Adam Bellow has been telling me for a year that he wants to bring back pamphleteering – not just the style of it, which has pretty well extended itself into blogging (“Blogging as modern-day pamphleteering” being a pretty well-accepted trope), but in the fact of it – little paper booklets you can buy in odd places like coffee shops, train stations, news racks. Booklets about serious things, because he believes as I do that the average American can take attention away from Survivor and Paris Hilton’s coochie to read, think, and talk about things that matter if they are presented in an accessible way.
Well damn if he hasn’t actually pulled it off.
He’s publishing a 3-part series by Michael Totten on Hiz’bollah. And it will be the first, I hope, of a long series of works he will put out under his own imprimatur: The New Pamphleteer. Their website is at www.pamphletguys.com, check it out. I just bought the first set, and suggest that you take a look and consider doing it as well.
Hmmm. The pricing seems a tad high, especially considering that it’s unclear from the website just how much material you’re getting. Also unclear is whether you get a PDF to download and print, or whether you’re buying a physical pamphlet that’ll be snail mailed to you. (How much did the Federalist Papers cost in today’s dollars?) $4 is well above the impulse buy threshold that seems to currently float in the $0.99-$1.99 range, but I’ll concede that it’s significantly below current mass-market trade paperbacks.
I’d also like some way to thumb through the material in advance of purchase, whether it’s reading the first page and TOC, or an extended blurb like you’d find on a dust jacket verso.
Interesting idea, though!
I think the dangerous fantasies put out by Totten and the PJM gang are a bigger threat to Israel’s survival than Hezbollah…
I bought a set and look forward to using them to teach my family about these issues. Thanks for your hard work.
A.L.
Thanks for the heads up. I have sent in my proposal. I’ll let you guess the topic.
This needs to be taken further.
I would suggest that most voters still get their news from traditional sources, not the blogosphere. More needs to be done to combat the traditional news sources.
What the MSM are doing is more pernicious than the suppression of the news practiced by authoritarian governments. The US media wraps itself in the mantle of ?freedom of the press? and the right to confront government. They then use the bully pulpit to mislead their readers and by extension any communications outlet which republishes their articles.
We need to take a page from what those in repressed countries have always done. Print up one page newssheets and larger broadsheets. Hand them out and paste them where people will see them. A good newssheet containing rebuttals with original source information will change the way people view the media and the people the media support. Imagine how President Clinton?s lies and evasions on the Fox News show would go down if a newssheet appeared that evening highlighting what Clarke and Berger said to the 9/11 commission about the plan or the efforts to get Bin Laden.
These newssheets can be as simple as using the corner print shop or home computer printer to print up your comments about Ellison and pasting them on the bus stop shelter wall. As simple as handing out copies of your comments to passers by (although this could be quite dangerous considering the violent tendencies of some in liberal fringe).