Don't Think, Smile!
McCarraher, Eugene
LEFT OUTSIDE Don't Think, Smile! Notes from a Decade of Denial Ellen Willis Eugene NcCarraher Although Ellen Willis's new collection of essays on the passing decade covers a range of cultural...
...Even so, her current book exhibits her signature clarity, argumentative dexterity, and moral passion—even if "morality" is, for an unrepentant Reichian like Willis, the chafing underwear of the bourgeois patriarchy...
...Her characterization of anticon-sumerism as "the puritanism of the Left" reduces it to moralism and obscures its sophisticated charges against consumer culture: the encouragement of political apathy, the anxious and joyless treadmill of purchasing, the conversion of "resistance" into commodified pacification...
...The ease with which Willis's agenda of desire has been counterfeited suggests that the Left will have to lift repression of longings that are more basic and intractable—redemptive, one should say—than it has dared to acknowledge...
...and the unportfolioed worry over such things...
...But these hopes must seek fruition not through the state—ultimately a tool of the oppressors, Willis warns—but in an array of decentralized institutions and experiments...
...Why, she asks with eminent Utopian sense, is labor in even the most stupefying, harmful, and/or ill-paid job an "index of moral and spiritual worth...
...All the great social movements of this century began with a "visionary minority" which, though derided at first as impractical, crazy, and/or immoral, captured the popular imagination by "presenting another possible world" and expressing "the secret hopes even of the resigned and the cynical...
...Her lame defense of Bill Clinton (to her, he's a neurotic, social-climbing Lothario wisely tolerated by a sexually enlightened public) makes no reference to the First Couple's serial duplicity and ruthlessness, and dares not plumb the meaning of the public's happy conjunction of sexual tolerance and political conservatism...
...What passes for morality and common sense when the Dow is the barometer of our social climate...
...Don't even think about racism, sexism, maldistributed wealth, ecological despoliation, and especially not the possibility of better ways to arrange our affairs...
...Yet they also contain a stock of polemical cowchips...
...the accelerating industrialization of professional as well as manual labor...
...A former staff writer at the Village Voice, Willis now occupies a post at New York University, a venue whose "not pampered but merely humane" conditions provide a touchstone for cultural criticism...
...Willis also recoils from the fusion of class politics and progressive nationalism advocated by Richard Rorty, Michael Tomasky, and others as an antidote to "identity politics...
...She observes that affirmative action, though "useful," functions both as a recruitment vehicle for the professional-managerial elite and prolongs the Left's "reflexive and misplaced reliance on an increasingly recalcitrant state...
...Suffused by a romantic and intelligent magnanimity, these essays abound with nuggets of insight: the erasure of gender from the Simpson case...
...Notes from a Decade of Denial Ellen Willis Eugene NcCarraher Although Ellen Willis's new collection of essays on the passing decade covers a range of cultural and political episodes—les affaires Lewinsky, Jones, and Hill, the Simpson and King trials, the Million Man March, The Bell Curve imbroglio, feminist infighting over censorship—her broader concern is the sorry but redeemable state of the American Left...
...I'd sign on (with reservations) only to the very last of those positions...
...Let a hundred flowers bloom...
...A new New Left, she counters, must be Utopian and (though she doesn't use the word) anarchistic...
...Excoriating the smug and celebratory moralism that pervades so much of contemporary public discussion, Willis calls into question hard work and meritocracy as well as the more obvious evils of racial bigotry and sexual inequality...
...True to form, she inveighs about the meretriciousness of family, community, religion, and other idols of the tribe...
...D Eugene McCarraher teaches history at Vil-lanova University...
...The hysterical liberal response to The Bell Curve signaled, she contends, not a clear moral consensus against racism but the conflicted racial feelings of liberals themselves, as well as their determination to stifle discussion of class (the main subject of The Bell Curve, as she usefully reminds us...
...And in one of her finest passages, she argues that hard work is neither useful as an exercise nor desirable as an ethic...
...Only the p.c...
...Class itself is an identity, she notes shrewdly (and a surreptitiously white, male, blue-collared one at that, she suspects), and the nation-state, however "progressive," is imperiled by capitalist globalization...
...Her eminently correct answer: The work ethic discredits dissent and propels accumulation...
...In her previous work, Willis has defended, among other things, sexual freedom, unrestricted abortion, and the liberating potential of pornography and rock music...
...the ambivalence of Americans about "the culture wars" as a sign of cultural radicalism's "enormous and lasting impact...
...Yet Willis doesn't find the Left very inspiring...
...This last shortcoming is telling, I think, because it underscores the impoverished and assimilable way in which Willis formulates those "secret hopes" of the subaltern...
...Beholden to the cultural-studies chestnut that consumer culture is a hotbed of "resistance," Willis testily dismisses arguments that "freedom" and "pleasure" have been easily absorbed—if not defined—by the bourgeois, slightly less male-dominated order...
...The cultural Left or "identity politics" with which she identifies most unambiguously has come to rely far too heavily on centralized authority to promote tolerance and Commonweal I 8 October 22,1999 recognition...
...Throughout, Willis's indictments of "Judeo-Christian morality" as a pathological condition of self-hatred and coercion never get beyond secularist boilerplate, and cannot be respected by anyone with a modicum of historical or religious literacy...
...By affirming this "democratic, libertarian radicalism," Willis poses powerful if not always convincing challenges to the complacency of our time...
...Don't even think about it," is Willis's answer as she summarizes the warnings of businessmen, politicians, and their legion of flaks in the punditocracy...
...Voicing a proud and unyielding desire for a "freer, saner, more pleasurable way of life," the New Left of the 1960s, she reminds us, once beckoned us to a life beyond the pursuit of higher property values, and demanded the elevation of freedom, pleasure, and joy to the status of fundamental and inalienable rights...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 18
