No. 20
MARK S. FISHER
Contents 1 The Head Office
This Cradle Won’t Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
John Summers
Salvos
10
Dead End on Shakin’ Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thomas Fr ank
Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jed Perl
18
The Joke’s on You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
30
Sit-Cons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
40
Oh, the Pathos! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
50
Accountants for Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
153
Presenting . . . The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Steve Almond Class on TV Heather Havrilesky
Presenting . . . This American Life Eugenia Williamson The Pew Charitable Trusts David D’Arcy
The Dollar Debauch
Dilemmas of the Rentier Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chris Lehmann
Into the Infinite
The Threshold of Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kim Phillips-Fein
72
116
Notes & Quotes
The Head Office . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kurt Tucholsky
Daniel’s Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Daniel A aron
Tod Mesirow
A Bad Day in Brooklyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Emma Gar man
Studies in Total Depravity
43
58
Party of None . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
80
Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
96
Barack Obama’s annoying journey to the center of belonging Chris Br ay
4 1 The Baffler [no.20]
8
17(+)
Maze of Doom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
M A R K DA N C E Y
6
Jim Newell
The high, the low, the vibrant Billionaire Ball . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epitaph for the student-athlete Matt Hinton
Stories
Lancelot Gomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Manohar Shetty
Mr. Secondhand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Manohar Shetty
Bhutas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Saskya Jain
106 130
140
144
Memoir
Delusional Parasitosis and Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Will Boisvert
Poems
Faulty Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alan Gilbert
Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kingdom 2 (a poetics) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
R ae Ar mantrout
The Back Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Geoffrey O’Brien
Tranche I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tranche II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Joshua Clover
Projecting Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Forrest Gander
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Susan Stewart
One Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Matthea Harvey
The Blackest Black Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
John Yau
Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers . . . . . . . . . .
The Homeless Economist
Remainders
Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seth Colter Walls
Ancestors
64 24
28 29
56
78 79
105
114
129
160
168 124
Life and Times of a Libertine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
161
Bafflers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
170
Christopher Lasch
M A R K DA N C E Y
The
Baffler [no.20] ! 5
[ S a lvos ]
Dead End on Shakin’ Street 3 Thomas Fr ank
M
y hometown is vibrant. Its status as such is certified, official, stamped on both sides. There was a time, though, when it wasn’t, when my friends and I would laugh at Kansas City’s blandness: its harmless theater productions, its pretentious suburbs, its private country clubs, its eternal taste for classic rock. We called it “Cupcake Land,” after a favorite Richard Rhodes essay from the eighties. The city knew nothing of the bold ideas of our robust generation, we thought: it had virtually no music subculture; it was deaf to irony; hell, it actually tried to drive out of business the last surviving club from its jazz-age glory days. Maybe that was the sort of criticism everybody made of their Midwestern hometowns back then. Well, those hometowns have certainly turned the tables on us today. Our enthusiasm for music is a dead thing now in these post-alternative decades, a mere record collection that we occasionally cue up after one Scotch too many to help remember the time when art seemed to matter. But Kansas City doesn’t need any reminders. The place fairly quivers with vitality now. It is swarming with artists; its traffic islands are bedecked with the colorful products of their studios. It boasts a spectacular new performing arts center designed by one of those spectacular new celebrity architects. It even has an indie-rock festival to call its own. And while much of the city’s flowering has been organic and spontaneous, other parts of its renaissance were engineered by the very class of civic leaders we used to deride for their impotence and cluelessness. At that Kansas City indie-rock festival, for example, the mayor himself made a presentation this year, as did numerous local professionals and business leaders. Besides, as everyone knows, cupcakes are cool nowadays, like yoga or something—the consummate expression of the baker’s artisanal vibrancy. 10 1 The Baffler [no.20]
Y
our hometown is probably vibrant, too. Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in. This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation’s city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration’s economic recovery strategy for the nation. In the fall of 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts launched “ArtPlace,” a joint project with the nation’s largest banks and foundations, and ArtPlace immediately began generating a cloud of glowing euphemisms around the central, hallowed cliché: ArtPlace is investing in art and culture at the heart of a portfolio of integrated strategies that can drive vibrancy and diversity so powerful that it transforms communities.
Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous. ArtPlace says its goal is not merely to promote the arts but to “transform economic development in America,” a project that is straightforward and obvious if you accept the organization’s slogan: “Art creates vibrancy and increases economic opportunity.”
DAV I D M c LI M A N S
The
Baffler [no.20] ! 11
[ S a lvos ]
Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics 3 Jed Perl
F
or years now the art world has been unpredictable, fragmented, disorienting, like a hair-raising rollercoaster ride. The economic situation in the galleries and the auction houses reaches dizzying heights followed by equally bewildering depths. And new artists and art markets emerge even before last season’s artists and exhibitions can be absorbed. All of this has a fascination, no question about it. Drop into the galleries for an afternoon and you may find yourself amused. I do. But when I go back to the galleries week after week and month after month, I find that my impressions grow unstable. I feel uneasy. And I know that I am not alone. Although gallerygoers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread feeling that nothing really adds up—either for the artists or for the audiences. No matter how eye-filling the encounters that people are having with works of art, these experiences, stripped of context and implication, can end up somehow unsatisfactory. For inveterate gallerygoers the art world has come to resemble a puzzle to which nobody really has any solution. And why is there no solution? There is no solution because too many of the pieces are missing. The shared assumptions about the nature of art that ought to bind together our variegated experiences are nowhere to be found. Look behind the art world’s glittering collage of a facade and you find a pervasive uncertainty, a culture adrift in sour disenchantment. There is so much disappointment and confusion around the very idea of art that even when the art does not disappoint, people find themselves backing away from the experiences they have. It is not easy for anybody to write about art in this strange, disconcerting time. I cannot say that I find it easy. The days I spend looking at art have their hours of high exhilaration. There is also an underlying anxi18 1 The Baffler [no.20]
ety, because the wonders are isolated, and it is difficult to see how things fit together. I keep looking for a key, a theme, a pattern. Week after week, month after month, I go to the museums and the galleries in many cities, but mostly in New York. And in New York, although I visit museums and galleries uptown and downtown and outside of Manhattan, most of the action, at least when it comes to contemporary art, is to be found along the streets of Chelsea, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, north of Fourteenth Street and south of Thirtieth Street. Walking those blocks, waiting for elevators, sometimes finding that the views of the Hudson River outside high windows trump anything on the gallery walls, my thoughts, more impressions than thoughts, are unsettled. Some days, I see so much and have so few strong experiences that by the time I get in a cab to go home my mind is pretty much a blank. Other times, things begin to fall into place, at least for the moment. Getting excited about new work can be a clarifying experience; that was certainly how I felt when I began to see the DVDs of Jeremy Blake, with their luxuriant, nostalgia-soaked hedonism. At other times, something indifferent or annoying or truly terrible has its own kind of clarifying effect. As I go from gallery to gallery I find myself trying to formulate an idea or develop a little theory, something that helps me make sense of it all. Not long after coming out of a Tony Oursler show—he makes elaborate installations with surreal bits of video projected on sculptural objects—I found myself thinking, “Okay, the art world is now a variety show.” At some point after returning from Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most widely discussed of the fairs where more and more of the business of art is going on, the words “laissez-faire aesthetics” came together in my head. And then there was the afternoon when I wandered across an empty plaza at the Los
[
BRAD HOLLAND
“Okay, the art world is now a variety show.”
