The Antichrist of North Carolina

BARBARA EHRENREICH

When I was in Scandinavia last spring promoting Nickel and Dimed, interviewers kept asking me to tell them about the "debate" my book had provoked in the United States. I had to confess that it had provoked no debate at all, at least none that I had heard of. In fact, when my book was adopted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a reading for all incoming students in 2003, the
administration expressed its conviction that it was a "relatively tame selection," at least compared to last year's choice -- a collection of readings from the Koran. I was beginning to envy Michael Moore, whose publisher had cleverly boosted sales by attempting to suppress his book Stupid White Men in the wake of 9/11.

Then, early in July, I got a phone call from Matt Tepper, president of the student body at UNC-CH, inquiring as to what I thought would be a useful way to direct the incoming students' discussions of Nickel and Dimed. I suggested that the students ought to apply the book's concerns to their own campus, where workers have been trying to organize against heavy administrative opposition. I sat back to wait for new students to arrive at the end of the summer so the controversy could begin. Within about a week--while the incoming first-year students were still working on their tans--a controversy arrived all right. It just wasn't the one I was hoping for.

On July 10, a group of conservative UNC-Chapel Hill students calling themselves the Committee for a Better Carolina, held a press
conference, along with a handful of right-wing state legislators, to denounce Nickel and Dimed as a "classic Marxist rant" and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics." Fine, at least I could cling to the adjectives "classic" and "intellectual." But when I read the full-page ad the Committee for a Better Carolina had taken out in The News and Observer, I saw that this controversy was less about the book than it was about me.

The ad charged me with being a Marxist, a socialist, an atheist, and a dedicated enemy of the American family--this last confirmed by a citation from the Heritage Foundation on my long-standing conviction that families headed by single mothers are as deserving of support as those headed by married couples. I was greeted on North Carolina radio talk shows by hosts asking, "What does it feel like to be the Antichrist in North Carolina?" and similarly challenging inquiries.

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She could have done so much more for all the people she professed to care so much about in her fine book by not voting for Ralph Nader and putting Bunnypants in the White House. But no, she wanted to stand by her "principles", so she voted for Nader: a relatively costless move for a well-off woman like herself, though she can feel good about herself, even as she enjoys her Bush taxcut. Unfortunately, all of the working people she covered in her fine book are now much worse off then they ever would have been had Al Gore been in the White House.

all of that from the article.

I must have missed something.
oh yeah, the fairly blatant prejudice against greens here.

whatever,
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