DON'T THINK, SMILE!: Notes on a Decade of Denial [Hardcover]

Ellen Willis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

"Reading Ellen Willis feels like a great discussion with a witty, politically perceptive friend over Sunday-morning bagels and endless cups of coffee."*
The 1990s were a decade of unprecedented economic expansion. They were also a decade that saw stagnant wages and globalization, Monica-gate and the O. J. Simpson trial, The Bell Curve and the Million Man March. Most notably, Ellen Willis argues, they were a decade that saw an astounding refusal, on both the left and right, to question received wisdom or engage in substantive deliberation. Turning her acute eye on the cultural and political reaction to these imbroglios, Willis demands that we radically rethink our country and ourselves to create a society in which we can fully enjoy life.

"Illuminating and incisive."—udith Newman, The New York Times Book Review

"In a time when politics and political writing have degenerated into sound bites and sensationalism, Ellen Willis reminds us that integrity and human dignity, a quick wit and a dead-on style, offer the hope that we can make sense of-and maybe even change-the world."—*Michael Bronski, The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

"For thirty years, in a wide arc from the Village Voice and Social Text to the New Yorker and Mirabella, Ellen Willis has been the sixties' best exponent and a savvy interpreter of American politics and culture."—George Scialabba, Dissent

"Suffused by a romantic and intelligent magnanimity, these essays abound with nuggets of insight."—Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The liberal cause finds a backbone in Ellen Willis's supple collection of essays. Whether writing about feminism, freedom of speech, O.J. Simpson, or The Bell Curve, Willis presents arguments that are always thought-provoking, and always meant to reconnect the current political divide between the economic and cultural concerns of liberals in order to strengthen the liberal position. "The left will continue to lose ground," Willis insists, "unless it gives up the untenable distinction between economics and culture to which it is stubbornly attached." Willis inspires political liberals to stop second-guessing what mainstream America really wants, and to stand behind real concerns about the rights to freedom and pleasure. Don't Think, Smile! has plenty to spar about, but one will do so with a truly invigorating pugilist. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly

In six provocative essays, Willis, who writes frequently for the Village Voice and other liberal publications, dissects the political agendas and actions of the American Left during the past decade, finding them insufficient to meet most citizens' everyday challenges. Claiming that mainstream political progressives have made a fateful choice to prioritize issues of class and economics over those of "culture" (e.g., race, sex, gender and sexuality), Willis argues that their approach does not acknowledge the complexity of American social structures and her own and most people's desire to have "a freer, saner, and more pleasurable life." Willis is at her best when she prods raw nerves in U.S. politics to illustrate her points, including the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill controversy, Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and Catherine McKinnon's anti-porn legislation. Viewing most contemporary conservative politics as a "backlash to the sixties," Willis writes with a great deal of wit and compassion. In addition to her firm grasp of the complexities of political discourse, her main strength is her ability to ground her ideological stands firmly in human needs and experience. She is particularly adept at examining how complicated individual responses to events such as Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky or the presumed connection between crime and race are missing from what she sees as the highly politicized, partisan news coverage of those events. Never taking the easy or predictable route, Willis shows an ability to explicate difficult dilemmas. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807043206
• ISBN-13: 978-0807043202
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,145,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Radical truthtelling" is like a blast to the brain., October 27, 1999

By 

Carie Fox (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: DON'T THINK, SMILE!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Hardcover)

Willis's style is challenging--she refuses to condescend to the reader--and utterly invigorating. On topics as varied as race relations, the work ethic, Monica Lewinsky, and class wars she manages to cut through the dross. What she says is both exquisitely painful in its candor, and paradoxically optimistic.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surviving Austerity, October 28, 2003

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: DON'T THINK, SMILE!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Hardcover)

In "DON'T THINK, SMILE: Notes on a Decade of Denial," Ellen Willis offers penetrating insights into the "new austerity," the anti-democratic, anti-radical ethos that has come to be the prevailing and controlling ideology of American life. From her perspective as a left libertarian, she offers a compelling critique of social conservatives on both sides of the aisle: on the right the neoliberal economists and right-wing libertarians (Bennett, Boaz Murray), and on the left, those who seek to revive the mass politics of the era of the liberal consensus (Rorty, Gitlin) by stifling as politically inastute the "balkanizing" multiculturalist thrust of the post-60s cultural left.

