GranolaBox

I’m in the middle of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On NOT Getting By in America. Every suburban white person in America should read this. It chronicles Ehrenreich’s experiment in which she travels to different parts of the country doing minimum to below minimum wage and attempting to survive. It’s incredible so far.

Anyway, she gets a few hours off from her two jobs in Portland, Maine. With no money, living in a claustrophobic trailer she finds little else to do on a Saturday night than attend a religious revival meeting. This passage is delicious.

“The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful “amens.” It would benice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the win-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it amy be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full-scale attack. I get up to leave, timing my exite for when the preacher’s metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there inthe dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.”

Filed under: General Observations, Politics on September 18th, 2008