Barbara Ehrenreich, Antichrist

[Clay Fink]

The Antichrist of North Carolina

By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Progressive
August 4, 2003

When I was in Scandinavia last spring promoting "Nickel and Dimed," interviewers kept asking me to tell them about the "debate" my book had provoked in the United States. I had to confess that it had provoked no debate at all, at least none that I had heard of. In fact, when my book was adopted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a reading for all incoming students in 2003, the administration expressed its conviction that it was a "relatively tame selection," at least compared to last year's choice – a collection of readings from the Koran. I was beginning to envy Michael Moore, whose publisher had cleverly boosted sales by attempting to suppress his book "Stupid White Men" in the wake of 9/11.


Then, early in July, I got a phone call from Matt Tepper, president of the student body at UNC-CH, inquiring as to what I thought would be a useful way to direct the incoming students' discussions of "Nickel and Dimed." I suggested that the students ought to apply the book's concerns to their own campus, where workers have been trying to organize against heavy administrative opposition. I sat back to wait for new students to arrive at the end of the summer so the controversy could begin.


Within about a week – while the incoming first-year students were still working on their tans – a controversy arrived all right. It just wasn't the one I was hoping for.


On July 10, a group of conservative UNC-CH students, calling themselves the Committee for a Better Carolina, held a press conference, along with a handful of rightwing state legislators, to denounce "Nickel and Dimed" as a "classic Marxist rant" and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics." Fine, at least I could cling to the adjectives "classic" and "intellectual." But when I read the full page ad the Committee for a Better Carolina had taken out in the Raleigh News and Observer, I saw that this controversy was less about the book than it was about me.


The ad charged me with being a Marxist, a socialist, an atheist, and a dedicated enemy of the American family – this last confirmed by a citation from the Heritage Foundation on my longstanding conviction that families headed by single mothers are as deserving of support as those headed by married couples. I was greeted on North Carolina radio talk shows by hosts asking, "What does it feel like to be the Antichrist in North Carolina?" and similarly challenging inquiries.


I suppose I should be grateful for the chance to parse the finer points of Marxism v. feminism, and socialism v. democratic socialism, on the kind of radio stations that update the traffic and weather every 15 minutes. In one week, I appeared on a half dozen radio shows, twice with Michael McCartney, the founder of the Committee for a Better Carolina, who insisted that the last two books chosen as readings for incoming students showed a pattern of liberal bias on the university's part. We had some interesting exchanges on whether the Koran can be considered a "liberal" document or, even, as McCartney seemed to think, anti-Christian.


I was getting into my new role as North Carolina's premier amateur philosopher and religious studies scholar, and hoping for some in-depth discussion of my own "anti-Christian bigotry," as one of the state legislators put it, no doubt referring to my description, in "Nickel and Dimed" of Jesus as a "wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist." On the "vagrant" part, there can be no debate, and, although "guzzling" may be a bit overstated, Jesus was sufficiently associated with wine ("I am the true vine," etc.) to be confused with the Greek wine god Dionysius in the Hellenistic world – a subject I have yearned to expound on for years.


As for Jesus being a socialist, I take it back. He was actually a little to the left of that, judging from his instruction to the rich man to sell all that he had and give to the poor. If that's what it takes to be a true Christian, believe me, it's a hell of a lot easier to be a socialist: You have to dedicate yourself to working for the poor, just as a Christian should, but at least you get to keep your stuff. The topic of Christian altruism v. socialist pragmatism could, I thought, entertain the rightwing radio talk show audiences for weeks.


But I was being distracted and diverted. The real issue, I've decided, isn't just the campus and its workers, but the state. According to the North Carolina Justice and Economic Development Center, 60 percent of North Carolina families with children do not earn enough to meet basic, bare-bone needs. Nationwide, when last measured in 2000, 29 percent of families were in the same straits, giving North Carolina twice the level of economic misery as the country as a whole.


My former husband, who was a union organizer in the state for several years, said he'd never seen such poverty anywhere. At a union organizing meeting held in a motel meeting room, for example, he noticed the workers covertly pocketing packets of Saltines left from a previous event. It's not a pretty picture: Well-fed suits engaging in chest-thumping attacks on an exposé about poverty while at least some of their constituents are basing their meal plans around soda crackers. I don't know much about pornography – and am eager to hear from any reader who has detected it in "Nickel and Dimed" – but I do know obscenity when I see it.


Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" and "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."

[walto]

Ehrenreich is tres cool.

