Burt Prelutsky's popularity is based on the fact that he writes for “everyman;” that shuffling, stoop-shouldered, balding, overweight drone inextricably bound to the postmodern world via its pernicious deviations. A review of his recent book.

Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
By Bert Prelutsky
Published by WND Books (October 1, 2006)
Ppbk, 336 pgs.
ISBN: 1581825714

MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL, THE OBSERATIONS OF A REFORMED HOLLYWOOD SCREEN WRITER!

Bert Prelutsky is a writer’s writer. Given his biography I suspect he wasn’t born a writer but learned and earned his craft through many an agonizing hour writing script and dialogue for the last of the television “dramas.”

What “dramas,” you ask? Well, how about Dragnet, McMillan and Wife, M*A*S*H, Dr. Quinn, and Diagnosis Murder! Now these — particularly Dragnet and M*A*S*H, both personal favorites — were shows that had a beginning, middle, and an end; and in between something called a “plot” which no longer exists on television.  So, in order to write for television back in those days, you had to be able to tell a story, another lost art.

Burt, like most of us except my wife, was a liberal back in the day. Then, during the Reagan Administration, he had an epiphany! The rest, as the ephemeral “they” are wont to say, is history. Burt became a missionary of sorts, a man whose destiny is to reveal the distortions, and perfidy of the Neo-Marxist Left, a man whose ire and choler is predicated on the fact that for forty-five years he was one of “them,” a blubbering liberal!

Just exactly how Burt made up for these “lost decades” is happily revealed in his new book, Conservative are from Mars, Liberals are from San Francisco, a collection of editorial perorations that showcase the talents of one of America’s leading polemicists!

Burt’s popularity is based on the fact that he writes for “everyman;” that shuffling, stoop-shouldered, balding, overweight drone inextricably bound to the postmodern world via its pernicious deviations. And, while “everyman” is controlled, manipulated, regulated, and restricted, Burt isn’t. Burt fights back: he insults the IRS (we don’t need no stinking taxes!), mocks the seemingly endless gaggle of moribund Hollywood personalities, raises hell over illegal immigrants doing the butterfly across the Rio Grande, beats up the ever present cadre of fun loving Jewish communists, criticizes contemporary Black culture or lack thereof, and pees in Andy Rooney’s ash tray, all-the-while saving his most sarcastic and caustic prose for the elite establishment Democrats.

My own particular fondness for the man originates with a piece he wrote sometime back (and appears in the book), "Are Liberals Really Lemmings?" Burt answers his own query with the well-rendered diatribe indicating that if liberals aren’t Lemmings they are surely mindless automations of some sort. But, the part that I truly did appreciate was his penultimate paragraph, to wit:

It’s been 140 years since the War Between the States ended. There is, I submit, a similar war being waged today. One could only wish that the opposition forces were being led by someone one-tenth as decent and honorable as Robert E. Lee.

Within those three short sentences Burt (1) properly identifies the “late unpleasantness” as “the War Between the States,” not as the “Civil War,” which it was not, and (2) acknowledges the iconic commander of the Army of Virginia as “decent and honorable,” as accurate a description ever written of Robert E. Lee. I must confess I got a little choked up on that one. Indeed, one observes not only the truth in print but senses a paleo-con aborning!

Burt is a political/cultural humorist of the first magnitude, a bizarre combination of Mort Sahl, H. L. Mencken, Albert Nock, and Mel Brooks; consequently his book is required reading for those of us regularly abused by big brother’s nomenclatura (Papers, please!) and the effete elite. He is so efficacious a scribbler I fear some suit in New York or the Left coast will sign him to syndication and we will no longer be privy to Burt’s predispositions posted regularly on the beloved Intellectual Conservative website. Yet, I could only wish him well, with just a touch of envy.

So go out and buy Burt’s book and enjoy yourself! After all, anyone who can get Peter Blatty, the author of the Exorcist, the most terrifying book ever written, to blurb his work, is ok by me!

Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco is available on Amazon.com.