Parenti, Michael. Dirty Truths. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. 282 pages.

This is an excellent collection of essays from one of America's most lucid progressive thinkers. Michael Parenti, born in 1933, grew up in a working-class family but managed to get a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 1962. Then he made a bad career move: he got clubbed by a cop while peacefully protesting at the University of Illinois in 1970. For stopping a club with his head, Parenti was charged with aggravated battery, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Ever since then, teaching opportunities have been hard to find. It seems that college administrators still hate him, even though he has published a dozen books, and packs them in when he lectures.

The best section of this book is the fifty-odd pages on the topic of conspiracy. Parenti criticizes other leftists such as Erwin Knoll, Chip Berlet, Alexander Cockburn, and Noam Chomsky for their phobia on this topic. As he points out, many of those who complained about the movie "JFK" have yet to read their first book about the assassination. Instead, they imply that examining the evidence is a diversion from true progressivism. Beyond that, they might denounce "scapegoating conspiracism," as if conspiracies never existed, or have always been unimportant. Conspiracy phobia is also a staple of our major news media -- for obvious, self-interested reasons. Fortunately, media criticism is another topic on which Parenti excels.
ISBN 0-87286-317-4

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