Book Review: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America by Bernard Goldberg

I need a bit more time to work on Part 3 of The Meaning of Mulan. In the meantime, I'm posting a book review I wrote but never published. I plan on doing more reviews in the future. Ideally, one a week (especially given how much I read) mixed in with reviews on movies, shows, and games, all with my cultural-historical outlook. For now, here's a bit of a test-run.

For a while, I was steeped in the culture of the early-2000s. I think partly because it’s increasingly entering the boundary of the historian’s “twenty year rule” and unlike my usual historical interests – the 17th Century, the Sengoku Jidai, the Himalaya – I was alive for it. And the early 2000s were not just a period of time I witnessed, they were formative to the person I would become… or at least, could have become.

Left: The book in question.

This book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America: Al Franken is #37 by Bernard Goldberg was published in 2005, and based on the context, seems like it was written in the weeks immediately after the 2004 election. It could’ve been a rant filled LiveJournal if it was written by anyone born after 1945 and not a sports contributor to CBS and HBO so consumed with his own self-worth.

I won’t be going through all 100 people and say whether or not they deserve to be on the list. First off, that’s pointless. Secondly, tedious. As far as first-impressions go, however, it’s clear that Goldberg (if it wasn’t clear from the title that specifically singles out Al Franken) isn’t just biased against what we can very broadly refer to as the American Left, but that he has no interest in even considering them as anything other than… well the very people ruining America.

I frankly don’t care who Goldberg cares are the people ruining America. I’m sure at any point in time, you could ask 320 million Americans and receive 320 million different answers. Yet, as far as Goldberg’s list goes, it was intensely revealing not just about him as a person, but about that period of American history and culture as well.

One Christmas I was watching Little Women with my grandmother. Midway through she mentioned how she missed a time when “people were nicer and more polite.” And I had to point out to her that the whole point of Little Women was that it was a story about sisters overcoming the trauma of the worst war in American history… a war in which one side was fighting for the right to keep slaves. Yet, this was a theme throughout my grandmother’s Christmastime visit. My Dad and I watched The Lord of the Rings, and she said, “I never saw so much fighting in my whole life.” At which point I brought up, “You lived through World War II and Vietnam.” And later at the dinner table, when she once again mentioned that while she knows that there were horrible things in the past – segregation, slavery, genocide, etc. - people were nicer.

Pictured: people being nicer.

Finally I said, “Nana, I think what you like is the aesthetic of a polite society. There was nothing nice or polite about slavery or everything that surrounded it.”

I bring this up because this is basically how Goldberg introduces 100 People.

I'M SITTING ON A JET PLANE at Newark Airport, minding my own business, waiting to take off for Miami. A few seats away is this lawyer right out of Central Casting—wire-framed eyeglasses, dull gray suit, red tie, mandatory suspenders. Attached to his ear is another mandatory accessory, the cell phone, which he's using to talk to a colleague about some legal brief. Actually, "talk" isn't exactly the right word. "Yell" is a lot more like it—which is the way a lot of people "talk" on cell phones. Anyway, just about everyone on the plane who isn't clinically deaf can hear the whole conversation, loud and clear, including the part where Mr. Lawyer actually invokes the name of a U.S. Supreme Court justice—Antonin Scalia—to give a little weight to his brief. Pretty impressive, I'm thinking. [...] "It's all f**ked [sic] up," he tells the guy at the other end of the phone. And here's the thing: No one within earshot raised an eyebrow.1

I’d honestly be embarrassed to put my name on a publication that amounted to, “I can’t stand these young people who swear and twerk. It’s the downfall of America.” I mean, not to bring up the P-word, but it’s really a mountain of privilege in and of itself to make one of your top concerns “linguistic decency.”

But just based on this initial paragraph, all of a sudden, the entire text was laid out before me. No wonder Al Franken was considered important enough to be on the title page: the biggest threat to America (in 2005, no less) was public decency.

