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Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

-Barbara Ehrenreich

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Considering The Absence Of

Barbara Ehrenreich

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Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

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Well I Do Think There Are People Who Are Habitually Negative And Depressed And Take The Opposite Approach Because They Imagine The Worst, And Their Minds Become Dominated By That. They Let Their Own Emotions And Expectations Transform Their Perceptions Of The World.

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African American

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Positive Thinking

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Positive Thinking

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Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

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Positive Thinking

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Native American

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Surely There Must Be Some Way To Find A Husband Or, For That Matter, Merely An Escort, Without Sacrificing One's Privacy, Self-respect, And Interior Decorating Scheme. For Example, Men Could Be Imported From The Developing Countries, Many Parts Of Which Are Suffering From A Man Excess, At Least In Relation To Local Food Supply.

It Was A Real Surprise To Me To Come Across The Evidence That Christianity Might Once Have Been A Danced Religion. Certainly, Some Of The Early Church Leaders Thought This Was Great And Spoke Of What Seems To Have Been Circle Dancing, Perhaps Around An Altar.

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We Who Officially Value Freedom Of Speech Above Life Itself Seem To Have Nothing To Talk About But The Weather.

There Is A Reason Why America Produced The Most Vigorous Feminist Movement In The World: We Were One Of The Only Countries In Which The Middle Class (which Is Wealthy By World Standards) Customarily Employed Its Own Women As Domestic Servants.

We Need A Kind Of Feminism That Aims Not Just To Assimilate Into The Institutions That Men Have Created Over The Centuries, But To Infiltrate And Subvert Them.

When Someone Works For Less Pay Than She Can Live On - When, For Example, She Goes Hungry So That You Can Eat More Cheaply And Conveniently - Then She Has Made A Great Sacrifice For You, She Has Made You A Gift Of Some Part Of Her Abilities, Her Health, And Her Life.

No Culture On Earth Outside Of Mid-century Suburban America Has Ever Deployed One Woman Per Child Without Simultaneously Assigning Her Such Major Productive Activities As Weaving, Farming, Gathering, Temple Maintenance, And Tent-building. The Reason Is That Full-time, One-on-one Child-raising Is Not Good For Women Or Children.

It Is The Marketplace That Calls Most Clearly For Men To Be Softer, More Narcissistic And Receptive, And The New Man Is The Result.

James Bond In His Sean Connery Days ... Was The First Well-known Bachelor On The American Scene Who Was Not A Drifter Or A Degenerate And Did Not Eat Out Of Cans.

No Matter That Patriotism Is Too Often The Refuge Of Scoundrels. Dissent, Rebellion, And All-around Hell-raising Remain The True Duty Of Patriots.

When I Was Born, My Father Was A Copper Miner In Butte, Montana. It Was A Hard-core, Blue-collar Situation.

Lenders, Including Major Credit Companies As Well As Payday Lenders, Have Taken Over The Traditional Role Of The Street-corner Loan Shark, Charging The Poor Insanely High Rates Of Interest.

Experimental Science Is Fascinating, But I Don't Want To Do It. I Want Other People To Do It, And I'll Read About It.

Experimental Science

Ineluctably, The Insults Inflicted In One War Call Forth New Wars Of Retaliation, Which May Be Waged Within Months Of The Original Conflict Or Generations Later.

The 'working Poor,' As They Are Approvingly Termed, Are In Fact The Major Philanthropists Of Our Society.

Exercise Is The Yuppie Version Of Bulimia.

Marx Was Wrong: It Is Not Only The 'means Of Production' That Shape Societies, But The Means Of Destruction. In Our Own Time, The Costs Of War, Or Just War Readiness, Are Daunting. ... The Resulting Cost Squeeze Has Led To A New Type Of Society, Perhaps Best Terms A 'depleted' State, In Which The Military Has Drained Reources From All Other Social Functions.

Thus Will The Fondest Dream Of Phallic Science Be Realized: A Pristine New Planet Populated Entirely By Little Boy Clones Of Great Scientific Entrepreneurs Free To Smash Atoms, Accelerate Particles, Or, If They Are So Moved, Build Pyramids -- Without Any Social Relevance Or Human Responsibility At All.

Poverty Is Not A Character Failing Or A Lack Of Motivation. Poverty Is A Shortage Of Money.

Even When Uttered By Democrats, "middle Class" Often Sounds Like A Mealymouthed Way Of Saying, "us, And Not Them," Where "them" Includes Poor People, Snake Handlers And Those With Pierced Tongues.

