Barbara
Ehrenreich
Author of
Nickel and Dimed talks with
Robert Birnbaum
 Posted:
Back in the Day
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz/ Duende Publishing
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Writer and social commentator
Barbara Ehrenreich has appeared in a diverse range of national publications
including Time Magazine, The New York
Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Ms.,
Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The
Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy, Mirabella
and more.
She has also written Blood Rites: Origins and History
of the Passions of War, The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverant
Notes from The Decade of Greed, Fear of Falling: The Inner
Life of the Middle Class, The Snarling Citizen, The
Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment,
The American Health Empire, Witches, Midwives and Nurses,
For Her Own Good, Re-Making Love, The Mean Season: The Attack on
Social Welfare and a novel, Kipper's Game.
Barbara Ehrenreich has been the recipient of numerous grants
and fellowships and awards including a Ford Foundation Award and
a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She received a Sydney Hillman Award for Journalism for
a chapter of her current book, Nickel
and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,
that appeared in Harper's. Those articles in Harper's
generated so much mail that the magazine created a special section
to accommodate them. Barbara Ehrenreich lives near Key West, Florida,
and is at work on at least three books.
Robert Birnbaum: This
week I am talking to two people who have published books [Ehrenreich's
book and Christopher
Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger] that had
their origins at Harper's Magazine.
Barbara Ehrenreich: I'm so glad that I've
discovered it. Or they've discovered me, or whatever, because it's
been a good place.
RB: It is a good place. You put together
a charming description of the origin of Nickel and Dimed.
You were having lunch with Harper's editor Lewis Lapham in
a nice, understated French restaurant and you suggested that somebody
ought to do some good old-fashioned journalism on the issue of the
working poor. And you described his look as "half crazed" —
is that accurate?
BE: I was pitching a story on something completely
unrelated. A story on sports fandom. And then the conversation drifted
to talking about welfare reform and the assumption that these single
moms could just get out there in the workforce and get a job and
then everything would be okay. They'd be lifted out of poverty.
We were both agreeing that nobody seems to see that the math doesn't
work. That's when I made this, perhaps disastrous suggestion, that
somebody should go out there and do the old-fashioned kind of journalism,
just try it for themselves and write about it. I did not expect
him to say, "Yeah, great idea. It should be you." (chuckles) So
that's how it started.
RB: That would be the sign of a great editor,
matching a story with a writer. Is there any one else currently
being published who could or would have done this story?
BE: Oh, why, I've never thought about that.
Why not anybody? The big problem is, could they do the work?
RB: I agree that's a problem. But I think
you sell yourself short. There is the story, there are the facts
you collect, and then there is the style of presentation. You've
drawn on descriptions and a way of putting this story that makes
it something more that a leftist tract.
BE: I should hope so. But there are a lot
of great writers.
RB: Tell me who?
BE: There is a lot of good writing. What
there is less of is having something really important to say. I'm
not as impressed by great writing as I was when I started out as
a freelance writer and I would say, "Oh my God, if I could ever
write like that." Now as a more mature freelance writer the question
is, "What is there to say? What's the story?"
RB: I recently came across a quote by Pete
Seeger [from David Hadju's Positively
Fourth Street] in which he defined a good song as a song
that did good.
BE: Yeah, I have read a lot of beautifully
written that I could have...
RB: Taking what we have just discussed, probably
there are a lot of good writers who could get the facts. Would they
recognize the story and its nuances, the story of people on the
economic margins?
BE: Maybe they could. I like to think what
was special about me, here, was that I actually did the work. I
don't mean the writing work, I mean I did the jobs. I take great
pride in that.
RB: The physicality of it?
BE: This was punishing, hard labor in almost
all of these jobs.
RB: Does it take anything away from this
experiment that you knew there was an end date to it all?
BE: That affected my psychological state,
but that didn't get me through the day physically, knowing it was
going to end. Like many people of my actual social class, I've been
a gym member for many years. I work out. I'm strong. But I never
thought of being in the gym all day. And some of these jobs felt
like that. "Like when does this end? My god, I can stand up any
longer."