9 Angeles County Museum of Art, wondering what on earth I could say about the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and came to the conclusion that under the circumstances all I could do was send postcards from nowhere. Writing, no matter how difficult, is just about the only way I have of making sense of the disconnect between the enthusiasm I feel
for some of the work that I’m seeing and my more general distress at an art world that’s drunk on money and publicity. Although some have argued that tougher economic times can lead to a more disciplined—or at least a somewhat chastened—art world, my feeling is that money and publicity remain paramount even when the money is drying up. The
Baffler [no.20] ! 19
[ S a lvos ]
The Joke’s On You
Presenting . . . The Daily Show and The Colbert Report 3 Steve Almond
A
mong the hacks who staff our factories of conventional wisdom, evidence abounds that we are living in a golden age of political comedy. The New York Times nominates Jon Stewart, beloved host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as the “most trusted man in America.” His protégé, Stephen Colbert, enjoys the sort of slavish media coverage reserved for philanthropic rock stars. Bill Maher does double duty as HBO’s resident provocateur and a regular on the cable news circuit. The Onion, once a satirical broadsheet published by starving college students, is now a mini-empire with its own news channel. Stewart and Colbert, in particular, have assumed the role of secular saints whose nightly shtick restores sanity to a world gone mad. But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously. Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage. 30 1 The Baffler [no.20]
F
ans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times offered a summation of the majority opinion in a 2008 profile of Stewart that doubled as his highbrow coronation. “Mr. Stewart describes his job as ‘throwing spitballs’ from the back of the room,” she wrote. “Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day . . . in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.” Putting aside the obvious objection that poking fun at the powerful isn’t the same as bluntly confronting them, it’s important to give Stewart and Colbert their due. They are both superlative comedians with brilliant writing staffs. They represent a quantum improvement over the aphoristic pabulum of the thirties satirist Will Rogers or the musical schmaltz of Beltway balladeer Mark Russell. Stewart and Colbert have, on occasion, aimed their barbs squarely at the seats of power. The most famous example is Colbert’s turn as the featured speaker at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Paying tribute to President George W. Bush, seated just a few feet away, Colbert vowed, “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he
[
S TE P H E N K RO N I N G E R
Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive.
9 stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.� He went on to praise,
in punishing detail, the media who had served as cheerleaders for the president’s factually spurious rush to war in Iraq, and his embrace of domestic surveillance and torture. The crowd, composed of A-list cheerleaders, sat in stunned silence. The
Baffler [no.20] ! 31
[ S a lvos ]
Sit-Cons Class on TV
3 Heather Havrilesky
O
n television, money imbues characters with honor or shame, dignity or recklessness, charity or malevolence. While the black hat vs. white hat moral absolutism that once dominated the small screen has slowly dissolved into an ethically ambiguous world of pure-intentioned, pill-popping nurses and idealistic, philandering ad men and humble, meth-slinging chemistry teachers, these nuances are less often applied to matters of class. The very rich are either breathtakingly noble or downright nefarious, while the very poor are as self-destructive and helpless as injured baby animals. It’s odd, then, that the one show that dares to burden its privileged heroines with both aggressively entitled and infantile urges of the urban elite would come under fire for focusing on rich white women. Forget the whitewashed, class-bound portrayals of every maledominated TV show of the past half-century; HBO’s Girls, a comedy about the demeaning post-college years of coddled white girls, should shift its premise, its focus, and its tone in order singlehandedly to carry the banner of multiculturalism and class unity. Yet it’s hard to think of a single TV show that approaches upper-crust decadence with as much transparency (and, at times, outright scorn) as Girls does. From the very first scene, Hannah (Lena Dunham) takes the shape of a self-satisfied, overgrown infant, slurping up pasta on her parent’s dime, while they steel themselves to inform her that they’re cutting her off financially. Her response? She pouts like a spoiled brat, protesting that all of her boho artist friends are fully funded by their parents and hinting that her entire life will fall to pieces without their support. Hannah’s friends, meanwhile, are exposed as overindulged and deluded. Hannah’s wealthy, egocentric friend Jessa ( Jemima Kirke) deliv-
40 1 The Baffler [no.20]
ers a rousing speech to her fellow nannies at a city playground about demanding fair pay and benefits—as her own two charges wander off unattended. Meanwhile, Hannah’s pretty roommate Marnie (Allison Williams) is disparaged for floating in an insulated bubble
[
J . D. K I N G
Downton Abbey’s parade of poor, dumb proles is so relentless that it’s hard not to picture its Yank fans savoring the show’s ugly class implications as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.
9 The
Baffler [no.20] ! 41
[ S a lvos ]
Oh, the Pathos!