Spoiler alert for a book published in 2005, but 49/100 entries are media personalities. The list includes actors, musicians, TV show producers, rap groups, cartoonists, journalists, and authors. It’s an illustrious group that includes everyone from Tim Robbins (81), to Dan Rather (12), to Courtney Love (95), to Jimmy Swaggart (70). It’s a dizzying list that is often difficult to parse apart.

For example, he includes Michael Jackson (90), and his justification is a single sentence:

IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN it to you, you shouldn't be reading this book!2

And I mean… I don’t know what to say about that. What were we upset about regarding Michael Jackson back in 2005? I think it was mainly a photo of him holding his child over a balcony. And honestly, it might be just what Goldberg had in mind for the list. It’s a pretty petty list. But it could very much have been his… indecent music? Though honestly I have no idea. I live in 2024. Jackson’s music is basically regarded as “classical” at this point, and we’re mostly acknowledging Jackson being a problematic for his predatory relationship with young boys.

Somewhat ironically, Goldberg made a similar entry on his list, a name which may ring an odd bell for some listeners: Judge Roy Moore (21). For those unaware or who just forgot about this skid mark, Roy Moore ran for Alabama’s special election in 2017 after Jeff Sessions’ appointment to Attorney General. He then was outed as not just being a weird racist (which is frankly expected in Alabama politics) but a rapist who preyed on young girls, trolling the Gadsden Mall so much so that he was banned from it.

Anyway, all of this came out on the campaign trail where he won 48% of the vote to Democratic candidate Doug Jones’ 49%. Doug Jones, by the way, was the prosecutor who charged and convicted the Birmingham City Bombers, and was, somehow relevant to the election, not a pedophile.

Anyway, this was some twelve years after Goldberg’s book came out. What Goldberg had to say about Moore was how he participated in judicial activism, forcing himself into the culture war by putting a stay on an order to remove a stone copy of the Ten Commandments from an Alabama Courthouse. Noticeably, Goldberg doesn’t really seem to take an issue with whether or not a copy of the Ten Commandments should be there. It’s doesn’t affect him at all. And, fine. Who cares? It doesn’t affect me at all either, and I couldn’t care less. No, Goldberg’s issue here is that Judge Moore was engaging in judicial activism, and if it’s wrong for liberals to do it in the name of their social causes, like pesky civil rights issues, then it’s wrong for conservatives to use it to champion their causes too, like demolishing the walls between church and state.

Once you get past the subject matter of Goldberg just hating on just tons of media personalities mainly because he doesn’t like their politics (so many people are labeled as “America Bashers” and the only reason articulated is that they disapproved of the Iraq War and actively spoke against President Bush) what I really came to notice was the difference in language that Goldberg uses to describe people.

Men are vicious and women are stupid. I personally doubt Goldberg was even aware of his obvious prejudices. This book was clearly banged out in a long ranting weekend about the evils of people swearing in public, and how Tim Robbins was to blame. Which undoubtedly explains why he leaned into such bigoted and frankly disturbing language.

For example The Dumb Celebrity (85), which contains Cameron Diaz, Fred Durst, Kate Hudson, Margaret Cho, and Janeane Garofalo.

The next entry, #84 is The Vicious Celebrity (84), which contains, shock surprise, Alec Baldwin, Wallace Shawn, Sean Penn, and Janeane Garofalo.

Then it’s The Dumb and Vicious Celebrity (83), which includes Linda Ronstadt, Martin Sheen, David Clennon, and Janeane Garofalo.3 I mean, yeah I guess it’s funny that Janeane makes the lists redundant, but honestly, it’s just exhausting. These people said one thing each (and Janeane one per entry) that mostly revolved around calling out Bush or other conservatives for their politics, and Goldberg – this crusader for linguistic decency – apparently decides this is enough to condemn them as “vicious” and “dumb.”