RB: You made a very striking observation
about the way people look at poverty...
BE: They don't look at it as a state of emergency.
The comforting thing that affluent people console themselves with,
if they worry about these things at all, is, "Oh, there have
always been poor people. And yes, it's a state of relative privation
and no, their kids may not go to college or not to a good college..."
And you can think of all the things that they are missing. But there
is still this idea somehow that they are scraping by. And of course,
many are.
What there is not enough awareness of is the immediate
hardship, hardship in a biological sense. Missing rent, for example.
That can get you in trouble, get you thrown out. Missing meals.
That is where it gets kind of biological and basic. I don't understand
how some of the people I worked alongside could get through an eight-to-nine-hour
shift without eating. It took me a long time to realize that they
weren't dieting. It was not that at all. They actually did not have
fifty cents in their pockets. The way I found that out in that particular
[housecleaning] job was, we would drive from house to house in a
company car and it was a crisis when we had to go through a toll
booth.
"Who has a quarter?"
"Well, I don't know. How fast do you think the boss
is gonna reimburse me? Will I get it back today? Last time he made
we wait three days."
It's crisis digging in your pocket for a quarter?
That certainly made me think of about my own usual perspective.
A quarter is not an amount of money that I miss.
RB: You worked in Key West for a month, Maine
for a month, and Minneapolis for a month, and eschewed going to
California because you thought that the Latinos had hogged all the
low-paying jobs and substandard housing. Do you think this experience
would have been easier in more temperate climes...well, I guess
Key West in warm.
BE: I was in warm places. It was always the
beginning of summer, end of the summer. Key West, it was summer,
it's just too hot. That's actually a bad time to be trying this
in Key West because it was off-season that's why I had such a struggle
making it as a waitress...
RB: Let me ask that from a different angle.
Is there a regional distinction with which people approach subsistence
survival? Are people working on the margins faced which pretty much
the same stuff in Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Texas, etc.?
BE: I think it's pretty universal. For example, on the housing
issue, everybody thinks where they live has a unique crisis. Like
in the lower keys, "Oh well, it's impossible here, it's a tourist
area." Actually, I found more housing possibilities there than in
the other places I went to. And I deliberately did not go to, say
Boston, or the Bay area, because I knew I will never find a place
to live and I am not doing an experiment in homelessness. So forget
about it! So I picked places that I figured would be kind of manageable.
And still there were all these problems. So, no I don't think there
are huge regional differences.
RB: This a universal national problem?
BE: There are certainly places that have
lower rents, some non-urban spots in the midwest or in the Rockies...well,
I don't know, I take that back, the Rockies, well you have tourists
again. So I don't know where you go for a cheaper place to live.
RB: When did you complete this book?
BE: I turned it in September 2000.
RB: And is the book different than the published
Harper's piece?
BE: Only one chapter was published in Harper's,
the one about Key West. I added some things in the book that weren't
in the chapter.
RB: It's not been quite a year since you
completed this book. You finished in Minnesota about a year ago.
How much has this book stayed with you?
BE: It certainly influences my agenda as
a writer and as, in some small scale, an activist. Yeah, you have
to come out of these situations and say the only way to justify
going back into a middle-class style and everything — well,
I say justify, but I was desperate to go back to middle class life
style — [is to ask] what am I doing for change, what
am I doing to make this a less brutally unequal society.
RB: On a daily basis, when you go to a restaurant,
are you more conscious of the workers?
BE: Oh yeah. In small ways, you know. I was
one of those messy shoppers. At least until I worked at Wal-Mart
and was the person picking up after the messy shoppers. Now you
find me neatly folding the garment I have just tried on. I tip better.
I don't think I was ever stingy in that respect, but now I may be
a little unusual. Those are small things...
RB: I would expect that in the bigger picture
your consciousness of this issue will continue and, as you say,
be part of your agenda. But thing is, this is not new news or surprising.
Neither is the Kissinger war criminality issue new or surprising.
Who is paying attention?
