Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - American Histories

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

One of our heroes Barbara Ehrenreich passed away earlier this year. She was one of America’s best undercover journalists. We once spoke with her about her book Bright Sided, her journey into the heart of American darkness:  the  positive thinking industry. Also we hear from an ex clan member who reveals the secret of the twinkling cross. Plus your host wonders “what would the founders do” @radiotopia is THE home for independent podcasts–we own our shows, and make them how we want, because we’re supported by listeners like YOU! Donate today to help us reach our goal of 1,000 donors. Thank you <3

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called American Histories. Barbara Ehrenreich, one of my favorite writers, passed away earlier this year. She wasn't the only person to practice undercover journalism, but she was definitely one of the best. In her most famous book, Nickel and Dimed, she worked a number of low-skilled jobs to report on working conditions in America's low-wage sectors. She kind of expected it would be awful, but still the toil and humiliation surprised her. But what really blew her mind was just how difficult it was to even make ends meet. My personal favorite of her books is Bright Sided.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she immersed herself in the world of positive thinking. And to her horror, she discovered an entire industry dedicated to scamming society's most vulnerable. Like all of her books, though, Bright Sighted also serves up an almost secret history of America. I interviewed Barbara Ehrenreich in 2010, back when Bright Sighted came out. And we're going to revisit this one again in her honor. One of my favorite things about your book is some of the individuals you encounter, a lot of them think that you're, you know, from another planet. This whole idea that happiness doesn't necessarily equal good, you know, you seem to blow a lot of folks' minds when you

bring up that idea. Well, I'm not against happiness. Let me clear that up right away. It's a hard thing to measure and study. I do complain about that. What I'm really up against here in Bright Sighted, though, is the pretense of happiness, the kind of act we perform for each other so much, which is called being positive, being cheerful, upbeat, no matter what the situation. And this is not something we just do voluntarily. I mean, it is expected. It is demanded of people in so many jobs today.

The positive attitude is said to be more important than whether your skills are, your experience, or anything. In your book, you take us on this journey that you have with breast cancer to show just how pervasive the positive thinking industry is ingrained in the healthcare system. We may not get healthcare, public option, but we do get the plush color bears. And again, this seems like another thing that's taken for granted. You know, I was even let down when I read in your book that, you know, there are studies that show that actually, no, positive thoughts do not empower the immune system. But why are studies that call this sort of, you know, wishful thinking, I guess, into question, having such a hard time making it to the front pages? Well, I really first became aware of positive thinking as a requirement in our culture when

I was being treated for breast cancer eight years ago now. And everywhere I heard the same thing. You've got to be positive about it. You've got to think, even think of it as a good thing that's happening to you. Think of cancer as a gift, because at the other end, you're going to be more spiritual, evolved, etc. Now, that's not how I felt. I was horrified to have the disease, horrified at the forms of treatment that existed and still exist. Didn't know why we have this epidemic. So I had a very bad attitude. And yet I was also being told that whether I recovered or not might depend on my attitude or did depend on my attitude, that the kind of bad, angry attitude that I had could be condemning me to death. It was sort of smile or die. And well, fortunately, we now know

from a number of studies and any with different kinds of cancer, that your outlook, your mental state has nothing to do with the progress of the disease. Now, that's, I think, a big relief, because it's an extra burden to not only be sick, but be told that you will get better only if you change this other thing that's wrong with you, that is your attitude. Yeah, now you quote a few women from message boards that you found online during this period that were really, really haunting. Basically, women wondering why, considering how positive they were being, why were they still ill? There's a very sad thing I quote.

It's actually from Deepak Chopra's website, where a woman had written to him saying that her cancer kept metastasizing, and even though she did all the right things to be positive, everything apparently that he had urged her to do, and that she was constantly working on her attitude. And he wrote back and said, well, you just have to work harder. And I thought, oh my God, give the poor woman a break. You know, what's happening to her is terrible. We have to acknowledge that. And maybe

we have to listen to her pain instead of just telling her to put on a smiling face. This, to me, seems the strongest claim that, you know, positive thinking might actually be bad for you because a woman in this situation can't help but sort of turn this frustration inwards. You start, you know, to blame yourself. It's the same, I think, though, with other things besides disease. If you lose your job in a layoff, you're going to encounter the career coaches and life coaches who will tell you that that's an opportunity. That's not a bad thing. That's an opportunity. Now you should be cheerful.

You should be, in fact, grateful for having lost that old job. I was just laid off, and it's the best thing that ever happened to me. There is a book called We Got Fired, and It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us by Harvey McKay, a very well-known coach and positive-thinking guru. So, yeah, I think we tend to silence people who are unhappy, maybe for very good reason, because of terrible circumstances in their lives. And the attitude, I think, it becomes very cruel.

