>On Nov 15, 2007, at 11:30 PM, dredmond at efn.org wrote:
>
> > Dennis Perrin has a point, though. Extended unemployment/
> > underemployment
> > really and truly does awful things to the body and brain, even for
> > those
> > of us who have advanced degrees.
>
>Well yes they do. Should Ehrenreich subjected herself to that just
>for authenticity's sake?
>
>It amazes me. A smart, stylish, and funny writer with good politics
>scores a popular success with a book that explains to millions how
>the working poor live and she's raked over the coals for it. What's
>wrong with you people?
>
>Doug
she did, so to speak. the point of her follow up book, one that tried to get at the experience of long-term joblessnes and underemployment among degreed, experience professionals.
she doesn't meet the purity test. she lied to those folks, too. ahh well. from speaking with her as she was starting to write the book about her experiences as a late middle aged woman trying to get a job in corporate america, she talked about how she hired the people she met, who'd been out of work for a long time, simply because she had some idea what it must be like from being around them, interviewing them, etc.
normally, when someone wants to know about my research, as E did at the time, I take the typical academic view: oh, no problem. here's my brain, I dump it on the table for you to pick over -- for free! But once she realized that I'd just been laid off, etc. she promptly offered a job, knowing that the kiss of death is to show yourself to have been unemployed for any length of time. She paid me a damn decent salary for doing things like going to the library and making photocopies of articles from books that you had to hunt down. She could have easily done this on her own, but she was so sensitive to the plight of these folks that she did what she did throughout her research in the trenches: gave people jobs doing work she would have otherwise done herself.
btw, john thornton should read Bageant for someone who, while he's not lying, can sometimes make people look like real jackasses. he knows this, and he's aware it can be cruel, but he wants to get the story out and tell it like it is. Im thinking particularly of his discussion of an old high school classmate, who he couldn't resist talking about wanting to boink. She has a ribbon on her car. He wondered why. She believed they were fund raisers for the troops.
He's well aware that this made her look like a stupid ass. And quite frankly, in the right hands (and as much as Bageant irritates, he doesn't do a bad job here), the story has to be told: people are ignorant asses -- not congenitally so, but ignorant because unaware, uncurious, not willing to dig beneath the surface of daily platitudes, easily manipulated, etc.
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