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Aug. 30th, 2004 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheThe Angry Editor
What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Freedoms, Ravaged the Environment and Damaged America and the World is a book that has been assembled rather more than written. With great recourse to lists and bullet-point breakdowns, it audits Bush's shortcomings across every department of government, opening each chapter with one of the president's goofy quotes ("It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it") then slamming home wave after wave of damning facts and anecdotes: that Bush tried to reclassify "manufacturing" jobs to include people who worked in fast-food joints; that teachers in Missouri were ordered to remove every third light bulb from schools to save money; that parents of soldiers in Iraq were in some cases forced to buy their children's own body-armour vests ("$1,500 retail"), plus hundreds of statistics attesting to Bush's failure to help America's poor, sick and discriminated against. The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results. Carter says he intended to write a short handbook, but that the more he and his researchers looked into it, the longer the book got.
"We had meetings on the research every couple of days; we went through 30,000 reports - it was daunting, what the Bush administration had done," he says. "I went into this thinking I knew maybe a 10th of it; I didn't know the 1,000th of it. I'm really crummy at deadlines - which is strange, 'cos I'm a very punctual person usually for lunches - and a really slow writer, but I had to do this in four months and worked till 2am every morning. I was saying to my kids, the one thing this book did was use my brain cells, 'cos I've been an editor so long. An editor rarely uses his brain; he uses his gut more than his brain. My brain was worn out, the tips of my fingers were worn out."
What We've Lost: How the Bush Administration Has Curtailed Freedoms, Ravaged the Environment and Damaged America and the World is a book that has been assembled rather more than written. With great recourse to lists and bullet-point breakdowns, it audits Bush's shortcomings across every department of government, opening each chapter with one of the president's goofy quotes ("It's clearly a budget. It's got lots of numbers in it") then slamming home wave after wave of damning facts and anecdotes: that Bush tried to reclassify "manufacturing" jobs to include people who worked in fast-food joints; that teachers in Missouri were ordered to remove every third light bulb from schools to save money; that parents of soldiers in Iraq were in some cases forced to buy their children's own body-armour vests ("$1,500 retail"), plus hundreds of statistics attesting to Bush's failure to help America's poor, sick and discriminated against. The result is so overwhelming that it reads a little as if someone has fed "Bush, presidency, fuck up" into a search engine on the internet and loosely organised the results. Carter says he intended to write a short handbook, but that the more he and his researchers looked into it, the longer the book got.
"We had meetings on the research every couple of days; we went through 30,000 reports - it was daunting, what the Bush administration had done," he says. "I went into this thinking I knew maybe a 10th of it; I didn't know the 1,000th of it. I'm really crummy at deadlines - which is strange, 'cos I'm a very punctual person usually for lunches - and a really slow writer, but I had to do this in four months and worked till 2am every morning. I was saying to my kids, the one thing this book did was use my brain cells, 'cos I've been an editor so long. An editor rarely uses his brain; he uses his gut more than his brain. My brain was worn out, the tips of my fingers were worn out."