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When Our Children Are Old Enough, And If We Can Afford To, We Send Them To College, Where ... The Point Is To Acquire The Skills Not Of Positive Thinking But Of Critical Thinking.

-Barbara Ehrenreich

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When Our Children Are

Barbara Ehrenreich

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When Our Children Are Old Enough, And If We Can Afford To, We Send Them To College, Where ... The Point Is To Acquire The Skills Not Of Positive Thinking But Of Critical Thinking.

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Positive Thinking

More From Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

At Best The Family Teaches The Finest Things Human Beings Can Learn From One Another Generosity And Love. But It Is Also, All Too Often, Where We Learn Nasty Things Like Hate, Rage And Shame.

When You Watch Television, You Never See People Watching Television. We Love Television Because It Brings Us A World In Which Television Does Not Exist.

That's Free Enterprise, Friends: Freedom To Gamble, Freedom To Lose. And The Great Thing - The Truly Democratic Thing About It - Is That You Don't Even Have To Be A Player To Lose.

Exercise Is The Yuppie Version Of Bulimia.

Transcendent Oneness Does Not Require Self-examination, Self-help, Or Self-work. It Requires Self-loss.

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.

Yes. I Think The Anti-wal-mart Is Costco, Which Pays Much Better And Has Much Better Health Benefits And Which Is Profitable And Offers Low Prices.

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.

Some Of Us Still Get All Weepy When We Think About The Gaia Hypothesis, The Idea That Earth Is A Big Furry Goddess-creature Who Resembles Everybody's Mom In That She Knows What's Best For Us. But If You Look At The Historical Record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, Poison Ivy, And So Forth Down The Ages - You Have To Ask Yourself: Whose Side Is She On, Anyway?

In Matters Of The Heart As Well, A Certain Level Of Negativity And Suspicion Is Universally Recommended. You May Try To Project A Thoroughly Positive Outlook In Order To Attract A Potential Boyfriend, But You Are Also Advised To Google Him.

It's A Glorious Universe The Positive Thinkers Have Come Up With, A Vast, Shimmering Aurora Borealis In Which Desires Mingle Freely With Their Realizations. ... Dreams Go Out And Fulfill Themselves; Wishes Need Only To Be Articulated.

The Feminist Anti-pornography Movement, No Less Than The Feminist Movement Of A Century Ago, Encourages The Assumption That Male And Female Sexuality, And Possibly Morality, Are As Unlike As Yin And Yang.

Consider The Standard Two-person Married Couple. ... They Will Share A Vcr, A Microwave, Etc. This Is Not A Matter Of Ideology Or Even Personal Inclination. It Is Practically The Definition Of Marriage. Marriage Is Socialism Among Two People.

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.

For A Long Time On Earth Humans Didn't Worship Good Gods; That's A New Idea. The Ancient Greek Gods, The Hindu Gods, Are Fairly Amoral, Most Of Them. We Get Stuck When We Insist That God Be Both Good And All-powerful.

From The Point Of View Of The Pharmaceutical Industry, The Aids Problem Has Already Been Solved. After All, We Already Have A Drug Which Can Be Sold At The Incredible Price Of $8,000 An Annual Dose, And Which Has The Added Virtue Of Not Diminishing The Market By Actually Curing Anyone.

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

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.

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.

A Cynic Might Conclude That The Real Purpose Of The $500 Million-a-year Implant Business Is The Implantation Of Fat In The Bellies And Rumps Of Underemployed Plastic Surgeons.

The Obvious Liberal Rejoinders Come To Mind: What About The Child Whose Home Is Hit By A Bomb? Did She Have Some Bomb-shaped Thoughtform That Brought Ruin Down On Her Head? And Did My [fired White-collar Workers] Boot-camp Mates Cause The Layoffs That Drove Them Out Of Their Jobs By "vibrating" At A Layoff-related Frequency? It Seems Inexcusably Cruel To Tell People Who Have Reach Some Kind Of Personal Nadir That Their Probem Is Entirely Of Their Own Making.

