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| Popcult | |
words from the left As the nation struggles with the massive bailout Sep 29, 2008
A roil of anger is already sweeping across the country, aimed at Washington, at Wall Street, at Big Oil and just about anyone else who can be blamed for this current mess, and no amount of soothing talk will still the racket. Out of that will come a sea of voices calling for fundamental change, and they make for must reading these days. But also on the must-read list is Barbara Ehrenreich, author of this summer's “This is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation,” a collection of essays that plumbs what's now an ancient theme of the left that's likely to be talked about a lot more in these coming days. That's the growing disparity between the poor--and fast getting poorer--and the fat cats of the sort who are walking away with millions from the financial institutions they toppled through risky management practices. It's much the same territory she explored in her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America," in which Ehrenreich went undercover, leaving her comfortable middle-class life to work low-paid jobs. If Phillips brings to the discussion numbers and analysis, Ehrenreich brings a searching analysis of the deeper social change behind this collapse, where she believes compassion has given way to a new ethos of personal hucksterism: the individual as the mini fat cat who can have it all with a little bit of hustle. "Greed--and its crafty sibling, speculation--are the designated culprits for the ongoing financial crisis, but another, much admired, habit of mind should get its share of the blame: the delusional optimism of mainstream, all-American, positive thinking," Ehrenreich writes in her blog. "As promoted by Oprah, scores of megachurch pastors, and an endless flow of self-help bestsellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because thinking things, 'visualizing' them--ardently and with concentration--actually makes them happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits, the reasoning goes, if only you truly believe that you can." If the themes Ehrenreich hammers at are old left, or old new left, dating back to the 70s, her style is very contemporary, with little of the arch moralizing and didacticism of those movements. She can write to anyone, and she does, and she does it by the elegance of her expression. She has that rarest of qualities in a writer: You can read her and disagree with her every thought and still admire how she expresses them, and like her too. The first decade of this new millennium, Ehrenreich believes, has been the cruelest in memory and one of frightening extremes. She sees America as a country where the wealthy binge on cosmetic surgery yet the poor can’t even afford healthcare for their children and a place where CEOs earn some 400 times the lowest paid employee. “How many ‘wake-up calls’ do we need – how many broken levees, drowned cities, depleted food pantries, people dead for lack of ordinary health care?” she asks in "This is Their Land." These are questions she's been raising consistently over the years, often in the mainstream media. Through much of the 90s she was a columnist for Time, and more recently for The New York Times. She's written for Harper's, The Atlantic and Salon, but also Mother Jones and The Progressive, Ms, and In These Times. Ehrenreich is avowedly left, and has been since her first political book, published in 1969, "Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad." She serves as the honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has long been tagged a Marxist. Born in 1941 in Butte, Mont., Ehrenreich was the daughter of a former miner who managed to climb the economic ladder into the middle class. After getting a PhD in cell biology she turned to activism, working for a non-profit organization in New York that sought better health care for the poor. Her work on the charity’s monthly news letter pushed her toward journalism. *** Meanwhile, elsewhere in popcult, the new release “Eagle Eye” was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, bringing in $29.2 million. Another new release, “Nights in Rodanthe,” debuted at No. 2 with $13.6 million in ticket sales.
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