Barbara Ehrenreich
Conniff, Ruth
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Barbara Ehrenreich BY RUTH CONNIFF Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those rare creatures, a funny left-wing political writer. Her dry wit is familiar to readers of Time...
...Everybody's been saying that...
...Q: You said in one of your Time essays that the message of overpopulation is we should teach teenagers that sex is play—I thought it was very inflammatory...
...And you can't stand there and shake your fist at that...
...All I could say was "Uh...
...Q: Who are you writing for—who do you imagine your readers to be...
...What will they think of this...
...What was your inspiration...
...And I don't mean to replace it with promiscuity but I think it's a very radical message in this culture to say you are entitled to pleasure...
...Just the potential is there to say okay, all you people doing data entry, you don't have to do that anymore...
...What makes the difference between a spirit of generosity versus the meanness that seems to be the current trend...
...I just think of myself as a hired hit man up against some of those right-wingers...
...She earned a Ph.D...
...Ehrenreich: Oh, I think the space program has become an extension of the military, and a way of putting up more communications satellites and bringing us more talk shows...
...Do you worry about the implications...
...News about the universe can change my day...
...Q: What do you think about applying evolutionary theory to human behavior...
...Q: Have you thought about how to respond to this idea of putting the children of the poor in orphanages...
...Q: I thought that what you said in your book about the 1980s is still true—that people prematurely abandon idealism and principle in order to get jobs that will give them money and security...
...And it's not worth trying to refute on any very specific grounds, as far as I'm concerned...
...I can't speak for everybody...
...Ehrenreich: No...
...They'll say anything...
...You can read some pretty good indictments of war going right back...
...And we are forming a kind of media hit squad to respond to the lies that are being told...
...Ehrenreich: It's partly that...
...But here we are, hacking each other to death throughout the world, and to me there's a great urgency about understanding what this world is, not the human world but the whole world...
...But yeah, I would say, "Let's get everybody fed, let's do the best we can to eliminate suffering, so that everybody's mind is free as much as possible so that we can all think about these great problems and think about them however we want—through art for some people, through poetry, and through science for people like me, who want their answers that way...
...Don't bother me with all that...
...Q: And it has to do with retribution for being eaten...
...It creates this metaphysics, all through various plots and conspiracies...
...I remember the response I got from this editor...
...Ehrenreich: Well, this comes from a very cosmic thought—I actually wrote this up and it was published in Socialist Review...
...Q: So you disagree with people who say, "Cancel the space program...
...Ehrenreich: Then those jobs get eliminated, too, as soon as you have scanning instead of data entry...
...And do you have a different voice when you're writing in the mainstream media...
...But The Bell Curve is just another case of bad science...
...Now, how do we spread that out...
...When I'm writing for Time I think of people, readers like this one uncle of mine, I guess he's been a Time reader for a long time and he used to be a Republican—the only one in the family (he's not a blood relative...
...And this goes very much to the reactionary mood in the last election year...
...Ehrenreich has an eclectic background...
...Probably 300 people in the world believed her...
...I think I can be mean and rational, too...
...So I think the great success of the Right is to make the working class grovel with this constant feeling of scarcity...
...But there's a working-class intellectual tradition in this country...
...She has published nine books covering a wide range of topics, including feminism and the sexual revolution in Remaking Love and The Hearts of Men, the middle class in Fear of Falling, and the 1980s in The Worst Years of Our Lives, a best-selling collection of humorous essays...
...We have to start thinking about our vision for the Twenty-first Century—very different from Marx's—of what can be a good society when that can no longer be based on just more and more stuff...
...Members of the upper-middle class tend to really look down on working-class people...
...I hate the way this whole culture of predictions works...
...Quite surprising...
...People know it's wrong, and they've known that for a long time...
...Anger gets too quickly deflected to the easiest target, which might be irrelevant to the problem...
...At the very end of the show—we were talking about movies, I guess—she said that every movie in Hollywood before it can be released has to be screened by a board of homosexuals to see if it meets with their approval...
...There's a certain appeal to that populism...
...It's not many communities that honor their terrorists," she pointed out...
...If you watch some of these shows like The McLaughlin Group, it's all about making predictions...
