Sweating the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich ... a name to conjure with. Her national best-seller on the lives of the working poor, "Nickle & Dimed," was featured locally for the freshman reading program at ASU in 2003. Ehrenreich's research for "Nickle & Dimed" involved a series of minimum-wage jobs (including one at Wal-Mart). She tried to live on her poor earnings and produced what one reviewer called a "heart-wrenching, infuriating, funny, smart and empowering" report. Our own Madame Virginia Foxx took one look, sniffed like she was smelling feces, and pronounced the book "propaganda," since it did not cheer for the supposed economic recovery of the Bush administration. Despite Madame Foxx's disdain, "Nickle & Dimed" has sold more than a million hardcover and paperback copies combined, according to its publisher; the paperback edition has spent 92 weeks on the New York Times's bestseller list.

Now Ehrenreich has produced another book in like fashion, living the life she's trying to report on, only this time she went undercover as an unemployed white-collar professional. The result, "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream," is out now. "Bait and Switch," combined with "Nickle & Dimed," presents a vivid portrait of the "American Dream" as a soul-destroying fraud meant to keep the working class -- whether they slop food in a diner or slop PR for a major corporation -- anesthetized and uncritical of the power elite who control their lives.

A lengthy article in today's WashPost on Ehrenreich's new book is worth a look.

What caught my eye is this passage: "What are her hopes for 'Bait and Switch'? She wants her middle-class readers to stop thinking of poor people as 'the other,' some kind of unique species, fundamentally different from themselves. 'I want the 35-year-old middle manager at a bank to be thinking: I have something in common with a homeless person. It could happen. I'm not so far away from that.' "

We're none of us so very far away from being in the same soup as those poor souls on the Gulf coast ... though you can't tell it from the continuing voice of the pharisees that we hear in the land: "Those people in New Orleans brought it on themselves!"