Willis makes a good case for cultural politics as the more successful of the two strands leftist practice. She notes that no American has been untouched by the changes in "sexual mores, male female relations, the breakdown or taboos on public experession, the demand for a cleaner environment and a healthy diet, the new centrality of paid work to women's lives, the icreasing racial and ethnic heterogeneity of mainstream American life" ---- all of which grew out of 60s cultural radicalism -- and which has "after three decades and more of ferocious backlash, actively supported by the federal government, accomplished the social equivalent of the putting the toothpaste back in the tube."

She suggests that Americans lack of interest in the agenda of the traditional left may be due to the fact that it is a pale echo of the conservative social agenda of work, more work, family values and upright "Christian" living. That is certainly at least partially true, but it could also be argued that the relative popularity among the mainstream of the messages of cultural radicals can also be traced to their support by advertisers who found, starting in the 60s, that wild, sexy, carnivalesque, forever young, and alternative lifestyle advertising appeals worked, reviving a flagging economy whose plodding, adult-directed mass market 50s sales techniques no longer worked. Willis tends to discount as too neat the theory that the rise of the "consumer republic" as instituted by corporate marketers depoliticized many Americans in the deft substitution of the rights and responsibilities of consumership for those of citizenship. This argument does, however, more than hold its own in explaining the lack of engagement among many Americans with the traditional liberal goals of economic equality as a quasi-material version of this goals can be instantly achieved through the use of credit cards.

Willis is at her best perhaps when she personalizes her politics in stories about her own life. For instance, her reaction to no parking signs in New York which tell drivers, quote: "Don't Even Think of Parking Here" make her want to plaster a bumpersicker over them that reads: "Don't Even Think About Telling Me What to Think." She notes that such signs are emblematic of the "one-way coversations carried on by driveway guards who call themselves journalists: "Dont even think about questioning the need to balance the federal budget. Don't even think about workers getting a fair share of the wealth they produce. Don't even think about the problems with the institution of marriage that punishing unmarried mothers won't solve."

As the subtitle says, Willis takes on the issues that defined the 90s: "The Majoritarian Fallacy" (traditional liberals who believe the average American will sign up for redistrubitive tax policies because it is, after all, in their own best interests -- a bloodless theory shorn of any animating cultural values), "The Decade of Denial (Don't Even Think About, etc.), "Race and Ordeal of Liberal Optimism" (the belief by even liberals that no alternative to the mystical power of capitalism can ever be imagined in the amelioration of racism), "Beyond Good and Evil (views on the runaway criminal justice state and the inculcation of fear), "Freedom, Power and Speech (the wrong-headed philosophical formulations of anti-porn feminists, and their subsequent colonization by the right wing values crowd), "Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity" (the imposition of the discipline of the market into every aspect of intellectuals, and everyone else's lives), and, finally, "Their Libertarianism -- and Ours" (a discussion of the bizarre justifications of reactionary social policy under the philosophical heading of libertarianism by Charles Murray and David Boaz, executive president of the Cato Institute).

Willis' discussion of her intellectual journey and the economic hurdles placed in her path from the 70s on by the imposition of the neo-liberal economic regime is particularly engaging. She tells of a 60s New York where jobs were easy to come by, where a person could support themselves on a small salary and had plenty of time left of social and cultural events. Then, New York, which had been the experimental site of liberal, faintly socialistic programs -- free education at City College, subsidized housing -- was told to "Drop Dead" by President Ford. The city's leaders buckled to demands for fiscal "austerity," and within ten years New York became a place where artists and writers, the city's lifeblood, could not afford to live.

Willis's perspective might be seen to be an artifact of that earlier period when radicalism was possible, socialism was almost acceptable, where radical left-wing intellectuals ruled the roost in New York. After all, how many liberals actually have the nerve to think, must less to say these days, that workers should get a fair share of the wealth they produce? Emerson, aphoristically observing the anti-human outcome of the early industrial revolution in America, said: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Willis, in her radical left libertarianism, her refusal to accept either the halter of the "free-enterprise" system or the saddle of the liberal left's majoritarian fallacy, is indispensible in this right wing age of compassionate conservatism, and left-wing conservative compassionism.