Vice President Cheney heralded "its last throes", readers might well ask just who are the true comedians here? "They should not be running a small-town hardware store," observes Franken, "much less the world's remaining superpower."
The book ends with the author's proposals for a better America, sensible measures like universal health care, enhanced funding for education, and ending an addiction to fossil fuels that has the US organising its foreign policy around access to Persian Gulf oil. Franken also bruits a possible run for the US Senate in his native Minnesota in 2008. Indeed, better by far this committed, compassionate comedian in Congress than the long-running joke currently in the White House.
Boston-born Anthony Glavin is a novelist, editor and lifelong Democrat
The Truth (With Jokes) By Al Franken Allen Lane, 336 pp. £17.99