The Great Divide

Rating:
Summary: There's a meaness in the land....
Review: From reading Studs Terkel's _Working_ some years ago I knew that he was a perceptive and honest writer with a ground level understanding of working-class reality. This later work,however, is even better. In fact, it is the best, the most accurate and honest, book on present day American society that I've read.

Terkel interviews a wide range of typical Americans and shows the great economic, social, racial, political, and religious differences that separate us. The primary problem seems to be the huge and growing gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" (the book makes it clear that the only thing that most Americans are really interested in is money.) He also points out the extreme historical illiteracy of the younger generations that cuts them off from their own past.

The most frightening part about the book is the almost sociopathic way in which the "haves" have of belittling the "have-nots." People with money would literally rather see poor people starve in the streets rather than see one dime of their taxes spent on "welfare." As the book points out, there's a meaness in the land that wasn't here in the thirties, and we're losing a feeling as a people.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to the 60s?
Review: This book is a collection of interviews with ordinary Americans about their lives in the 1980s. A wide variety of people from many walks of life explain who they are, what they do, and what they worry about, from socialites to factory workers, from Clarence Paige to a Klan member. The general, though unstated, theme of the book seems to be the loss of the idealism of the 1960s. We hear from a university teaching assistant how students of the younger generation not only have no memories of the Vietnam conflicts, but they also have no interest in questioning authority. We hear updates from people involved in the Civil Rights movement, and from others reminiscing about their neighborhood social activism during the 60s. Many of the interviewees are from the Chicago area, highlighting the division between the various neighborhoods there that rose to a crisis-point during the 1980s. The book closes with an interview from Jean Gump, a 1980s peace-activist imprisoned for damaging a nuclear warhead, possibly intended as a positive note for the future in that it shows how some idealists were still doing what they thought was right.

Terkel documented the problems being experienced in the 1980s by union members and farmers. Looking back now, I can have pity for these people as individuals, but it seems the only way out of their quagmire was to take a different approach. Unions will have little success in maintaining wages amongst American workers as long as foreign workers earning far less per hour compete with them. Instead of trying to organize American workers, the energies of union organizers might be better spend at this point in time in lobbying for legislation that would restrict competition in the US to products manufactured by workers who enjoy the same labor organization rights and safety protections as US workers have. There's nothing wrong with a little competition, as long as the playing field is level. When productivity increases, jobs will inevitably be lost, and the only viable way to fight back long-term is to somehow differentiate the product (offer organic produce, increase quality, or invent something new) so that consumers will be willing to pay premium prices. But allowing sustained aid programs to those who have lost their jobs only leads to a culture of entitlements without creating real solutions.

I found the most heartening interviews in the book to be the back-to-back interviews between a big-city chief of police and his wife. The police chief tells us how he is first and foremost, a civil servant, that he fervently believes in law-and-order, and how under his watch, arrests have increased dramatically. Then his wife tells us that she is a peace activist, and has been arrested 5 times for civil disobedience by officers serving under her husband. This is a true indicator of a civilized society, where people are not afraid to criticize the government or take action against it, and where a man can occupy a position of supreme authority in a city, yet his immediate family members are subject to the same laws as everyone else. And to top it all off, both the husband and wife are first-generation immigrants. Only in America!