Presenting . . . This American Life 3 Eugenia Williamson
T
his spring, professional storyteller Mike Daisey was revealed to have fabricated key events in a segment for the public radio show This American Life. The broadcast, an adaptation of his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, recounted his journey to the Foxconn manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, China. In record time, the monologist’s name became shorthand for self-aggrandizing deception—though curiously little attention has been paid, then or since, to the manner in which Daisey’s story scrupulously adhered to the narrative conventions of This American Life. The episode in question, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” was an inventory of high Victorian exploitation straight out of the Industrial Revolution. During his tour of China, Daisey explained, he encountered sad but noble workers, among them a man with a hand ruined in a factory explosion who was spellbound by the iPad Daisey brought with him. “It’s a kind of magic,” the worker said, or rather didn’t. Volumes of predictably earnest media criticism were expended on Daisey and his transgressions. One man’s fabrications sent the pundits into rounds of frantic handwringing, causing them to question the nature of narrative, reportage, and truth itself. Most critics agreed that This American Life host Ira Glass displayed heroic grace in the wake of the damaging revelations. When Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz suspected Daisey had lied, Glass promptly looked into the matter, confirmed Schmitz’s suspicions, and issued a press release confessing that he hadn’t fact-checked the story as thoroughly as he should have. Glass then devoted an entire episode of This American Life to explaining Daisey’s falsehoods. “Retraction” culminated in a fraught interview with Daisey himself, during which Glass expressed both anger and 50 1 The Baffler [no.20]
empathy. “I simultaneously feel terrible, for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also I stuck my neck out for you. You know, I feel like, I feel like, like I vouched for you. With our audience,” Glass said. “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” was hardly This American Life’s first foray into investigative journalism. Each week, the program presents three stories on a theme. More often than not, these are quirky personal anecdotes about The Way We Live Now, though in recent years the show has tackled issues of broader importance: kidnappings in Colombia, Geoffrey Canada’s radical approach to educating the poor, the root causes of the new depression. Daisey’s story, among the show’s most ambitious attempts at social criticism, was the most popular episode in the history of This American Life. And in an hour, the pundits moaned, Daisey dashed the trust it had taken Glass twenty years to build. Amid all the coverage was a stinging remark from Bloomberg reporter Adam Minter. Speaking to Marketplace, he suggested that the audience of This American Life was part of the problem: “People like a very simple narrative. . . . Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good. That’s a great, simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons [Daisey] had so much traction.” While Minter’s comment was the most accurate explanation of what had happened, it still missed the mark. It’s obvious that Mike Daisey wasn’t some marauding blackguard hell-bent on tricking the noble, irrepressibly nice host of a public radio institution and his legion of right-minded fans. But the truth is far more uncomfortable: Daisey stepped forward to deliver to This American Life listeners exactly what Glass has conditioned them to
[
P E TE R A R K L E
Daisey’s story, suggestive of the show’s push into social criticism, was the most popular episode in the history of This American Life. And in an hour, the pundits moaned, Daisey dashed the trust it had taken Glass twenty years to build.
9 expect—a dramatic nonfiction narrative in the form of a personal journey. A self-aware, middle-aged, middle-class everyman who travels to an exotic locale and meets a bunch of people who aren’t too different from This American Life’s listeners is the show’s perfect story. That’s why Glass had to
send Daisey to the gallows for minor falsehoods that in no way obscured the greater truth about Apple Inc. Daisey exposed the fact that the aesthetics and conventions of the kind of narrative journey Glass has patented—one born of nineties boom-time decadence—were never designed to accommodate The
Baffler [no.20] ! 51
h No t e s
& Q uo t e s
A Bad Day in Brooklyn 3 Emma Garman
I
f the financial industry operates in our society like a ruthless drug dealer, then the book publishing industry is like a superannuated old biddy, once grand and imperious, now losing her faculties and prone to ill-advised dispensations of large sums of money. She sort of means well, though, so it’s best to kiss up to her and pretend not to notice her decrepitude, bless her heart. Hence the uproar this spring. When the arbiters of publishing-industry taste were inexplicably denied that ne plus ultra of ass-kissing opportunities, the annual awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, they all rose up in comically jowly dudgeon as though someone had slapped granny. Publishers and booksellers—an ultra-civilized cadre not given to extreme displays of temper—were, as the New York Times reported, “incensed.” Never mind that it’s not so uncommon for the Pulitzer board to beg off from awarding the fiction prize. Such abstentions have occurred ten times in the prize’s ninety-four-year history; the last time was in 1977, to remarkably few sententious hues and cries from the literary overclass. And anyway, it was far from the case this year that the literary scene was subject to complete, loutish neglect. The Pulitzer fiction jury shortlisted three novels—Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson—for prospective acclaim, but, for reasons unspecified by the prize administrator, none wound up with the $10,000 prize and attendant career boost. This unexpected turn of events, to judge by the incoherent emotions issuing from the literati, signaled nothing less than a plunge straight back into pre-Enlightenment darkness. For it wasn’t merely disappointing that neither Karen Russell, nor Denis Johnson, nor the late David Foster Wallace was honored. It was, averred Pulitzer juror Maureen Corrigan, “terrible news.” (To which the only sensible response is: how enviable a life in which the absence of a book plaudit qualifies as terrible news!) “We were invited to serve on the jury because we’re recognized as being, in some way, literary experts,” Corrigan wrote in the Washington Post. “Why, then, turn the final decision over to a board primarily composed of non-literary folk?” The no-Pulitzer uproar was absolutely the rage of the literary experts. Corrigan—a book critic for NPR and a lecturer at Georgetown University—shared judging honors with Susan Larson, the former books editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and Michael Cunningham, who’d brought home a Pulitzer of his own for his 1999 opus The Hours. In defending the experts, the New Yorker ran an excruciatingly condescending blog post depicting the Pulitzer board as vacant idiots who’d rather watch cat videos, read The Hunger Games, and throw Mad Men parties than consider the oh-so-worthy fiction shortlist. In the New York Times, meanwhile, Ann Patchett—novelist, bookstore 58 1 The Baffler [no.20]
g
M E LI N DA B EC K
This unexpected turn of events, to judge by the incoherent emotions issuing from the literati, signaled nothing less than a plunge straight back into pre-Enlightenment darkness.
