Doug Henwood wrote:
> By the way, this is one of the themes of Nina Eliasoph's fine book,
> Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life.
> Since the "ordinary" people she studied believe that nothing can be
> done (and that since no one can know all the facts, things are best
> left to "experts"), anyone who makes political claims is disparaged
> as "soapboxing."
My first inkling of this almost 30 years ago was the chapter in *Muscles and Blood* that described a town (I think in Montana) that depended on its livelihood on a silver mine, which produced so much lead dust that townspeople who had never been near the mine would have blue lines int their teeth. They tended to think that things weren't too bad. That is, they seriously denied what they seriously knew. Then and now I could only understand this as a reasonable response to an intolerable situation that couldn't be changed. (One alternative is merely to sneer at them as apathetic or stupid, which is usually just another form of blaming the victim.)
I also noticed that it became more difficult after Watergate to interest people in left politics -- added to the forces of anti-communism was the force of dismissing communists as just more politics -- "soapboxing."
I like that title, "how americans produce apathy."
Carrol