Review: Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

John Semley reviews Naomi Klein’s latest leftie lament No is Not Enough.  Semley begins his review by characterizing Michael Bloomberg’s offer to fund U.S.’s financial commitment to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as mega-billionaire salvation.  He further metaphor’s Bloomberg, likening him to a firefighter saving a cat in a tall tree.  Then further depicts Bloomberg vs Trump as behemoths in a Japanese monster movie battling each other with briefcases.  Somewhere down below his third paragraph is Naomi Klein, pinned in by metaphors, lost in the sea of panicked little people scurrying for safety.

Finally, we find Naomi, disparaging elite liberals as saviors and advocating grassroots push back for meaningful change.  Populist uprising must be met and pushed back with grassroots movements on the green field of political advocacy.  The reviewer decides the Ms. Klein’s slim offering is a place for anyone to start to make sense of Trump and Trumpism.  Naomi describes a culture that grants indecent impunity to the ultrarich because it is consumed with winning and dominance.  As we have seen with articles of anti-Trump pundits and late-night hosts, the author prescribes making our president look like a puppet (Bannon, Putin).  This tactic and other such bating has proved, in some instances, deliriously successful.

Naomi Klein, with her holy trinity of of contemporary progressive-leftie doctrine (2000’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine and 2014’s This Changes Everything), preaches that major crises precipitate political change, both good and bad.  People unite to build a better world or disband and feel sorry for themselves in a Trump world.  A point that may be missed in John Semley review of Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough lies in the final quote from Belgian cartoonist Jean-Claude Servais:

The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

Note the word hour…optimism has a shelf-life, seize it before it spoils.