Two Tears in a Bucket

THE WORKING POOR: INVISIBLE IN AMERICA BY DAVID K. SHIPLER KNOPF, 336 PAGES, $25

DAVID SHIPLER'S Working Poor starts with promise, dragging the reader straight toward the barricades of class war. Rage is the dominant theme from the opening line of the introduction: "Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage," he writes, implying that whoever has the time to read his book does have the luxury of rage and should feel it. It's a welcome challenge to the reader, a contract I looked forward to fulfilling on my end.

Shipler lays out some of the most obvious yet censored truths about America's ugly soul right from the start: "The American Myth still supposes that any individual from the humblest origins can climb to well-being. But the American Myth also provides a means of laying blame…if anyone in the society can attain prosperity through work, then the failure to do so is a fall from righteousness. The marketplace is the fair and final judge; a low wage is somehow the worker's fault." As Shipler shows, most people don't even consider questioning an employer's wage scale, no matter how low it is set. It's as if questioning low wages in this country is somehow unseemly, and makes one, by definition, a cultural outcast. Meanwhile, the upper classes' fortunes have skyrocketed while the working poor's have stagnated or fallen.

Shipler names villains, a rarity among liberals. He nails Judy Woodruff of CNN, who likened welfare status to immorality during a 2000 Republican presidential debate, and professor Michael Goldstein, who said on PBS, "We all live in the suburbs now, not in the inner cities"—thus denying the very existence of millions of impoverished people in a way that has become almost second-nature in post-Reagan America.

For the first third of his book, Shipler more than fulfills his opening pledge to inspire rage. The stories he tells of America's working poor getting trampled by a cruel and predatory economic order are so heart-breaking, the villains so contemptible, that you find yourself thinking, "Why aren't any of these people strapping suicide belts to their torsos and taking the assholes down with them?" (Don't laugh—on March 30, a Bolivian miner who was denied a state pension blew himself up in the Bolivian Congress building, leading to the granting of pensions two days later for tens of thousands of Bolivian miners. Why are America's poor so passive?)

Shipler is at his best with concrete examples. He exposes how the rules in this country allow H&R Block to prey on the people's earned income tax refunds, transferring the working poor's meager funds to the company's shareholders. This is but a microcosm of the vicious wealth transfer from the bottom to the top that we've seen over the last few decades.

In the chapter "Work Doesn't Work," a critique of the welfare reform act of 1996 (given the Soviet name "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act"), Shipler twists the microscope lens closer, exposing the very genes of a socio-economic culture where the working class gets fucked no matter how hard they try. The case of Caroline Payne is the most unbearable of all. A single, middle-aged white mother, hard-working and hard-lucked, Payne earned $6 an hour in a Gillette factory in the 1970s; in 2000, she earned $6.80 an hour at Wal-Mart, making her the statistical norm. She loses her teeth and can't afford dentures—meaning she has greater difficulty finding work. After her welfare benefits are cut, she loses the house she so desperately saved up for and ends up homeless with her daughter.

And then Shipler reveals the most shocking detail of all about Caroline Payne. In the 2000 elections, "Bush struck her as preferable…'I want a motivated person like me that has been through these situations and knows what it's like out there [Caroline says].'"

This is the defining moment of the book, the point at which the working poor are revealed as stupid. If Shipler were even more honest, you'd also see how mean they could be. Cut through every layer of modern America in Shipler's analysis, and what you get is a stupid, nasty culture, through and through. The implications are both profound and overwhelming.

And it is here, on the final block toward the barricades, that Shipler cops out, diverting his reader toward the familiar, weepy, tissue-lined road of liberal bathos. This is bathos with a John Denver soundtrack—the very bathos that helped to turn once-raging leftists into the arms-are-for-hugging idiots of today. To truly consider Caroline Payne's example would mean abandoning warm liberal notions of humanism and the essential decency of the poor. Being poor is a horrible state that often makes people mean and stupid, not inherently better.

The last two-thirds of Working Poor are genuinely shocking: a liberal-humanist version of a happy Hollywood ending, a Joel Siegel-approved "Triumph of the Spirit!" topped off by a megalomaniacal 15-page policy proposal on how to turn America into a nicer place.

From a promise to inspire rage, Shipler ends the book with this line: "It is time to be ashamed." Well, blow me down. A limousine liberal—and Shipler is that, son of a shipping magnate, a Pulitzer-winning journalist living in Chevy Chase—calling on his liberal readers to feel ashamed. That's like asking a pothead to feel the munchies. There is no more comforting state of mind for a middle-class liberal, suffering from mild bipolar disorder as they all do, than to feel shame. Shame is an enervating, passive emotion. Rage is shame's opposite. Rage is an essential biochemical ingredient to social change. That is what scares Shipler. And because it scares him so much, his book is a colossal failure.