Politics of Anger

David Sirota describes an uprising.

Comments (0) By Mark Dragotta Thursday, Jul 10 2008

"An uprising is the middle state between the disengaged stasis that we’re used to and those very powerful, well-organized social movements,” says author/columnist David Sirota. “And this current uprising is not going to dissipate. People are just too angry.” Tonight starting at 7:30 p.m. at the Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl Street, Sirota will discuss and sign his new book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. Extensively traveling the country, Sirota discovered that from Minutemen guarding the Mexican-American border to communist union organizers in Seattle, from anti-war marchers to Exxon-Mobile stockholders, unrest was ripe in the minds of rank-and-file folks of all political persuasions.

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“I think we’ve had historical uprisings that have gone in progressive and conservative directions,” says Sirota. “The best example is 1976. You had an outsider running for president right after a major corruption scandal. You had an impending energy crisis, a pending recession. This sounds exactly like what’s going on today. We all feel like we’re at a progressive moment right now. And although Jimmy Carter won, the uprising was not represented in the administration. It just got more intense and very quickly turned into a conservative movement through the presidency of Ronald Reagan. My book basically concluded that this is a very high-stakes moment where the country could go in one direction or the other in a pretty intense way.”

For more information, call 303-447-2074 or go to www.boulderbookstore.com. Sirota heads to the Colfax Avenue Tattered Cover tomorrow; get details at www.tatteredcover.com.
Tue., July 15, 2008