Selling Hope in Hard Cover
By William Greider

 Please, please take this book seriously. I worked on it for three or four years and now I have only a few minutes to explain what a wonderful, important and rewarding thing it is. So I tell stories, crack jokes, talk too long and try to seem restrained, if not detached. And the people who show up nearly always bathe me in good feeling (even if some of them may privately think the book sounds crackpot). They ask serious, adoring questions and ask you to sign a copy for their son who’s going to business school or maybe the father who has been ranting about the failures of capitalism for years. They offer quick, sincere thanks for something of yours they read previously, an earlier book, maybe columns in Rolling Stone when they were teenagers or a recent Nation article. This feels good, really good. How could it not?

What leaves you somewhat exhausted on a book tour is this constant back-and-forth between ego-charging exhilaration and then returning to the loneliness of the hotel room, where one’s adrenalin collapses and author’s paranoia creeps back in. Did they really think our baby is cute or were they just saying that? This is adolescent, of course, and a good meal usually brushes it aside. I’ve done many book tours in the past and managed to stay detached from the outcome. I’ve been lucky and unlucky in the marketplace (lucky is a lot more fun) but I also learned to distinguish between the experience of writing the book – arduous but deeply fulfilling – and the wickedly random experience of marketing it. I always tell young first authors to do the same.

This time feels different, I realize. I am invested more deeply in the outcome, perhaps because I am invested more personally in the content. This book is “more from the heart,” a friend observed, and my own hopes for the ideas are upfront and fully exposed. I am anxious for this book to find its true audience – the people who are able to recognize its value, who may be optimistic enough to take up some of the ideas and pursue them beyond the present. Above all, I do not want this book to disappear beneath the waves and leave no trace. So I talk too long.

Bottomline: I am already feeling wonderfully confirmed by the people I have encountered. This book was always going to be a tough sell, both because capitalism is such an intimidating subject and because it requires people to look up from present troubles (the war, the economy, the shock politics of GW Bush) and squint hopefully at the larger future. I can report that lots of folks are willing to do that, perhaps hungry for the opportunity. In the sales pitch, I sort of introduce myself as Dr. Sunshine, come to inject a little light and hope amid troubling events – even take them to the mountaintop and envision the possibility that American capitalism can be reformed in substantial ways in order to serve society more faithfully and equitably, rather than overwhelm and damage it. These are not the worst of times, I remind audiences. But if we are so wealthy as a nation (and we are), why does it not feel like the best of times? If we are the richest, greatest, freest, most powerful nation on earth (as we regularly tell others), why then do Americans feel so confined and trampled, sometimes desperate, amid the vast abundance? Or maybe because of it.

Talking like this naturally invites ridicule in established circles and the Wall Street Journal grabbed the opportunity. Its reviewer described me as plain spacey -- possibly drugged? -- like Jerry Garcia pulling on a bong. But, likewise, a liberal reviewer in the Washington Post dismissed my views as trivial sentiment alongside the present-day emergencies. I incorporate their complaints in my talks and it always get a big laugh. If orthodox left and right both think I am hallucinating, I playfully suggest, maybe this book has opened up new ground.

The point is, nobody in the audience disputes the cramped reality of our prosperity or the scandalous injuries to lives and community that flow from the economic system. A few do wonder if these wounds can be healed by reforming capitalism (as opposed to blowing it up). The real test comes when I bring up some of the book’s more radical (as in fundamental) concepts. To understand the degraded conditions of work in America, one must recognize that the employment system is fundamentally organized on a “master-servant relationship,” the power relationship inherited from feudalism when the lord of the manor ruled the lives of any serfs on his property. Now the lord is called a CEO, but the domination of people is not that different in workplaces.

When I was writing this book, I wrestled at length with how to introduce this framework and explain in a way that would not sound utterly nutty to people. But, when I bring it up on the book tour, it excites them with the sense of recognition. After an hour on San Francisco’s KQED, I got an email from a listener, “I almost wrecked my car when I heard that.” When he got to work, he sent congratulations. I replied: “Get a grip, please. I do not want this book to injure anyone.”

Taking morning calls on Minnesota Public Radio, I heard from another commuter driving to work. He said, when he heard the master-servant relationship, “I put my fist in the air and shouted, YES!” Then he identified himself as the owner of a small company. The radio host asked: “But doesn’t that mean you are the master?” “Yes,” he said, “but I have also been an employee. I started my company partly to try change that.” I heard also from a business-school professor in the Northwest who said his faculty conducts running seminars with grad students on the same forbidden thought – the ways in which capitalism resembles feudalism. They were working toward doing a book. “You wrote the book,” he said.

You can see why I am feeling fulfilled, even excited. It is exactly what I had hoped for – that this book would at a minimum put some realities in plain view that the conventional wisdom of economics and business either doesn’t see or instantly denies, but that ordinary citizens at large can recognize as true. Whether or not this sells any books, I am pleased to know that I have relieved some people of the anxiety attached to knowing things that are never frankly acknowledged elsewhere by the dominant culture. In fact, the fun for me marches right along with the tour schedule because – thanks to the laptop, my new best friend – I get a continuous stream of confirming feedback. Do the radio show, come back to the hotel, get online.

There will be a dozen messages waiting for me, mostly endorsing my efforts and thanking me, many passing on enlightening stories from their own experiences (stories that would have worked brilliantly in the book). Some challenge various points I made, a few reject my sunshine optimism as too much for them. We have an amiable exchange of views in all cases. I hear from people in business and finance, lawyers and doctors. I hear from tech engineers out of jobs, with plenty of time to ponder how capitalism really functions, rueful with only a hint of bitter. I hear from young people seeking advice, heading into careers in business or finance and wondering how much of themselves they may have to give up.

I hear, most powerfully, from rank and file workers, union and non-union, who tell the chilling everyday stories of what is happening to them and their companies, as distant lords of corporate finance hack away at jobs, benefits, the once standard understandings of decency and equity. These messages continue through the night and I find many more to read in the morning. People in Washington and Wall Street seem to think that the country is mending, that people did not get very angry about the horrendous losses from corrupted managements and stock-market meltdown. Anyway, people seem to be getting over it, we can return to “normal” (if new scandals would just stop occurring). I think they are mistaken. What I hear from these people is smoldering anger. Americans have been deeply educated by events in the last few years. For the most part, they see nowhere to go with that anger, since neither political party seems alert to what they are experiencing. But plain-wrapper citizens are still thinking about why it happened, examining who and what are to blame. Maybe my book will give them some rebellious ideas.