Harmonic Convergence

Well, Lion's screed left me blog-satisfied for a while, especially seeing as how my opinions of Obama have gotten closer and closer to Mssr. Summerbell's as the days of incompetence and dithering have passed. I had a moment of particularly intense frustration today, possibly coming off the post (which has been stewing in my head for a while), and opened my computer to see this:

The old saw that there is no such thing as bad publicity could be behind the success of The Coming Insurrection, published under the pen name the Invisible Committee, which rejects the official Left and aligns itself with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe against immigration control and the "war on terror." Published by Semiotext(e), a small California press, best known for works of French cultural theory by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, the book has spent much of the week on Amazon's top 10 bestsellers list, alongside better known titles like Game Change and The Help...

But even before the official pub date, The Coming Insurrection benefited from an "endorsement" from Glenn Beck. As part of a seven-minute rant on Fox News in July, he said, "I am not calling for a ban on this book. It's important that you read this book." Since then, each time Beck has talked about the book, sales have spiked, according to MIT Press associate publicist Diane Denner. It's latest jump came after Beck devoted an entire segment to The Coming Insurrection, which he called "quite possibly the most evil thing I've ever read."

First off, starting from a more meta-level, very interesting to see a book like that getting a real sales bump. Obviously, birthers and Beckites are out there picking it up in the hopes that it somehow reflects true liberal/progressive thought across all boundaries, and so not every purchase is a sympathetic one, but it's nice (having not read the book and all) to see a possible resurgence of radical political thought that seems to actually make a dent on the thinking of, say, more than some myopic university students. Also, I'm always happy to see a political book getting sales that isn't Wings of a Dreamer a glossy retrospective on Sen. Bumblefuck's life and calling that is unsubtly funneling profits into some PAC somewhere.

Second, I want to read it. I'm considering ordering it via the interwebs, but I wanted to know if you'd yet digested it, Lion, and if so, what your thoughts are. I'm obviously not expecting a revelatory experience or even really a convincing one, I'm just curious to see what the state of radical thought is in this particular mire of an era we live in.