Probably the most notable occurrence of this phenomenon is also the simplest. Let me preface this with a mini-review: The Game by Neil Strauss. I picked up this book out of morbid curiosity. And, well, it at least restores a tiny bit of my faith in humanity that even as the book came out, coincidentally also in 2005, that critics pointed out that it took Strauss 400 pages to figure out what anyone over a fifth grade reading level could by page 10: that the book was filled with broken men who only used constant sex as validation. And I mean, I get it. Of all the reasons to have sex with someone, it’s probably one of the most primal and basic to human needs: to feel wanted. But the book was just… sad, after a certain point. They portrayed themselves as sexual libertines, and sensual wizards hacking through millennia of evolutionary programming and social norms to get what they wanted: women.

It wasn’t even about hedonism. Hell, at least I could have a modicum of respect if it was just about getting their kicks as much as possible with as many women as possible. At least that could be understandable, that level of honesty. But really, these men couldn’t be honest with themselves, and were constantly undergoing multiple levels of emotional crises with barely a veil of control.

At one point Strauss and a bunch of other pickup artists and their (mistresses? Partners? Hanger’s-on?) all shacked up together in some kind of colony. Enter Courtney Love. Confession: I didn’t really know who Courtney Love was prior to reading The Game, and I still have a vague understanding of what her deal is. What I do know is that she moved in with The Game guys and was clearly in the middle of an emotional crisis. And I mean, who wouldn’t be? She had just gotten out of the ‘90s media scene, her husband had commit suicide, and she was going back and forth on her substance abuse problem. In other words, she had undergone stresses that are by no means unique, but in unison, could tear any person apart. After all, who could predict how they would react in one of those circumstances, never mind all at once?

There was a weirdly touching scene in The Game where they gather and perform some kind of vague shamanic ritual.

After Gabby left, Courtney threw a bundle of sage on the coffee table. “Let’s clear the air in here,” she said. Then she skipped off to the kitchen, explaining, “We need some rice for good fortune.” Unable to locate any rice, she returned with a package of jambalaya mix and a bowl of water. She poured the jambalaya mix into the water, planted the sage in the middle of it, and then ran to her room. She emerged carrying a blue-and-white-checkered flannel shirt. “This will work,” she said. “It’s one of Kurt’s shirts. I only have three of them left.” She carefully arranged the shirt underneath the table, safe from harm, so that it could bring good energy to the house. After lighting the sage, she sat Mystery, Herbal, and me down next to her makeshift altar, and we joined hands. Her grip was bone-crushing. “Thank you God for this day and all that you have given us,” she prayed. “We ask that you clear the energy of this house of all evil. Please bring peace and harmony and friendship under this roof. No more tears! And help me win my court case in New York and help clear up all my other problems. I will work with you, God. I really will. Give me strength. Amen.” “Amen,” we repeated.4

To recap: Courtney Love moved to the other side of the country with a single suitcase, was doing her very best to run away from her life and her problems, but was walking around with her dead husband’s clothes.

And I get it. I don’t know anything else about Courtney Love. I know there was some issue with custody of her daughter, that she acted in movies, that she played the guitar. But more than that, I get what it’s like to want to desperately run away from everything… but still hold on to poignant otherwise meaningless reminders of a past filled with pain.

Left: Bernard Goldberg c. 2011.

Anyway, Goldberg lists Courtney Love as number 95, and his justification is a single word made up of two capital letters: “H-O.”5

Thank you for that, grandpa decrying the decline of civility and politeness in society. Real classy.

Hypocrisy is another deep element of Goldberg’s book. I noticed this especially in Tim Robbins’ entry. Which itself was hilarious. I mean, yeah The Shawshank Redemption is great, but, um, was Tim Robbins ever one of the most influential people in America? I mean, almost none of the people on Goldberg’s list were ever really that influential. There are some, but the entry on Tim Robbins is particularly seething, and it really shows.

