Book Review: This Land Is Their Land
Barbara Ehrenreich's no garden-variety pessimist on health care, Wal-Mart, and the superrich. She's a full-fledged member of the glass-has-only-one-drop-left cohort.
The secret source of humor, Mark Twain famously observed, is not joy, but sorrow. This collection of short commentaries from the prolific and sharp-tongued social critic Barbara Ehrenreich suggests a corollary principle: The secret source of satire is not bemusement, but anger. And make no mistake—Ehrenreich is mighty PO'd.
The targets of her ire are a deserving, if predictable, bunch. Wal-Mart, health care execs, Big Pharma, the superrich, and, naturally, the bigwigs of Bush Co. all get drive-bys here. Ehrenreich imagines a notorious corporate layoff artist consigned to a fate in which he is faced with "a choice of Dick Cheney or Nancy Grace as a roommate and spending eternity listening to Sanjaya's greatest hits." In one of her more purely comic essays, Ehrenreich demands that God apologize for the South Asian tsunami (his "latest felony") and decries his "penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief."
Overreaching is an occupational hazard for professional pundits, and Ehrenreich is not immune. In the realm of health care reform, she contends, all the Democratic presidential candidates (save Dennis Kucinich) are guilty of "Chamberlain-like appeasement." The health care industry may be dysfunctional, but are insurance companies really like Nazis? And while This Land casts a useful spotlight on various injustices and absurdities, it lacks the heft and original reportage of Nickel and Dimed.
By the end of the book, it's clear that Ehrenreich isn't a garden-variety glass-is-half-empty pessimist; she's a full-fledged member of the glass-has-only-one-drop-left cohort. If you need to bone up on your talking points before encountering that mouthy right-wing cousin at an upcoming family get-together, This Land belongs on your summer reading list.
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GOOD to the last drop!!! That's what I expect.
Ehrenreich comes by her pessimism honestly and, although I havn't read the book yet, I expect to derive guilty pleasure from this read.
You ask, "are insurance companies really like Nazis?" Well, do they let people die just to make a few bucks? Then the answer, of course, is Yes.
She may be considered a "pessimist" by some--the trouble is, she is absolutely right! To be honest, the "New bipartisanship" doesnt give me much hope ,either. To those of us "in the trenches" (as a former social worker, now living om Mediciad--gouty arthritis--explains typing), the future has never looked bleaker. "Propgressives"(??) "giving up on universal heALth care"?? And regulating Big Business?? Why bother, then. For the first time since i was l8, I may not vote at all. Consider it a protest. Useless and pointless? Probably--and i'm just the guy to do it!!
Now bear in mind this is coming from someone who's STILL sporting a Kucinich '08 button on their backpack and has a stack of pocket constituions just out of arms reach at the time of writing this but come on, STOP WITH THE COMPARISONS TO THE NAZIS!!! They willfully exterminated 7 million people (funny how often those 1 million gentiles are forgotten) and god knows how many died in their conquest of Europe. The one thing people leave out of the debates on health care reform are the instances when health insurance actually works! I had a CAT scan done during a trip to the ER and all in all I had to pay up about 1/6th of the cost, including the deductible. Yes, their tricks to save a few bucks for the shareholders and denying people needed healthcare are deserving of public floggings but...god, no other nation has come close to doing what the Nazis did except for the Nazis and perhaps Stalin.
Sorry, the German Nazis did away with eleven million innocent people, not seven. There were 6 million Jews (3 million of which were Polish), another 3 million non-Jewish Poles, and 2 million "other" (gypsies, homosexuals, disable persons, Russian POWs, etc.)
It seems inevitable and ineluctable for even a half-perceptive person to be pessimistic in this "race to the bottom" epoch. For someone of Barbara Ehrenreich's intelligence, it not surprising that she is of this gloomy persuasion to the extreme. I am glad she isn't shy about expressing it.
Artificial gaiety, except in satire, isn't a very intelligent way of dealing with the harsh exigencies of life.
Mr. Mosedale,
You say, and ask, "The health care industry may be dysfunctional, but are insurance companies really like Nazis?"
"Dysfunctional" is what you call it? How detached are you from reality? It is a total disgrace, especially since it occurs within the wealthiest country in the world.
Your dismissal of the tyranny that these insurance corporations inflict on their clients leaves one with only one question: What is your agenda? Yes, they are truly like Nazis, as they make healthcare decisions they are not qualified to make, refusing to pay for necessary treatment, refusing care to others entirely, causing needless deaths just to pump up their quarterly reports to their stockholders. Your wave-of-the-hand dismissal of these criminals-against-fellow-citizens is, at its best, an insult to right-minded thinking.
Your remark questioning whether the insurance company facists are like Nazis misses the point. What good are they? The only way that average Americans can afford quality health care is through some kind of pooled fund. Insurance companys are the free market's way of providing this pooling, but the insurance companies have no incentive to include the people who most need the care, and they have to make profits, which they translate into having to maximize profits by eliminating expensive treatments and high maintenance claimants. This pooling of funds is a function that the government is clearly better able to serve. Doctors who used to fear government regulation of their practices are now facing the same thing from HMO's and insurance company red tape that makes government bureaucracy look like heaven by comparison. How anyone can defend insurance companies as an answer to health care funding is beyond me. They have had most of the last century to prove themselves, and we are now so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in health care management efficiency that it's time to go with something that other countries have implemented successfully - universal, single payer health insurance. Call it socialized medicine of you want, but it works, and capitalism has no workable alternative. Competition among insurance companies produces nothing but confusing plans with different coverage that add to the administrative complexity without improving either the quality or availability of care. You don't have to compare them to Nazis to argue that they don't deserve to continue running the health care industry.
I'll take honesty and tough talk to get at the truth from Barbara Ehrenreich rather than listen to the phony Democrat and Republicans party candidates with their "Change We can believe in" campaign of Obama or the Bush clone "maverick" McCain who would like to stay in Iraq 100 years.
Since Dennis Kucinich has been desposed and smothered of by his own party and has no power to compel the Democrats to fight the good fight and hold the Republicans accountable, what rational choice is left? Ralph Nader.
Ralph is the most capable and accomplished candidate and will draw upon the people and resources to solve America's problems and make the Bush/Cheney corp. accountable for Constitutional violations.
Ralph has been the good, the true and the faithful for 40 years.
If Ralph is not elected, future life will not be worth enduring in the United States.
Once again, Mrs Ehrenreich hits the nail right on the head. I bought this book and highly recommend it to other readers. Keep up the good work, Barbara... Cheers
Roy, what do you call all the Native Americans we've slaughtered here? The horror of the Final Solution lies in the machinelike precision and speed with which they killed those 11 million people. We've slaughtered easily three times that many between abuse of slaves, genocide of Native Americans, and our foreign policy from 1776 on down to today. I mean, c'mon, one million Iraqis are gone between two wars we've waged in their country AND the sanctions against them between war 1 and war 2. Just because we don't use gas chambers means nothing. And that's not even getting into all the people American corporations have murdered for the sake of profit. We have a lot to answer for.