...New news about the universe can change my day...
...Her dry wit is familiar to readers of Time magazine, where, in her regular column, she casts a satirical eye on politics and the culture at large...
...Guys who had been Reagan Democrats saying, "What could I have been thinking of...
...My whole theme was that middle-class, single women tend to only look upwards in the socioeconomic scale, and there are a lot more guys out there if you're not focused on somebody who's richer than you are, blue-collar guys, for example...
...That's where that working-class intellectual tradition had been consolidated, and it was just removed...
...At Ms., years ago, I decided to do a column about the man shortage, when that was big news...
...I go through a personality transformation...
...Q: So what is the source of the much-discussed "voter anger" of the conservative, blue-collar electorate...
...What metaphysical world or universe does science have that justifies the search for knowledge...
...It just means unemployment...
...Q: So you think people are doing more interesting work because of technological advances...
...The most politically incisive bumper sticker I've seen lately is Mean People Suck...
...I just said I can only speak for one American person...
...And it was a convincing idea that there really was enough...
...It's okay that when I'm staring out the window of my office, I'm looking at palm fronds...
...Q: So you were thinking about science again after a long respite...
...Maybe I read too much science fiction before I ever got to Marx...
...You can be working in a factory or whatever at near-minimum wage and still be an extremely smart, well-read, curious, intellectual person...
...Ehrenreich: Oh, you want to focus on a very small time frame, like 200 years...
...They have produced enough so that nobody has to be miserable, if we just take over, redistribute things, and not have a few guys hogging everything...
...Q: Do you enjoy it...
...You say, "Well, I don't have enough money to support my family on $25,000 a year, what about this 15 to 20 percent that's going to the Government...
...Whenever they invite me, that is...
...The first thing is getting rid of all this unnecessary human cruelty so we can focus on the big things, but we haven't yet accomplished that...
...I mean, much more than we do now...
...And where I've seen this happen is in union-organizing drives...
...All the stereotypes—polyester, Budweiser...
...Q: You seem to be very sympathetic to the people you write about, even when you're poking fun at them...
...Ehrenreich: Well, if there's a discrimination, it's not so much because I'm female...
...you have a right to be unhappy about that...
...You're supposed to be so grateful if you have a job, you don't question the fact that you don't make enough to live on...
...But there's nothing in this society that's going to let her do that and not starve...
...It seemed to her like I was proposing some kind of kinky thing— sex with blue-collar men...
...Look at the mighty engines of industrial capitalism...
...There's enough information, for example—not all we want, but there's a lot that human beings have accumulated over the centuries...
...You have to say, "What's missing in our lives...
...It's because I'm too radical...
...I don't see any evidence for that at all...
...Let's talk about it...
...They'll just say, "There she goes about the universe," as if I were talking about some little speck...
...But now I don't think so...
...Once I was going through a pre-interview for some TV show and this woman kept asking me, "What will the American people think of that...
...Q: How about politics in this country, and prospects for the Left and all that...
...I think girls should hear that sex is supposed to be pleasurable...
...Their stereotypes are really offensive...
...and the show was over...
...Sorry, I only think in millennia—tens of millennia, preferably...
...There are plenty of people like that in my own family...
...But that doesn't mean anything good for those people...
...I must be sort of dumb, so I wouldn't even attempt to read his 800-page book...
...How can they know...
...Q: Do you ever feel typecast as the bleeding-heart liberal woman when you're on interview shows with all those male talking heads—that having a conservative, punitive point of view is associated with masculinity and rationality and taking the toueh stance...
...It's fun...
...How do we have education for everyone...
...Ehrenreich: Sure...
...But her firing has to do with the emotional tone from the Right, which is one of repressiveness—there shouldn't be any pleasure unless it's paid for, usually by pain...
...Q: What do you think about Joycelyn Elders...
...I made a lot of fun of the yuppies for their obsession with eating and exercising, but they were right about the food," she told me...
...At first I worried that maybe I would go soft when I moved down here," she confessed...
...in biology at Rockefeller University and planned to be a scientist before she became active in the movement opposing the Vietnam war...
...Just this morning we fired off a letter to Newsweek responding to several inaccuracies in a column by George Will...
