I may have to read Glenn Beck’s book.

When I was in the drugstore yesterday, browsing in the books and magazines aisle (I bought Game of Thrones in anticipation of the TV series, which I’d rejected a couple of times previously as too florid, but, as you can perhaps gather, I’ve lost all control of my bookish impulses.), I picked up the Overton Window and read from the middle, in which our hero makes out with our heroine and feels a passion unlike any he’s felt before, and then they talk about the tax code and go to the office where a meeting about the plot to ruin America was held.

I love it. It’s not as good as Ayn Rand–all hail the release of Atlas Shrugged Part I, which I will be attempting to convince my mother to see despite wretched reviews–but it’ll do. I’m not sure what it is about the fictionalization of these politics that make them suddenly not just palatable but delicious. These books are infinitely more revealing than their corresponding nonfiction in that they show us the kind of superhero the author imagines s/he’d be (or is?). It makes me feel sort of tender toward the writer–which Rand would find disgusting; I’m not sure whether Beck cares either way. There’s a hyperseriousness to these stories that makes someone think it’s perfectly appropriate to make one book (a long book, but still) into a movie trilogy. And that leads to this trailer:

I wish very, very much that I could tell you Glenn Beck wrote that poem, but no. It was Rudyard Kipling.

Do you have a favorite political-tract-as-novel? What exciting and strange propaganda am I missing?

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