by Barbara Ehrenreich
HarperPerennial, $12 paper
Some things you suspect, and some things you just plain know. Satirist Barbara Ehrenreich makes it a
habit to shout what most of us are thinking, but are terrified to speak above a
whisper. Ehrenreich struts her razor-sharp stuff in The Snarling
Citizen, a collection of essays that first appeared in other magazines,
most notably in Time and The Nation. Impassioned and incisive,
Ehrenreich’s rants resemble in no small way those of her conservative
counterpart Dennis Miller.
In more than 50 concise entries, she tackles sex, the family, politics, and
the mass culture of “high-tech suburban America.” While her perspective of
modern times is guaranteed to delight as often as it offends, Ehrenreich serves
up equally-scalding slabs of humble pie to all who asked for it. In “Fun with
Cults” the author notes that distinguishing between “religion” and “cult” is
“chiefly a matter of size.” A half-dozen fanatics meeting in a coffeehouse
might be a `sect’, but she offers that “a few million gun-toting,
Armageddon-ready Baptists are referred to as the Republican Party.” Under our
current socio-cultural conditions, she contends that we live to satisfy our own
lust for bloody images. It matters little that those images are “actual real
world events or artful cinematic deception.” Just give us the bloated corpses,
whether they’re the result of ethnic cleansing, or the work of a Hollywood
filmmaker.
Ehrenreich believes the media, politicians, and marketers feed our desires
using ratings and polls to gauge mass preferences. Almost instantly, they can
fine-tune programming and make enhancements they hope will keep us transfixed
(think of pre-Heather Melrose Place compared to the show’s current
incarnation; or heck, think of Bill Clinton).
In The Snarling Citizen, Ehrenreich shreds an age shaped less by
rational thought than by live coverage of celebrity escape attempts. While
Court TV, Cops, and Jerry Springer act as white-trash
catharsis, Ehrenreich tells us in plain language how trash has triumphed, and
why the only individual that matters anymore comes from the “movie-star class,”
which now rules the earth.
As Ehnereich summarizes, “In mass consumer society, notions like `precious
individuality’ are best reserved for Nike ads.” This is one individual you
ought to read. — Stuart Wade
This article appears in October 18 • 1996 and October 18 • 1996 (Cover).