Pity poor Farmer John Klar, twice-failed political candidate, leader of the doomed Agripublican movement, and essayist for right-wing sites like American Thinker and, well, Vermont Daily Chronicle, and author of a new book that just hasn’t gotten the attention that Klar thinks it deserves.
Small Farm Republic was published at the end of June by the once-respectable Chelsea Green Publishing, lately best known for publishing books by anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers. About six weeks later, Klar posted a piece on Vermont Daily Chronicle griping about the lack of mainstream press coverage for his terrible book.
(No, I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. I feel safe in labeling it as terrible because every Klar essay I’ve ever read has been terrible. I don’t need to go fishing in a brackish, stinking, faintly glowing pond, and I sure as hell don’t need to eat any fish that lived in that mess.)
Klar’s Komplaint is that “progressive” outlets such as Seven Days and VTDigger haven’t taken the time to “critique” his book. Well, a couple of points need to be made. First, our media’s attention has been dominated by the July 10 flood and its ongoing aftermath. It’s too bad for Klar, but even he might have to acknowledge that the flood is just a bit more important. In fact, it’s kind of tasteless for him to be griping about his book when thousands of Vermonters are struggling to recover. Of course, perspective has never been Klar’s strong suit.
But even in the absence of a major disaster, it’s doubtful that Klar would have gotten the attention he craves. Digger doesn’t do book reviews. And while Seven Days has an Arts section that publishes reviews, its primary focus is on creative writing, not sociopolitical polemics. These outlets to occasionally take on a nonfiction tome, but only when the author is a prominent figure. Think memoirs by Pat Leahy and Jim Douglas, not a guy who couldn’t come close to beating state Sen. Mark Macdonald when the incumbent barely campaigned at all because he was recovering from a stroke. (Klar also out-fundraised MacDonald by a margin of three and a half to one in that campaign.)
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