Robbins had a better grip on the underlying problem, which, he told the crowd was fundamentalism. "Let us find a way to resist fundamentalism that leads to violence," he said, " fundamentalism of all kinds, in al Qaeda and within our own government." My guess is that I'm not the only one who has had enough of this moral-equivalence crap. In Tim's world, on the one hand, there are the fundamentalists in al Qaeda who kill innocent civilians. They're bad. And on the other hand, there's the fundamentalism within the United States government. And that's bad, too. Really, Tim? While we're on the subject, exactly what "fundamentalism within our own government" are you talking about?6

The last twenty years have pretty much answered this question.

Celebrities hating on Bush for his launching of an illegal war that had profound consequences not just for the lives of people in the Middle East, but for the degradation of civil liberties around the world, is a theme in this text. Unless you are singing Bush’s praises, it’s enough to get you declared an “America basher” by Goldberg. For comparison, some other random people on his list include John Green (29) a random individual who threw a beer bottle at someone at a sports game, Richard Timmons (93) and James Kopp (25), both murderers (though why include these two and not just… any other murderers is anyone’s guess), Matthew Lesko (99), a random conman, as well as David Duke (66), Jimmy Carter (6), Howard Stern (62), Al Sharpton (17), and Ludacris (60).

I certainly don’t think any of these people are free from criticism, but the fact that Goldberg can include a bunch of people whose only “crime” is to criticize an undemocratically appointed President who started an illegal war alongside literal murderers and labels them as “these people are making America worse” speaks volumes. It says both “I banged this out in a long weekend of drunken ranting” and “I can’t tell the difference between these thoughts. Criticizing Republican president: bad. Rap lyics: bad. Murdering: equally bad.”

Fortunately, Goldberg also dislikes hypocrisy and finds Tim Robbins to be an intolerable hypocrite.

On 25 March 2003, Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post decided to stir the pot, bumping into Robbins and his then-partner Susan Sarandon at a party in L.A. The journalist said hello to the actors, but then mentioned that he’d spoken to Lenora Tomalin – Sarandon’s mother, who was an outspoken conservative Republican, Bush supporter, and “wry observer” of her daughter. It was then that Robbins’ “expression turned cold” and he said, “Wait. You’re the one who wrote about Susan’s mother? You wanted to be divisive and caused trouble in my family.” Robbins apparently stepped “within inches” of the reporter’s face and said, “If you ever write about my family again, I will [bleeping, sic] find you and I will [bleeping, sic] hurt you.”7

See, while Tim Robbins denounced an illegal war started by a President who lost an election only to have it overturned by partisan judges in a political scheme that would make Cersei Lannister proud, apparently this pacifist stance is incompatible with his threats against a mud-raking paparazzi.

These two things are absolutely comparable. See, to certain people, if you’re rich, white, and defend the status quo, and occasionally throw a bone to their dog whistles, there’s little wrong you could possibly do. Hell, after years of antisemitic fear-mongering over Bill Gates trying to insert microchips into all of humanity via vaccine so we could buy more Microsoft products, or whatever, Elon Musk, free speech absolutist who is silencing Turkish and Indian political dissidents on his website, actually funded experiments to put chips into the brains of chimpanzees, and a certain wing of the internet loved him for it.

Tim Robbins’ so-called hypocrisy would be totally fine and acceptable, if he were on the right team.

It’s one of their favorite games. Before he even gets to the main list, Goldberg takes time out of his introduction to talk about Hollywood Blowhards, “randomly selected from several billion possibilities” these quotes, and coming up with fun mocking titles:

“Republican comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant.” POLITICAL SCIENTIST JULIA ROBERTS “Bush is a f**king idiot.” HISTORIAN JENNIFER ANISTON “Bush is ‘as bright as an egg timer.’” CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR CHEVY CHASE “Bush is a ‘cheap thug.’” POLITICAL COMMENTATOR JOHN MELLENCAMP8

These criticisms and mocking titles must mean that Goldberg respects the research and opinions of actual academics… right? Because surely, by being educated in the subject as opposed to just being an old, washed-up SNL host must make your words matter more in Goldberg’s world?