...We see images all the time of starving people in the Third World battling each other for food packets...
...Or it's not good sex and you don't have to do it...
...We've lost that...
...Ehrenreich: Oh, they weren't really agitators...
...We need that money for social programs...
...And the more we can build that up in people, the less shit they'll take...
...You could discuss things with him...
...But not everybody in the world can have a car...
...I'm focusing on war, and focusing on organized and ritualized violence in general, too, which includes human sacrifice and animal sacrifice...
...Q: At the end of Fear of Falling, you bring up this Aristotelian idea of taking satisfaction in your work...
...And you would really see interesting changes in people as they went through a union drive...
...There's just an ecological limit to material things...
...Near the turn of the century, people working in sweatshops in Manhattan in the old garment district would hire a reader, who would read Shakespeare to them as they worked...
...There's nothing in human nature that says that we will all live in happy communes or villages and be productive and loving...
...So how do we broaden people's access to meaningful work...
...Ehrenreich: I didn't have high hopes, but I didn't realize he would turn out to be a growth medium for the Far Right, which he has...
...And although you see that all the time in advertising, you know that you're not going to get that pleasure from those objects...
...Newt Gingrich still uses the language about a "liberal media elite," and a "liberal elite," so that he can say, "Look, I'm on your side, you waitresses and fork-lift operators, against these contemptuous intellectual elitists...
...It's always man the hunter...
...But what I was led to, and I was completely not prepared for it—it wasn't anywhere in my mind—was that you weren't going to understand these things about us, this predilection for violence, being drawn to violence, without realizing how much of our history as a species was spent being prey for other animals...
...They were just eccentrics in some cases...
...Barbara Ehrenreich: Well, I sometimes feel when I'm addressing myself to America that I want to just say calm down...
...Q: In your book Fear of Falling, you stressed that the working class is not inherently conservative...
...Q: I wondered if you really meant it...
...Ehrenreich: Well, he was a populist, in addition to being a racist...
...I find that just loathsome...
...One theory is that McCarthyism did a lot to destroy that tradition, by wiping out the left-wing leadership of the unions...
...We're not equipped for this...
...Ehrenreich: Some...
...She cooked noodles...
...Or there are only little ones here and there...
...So I don't think the only business of a radical is to build on anger and make people angrier and angrier...
...And here again I fall back on my sort of biological way of looking at things...
...Ehrenreich: I don't believe that anything is particularly preordained that we should achieve...
...So I think of someone like him when I write...
...Ehrenreich is enormously prolific...
...we can't make history, and natural forces just sort of propel us along...
...I mean, all the things people can do and all the ways people can be creative do not get addressed, even as the jobs disappear...
...The local bookstore has a whole section devoted to Ehren-reich's work and that of other Key West literary luminaries, including Ernest Hemingway and mystery writer John Leslie, a friend and neighbor...
...Q: So you don't see a problem with teaching teenagers that sex is play...
...Every time I say there isn't a counterculture, somebody rises up and says, "Oh, yes, here we are...
...Q: Is it possible to reorganize work so it's not deadening for most people, if the crummy jobs still need to be done...
...Ehrenreich: I think there's a tremendous amount of snobbery on both the left and right sides of the spectrum...
...Q: How do you soften that climate and make it a more humane climate...
...I think the fundamental crisis for the Left worldwide is that there is no belief in abundance anymore...
...Ehrenreich: The novel was a way to think about science, because I had gotten my Ph.D...
...We're completely improvising from moment to moment...
...She writes with pride and affection about her working-class relatives, who helped to shape her populist views...
...They were just regular people...
...Ehrenreich: Oh, no, just the potential is there...
...Except Hollywood...
...Of course she clashes with the Republicans, and with Clinton...
...Seriously, this is one of those totally self-justifying arguments that elites can make: We're smarter than poor people, that's why we're in charge...
...Do you think there's a knee-jerk resistance to talking about humans in evolutionary terms...
...She also frequently appears as a guest on television and radio programs and as a lecturer throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe...
...You saw the wave of deep emotional feeling that swept this country...
...We don't know what this human nature is...
...My mother was at moments active in the Democratic Party...
...Q: Is that because people who are writers hold the sciences at arm's length...
