"Had I Known" by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

The problem with essay collections of previously published material is that the individual pieces do not stand up well in the passage of time.  The gifted writer and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich carefully skirts that problem in her new collection of previously published work, Had I Known:  Collected Essays (Twelve, 2020).  Her essays, some going back to the 1980s clearly illustrate how we came to be a country ruled by a buffoon, a nation riddled with class consciousness and racism, layered with poverty, desperation, rage, and dreams deferred.

That is the over-arching theme of much of Ehrenreich’s writing:  poverty and social classification.  One cannot read her work without feeling the suffocation that saps the fight out of human beings forced to play a rigged game.  Her work plumbs the depths of a no-man’s land of cyclical poverty and cynicism.  No one gets the American dream, and to Ehrenreich, this is the soul-crushing insult of life in this country, the painful longing for relief that never comes.  She turns her acerbic, biting pen loose to push back against the system, letting the bitterness flow and tempering rage with dark humor.

Ehrenreich is a scientist first, possessing a doctorate in cellular immunology, but she is truly a social and cultural critic as well as a journalist.  Early on in the book, she bemoans the decline of journalism.  She tells us that the “real face” of journalism is not the multi-million dollar celebrity news readers but the “low-wage workers” who scrape and claw for funding to get the story out there to consumers.  One cannot “hop on a plane to cover a police shooting in your hometown if you don’t have a credit card,” she writes.  She makes excellent and frequent use of data to make her point, combining the pointed observation with the numbers to back it up.

She is quick to point out the poison and the pathology infecting American life:  dire financial straits, lack of social justice, discrimination against immigrants, and rape culture.  She offers up the family crossing signs that dot the highways at the southwest border of the U.S. showing “a silhouetted family running together, reminding you that it’s parents and children, not deer, you’re likely to collide with just north of the fence.”  She illustrates the human damage in the policy-making, the homicidal nature of enforced poverty and lack of basic health care.

In the piece, “A Homespun Safety Net,” published first in The New York Times, 2009, she identifies the recession then plaguing the country as a “stress test for the American safety net.”  This is a case where we can trace where we have been to where we are now.  The safety net failed, or is failing, or is a failure, depending on how we wish to conjugate it.  Her prophetic writing in 2009 has proven all too spot-on.

She is able to weave in cultural criticism as well.  In her extended essay on the 2012 Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, she deftly weaves in an extended rumination on God and atheism, animals and anthropomorphism.  Along the way, she offers a vigorous dose of analysis of literature and speculative fiction, as well as an exploration of the great atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris before circling back to the film, instructing the reader not to be duped by figures in flaming chariots falling from the sky.  They are intruders who must be watched without falling to the ground in supplication.

Her most powerful moments in the book come from her analysis of the disappearing middle class.  Now we have college grads who cannot afford to pay back their student loans on minimum wage and low paying jobs that deflect the promise of an education.  This is crippling our society—no one can afford to get married, buy a house, take out a car loan or have a future of any promise.  Everyone, PhDs down to high school graduates are in the same boat:  the sinking vessel of poverty.  The boat is doomed, and according to Ehrenreich, this has been the case for some time now.  We have just failed to notice the water level rising.

She is merciless on white privilege, saying that they have become “ingrown, clannish, and stupid.  Cut off from the mainstream of humanity…,” they suffer from low self-esteem.  She wields a razor-sharp scalpel:  “Some white men, driven mad by the feeling that people are laughing at them, have taken to running around the streets and beating on random people of color or threatening to vote Republican.”  These are the same men who stalk the steps of the statehouse with assault weapons strapped across their chests and proclaiming loudly their Second Amendment rights.  They hope to assuage their impotence with a big gun.  Ehrenreich says the result is clear:  Americans now inhabit two nations, she says, the “hungry and overfed” and the “hopeless and the have-it-alls.”  From poverty, all social ills—hatred and violence—rise.

In all her words and analysis, this is Barbara Ehrenreich’s dire thesis.