BE: Anything about poverty should not be
surprising news. But there has been almost an embargo on any kind
of discussion of poverty. I read recently, in Guatemala, after the
US backed coup that overthrew Arbeniz in '54, the right-wing government
came in forbid discussion of poverty. You couldn't say the word,
you couldn't write about it, you couldn't talk about it. I thought
well, "It's not that bad here, but it's been almost that bad."
The last few years, like the years when I was doing
this, were known as a time of "unprecedented boom." Twenty-seven-year-old
millionaires all over the place, in the dotcom industry and it was
like this disappeared, it was never discussed. And I think also
there was a reluctance on the part of many liberals to talk about
this while Clinton was in office. Out of some sort of loyalty to
the Democratic Party. But the years that I was doing this work were
Clinton years. Boom years, Clinton years. In general there is a
taboo about talking about class in America. We can't do that. Or
it can only be approached as temporary individual misfortune. The
fact that there is anything systematic going on is very hard to
talk about. Or not welcome in a lot of mainstream media.
RB: Except when the Republicans want to talk
about class warfare...
BE: Whenever anybody talks about inequality
they — I mean on the left side, the Democrats — they
get accused of class warfare when actually there has been a class
war going on for quite a while now. It's a particularly aggressive
war since the 1970's, from the corporate elite against working America
and they're the only side that's been fighting, really. The other
side has barely been fighting back. Barely.
RB: What's the evidence of resistance?
BE: There have been some union organizing
successes. In California among janitors, home health aides — very
low-paid people.
RB: Is the recent Harvard strike considered
a victory for workers?
BE: Uh huh. Well, at least Harvard agreed
to think about dipping into its piles of lucre...
RB: 19 billion dollars...
BE: 19 billion dollars, right. Yeah, so that's
a little victory. There's just not been enough...and I will be critical
of unions. I think they have not put enough priority on the lowest
paid workers. They have been more attracted to somewhat more glamorous-seeming
workers, like airline workers. That's fine, they need it, too.
RB: Want to venture an opinion as to why
unions haven't organized low-wage earners?
BE: Dues are higher, if you are getting slightly
more affluent workers. It's hard work, organizing. And they are
not doing enough organizing in general. I also understand why. How
hard it is, how expensive. The only way this will be accomplished,
the only way unionization will begin to be a force or unions will
begin to be a force in this society is if they undertake organizing
in the spirit of an evangelical crusade. This is not business-as-usual.
It has to be a crusade. It has to draw on people who are burning
to do it. And who will make huge sacrifices in their lives to do
it.
RB: The big trick that corporations pulled
off was to convince the public that the unions were mirror images
of big business. Big, bureaucratic and wasteful. Certainly, no one
calls for the repudiation or tearing down of corporations in the
way that that call is sounded against unions.
BE: I have to laugh when people talk about
"big labor." Where is big labor? It's so tiny, unfortunately, compared
to what it's up against.
RB: You conclude Nickel And Dimed
with: "The 'working poor' as they are approvingly termed, are in
fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their
own children so that the children of others will be cared for: they
live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and
perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and
stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an
anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else." Is anyone
going to hear this, do you think?
BE: (laughs) I don't know. We can keep saying
it.
RB: You were to be in Boston some weeks ago
and were called to do the Oprah show...
BE: Yeah, I was on the Oprah show, and I'm
sorry but Oprah is bigger than Boston. When she calls, you know,
the publisher drops everything, whole cities are forgotten and left
in the dust and off you go.
RB: It's an amazing thing. Tell what the
Oprah experience was like.
BE: Well it was kind of fascinating...to
see the audience reaction to her. It's like as if a goddess were
in one's midst when she comes out. People get very emotional. It
was interesting.
RB: In other times people have done badly
with that kind of adulation and power.
BE: She seems to be pretty level-headed.
In so far as I know, and what do I know about her other than from
the tabloids? Everybody says she's really smart, and she impressed
me that way, too.
RB: What did she talk to you about? Had she,
in fact, read your book?
BE: I think she had. She said personally,
before we went, something about that she had read it and enjoyed
it... The standard questions. And she also had three women in poverty — one
who was struggling up from welfare and not doing all that well,
I would say — on the show. So that was good, it shouldn't
just be journalists being your tour guide.
RB: Any sense of the after effect from being
on the show?
BE: I don't know.
RB: Are you called to do readings and speaking?
BE: I do a lot of lecturing in my normal
life, yeah.
RB: What kinds of places do you lecture at?
BE: You mean in real life (as opposed to
book tour)? Colleges, sometimes churches or unions. Usually campuses.
RB: You have a basic text or speech, or do
you create one for each engagement?
 BE:
It depends on the subject. Oh yeah, they're specific. Some subjects
I have done several times. It's like writing an article, preparing
a talk.
RB: Your previous book was Blood Rites,
an investigation of aggression...
BE: Not aggression really. The thrill of
war, the psychology of war.
RB: And what's next for you?
BE: There are a few things. One which bears
very much on Nickel and Dimed, a fairly short book with Francis
Fox Piven, the political scientist who is an expert on welfare.
We are going to be looking at what is really going on with welfare
reform and what — not to be conspiratorial about
it — almost looks like a cover-up...it is a cover-up
of all the unpleasant results. And the increase in hunger and homelessness
that have been observed.
RB: Who is charged with monitoring and issuing
reports on the results of welfare reform?
BE: No one. Welfare reform was passed without
any provision in the legislation to study its effects. So the Federal
government has no official interest in finding out what happened
to both those who get kicked off of welfare and those who never
get on, now. Who are turned away at the door.
RB: In your book you indicate a study in
Minnesota that was used to support claims of success for welfare
reform...
BE: That's the kind of thing that looks like
to me like outright deception. Minnesota was being touted a year
ago as having this wonderfully successful welfare reform program.
A study had shown that people had gotten out of poverty...all these
good effects were cited. I believed it until I found out, which
took a little research, that, in fact, what was being touted was
not Minnesota's welfare reform program, but a pilot study affecting
only seven counties in Minnesota, which had pretty enriched transitional
benefits and counseling and help and all kinds of things...childcare
and all this support for the participants, which had been ended
in 1997. It was not about Minnesota's welfare reform program. It
just happened to have the same name and yet Time magazine
and all these national publications [used it to say] "Look welfare
reform works." And nobody from the statehouse in Minnesota called
up the media to say, "Oh you've got it wrong. It was just a
little thing and it's over..." So, I think that's deceptive.
RB: Since the Harper's article and
the book, have you seen many articles on poverty?
BE: Nope, No I don't think so...
RB: Has your book been broadly reviewed,
reviewed in a lot of places?
BE: Oh yeah. I'm really amazed at the amount
of attention it's gotten. My experience as a freelance writer was
that it's just really hard to get into media with these issues.
There's a structural reason for that...in the case of magazines
for example, the advertisers have a lot of pull and they want, quote,
good demographics, unquote. That is they want to think that the
readers are all upscale and have a lot of discretionary income.
They don't want to see a lot of depressing articles about poor people...
RB: I just read an exception that may prove
that rule. In the July Men's Journal, amidst the ads for
luxurious personal appliances and conspicuous accessories, Jim Harrison's
article called "Life on the Border." In any case, is your book selling?
BE: Uh huh.
RB: So do we conclude there is an audience
out there who will read about the harrowing lives of low-wage workers?
Unless they think this is something else?
BE: Yeah, investment advice. It's been on
the best seller's list for three weeks...that's pretty amazing to
me.
RB: Did you ever imagine that?
BE: No, this book is such a departure for
me. I have written books which are really collections of humorous
or satirical essays and Blood Rites was theoretical, an attempt
to come to a new understanding about human nature and human history.
So this is completely different. This is not library research. And
I don't usually do reporting. This is reporting. I don't usually
write in the first person. This is all in the first person.
RB: You made mention of the '60's trend
of middle-class college students going to factories and...
BE: In the '70's there was a vogue of proletarianizing
yourself...
RB: You then talked about how you were not
that far removed from that and you go on to say that you felt a
sense of responsibility to sit at your desk and write for all those
people who had never been able to get their story told.
BE: People in my family. They stick in my
mind. People of quite heroic proportions in family myth who were
miners or railroad workers and smart people. Interesting people,
but nobody ever listened to them. Nobody ever sat down like we're
sitting down here and asked them a lot of questions.
RB: Studs Terkel.
BE: Well, yeah, right, that's true. But it's
so unusual to be listened to in our society if you are a working
person... So I remember this vogue among young radicals of going
to work in factories came up, I thought, "Are you kidding?" Enough
family and my lineage, my parents and so on have done terrible work
like that, and I wasn't going to. It was never in my mind that I
would walk away from my books and my computer and do something like
this. And I, of course, didn't do it to "proletarianize" myself
but just as a reporter.
RB: You noted that in these various work
situations no one looked at you and identified as too educated or
too skilled or different from other low wage workers...
BE: I've been asked that a lot. "Couldn't
people tell you were different?" I wish that I could say that just
once some co-worker or manager had taken me aside and said, "Barbara
there's something special about you. Some indefinable quality or
something." Never! The only thing special about me was I was inexperienced,
I was new. This is another comforting myth of the affluent. That
those who are toiling away, unrecognized and underpaid and so on,
are kind of dumb and so that's all they can do and too bad about
them. When, in fact, they are just as various and interesting and
different as any other stratum of people or segment of people. Which
is something I knew because there were so many people in my family
who had been blue-collar workers.
RB: Where is that comforting mythology coming
from?
BE: I think it takes very organized forms
in books like The Bell Curve, a few years ago. Which set
out the poor, especially the black poor, are stupid. The book turned
out, as one would suspect, it was based completely...it was really...what's
the best word here? What's a word for fraud? I don't want to be
sued here. I'm looking for a nicer way for saying fraud.
RB: Hoax?
BE: All right you said that, sue him. Some
of us went through high school in mixed class and racial situations.
I know as high student I felt like, "Hey, I'm not like those other
kids [in the vocational track]. They may put me down for being so
nerdy, but hey, I'm not going to be carrying trays in five years,
that's for sure." It starts there. It's as if they hadn't tried
and you did.
RB: I remember reading Paul Goodman and his
attention to a bye-gone time where there was a possibility of being
poor with some dignity, you could live without being stigmatized
for bring poor...doesn't exist anymore.
BE: Yeah, that's the culture my parents came
out of, was the honest, dignified poor. But that's gone. One part
of the change was deindustrialization, which we talked a lot about
in the 1980's. We don't talk about it anymore now. But those relatively
well-paying unionized jobs, mainly for white men (but not entirely)
just disappeared so fast. Those were jobs you could get right from
high school and if you were a man of my father's generation you
expect to support your family without your wife working. That's
all gone. That's all over. That's one part of the change. The other
part of the change is in the culture itself. Which in the 80's and
the 90's has just glamorized the wealthy so much. Of course the
wealthy are always supposed to be more glamorous than the rest of
us. You could think that all the work in this country in the last
few years has been done by software designers and dotcom entrepreneurs.
They're working hard and skateboarding around their offices and
inventing new stuff. Completely left out is the fact is that somebody
makes those computers.
RB: Somebody making those chips in Mexico
or Malaysia or...
BE: Probably some teen-age girl in fact.
So we have just turned into celebrities — in the
80's, it was the arbitrageurs and the stock broker investment bankers,
in the 90's, it was the internet people. They get glamorized, and
you just forget that somebody is actually making things happen everyday.
Getting stuff delivered from place to place in trucks and cleaning
the offices and...there may be less manufacturing but all these
services are easy enough to invisibilize in the media.
RB: In your last chapter, "Evaluation",
you say, "Corporate decision-makers and two-bit entrepreneurs tend
to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit
their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management
and intrusive measures."
BE: I don't know the real reason, that's
my guess. It certainly looks that way. I think that assumption of
management is that their low wage workers are criminals. Or will
be given half a chance. First there's the drug test. Which I have
many reasons for opposing. It's an indignity, it's an invasion of
privacy and a violation of the 4th amendment. I thought that before
I had to undergo them. Then I began to realize something else about
it. It's a ritual of humiliation. It puts you in a one down position,
even though they need workers desperately, they have to put you
through that little humiliation. I was warned very early on in one
of the first places I worked to be careful what I carried in my
purse because management could search it without any notification.
RB: But that never actually happened to you?
BE: No, it never happened. That, I just could
not believe that.
RB: What do you think you would have done?
BE: Nothing. I was a very obedient worker.
RB: You would have played along with the
role you were in? It wouldn't have snapped something deeper?
BE: Well, yeah there would have been a very
strong feeling that I'd like to bat over the head with a purse.
The idea was stolen goods, I guess. And then ridiculous rules like
no chatting with fellow employees even when there was a quiet time
or when you were working side-by-side. That's a very important thing.
I didn't think about really until a month ago, long after the book
was written, how important things like that are to preventing unionization.
You make illicit casual contacts among workers. Now what's the point
of that? Well, they'll say, "We don't want you wasting our time."
Well, there are times while you are working with your hands while
you are talking. They don't want you griping together.
RB: Seems like prison rules.
 BE:
Well, perhaps. I guess the prison movies I've seen are getting out
of date. I did think of prison now and then in these jobs, because
you really check your civil rights at the door when you go into
some of these jobs. Your freedom of speech, forget about freedom
of assembly, any kind of privacy rights. All gone, [when] you enter
there. You leave what you thought was America behind and you enter
a totalitarian state where you have these rules, where you are being
watched, where you are punished for little things. I did not respond
to a manager when she said something really rude in front of an
immigrant dishwasher, about the immigrant dishwasher. And said something
rude and dismissive. I guess she was expecting me, as a native-born
white American to say, "Heh heh, heh, yes you're right." And I didn't
smile, didn't speak, looked away and walked right past her. Very
bad. My punishment was: when it was time for me to leave that night,
she said, "Hey you, you've got to start mixing the new 4-gallon
batch of blue cheese dressing." And that's...I don't know what I
can say on the web, I almost said a word I can't say on the radio...
RB: Say anything you want.
BE: Well, that's bullshit. I'd done my work
and so what if I didn't kowtow to her when she was being insulting
to a co-worker. The point is that I could be punished. You are in
this strange realm where people have arbitrary powers over you.
RB: Doesn't that imply the greatest myth?
Someone might observe, "You don't have to work there. You are not
a slave. You can leave if you don't like the conditions."
BE: Sure, and you can, of course. I was often
urging co-workers to get out of these jobs. Especially very young
people, who I had developed a maternal interest in. But I could
also see how difficult it is. Changing jobs is going to cost you
two, maybe three weeks of pay. And it's going to mean driving around
for applications, more drug tests, more interviews. People look
at those drives now in new way because of gas prices are so high.
You have to think about all that. Maybe you have to have a babysitter
while you do it. So there are things that keep people stuck more
than they should be. It's not so easy to move to the best place.
RB: You point out that in lab animals, a
certain level of depression sets in, then they don't even have the
ability to fight for themselves.
BE: Moving over to my biological part of
my brain...yeah, if you put rats and many other kinds of animals
in hierarchical situations — all we are talking about
is hierarchy — the ones at the bottom, the very undominant
ones, develop a kind of syndrome which looks like human depression.
They become passive, don't move around as much, and they are less
likely to defend themselves. Some like that can happen over the
years in jobs. This is a price that you pay for being in a hierarchical
society and not being anywhere near the top of it.
RB: Would you characterize the behavior of
your co-workers in these jobs as being depressed?
BE: Not on the face of it, from what I saw
of them. In fact, I was very struck by how much pride people took
in their jobs. The one that this did not apply to so much was the
house cleaning job. Where there was a certain amount of palpable
resentment, in some cases, of the really rich people whose houses
we cleaned. Waitresses really want the food to look nice when it
comes to the table. They want it be hot, to be good, they want to
please the customer. Even in this Wal-Mart job where we were getting
no strokes or praise or anything, we took quite a bit of pride in
our department and how it looked. I maybe got a little carried away
and began to think of it as my place. I didn't want customers coming
into it and messing it up. (laughs)
RB: Resentment (toward the rich) by house
cleaners seems like such a mild reaction. Perhaps in other times
or places there would be revolutions as a reaction.
BE: That's the risk you take when you have
such a divided society. It's a very interesting situation, the servant
economy that arising. Particularly, so in the kind of situation
I worked with, which is not working as an individual housecleaner,
but you are with a team, it's very industrialized. You have a system
and it's not a personal relationship with the customers. They don't
know you. Very often if they were home they might open the door
and step aside and not even say hello to us. We were at the bottom
of the social hierarchy. And yet as a housecleaner, you know all
about them. They know nothing about you, but you, especially with
dusting — that chore involves all the items — you
see the whole family history, whole biographies unfold in front
of you. One of the women I worked with was really fast, I don't
know how she did it, she'd have enough time to stand around and
read people's letters. I'm not revealing her name, she's safe. It's
true in general, the rich know almost nothing about the poor. They
don't clean their house. Whereas the poor can turn on TV, not only
house cleaners, and see how the rich live. And if you are a house
cleaner you exactly how individual rich people live. There are risks
in that.
RB: Has it occurred to you, as we endure
Bush II, to write a sequel to The Worst Years of Our Lives?
BE: The Even Worst Years of Our Lives.
I haven't been doing that same kind of short humorous essays. I've
been doing longer pieces.
RB: Where has your work been appearing?
BE: I write a column for The Progressive,
almost every month.
RB: You were, for a long time, a back page
essayist at Time magazine.
BE: Yeah, I'm on the masthead still as a
contributing writer, but it might be every six months or four months.
It's more an ad hoc arrangement now. They'll call me. I seldom dare
call them because I am more likely to get it accepted if it was
their idea. It's hard to get by them.
RB: Anywhere else?
BE: I'm a real slut when it comes to freelancing.
Last year I did something for Aperture, the fancy photography
magazine, about capital punishment.
RB: I read it...
BE: Somebody read it.
RB: I read it because it was tied to the
Benneton death row ad campaign. And I was interested because Lou
Jones, a Boston photographer, has published a book of death row
photos and I was hoping a serious photography magazine might give
him credit for what he had done...ahead of the very suspect Benneton
project.
BE: Yeah, that was what I was supposed to
be writing about. Though I was invited to a vigil outside of San
Quentin that turned out to be a much more disturbing experience
than I had bargained for. I've written for Civilization in
the last year. Got an assignment at Oprah (chuckles) and you know
that's what you do when you are a freelance writer.
RB: It's a tough job.
BE: It was good preparation for my low age
life. Not in the economic way, because I do all right most of the
time. But for humiliation. (both laugh) You've gotta take it.
RB: I proposed a piece on internationally
known and celebrated photojournalist James Nachtway to The Boston
Globe when Nachtway was here for a lecture coincidental with
the publication of his incredible photo book, Inferno. I
wrote seven hundred words in newspaper journalese tying in the book
and the lecture. The response from the Globe arts editor
was that they had done something on Nachtway three years ago. Anyway,
no Worst Years II? You wouldn't chronicle this administration?
BE: Worst Years I was a collection.
I don't know, I have so many other things to do right now. One is
the book about welfare reform. Another is an anthology with Arlene
Hofshuld, a well-known sociologist, about immigrant women — nannies,
domestics and sex workers — women coming from poor
countries to rich countries to do what was women's work in those
rich countries. We're not writing, we're editing. That's fascinating,
I'm learning a huge amount from that. And then I have another book
project which I get to every now and then. Which is about ecstasy,
not the drug. But collective ecstasy, as in festivities, ecstatic
rituals and its suppression in and by western cultures. I love history,
so I'm having a good time with that.
RB: In the 60's, there was interest in Sufuism
and certain kinds of mysticism...
BE: I'm not really interested in mystical
things. For a contemporary example: like a rave. Danced ecstatic
ritual have been very much a part of human culture, almost universally
and have been pretty much wiped out.
RB: How far back are delving?
BE: The ancient world all the way up. Those
things get driven out marginalized, forbidden. Puritanism within
European and American history is a big force in squelching rituals.
Squelching fun and festivities.
RB: Don't Latinos have such rituals besides
festivals?
BE: Some of the surviving religious remanants
in the Western Hemisphere include Voodoo, Santeria and Condomble,
where the point of the ritual is to go into an ecstatic state and
merge with a diety. People can also just have a great time at carnival,
and you might not call that ecstasy, but it's certainly a self loss
and a feeling of union with others we don't commonly have in our
culture.
RB: You've written a book about the war impulse,
and you are writing about the ecstatic impulse, is there another
piece to this?
BE: I don't know what it is yet. I haven't
figured out beyond that book.
RB: Does writing come easy to you? Is it
a chore?
BE: If it's a chore, there's something wrong.
If it feels like a chore, it's because I haven't done enough research
or haven't figured out what I want to say. I think there is no such
thing as writer's block. It just means do more research, think more.
And I love research. Any kind of research.
RB: Well, thank you.
BE: Well, you're welcome.
All fotos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing.
Robert Birnbaum came to journalism, where
he has been a practitioner for the past two decades, from a series
of possibly (it's too soon to tell) educational vocational experiences
that are too numerous to mention. In the '80s and '90s, as publisher/creative
director of STUFF magazine in Boston, when he wasn't attending industrial
gatherings, he interviewed nearly 500 hundred writers — from
Martin Amis and Isabel Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn
— and read almost 1000 books. He is currently, among other
things, pondering if there is a place for him in a profession increasingly
infested with vulgarians who believe 'editorial content' is celebrating
restaurant and shop openings, endlessly lionizing the same small
group of celebrities and reiterating the press releases of the publicists
they have just had lunch with. He lives with his Labrador retriever
Rosie and helps parent his young son Cuba Maxwell.
Note:
Featured author in November 2000
E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com
Writing interests: Interviews, Photography
Author interviews: Dorothy
Allison, Nicholson
Baker, Julian
Barnes, Andrea
Barrett, Alex
Beam, Jill
Bialosky, Amy
Bloom, Amy
Bloom 2002, Alain
de Botton, Arthur Bradford,
Ethan Canin, Stephen
Carter, Sandra
Cisneros, Michael
Connelly, Richard
Conniff, Frank
Conroy, Mark
Costello, Elizabeth
Cox, Jim Crace, Nicholas
Dawidoff, Andre
Dubus III, John
Dufresne, Tony Earley,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Gretel
Ehrlich, James
Ellroy, Richard
Ford, Alan
Furst, Alan
Furst 2002, Anthony
Giardina, James
Gleick, Adam
Gopnik, Allan Gurganus,
Barbara
Haber, David
Hadju, Ethan
Hawke, Christopher Hitchens
#1, Christopher
Hitchens #2, Gabe
Hudson, Elizabeth
Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor,
Nora
Okja Keller, Chip Kidd,
Anthony
Lane, Annette
Lemieux, Alan
Lightman, Paul Lussier,
Ruben Martinez, Daniel
Mason, Thomas
McGuane, Thisbe Nissen,
Tim
O'Brien, Susan
Orlean, Ann
Packer, Arthur
Phillips, Samantha
Power, Christopher
Rice, David
Rieff, Hazel
Rowley, Richard Russo #1,
Richard
Russo #2, John
Sedgwick, David
Shields, Ilan
Stavans, Darin
Strauss, Manil
Suri, Nick
Tosches, Brady
Udall, Sarah
Vowell, Brad
Watson, W.D. Wetherell,
Mark
Winegardner, Howard
Zinn
Author portraits: John
Sayles, Howard
Zinn, Robert
Stone, Ana
Castillo, John
Waters, Allen
Ginsberg, Carl
Hiaasen, Carlos
Fuentes, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo
Galeano, Isabel
Allende, Junot
Diaz, Joan
Didion, James
Ellroy, John
Edgar Wideman, Martin
Amis, Michael
Ondaatje, Richard
Price, Rigoberta
Menchu, Louis
de Bernieres, Studs
Terkel
Photography: "I
am the Son of my Son"
Journal: "A
Reader's Progress"
Link: Review
of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Hyde Park Review
of Books |
