Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial

By Ellen Willis

Book Overview

If the 1970s were the "Me Decade," and the '80s were the years of the Reagan counterrevolution, then the '90s, writes Ellen Willis, were the Decade of Denial. In keeping with the mass media's glib assumption that a phenomenal increase in wealth for a minority meant genuine national prosperity, the 1990s saw an astounding refusal, on both the left and right, to question received wisdom or engage in substantive deliberation. Turning her acute eye to the decade's defining moments-imbroglios like those surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial, The Bell Curve, Monica-gate, and the Million Man March-Ellen Willis reveals the mindlessness behind the noise. Arguing that we suffer from a lack of true freedom, she demands that we radically rethink our country and ourselves to create a society in which we can fully enjoy life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807043214
• ISBN13: 9780807043219
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Surviving Austerity

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

"Radical truthtelling" is like a blast to the brain.

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.