I should have stopped reading Salamander Gangrene’s The Art of Transformation (2006) at page 1.  Ah, but I’m using the author’s alternate reality name.  In consensus, he’s a fat piece of shit named Newt, last name Grinch, I mean Gingrich, I mean Gristle (as in, ‘full of’). Nevernewt Glockenspiel.  Norbewtal Grointoninch.  Fatty Fatty Dick-Breath.

Or, just Evil Fucking Slut.

Newtcompoop Juggynit shouldn’t be allowed to preach outside subways wearing suits fashioned from his own stringy bowel movements, let alone to publish novels (he’s done a whopping 18 that weren’t semi-erotic war scifi).  With The Art of Transformation, he’d have been better off holding our attention with under-the-desk sex acts, trite cold war villains and nuclear program raids; but instead he offers little more than the kinda bunk poo’d out at any “better business” conference.

The book in a nutshell:  Ronald Reagan blah blah blah, Henry Ford blah blah blah, Railroads, Walmart, medicare, guns.   Throw some Katie Couric and Compstat in for good grief, and call the fucking thing a cookbook, then a gourmet cookbook, but be sure to cover your ass that it ain’t no “magic” cookbook.  Cause the magic would mean it, and DingDong Grundelchode, never existed in the first place.

Y’all hear he recanted his position on stem cell research?  Well, at the time of The Art of Transformation Salamander was all for it, but this week he announced (to a congregation of Baptists, no less) that as president he would abolish such practices as “the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies.”

He also doesn’t understand why we keep the embryos.  So let’s maul him to paralysis and see what he understands then, eh?

Cause I still don’t understand why he’d author such a grossly unspecific workshop manual for marketing an unspecific but somehow better future to an entirely moronic audience that doesn’t already know what’s important re: its future.  In the words of Tony Soprano, “marone!”  He speaks to us as if we’re just the next gullible prick at his self-promotional event, and at times, as if we’re the next city-college attending barista he intends to corn hole in a public bathroom.

Actually, Salamander means to transform America and American lives using a model inspired by the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command from 1979-1984, and dumbass fucking charts inspired by the McDonald’s vision statement.  But dude relies far too heavily on historic examples rather than any concrete, novel proposals for an American transformation.  And for a sci-fi geek, the only science presented are the likely exaggerated claims that the human brain will be entirely accounted for by 2026, when nanobotic orange juice will also be cleansing our arteries.

What semblance of reason in The Art of Transformation is made with maybe one or two points (that aren’t sorely obvious) including the imperativeness of transforming education via “intelligent synthetic environments.”  Of course Acceler8or readers know this, but you American Idol watchers might not.

And trust me, these points are easy to overlook/forget entirely amongst all the Congress should act like the Joint Forces Command/military mucky-muck; irrelevant anecdotes about ballerinas (are these underage ballerinas?); meta-page special-ed lessons on what a habit is, the difference between active and passive verbs, and how elevators work; barfing 4-aim alliterations (including a “leadership model” titled: Listen, Learn, Help, and Lead); blatant falsities such as no one’s yet written open source models for innovation or transformation, or that America has the highest life expectancy rate (we’re actually tied with Cuba at #31 out of 194 says the UN circa 2005-2010, #34 says the 2011 CIA estimates; redundant metaphors of humans as antelope hunters and endless idiotic contradictions (reward, don’t punish, but punish too; migrate, don’t leap — but create a sense of urgency!)

Naturally, Salamander puts energy and the environment below government management, taxation and litigation as far as urgency issues, and science (which he admits changes everything) as the last of the four levels of transformation.  So I try to stay awake enough to blunder through 15 key steps to transformation and 31 principles of transformation to learn that Baby Boomers are actually the center of gravity and that saving lives is on par with saving money.  And remember, “brute repetition” is the key to ultimate success, working to the sound of guns the keyhole, and cheerfulness the twisting motion.

Basically, The Art of Transformation is a cynical (and often subliminally angry), vote-hungry, bollocks-reiterative, pseudo-jerk off ending in Reagan’s words, not Spanky’s.  From whom an original conclusion would certainly contain the words “metrics,” “transformation,” “hard,” “Billy Bean.”

Oh, do me a favor and email info@healthtransformation.net to ask why the hell banning embryonic stem cell research is a transformational move for human health.  You better believe I will.