The Snarling Citizen (Barbara Ehrenreich)
Ferguson, Anderew
the ways and means of compelling Japan to surrender. Nobile and Bernstein reveal nothing new about these discussions. It is no surprise to learn that, among those charged with the dread...
...It's like watching Fred Astaire dance with a mop...
...I am just as uncomfortable about the Air Force Association exercising veto power as I would be about the National Organization for Women...
...It is no surprise to learn that, among those charged with the dread responsibility, opinions tended to differ...
...Offensive to the amphibian community...
...She is a witty, graceful stylist who first came to prominence in the Nation, Ms., and Mother Jones...
...She opens her first essay on the family with the statement: "The U.S...
...I don't know, and neither, I suspect, does Ehrenreich, but "postmodern" is one of her favorite words, recurring even more often than such phrases as "apocalyptic frisson," "post–Judeo-Christian generation," "posttrend era," "post-feminist era," and "advanced capitalism"—the big, blowy tropes that dazzle editors while allowing a writer to elide from the concrete to the dubious, and from the self-evident to the debatable, without debate...
...She is now so certifiably mainstream that mainstream publishers are happy to get out collections of even her most quotidian pieces...
...How do you "learn to love a little less...
...Nor, for that matter, is it news that in subsequent years many prominent Americans (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, William D. Leahy, John Foster Dulles) expressed strong reservations about the use of the bomb...
...The collection begins with "Life in the Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor for the Weekly Standard, which begins publication in September...
...Millions adhere to creeds religious and political—that are militantly "profamily...
...But the line of authority trails off...
...She writes:"Everything that happens, we are led to believe, is a historical reenactment," and the belief makes us putty for the forces of reaction...
...Our families, in most cases...
...One essay—to choose a typical instance—attacks the "dangerous" idea that "history repeats itself...
...We are all, it is often said, in recovery...
...We live in a post-traditionalist age...
...She's good with a joke—about that most public recluse, Salman Rushdie, she writes: "What is it with these fatwa guys—can't they get a copy of Rushdie's schedule from his publicist, like everybody else...
...Query to Time editors: Ageist...
...Americans act out their ambivalence about the family without ever owning up to it...
...The two sentences about millions being religiously pro-family and millions flocking to self-help groups are logically unrelated, but the juxtaposition is meant to imply that the second sentence discredits the first...
...We watch for what might be called political reasons: because everyone knows that the movie-star class now rules the earth...
...People may disagree about whether it was right or necessary to inflict the Bomb on Hiroshima, but they cannot reasonably argue that the decision was taken lightly...
...Ehrenreich's balloons into a genuine, ill-disguised hostility toward civilization itself...
...Why do we watch the Academy Awards...
...In the midst of a vicious war to the death in the Pacific, the American government had the time and inclination to study the nature of the bomb...
...Act out" is a cant phrase, coined by counselors and facilitators...
...The most recent and exhaustive survey, Sex in America, puts the figure at less than 15 percent...
...And what's an "inner child...
...Another point is the studied indifference of Nobile, Bernstein, and friends to the prospect of American casualties in Japan...
...How clever, how unconventional, how not even remotely true...
...She knows that caricature can be a verbal art, with the capacity to expose an essence more quickly than a dozen arguments, but too often her fondness for exaggeration and hyperbole drags her into mere buffoonery...
...Actually, "studies show" that teachers THE SNARLING CITIZEN: ESSAYS Barbara Ehrenreich Farrar, Straus & Giroux /245 pages /$20 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON 66 The American Spectator August 1995 don't "call on" boys more often, they call them out more often—reasonable enough, since schoolboys make more trouble than schoolgirls, requiring more frequent eye contact and more pushing to perform...
...It is indeed often said that "we are all in recovery," but that doesn't mean it's true, or that the phrase has any content at all...
...Unlike Molly Ivins, she's a mom—a working mom!—and unlike the late Anna Quindlen, she never whimpers...
...There will always be straw men, and the book is overstuffed with them...
...0 The American Spectator August 1995 67...
...Nobile is correct that the text of the Smithsonian exhibition is not quite what its critics contended: In some ways it is better, but in other ways it is worse...
...divorce rate remains stuck near 50 percent...
...proper...
...She argues against the notion with great force and indignation, mustering facts and examples, moving elegantly from the specific to the general, from the personal to the universal and back again, without once stopping to consider that nobody in his right mind takes the idea literally...
...This is not a question of censorship, but of judgment...
...We are no more likely to achieve unanimity of opinion on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than on whether McClellan could have pursued Lee into Virginia, or Pope Clement VII should have granted Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon...
