Word: wallenbergs
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...rhetoric Wallenberg deplores comes mainly from a "hydra-headed infrastructure," which he labels the Failure and Guilt Complex. Born in the '60s, Ihe F & G C is not a Freudian concoction but a "loose, unorganized organization" incorporating members of "the Movement," "cause people" and "freelance naysayers" that together "came close lo dominating the intellectual discourse of our time...
Armed with his statistical broadsword, Wallenberg whacks at the Failure and Guilt Complex branch by branch. He demolishes the "explosionists" in the demographic branch with specifics on the falling birth rate that is replacing the population explosion ("if indeed it ever existed") and "may well prove to be the single greatest agent of an ever increasing, ever wealthier middle class in America." For the benefit of the F & G C's sociology faculty, Wallenberg marshals facts to support his thesis that "American workers are engaged in more interesting, more skilled and more productive work than any other workers...
...counter the women's auxiliary of the F & G C, which insists that American women are "oppressed, indeed enslaved," Wallenberg brings on his secondary weapon, the opinion polls. From the findings of Gallup, Harris and others, he concludes that "American women don't believe they are living in a rotten, corrupt sexist society that has crushed them. They are, in fact, more satisfied than men." Similarly, polls show that the majority of Americans are middle class "because they think they are middle class, and they think they are middle class because they fit the criteria that they themselves...
Sunny Side. On page after page, Wallenberg repeats the refrain that is his definition of progress: "It is better by far than what it replaces." Focusing on the sunny side of modern society, he minimizes the clouds by looking only at their silver linings. The General Motors assembly line at Lordstown, Ohio, may be boring and dehumanizing, but it uses fewer workers to turn out more cars than earlier plants, thereby freeing other workers for more interesting jobs. Thus, Wallenberg insists, "the significance of Lordstown is in who doesn't work there." Wilh a similar cavalier indifference that would...
Because many modern problems (e.g., crowded parks) "are the side effects of success, not the fruit of failure," Wallenberg suggests that they are not really problems at all. He dismisses critics of the food and decor at McDonald's, for example, with Ihe assertion that "the function of the fast-food business ... is quite simple: Women's Liberation." That is, it frees Mom from shopping, cooking and washing up, so don't complain. In the same vein, "suburban sprawl is a pejorative phrase that describes perhaps the most comfortable mass residential living conditions in history...