This Land Is Their Land (a book review post)

I'm going to say right up front: This is probably not a book you should read.
Wait, let me revise that: This is not a book you should read if you haven't read any other books by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Also: This is not a "book." It's a collection of essays.
Funny story: I didn't know that when I started reading it. Having read many other Ehrenreich books, I was more than a little thrown by how disjointed this seemed... until I realized that it was a collection of essays, then it made sense.

The other drawback is that the book is 10 years old, and there are moments when that is readily apparent. Beyond the fact that she's talking about the Bush presidency, that is. There are some things that have dropped out of the national consciousness since the book was published, which can leave you wondering why that was even something being talked about at the time. Like the attack on Cabbage Patch dolls back in the 80s by Right-wing nutjobs. Not that that is in the book, but it's one of those things that, when you look back at it, it leaves you scratching your head "why?!?!"

That said, this book still has a point to make, and it's a point that needs to be made again and again until people realize they need to do something about it rather than wait for someone else to fix it for them. Especially since the someone they are hoping will fix the problem are the very ones who are the problem: the 1%.

Unfortunately, the book will also highlight for you many of the ways we are regressing back to all of the places we were 10 years ago. Like, say, health care. Which got better for a brief period with Obamacare but, which, now, is being killed slowly by Trump (#fakepresident) and his goons. Or, say, banks...

Look, "we" put Dodd-Frank in place to prevent banks from doing things like they did that caused the economic collapse a decade ago. You do remember that, right? It was so bad that people were just walking away from their homes. You haven't forgotten, have you? The answer, or part of it, was Dodd-Frank. Of course, the 1% want to be able to bleed everyone else for as much as they can get, and they don't much like regulations which protect the consumer so, again, Trump (#fakepresident) and his Republican death machine have undone much of what was put in place to protect everyone else.

Actually, when you look at what happened there with the banks, it's like they were merely put in a time out. They had a club they were beating on people with and had it taken away from them and told to go sit in the corner. All the Republicans went to go play in the corner with the banks until they could maneuver the club around to someone who would give it back to the banks. It's all really rather sickening and the sheep who make up the people who vote for Republicans and who can't see beyond the dog-whistle words of "abortion" and "guns" will contentedly continue to gnaw off their own legs rather then open their eyes and look at what's being done to them by people like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnel, and the ever-blazing Trumpster fire who thinks he's a president.

Yeah, okay, none of that last paragraph was in the book, because it was written more than a decade ago, but there are sections of the book that really resonate with what's happening right now, especially since Dodd-Frank is being dismantled right now, so you can see the return to the things she's talking about in the book.

Anyway... If you've read other Ehrenreich books and enjoyed them, you'll probably find this a good read. Besides, it's quick, especially if you read it as bites of essays here and there. If you haven't read Ehrenreich, go get a copy of Nickel and Dimed or Bright-sided and start with that.

1984 (a book review post)

I first read 1984 in 1984. I was in 8th grade, and I suppose my teacher thought it was appropriately timed, though I do think 8th grade was the normal time to have the book assigned anyway. Maybe. At any rate, I remember reading the book and having thoughts like, "Isn't it great that someone wrote such a great warning for us so that this can never happen here." And that seemed to be the consensus, even from the teacher: This will never happen here.

Oh, how wrong we were.

No, I'm not saying we're full on living in Big Brother world, but, in many ways, we have taken our first steps toward it. And I'm not just talking about how we're (the USA) the most surveilled nation on the planet, either.

Here's an example:
In the book, the proles (the mass of common people) are kept uneducated, just enough education so that they can do the menial labor jobs they need to do. This serves multiple functions, but the primary ones are that the uneducated tend to question authority less and do as they're told more. It makes them unquestioning of their lots in life so that they don't rise up in revolt. When they're told that their lives are better than the people's of days past, they accept it and are thankful.

For the past several decades, the Republicans have been working at undermining education and preaching the worthlessness of education to their followers for these exact same reasons. When they tell their followers something like "the Republican healthcare bill is better for you than Obamacare," their followers swallow it whole and think it's yummy because they don't have the facilities to question what they're being told. The Republicans have discredited science in favor of dogmatism, and that's straight out of 1984.

At this point in my life, though, the thing I probably find most interesting about the book is the stuff about language, because Orwell has been proven, yet again, to be ahead of his time. The idea of Newspeak in the book is to reduce language to a point where things like freedom and equality aren't even concepts, and we, today, tend to think that that's kind of a dumb idea. I mean, you can't get rid of concepts, right?

Well, let me give you another example:
Anthropologically speaking, all cultures started out with only two colors: light and dark, or white and black, depending on how you want to say it. Other colors didn't exist for those people. You might think that's crazy talk because, if you look out the window, clearly, you can see a whole range of colors: blues and greens and reds and all of these colors that are just part of our world. Clearly, those colors exist, right? Well, sure, from an objective, scientific standpoint, those colors, the wavelengths for those colors, exist, but those people didn't see those colors, not the way we see them; conceptually, they were just lights and darks. But over time, other colors got added in, and it was actually an expansion of the world for those people.

