Reason Is as Reason Does

I really wanted to like Al Gore's latest book, The Assault on Reason. I wanted to believe that someone with the ability to attract public attention was making sense of why the American dream has degenerated into the American pyschotic episode.
I don't think this is it. Too much of the book is a recitation of the harm George W. Bush has caused America. No argument, but no enlightenment either. Gore's statements are sometimes pretty loose. He talks about America inventing democracy (they didn't, Greeks did), and planting it carefully in the New World (someone else's garden--I don't remember ever hearing that Native Americans were consulted about having their own society replaced by a European transplant). He tends to leave out inconvenient truths. For example, though he says there are none, there are examples of very effective, long-lasting and efficient autocratic societies--the Roman empire, for one. Not that I would have liked to under its rule, which doesn't make it any less real.
Gore says the government of his country, set up by nearly Olympian Founding Fathers (always capitalized) and dependent upon the wisdom of the masses, has been corrupted because the average person no longer is part of the dialogue. I try to imagine at what time the average person was part of the dialogue. Gore says it was pre-TV, when most folk got their view of the world from newspapers. TV is all one-way, he says, so there is no dialogue. The average person doesn't have access. The rich guys that own TV control how the public sees policies and politicians, and they have their own agenda, and therefore make public policy.
Maybe. It seems to me newspapers were, and are, pretty much one way. A person can read the news, but not discuss it with the writers of the news. Newspapers then and now were/are owned by rich people with agendas and a desire to get richer. And many people were disenfranchised in those good old days and many couldn't read back then, even more of them than have that problem now.
The government lied to the people, Gores cries over and over again. Well, yeah. Governments lie. To quote Gregory House and Mark Twain, everybody lies. The pain and wonder of it is, so many people believe. Those masses upon whose wisdom we are urged to rely elected that government. Twice. Fool me once. . .