There is not even a little doubt in my mind that, if The Rittenhouse Review's Jim Capozzola had remained a Republican, he'd be alive right now. He would have been in a well-paid think tank job, living the high life. (He did, after all, have a masters degree in foreign policy.) Most importantly, he would have had health insurance for the past six years.
And what did his talent and dedication get him on the liberal side of the political noise machine? Some free books. A life that, as intellectually stimulating as it was, reduced him to living on the charity of strangers.
People saying really kind and thoughtful things about how important he was to the cause - after he's dead. Isn't that ironic?
Jim died as the result of a preventable condition that went undiagnosed, and therefore untreated, because, without health insurance, he did not visit a doctor on a regular basis. Susan is currently working on putting together a non-profit that will provide health insurance to progressive bloggers, so that what happened to Jim will not happen to anyone else in our community. I sincerely hope she succeeds, and I will work to make sure she does, because what happened to Jim scares the shit out of me. This is because, you see, even though Jim was a dozen years older than me, like Jim, I am a blogger living in Philadelphia, trying to make a living as a progressive activist and a political writer, and I don't have health insurance either. In fact, the last time I went to a doctor was ten years ago, when I had emergency surgery to remove my appendix. (OK, that is not entirely true. I have been to the dentist twice, and I also went to an eye doctor once in order to purchase new glasses. But I haven't been to see a physician in over a decade.)
Finding a way to survive in the world of independent progressive media, or within the progressive political world outside of Washington, D.C., is not an easy game. A bare minimum in the way of support networks exist in either of these worlds. Also, The problem is further complicated by the chronic debt problems many Americans face. For example, what surplus money I have made over the last four years always went immediately into paying off the $25,000 in debt that I faced when I started blogging full-time back in May of 2004. Considering the drastic differences interest rates on the debt I faced, versus interest rates on investments I could have made, it was a no-brainer to throw my money in that direction. Fortunately for me, I have been luckier than most in terms of finding income as a blogger, and it shouldn't be long before I pay off my debt entirely. Then, so my plan goes, assuming I can maintain a decent source of income I can take my remaining money to purchase health insurance.
I am not whining about this. It was my choice to live as an activist, a writer, a union organizer, as an adjunct college professor, and, before that, as a teaching assistant in graduate school. I want to work in the non-profit world, the social justice world, and the non-corporate world in general. I am aware of the risks, but in my judgment the value of the path I have chosen outweighs them (at least so far). All I want to say is that pulling it off is not an easy task, and the lure of taking one of the many high-paying jobs I have been offered over the years tends to loom large. Last November, after the 2006 elections, Matt filmed me joking about this:
In addition to what I said in the video, I should have also added "if you don't care about having a social life," "if you don't mind being viciously attacked dozens of times every day," "if you don't have a wide range of interests in life," "if you don't mind paying for your own health insurance," "if you don't like taking vacations," and "if a one-bedroom apartment In West Philly is your idea of high living," then you definitely meet the qualifications for being a successful, full-time progressive blogger.
Choosing to go the route of social justice is not an easy one, and even now I sometimes contemplate "selling out" so that I won't have to worry about things like how to pay for my health insurance.
This difficult choice that many progressives have to make, between taking a high-paying job in the corporate world, and braving the difficult world of social justice, is the subject of an excellent new book by Philadelphia-based journalist Daniel Brook: The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. Rick Perlstein recently offered a rave review of the book, of which here is an excerpt:
The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook is one of the most brilliant and important books to come along in many years. Synthesizing stories from people in real life with a strong and healthy dose of history (particularly the history of the 60s through today, both politically and economically), Brook's book paints a stark picture of the death of the American middle class as a direct result of the Reagan Revolution, and implicitly suggests that the clear and simple solution is to revert to the economic policies of the New Deal.
Brook opens the book with stories of people torn between the desire to do good (in the world) and the need to do well (financially). Several conservative reviewers have trashed the book on this basis, suggesting one shouldn't empathize with people who are experiencing existential angst over making $150,000 a year in a corporate law firm instead of working for Public Citizen, but apparently none of those reviewers bothered to read beyond the first two pages. With devastating precision, Brook shows how the basic necessaries of health care, housing, and providing for a safe retirement require a startlingly high income (particularly for people who live in our big cities).
