barbaraehrenreich-thislandisthereland.jpgDivided Houses
Barbara Ehrenrich’s This Land is Their Land

Barbara Ehrenreich writes like an old time war reporter. The kind of person who would go to what were then called the fighting men and women, and ask them what they saw, and tell the stories that unfolded before her eyes. Her message from George W. Bush’s America would fit in with a military acronym from that time: FUBAR. It is about the small problems that add up to a mountain of unhappiness, and it consists entirely of small pieces, many op-eds or recovered blog posts, organized into larger headings.

The war that she is covering, however, in her book, subtitled "Reports from a Divided Nation," is that cultural and social war within the nation that plays itself out in the myriad forms of social violence that we inflict on each other, and on ourselves, to stay locked on the march of the consumer society. She mentions its Orwellisms – such as Wal-Mart spying on its worker’s private lives – and documents its Huxleyian obsession with being positive – such as in her piece on "Invasion of the Cheerleaders," where cheerleading is considered a key qualification for selling prescription pharmaceuticals.

She casts sidelong glances at some of her intellectual allies such as Jared Bernstein of the EPI, author of a book called Crunched: Why do I feel so squeezed?, but the core of the book is the same material she covered in an expository way in Nickel and Dimed. It is the other side of the big picture arguments you hear from the flatheads, and distant from the sweeping generalizations that populate the columns of David Brooks. Instead, Barbara Ehrenreich’s view is not from 30,000 feet and 30 trillion dollars, but from the ground where soldiers need food stamps, and most of the fastest growing job categories are menial service jobs that pay near poverty wages.

Often when a large social or economic direction is set, it is the women who are recruited, enticed, or coerced, into being the hands, eyes, and ears of that direction. From the recruiting of intelligent women to sort through the stream of Alfred Sloan consumerism, to the rush into the work force in the era of inflation – to the present push out which, far too late has gotten notice in the circles of the wise, when it masks a much darker reality of what has been called "Women’s Work." In the present, it includes the unglamorous tasks of rationing health care, and bullying people to conform in what she calls the Big Box Brother workplace.

This Land is Our Their Land chronicles these parallel forms of social violence: the rise of petty meanness as a principle of social organization, and the ways which ordinary people, particularly women, are on the front lines of inflicting and bearing a culture that has those who are ready to declare wars over marriage and music lyrics and Santa Claus. It is a world which has forgotten human dignity, a point she makes by referring to Robert W. Fuller’s Somebodies and Nobodies, and by telling stories of how people, as customers, consumers, employees, or even neighbors of the corporate system are treated without a shred of that most basic of liberal values.

There is in this book a necessary bluntness, most pointedly in her section "Owning Up to Abortion," where despite her perspective from the trenches of the social wars, she does not treat the world of working and ordinary people as one inhabited by noble savages, or utopian beings. Instead, she is often at pains to point out that they do not do it to us, but instead, it is often we do it to ourselves. That the war on Humanism that the conservative movement has preached, ends up, of course, being both a war on humans, and a war on our own humanity.

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