9 The
Baffler [no.20] ! 59
[ M e moi r]
Delusional Parasitosis and Me 3 Will Boisvert
F
irst, let’s get something straight: our apartment does not have bedbugs. Which is strange, since it’s hosted every other kind of vermin. Cockroaches, of course. One of the string of transient roommates who troop through our living room once left a pot of cooked vegetables sitting out for a week, and fruit flies swarmed. For a while there were mice in the shin-deep trash piled up on the kitchen floor, dumped there by Max, the thirtysomething Ukrainian philosophy grad student who holds the lease. Until I pressed the issue, Max barred me from cleaning up the mess on the grounds that there were important documents buried in it that he would need months to extricate. Meanwhile, the drifts of three-yearold magazines, students’ blue books, soiled paper towels, and mangled tennis shoes made ideal nesting habitat for rodents. But we did not have bedbugs. No one in the apartment was ever bitten. There were no live bugs or nymphs on the bed or in the crevices of furniture and walls, no cast-off exoskeletal husks, no blood smears on the sheets to mark the path from host to hiding place, no black ink-spot fecal stains between mattress and box spring, no cloying odor of strawberries and coriander. When our landlord announced a building-wide inspection by a bedbug-sniffing canine, I felt confident. Ramon (the super), a short, balding man with a ponytail leading a small beagle on a leash, arrived with the rest of the bedbug team. I watched the dog nose around my bedroom. “What does he do if he finds bedbugs?” I asked Ramon. “Ah,” he smiled. “He sits.” After five minutes of no sitting, I relaxed. Then the handler picked him up, put him on top of the bed, and started making vigorous arm gestures, as if he were calling the dog out 64 1 The Baffler [no.20]
at home plate. Still, the dog did not sit. He yelped. “There are bedbugs in here,” breathed the handler. The same procedure marked Max’s bedroom as infested, too. “But no one’s ever been bitten,” I spluttered. “I’ve never seen any bedbugs.” “That doesn’t matter,” said Ramon. “They could be hiding anywhere. Some people don’t react to the bites. And they don’t bite everyone. You could have a wife getting bitten and her husband beside her won’t notice anything.” What the hell? I seethed, composing the rant that would take over my internal monologue in the coming days. So, a man who knows goddamned well he’s not getting bitten by any goddamned bedbugs, a man who doesn’t have a wife in bed with him (thank you very much), a man who’s never seen any bugs, which would have to be leaving his bed every night and crawling to some other apartment to bite somebody else and then returning to his bed to digest the blood they sucked—that man’s carefully marshaled evidence, experience, and informed opinion should be ignored just because some fucking dog that ought to have its snout kicked in barked? And with that I crossed into the world of New York’s bedbug epidemic, where the verdict of a transparently coached dog cannot be appealed. Kafkaesque is an apt, but too mild, word to describe it. In his celebrated giant-bug tale, “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka imagined that a family of middle-class urban strivers would react to a son’s transformation into a cockroach by attempting a reasonable coexistence before moving on to eradication. In twenty-first-century New York, bedbugs don’t need to bite, or even make a cameo appearance, to provoke scorched-earth militance in the city’s class struggle.
[
S
even years of Daily News headlines— from 2004’s bedbugs blitz city to 2010’s bloody bedbug nightmare to last year’s brooklyn bedbug hell—attest to New York’s panic over the species Cimex lectularius. A once ubiquitous cohabitant of human dwellings that was largely eradicated in
HENRIK DRESCHER
rich countries by DDT after World War II, the bloodsucking parasite has staged a comeback in the last decade thanks to pesticide resistance and global travel. The size of an apple seed, the bug presents a truly fearsome prospect only when blown up on a tabloid’s front page: blunt-nosed and beady-eyed, The
Baffler [no.20] ! 65
v Th e D o l l a r D e b a u c h
Dilemmas of the Rentier Class 3 Chris Lehmann
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mid the run-up to the general election, one of those awkward facts that don’t have any relevance to either of the major party’s stratagems nonetheless has come to light. As President Obama has begun aggressively touting the “Buffett Rule” to introduce marginal increases in capital gains taxes, and as advisers such as economic policy czar Gene Sperling have launched yet another decorative bid to step up investment in the manufacturing economy, data from the IRS shows that the Obama years have achieved almost nothing to remedy the yawning inequalities in the economy. The top 1 percent of income earners have taken in fully 93 percent of economic gains since the Great Recession, the numbers show. That share outpaces Bush-era figures by a mile; as the economy emerged from the 2001–02 recession, the top 1 percent claimed a lousy 65 percent of the gains that followed. It’s never been a better time to be rich in America. As the administration’s defenders will tell you, there are structural reasons that the post-2008 feints toward recovery have proven so strikingly top-heavy. In the Bush-era recession much of the damage was confined to the investor class, while in 2008 the housing economy was devastated, and along with it, a great deal of the demand that stoked growth in the labor market. A slower recovery in the real economy meant that returns were greater for the 1 percent. But such explanations are something close to question-begging. If the Obama administration had wanted to spread recovery measures broadly among the earning public, it could have crafted policies accordingly—in much the same fashion that Franklin Roosevelt responded to the last major economic meltdown by using Keynesian stimulus programs, by scrapping the gold standard, and by curbing Wall Street. The chair of Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisers through 72 1 The Baffler [no.20]
2010, Christina Romer, repeatedly sought to place job growth at the center of the administration’s economic agenda, but Obama ensured that financial policy remained right where it’s been over the past generation or so of anemic economic gains for working Americans—in the hands of Wall Street– approved caretakers of the paper economy such as Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Lawrence Summers. In an already upward-skewing pattern of income distribution, in a heavily worker-averse economy, this administration is reaping what it has sown. Except, you know, for the reaping part. This dry and dismal litany of economic fact has come nowhere close to dislodging the rote messaging of the campaign season, whereby the market-appeasing incumbent is feverishly ginning up the impression that he’s a populist, deep down, since he has had the good political fortune to draw from the GOP deck a complacent former private equity kingpin as his major-party opponent. Hence his cost-free embrace of the Buffett Rule—a cosmetic simulacrum of serious tax reform (tellingly named for a billionaire) with zero chance of passing Congress. Amid the campaign-friendly, ritual invocation of the Buffett Rule, scarcely anyone noted the president’s craven, and far more consequential, signing of the House Republicans’ JOBS Act. Since so few GOP lawmakers have firsthand acquaintance with actual jobs, they have mistaken the word for an acronym, as in “Jumpstart Our Business Startups.” The JOBS Act suspends independent accounting requirements and due-diligence reporting protocols for businesses floating new stock offerings—which means, in the mobbed-up climate of today’s Wall Street, that it’s essentially a license to commit fraud. And like the Clinton administration’s spectacularly dumb endorsement of the GOP Congress’s repeal of New Deal regulations enacted in the 1933
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Glass-Steagall law, the JOBS Act effectively wipes out the recent lessons of financial history, rolling back the enhanced accounting standards signed into law after the catastrophic market failures known as Enron and WorldCom. Such staggeringly cynical displays are the sort of campaign messaging that matters in the orderly conduct of elections under a plutocracy. The JOBS Act serves as an un-
