Sirota’s Tour of America: There Are All Kinds of Uprisings

By Robert Stuckman, 5-06-08

The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Searing Wall Street and Washington
Crown Publishers
May 27, 2008
$25.95

Reading The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Searing Wall Street and Washington, by David Sirota, is a bit like a cross-country road trip with an insistent guy who talks the whole time. 

The thing is, Sirota’s saying stuff you should probably hear, and he goes to places you need to go, but he’s tough to follow at first. He starts in Helena, Mont., with a barrage of information about the partisan political machinations of the state’s most recent biannual legislature, and he tosses other stuff in at a dizzying pace and with a good dose of populist outrage: from vermiculite poisoning in Libby to Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting of his hunting companion to century-old labor wars to an aside about how some Helena locals referred to him (Sirota) as a “city mouse.”

His story gains traction when it becomes clear that he’s not finding a uniform populist movement in America where there isn’t any. Sirota reports on the outrage felt by working people, whether it is channeled toward big business or misdirected at Mexican immigrants.

The material on the Montana legislature describes how progressive Democrats in the state have, in large part, taken back populist rhetoric from the right-wing, which has grown increasingly strident and fragmented. Montana has some truly weird politics. I don’t want to get too far into it here, but suffice to say the state has a perennial blue man (discolored because he took colloidal silver) running for governor.

The Montana part also describes how Plum Creek Timber Co., which operates its most profitable business basically tax-free in Montana as a real estate investment trust, successfully lobbied to kill a bill that would have taxed some of its earnings on land sales. (Plum Creek is the largest private landowner in the United States.) It’s a great description of how big business has its way with taxpayers.

Other parts of the book recount a convention in Las Vegas of online liberals and explore the efforts of trade unionists as they try to organize office workers.

Sirota, a political organizer and syndicated columnist, shows his reporting mettle—and the breadth of the growing ire in America—when he travels to Southern California to spend time with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a heavily armed group of xenophobic extremists who patrol the US-Mexico border and gripe about how California has already been overrun. Sirota doesn’t lampoon them. He quotes them honestly, with understanding. He doesn’t hold back his analysis either. In the desert at Camp Vigilance, he encountered “a kaleidoscopic mix of earnest intentions, confused paranoia and ugly instincts.”

And that’s really the strength of Sirota’s new book. (His first book, which came out in 2006, was Hostile Takeover.) He doesn’t fabricate cohesion from the unrest. He does what good reporters should do: he asks people questions and records their answers. And he gives you his own take, too. It’s gutsy stuff.

Sirota’s road across this landscape isn’t straight. It’ll take you to some bizarre outposts. America is at a crossroads, Sirota says, and it’s unclear who will swing this crazy vehicle forward, and in what direction.