Agenda 21 Book Review

This is a review from Goodreads website by Sarah Cyphers regarding Glenn Beck's Agenda 21. I thought she made a number of excellent points in her assessment of this book. Enjoy.

Here's the scoop: Cover up Beck's name and read the book. He's not actually the author, anyway. The woman whose name appears as a ghostwriter conceived of and wrote the book herself.

If you don’t happen to be an urban planner, here’s a crash course on the novel’s eponymous UN Agenda 21. It’s a forty-chapter behemoth written in 1993. 

It lays out non-binding guidelines for promoting economic growth, environmental protection, and social equality. Basically, it is a recipe for living within our means today, so that we do not pass along to our children a degraded economy, environment, and society. It addresses topics as various as toxic waste, biotechnology, conservation, and green transportation, all with the goal of helping poor countries develop economies—in large part, by encouraging wealthy countries to dial back in sensible ways on their consumption of resources. Today, city and regional planners support the concepts that underpin Agenda 21, because they translate the big picture to local efforts to save people time and money as their communities adapt to change over time.

Glenn Beck and fellow pundits hate Agenda 21, however, because they interpret a few lines from Chapter 4 out of context. Their scare tactic is to say it’s the narrow end of a wedge that will insert global UN authority over American towns and cities, allow the government to confiscate private land, reallocate resources by force, and evict people from their single-family homes. Never mind that the law of the land is the United States Constitution and that our relationship with the UN can hardly be described as lockstep. 

Moreover, the United States has no land use laws at the federal level, whatsoever. All land use decision-making authority in the United States lies with the states, who delegate authority to local governments. Relatively speaking, the United States has some of the strictest protections for private property in the world.

Agenda 21 is simply a non-binding, unenforceable menu of guidelines that exists to help any town or city that signs on to it. But when removed from all sensible context and cast forward into a dystopian future, Agenda 21 becomes the novel Agenda 21, which tells the story of a post-American settlement where people are forced to ride bikes and walk on treadmills to generate electricity, told whom to marry, raised in communal kibbutz-like nurseries, and forced to swear allegiance to a scary green one-world socialist entity.

I argue that if the book had been published under Ms. Parke’s name alone, it would remain an entertaining dystopian novel. The writing is capable, the story compelling, and most of its values are to be respected—family, localness, and a good education in history (Beck, and his publishing house, ought to take note of that, by the way). It would be marketed and sold to readers of speculative fiction, which are typically a brainy crowd. Maybe some among them would hold it up as a negative vision of a radical environmental agenda run amok, albeit in a world without Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart—in fact, one without any wealthy corporations at all, who historically pitch their vast financial resources against environmental regulations.

Publishing Agenda 21 under Glenn Beck’s name transforms it, at least temporarily. Glenn Beck is more than just the nice guy whose publishing house is bringing Ms. Parke’s work to a national audience. He’s also a professional ideologue whose establishment confers the full force of its intellectually and morally irresponsible franchise on a novel that distorts the truth about Agenda 21, which is doing good work in the world. Glenn Beck is not writing as an artist, bound by the conventions of his art, plying his craft on the willing human imagination. Hell, he’s not writing at all. He is a brand, with a budget, and with an agenda of his own. Ultimately, by assigning his brand to the novel Agenda 21, Beck turns a form of entertainment into a political lie, a tool for politicizing people.

As a genre, speculative fiction keeps one eye on politics, but its goal is not to preach. It’s to make up an entertaining version of reality—an augmentation of social truth, which is not the truth itself. A novel’s vision can scare us, inspire us, affirm our emotions, and articulate our fears. It shouldn’t, however, serve as a primary political agenda any more than Paul Ryan should be waving Atlas Shrugged around on the House floor. 

In the same way, Agenda 21 is being delivered as propaganda, and by buying the right to call himself its author, Glenn Beck is diminishing a work of fiction to nothing more than a cheap appeal directed at an uncritical audience.