The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 3, 2000

These essays, most previously published in Tikkun, where the author is associate editor, exude the spirit of the '60s in their call for spiritual and political renewal based on the "politics of meaning." Gabel (who is also president of New College of California) offers a vision of a communitarian, loving, transformed world. His vision entails a diagnosis of what ails us--a culturally produced "alienation of self from other" yielding "a crisis of meaninglessness"--and a cure: the politics of meaning, a radical social effort to "transform the alienating public culture that envelops us" and to generate "reciprocal affirmation through meaningful public action" in a way that links spirituality and politics. The concepts sound fluffy in the abstract, and they don't entirely lose their fluff as Gabel applies them to such areas as philosophical foundations, American politics, public policy, education (he wants to abolish the SAT) and law. Yet Gabel is onto something. The title essay nicely challenges the notion that a "bank," for all its hierarchical trappings, is not a "group of people in a room," too terrified of humiliation to step out of their assigned roles, whether that of teller or customer. Clinton's election is convincingly depicted as the triumph of the reemergent "erotic power of the sixties," a decade Gabel extols, down to its rock lyrics (e.g., "All You Need Is Love") and urges us to learn from. This book is like a pie: a flaky crust, but a substantial interior.