Attention Deficit Democracy

by James Bovard

Does the people's need to believe in the president trump their duty to understand, to think critically, and demand truth? Have Americans been conditioned to ignore political frauds and believe the lies perpetuated by campaign ads? James Bovard diagnoses a national malady called "Attention Deficit Democracy," characterized by a citizenry that seems to be paying less attention to facts, and is less capable of judging when their rights and liberties are under attack. Bovard's careful research combined with his characteristically caustic style will give "ADD" a whole new meaning that pundits, politicians, and we the people will find hard to ignore.

Genres: Politics, History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Is a libertarian author and lecturer whose political commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, The American Conservative, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

Reviews

[wally · Rating 3 out of 5]

i am not yet finished with this one, am about 40% done, kindle, but i wanted to write a few things and that is what i am doing.

just finished a rather lengthy chapter on the torture issue.

and now i need to hit "save" on this so i can see my kindle highlights here so i can continue to write the things i'd been thinking about...

this is the rough draft/final version, my "notes to myself"...if another benefits from what is here, hallelujah.

anyway, bovard writes, "This book examines the rising ignorance of the electorate, the fearmongering tactics of the 2004 and other presidential campaigns, the profusion of lying and how it fundamentally changes candidates’ relation to citizens, the ways in which contemporary elections are degenerating into a tawdry trading of votes for handouts and subservience, and the current Messianic Democracy push."

so...yeah, okay. some of the information here is new to me. the n.e.d. the i.r.i. has to do with influencing elections, the manner in which the u.s.a. has done so. what with the hullabaloo over the alleged "russian influencing elections here" and the abundant lack of any evidence of that, lack of anything to justify the hype...apropos. here's one highlight:

McCain hooted in 1997: “When we provide the democratic opposition in Albania with 12 Jeep Cherokees and they win an election, I’m incredibly proud.” and yet he is deeply disturbed at the thought of russian involvement on our shores. okay, johnnie. you bet. some relatively good information here regarding our (u.s.a.) influencing, meddling, overseas. some of it new to me.

what else? i just finished a lengthy chapter on the torture. i'm honesly inclined to not give a damn. it's war. both sides are trying to make the other side bleed, and bleed profusely, to bleed until they quit. and we're talking about torture? yeah. okay. sure. it's war. we expect people to be polite? they hack off a guy's head on national television and caution us over and over that we can't use the word islam and terrorism in the same sentence. torture? they march twenty men in orange jumpsuits down to the beach, hack off their heads. torture? meh.

toward the end of the lengthy, very very protracted chapter on torture, bovard asks the hypothetical question: What would it take to make the public acquiesce to the torture of Americans? Would simply applying an “odious” label (such as “cultmember” at Waco, or “Muslim” with John Walker Lindh) to the victims be sufficient? There certainly was little or no outcry about the brutalizing of John Walker Lindh.

and i thought, finally! you see, bovard in this lengthy and protracted chapter chastising bush and company for torture--one gets the sense that bush is there, brandishing the electrodes--and i suspect the only reason the bush name is used, repeatedly, is because the administration in the form of lawyers wrote down guidelines for torture. otherwise...otherwise what? i dunno. there is no otherwise. but i thought with that "cultmember" word...that comes at the bottom of the page...that i quickly turn to see if he makes the point i'd been thinking about all along...when i read of torture that consisted of, quote "According to the logic of the attorney general nominee, federal authorities could deprive American citizens of sleep, isolate them in cold cells while bombarding them with unpleasant noises and interrogate them 20 hours a day while the prisoners were naked and hooded, all without violating the Constitution." end quote.

the point is, that was done! on national television! at waco! and the people inside the building being bombarded with noise and light included children. and it was general reno who rented a tank to do them in.

so mr bovard, you you certainly know, What would it take to make the public acquiesce to the torture of Americans? you know. you watched it, too, you saw it on national television. you get the american people to acquiesce to the torture of americans by labeling them a cult. you continue that mindset with eight years of abuse of the white house by having all and sundry use words like "white trash"..."red neck"....and "big-haired wimmen"...all in the name of keeping potus's numbes relevant and up there. americans watched torture of their fellow americans on the nightly news and i remember the day the world war two vet walked outside to report on general reno driving the tank through the building...next door neighbor, gone now...but yeah. you think people are not paying attention? guess again.

anyway. that is all for the moment. 'bout 44% done. had to look see when this came out. 2005. so there's quite a bit of government lies and abuse not covered up to the current day. curious to see how the rest of it goes.

