Franken - The Truth (with jokes)

W hen Al Franken asked me to write a foreword to this astonishing and profoundly moving book, he had only one condition: that I remain anonymous.

Why? I asked. Having a big name like mine on your cover would be an enormous feather in any authors cap.

Thats exactly the point, he responded.

Al, you see, is too modest to want to call attention to the fact that he and I are such close friends. Typical Al. He always hides his light.

I reluctantly agreed to his condition, but in return I extracted one of my own. In exchange for concealing my famous identity, I demanded total control over the text of this foreword. I knew Al too well to give him the chance to edit out all the well-warranted praise I intended to heap on him. But even though this enthusiastic foreword will no doubt embarrass Al, I believe that you, the reader, deserve to know the full truth about this great American and about this book. I believe it to be not only the finest volume he has written, but perhaps the Great American Nonfiction Hardcover itself.

The Truth is a very different kind of book than the ones this multifaceted genius has given us before. Oh, its funny. (How could Al Franken not write a funny book?) But its more than that. Gone is the familiar cast of villains: the psychotic Ann Coulter, the sex-addicted Bill OReilly, the drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh. Consigned to their own personal hells by their failings as human beings, Franken mercifully leaves them be. Ann Coulter has been banned as effectively from these pages as from the intellectual salons to which she so desperately craves admittance.

In The Truth, the fish are bigger, and the fry is deeper.

Frankens targets this time include both peopleBush, Cheney, Rice, Rove, DeLayand something new: ideas. In particular, the idea that the 2004 election meant that Frankens beloved America had moved to the right. Al Franken aint buyin it.

Using access to confidential documents and firsthand accounts, Franken weaves the true story of the Making of the President 2004, starring the Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse: Fear, Smears, and Queers.

Franken shows more than how Bush won. He shows what Bush won. (Or in the case of a mandate, what he didnt win.)

But this story chronicles more than a rise. It chronicles a fall. And what a fall! Was Bush like Icarus, simply a man who dared to dreama man who flew too close to the sun? Or like Daedalus, a man who equipped his son with unsafe wings made of easily melted beeswax?

As Franken makes clear, the answer is bothand neither.

If you doubt that Icarus has fallen, then I say these words to you: Terri Schiavo, Social Security, Ahmed Chalabi, Tom DeLay, and Iraq.

But this book is more than just a disconnected list of names, places, and topics. Far more. It is something new for Franken. And, I would argue, for literature. Here, Franken has taken a single stem cellthe English languageand grown from it a fully functional kidney with which to purify the blood of the body politic.

In the rarified sphere of contemporary general-audience nonfiction, few books live up to the promise offered by their title. Fewer still, their subtitle. But in The Truth (with jokes), the author lives up to not only his title and his subtitle but, most important, to the name that appears on the cover. Al Franken.

Anonymous
New York, NY
August 13, 2005