If Men Were Equally At Risk From This Condition - If They Knew Their Bellies Might Swell As If They Were Suffering From End-stage Cirrhosis, That They Would Have To Go Nearly A Year Without A Stiff Drink, A Cigarette, Or Even An Aspirin, That They Would Be Subject To Fainting Spells And Unable To Fight Their Way Onto Commuter Trains - Then I Am Sure That Pregnancy Would Be Classified As A Sexually Transmitted Disease And Abortions Would Be No More Controversial Than Emergency Appendectomies.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

War Cannot Be Used As A Means To Prevent Or Abolish Wars. ... The Idea Of A War To Prevent War Is One Of Its Oldest, And Cruelest, Tricks.

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

So Even Though I Consider Myself A Fairly Upbeat Person, Energetic And Things Like That, I Never Do Very Well On Happiness Tests.

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.

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.

Crime Seems To Change Character When It Crosses A Bridge Or A Tunnel. In The City, Crime Is Taken As Emblematic Of Class And Race. In The Suburbs Though, It's Intimate And Psychological, A Mystery Resist To Generalization, A Mystery Of The Individual Soul.

Feminists Have Not Tried To "destroy The Family". We Just Thought The Family Was Such A Good Idea That Men Might Want To Get Involved In It Too.

Both Chronic, Long-term Poverty And Downward Mobility From The Middle Class Are In The Same Category Of Things That America Likes Not To Think About.

Marriage Is Socialism Among Two People.

I Have A Ph.d. In Cell Biology. And That's Really Manual Labor. I Mean, Experimental Science, You Do It With Your Hands. So It's Very Different. You're Out There In A Lab, Cleaning Test Tubes, And It Just Wasn't That Fascinating.

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

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.

There Seems To Be No Stopping Drug Frenzy Once It Takes Hold Of A Nation. What Starts With An Innocuous Hugs, Not Drugs Bumper Sticker Soon Leads To Wild Talk Of Shooting Dealers And Making Urine Tests A Condition For Employment -- Anywhere.

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.

To Be Homeless In America Is To Live Like A Fugitive. The Destitute Are Our Own Native-born "illegals."

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

Wars Produce Warlike Societies, Which In Turn Make The World More Dangerous For Other Societies, Which Are Thus Recruited Into Being War-prone Themselves.

I Realize That After Decades Of Positive Thinking The Notion Of Realism, Of Things As They Are, May Seem A Little Quaint. ... When The Stakes Are High Enough And The Risks Obvious, We Still Turn To People Who Can Be Counted On To Understand Those Risks And Prepare For Worst-case Scenarios. A Chief Of State Does Not Want To Hear A General In The Field Say That He 'hopes' To Win Tomorrow's Battle Or That He's 'visualizing Victory'.

Positive Thinking

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.

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.

Frankly, I Adore Your Catchy Slogan, "adoption, Not Abortion," Although No One Has Been Able To Figure Out, Even With Expert Counseling, How To Use Adoption As A Method Of Birth Control, Or At What Time Of The Month It Is Most Effective.

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

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.

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

The Internet Was Supposed To Make This Whole Business Of Job Searching Rational And Simple. You Could Post Your Resume And Companies Would Search Them And They'd Find You. It Doesn't Seem To Work That Way. There Aren't Enough Jobs For Experienced, College Educated Managers And Professionals.

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.

Heads Of State Are Notoriously Ill Prepared For Their Mature Careers; Think Of Adolf Hitler (landscape Painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), And Our Own Ronald Reagan.

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.

The Only Truly New Ideas [the Right] Has Come Up With In The Last Twenty Years Are (1) Supply Side Economics, Which Is A Way Of Redistributing The Wealth Upward Toward Those Who Already Have More Than They Know What To Do With, And (2) Creationism, Which Is A Parallel Idea For Redistributing Ignorance Out From Its Fundamentalist Strongholds To Those Who Know More Than They Need To.

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.

Racist, Sexist, And Homophobic Thoughts Cannot, Alas, Be Abolished By Fiat But Only By The Time-honored Methods Of Persuasion, Education And Exposure To The Other Guy's-or Excuse Me, Woman's-point Of View.

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.

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

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

The Secret Of The Truly Successful ... Is That They Learned Early In Life How Not To Be Busy.

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?

The Psychological Trauma Of Losing A Job Can Be As Great As The Trauma Of A Divorce. It Creates A Lot Of Anger And Emotional Hardship. People May Become Quite Depressed.