See, here's the thing, and this is a science fact: Language changes our brains. How we speak and what we speak affects our brains and how we see the world and interact with the world. Learning other languages and new patterns of speech changes the "wiring" in brains and causes us to see the world differently. [So does reading, by the way.] So this concept in 1984 where they remove the ability from people to think of freedom and independence by removing the concepts from the language is not very far-fetched. It's not far-fetched at all.

And, hey, Trump is doing a great job of reducing language. And rewriting facts and history to suit his own agenda, another thing covered in the book.

I mean, it's like the GOP read 1984 and decided that they could use it as their own, personal playbook.
"...a hierarchical society [is] only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
That sounds like them to me.
"...human equality [is] no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted."

So, yeah, this book is still vitally important and everyone should be reading it. The thoughtpolice, though not quite real in the sense they are in the book, are growing in power, and a huge segment of the population have fallen under their sway and believe every fabrication and alteration that comes out of their mouths. Right now is a time for clinging to facts and truth and upholding them because "reality" isn't as objective as we'd like to think it is. In fact, reality is only as objective as we make it, and we can't allow Trumpism to bend and warp the truth of the world around us into the madness he'd like to make it.

Day Eight

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Dad made me go to the junkyard with him today. And then to the dump. It was so gross. The dump, not the junkyard. The junkyard might have been kind of cool except that Dad wouldn’t let me look at any of the old cars and stuff. He just wanted me to crawl around in piles of scrap and look for something to make an antenna out of.

No one has antennas. Trump keeps saying they’re going to make sure that everyone has antennas – it’s on the radio all the time – but the stores don’t have any. The only person I know of with an antenna is that old guy down the street, the one who still gets a newspaper, except everyone is getting newspapers now. Or trying to. We’re on a waiting list, and Dad is mad about that, too.

So Dad made me crawl all around in these piles of scraps looking for… You know, I don’t even know what I was supposed to be looking for. He just kept saying to find something he could make an antenna out of, but he wasn’t satisfied with anything I found, and he was kind of frantic about it because he wasn’t the only one to have the idea to check the junkyard, I think, because there were a lot of other people there, too, clawing through piles of metal scrap and junk. Some of them were making their kids crawl around in the piles of scrap, too.

Then I fell because someone yanked on something at the bottom of the pile I was on and everything shifted, and a rusty piece of I-don’t-know-what sliced open my leg, and my dad, instead of helping me, got into a fight with the man until the owner of the junkyard came over and made us leave. Dad was fuming, and I was bleeding everywhere, but did we go home? No! We drove to the dump!

Dad tried to make me crawl around in the garbage to look for stuff for him, but it stank so bad, and I was still bleeding, so I wouldn’t do it. He made me go back to the car, which is what I wanted to do anyway. He’s such an asshole. We left right after that. I watched him walk over to a pile of garbage, but he just stared at it for a few minutes until he came back to the car, and we drove off and he didn’t say anything else to me at all. Why should I have to crawl around in garbage shit when he won’t even do it? Asshole.

But he got yelled out by mom when we got home and she saw my leg. I wish that had gone on longer, because she didn’t let him get a word in at all and told him she didn’t care about some “damn fucking antenna” if it meant that I was going to get lockjaw because of it. Mom never cursed, so I knew something bad was happening.

It wasn’t until we – Mom and me, because dad stayed home – were on the way to the hospital that I could find out what lockjaw was. That made me scared. I didn’t know if I’d had a tetanus booster. I just know that I sometimes go get shots; I don’t know what kind of shots they are. I think I might decide that I want to know, now, though.

We had to wait a long time in the emergency room, and it was so boring. Mom’s phone wasn’t good for anything since there wasn’t any internet, there was nothing on the TV in the waiting room except static, and I didn’t even have the stupid book I was reading because Mom made me get out to the car so fast. So I just sat there and bled on the floor until some nurse noticed and yelled at me for getting blood on the floor, but they took me to see a doctor.

The doctor said I was probably okay since it hadn’t even been two years since I had a deetap but, since the cut was so deep, they would give me a booster anyway. And another antibiotic, just to be safe. And stitches! I had to have stitches because my stupid father made me crawl around in rusty scrap metal.

Then, before we could leave, Mom had a fight with the lady at the desk because of the bill. I didn’t know they made you pay when you have to go to the emergency room, and I guess Mom didn’t know either. Or she did but didn’t realize how much it was going to be because we lost our insurance when Trump took away Obamacare. Mom did a lot of cussing and kept saying, “What was I supposed to do, let her fucking leg fall off?”

Finally, we just left, but the desk lady kept yelling at us as we were going that they were going to send us a bill. Mom actually flipped her off as we were going out the sliding doors. I’ve NEVER seen my mom act like that before. Or heard her say anything bad about Trump, but she cursed him all the way home.

Good.

My leg hurts.

A lot.



A Note from the author:
I hope you are enjoying this piece of FREE! serialized fiction. At least so far as it is fiction. For the moment. Who's to say what could be happening a year from now considering where we are at this moment in time.
Speaking of FREE!, because this is FREE!, it would be great, if are enjoying this story, if you could support the author by purchasing one of his other stories. Like, maybe, "Tiberius," collection One of Shadow Spinner. Or something else; there are links all over the page and many different types of stories available.

It's always great to feel supported.

Thanks!