mistakable reminder to skittish Wall Street donors that all the loose populist talk is just so much telegenic blather for the impressionable 99 percenters, just as the donor class suspected. When it comes to policy, indeed, Obama’s message is: don’t pay any attention to Warren Buffett’s public shows of tax contrition; rather, heed the way that the Berkshire Hathaway baron amassed his fortune—and go and do likewise. The
Baffler [no.20] ! 73
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Party of None
Barack Obama’s annoying journey to the center of belonging 3 Chris Br ay
In real life, the balls were rushed and exhausting for the Obamas to attend. They danced ten times to the same song, “At Last” by Etta James, hearing the same lyrics over and over. But the version shown on television was stunning, one of those rare moments when presidential symbolism, personal history, and the nation’s emotions met and fused. —Jodi Kantor, The Obamas
B
arack Obama’s personal journey begins, and it is instantly made meaningless. Sometime in the first half of 1966, Obama’s stepfather was mysteriously forced to return to Indonesia from grad school in Hawaii. Lolo Soetoro went home to a long episode of political violence, the outlines of which are not substantially in dispute. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, had tried to create political stability by balancing three competing political forces in the life of a new country: the army, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), and Islam. On the night of September 30, 1965, PKI members and leftist military officers attempted a clumsy sort of coup d’état that resulted in the murder of six right-wing generals and, accidentally, a lieutenant. The plot was a shambles: publicly incoherent, loosely planned, and easily suppressed. Suharto, the most powerful right-wing general to survive the attempt, used the plot as a pretext to seize power and purge communists from Indonesia’s political life. Within weeks, soldiers and militias were killing hundreds of thousands of people and removing thousands more to detention camps. In Jakarta, U.S. embassy officials informed their Indonesian counterparts that they were “generally sympathetic with and admiring of” the army’s chosen course. American military planes rushed to supply radios to Suharto’s headquarters to help his army coordinate the purge. So Lolo Soetoro goes home, soon to be followed by his young wife, Ann, and her son, the future U.S. president. According to for80 1 The Baffler [no.20]
mer New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (Riverhead, $26.95), nobody really knows even today what was happening at the time. “The details of the September 30, 1965 coup and counter-coup remain in dispute, as do the particulars of the slaughter that followed,” Scott avers. Still, she concedes that a few things aren’t shrouded in fog, such as the fact that “it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors.” As a result of this nationwide outbreak of neighborhood violence, Scott concludes on the same page, “The army became the dominant institution in the country.” Neighbors spontaneously turned on neighbors, driven by unclear motives to perform unclear acts; the PKI was destroyed; the army ended up in power. Mysterious events, clear outcome. The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, $29.95), by New Yorker editor David Remnick, gives the story a touch of detail, explaining that Lolo Soetoro found himself in grad school “at a time when his country was enduring a horrific civil war.” Seven dead on one side, hundreds of thousands on the other: civil war. Why were they fighting? “Suharto claimed that the violence had been initiated by leftists,” Remnick reports, though he pronounces no judgment as to the veracity of the claim. The whole thing may have had something to do with the left and the right. Let’s move on. Placed by the authors in a murky setting, the narrative version of Obama’s stepfather is
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assigned a murky role. “Lolo was in the army,” according to Janny Scott’s book, which shows him in uniform. Remnick, on the other hand, says Lolo “had taken a job as an army geologist,” language that neatly elides the question of his personal agency.* Either he chose to become a geologist after a civil war, or he was forced to serve in an army that had recently engaged in mass murder and was still engaged in the indefinite military detention of political enemies. Apparently, these are small distinctions. He took a job in Suharto’s army, sometime in 1966. Whatever Lolo was up to, Ann and Barack were devastated and delighted to join him. Janny Scott has them living in a place where people are “unable to eat the fish because of
decaying corpses in the water.” On the next page, “Jakarta had a magical charm,” and on the next “the city felt friendly and safe.” Jumping into this milieu of orientalist exoticism, Ann eventually got a job as an English teacher, where snacks were available in the teacher’s lounge. There were, Janny Scott reports, many kinds of Indonesian snacks: “They include seafood chips, peanut chips, fried chips from the mlinjo tree, chips made from ground rawhide mixed with garlic, sweet-potato snacks, mashed cassava snacks, sweet flour dumplings made with sesame seeds, sticky rice flavored with pandanus leaves, sticky black rice sprinkled with grated coconut, and rice cakes wrapped in coconut leaves or banana leaves, to name a few.” This is more detail than Scott has
* Another, smaller problem: Lolo Soetoro was a geographer, not a geologist. The
Baffler [no.20] ! 81
[ S t u di e s i n To ta l Depr av it y]
Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard 3 Jim Newell
O
n December 23, 2011, the dons of Harvard University finally got to see Adam Wheeler sentenced to a year in prison. Wheeler, a twenty-five-year-old whom they admitted in 2007 on the strength of an academic record he’d fabricated out of thin air, had been caught again—and this was not something a young gentleman does to America’s most highly self-regarded institution of advanced credentialing. A few months earlier, Wheeler had submitted a résumé to U.S. Green Data Inc., on which he said he had attended Harvard. Technically, this was true; he’d been one year short of graduating when someone at the school belatedly noticed he had falsified the credentials that won him admission, and that he had plagiarized the papers that won him scholarships and prestigious awards. But the ten-year probationary punishment that the Middlesex County Superior Court had meted out upon the discovery of his fabulism forbade him ever from claiming he had attended the school, and the new offending résumé landed on the desk of a Harvard alum, who forwarded it to a dean, who turned it over to the district attorney’s office. And Adam Wheeler, who attended Harvard and who had been forced by the Court to lie about his having attended Harvard, was packed off to jail for lying about his having attending Harvard. The school of George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger (the war criminal who was feted on campus this spring as a conquering hero) took all appropriate measures to ensure that its name would never be sullied by associating with an immoral, egomaniacal charlatan, at least one who never held high office. And all the useful knowledge that Wheeler picked up in more than two years of classes was no longer something from which he could draw on to contribute to society. 96 1 The Baffler [no.20]
College credential fraud may seem like a nitpicking offense for throwing a nonviolent offender into the overcrowded prison system for a tour of the seasons. But Wheeler embarrassed Harvard; his puncture of arbitrary power was so trifling that, paradoxically, it couldn’t be ignored. Harvard officials had little choice but to make an example of him through an aggressive, custom-tailored prosecution whose real aim was to restore the correct order of things. Adam Wheeler, after all, is merely a mediocre public school graduate from Delaware. But Harvard—well, everyone knows that Harvard shines across the fair land as a beacon of meritocratic upward mobility universally accessible to a nationwide corps of upper-middle-class teenagers of arbitrary intellectual ability. Take a look at the victim impact statement Harvard presented to the Court in 2010, and notice how the country’s mightiest and richest institution of enlightened learning asks for the maximum punishment to be inflicted upon a lying schoolboy. The victim wanted to send a message to the entire world that fraud on campus will not be tolerated, no ifs, ands, or buts about it: Wheeler’s acts of deception and fraud not only harmed Harvard University directly, but also undermined the public perception of integrity in higher education nationally and around the world. We require honesty as well as excellence from our students, which is why, when we discovered Mr. Wheeler’s fraudulent conduct, we brought it to the attention of the district attorney’s office. In terms of sentencing, we believe restitution is appropriate, so that the financial aid and other funds that Mr. Wheeler stole from Harvard can be put to use to support deserving Harvard students. We also feel strongly that Mr. Wheeler should be