...Ehrenreich: I think she's wonderful, and I hope she remains in a prominent, public position because it's so rare to have someone like that in public life, who tells the truth...
...I can be hard and debate like that and be cutting in dealing with those people...
...in biology years ago, and then all that went out of my life in any direct way...
...One of the best ones I've read is from about 600 b.c...
...Q: Have you got the feeling from delving into prehistory that there's been a moral development of humans over time...
...People are angry already...
...Ruth Conniffis Associate Editor of The Progressive...
...But the more you can get girls to focus on their own pleasure, the less unhappy sex and teenage pregnancy there will be, and that should include options of lesbianism and masturbation...
...Ehrenreich: Well, we are biological beings...
...These pundits are like meteorologists who monitor our mood...
...And if it's not pleasurable, it's not sex...
...That's real food.' But now I have extra virgin olive oil, and fresh basil and all that...
...And the novel tries to deal with the question, "What is a metaphysics for science...
...Q: And that accounts for war in some way...
...And I don't understand why most of my friends think that's silly.' We ve been told there s grave overpopulation of the globe...
...So there's no way you can say, "My life is miserable and it's because of corporation X or the store down the street...
...And I think it contributes to a kind of deep passivity...
...But of course I come from a long line of geniuses—self-proclaimed geniuses in most cases—who were manual laborers...
...I visited her apartment in Key West, Florida, where she has recently moved from Long Island...
...Ehrenreich: Yeah, I think it's a knee-jerk resistance, and I've met feminists who thought that any study of innate differences between the sexes was politically incorrect and wrong, and I don't think so...
...For 99 percent of homo sapiens' existence, we've been hunter-gatherers...
...Ehrenreich: Sure...
...Marx was naive, even in his own time, because he didn't think about ecological limits...
...An essay is like a little story, a short story, and I will obsess about what is the real point, what are the real connections, a long time before I ever put finger to keyboard...
...People who write about prehistory have a very hard time dealing with that...
...So, you're unhappy about your job...
...What is there enough of...
...You had an interesting analysis of the chord George Wallace struck in the 1960s with the same group of working-class, American voters...
...That would be my ultimate philosophy...
...There is no guarantee of that...
...They've done very well with him...
...Or I think in scientific terms...
...Ehrenreich: I am involved in a little group of writers and activists that is trying to combat the attacks on welfare...
...It makes it hard if you want to think at all, whether you're on the Left or the Right, to be on those talk shows, when everything is framed as predictions about The American People...
...We don't have a society that can say, "So now you might want to go, tuition-free, to an Ivy League, adult-education program where you will get turned on to publishing a little poetry journal...
...She was an early member of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America...
...And then it can be quite arbitrary where it goes...
...Q: What do you think about the idea that the American people are turning to the Right and tuning in to Rush Limbaugh...
...There are working-class intellectuals to this day...
...It's going to a bunch of immigrants and welfare clients...
...Obviously I'll assume more political sympathy for my views if I'm writing something for Z or the Guardian in England or The Nation than Time, but it might be the exact same basic argument...
...This is because of the book I'm working on now, about war, which is taking me back into prehistory, and I'm just fascinated by it...
...Q: How about that novel you wrote...
...Q: Have you been surprised by the way things turned out with Clinton, or did you think it was going to be this bad...
...Once you get past the really silly stuff, the next thing you have to get to is that ours is no longer a political culture in which you can criticize employers, much less "Big Business...
...Q: What is it...
...You're a loony to think anything else...
...Clinton has a problem with black women, as was evident with Sister Souljah and Lani Guinier...
...Now I have a lot of confidence in us, because we're smart as creatures go...
...Q: I loved your "My Family Values" essay about your laborer, agitator relatives...
...Ehrenreich: No, the only people who really make me mad and I feel real anger at are the Charles Murray types and the Mickey Kaus types who are comfortably patting their paunches while planning how best to starve very poor people...
...But they keep doing it...
...It's too big, it's too vast...
...Ehrenreich: Part of what makes it hard is there isn't a counterculture in this country...
...I don't follow a lot of things in science, but I do like to read some of the things in Scientific American and my favorite day is Tuesday, which is science day in The New York Times...