Goldberg does in fact include a historian on his list. Eric Foner (75). Foner is an historian of the United States and is particularly well-known for his research on the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Foner isn’t a political ideologue. He isn’t out there tweeting “The American Civil War was about slavery. End of story.”9 He writes academic articles about the complex socio-economic and political causes of the war, and detailing the events that happened with the accuracy and well-researched arms of a professional historian. Honestly, unless you’re into dry history, you probably have never heard about him, much less read anything by him at this point.

And it’s not like Eric Foner is out there making political statements or swearing at the President. But here we have someone who is a literal historian, and is well-known for being a good historian, who does research with nuance and depth of understanding… and yet it’s not good enough because he doesn’t parrot a particular line.

Telling, isn’t it?

My question to Goldberg is, what exactly does Free Speech mean if you can’t insult the head of state? What’s the point of the First Amendment if you can’t call out leaders for being bought-and-paid-for thugs and gangsters? Why does one have to be a political scientist to make a joke about Republicans? Why does one have to be a historian to call a president who started an illegal war an idiot? Apparently, you have to be a Constitutional Scholar to criticize the president, or be a professional political commentator to call an egg timer the cheap thug he is.

And nothing has really changed. When people were calling out Trump, a man who spent his entire Presidency sundowning, praising literal Fascists, and tweeting on the toilet, the same rhetoric was used against anyone who dared write “FUCK TRUMP” on a sign, or called for resistance against the Fascist creep, despite the fact that the President literally said that his supporters should commit acts of violence against protesters.

It makes the Roy Moore bit even more revealing. In the passage on Roy Moore, Goldberg pretends that it’s the principle of judicial activism that he’s against. And if it’s wrong for libs, then it’s wrong for cons. That’s right: conservatives are just that principled. It’s just all about decency and decorum. Look, if you don’t know what you’re talking about JULIA, then just shut your mouth. If you don’t have anything nice to say CHEVY, then please refrain from speaking.

Now did the same apply when people were hanging and burning Barack Obama in effigy, who very much was a constitutional scholar who was the President of the Harvard Law Review and taught Constitutional Law?

We all know the answer to that question.

This review over a book that’s well past its prime is already too long. But I will say that it was very interesting to read the passages that Goldberg seemed to feel he needed to include, but his language turns much more… well it doesn’t have that sting. He includes Ken Lay (45), the former CEO of Enron, for what are pretty obvious reasons.10 And Goldberg even spends a big portion of his intro talking about how these shady business practices are really ignoble and are making America a worse place to be. Hard to argue with that!

But what’s so frustrating about this stupid fucking book is that he can’t see past his nose long enough to argue or even conceive of any kind of structural reform. Businessmen like Lay, like Dennis Kozlowski (44, who is called out for holding some kind of coke-fueled yacht orgy using company money), like Donald Trump, do things like this because they can. They get away with capitalist abuse, because we let them. It’s not a bug in the system, it’s how it was meant to function.

Other than Moore, Goldberg does call out other politically active people. And I’m sure the list will shock no one: Sheila Jackson Lee, George Soros, Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Edwards, Maxine Waters, Ted Kennedy. All people who very much deserve good-faith criticism, just as Al Franken certainly did, but Goldberg’s criticism is anything but. Like most conservatives, he hides behind the concept of a principled stand, “Look, of course I have compassion for the poor, but actually doing anything to help them would be a violation of the free market. If they want to improve their lot, they should get an education/join the military/start a business/work harder,” but without the emotional intelligence to realize what it would take to actually make one.

At the time the book came out, John Stewart invited Goldberg onto The Daily Show to talk to him about it. Stewart called out the book’s imbalance, saying that people like Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts can’t be compared to the Karl Roves and Colin Powells of the world, who controlled the levers of power and actively making the world a worse place.

