Gore and "The Assault on Reason"

Traub seems to be trying not to be too snarky, though he can't help referring to Gore's physical size and appetite (what is up with that?), and he manages to sneak in a few interesting tidbits amidst the anti-intellectual snipes, such as...

Al Gore has given a great deal of thought to why some people still don’t recognize the cliff we’re about to drive over. “The Assault on Reason” is Gore’s own attempt to explain, as he put it to me, “why our public discourse is so vulnerable to the kind of rope-a-dope strategies that Exxon Mobil and their brethren have been employing for decades now, and why logic and reason and the best evidence available and the scientific discoveries do not have more force in changing the way we all think about the reality we are now facing.” The very fact that Gore feels that this requires an explanation shows what a high-minded rationalist he is. He says he believes that ideas were given a fair hearing on their merits until television came along and induced a kind of national trance. This is a hoary line of argument, but Gore adds a novel neuropsychological twist, explaining that the brain’s fear center, the amygdala —“which as I’m sure you know comes from the Latin for ‘almond’ ” — receives only a trickle of electrical impulses from the neocortex, the seat of reasoning, while sending back a torrent of data in return. This explains why “we respond to spiders and snakes and claws and fire, but we are less likely to feel urgency and alarm if the threat to our species is perceptible only by connecting a lot of dots to make up a complex pattern that has to be interpreted by the reasoning center of the brain” — well, it’s quite a challenge for the explainer.

Still, like all political reporters, Traub seems chastened that an idiot was named president instead of Al Gore, yet refuses to admit political reporters' role in the take down of Al Gore. He hints that Al Gore probably doesn't want to put himself through it again, but doesn't explain why.