...That, maybe I have some leverage over...
...And I don't understand why most of my friends think that's silly...
...It's pretty important to tell people that you really have a right to pleasure in your life...
...But no, I've never had that used against me personally...
...It's not the same as just talking to somebody across the kitchen table...
...I think it's also a frustration in some people, like "Why bother...
...I don't understand it...
...I mean, if all you hear is the kind of spectrum represented by the Capitol Gang or at best, I suppose, Crossfire, what else is there to think...
...Mike Albert, the editor of Z, recently asked me this...
...In person, Ehrenreich is friendly and unassuming, with an eccentric assortment of friends...
...But there's not a large enough one that can sustain people who are not making a lot of money and give them a community where that's all right, where that's not the standard by which you're judged, where you're going to be judged more by that rent strike you organized or that poem you wrote...
...I think the Right is running out of it, though, because there's just not enough of a liberal elite anywhere...
...We'd just keep producing, he thought, and everybody could have everything...
...That I didn't expect...
...It's pathetic...
...Data just automatically enters itself...
...Once the technology improves...
...Nobody wants a future where we're just all equally poor...
...In the early 1980s, I thought, 'Oh, this is disgusting, I'm going to eat cheeseburgers...
...One evening when I was visiting she attended a fund-raiser for a Key West man recently released from prison after threatening to blow himself up along with the Navy housing that was taking over the island's last scrap of public land...
...I remember being on a CNN talk show, pitted against Pat Buchanan's sister, Bay Buchanan, and she is, if anything, to the right of him...
...It seemed like you really felt there was space for people to get together, and to recognize that it's not the welfare recipient or the immigrant taking working people's money away...
...Ehrenreich: Isn't it sad that, after we've been through a whole analysis of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, politics would boil down to "nice" versus "mean...
...from China...
...Also, it seems to me part of the political effort in America to make things more progressive is to cut through this kind of punitiveness and the puritanism that goes with it...
...Do you think working-class people used to be recognized as intelligent...
...Q: So you don't write from anger...
...Ehrenreich: Well, if I were designing sex education—and there's no way they would ever let me near sex education—I wouldn't just say this is for play, I mean empowering girls would be very much a part of it...
...That's really the no-brain analysis...
...She said, "But can you talk to them...
...How do you maintain your optimism...
...We are trying to get on television people whom welfare has helped in their lives—who are, of course, exactly the people left out of this debate...
...Ehrenreich: That's true...
...These are not things a novel should do—which I guess is what some of the bad reviews were telling me...
...Q: A lot of people objected quite strenuously to the idea of applying science that way in Charles Murray's book, The Bell Curve...
...Ruthless...
...You have to go into a kind of performance mode, and get very aggressive...
...I really don't see, from the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs—I know it's politically incorrect to believe the Aztecs did that, but I think they did—to the Holocaust or Rwanda, I don't see the improvement...
...I can't tell you what everybody is going to think...
...But I don't see myself as writing polemics where I'm just trying to beat something into people's heads...
...I've run into that again and again talking over the years to different magazine editors...
...It's the theme of punitive outrage...
...That is very instructive to me because it says something about the importance of having some alternative voices out there in the media...
...I think that, very simply, yeah, some of those responses to violence and the threat of violence are probably hard-wired into us and show up today in response to human enemies, when these "enemies" are identified for us...
...I feel sometimes we're witnessing, like in this last election, a lynch-mob mood...
...It's going to contain a new theory that does reflect on human evil in a new way...
...I still think there is such a space...
...Now I'll look like a loony if you quote me on this, but I think it's very painful, it's very humiliating to be confined to one two-bit planet on the far fringes of a second-rate galaxy for my whole life...
...John McLaughlin will say, "And you, Fred Barnes, what will be the numbers for the Republicans in North Carolina...
...Ehrenreich spends the mornings writing, so I came over for lunch...
...Ehrenreich: Well, I think the root cause of the anger is economic insecurity...
...Q: Do you feel that you've been treated the same as male commentators when you're invited to speak...
...And this is something I've been thinking about before, but the Gulf war certainly crystallized this question...
...And that's something that's repressed, that we have trouble acknowledging...