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[ S t u di e s i n To ta l Depr av it y]
Billionaire Ball
Epitaph for the student-athlete 3 Matt Hinton
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ustin, Texas, where I live, brands itself as “The Live Music Capital of the World.” And at times, you can look on the heavy concentration of local musicians and the buzz of the lines streaming out of downtown clubs and believe that the city’s economy is based on a disheveled army of twangy, Waylon-and-Willie-worshipping troubadours. Each spring, after all, the native gestalt is amplified and put on display for the rest of the world during the city’s annual celebration of the hipster zeitgeist, South by Southwest. Meanwhile, the start-up companies hiding in discreet campuses around the city tell a different story of what makes Austin hum, and, if you ask the boosters at the chamber of commerce, they will point you to the city’s quiet concentration of high-tech heavies—your Dells, Apples, IBMs, Samsungs, and so forth. But the most readily visible, upwardly mobile, relentlessly promoted, frequently visited, and universally beloved business in Austin doesn’t technically qualify as a business. That would be the tax-exempt University of Texas Athletic Department, an unstoppable, ever-expanding machine that obliterates all race- and class-based lines in a ritual quest for money and glory. As anyone who spent any time on or near campus during the most recent overhaul of the 100,119-seat Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium can attest, this is one local business that has weathered the recession quite nicely. When DeLoss Dodds took over as Longhorn athletic director in 1981, annual revenue hovered around $4.5 million. Dodds’s department took in more than $150 million in 2010–11 (nearly $20 million more than its nearest competitor, Ohio State), with profits in excess of $16.6 million after record-breaking expenditures. Mack Brown, the head football coach, makes $5.1 million a year before incentives; 106 1 The Baffler [no.20]
men’s basketball coach Rick Barnes brings in $2.4 million. (Brown and Barnes are the highest-paid public employees in the state by a wide margin despite their official status as nonprofit executives.) The department has its own bureaucracy, its own sponsors, and its own licensing and fundraising arms. Last year, it launched its own (theoretically) national television network devoted exclusively to Texas sports. For broadcasting rights, ESPN agreed to shell out $300 million over twenty years. For all intents and purposes, University of Texas Athletics is a self-sustaining corporate entity using the university as a tax shelter. And it’s not alone: amid cutbacks, furloughs, layoffs, and tuition hikes at virtually every public university in America, more than a dozen athletic departments reported at least $90 million in revenue apiece in 2010–11 as a result of fat television contracts and fat-cat donors, an unthinkable total for any college sports program as recently as a decade ago. Football, and to a lesser extent men’s basketball, is an automatic moneymaker almost everywhere— leaving the storied traditions that form the basis of long-term fandom a marketing fig leaf at best, and a vanishing dead letter at worst. And nowhere is the tension at the divided heart of collegiate sports more evident than in the “scholar-athlete,” the disenfranchised worker at the center. Here’s a century-old enabling fiction that’s become an aggrieved, orphaned ideal-type in today’s money-steeped, scandalplagued higher education. Build It and They Will Yum As state legislatures have slashed humanities budgets and research grants, big-time college sports has pointed the way from the moldering ivory tower to the lush green fields of the market—or, to borrow an all-too-appropriate phrasing courtesy of University of Louisville
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s Into
the Infinite
The Threshold of Joy 3 Kim Phillips-Fein
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argaret Fuller was thirty-three and suffering from migraines when she wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” a manifesto on behalf of sexual equality, and saw it published in The Dial, the journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson whose editorship she had recently resigned. The article, expanded into a book and published in 1845 under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century, made its stirring claim to equal rights in the rhetoric of transcendentalism, according to which the self was limitless and unbounded, with each human being containing the possibility of divine perfection. Fuller, far from limiting her vision to political or legal equality, saw sexual inequality in terms of its corrosive power to destroy not only love, marriage, and family relationships, but also the inner or existential lives of women. Sexual hierarchy robbed women of “the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means, to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge.” In the book-length version, she wrote of little girls encouraged to play with feminine toys; of society’s unfair denigration of single women (or “old maids”), whom she argued could play an important social role; and of the necessity of widening the range of occupations open to women. Most of all, she wrote of how the psychological and economic dependence of women trapped them as permanent children, a condition that stunted their spirits and therefore held back the whole development of humanity. For male and female souls were entwined; masculine and feminine “energies” spilled into each other. Men and women were thought to occupy two separate spheres, two entirely different ways of being in the world, “but, in fact,” Fuller wrote, “they are perpetually passing into one 116 1 The Baffler
another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” After writing “The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller broke out of her New England world, leaving behind the Cambridge of her childhood. She moved to New York to write for the New York Tribune. She then departed for Europe, where she lived in Rome and reported on the Italian Revolution of 1848–49. Her thought widened and expanded beyond the transcendentalists’ focus on the self, and turned toward revolutionary socialism. Fuller’s transformations were not only political and intellectual: while living in Italy, she became pregnant and bore a child. It is not clear that she ever married her son’s father, but if she did, it was only after the conception of the baby. Margaret Fuller then died dramatically and unexpectedly, in 1850, in a shipwreck only 220 yards off the shore of Fire Island. Most of the wreck’s victims who tried to swim to land survived. But Fuller—and her child and his father, whom she was bringing back to America—stayed aboard the sinking ship for hours, waiting for help that never arrived. Her death fascinated and horrified her contemporaries, many of whom could not help but interpret it as an appropriate, if terrible, end to a life that had strayed so far from social conventions. She was depicted in sketch-art aboard the storm-tossed ship, her clasped hands at her bosom and her eyes cast toward heaven. Ralph Waldo Emerson and a few of Fuller’s other famous associates collected some of her writing, along with their own memorial essays, and published a volume of her Memoirs, which enjoyed a brief period of surprising commercial success. But shortly after, the public’s interest in Fuller— as in the transcendentalist movement—disappeared. In the late twenties, literary critic V. L. Parrington described her work as “the completest embodiment of the inchoate
s
Fuller, far from limiting her vision to political or legal equality, saw sexual inequality in terms of its corrosive power to destroy not only love, marriage, and family relationships, but also the inner or existential lives of women.
