BARBARA Ehrenreich has long been a happy warrior sallying forth against what she regards as the Big Lie about equal opportunity in our society, and peeling away the myths that she sees pacifying the overwhelming (and overwhelmed) majority in the inte
rests of a manipulative minority.
To call her prolific would be an understatement. She has 15 books listed on her credit page, six in collaboration with others: not so much a writer as a writer's collective. They tackle matters such as the struggle of service workers to make do on miserable pay, the hollow offerings of the career advice-and-placement industry, the middle-class fear of falling, men's inability to commit, the historical flimflamming of women and much more.
This new book runs through the same topics like a dicing machine. The pieces are brief and there are more than 60 of them, comprising a collection of newspaper and magazine commentaries, as well as blog postings. They contain some precious kernels, but the form has real drawbacks. One is that the drumbeat of mini comments, even the most valuable, tends to rattle and numb. It is a woodpecker going at the tree instead of a woodcutter felling it, as in the best of her other books.
Often the shock comes in an ostensibly bland passage that rears up and stabs. Her subject, for instance, may be the unaffordability of health insurance, but she starts some way out with a professor who asserts that the billions of dollars spent annually on pets' health is justified because "they are part of the family". Seeing a locomotive-size opening, she steams through: "Well, there's another category that might reasonably be considered 'part of the family.' True, they are not the ideal companions for the busy young professional: it can take two to three years to housebreak them, their standards of personal hygiene are lamentably low, at least compared with cats, and large numbers of them cannot learn to 'sit' without the aid of Ritalin. I'm talking about children, of course."
The best of the pieces are small, absurdist gems. Ehrenreich will take a familiar social or cultural inequity, and then take it too far, and then take it so far that it metamorphoses into a disbelieving belief. If she often resembles Mr Dooley drawling out a newspaper item and giving it a sardonic jab, there are times she is closer to Dean Swift with his Modest Proposal to alleviate starvation by cooking and eating babies. "No", we flinch; and a moment later, "Yes, by God".
The full article contains 450 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