Roman Catholicism: A Hundred Million People Bowing Down Before A Flesh-hating, Elderly Celibate.

If There Is No God Or No Evidence Of God And Certainly No Evidence Of A Very Morally Engaged God, Then Whatever Has To Be Done Has To Be Done By Us.

Evidence Of God

The War With Iraq ... Had To Be One Of The Greatest Non Sequiturs In Military History. Attacked By A Gang Composed Largely Of Islamic Militants From Saudi Arabia, The United States Countered By Invading An Unrelated Country, And One Of The Most Secular In The Middle East At That.

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain, And That Human Civilization Will Collapse When The Number Of, Say, Tax Lawyers Exceeds The World's Total Population Of Farmers, Weavers, Fisherpersons, And Pediatric Nurses.

There Is The Fear, Common To All English-only Speakers, That The Chief Purpose Of Foreign Languages Is To Make Fun Of Us. Otherwise, You Know, Why Not Just Come Out And Say It?

But The Economic Meltdown Should Have Undone, Once And For All, The Idea Of Poverty As A Personal Shortcoming Or Dysfunctional State Of Mind. The Lines At Unemployment Offices And Churches Offering Free Food Includes Strivers As Well As Slackers, Habitual Optimists As Well As The Chronically Depressed. When And If The Economy Recovers We Can Never Allow Ourselves To Forget How Widespread Our Vulnerability Is, How Easy It Is To Spiral Down Toward Destitution.

In Fact, There Is Clear Evidence Of Black Intellectual Superiority: In 1984, 92 Percent Of Blacks Voted To Retire Ronald Reagan, Compared To Only 36 Percent Of Whites.

I Grew Up Hearing Over And Over, To The Point Of Tedium, That "hard Work" Was The Secret Of Success: "work Hard And You'll Get Ahead" Or "it's Hard Work That Got Us Where We Are." No One Ever Said That You Could Work Hard - Harder Even Than You Ever Thought Possible - And Still Find Yourself Sinking Ever Deeper Into Poverty And Debt.

Finding Yourself

A Free-enterprise Economy Depends Only On Markets, And According To The Most Advanced Mathematical Macroeconomic Theory, Markets Depend Only On Moods: Specifically, The Mood Of The Men In The Pinstripes, Also Known As The Boys On The Street. When The Boys Are In A Good Mood, The Market Thrives; When They Get Scared Or Sullen, It Is Time For Each One Of Us To Look Into The Retail Apple Business.

Of All The Nasty Outcomes Predicted For Women's Liberation... None Was More Alarming, From A Feminist Point Of View, Than The Suggestion That Women Would Eventually Become Just Like Men.

A Great Deal Of The Wealth At The Top Is Built On The Low-wage Labor Of The Poor. Take Wal-mart, Our Largest Private Employer And Premiere Exploiter Of The Working Class. ... You Think It's A Coincidence That This Union-busting Low-wage Retail Empire Happens To Have Generated A $65 Billion Family Fortune?

The "discovery" Of Poverty At The Beginning Of The 1960s Was Something Like The "discovery" Of America Almost Five Hundred Years Earlier. In The Case Of Each Of These Exotic Terrains, Plenty Of People Were On The Site Before The Discoverers Ever Arrived.

The Republicans Hardly Need A Party And The Cumbersome Cadre Of Low-level Officials That Form One; They Have A Bankroll As Large As The Pentagon's Budget, Dozens Of Fatted Pacs, And The Well-advertised Support Of The Christian Deity.

Anyone Who Has Invented A Better Mousetrap, Or The Contemporary Equivalent, Can Expect To Be Harassed By Strangers Demanding That You Read Their Unpublished Manuscripts Or Undergo The Humiliation Of Public Speaking, Usually On Remote Midwestern Campuses.

Public Speaking

Well, The First Thing That Clued Me In To The Fact That There Was Something Really Scary About Breast Cancer, Way Beyond The Thought Of Dying, Was Coming Across An Ad In The Newspaper For Pink Breast Cancer Teddy Bears. I Am Not That Afraid Of Dying, But I Am Terrified Of Dying With A Pink Teddy Bear Under My Arm.

At Wal-mart, A Co-worker Once Advised Me That, Although I Had A Lot To Learn, It Was Also Important Not To "know Too Much," Or At Least Never To Reveal One's Full Abilities To Management, Because "the More They Think You Can Do, The More They'll Use You And Abuse You." My Mentors In These Matters Were Not Lazy; They Just Understood That There Are Few Or No Rewards For Heroic Performance. The Trick Lies In Figuring Out How To Budget Your Energy So There'll Be Some Left Over For The Next Day.