[blawless]

Thanks, Clay. I found this, an editorial from the Raleigh News and Observer, that suggests--in the writer's supposedly balanced perspective on the UNC controversy, for one thing--how completely Ehrenreich has been hijacked by the right.

Clueless and calculating
By J. PEDER ZANE, Staff Writer
According to officials at UNC-Chapel Hill, they're just a bunch of clueless naifs, mystified by the controversy surrounding the book they've asked incoming freshmen to read, Barbara Ehrenreich's best seller , "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America."
But to their well financed right-wing critics, they're calculating bomb throwers, bent on indoctrinating unformed minds with their leftist politics.
Clueless or calculating? Two views, worlds apart.
Both may be right -- better make that correct (but not politically). The reason helps explain why the brouhaha at Chapel Hill is much larger than one book and one campus. The flap is a flash point in the increasingly noxious and partisan political battle that has been crackling since the Supreme Court made George Bush president in December 2000.
To begin, "Nickel and Dimed" is not simply an account of the struggles of low-wage workers. It is a polemic against American capitalism. Built around three one-month stints Ehrenreich spent working as a maid, waitress and Wal-Mart clerk, "Nickel and Dimed" compellingly illuminates the challenges faced by her fellow employees. It does not even attempt to give an employer's point of view or provide a larger context for understanding the forces driving our economy.
Instead, Ehrenreich uses her reporting, and her sharp wit, as literary devices to liven up a call for a higher minimum wage and more powerful labor unions. "Nickel and Dimed" does not force readers to think, but tells them what to think.
Given the right-wing's anger over last year's summer reading assignment, "Approaching the Qur'an" by Michael Sells, UNC's surprise at the controversy over Ehrenreich's avowedly leftist work seems unfathomable. According to UNC-CH Provost Robert Shelton, "Nobody I talked to thought this would be a controversial book."
I don't doubt that. And therein lies the problem. His comment suggests a staggering lack of intellectual diversity on campus. What critics cast as a "Marxist rant," campus officials see as an honest and important work that tells the truth about an under-addressed social problem. Who's right is a matter of opinion. What seems more certain is that UNC officials -- like their critics at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh -- are so like-minded that they never came across a single voice expressing a common complaint about the book.
However, the "Nickel and Dimed" debate is far more than a tired rerun of the ongoing drama "Ivory Tower Liberals and the Right-Wing Fanatics Who Despise Them." The two radically divergent views of the book reflect the increasing compartmentalization of American intellectual life. As our politics become more partisan and our news sources more varied and ideological, it is becoming easier to pass one's life without ever hearing many opinions that challenge one's perspective. Broadly speaking, liberals get their version of reality from CNN, NPR, the Nation magazine and progressive books and Web sites, while the right feeds on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, Ann Coulter and conservative blogs.
Where you tune in increasingly defines who you are. And never the twain shall meet.
Is "Nickel and Dimed" fair and balanced? You decide.
While I accept UNC's claims of cluelessness, I also suspect that, subconsciously at least, their actions were quite calculated. Their choice of Ehrenreich's book has an in-your-face quality that reflects a cancerous dynamic that has metastasized since the presidential election (selection?) of 2000: a process I call "the rightification of the left."
Liberals are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore.
After years of mostly silent suffering at the mouths of conservative firebrands, the left has decided that turnabout is fair play. While Al Gore has called for a liberal talk-radio alternative as strident as the one the right has ridden so hard for so long, left-leaning writers have been sharpening their knives. The nation's most prestigious newspaper, The New York Times, boasts three liberal columnists -- Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman -- who describe the Bush administration in Michael Savage-esque terms. Ehrenreich and her fellow provocateurs such as Noam Chomsky ("9-11") and Michael Moore ("Stupid White Men") have turned their fury into best sellers.
And this fall, publishers will release dozens of books inveighing against Bush and the right including "The I Hate Republicans Reader" edited by Clint Willis, "They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back" by Jim Hightower and "Lies, And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them ... A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" by Al Franken.
We may lament the left's efforts to ape the worst habits of the right, but their logic is undeniable -- what's good for the goose is good for the gander. In this context, UNC's selection of "Nickel and Dimed" can be seen as a salvo in the culture wars. Given the current political environment, defined by warring camps who live in their own worlds, it is reasonable to conclude that the school's administrators were both clueless and calculating. A part of them couldn't imagine that anyone would find "Nickel and Dimed" inflammatory; part of them, it seems, wanted to send this message: If you thought last year's book was bad, try this one on for size.
Book review editor J. Peder Zane can be reached at 829-4773 or pzane@newsobserver.com.