Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

by Mark Crispin Miller

Book Overview

Read a newspaper or catch the news on television and you might get the impression that America's current leadership is mainstream: perhaps a bit more conservative and in its foreign policy more belligerent than its predecessors, but still a federal authority that functions within America's political traditions. But as Mark Crispin Miller argues here with great clarity and effect, we are in fact living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers:...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393326780
• ISBN13: 9780393326789
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The Heart of The Matter

As an author and professor of media communications and culture at NYU, Mark has an impressive track record of examining the media power-of-suggestion stranglehold on individuated and collective reality. Or, "unreality." The work he did in one of his earlier books, "Boxed In," regarding television-induced culture, is brilliant, and in some ways reminds me of author Harlan Ellison's scathing critiques of TV-lunatic reality which were essembled in two volumes as "The Glass Teat," the title devilishly makes the perverse comparison of the nutritional intake of suckling infants and an uncritical, desensitized populace feeding off of the lies and razzle-dazzle of television. Ellison quickly found his way to Reagan/Bush's list of "subversives." That aside, however, Mark's book, "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's NWO" gets to the true heart of the matter and does so in with a clarity that apparently isn't easily accepted by many, including those who see themselves camped in the 'left'. The crux of fully understanding the dilemma of the right wing strains which now menace not only our country but the entire planet, rests in avoiding or denying the magnitude of the threat. Mark correctly points out how those who comprise the mainline media are complicit to what has happened in as much as it is through those very institutions which has come an intentional and strategically foisted Orwellian false consciousness which enshrouds the collective perceptions of what the true right wing agenda is. The right wing movement is, in psychological terms, projective, meaning, if you took away the movement's need and desire of imputation, attack ad homonym, shout down and hate others, nothing would remain. Naturally such a radically venomous movement needs to cloak itself within seemingly morally upright guises of patriotism and "God is on OUR side!" [Although, I should add, Mark's book is NOT an attack on religion, religious beiefs, or liberal Christians] It's helpful to bear in mind that, often times, spiritually and mentally ill people[who just as often may appear 'normal' and healthy to those likewise afflicted with similar defiencies]can not and will not be capable of empathy, sympathy, humility, or contrition. Sound familiar of the Christ-o-fascist Bushies? In simplistic terms, crazy people don't know they're crazy. They'll often never question their sanity, and are, by nature of their illness, unable to even fathom the idea. This is why the right wing has spent vast sums of money for ideological, cultural/institutional warfare since the early 1970s; to ensure that nothing like what happened in the counter-culture era ever happens again. Power, be as ill and spiritually deficient as it is, given how unconscionablity, hostility and aggression become exalted properties to and for power/belief structures which define success and the intrinsic worth of existence in cold, materialistic terms, only seeks to exert itself; to make everything and everyone think, app

Cruel And Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

A gripping assessment of the current culture wars and how the Bush Administration has hijacked the Constitution, replacing it with an extremist evangelical agenda...fueled by a lock-step patriotism.If you want a clear picture as to the direction our Nation is moving in, this book is a must read. Ben Mercadante

"Cruel AND Unusual": a denial-busting book

Reviewers who flay Mark Crispin Miller's "Cruel AND Unusual" do so, I believe, because Miller's exposé comes at us in tidalwaves, crashing through our denial(my own included)of the gravity of the consequences of the stolen election of 2000. Profoundly unsettled by Miller's documented contention that Bush and Co conduct themselves like Fascists, the book's detractors veer from sloughing off the danger to labeling Miller a loose-brained liberal. But none of Miller's critics has dared to call "Cruel AND Unusual" a pack of lies.--Daniel Birnbaum, Paris

A must-read book

Crestfallen over the upcoming election? Bummed out because there's no anti-war candidate to pull the lever for? Feeling . . . disenfranchised? Cheer up. This new book will make you feel positively giddy about trooping to the polls Nov. 3 and voting Democratic. With hardly a mention of the disheatening John Kerry, media critic Mark Crispin Miller has penned a book that will fire up your enthusiasm for the dreary Dem--or, for that matter, anyone to the left of the ayatollahs or Jerry Falwell. Yes, the prospect of a second Bush term is that bad, the NYU professor writes. "Our unprecedented problem is that Bush & Co. is intent not just on fortifying the presidency, as did, say, FDR," Miller writes. "The regime's goal is to abort American democracy and to impose on the United States another kind of government entirely." To put it another way: For all his considerable faults, at least John Kerry won't ditch the Constitution. At a recent booksigning, Miller put the election in perspective: "I'll be happy if we come out of this with the right to free speech and free assembly." You can't say you weren't warned after reading this compelling book by one of our leading intellectuals.

The whole picture

I like the way Mark Crispin Miller writes. I couldn't put down "The Bush Dyslexicon" after I bought it, and "Cruel and Unusual" is even better. We have been inundated, for many good reasons, with anti-Bush books in the last few years, but a few of them, however well-intentioned and well-researched, are simply too maddening to read. I bought "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast and even though he is a great reporter whose work anyone interested in marginalized news stories should read, his journalistic style and the litany of past crimes he details made me feel helpless and angry and made the book difficult to read in its entirety. "Cruel and Unusual," however terrifying its conclusions, is, on the other hand, empowering. As I read it I felt like I was coming across my own thoughts and feelings articulated more powerfully than I might have done. I recommend it to anyone on the left looking for a book about the whole picture - civil rights issues, the Iraq war, terrorism, religion, Bush's personality, as well as the origins and workings of the mechanisms that undergird the current administration. All political books preach to the choir, but only a few move the choir to sing in such a way that draws others to the song. This is such a book. Don't try to get your conservative Republican brother-in-law to read it. Just buy it yourself, read it, and tell your conservative Republican brother-in-law the things that the Bush administration is doing to his country while betraying his trust.