I Was Raised The Old-fashioned Way, With A Stern Set Of Moral Principles: Never Lie, Cheat, Steal Or Knowingly Spread A Venereal Disease. Never Speed Up To Hit A Pedestrian Or, Or Course, Stop To Kick A Pedestrian Who Has Already Been Hit. From Which It Followed, Of Course, That One Would Never Ever -- On Pain Of Deletion From Dozens Of Christmas Card Lists Across The Country -- Vote Republican.

Historians Differ On When The Consumer Culture Came To Dominate American Culture. Some Say It Was In The Twenties, When Advertising Became A Major Industry And The Middle Class Bought Radios To Hear The Ads And Cars To Get To The Stores. ... But There Is No Question That The Consumer Culture Had Begun To Crowd Out All Other Cultural Possibilities By The Years Following World War Ii.

By The Reagan Era, The 'culture Of Poverty' Had Become A Cornerstone Of Conservative Ideology: Poverty Was Caused Not By Low Wages Or A Lack Of Jobs But By Bad Attitudes And Faulty Lifestyles. The Poor Were Dissolute, Promiscuous, Prone To Addiction And Crime, Unable To 'defer Gratification' Or Possibly Even Set An Alarm Clock. The Last Thing They Could Be Trusted With Was Money.

The Money That Fueled The Explosion Of Gluttony At The Top Had To Come From Somewhere Or, More Specifically, From Someone. Since No Domestic Oil Deposits Had Been Discovered, No New Seams Of Uranium Or Gold, And Since The War In Iraq Enriched Only The Military Contractors And Suppliers, It Had To Come From Other Americans.

What Would It Mean In Practice To Eliminate All The 'negative People' From One's Life [as Demanded By Motivational Speaker J.p. Maroney]? It Might Be A Good Idea To Separate From A Chronically Carping Spouse, But It Is Not So Easy To Abandon The Whiny Toddler, The Colicky Infant, Or The Sullen Teenager.

What We Need Is A Tough New Kind Of Feminism With No Illusions. Women Do Not Change Institutions Simply By Assimilating Into Them. We Need A Feminism That Teaches A Woman To Say No - Not Just To The Date Rapist Or Overly Insistent Boyfriend But, When Necessary, To The Military Or Corporate Hierarchy Within Which She Finds Herself. We Need A Kind Of Feminism That Aims Not Just To Assimilate Into The Institutions That Men Have Created Over The Centuries, But To Infiltrate And Subvert Them.

In A Process That Had Begun In The 1980s And Suddenly Accelerated In The Early 2000s ... [t]he Peaks Of Great Wealth Grew Higher, Rising Up Beyond The Clouds, While The Valleys Of Poverty Sank Lower Into Perpetual Shadow. The Once Broad Plateau Of The Middle Class Eroded Away Into A Narrow Ledge, With The White-knuckled Occupants Holding On For Dear Life.

You Still Don't Like The Idea Of Gay Marriage? Then, As My Friend, The Economist Julianne Malveaux, Says: Don't Marry A Gay Person. Case Closed, Problem Solved.

Then, In The 1980's, Came The Paroxysm Of Downsizing, And The Very Nature Of The Corporation Was Thrown Into Doubt. In What Began Almost As A Fad And Quickly Matured Into An Unshakable Habit, Companies Were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' And Generally Cutting As Many Jobs As Possible, White Collar As Well As Blue . . . The New York Times Captured The New Corporate Order Succinctly In 1987, Reporting That... 'all Such Allegiances Are Viewed As Expendable Under The New Rules. With Survival At Stake, Only Market Leadership, Strong Profits And A High Stock Price Can Be Allowed To Matter'.

Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For The Kind Of Woman Who Plays With A Full Deck Of Credit Cards, Who Won't Cry When She's Knocked To The Ground While Trying To Board The Six O Clock Eastern Shuttle, And Whose Schedule Doesn't Allow For A Sexual Encounter Lasting More Than Twelve Minutes.

That's The Really Neat Thing About Dan Quayle, As You Must Have Realized From The First Moment You Looked Into Those Lovely Blue Eyes: Impeachment Insurance.

However And Wherever War Begins, It Persists, It Spreads, It Propagates Itself Through Time And Across Space With The Terrifying Tenacity Of A Beast Attached To The Neck Of Living Prey. This Is Not An Idly Chosen Figure Of Speech. War Spreads And Perpetuates Itself Through A Dynamic That Often Seems Independent Of Human Will. It Has, As We Like To Say Of Things We Do Not Fully Understand, 'a Life Of Its Own.

Yes, I Think Especially The Pentecostal Churches, You Know, That There's Been Such A Growth In Pentecostalism. And It's A Rejection Of The Much More Dour And Barren Kind Of Calvinist Worship And Also, The Very Formal Catholic Forms Of Worship.

Warriors Make Wars, But It Is Also True That, In What Has So Far Been An Endless Reproductive Cycle, War Makes Warriors.

My Turn Is The Distilled Bathwater Of Mrs. Reagan's Life. It Is For The Most Part Sweetish, With A Tart Edge Of Rebuke, But Disappointingly Free Of Dirt Or Particulate Matter Of Any Kind.

From An Entertainment Point Of View, The Solar System Has Been A Bust. None Of The Planets Turns Out To Have Any Real-estate Potential, And Most Of Them Are Probably Even Useless For Filming Dune Sequels.

While Everything Else In Our Lives Has Gotten Simpler, Speedier, More Microwavable And User-friendly, Child-raising Seems To Have Expanded To Fill The Time No Longer Available For It.

It Used To Be Almost The First Question (just After 'can You Type?') In The Standard Female Job Interview: 'are You Now, Or Have You Ever, Contemplated Marriage, Motherhood, Or The Violent Overthrow Of The U.s. Government?

People Tend To Judge Presidents On How The Economy Performs, And Yet We Don't Expect Them To Have The Power To Do Much About It. Or We Don't Want Them To Exercise That Power, If They Were To Have It.

Once You Do Lose A Job, There Are Not A Lot Of Social Supports For You. You Lose Health Insurance Because We Have This Absurd System In America Where Health Insurance Is Usually Tied To Employment. Your Income Dips. And That's When You Get Into Selling The House.

It Seems To Me That There Must Be An Ecological Limit To The Number Of Paper Pushers The Earth Can Sustain.

At Issue Is Not Only Knowledge Of The World But Our Survival As Individuals And As A Species. All The Basic Technologies Ever Invented By Humans To Feed And Protect Themselves Depend On A Relentless Commitment To Hard-nosed Empiricism: You Cannot Assume That Your Arrowheads Will Pierce The Hide Of A Bison Or That Your Raft Will Float Just Because The Omens Are Propitious And You Have Been Given Supernatural Reassurance That They Will. You Have To Be Sure.

The Nation Was Not Founded By Habitual Groupthinkers. But It Stands A Fair Chance Of Being Destroyed By Them.

We Need To Brace Ourselves For A Struggle Against Terrifying Obstacles...bot H Of Our Own Making And Imposed By The Natural World. And The First Step Is To Recover From The Mass Delusion That Is Positive Thinking.

Positive Thinking

Marriage Is Socialism Among Two People.

Jesus: A Wine-guzzling Vagrant And Precocious Socialist.

There's More Pressure On Women To Be Chirpy And Perky.

A Lot Of What We Experience As Strength Comes From Knowing What To Do With Weakness. Nickel And Dimed On (not) Getting By In America

As A General Rule, When Something Gets Elevated To Apple-pie Status In The Hierarchy Of American Values, You Have To Suspect That Its Actual Monetary Value Is Skidding Toward Zero. Take Motherhood: Nobody Ever Thought Of Putting It On A Moral Pedestal Until Some Brash Feminists Pointed Out, About A Century Ago, That The Pay Is Lousy And The Career Ladder Nonexistent. Same Thing With Work: Would We Be So Reverent About The 'work Ethic' If It Wasn't For The Fact That The Average Working Stiff's Hourly Pay Is Shrinking, Year By Year.

If That's How It All Started, Then We Might As Well Face The Fact That What's Left Out There Is A Great Deal Of Shrapnel And A Whole Bunch Of Cinders (one Of Which Is, Fortunately, Still Hot Enough And Close Enough To Be Good For Tanning). Trying To Find Some Sense And Order In This Mess May Be As Futile As Trying To ... Reconstruct The Economy Of Iowa From A Bowl Of Popcorn. [on Searching For Evidence Of The Big Bang.]

I Complain To One Of My Fellow Servers That I Don't Understand How She Can Go So Long Without Food. "well, I Don't Understand How You Can Go So Long Without A Cigarette," She Responds In A Tone Of Reproach. Because Work Is What You Do For Others; Smoking Is What You Do For Yourself.

