I had reads parts of this one before, but I'm currently going through it cover-to-cover: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Despite its insipidly reformist politics, it's a banger for sure. It connects declining life expectancy among the white working class (and other parts of the U.S. population) with the evisceration of labor power and the increasingly predatory nature of the neoliberal capitalist economy, particularly the health care sector.

Please note that the increasing rate of "deaths of despair" (drug overdoses, rising suicide rate, diseases arising from addiction, etc) coincide with the past 30 years, the period that Boilermaker Rick identifies as the Golden Age of American society.

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I'm all for reading cheap or free books, but investing your time in an 18 year old James Frey book is a bold move. I remember buying my mom Million Little Pieces for Mother's Day, walking into a Borders, and realizing I have no idea where to find the book. I wanted to ask the sales clerk if they had a discredited memoir section.

The Picture of Dorian Gray has gotten a lot of play in this thread for such an old book. That's cool, it's still a worthwhile read.

Henderson is really making the rounds promoting that book. He's popped up on at least one of the podcasts in my rotation and I've seen him pop up on Twitter from the small handful of people I check in with on that platform.

I heard him on Glenn Lowry's podcast. I sometimes listen to Glenn Lowry because we are both South Side Lowerys, though he can't spell his name and he Black. Henderson was frankly a little dull, and he never accounted for his success. I think he must in the book, though. He also said things about social class that I thought about 25 years ago, and if I am that far ahead of the curve, God save us all.

In fairness, I don't think I got the gist of his book from the podcast, but I may read it, as it is easy reading, which I need right now, viz. An Ordinary Man by Paul Rusesabagina. Horrific, but you can fly through it. Never saw the movie Hotel Rwanda, which is based on Rusesabagina's book.

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Henderson's book is in the same vein as J.D. Vance's except Henderson is a lot brighter than Vance.

One of the funnier things is that his elite classmates and professors at Yale recommended he watch The West Wing. It says a lot about the tastes and beliefs of America's upper class. Victor Davis Hanson talks about this kind of elitism all the time, e.g. one guy is a house painter and one guy is a high school teacher and each earns $82,000 a year, but the teacher looks down on the house painter because he spends his money on jet-skis and Disney vacations while the teacher goes to Napa and watches The West Wing. Which is a shitty TV show.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

Gotcha. Vance is not as smart as I expected him to be when he was being promoted. Then I read his book, and I was like, the policy portions suck. Using Newsweek as a source. (Narrative was ok, but he never accounted for his success.) And he's shown himself to be a politician, not a thinker. Too bad.

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I don't think a teacher making 82 grand a year is exactly what I would call a member of the professional-managerial elite. Moreover, school teachers across the U.S. have been one of the driving forces behind the growing labor radicalism of the past decade. Maybe the teacher and the painter have more in common than is commonly perceived.

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They may have salary in common, but if the teacher is making $82K, there's a good chance they have an employer-backed 403b. Painter has zilch (at least employer-backed). Also, the painter doesn't have other stuff a teacher has: a pandemic-proof job, possibly a union, and probably some insurance, depending on where they are.

I don't think people with similar economic interests is really a unifying thing. I know that's the fantasy, but if it were true, Bernie would have gotten 75% of the vote.

The teachers made be union radicals, but the politicized ones look down on everyone else, which is odd, because there are some dull fucking teachers out there. (I'm thinking high school here.) Dull fucking people who guilt the students into thinking the way they do. I hate to say that because it empowers all the Caller-Bob-illiterate-angry types out there.

Teachers have a difficult job, though. Zero authority. Sucks.

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The elitism comes in the judgment of what people like and how the spend their money.

Teachers are government workers, thus they are not labor.

Your last sentence may be true but as the parties themselves don't think so, it doesn't much matter.

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His mind is not for rent to any God or government.

Yeah, many teachers come from working class backgrounds and are hardly representative of the cultural elitism endemic to the upper classes. And many of them also don't make close to 82 grand a year. Teachers aren't labor? That's your position, not that of organized labor. And your last sentence is less a reflection of reality than it is of your own biases. The wildcat teacher strikes that took place a few years ago in several states help illustrate this point since these often illegal labor actions were consistently supported and sustained by organized and unorganized blue collar workers.

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People like to think of themselves as superior to other people. I don't think that changes if you're a teacher or a painter. I suspect there would be judgments being made in both directions in your example.

I finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I thought the middle portion was excellent. It was more or less several illustrations of what people did to survive in the middle of a world and a situation that did not give a f**k, but the first and last part of the book, while also carrying on the theme, were somewhat marred by typical novel conventions. All that said, it was a pretty powerful book that I suspect will stay with me for a while.