It's like, don't be a whiner, don't be a complainer. You know, it's been an amazing year watching the media try to both apologize for not being on the ball about the financial crisis, and at the same time, try to pretend that it's now able to explain to us why it happened. And you seem to suggest that the core of the problem might actually be related to positive thinking. In other words, the banker who brings up, you know, the harsh realities of impending mass mortgage default default is seen as negative and not a team player

is this really what happened there are a lot of things that fit into the financial meltdown of two thousand and eight and greed and uh... you know i i i can economy more and more uh... focused on financial transactions rather than making anything more doing anything useful. But you cannot deny the role of sort of mandatory optimism in bringing about the crash. At one level, the level of, you know, average people, poor people even, who took out subprime

mortgages and adjustable rate mortgages in the middle of the decade, because they were told, don't worry about it. You know, here's your opportunity. Maybe they had a positive thinking type preacher, as many of the Christian evangelicals are today, who was saying, God wants you to have a bigger house. So yeah, now there's finally a mortgage for you. Grab it, you know. And then at the other level, at the highest levels of the corporations, this mentality was becoming, as one insider put it to me, viral.

That what happens in the world just depends on what we think, not on what we do. And if you want good things to happen, you have to eliminate negative thoughts and negative people who might be around you. So if there's somebody who keeps saying, oh, I'm a little worried about the subprime exposure we've got here, get rid of him. You know, that's annoying. That'll bring, it's a bummer. It'll bring everybody down. You don't want that around. Isn't this perhaps the best definition then of Alan Greenspan's irrational exuberance? Yeah, I mean it's certainly related to what Greenspan called irrational exuberance, but I think you have to also put in the factor of

how much this was a bubble of, you know, people had enclosed themselves in a bubble of cheerfulness, and would not let any doubts or questions creep into that. So let's say you decided to hit the lecture circuit and motivate people to stop thinking positive. Let's say you're at the podium in an auditorium of folks who've paid money, like some of the things you've gone to, to get inspired.

How do you start off? Well, first of all, positive thinking can hurt because it's delusional you know if you have to assure yourself that everything is going to turn out well all the time you're in trouble you know we need something called realism it's an old-fashioned idea trying to understand what's really going on in the world without just coloring the world with our wishful thinking. On November 14, 1775, the revolutionary forces were dealt a most cruel of blows. John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and the royal governor of the colony of Virginia, issued a proclamation. Now, even though Lord Dunmore had been forced to abandon his estate at Williamsburg, he was still directing operations against the Patriots from his ship off the coast of Yorktown, and

this proclamation was perhaps his greatest offensive move. Dunmore's proclamation offered freedom to all slaves belonging to rebels able to bear arms for the crown. It is the first large-scale emancipation of slave labor in American history. Within a month, several hundred slaves risked their lives in escape and joined him. It is a dark, dark moment for our freedom-loving ancestors, because this put them in an impossible situation, in the middle, fighting both their British overlords and their rebelling slaves. The Virginia Convention quickly drafted a counter-proclamation, which reminded the slaves

that the punishment for escape would be death, a horrible death without benefit of clergy or mercy. But still, freedom beckoned. It is estimated that up to 100,000 attempted escape. The men who did manage to reach Dunmore joined his Ethiopian regiment. And by December 1775, this regiment had nearly 300 blacks, including its most famous member, the escaped slave named Titus. Titus and his comrades wore regimental uniforms inscribed with the words, Liberty to Slaves. They believed they were not just fighting for their own individual freedom, but for freedom and liberty itself.

During the winter of 1776, nearly half of Dunmore's forces were black, and when they fought against the North Carolina troops at the Battle of the Great Bridge, they captured two colonels. One was even taken by his former slave. News of this event spread like wildfire and only fueled Lord Dunmore's undoing, for he vastly misjudged how those not caught up in the loyalist or rebel cause, the Great Middle, would take his proclamation. The moderates exclaimed that Lord Dunmore's proclamation was blasphemy, a direct offense of their rights and dignities.

But I think it was really the idea of being molested by one's property that kept them up at night. But regardless, they began to accept what the radicals had been saying for some time, that the protection of their freedoms and rights was worth fighting for. Unfortunately, the Ethiopian regiment did not get to see much battle. They were decimated by a smallpox outbreak in less than a year, and Titus died from a gangrene infection, from a musket wound. When the war ended,

the British, determined to make good on their promise of freedom, evacuated almost 300 former slaves to Nova Scotia. But the victorious Americans were just as determined to make an example of the slaves who had dared to interfere in their glorious fight for freedom. Some plantation owners even journeyed to the north,

seizing blacks off the streets of New York and Boston. But they were the lucky ones. There are many accounts of former slaves who were executed in the most barbaric and horrific fashion. Decapitations, flayings, burnings. On one occasion, a 15-year-old girl is thrashed to death by her former master. And before she dies, he places hot embers in her wounds. I realize, of course, it's bad form to bring stuff up like this. Race and slavery do have a way of mucking up America's glorious historical narrative. But I must confess that all the outrage and all the shouting of late

has set my overactive imagination spinning, and I just can't get this scene out of my head. I'm in a jail cell with a bunch of intellectuals and bohemians, and just beyond the bars, our jailers, who are decked out in these red, white, and blue overalls, are arguing about our fate. One keeps shouting with determination, well, what would the founding fathers do?

