Barbara Ehrenreich.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Columnist - Interview

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those rare creatures, a funny left-wing political writer. 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. She also frequently appears as a guest on television and radio programs and as a lecturer throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Her essays and articles have appeared in Z, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Ehrenreich is enormously prolific. 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. She published her first novel in 1994, a science-fiction story called Kipper's Game. 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 has an eclectic background. She earned a Ph.D. in biology at Rockefeller University and planned to be a scientist before she became active in the movement opposing the Vietnam war. She was an early member of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America. She writes with pride and affection about her working-class relatives, who helped to shape her populist views.

I visited her apartment in Key West, Florida, where she has recently moved from Long Island. "At first I worried that maybe I would go soft when I moved down here," she confessed. "But now I don't think so. It's okay that when I'm staring out the window of my office, I'm looking at palm fronds."

The local bookstore has a whole section devoted to Ehrenreich's work and that of other Key West literary luminaries, including Ernest Hemingway and mystery writer John Leslie, a friend and neighbor.

Ehrenreich spends the mornings writing, so I came over for lunch. She cooked noodles. "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. "In the early 1980s, I thought, `Oh, this is disgusting, I'm going to eat cheeseburgers. That's real food.' But now I have extra virgin olive oil, and fresh basil and all that."

In person, Ehrenreich is friendly and unassuming, with an eccentric assortment of friends. 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. "It's not many communities that honor their terrorists," she pointed out.

Q: You seem to be very sympathetic to the people you write about, even when you're poking fun at them. How do you maintain your optimism?

Barbara Ehrenreich: Well, I sometimes feel when I'm addressing myself to America that I want to just say calm down. I want to say something soothing, instead of my impulse in the 1960s, which was to shake my fist at people. I feel sometimes we're witnessing, like in this last election, a lynch-mob mood. And you can't stand there and shake your fist at that. You have to say, "What's missing in our lives? Let's talk about it. Let's settle down. So, you're unhappy about your job; you have a right to be unhappy about that." Anger gets too quickly deflected to the easiest target, which might be irrelevant to the problem.

Q: So you don't write from anger?

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. I find that just loathsome.

Q: Have you thought about how to respond to this idea of putting the children of the poor in orphanages?

Ehrenreich: I am involved in a little group of writers and activists that is trying to combat the attacks on welfare. 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. And we are forming a kind of media hit squad to respond to the lies that are being told. Just this morning we fired off a letter to Newsweek responding to several inaccuracies in a column by George Will.

Q: What do you think about the idea that the American people are turning to the Right and tuning in to Rush Limbaugh? You had an interesting analysis of the chord George Wallace struck in the 1960s with the same group of working-class, American voters.

Ehrenreich: Well, he was a populist, in addition to being a racist. 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." 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." There's a certain appeal to that populism. I think the Right is running out of it, though, because there's just not enough of a liberal elite anywhere. Except Hollywood.

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 tough stance?

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. But no, I've never had that used against me personally

Q: Do you feel that you've been treated the same as male commentators when you're invited to speak?

Ehrenreich: Well, if there's a discrimination, it's not so much because I'm female. It's because I'm too radical; my politics are in the wrong direction. I think I can be mean and rational, too. I can be hard and debate like that and be cutting in dealing with those people. Whenever they invite me, that is.

Q: Do you enjoy it?

Ehrenreich: Sure. It's fun. I go through a personality transformation. It's not the same as just talking to somebody across the kitchen table. You...