Had this book been written more recently, I could imagine, for example, Miley Cyrus being on the list, along with some single word explanation like, “HO.” When in actuality, one needs to only glance at Cyrus’ career to see that she spent a year flaunting her sexuality as a kind of “coming out” as an adult, wanting to get away from her reputation as the little girl who played Hannah Montana. And her strategy worked. While people think fondly of Hannah Montana, no one infantilizes present-day Miley Cyrus, pigeon-holing her into roles that she’s trying to escape. It took a bit of a media blitz and literally shaking her ass, but who cares? It was literally a marketing stunt.

I’m sure when it was happening, Goldberg was probably mashing his keyboard talking about the downfall of society because a young woman with a microphone and a record deal had the audacity to flaunt her sexuality. Dear Lord, what is this world coming to? Can you just imagine how society might have collapsed if, shudder the television cameras panned below Elvis Presley’s waist line? There would have been pandemonium. The streets would NEVER have recovered from all of the fluids!

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a conservative sports commentator sees murderers, high-profile Democratic Party members, the absolute worst Republicans, and a bunch of (relatively) outspoken celebrities who don’t share his politics of presidential submission, as all even remotely relatable. What is shocking to me, much more so than the “political imbalance” is that he thought these ramblings, and his publisher, thought that this was sufficient to make into a book that was sold on shelves. That someone would look at this not as an ugly rant against more-or-less random people that Goldberg just doesn’t like, but as something worth putting out in the world.

Really, the reason I’m happy to have read it, and I use that term lightly, is because there’s this narrative that has been present since the beginning of the Trump Administration. People are fond of saying, “Look, the Republican Party used to not be like this. This is new.”

There was a whole book written about this phenomenon, Over the Edge, about how the election of a black man made the Republican Party lose their minds and dive head-first into neo-Fascism for a New York conman. Even people I know who are very much in-the-know have a habit of saying, “Yeah, they’re really mask-off.”

But this book shows that, really, this attitude always existed. At least in my lifetime.

In 2017, Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine posted a picture of himself on Instagram with a t-shirt that read “Mother, should I trust the government?” and his guitar, where he had put a sign that said, “FUCK TRUMP” on the back. A user, probably not Bernard Goldberg, responded, “Another successful musician instantly becomes a political expert.”

It was 2017, and this kind of comment was never intended in good faith. It’s not meant to spark discussion or debate. It’s especially rich coming from the free speech crowd. But Morello responded to this Constitutional Scholar and First Amendment Advocate: “One does not have to be an honors grad in political science from Harvard University to recognize the unethical and inhumane nature of this administration but well, I happen to be an honors grad in political science from Harvard University so I can confirm that for you.”

No, you should not trust the government. Or their shills that tell you you need a PhD to speak out against it, and should be ashamed for doing so, regardless.

Next week, back to The Meaning of Mulan

Discuss this Article on the r/JackAdrian subreddit.

Footnotes

1. Goldberg 2005. p. 3.

2. Ibid. p. 53.

3. Ibid. p. 59-61.

4. Strauss 2016. Step 10. Chapter 6.

5. Goldberg 2005. p. 47.

6. Ibid. p. 64.

7. Ibid. p. 65.

8. Ibid. p. 11.

9. To be clear, Foner has been very explicit that the leading cause of the Civil War was very much slavery. He has never wavered on this issue. The point here being that he’s not a “Social Justice Warrior” on the website formerly known as Twitter just there to say “Gentle reminder: the Civil War was about slavery,” but that he’s an award-winning historian, an academic whose primary work analyzes the causes and effects of the Civil War in exhaustive detail. So he has explicitly said that slavery was the underlying cause of the Civil War, just, he 100% of the time accompanies that very simple statement/fact with a lot more.

10. Though my criticism against him is one of grammar. I think Lay and his ilk made America worse. By 2005, it seems to me like they weren’t making much of anything any more.