I'd have to say probably the earliest memory that I have of a cross-birding would be there was a black man and a white woman that were married to each other and they were living in our town and so several of us went by and made a cross and went by and put it in their yard and set it on fire. I found this ex-Klan guy, Johnny Angel, on Twitter back in the early days, back when Twitter was fun and exciting and full of promise. Perhaps I'm just revealing my own positive thinking, but there's something inspiring about Johnny, something that makes me believe that one day we all just might emerge from

the darkness of America's history into a brightly colored and brightly lit future. When the Klan makes a cross, they wrap it in rags and soak it in kerosene. The correct way that they did it, then you set it on fire. That way it burns for quite a while before it goes out. Whenever the Klan would do something like that you didn't stand around and watch it, you know, watch the cross burn. You just put it on someone's lawn, light it on fire and get going, you know, watch the cross burn. You just put it on someone's lawn, light it on fire, and get gone, you know, because, I mean, if you get caught, you know, you're going to go to jail. You do it in the middle of the night, you do it in the dead of the night, you do it quickly, light it on fire, and gone. That's the way that the Klan did things back when I was a kid.

Now, see, when the Klan burns a cross on someone's lawn, it's a little different from when they burn a cross at a rally. That is their symbol. And they stick around and do that when they're standing around in a circle generally and they light the cross. They say, behold the fiery cross, the oldest symbol of Christianity, signifies Jesus is the light of the world. Through him he removes all darkness and hail the white race.

So what about electric crosses? It seems to me I found some information that the Klan also would use, especially for their own meetings, they would use electric crosses. Did you ever see anything like this? Yeah, well, what the Klan done is, if it's too cold outside, then they would come into someone's home or to a meeting hall, like a lodge hall or wherever they would have their meeting and they would have a wooden cross that's erected on a stand and it would have Christmas lights strung around it like white Christmas lights strung around the cross all the way up and down and you know it's to cover the entire cross and plugged in and they light it that way and then prospective members must kneel at that cross,

or they use it as if they're going to just do it. Even if they're not swearing in prospective members, they would have a cross lighted that way, and that's what some people would refer to as the electric cross. But if you were a prospective member and you were ready to join this organization that you were all excited to kneel down before the fiery cross, and you opened your eyes and you're just looking at a string of Christmas, I could think that might be a little bit of a letdown, no?

The idea of someone joining the Klan is pretty sinister anyway, you know, the reason someone would join. I don't think that they would be too concerned with whether it's done with a cross that has Christmas lights stuck around it or the fiery cross out in the pasture somewhere, you know. I think that what's important to the Klan is getting someone to take the oath to join the Klan because the oath of the Klan, what they call the naturalization ceremony, that's when someone goes from being a prospective member to a full-pledged member of the clan. What kind of cross did you get? I had the one with the Christmas lights stuck around it,

and I was sworn in inside of a home by the imperial wizard himself. When I look back on any of that, I look at the whole symbol of it as a Christian now. I look back on it as a symbol of evil, as a symbol of Satan, you know, because it is a symbol where the cross sets mankind free. And when the cross is on fire, to me personally, it's evil because it is Satan trying to destroy what sets mankind free. I'm not going to assault your intelligence and tell you that when I gave my life to Christ,

you know, I jumped up after saying one prayer. I jumped up and I said, man, I see the cross differently. Now I see black people differently. They're my friends and I love them. They're my brothers and sisters. And I'm going to call up Cindy Popper and Michael Jackson and sing. We are the world with them.

You know, that's not what happened. Okay. I had a whole, I had to get my mind renewed. I still have prejudice. I still had racism. I still saw things different. And I had to quit reading all of that junk that I'd been reading all of my life. I had to burn my Klan robe.

I had to get rid of all that Klan paraphernalia. You burned it. You burned it. I sure did. Really? I burned my Klan robe. I burned my Klan robe. I burned Klan paraphernalia.

I burned Klan books. I had Klan posters. I had Klan knickknacks, you know, you name it. I built a bonfire and I threw all of that in there. I rebuked it off of my life and I said, I want this to be no part of my life whatsoever. My whole journey in life was all about the cross. I burned the cross and now I've gone to preaching the cross. On my Twitter page is the cross of Christ with the Holy Spirit dove floating across the cross. It's a symbol of Christianity, a symbol of Jesus Christ and what Jesus did

for me at Calvary with the Holy Spirit dove coming across it, which is the spirit of peace. So today then, if you see a cross with Christmas lights on it, say, on someone's lawn at Christmas time or at the mall, does this bring back memories of your Klan days? Sometimes it does. I'll be standing in church, and sometimes they'll be singing a hymnal, and there's a song that says, At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light. Sometimes I'll hear them singing that, and the memories come back. And I know it shouldn't, because know, and the memories come back, you know.

And I know it shouldn't, I mean, because it's a good clean beer song, and they're certainly not singing songs about the KKK. But, you know, the whole idea, when I sing a song at the cross where I first saw the light, I mean, of course I'm going to have some bad memories that's going to pop back into my mind. But the thing to do is that I just, when that happens, I just go on and I just pop it right. I do my best to pop it right Theory of Everything. This installment is called American Histories. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Barbara Ehrenreich and Johnny Angel. All three stories come from my own personal historical archive. You can find more information at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com.

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