'This Land Is Their Land' by Barbara Ehrenreich

Reports From a Divided Nation

Barbara Ehrenreich

Metropolitan Books: 252 pp., $24

LISTEN carefully. Over the din of Fox News commentary, AM radio shock talk, Cialis ads and pandering presidential candidates, you can hear it: the sound of Barbara Ehrenreich screaming. "Wake up!" she's shouting at the working people of America. "The people you trust are lying to you. All of them."

From where Ehrenreich sits -- no ivory tower but not quite ground level, either -- the good people of America are being gouged, duped and distracted; trapped on airplanes during their hard-earned summer vacations, scared away from demanding better wages, lured to vote for the party of the rich for the sake of phony moral values. We're being made to buy Disney dolls and self-help books, force-fed unsatisfying low-fat diets -- and look! We're all poorer and fatter than ever. And we wouldn't know a decent healthcare plan if it cracked our heads open.

In her new book, "This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation," Ehrenreich compiles published commentary and blog posts into a volume that might be read as a crescendoing howl against American injustice early in the second millennium. With burning wit and righteousness, Ehrenreich critiques politicians, evangelicals, corporations (Wal-Mart, Circuit City, the Gap, Target) and the odd movie ("Miami Vice") with a scorn that abates only when she's talking about her granddaughters, whom she invokes to remind MSNBC analyst Kate O'Beirne that she is far from the family-hating feminist O'Beirne makes her out to be.

Given the wretched state of U.S. healthcare, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the looming threat to reproductive rights and the nattering mendacity that issues from the mouths of cable-news pundits, it's hard to deny Ehrenreich her outrage. Hardly any contemporary social critic is so entertaining in her darkly satirical fury, or so clear. Neither of the current presidential candidates has matched Ehrenreich in driving home the healthcare problem as she does in one short essay (written shortly after President Bush vetoed a bill expanding state health insurance coverage for children) titled "Children Deserve Veterinary Care Too." Citing a few cases in which a vet could have saved uninsured children's lives, she proposes a $33-per-month pet-insurance policy for toddlers, insisting that it's a good investment: "In many ways," she writes, "children stack up well compared with common pets. They can shed real tears, like Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs."