Come from the Shadows: a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bait and Switch

The following review has been sent to Amazon.

BAIT AND SWITCH: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara ("Nickel and Dimed") Ehrenreich: Henry Holt, 2005

Barbara Ehrenreich documents the nightmare world of the white collar unemployed.

She addresses the fearsome "Gap", which doesn't refer to the clothing store where corporate employees buy their monkish "casual" clothes, but to any departure, no matter how short, from the corporate world.

However, one small cavil is that she treats the "Gap" as irrecoverable and comes close to advising the job seeker to lie. I covered my own "gaps" not by lying on my resume, but by creating my own entrepreneural self-employment. For example, I wrote and published "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler" (Apress 2004) during one of my Gaps. I also wrote several magazine articles for which I got paid.

However, in software, you can still, to some extent, find opportunities to consult and publish wherein actual money as opposed to total BS changes hands. Barbara speaks true when she says that a life in progressive causes hasn't prepared her for systematic selfishness. She gives one "job search consultant" very valuable advice about his own style...and winds up paying him for his time anyway: she didn't seem to realize that at the end of the session, she needed to say "I've just done you a favor, and I'd like to be paid for my time".

It has to be remembered, however, that in both of Barbara's Sullivans Travels (Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch) she was in the equivalent of Second Life, that computer game where people adopt electronic personalities. The "real" Barbara had a Keogh plan, and only a "real" "Barbara Alexander" would have been facing going back to her Atlanta motel and not being able to pay the bill. Only this would have caused "Barbara Alexander" to ask, in a session for which she was to pay, to be paid..perhaps a minimal "net" amount reflecting the consultant's fee minus her fee, which she'd set at A Few Dollars More.

If I may be permitted to mix language and metaphor, *chutzpah* does not spring full formed *ex nihilo*. In a Marxist sense, you learn to ask for what you need only in the real world. You don't have to be Jewish to have *chutzpah*, because *chutz-pah* is (in David Mamet's words) "I make this sale or I don't eat lunch".

Thus Barbara discovers, as did Joel McCrea in Sullivan's Travels, that class divides are not reproducible in electronic worlds or other, fabricated worlds: McCrea learns the real situation of the 1930s poor only when he loses his memory, in a brilliant plot device that anticipated, by thirty years, the "veil of ignorance" philosophical device of political theorist John Rawls.

Barbara is as we used to say in the Sixties, right on, when she points out that the job seeker has to internalize society and its grim demands. She mentions Fromm, who in Escape from Freedom points out how the modern urban dweller confuses his own needs with those of society and cannot "relax": even his leisure is structured and compulsive.

Tell me about it, Kiddo. I drove my once, only and former wife crazy by being a proto computer nerd because of society's absolute demand, even in 1975, that I stay employed and employable to support my kids. Why, she'd demand, did I come home to write compilers to fit on 1K personal computers? Why was I in love with the inorganic?

She was reading Fromm, and when, much later in sorrow and in anger I read his mentor Adorno, I realized that this is what we do. We Work Out and Dress For Success to make us into things. Rationality necessarily turns upon itself, feeds upon itself, and when we Work Out and Dress for Success and make ourselves into things, we are enacting prophesies of Adorno and even Albany's vision in Shakespeare's King Lear:

It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep

Even within the framework of Escape from Freedom, we recursively escape. I abandoned my 1971 sense, in reading Dan McCracken's book on Algol 60, that Algol and its paradigm were superior to and more human than Fortran and its dull "go to" paradigm, but I allowed clownish head hunters in crumby Loop offices to tell me that Cobol was the wave of the future, where Cobol manages to be even more soul-destroying, even within the framework of Escape from Freedom, than Fortran. And, like many males before and since, I took out my anger on the little lady.

Of course, Barbara needs not point out that modern, American society, with its frayed and almost nonexistent safety net outside the corporation, would not reward a reader of Fromm and make him a free, loving, human being. Instead, he becomes a snarling homeless Trogdolyte.

Barbara finally recognizes almost completely her brothers and sisters in the white collar corporate world, people like the Borders event planners who set up her signing parties.

A postmodern Adorno come to judgement, she sees clearly the violence done to language and the truth in corporate settings outside hard and high technology (and, in my own experience, where violence can be done to the truth in hard and high technology in the corporation, that rape goes forward).

She explores the dark underside of a "motivational" industry that preys upon job and status seekers, in which an antitheory culture does primitive and brutal theory primarily in the form of Scholastic taxonomies that would embarass a mad monk, mostly "personality types".

Implicitly I think she realizes that almost any taxonomy is some sort of safe and nontoxic antidepressant for the unemployed, who can write it down and think about it instead of turning on the gas: since we're built to classify and order the world, almost any exercise of that organ is a Good Thing considered as an anodyne.

But: as Emily Dickinson saw, the Soul who seeks Pleasure first seeks "those little Anodynes that deaden suffering" as the night falls on an increasingly dysfunctional America: an America in which the "material basis" is quietly collapsing: an America, which sends containerships either empty or full of waste paper or scrap metal to a Hong Kong, where kids know things that six-figure American computer programmers, uh, don't.

I also think that Barbara realizes that in a hyperindividualistic society, the job seeker is motivated by the bad news that she must take hyperresponsibility and move forward, by posting to job sites that won't generate leads, "networking" with fools, and even singing Hosannahs at "business" meetings that wallop Christianity in a way so disloyal even to the literal meaning of the Bible that they are seen even by the scamps including Barbara, as blasphemy.

In one meeting, the clear literal meaning of the rich man and the camel is actually twisted into its reverse by people who insist on the "Bible's literal truth"...except of course where Amos, and Jesus, question the gospel of wealth.

The intelligent job seeker, Barbara now knows and transmits, must needs become Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. One does this as a Fun Game, Barbara. Like a child I Worked Out and Dressed for Success, all the while trying to not take it seriously...like the father in Life is Beautiful, I had to do something.

But then, like Wild Bill Hickok, "boys, why then, I died!" That is, I became an expatriate because even as a Fun Game, Escape from Freedom exacts a terrible toll.

Barbara's prescription is also Right On. But note that even in the 1930s, the employer class fought the very idea of a union for the unemployed with the same savagery they'd destroyed the IWW ten years before.

I think she's smart (dialectical) enough to realize that American individualism is a partial truth and an object lesson. Progressives who ordinarily live in networks (which include job and grant finding networks) built on solidarity never get a chance to learn the strength that comes from fighting life's battles as a middle aged unemployed corporate foot soldier who maintains his love for his family and his sense of humor.

He is a better man than the white collar class of Germany circa 1929 whose non-individual solidarity choice was the nightmare inverse of the collectivism that Barbara so rightfully recommends. He is the man who takes rejection like a man, or the single Mom who remains cheerful for the sake of the kids. He's in other words an American ordinary slob, and in Arthur Miller's words, "nobody dast blame this man", because "a salesman's gotta dream".

But he needs to Come from the Shadows.

Will he? The men at the events Ehrenreich attends mostly glare at her with the sort of hostility Adorno saw on the tram in 1930.

The jury is out.