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.

A Child Is Not A Salmon Mousse. A Child Is A Temporarily Disabled And Stunted Version Of A Larger Person, Whom You Will Someday Know. Your Job Is To Help Them Overcome The Disabilities Associated With Their Size And Inexperience So That They Get On With Being That Larger Person.

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.

Human Intellectual Progress, Such As It Has Been, Results From Our Long Struggle To See Things 'as They Are,' Or In The Most Universally Comprehensible Way, And Not As Projections Of Our Own Emotions. Thunder Is Not A Tantrum In The Sky, Disease Is Not A Divine Punishment, And Not Every Death Or Accident Results From Witchcraft. What We Call The Enlightenment And Hold On To Only Tenuously, By Our Fingernails, Is The Slow-dawning Understanding That The World Is Unfolding According To Its Own Inner Algorithms Of Cause And Effect, Probability And Chance, Without Any Regard For Human Feelings.

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.

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

Jesus: A Wine-guzzling Vagrant And Precocious Socialist.

As Anyone Knows Who Has Ever Had To Set Up A Military Encampment Or Build A Village From The Ground Up, Occupations Pose Staggering Logistical Problems.

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.

The One Regret I Have About My Own Abortions Is That They Cost Money That Might Otherwise Have Been Spent On Something More Pleasurable, Like Taking The Kids To Movies And Theme Parks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Individually The Poor Are Not Too Tempting To Thieves, For Obvious Reasons. Mug A Banker And You Might Score A Wallet Containing A Month's Rent. Mug A Janitor And You Will Be Lucky To Get Away With Bus Fare To Flee The Crime Scene.

If You Can Attribute Your Success Entirely To Your Own Mental Effort, To Your Own Attitude, To Some Spiritual Essence That You Have That Is Better Than Other Peoples, Then That Must Feel Pretty Good.

Like Many Other Women, I Could Not Understand Why Every Man Who Changed A Diaper Has Felt Impelled, In Recent Years, To Write A Book About It.

In Sci-fi Convention, Life-forms That Hadn't Developed Space Travel Were Mere Prehistory -- Horse-shoe Crabs Of The Cosmic Scene -- And Something Of The Humiliation Of Being Stuck On A Provincial Planet In A Galactic Backwater Has Stayed With Me Ever Since.

I Think It's Tragic That We Have This Human Capacity, Which Appears To Be Hardwired, Or So The Evolutionary Biologists Say, For Collective Joy. We Have These Techniques For Generating It That Go Back Thousands Of Years, And Yet We Tend Not To Use This.

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

For The Millions Of Us Who Live Glued To Computer Keyboards At Work And Tv Monitors At Home, Food May Be More Than Entertainment. It May Be The Only Sensual Experience Left.

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'.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

Cheerfulness, Up To And Including Delusion And False Hope, Has A Recognized Place In Medicine.

Even Healthy Families Need Outside Sources Of Moral Guidance To Keep Those Tensions From Imploding--and This Means, Among Other Things, A Public Philosophy Of Gender Equality And Concern For Child Welfare. When Instead The Larger Culture Aggrandizes Wife Beaters, Degrades Women Or Nods Approvingly At Child Slappers, The Family Gets A Little More Dangerous For Everyone, And So, Inevitably, Does The Larger World.

Given The Cultural Barriers To Intersex Conversation, The Amazing Thing Is That We Would Even Expect Women And Men To Have Anything To Say To Each Other For More Than Ten Minutes At A Stretch. The Barriers Are Ancient -- Perhaps Rooted, As Some Paleontologist May Soon Discover, In The Contrast Between The Occasional Guttural Utterances Exchanged In Male Hunting Bands And The Extended Discussions Characteristic Of Female Food-gathering Groups.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Our Children Are Old Enough, And If We Can Afford To, We Send Them To College, Where ... The Point Is To Acquire The Skills Not Of Positive Thinking But Of Critical Thinking.

Positive Thinking

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.

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.]

For Anyone Worn Down, The Impossible Will Take A Little While Is A Bracing Double Cappuccino.

