The antichrist of North Carolina.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

When I was in Scandinavia last spring promoting Nickel and Dimed, interviewers kept asking me to tell them about the "debate" my book had provoked in the United States. I had to confess that it had provoked no debate at all, at least none that I had heard of. In fact, when my book was adopted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a reading for all incoming students in 2003, the administration expressed its conviction that it was a "relatively tame selection," at least compared to last year's choice--a collection of readings from the Koran. I was beginning to envy Michael Moore, whose publisher had cleverly boosted sales by attempting to suppress his book Stupid White Men in the wake of 9/11.

Then, early in July, I got a phone call from Matt Tepper, president of the student body at UNC-CH, inquiring as to what I thought would be a useful way to direct the incoming students' discussions of Nickel and Dimed. I suggested that the students ought to apply the book's concerns to their own campus, where workers have been trying to organize against heavy administrative opposition. I sat back to wait for new students to arrive at the end of the summer so the controversy could begin.

Within about a week--while the incoming first-year students were still working on their tans--a controversy arrived all right. It just wasn't the one I was hoping for.

On July 10, a group of conservative UNC-CH students, calling themselves the Committee for a Better Carolina, held a press conference, along with a handful of rightwing state legislators, to denounce Nickel and Dimed as a "classic Marxist rant" and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics." Fine, at least I could cling to the adjectives "classic" and "intellectual." But when I read the full page ad the Committee for a Better Carolina had taken out in the Raleigh News and Observer, I saw that this controversy was less about the book than it was about me.

The ad charged me with being a Marxist, a socialist, an atheist, and a dedicated enemy of the American family--this last confirmed by a citation from the Heritage Foundation on my longstanding conviction that families headed by single mothers are as deserving of support as those headed by married couples. I was greeted on North Carolina radio talk shows by hosts asking, "What does it feel like to be the Antichrist in North Carolina?" and similarly challenging inquiries.

I suppose I should be grateful for the chance...