...When she deals with "the family," as she often does, she can be funny but uncomfortably bitter—imagine Erma Bombeck, if Erma Bombeck's husband ran off with a call girl and her son decapitated the family cat...
...She writes: "Studies show [ditto!] that teachers tend to favor boys by calling on them more often, making eye contact with them more frequently, and pushing them harder to perform...
...So where is a left-wing polemicist to turn—when facts fail you, when the "surveys" don't "show" what you want them to, when your intellectual tradition is neither long nor particularly honorable...
...Her facts, for example, aren't really facts...
...Ehrenreich herself is undeluded...
...This stylistic trick is essential to her appeal as an essayist, for when Ehrenreich does offer a straightforward observation or assertion of fact, she tends to wobble...
...According to surveys [block that phrase!], somewhere between 26 percent and 41 percent of married women are unfaithful...
...It would be difficult to write a paragraph with more confusions than this one...
...There is a long and honorable tradition of what might be called `antifamily' thought," she writes, invoking authority to buttress her case...
...In this instance, the political pressure applied to the scholarly process—from the American Legion, from Congress, from the press—was valuable and largely right...
...Hence The Snarling Citizen, a loosely packed duffel of Ehrenreichiana previously published in Time, the Nation, the Guardian, and elsewhere...
...To impose coherence she has grouped them under chapter headings: "Trampling on the Down-and-Out," "Sex Skirmishes and the Gender Wars," and so on...
...The fat cats of "mainstream" journalism do not allow writers with Ehrenreich's attributes to languish on the leftward fringe, and so for the past several years she has been a featured essayist on the back page of Time magazine, where her unabashedly left-wing views make a pleasant contrast to the abashedly left-wing views found in the pages preceding it...
...S he has her gifts...
...Should the veterans of one-half century ago have been insulted by their government, or graciously acknowledged...
...Erma's treatment of the family, jaundiced as it was, was at bottom affectionate, confined to small but endearing frustrations...
...But, after all, the Smithsonian is a publicinstitution, not a private preserve for the amusement of its curators...
...For conservatives she is cause for rejoicing, a knowledgeable, highly credentialed, top-of-the-line tour guide to the Potemkin Village they hope to overrun...
...He is also correct that history can be dangerously vulnerable to influence...
...71 Postmodern Family," raising the question, right at the start, of what a postmodern family might be...
...In any case, absolute consensus is impossible...
...The essays here are brief without exception...
...the longest couldn't be longer than 1700 words...
...This is Oprahspeak, unbecoming a writer who fancies herself a skeptic...
...But here in postmodern, postfeminist America, Oprahspeak seems all that's left to the left...
...And you can't completely write off a woman who has the taste to call Jack Valenti an "ancient lounge lizard...
...And her points are larger than you can imagine...
...When she makes an argument she tends to jump around...
...Even so, I agree with the many blurbsters on the dust jacket—Susan Faludi, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ellen Goodman among them—who suggest that Barbara Ehrenreich may be the best polemicist the left-wing can produce nowadays...
...Ehrenreich traces the tradition to the Rousseauian philosopher Charles Fourier, through unnamed "early feminists" and "radical psychiatrists," to the renowned British crank Edmund Leach...
...This is a chestnut of newsmagazine chin-waggers, but in fact the divorce rate is 4.8 percent per 1,000 Americans...
...And from what...
...The errors of fact don't make much difference to the quality of her arguments, for Ehrenreich, as an ideologue, is impervious to any data that don't serve the larger points she wishes to make...
...As an intellectual genealogy it's not quite Aristotle-to-Aquinas-to-Kant, but it will have to do...
...This alone makes her stuff worth reading...
...But at the same time, millions flock to therapists and self-help groups that offer to heal the "inner child" from damage inflicted by family life...
...Legions of women band together to revive the self-esteem they lost in supposedly loving relationships and to learn to love a little less...
...For liberals she distills contemporary liberalism down to its essence, which by now is nothing more than a series of attitudes and poses and sneers...
...In the future, however, there is no reason to doubt that other interested parties, in subsequent exhibitions, will make their views known, and to the detriment of history...
...It is no wonder that those who were poised to invade Japan—William Manchester, Paul Fussell, William Styron, and others, fresh from the killing fields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa—were delighted to be spared, and "thank God for the atom bomb," in Fussell's memorable phrase...
...Even if we accept the lowest estimates, 26,000 dead Americans is a lot of corpses...
...The fact that the national legislature should take an interest in the uses to which tax revenues are put is neither surprising nor imB arbara Ehrenreich's career as a journalist has followed an interesting trajectory...
...E hrenreich's journalism is filled with such casual misstatements—little wisps of faulty data upon which she builds whole cathedrals of commentary...
Vol. 28 • August 1995 • No. 8