4/19/17, finished
and i'm done.

back to the torture issue. bovard, like i said, devoted a long protracted chapter to the issue of torture. i realize when one gets into a numbers game one risks. in another chapter, bovard writes about the number of iraqi children that died as a result of sanctions. hundreds of thousands. children. disease, this, that, the other. sanctions stared...presumably under bush-one, continued under clinton, and still in force to the u.s. invasion. while some were wringing their hands over some who were tortured, that same heart-felt emotion was missing when the matter was the death of iraqi children. perspective.

meh. why bother?

throughout, bovard makes the point that the american electorate is less than stellar in their choice at the polls. not as much time is spent on the idea that we are presented with two choices, a third, if there happens to be a third force contender...say, ross perot, was it in '92? '96? that probably had something to do with why b.c.f.r came about. the incumbent protection plan. and a violation of the 1st amendment though it was upheld by the u.s.s.c. their decision coming down a few days before saddam was found hiding in a hole.

what bovard does not cover
the lament that we continue to elect deceitful men, and then re-elect them to a second term, is the argument. that we are losing our liberty as a result is a point. what bovard doesn't say anything about is the army of bureaucrats who are unelected, accountable, and who have all three powers of government at their disposal. unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats writing regulations that have the force of law is fascism. when those same bureaucrats have all three powers of government at their disposal it is fascism squared...or cubed. never could get my geometry straight. nothing about that in here.

ummmm.

a couple items i noted
at one point, bovard used this expression It was unclear whether this warning rallied the redneck vote for Bush.

the point isn't "this warning"...the point is the use of the term "redneck" used without apology or regret. imagine bovard using the fabled n-word. we wouldn't hear the end of it. but it goes to what i've been saying...in the various "speak bitterness" campaigns i'm free to engage in on facebook...that after 8 years of hearing the same disparaging words from the media elite during the clinton abuse of the white house...after 8 years of hearing the warnings about using the words "islam" and "terrorism" in the same sentence...after 8 years of hearing the "racist" label bandied about whenever i've openly expressed disapproval of citizen obama's objectives...i'll say that i am not surprised, at all, that the one candidate who resembled a third-party candidate, trump, was elected. i doubt i am alone in my thinking.

we know the zombies are taught not to denigrate the different. we hear it almost daily. we're inundated with it, political correctness. but like i said, for 8 years during clinton, for 8 years during obama, the zombies have also know that there are some it is perfectly okay to denigrate. here's another that bovard uses:

Despite history’s failure to validate his theory, Kant’s doctrine has been embraced in recent decades with the fervor of a religious revival meeting.

unlike some here, too many, at goodreads, who should be subject to the same "show me don't tell me" criticism, i prefer to show. there's no doubt what is meant by "religious revival meeting" and there's no doubt, the zombies would know, that yes, it is okay to denigrate the different, in this case, the christian. and yes, it is okay to use a tank to run over "cult" members (the ultimate torture) because the media and political elite have said so...in so many words. all goes to support my point that after a certain amount of time, the people get fed up, and chose another path.

much of bovard's thesis can be summed up in jefferson's words from the declartion, paraphrased (probably) that all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have grown accustomed. remains to be seen whether the people can take back that liberty which has been taken from them by dishonest, power-hungry politicians.

bovard uses the "fact" of polling to support his claim that the people are somewhat ignorant of government, too trusting. all so very scientific. polling. i remember answering the phone on occasion, some pollster, asking questions, me with a mouthful of spaghetti, or the pot boiling, or me, wanting a cold beer, just having gotten home from work. meh. polling. science? and yet i tend to agree with his claim that the majority (majority?) of people are not engaged enough with the political process.

ummm...what else?

endless footnotes. touches on the court decision, was it kelo? kelso? about the land grab. touches on b.c.f.r. has some truly remarkable and dumbfounding quotes from politicians. heh! there's one from nixon...a number of others.

that's all for now. i doubt i try to re-write this, try to make it coherent. for whom?

wait now...there was another point i wanted to make. what was it?

bovard touches, briefly, on the idea of the two-party we have. i know the last...at least six presidential elections, my vote has been for the lesser of two evils. can't say it any clearer than that. forget the offices below that. forget trying to engage representatives... think it is interesting that when one on the "right" opposes big government, the label is "anti-government" when that is not true. smaller government, yes. anti-government? no. how about the left? a variety of labels i guess...unpatriotic? this, that, the other. from a variety of sources. when the "anti-gov't" label comes from across the board, from all. curious, is all.