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2 Re m a i n d e r s
Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images 3 Seth Colter Walls Is the noxious event setting up a broader insight or critique? Or is this just part of the period verisimilitude of the show, akin to its unfailing attention to the right cabinet cozy or comb lubricant that was all the rage among the privileged class of 1963?
9
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n ad-agency savant is known for composing inspired campaigns on the fly. After work hours, bouts of heavy drinking alternate with bedding extramarital partners who are left begging for more. Then this world-by-the-gonads member of the creative class heads home and puts the children to bed—before enjoying some banal but topical spousal conversation about a fast-changing, latesixties milieu. No, this isn’t a recap of a Mad Men episode, but a rough précis of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images, a 1966 novel about a professionally sure-footed yet spiritually unfulfilled ad-woman named Laurence. The novel’s sole English translation is out of print—perhaps because de Beauvoir’s existentialist attention to the empty form of betterment aligned with the late-sixties “good life” is far less market-friendly than the soft-focus anomie of the AMC franchise. Mad Men–branded suits—an “exclusive” creation of the show’s costume designer, Janie Bryant—will always look handsome enough in a Banana Republic display window, quite aside from the show’s content. I learned about Les Belles Images by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s collection of essays and criticism, Making Waves (newly reissued in paperback). Responding to literary fashions circa 1967, which held that de Beauvoir was a tapped-out, old fogey writer of fiction, Vargas Llosa threw down like so: “Quite wrong . . . although faithful in its contents to the existential postulates of ‘commitment,’ . . . [it] is similar, in its writing and structure, to an experimental novel.” Eventually, I found a used out-of-print copy of Les Belles Images at New York’s Strand Bookstore. And I’ve spent the last few years of Mad Men mania trying to get coworkers and acquaintances to read it. It’s not been the most welcome suggestion, despite the novel’s superficial similarities to television’s unofficial show of the moment. Strobing flashes of professional inspiration can rudely intrude upon Laurence’s domestic life, just as they do in Don Draper’s world. “The children made their way into a hollow tree and there they found themselves in an enchanting room all paneled in natural wood,” Laurence’s interior mind rhapsodizes, in the service of a client, as she looks upon her own daughters. “Follow up this idea. . . . I am not selling wooden panels; I am selling security, success, and a touch of poetry into the bargain.”
I
n other ways, though, de Beauvoir’s Laurence is quite remote from the world of Mad Men—a place where most characters mark time in the grip of various professional grudges while steadily getting richer. Most usefully, for our purposes, the novel’s protagonist allows 124 1 The Baffler [no.20]
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Lancelot Gomes 3 Manohar Shetty
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t was Filomena Rodrigues who broke the news at the Panjim fish market. She ran into her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, who was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky bosom. “Did you know,” Filomena said in a breathless undertone, stuffing silver-black mackerels into a plastic bag, “Lancelot Gomes has married again?” Maravilha almost dropped the mullet, and gasped, “What? Again?” “You just won’t believe,” hissed Filomena, eyes coruscating like a cat’s. “It’s his own secretary this time and she’s only twenty-two. And he must be at least fifty plus! And just you guess what, and this will shock you, ooo, she’s a ’indu!” Maravilha pressed her crucifix into her chest involuntarily. “Oh Lord,” she exclaimed. “A twenty-two-year-old ’indu girl? What is the world coming to? And to that senile old rake?” After some more haggling by Maravilha, the two parted company, promising to “put their heads together” over the “scandalous business” later at home in Merces. Maravilha posted a chain-letter and crossed herself at a wayside shrine as she trudged towards the bus-stand.
7
“What is the world coming to?” she repeated to her husband Mussolini da Gama that same afternoon. “This must be his third or fourth marriage and the girl is only twenty-one! And he must be at least fifty-five, the scoundrel!” Mussolini, a tall, mongoose-faced schoolteacher, said, “It’s shameful. Shameful! We must do something. Morals have gone down the drain these days. This is bad for the children.” “But what can we do?” said Maravilha, dropping a block of dried pig’s blood into the 130 1 The Baffler [no.20]
sorpotel simmering in a clay pot. “Everyone is so loose nowadays. Too many dances and carnivals! And see what shameful things they are showing on the TV these days. It is corrupting our youth!” Montgomery, the youngest of her eight children, heard the entire conversation.
7
That evening, he met his friend Auduth Camotim at the “Tulxidas” taverna. After three stiff pegs, he said, “You know something, Camot—the old fellow who lives in the old bungalow near the church? He got married again, to a twenty-year-old dame, a Hindu chick.” “Lucky bugger, that Lancelot Gomes. His first conquest was a Muslim broad, Ghulam Xec’s daughter, I think, from Vasco.” “Yah, man,” Montgomery said expansively. “Whadda heck—variety is the spice of life. But why you not geddin’ married, man? Already you’re geddin’ grey hair.” “What to do, Monty. Apply, apply, but no reply,” said Camotim, mournfully sipping his fourth Old Monk.
7
The following day Camotim met his bank office colleague Naguesh Vencatexa Naique at a football match between Pele’s XI and Eusebio’s XI at a shorn paddy field in Caranzalem. At the half-time break, in between gulps of canned beer, Camotim said, “Arre Naguesh, you know that old bugger Lancy Gomes?” “The one who lives in the new bungalow near the post-office?” “Correct, correct. He has tied the wedding knot yet again. For the third time. A Hindu dame this time, only nineteen years old, I have heard. The ceremony was top secret.” “Third time? What stamina, man. More than even Eusebio’s center forward.”
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“More than even Maradona. He must be sixty years old, a real budda.”
7
“What stamina he must be having,” Naguesh told his girlfriend Teresa, at a secret tryst with her at a hill-top cross in Dona Paula. “Must be like a marathon runner.” Teresa, plump and giggly, said, “I saw his first wife once. Very fair she was. A Parsee, I think, from Bombay. I think he is doing some real estate business.” “No, no. Not real estate. He is a printer, I think, printing visiting and greeting cards. I think his first wife was a Muslim from Vasco. Some Muslims are very fair. But what stamina!” “Definitely not Muslim. Her name was Nilofer, I think. But I’ll ask my friend Belvinda tomorrow. She used to work for this Gomes. Made advances to her also, I think.” “Three dames—bloody hat-trick.” “You’re jealous or what! Don’t try any
hattrick-fattrick with me!”