The Seeker Who Embraces Positive Theology Finds ... That You Can Have All That Stuff In The Mall, As Well As The Beautiful House And Car, If Only You Believe That You Can. But ... If You Don't Have All That You Want, If You Feel Sick, Discouraged, Or Defeated, You Have Only Yourself To Blame. Positive Theology Ratifies And Completes A World Without Beauty, Transcendence, Or Mercy.

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.

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 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.

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.

Upscale People Are Fixated With Food Simply Because They Are Now Able To Eat So Much Of It Without Getting Fat, And The Reason They Don't Get Fat Is That They Maintain A Profligate Level Of Calorie Expenditure. The Very Same People Whose Evenings Begin With Melted Goats Cheese... Get Up At Dawn To Run, Break For A Mid-morning Aerobics Class, And Watch The Evening News While Racing On A Stationary Bicycle.

Whenever People Can Access Deities Directly Without The Intervention Of A Religious Hierarchy, They Don't Need To Have Hierarchy So Much.

The Secret Of The Truly Successful, I Believe, Is That They Learned Very Early In Life How Not To Be Busy. They Saw Through That Adage, Repeated To Me So Often In Childhood, That Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well. 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.

The Less Sophisticated Of My Forbears Avoided Foreigners At All Costs, For The Very Good Reason That, In Their Circles, Speaking In Tongues Was Commonly A Prelude To Snake Handling. The More Tolerant Among Us Regarded Foreign Languages As A Kind Of Speech Impediment That Could Be Overcome By Willpower.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There Is A Vast Difference Between Positive Thinking And Existential Courage.

Positive Thinking

Some People Make Stuff; Other People Have To Buy It. And When We Gave Up Making Stuff, Starting In The 1980s, We Were Left With The Unique Role Of Buying... We've Shopped Till We Dropped Alright, Face Down On The Floor.

No Job, No Matter How Lowly, Is Truly 'unskilled.

Employers Have Gone Away From The Idea That An Employee Is A Long-term Asset To The Company, Someone To Be Nurtured And Developed, To A New Notion That They Are Disposable.

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.

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.

Personally, I Have Nothing Against Work, Particularly When Performed, Quietly And Unobtrusively, By Someone Else. I Just Don't Happen To Think It's An Appropriate Subject For An 'ethic.'

The Failure To Think Positively Can Weigh On A Cancer Patient Like A Second Disease.

... There Hasn't Been A Serious Life-style Trend Since The Couch Potato Was Sighted, In About 1986, On One Of Its Rare Forays To The Video Store. Cocooning Remains A Significant Mass Enterprise, Encouraged By The Availability Of Five Hundred New Cable Channels And Microwavable Popcorn.

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.

To Live In Poverty Is To Live With Constant Uncertainty, To Accept Galling Indignities, And To Expect Harassment By The Police, Welfare Officials And Employers, As Well As By Others Who Are Poor And Desperate.

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

I'm Not A Nice Person.

If You Search The Bible, You Will Find No Reference To Birth Control Or Gay Marriage, And You Will Not Find A Word, Strangely, About Stem Cell Research. I Have Searched.

We [on The Left] Have To Be Used To Being A Minority -- A Small Minority -- For Some Time To Come. The Odd Thing Is That The Right, Even When It Is In Power, Likes To Think Of Itself As An Embattled Minority Against This Elite That Somehow Runs Everything. Whereas The Left, Even When It Has No Power At All, Likes To Imagine It Somehow Represents The Majority Of People. These Are Mirror-image Delusions.

The Question Is Why One Should Be So Inwardly Preoccupied At All. Why Not Reach Out To Others In Love And Solidarity Or Peer Into The Natural World For Some Glimmer Of Understanding? Why Retreat Into Anxious Introspection When, As Emerson Might Have Said, There Is A Vast World Outside To Explore? Why Spend So Much Time Working On Oneself When There Is So Much Real Work To Be Done?

The Republican Party: A Few Million Gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

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.

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.

Given The Cultural Barriers To Intersex Conversation, The Amazing Thing Is That We Would Even Expect Women And Men To Have Anything To Say To Each Other For More Than Ten Minutes At A Stretch.

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 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.

The Fact Is That Heterosexual Sex For Most People Is In No Way Free Of The Power Relations Between Men And Women.

America Is Addicted To Wars Of Distraction.