As Brook points out, "Starting in the 1980s, the media began to note that more and more of the best and the brightest were going to work for corporate America." He adds, "Their analysis focused on the proverbial carrot, never considering the stick." He lays out how the middle class has been wiped out in America, quoting, for example, a Brookings Institution report from 2006 that found "the proportion of middle-class central-city neighborhoods was cut in half between 1970 and 2000; the number of rich and poor neighborhoods grew. Most metropolitan neighborhoods were middle class in 1970; only 41 percent were by 2000." In LA it's down to 28 percent of households, and New York is the worst in the country. And it wasn't this way at all before Reagan.
Brook's book lays out in stark detail how the new economic realities of America have severely complicated the path of any progressive seeking to take the path of social justice work instead of corporate work. While my case is nowhere nearly as extreme and tragic and Jim Capozzola's, I know these realities up close. If you be a full-time progressive activist, do not expect a comfortable life in return.
Conservatives, however, apparently think that the preventable deaths of progressive activists such as Capozzola, and before him Maria Leavey, who refuse to take the corporate route and instead are dedicated to social change, are laughable instances of whining, left-wing elitism. For example, back on Monday, Instapundit, a tenured professor of law at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, mocked the entire premise of Brook's book:
Daniel Brook's The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. The tragedy, apparently, is that jobs in corporate America pay more than social activism. The Amazon reader reviews are fun, too.
As with Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt, this seems like more excessive complaint from the privileged classes. (Brook and Kamenetz overlapped at Yale, in fact). And is it really true, as the back cover asserts, that only the "corporate elite" can now enjoy middle-class comforts?
I opened Brook's book up and saw this passage:
After graduating Yale in 2003 with a double major in film studies and gender studies, Tara moved to San Francisco to pursue queer documentary filmmaking. She settled in the Castro district, the historic epicenter of American gay culture, and quickly discovered plenty of enticing projects. "There were lots of opportunities to do film and to help people with their films, but no one had any money to pay me so I did a lot of volunteering and part-time work," she told me in a Castro coffee shop.
My goodness. What message could the market system have been trying to send?
That line about the market economy is pretty laughable coming from someone whose well-paid job at a large public university is made possible by public funding. Like most conservative pundits, he isn't supported by the market economy, but feels obligated to tells everyone else that they should be. Further, Instapundit's July 16th link to Brook's book on Amazon also seems to have immediately led to eight extremely low reviews post by people who read Glenn Reynolds, but have clearly never read the book. I guess it is a perfect example of the conservative version of the free market in action for people to post reviews on Amazon without, you know, actually reading the book they are reviewing.
Conservative bloggers want to turn Brook's book into an anecdote about Ivy league elitists. I'm sure they don't want to turn it into a story about dead bloggers like Jim Capozzola. Then again, considering the string of death threats I received from conservative blog readers for my Googlebomb the Elections campaign back in October of 2006, there are actually probably a bunch of his readers who derive some satisfaction out of the death of a progressive blogger. The language of violence pervades the right-wing blogosphere (see here and here for just two examples), and I am sure that there are many in the conservative blogosphere that have no moral qualms about turning even the deaths of progressive activists who want to make a difference in the world into some argument about elitist we all are. After all, only dead elitists don't sell out. Everyone else has the good sense to live off public funds while criticizing others for not finding a cushy lifestyle via the market economy.
For the conservative movement, the harsh economic realities their policies have created for most Americans have had a nice side benefit of drying up activist recruitment in the progressive ecosystem. Right-wing economic policies have made it increasingly difficult for would-be progressive activists to literally make a living in politics and social justice. This right-wing attack on Dan Brook's excellent work is another example of an attempt to defund another emerging figure in the progressive movement. As such, tomorrow, when we are raising funds for Act Blue on Blogosphere Day, please consider not only helping out a key new organization of the Open Left, but also pick up a copy of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. I think the readers of this blog will find it to be a message and an argument of great relevance to the progressive movement, not to mention another way of actually helping fund it.
As an anti-spam measure, there is a 24-hour waiting period after registering before new users can comment. blog advertising is good for you
blog advertising is good for you
