‘Bernie’ by Ted Rall – Review and Excerpt
[Check out the exclusive excerpt at the bottom of the post]
Love Bernie. Hate Bernie. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. I’m violently non-partisan by profession and nature. But, I demand you read Ted Rall’s comic book biography of Bernie Sanders.
It’s not some propaganda crap-ola to promote Sanders’ Presidential campaign. You don’t get a lot of stuff that makes you feel warm and fuzzy about the candidate. Rather, what you get is, “The Making of a Guy Pissed-off with the Way the System is Stacked Against the Average Joe.”
Rall’s Sanders was not the intellectual child of Karl Marx. Rather, he was the child of Eli Sanders, a low-ticket salesman whose commissions barely covered the rent on a one-bedroom flat in Brooklyn – except when they didn’t cover it and Sanders’ parents would fight.
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Bernie is also a quick primer on “Pot-hole Socialism.” For example, as Mayor of Burlington, Sanders brought a minor league ball team to town, built affordable housing, balanced the budget and took care of business. Bernie was a government executive even Paul Ryan could love (if Ryan weren’t a sick, duplicitous shill for billionaires.)
Ted Rall is an ornery cuss, so he has lots of gripes about some of Sen. Sanders’ votes and views – and the book is the better for it.
The book’s opening is a particularly enjoyable I-didn’t-know-that history of the Democratic Party’s “moonwalk,” sliding right while pretending to defend progressive views. It’s the betrayal that created Bernie’s movement, not just his political moment.
With Bernie, Rall does the job that used to belong to news reporters – illuminate the soul of a candidate. And, most importantly, he puts Progressivism back into the story of American history.
Given that our media covers little more than pollster yammering and Trump’s hairdo versus Hillary’s, Rall’s book comes as a welcome cure for stupid.
thanks to the l.a.p.d. and the l.a. times, ted rall lost his job last year.
signed copies of his bernie book are available at ted rall’s rallblog.
nice to see greg palast on this site.
keep up the good work.
Be interesting to read it and any other glimpses of Bernie’s life. I’m feeling the burn for iowa’s primary.