If his advice often sounds oversimplified, that's because it is. For instance: government regulation of pharmaceutical-drug costs improving the media by levying a tax on broadcasting companies, which will be collected for airing educational ads compulsory universal service based on FDR's Civil Conservation Corps projects, such as building roads and planting trees and a progressive tax on the wealthy. He hammers away at his message that community trumps the individual, long-term goals are paramount, and extremists are ruining the country.Īnd while the author's humorless outlook is forbidding, his optimism that things can be corrected is tenacious what distinguishes Real Common Sense from the thousands of other titles calling for a major shift in values is that it actually offers solutions. No doubt influenced by his prodigious employment record-boxing coach, ranch hand, journalist, documentary filmmaker-Kahn displays an empathy for the common person that is passionate and inflexible. Somewhere between a New Deal Democrat and a Lincoln Republican, Helena-based Kahn is host of the award-winning radio program "Common Ground," as well as an activist for a variety of causes. Like any strictly partisan book, Real Common Sense will elicit one of two responses: If you are on the right you will loathe Kahn's ideology, but if you are even two inches to the left you will appreciate the radical streak of Kahn's mind and read it in one sitting. Kahn's rhetoric is occasionally heavy-handed, yet his writing is both informative and intelligent, especially in his mockery of "socialist engineering"-the right's taboo labeling of anything remotely humanist-that would include Medicare, the armed forces, and national parks. Liberally peppering his book with the words of Jefferson, the Constitution, FDR, and others (we would have liked more Kahn and fewer quotation marks), he laments the corporatist insanity that caused our almost-Greater Depression, the media's reliance on airing entertaining punditry over information, and an unhealthy junk food culture that the government seems powerless to prevent. Kahn pinpoints the crises of American political life and shows how each is an entanglement of consumerism, privatization, and irresponsibility. Real Common Sense attempts the daunting task of wresting the ideals of the American Revolution from the clutches of the Right. Kahn says that the fault for our inactivity lies in our own consumerist tendencies, but a larger part resides with the Right, which has unfailingly been opposed to progress of any kind and, worse, tried to appropriate the Founding Fathers to support its views. What's the alternative? "The alternative is to think clearly, to orient ourselves, and to act," Brian Kahn writes at the beginning of his new book Real Common Sense, and if that sounds easier said than done, it assuredly is. As angry bumper stickers and interminable internet threads suggest, Americans don't even have to talk when they vent their politicized misgivings. Sometimes, Americans even complain that there is far too much complaining going on.
What's the alternative? "The alternative is to think clearly, to orient ourselves, and to act," Brian Kahn writes at My review from the Missoula Independent:Īmerica has a rich history of bitching. My review from the Missoula Independent: America has a rich history of bitching. We have gone off course as a country by emphasizing consumerism over citizenship, entertainment over education, and "me" over "we." By rediscovering the moral compass our Founders put into place, we can create a united America, and a future worthy of our grandchildren.more It’s time to cut through the rhetoric, smoke, and spin, and get back to our core American values. Pundit Glenn Beck has gone so far as to use the title of Tom Paine’s famous 1776 pamphlet Common Sense for his own book-a book that attacks the political, social and economic rights which Paine and the Founders fought for. It’s time to cut through the rhetoric, smoke, and spin, a America's extreme Right falsely claims the Founding Fathers as allies for their radical agenda.
America's extreme Right falsely claims the Founding Fathers as allies for their radical agenda.
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