...And some not...
...That potential has been talked about for thirty years—the potential for meaningful and enjoyable work...
...While there may be a scarcity of economic resources, you say there's not going to be a scarcity of meaningful work to do...
...Anyway, he was a Republican but he was a reasonable man...
...That's what it seems to collapse down to...
...Ehrenreich: Well, I think a lot about science...
...Q: Do you believe in the idea of progress—that we're better off in some way socially or politically...
...It really depends on what you're going to do with the information...
...I think of myself as a hired hit man up against those right-wingers.9 Ehrenreich: It hasn't been said to me, but it was certainly said to some of the female candidates running for office—the suspicion that they could never be tough enough on crime...
...And what do you know...
...My ex-husband is a union organizer...
...So what kind of abundance are we going to be able to talk about...
...Ehrenreich: Well, every war has millions of reasons for that particular war, obviously...
...It's been true for a long time that with computers you can get rid of more and more of the boring work, which we are actually doing, but without creating new jobs...
...Let's settle down...
...The great thing that Marx was able to do in the middle of the last century was to say there really is enough to go around...
...What's that about...
...That life is too precious to spend doing repetitive or boring or useless work that is just not satisfying in any way...
...That's what seems to be happening...
...The person who's been doing data entry might want to write poetry, or edit the poetry journal...
...I'm not arguing that one way or another, but we've certainly been told that, and relative to resources it sure looks like it...
...my politics are in the wrong direction...
...I want to say something soothing, instead of my impulse in the 1960s, which was to shake my fist at people...
...l think a lot about science...
...Q: There are a lot of telemarketers and data-entry workers, though...
...She published her first novel in 1994, a science-fiction story called Kipper's Game...
...Ehrenreich: I couldn't believe they printed it...
...You're not going to get the kind of friendship and community and love that you see people getting in those commercials...
...Q: You talk about the media "discovery" of the working class in Fear of Falling—the stereotype of the pot-bellied guy with the beer can...
...Ehrenreich: Absolutely...
...Ehrenreich: I don't think it's really a different voice...
...And the Right gets ahead by being populist, in their peculiar, completely duplicitous way, being representatives of the little guy against some kind of "liberal elite...
...It was quite appalling...
...You have the wonderful potential of eliminating lots and lots of boring and physically difficult things to do...
...The attempt to live together agriculturally or in villages with rather large concentrations of humans is only maybe 10,000 years old...
...A major book about war is under way, and a new book of essays for the 1990s, Snarling Citizen, will be out in the spring...
...Ehrenreich: I think it has to do with the form of defense that primates would have used, and do use, which is a collective defense...
...But there's nothing written that says we're going to succeed and we're not going to make ourselves extinct...
...But in a kind of loopy, thriller way, these are the questions the novel answers...
...Ehrenreich: All right, I'll tell you, but it may sound crazy without all the arguments and evidence...
...I'll be thinking about something and it will be gestating as a column or an essay...
...And yet they sit there saying, "58 percent...
...That completely undercuts the grounds for socialism...
...My response to this book is if what he's saying is that poor people are dumber, then I'm just middle-class so I'm not too smart, either, right...
...Q: Are they purposeful, political types, your friends...
...And she's absolutely right that we should talk about masturbation in the schools...
...When I say it to many people, they laugh...
...Because the whole point for me of being a radical was that we could get the man-made misery and inequality out of the way and begin to focus on the really important things, such as understanding this situation we find ourselves in, which we call the universe, or such as getting off this planet...
...Her essays and articles have appeared in Z, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere...
...But what I'm really looking at in this book is why do we bring all these powerful sorts of quasi-religious feelings to war...
...And meaningful work has to be part of it...
...Because the only socialism that you can then imagine is of everybody being poor, everybody being miserable, which is people's image of Cuba, and perhaps quite a bit of the reality of Cuba, leaving aside what's been done to Cuba by the United States...
...I see nothing wrong with wanting to know about our evolution...
...We have a political culture in which the happy myth is that employers are philanthropists because they've given you a job—not that you give them your labor power and don't get paid enough for it, but that they have given you a job, how kind of them...
Vol. 59 • February 1995 • No. 2
