Steve
Bitch wrote: uh. i'd missed this in the discussion earlier. after rereading BE, hadn't read it since 2003, I'm a little more than disgusted by this guy's characterization. I take it, from the slam against "left biased opinion" he's some sort of anti-leftist, right? I mean, read the whole thing, he's got a hard on for anyone who dares write about race in this country.
And newsflash to the fuckstick: at the end of his review, he quotes E writing about catching the first airing of Survivor. If he'd bothered to be honest, he might have pointed out that she ruefully mocks herself for mocking Survivor:
"Tonight I find the new sensation, Survivor, on CBS, where "real people" are struggling to light a fire on their desert island. Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? Then I remember where I am and why I am here."
What a flaming hot asshole Herrle is.
anyway, it's a ridiculous characterization. She wrote the book, coming off the heels of welfare reform, where people took quite seriously the notion that people could live on low wages -- coz poor people had some special ways of actually doing such: ways of saving money heroic stamina, etc. etc. but mostly, people were pretty convinced that anyone could make it on those wages and it would be a lot better for them to get off their lazy asses and get out of the house than to sit around in no job despair.
she did not set out to discover the crummy jobs offer crummy pay and aren't easy. She set off to very explicitly see if she could make the next month's rent on low wage work. The number crunchers said it was quite possible. She wasn't there to pretend to be working class. She wasn't there to find out what "the culture" was like. She makes all this quite clear, and repeatedly so. Moreover, she makes very clear that she wasn't living life like any of these folks at all. She states right up front that she rules for herself and insisted that she was going to use cash to supplement if need be, rather than live in a shelter. (I wouldn't blame her. Ever been in one? It's fucking terrifying.)
Again, she wasn't there to discover anything other than how much money it actually took to live and if, as she sometimes says, the poor had figured out ingenious ways to survive: you know, how they're always coming up with crafty ways to game the system, make extra cash under the table, etc. As Prof. Asshole said, her point was to say, "Oh, hey, if someone like me with all the advantages of a high protein diet, plenty of exercise and medical care to keep me healthy and a life time of not working body debilitating jobs finds it difficult, what about these women who live on half a bag of Doritos because they can't afford monetarily or timewise to figure out something a bit more nutritious for lunch." And so she pretty dutifully reports how she feels about everything, noting how, when working the floor at Walmart, she turns into someone who cares more about creating a perfect atmosphere of folded clothes and spotless floors. It's a world where customers become the enemy. She talks about how you become sucked into the service ethic, taking care of your patrons, patients, etc. when you deal with them directly. How it brings out this nurturing relationships.
What she's doing is a gorgeous piece of ethnography on the on the ground social relations of production -- how it shapes your life for 8 to 9 hours a day and, thus, can shape your very sense of self, being in the world, attitude toward yourself and others, and so forth.
What a load of horse shit this HerrleAss doled out. This is why I get so incensed when I learn that people base their opinions of books on snippets passed around the Internet or, worse, based on the crud that festers from the digits of fucksticks like Herrle.
-- Stephen Philion http://stephenphilion.efoliomn2.com/