He Is Not America
a review by by S. Cosburn Mortimer,
research director of the Bankers' Alliance for Responsible Freedom
Reviewed in this article: I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert and others; Grand Central Publishing, 230 pp.One of the many signs of the dysfunctional state of labour-management relations in North America is the current television writers’ strike in the United States. While professional American politicians and journalists remain free to inflict their amateurish burlesque of politics on the public, the serious political commentary of comedians is kept from us.Among the commentators of whom we are deprived is Stephen Colbert. For the last two seasons, on The Colbert Report, his portrayal of a feckless liberal comedian who finds himself out of his depth in satirizing conservative political commentators has allowed him to present economically responsible political thought to a new audience: liberals!
Consequently, when a review copy of his new book, I Am America (And So Can You!), arrived on my desk I looked forward to re-acquainting myself with his penetrating political insights, denied us for months by the intransigence of organized labour.
However, I was in for a shock. Shortly after beginning the book it became clear to me that although Stephen Colbert has been talking the talk on television for two seasons, and although he is talking it in this book, he is not walking the walk.
I Am America (And So Can You!) is a quality production, featuring heavy paper, many illustrations, and, thanks to the inclusion of marginal comments, more text per page than equivalent books. However, all Mr. Colbert is charging for this book is $31.25! And that’s in Canada! In the United States, he’s only charging $26.99!
As we know from trickle-down economics, increases in profit at the highest levels of society result in prosperity trickling down to the lower levels – employers can use their increased profits to hire more people, who can buy more goods, thereby increasing profits even more, and the cycle begins again.
Given his popularity, Mr. Colbert’s duty was to make people pay through the nose for his book. Sadly, not only is he offering the book in Canada for a piffling $31.25, he’s giving his fellow Americans a cut rate! How does he expect to help America by acting like some sort of philanthropist? You use philanthropy to lower your taxes, thereby helping America.
As I have noted, the book provides a great deal of text. If we consult the list of authors we find that to produce this exemplary amount of content Mr. Colbert engaged ten other writers. But – none of them is Chinese!
Outsourcing work to China is essential not only for increasing the profits necessary for initiating the trickle-down cycle of endless prosperity, but also for creating forces within China which will lead to the creation of a branch of the Republican Party in a land until only recently ruled by the fanatically communist Red Guard. Plus I know a publisher in China who would have got the work done at a fraction of the cost Mr. Colbert probably incurred. If Mr. Colbert had called me first, then maybe his fire sale pricing would have made sense.
But then came the final straw. Tucked away in the back of the book, in tiny type on the dust jacket, is an inconspicuous note that the American-sounding Grand Central Publishing, which is the nominal publisher of the book, is simply a front for Hachette Book Group USA, a division of Hachette Livre. Hachette Livre is French! This book is French!
At this point the scales fell from my eyes. Stephen Colbert (his last name pronounced à la française) is not a conservative portraying a feckless liberal portraying a conservative, he’s a Frenchman portraying a conservative portraying a feckless liberal portraying a conservative!
Friends – don’t send your hard-earned dollars to France, where they will be converted into effete “Euros” and used to buy things like dangerously unpasteurized cheese and cigarettes that taste as if you’ve just set fire to a pile of unwashed socks in your mouth, the profits from which then trickle down to...the French! Turn your back on the misleadingly named I Am America (And So Can You!), and make a purchase that will send your dollars to the real America! Eventually American tourists will bring some of them back to Canada.
He Is Not America © John FitzGerald, 2008
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