Is it the group dynamics?

It is partially the group dynamics—people working together who don't always know each other well, and a lot of it is done over email, which is a very volatile medium. It's partly that we had to find the money, and there were logistics…activism is really tough, really difficult. Look at local community groups who spend years trying to get a traffic light at a dangerous crossroad.

It comes back to this question I had about boredom, but it's also about immediacy. People don't have a lot of patience now for things that seem ponderous and analog. So, people like me who have been part of the "information revolution"—which may or may not be failing now, at least as a business strategy—have tried to use email and the Web to speed things up, to make things seem hipper and more interesting. I'm just not sure if that's the answer.

I think that the Web has resulted in a proliferation of ways to think that you are doing something, when in fact you are only sending an email.

I'm always sending emails to my elected representatives and others through various Web sites like the ACLU and NOW and the Feminist Majority, and I even belong to something called Progressivesecretary.org, which offers letters on every lefty topic under the sun. They are very well researched…they send you the email, and you say "send," or "don't send," and off it goes. But I do sometimes wonder, since I recently read that our senators and representatives are totally swamped by email: do they read these things?

No.

So, you can see how you get a sense of doing something without really doing something.

So what would really doing something look like? Writing a paper letter?

OK, if you write a paper letter, someone is going to read it.

Here's another example: cyberwar. Cyberwar was a plan of a few years ago to use email and the Internet to achieve political goals by, for example, on a particular day having everyone email the Mexican government with pro-Zapatista messages, and this would cause their email system to break. And yet, the Mexican government seems to be doing just fine—a lot better than the Zapatistas are. So you just wonder how much of this works. The technology that lets you do it…well, they have technology also, so then they can make a little email box and all your messages go into that.

I think maybe there aren't so many shortcuts. These things that you call "analog" and "boring" can work. The Web seems so magical that it seems you ought to be able to eat, sleep, and get married with the computer, but I just don't know if it's really going to add up to that much.

I will say that it's an excellent way to inform people. There have been some wonderful things that have happened through email that could not have happened another way. For example, a lot of the Seattle organizing was done over the Internet, a lot of the anti-NAFTA stuff.

Recently there was an email that went around, originating in a column by Pat Morrison, who is a California newspaper columnist, suggesting that people send money to a pro-choice organization in George Bush's name for President's Day. Planned Parenthood got half a million dollars! Other groups got money too. I received this email about a hundred times. So, I think that there are some ways in which the difference in communication is great; that is something that could not have been organized in another way.

Finally: what has George Bush done so far that has made you the angriest?

Pollitt on prayer in the schools

Oh, well, there's so much competition! Everything he's done is just so terrible. I think that the faith-based initiative is going to be very disastrous, and what makes me very angry is that there are good liberal and progressive people who don't see that.

I think the temptation is to go for the quick fix. This is what really bothers me about the left—this mindset of, "Well, people don't really like us. People are conservative and religious. If we were more conservative and religious, maybe they'd like us more." So you get this fairly cynical move to embrace things that our politics really are not about.

This faith-based initiative stuff…the idea that the government is going to be giving money to all these shysters for these programs that everyone seems very willing to believe work when there is no evidence that they do. For example, The Nation's legal correspondent David Cole wrote an article on the New York Times op ed page in which he said faith based initiatives were great, we shouldn't be afraid of it…look at Teen Challenge; 80 percent of their drug addicts get reformed. Well, where does this number come from? It comes from Teen Challenge!

There's no peer review of these things. Nobody calls up five of these people five years later and says, "Well, have you taken any drugs lately?" That's true for AA also; I think AA is a wonderful organization, which does not need any faith-based money because it is completely volunteer-led, but they do not even know what the success rate is. How would you? People come, they go, you'd really have to design a study. It's really hard to do, and I don't think AA is particularly interested in doing it.

There's just this eagerness to find something that people will like.

...and to not be marginalized.

Right, but they'll be marginalized anyway. The sort of liberal preachers that are in favor of this, like Jim Wallis…Jim Wallis is not some major religious figure with a congregation of hundreds of thousands; he's like The Nation, another small liberal entrepreneur. I would just think that for Jim Wallis to embrace George Bush so that he can get a couple of thousand dollars…to me, this is not very dignified.

It also reinforces the idea that you can't say anything negative about religion.

Yes, and it also obscures the unfortunate fact that religion has not had a happy history with relation to modernity in a lot of ways. For example: reproductive rights. Jim Wallis is pro-life; he doesn't talk about it much, but that's what he is. I wouldn't want hiss organization running the teen shelter.

And there's nobody to monitor these programs.

Nobody! Nobody's going monitor them, and even though you're supposed to keep separate books, nobody's going to monitor that either.

Besides, how can you have a smaller government when you have create more positions to manage a new bureaucracy?

Exactly. It's just a giveaway, an enormous boondoggle for anyone who can call themselves religious. Most of the churches that will actually go after this money will be quite conservative, and I'm not for that.

Is there anything you'd like to say about the book?

I had a lot of fun putting this book together because it was already written, and I had an interesting time writing the introduction about feminism at the millennium. It's one of those glass-half-full/glass-half-empty questions: how far have women come?

It's so interesting to me that so many features of the lives of women have changed since I was in college, and yet the social subordination of women, transfigured in certain ways, persists. I think it was a little more optimistic than it would have been if I were writing it today.

Have things gotten worse in the past six months?

I think having the Republicans control the government is really not good, and people who say that it doesn't matter who the president is are just talking through their hats.

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