The Label Of Liberalism Is Hardly A Sentence To Public Ignominy: Otherwise Bruce Springsteen Would Still Be Rehabilitating Used Cadillacs In Asbury Park And Jane Fonda, For All We Know, Would Be Just Another Overweight Housewife.

Every Time A Bank Swoops Down To Snatch Up A Home, It Should Be Met With A Crowd Of Jeering, Obstructive Neighbors. And Although This May Be Point 4.5, How About Organizing A Mass Refusal To Pay Back Student Loans?

No One Should Be Incarcerated For Debt Or Squeezed For Money They Have No Chance Of Getting Their Hands On.

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.

The Fastest-growing Brand Of Religion Is Of The Magical 'name It And Claim It' Variety, In Which The Deity Exists Only To Meet One's Immediate, Self-identified Needs.

Sometime In The Eighties, Americans Had A New Set Of 'traditional Values' Installed. ... The Poor And The Middle Class Were Shaken Down, And Their Loose Change Funneled Blithely Upwards To The Already Overfed.

An Asteroid Could Hit Us At Any Moment. This Is Not - And Also, The Most Successful Kind Of Life On This Planet Is Not Us, It's Microbes. They're The Ones Who Greatly Outnumber Us, And May Eventually Destroy Us.

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.

Call It 'nationalism' When You Affix A Flag To Your Car, And Leave The Word 'patriotism' For Your Efforts To Make This Country A Kinder, More Egalitarian Place, And One That Is Less Dangerous To The Rest Of The World.

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.

Marriage Probably Originated As A Straightforward Food-for-sex Deal Among Foraging Primates. Compatibility Was Not A Big Issue, Nor, Of Course, Was There Any Tension Over Who Would Control The Remote.

I Don't Know When The Cult Of Conspicuous Busyness Began, But It Has Swept Up Almost All The Upwardly Mobile, Professional Women I Know. Already, It Is Getting Hard To Recall The Days When, For Example, 'let's Have Lunch' Meant Something Other Than 'i've Got More Important Things To Do Than Talk To You Right Now.

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.

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

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

Labor Is Like Motherhood To Most Of Our Political Leaders: A Calling So Fine And Noble That It Would Be Sullied By Talk Of Vulgar, Mundane Things Like Pay.

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.

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.

Personally, I Can't See Why It Would Be Any Less Romantic To Find A Husband In A Nice Four-color Catalogue Than In The Average Downtown Bar At Happy Hour.

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.

Natural Selection, As It Has Operated In Human History, Favors Not Only The Clever But The Murderous.

Whether You Work Outside The Home Or Not, Never Tell Them [your Children] That Being A Mommy Is Your 'job.' Being A Mommy Is A Relationship, Not A Profession.

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

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.

Among Other Things, [books By Bruce Doyle Iii And Mike Hernacki] Explain The Importance Of The "winning Attitude" I Have Been Urged To Adopt: A Positive Attitude "attracts" Or "fulfils", Depending On Which Author's Weird Science You Go With, Postiive Results, With Little Or No Action On Your Part Required. Herein, Too, Lies The Answer To The Question I Once Posed ...: Would It Be Enough Just To Fake A Winning Attitude? No Way, According To Doyle.

The Media Have Just Buried The Last Yuppie, A Pathetic Creature Who Had Not Heard The News That The Great Pendulum Of Public Consciousness Has Just Swung From Greed To Compassion And From Tex-mex To Meatballs

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?

You Can Turn Away The Mexicans, The African-americans, The Teenagers And Other Suspect Groups, But There's No Fence High Enough To Keep Out The Repo Man.

African American

Americans Love Marriage Too Much. We Rush Into Mariage With Abandon, Expecting A Micro-utopia On Earth. We Pile All Our Needs Onto It, Our Expectations, Neuroses, And Hopes. In Fact, We've Made Marriage Into The Panda Bear Of Human Social Institutions: We've Loved It To Death.

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.

There Can Be No More Ancient And Traditional American Value Than Ignorance. English-only Speakers Brought It With Them To This Country Three Centuries Ago, And They Quickly Imposed It On The Africans--who Were Not Allowed To Learn To Read And Write--and On The Native Americans, Who Were Simply Not Allowed.

Native American

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

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?

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