People Who Just Pretend To Have A Positive Attitude May Be More Acceptable, But They Will Still Attract According To How They Are Really Vibrating- The Energy They Are Emanating Will Attract Their Circumstances.

Imagine Spending Four Billion Years Stocking The Oceans With Seafood, Filling The Ground With Fossil Fuels, And Drilling The Bees In Honey Production - Only To Produce A Race Of Bed-wetters!

The Urge To Transform One's Appearance, To Dance Outdoors, To Mock The Powerful And Embrace Perfect Strangers Is Not Easy To Suppress." --barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing In The Streets, 260.

I'm Not A Nice Person.

Our Great Common Challenge ... Is To Free People From Religion, Get It Out Of Our Laws, Our Schools, Our Health Systems, Our Government And, I Would Add, Also Our Sporting Events. I Would Really Like To See Some Separation Of Church And Stadium, If We Could Work On That.

But Our Culture Is In Truly Bad Shape If We Have Come To Define Respecting Something As The Failure To Set It On Fire.

Money Does Not Bring Happiness' - Only The Wherewithal, Perhaps, To Endure Its Absence.

It's Even Occurred To Me, As A Teeny Little Subversive Whisper Of A Thought, That If We Stop Mowing The Lawn Right Now, It Will Probably Be A Long, Long Time Before The Yard Gets Overrun By Lions And Snakes.

War Is, In Some Not Yet Entirely Defined Sense, A Self-replicating Pattern Of Behavior, Possessed Of A Dynamism Not Unlike That Of Living Things.

Middle-class-led Reform Movements, From The Progressive Era To The War On Poverty, Have Been Marred By An Elitist Distance From The Would-be Beneficiaries Of Reform.

Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For The Kind Of Woman Who Plays With A Full Deck Of Credit Cards.

So Why Do People Keep On Watching? The Answer, By Now, Should Be Perfectly Obvious: We Love Television Because Television Brings Us A World In Which Television Does Not Exist. In Fact, Deep In Their Hearts, This Is What The Spuds Crave Most: A Rich, New, Participatory Life.

In Our Culture, The Professional, And Largely White, Middle Class Is Taken As A Social Norm - A Bland And Neutral Mainstream - From Which Every Other Group Or Class Is Ultimately A Kind Of Deviation.

If God Cares About Our Puny Species, Then Disasters Prove That He Is Not All-powerful; And If He Is All-powerful, Then Clearly He Doesn't Give A Damn.

War Has Dug Itself Into Economic Systems, Where It Offers A Livelihood To Millions ... It Has Lodged In Our Souls As A Kind Of Religion, A Quick Tonic For Political Malaise And A Bracing Antidote To The Moral Torpor Of Consumerist, Market-driven Cultures.

What You Don't Necessarily Realize When You Start Selling Your Time By The Hour Is That What You're Really Selling Is Your Life.

The Truth Is, Many Things Are Worth Doing Only In The Most Slovenly, Halfhearted Fashion Possible, And Many Other Things Are Not Worth Doing At All.

When Television Families Aren't Gathered Around The Kitchen Table Exchanging Wisecracks, They Are Experiencing Brief But Moving Dilemmas, Which Are Handily Solved By The Youngest Child Or By Some Cute Extraterrestrial Houseguest. Emerging From Family Ties Or My Two Dads, We Are Forced To Acknowledge That Our Own Families Are Made Up Of Slow-witted, Emotionally Crippled People Who Would Be Lucky To Qualify For Seats In The Studio Audience Of Jeopardy!

In Economics, We Borrowed From The Bourbons; In Foreign Policy, We Drew On Themes Fashioned By The Nomad Warriors Of The Eurasian Steppes. In Spiritual Matters, We Emulated The Braying Intolerance Of Our Archenemies, The Shite Fundamentalists.

We Are Reaching The Point, If We Have Not Passed It Already, Where The Largest Public Housing Program In America Will Be Our Penitentiary System.

One Of The Most Essential And Mundane Of Human Activities - Taking Care Of Children - Requires High Levels Of Anxious Vigilance. ... [parents] Dare Not Risk Assuming That The Sudden Quiet From The Toddlers' Room Means They Are Studying With Baby Einstein. Visualize Fratricidal Stranglings And Electric Outlets Stabbed With Forks: This Is How We Have Reproduced Our Genomes.

Medical Debts Are The Number-one Cause Of Bankruptcy In America.

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