i wanted something to read...maybe to cleanse the palate...after listening to cnn or fox news on the truck radio...i rarely watch television. thought bovard would be the ticket. somewhat. dissatisfied that so much was made about the torture (of a relative few) compared to the small service paid to the death of hundreds of thousands of children...and i had to backtrack to discover what president was responsible for that...bush-one, clinton, and bush-two...but there was no doubt about the torture issue. bush/cheney. and like i said, americans watched other americans being tortured on the nightly news, a la waco,texas...and narry a word. not a word. bovard did touch more on the waco incident later...after i wrote the far above, past the 44%-read mark.

all in all, good read.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only rational response to Attention Deficit Democracy is guttural screaming. TLDR: Democracy =\= freedom and George Bush has done irreparable damage to the American experiment.

So much of this book will stick with me, which is unfortunate because being part of the idiotocracy is far easier than being an actual patriot. My favorites:

“Rather than the ‘will of the people,’ election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.”

“The Bush campaign made mentally negligent citizens feel morally superior… for true believers, ‘good versus evil’ trumps hard facts almost every time.”

“The Patriot Act authorized confiscations of travelers’ money in violation of a Supreme Court ruling, the use of new surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of people‘s emails without a search warrant, nationwide ‘roving wire taps,’ and seizing library, bookstore, and other business and financial records based solely on subpoenas issued by FBI field offices on the flimsiest of pretexts. … But all the violations of Americans’ rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to ‘secure liberty.’ … Thus if you favor freedom, you must support permitting the president to lock people away forever without any evidence, to order torture, and to lay waste to foreign land based on whatever bogus claims he invokes.”

AHHHHHHHH.

[TRE · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good book overall. Lacks in some things as it's a decade and a half old while talking about the Bush administration in the present tense, but some of it was eerily prescient about fake news and journalists being lazy hacks.

[Efrem Sepulveda · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the conclusion of this book Attention Deficit Democracy, the author, James Bovard makes the following observation:

"We will know that Americans have regained the right toward Washington when a negligent congressman dreads a public meeting with his constituents the same way the average citizen anticipates an IRS audit."

I find this interesting for at the time of the writing of this review a well-known Arizona U.S. Senator was subjected to a excoriating audience in Gilbert, AZ at a town hall meeting. Many were unhappy with the politics that are emanating from the nation's Capitol and it seems that politicians are finally coming under fire for their negligent work in defending the Constitution and the rights of the people.

Mr. Bovard thesis to this book is that the American people have been subjected by politicians to bevy of lies for so long that their tolerance to the fibs has deadened their sense of civic duty. Subjects that were covered include the ignorance of the voting public, the scaremongering that surrounds presidential elections, the idea of a reverse slave auction where the electorate does not elect statesmen, but rather their slave masters and the idea of messianic democracy where our government intended to spread the gospel of democracy through deceit and foreign domination.

Mr. Bovard elaborates on these subjects with clarity, but he tends to repeat himself a bit, but then again that is to be expected when the lies come fast and furious. It was a quick and enjoyable read of just over 250 pages along with an index and end notes. The author encourages us to return to the ideas of the Founding Fathers and tells us not to rely on Washington for all of their needs. There is equal disrespect for both parties with George W. Bush and Bil Clinton getting grilled so this tome is completely non-partisan. Highly recommended.

[Bobbi Jo Chavarria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy crap! As a citizenry, we suck. It took me nearly three months to finish this book because I had to keep putting it down with disgust at all the things that we put up with from our political representatives. Note: They're not our "leaders" they're not simply "politicians" as if that's their job and no need to hold them accountable -- they are our political representatives and we've got to stop relying on them to run our communities, our nation and our world.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author contends that the average American knows less less about his government than they do about math and science in which areas America has dismal rankings. Part of this is due to the fact that Americans no longer real to inform themselves but depend on media and social networking mush.

[Craig Bolton]

Attention Deficit Democracy by James Bovard (2007)

[Josh Button · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2016 election between two of the worst presidential candidates in 50 years with both parties screaming about horrible the other candidate is while downplaying how horrible their own candidate is has demonstrated the point of this book beyond any reasonable doubt.

The major party nominees have consistently declined in quality over my lifetime. I actually can't think of a decent person nominated by either party in the last 30 years, yet the government has more and more power over our lives in spite of the idiots we keep electing. We keep asking the idiots we elect to solve all our problems.

I weep for our country.