Yay! I Finished Another Book - Ameritopia by Mark Levin

I have to be careful what I say today.  I'm guessing I'll turn off and repel about half of you.

I don't care. 

Right now, for a myriad of reasons both understandable and stupid, conservative talk radio is under attack.  We are moving to a society here in this country where speech will be about as free as the premium pay channels on HBO.  At the moment, if you have a viewpoint that opposes those currently in power in this country, well, you need to either keep it quiet or to yourself altogether.  And, if you're on the radio, good luck to you.

The good news is that they're not attacking books.  Yet.  We still have the freedom to plunk down our hard-earned money and take an adventure into the mind of whatever author you're purchasing.  To be entertained.  To be revitalized.  To be motivated.

And, in the case of Mark Levin's "Ameritopia," to be educated. 

Truth be told, Mark Levin is the only national radio talk show host that I will make a point not to miss.  Appointment radio.  Aside from his conservative view, lots of folks don't like him because of his voice.  A face made for radio?  Mark's fine whine is a voice not made for radio.  But, once you get past that really immaterial quality, there is learning to be done by this man who really knows constitutional law, American history, and, most importantly, common sense.  Levin worked in the Reagan White House for eight years and is proud to share that experience for three hours every day.  Say what you want about the politics, I have learned more from Mark Levin than in any college textbook on the subjects at hand.

"Ameritopia" is Mark's latest work and his last ditch effort to educate Americans on what is happening in our political marketplace right now.  He reads like a college textbook, but is hardly as dry as anything I was forced to read in Political Science 101.  The book is methodical, well researched, and amazingly not dry.  I was shocked that the subject matter could be not only interesting, but a relatively fast read.  I knocked it off in two days and you know what a slow reader I can be.

By laying out past "utopian" societies down through the ages, Levin shows us the most evil and detested tenets of governments gone by.  He lets you see how a "utopian" model is not only unachievable, but something to be clearly avoided.   That's the first half of the story.  Mark then uses all these examples to tie in what is transpiring in Washington DC today.  It all then sounds eerily familiar...and downright scary.  The extended title of the book is "The Unmaking Of America."  True as can be.

And, boy, oh, boy, we are in trouble.

If you told me that I would be loving a book that includes in great detail Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Hobbes' Leviathan, and Karl Marx' nonsense, I would ask you what you're smoking and how much did you pay for it.  But, still, it was all here in Levin's book.  A must read if you want to understand the basic principles that this country was originally built on.  Days gone by with, sadly, freedoms that are going by every single day.  These are not simply talking points of the Republican Party.  This book is loaded with fact upon fact and it's got the extensive footnoting to prove it.

The more I learned, the more I boiled.  Levin finishes his book with a simple question.  Do we want utopia or do we choose freedom?  If the former, a work like "Ameritopia" doesn't get written in five or ten years.  Or, at the very least, it winds up at the bottom of a bonfire in the town square.

Mark Levin gave a lecture at the Reagan Library two weeks ago.  Despite the fact that it sold out in twenty minutes, I was one of the lucky people to get tickets.  There were plenty of good folks there.  No racists.  No lunatic wackos.  No clowns living in the past.  They were simply Americans who care.  And, like what they all probably read in Mark Levin's "Ameritopia," they simply want to enjoy life in the greatest country of the universe. 

Trust me.  From what I saw, they're not the minority.

Dinner last night:  Pasta shells, sausage, and tomatoes.