going to print out and pass around to my Bushbot friends.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=3779Tomgram: Arlie Hochschild on the Bush Empathy Squeeze
In October 2003, Arlie Hochschild wrote a piece for Tomdispatch, Let Them Eat War, on the way President Bush might play war and terror fears as his trump card and win enough of the blue-collar vote to take the 2004 presidential election. He did and he won. Now, looking back, Hochschild, the author of The Time Bind and The Second Shift and a sociologist who knows a great deal about how the lives of all us have been squeezed in recent years, suggests another factor in the Bush victory and in Republican politics: an empathy squeeze. In the piece that follows she explains how, as Bush used his war policies to create votes, so he converted an economic program aimed at strip-mining America into a program for winning blue-collar hearts and minds. This piece will appear in print in the July issue of The American Prospect magazine. Tom
The Chauffeur's Dilemma
By Arlie Hochschild
Let's consider our political moment through a story. Suppose a chauffeur drives a sleek limousine through the streets of New York, a millionaire in the backseat. Through the window, the millionaire spots a homeless woman and her two children huddling in the cold, sharing a loaf of bread. He orders the chauffeur to stop the car. The chauffeur opens the passenger door for the millionaire, who walks over to the mother and snatches the loaf. He slips back into the car and they drive on, leaving behind an even poorer family and a baffled crowd of sidewalk witnesses. For his part, the chauffeur feels real qualms about what his master has done, because unlike his employer, he has recently known hard times himself. But he drives on nonetheless. Let's call this the Chauffeur's Dilemma.
Absurd as it seems, we are actually witnessing this scene right now. At first blush, we might imagine that this story exaggerates our situation, but let us take a moment to count the loaves of bread that have recently changed hands and those that soon will. Then, let's ask why so many people are letting this happen.
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