Barbara Ehrenreich

Studs was cool when it came to sports, and I never really liked Hunter S. Thompson, but...

Barbara Ehrenreich really stuck out to me as someone who did the same thing.

She wrote Nickel and Dimed where she went and lived and she made rules for herself.

I'm going to live on whatever job I can get that's considered the most unskilled labor.

And so obviously this is quite relevant to the work that I do and quite relevant to the care.

And yet I feel like there's this dark undercurrent, and I often will cite Barbara Ehrenreich when I talk about the...

the kind of shift in the public consciousness towards hook, line, and sinker, accepting placebo and nocebo as some sort of force beyond oneself and really kind of grappling, and I hear this a lot from my patients, with a pressure to maintain specific attitudes or specific mental, cognitive, emotional processes for fear that their cancer will get worse unless they stay positive all the time, or I'm going to die unless I really don't fall into, you know, any sort of negative thinking.

And I'm constantly working to counter those beliefs with my patients and to minimize some of their belief about the quote unquote power of this cancer.

My thing with beginning the story of theater with the Greeks is that my thinking on that has changed a lot over time.

I don't know if you're familiar with a book by Barbara Ehrenreich called Dancing in the Streets, but I highly, highly recommend it.

And it gets into the evolutionary biological reasons for why dance and rhythm exist in the human species.

And for me as a theater artist, I find this fascinating.

It was that one.

And it was Barbara Ehrenreich, the socialist writer.

I participated in one cancel mob because she said some dipshit, like, mean thing about Marie Kondo, the, like, tidying up woman from Japan.

And she, like, said some kind of, like, snippy mean, you know, thing about her.

And then, like, everybody just went after her.

Like, she's the...

Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term PMC, professional managerial class.

She's, like, a socialist writer.

It was that one.

And it was Barbara Ehrenreich, the socialist writer.

I participated in one cancel mob because she said some dipshit mean thing about Marie Kondo, the tidying up woman from Japan.

And she said some kind of snippy mean thing about her.

And then everybody just went after her.

Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term PMC, professional managerial class.

She's like a socialist writer.

She...

There's fiction based on fact, and facts you wish were fiction.

The journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who passed away at the age of 81, brought us decades of narrative journalism that introduced us to memorable characters, like the elder still working for a pittance cleaning motel rooms, or the young cheerleader hired to sell dubious doctors on the latest wonder drug, or the women hired at upon being hired or offered help applying for food stamps, welfare, assistance, because the company knows that no one can survive, let alone support a family on what they pay.

The New York Times obituary of Ehrenreich was headlined, Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side, to which she would have said, bitingly I bet, that this wasn't prosperity at all, but rather pain.

The pain of millions of the people she called society's anonymous philanthropists, who give their all and get almost nothing in return.

There's a very strong argument that that's an evolutionary imperative [laughs] that's driving us to that, to that concert, that drives us towards any crowd of, of like-minded souls.

Um, I've drawn, like, the, on the books of Barbara Ehrenreich, who's a huge journalistic hero of mine.

She wrote a great book called Dancing in the Streets in 2007, which, uh, which made the argument that early human societies, um, when, you know, you initially had groups of cave dwellers in, in family groups, they left those caves for the first time and started bonding together in the first sort of micro-civilizations, you know, groups of 20 to 30 people, larger than the family group, because they needed, uh, because they were better, um, able to survive pred- predators [laughs] like saber-toothed tigers by being in larger groups.

Well, how did they bond together? Well, language was part of that.

Is that, is that right?

No, no, no, no, no. Um, it, the- The John and Barbara Ehrenreich really talk about the professional managerial class takeover of the Democratic Party in 1967.

But, um, people were talking about things like the new class that this was from the right wing.

They were like, "The liberal elites are a new class." This was, um, um, promoted by, um, right-wing thinkers and think tankers.