7
The following afternoon Teresa went with Belvinda to see a Hindi movie at the El Dorado theatre. After the movie, her eyes still puffed from the tear-jerker, Teresa said, “Nice movie, no. Life also is like a movie only. Do you remember your former boss, Lancelot Gomes? You know, you know, he got married again!” “O gosh!” said Belvinda, “The creep! He must be at least sixty-two years old.” “And you know, you know the girl is only eighteen and that too a Hindu!” “What a scandal! His first wife was an Anglo, I think. Nellie something. From Bangalore.” “You knew her, no?” “Lid’lbit. But just last week I saw this girl in his car. She was wearing a red salwar khameez and I was wondering and wondering who she was. I thought she was his daughter.” The
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Mr. Secondhand 3 Manohar Shetty
W
hen Cajetan Xavier sold his tenyear-old Vespa to buy a ten-yearold Maruti 800 it came as no surprise to the other residents of St. Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula. The wiry frame of Cajetan putt-putting on his aging scooter up the steep slope before the National Institute of Oceanography and in the hash-mark streets of Panjim was a familiar sight. In the colony itself he was a well-known figure as he tinkered with the old scooter, injecting it with a few more months of sustenance in his crowded makeshift garage, or as he rode up the slope to his house, the chassis, backseat, and handlebars loaded with bags of his weekly provisions. Other residents passing by in their swanky cars would often gesture if he needed any help with his load, but Caji was an independent sort and he would simply wave them on. They were now pleased and relieved to see him in the comparative safety of his car. A secondhand car, undoubtedly, but still safer than that old, rundown Vespa. Cajetan was quite content to live all alone at St. Jerome’s with a few daguerreotypes of his ancestors in tailcoats, hoary moustaches, and hats hanging from the walls of his dining room. He hired no maids and did his own frugal cooking, swept and swabbed his own floors, and kept his garbage out in the green and black dustbins provided by the Panjim municipal corporation. He attended Sunday Mass regularly in the village chapel nearby in his grey suit, off-white shirt, striped tie, and slightly scuffed shoes—his apparel never changing in all the years he had attended Mass at the chapel. The other residents of St. Jerome’s, who were not in the least bit surprised when he bought the secondhand car, wondered if he possessed another suit or formal shirt and tie. Behind his back they often passed catty comments. On his latest acquisition one
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said: “Maybe the government in Lisbon has doubled his pension.” “At last I think he has dipped into his savings . . . Such a skinflint,” said another. “Why can’t he buy something new for a change? Even on installments . . .” said his immediate neighbor, Hector Gonsalves. That last comment, even given its waspish tone, was most pertinent. Ever since Cajetan had settled in the colony all those years ago, none of the residents could recall him buying anything new. His purchase of the secondhand car after the sale of his secondhand scooter had followed a set pattern. His fellow residents knew that all the furniture in his house had been bought secondhand, some of it from the previous owner of the house and other pieces from households who had migrated to the Middle East or to Canada. The fans, the refrigerator, the cooking gas stove, and the mixer-juicer had all been bought from previous owners. There were rumors in the colony that even his clothes, including the Sunday suit and shoes, had been bought secondhand from Chor Bazaar in Bombay. No one knew for sure the antecedents of his crockery and cutlery. Some of the residents were even convinced that they had all been bequeathed to him by some kind families in Beira. To be fair to the Jeromites (as they called themselves), they were not off the mark on the used origins of Caji’s belongings, and on his cognomen “Mr. Secondhand.” Cajetan, indeed, harbored a compulsive fondness for used goods. But it was not a proclivity born out of stinginess or financial necessity. Caji simply liked old things and could not bear to discard used goods. He had a knack with discarded stuff, especially old machinery. With a deft touch of his hands and a reservoir of patience, he could inject new life into a discarded fan or air conditioner or carburetor. Cajetan hated throwing out old things and his makeshift garage and
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backyard were filled with rusted parts of all kinds of machinery—domestic and vehicular. In fact, in Mozambique he had gained a reputation as something of a miracle worker with obsolete trucks and cars, farm machinery, water pumps, and such other mechanical goods. In the school he had taught in he was well known for fixing old laboratory equipment and machines and the cycles of his many students. It was this particular talent for creating born-again machinery that had forced him to flee the country. In the many internecine conflicts that had plagued Mozambique, Caji’s services had often been called upon to repair jammed and rusted weaponry and quasi-military vehicles. Caji was a peaceable
man, neutral as Bern in his political views, and his services and talent had often been compelled into use by opposing forces. It was this double-edged situation he found himself in that had finally compelled him to leave Mozambique. He had tried to be impartial in his forced services, but in times of conflict this had proved to be a most inequitable position to be in. Thus he had reluctantly left the country and his chosen vocation. But in return for his many years of service, the Portuguese government still sent him his monthly pension. And he came away to Goa with his knack of repairing old machinery and other goods still intact. When any of the residents of St. Jerome approached him with a faulty mixer-cum-grinder or table fan, Caji The
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wS
T O R I E S
Bhutas 3 Saskya Jain
S
ant Ram did not have a drinking problem when he started working at the museum. That was a year ago. It was L.M. Pant, the museum’s director, who gave Sant Ram the job as a watchman. Sant Ram arrived in Delhi from the hills to stay with a cousin’s uncle, who was the museum’s head sweeper. The uncle went to the office to put in a good word for Sant Ram with the chief peon, who would pass it on to the personal secretary, who promised to mention it to the director. A few hours later—the sun had not quite reached its apex—the uncle went to the communal tap for a handful of water when he stopped short, body stiff, eyes wide. He collapsed to the floor, and was pronounced dead of a heart attack within the hour. Later that day, Sant Ram, the only blood relative present in the city, found himself accepting Pant Sahab’s condolences when the secretary whispered something in the director’s ear. Sant Ram was taken on immediately, going from jobless in the morning, to homeless at lunch, to gainfully employed by sunset. “I know you always suspected this,” Sant Ram wrote to his wife, Hansi, in a letter that night, “but now you can be absolutely sure that you are married to a blessed man. Thanks to God’s grace and Diwan Chacha’s death—may his soul be at peace—your husband has already found a job.” He thought of Billu, the village postman, reading his letter out to Hansi and added “A job in that glorious city of cities, Delhi.” It was the same Billu who had always taunted him at school because Sant Ram was afraid of birds, especially chickens. Sant Ram grinned to himself. He set the pen to the paper again. “Not just any small-time job like delivering things to other people,” he wrote, “but a real job, with one of the most powerful institutions in the world, the Government of India.” Before signing off, Sant Ram informed his wife that she was to pack up her belongings and take the next
144 1 The Baffler [no.20]
train to the city along with their young son. He promised that he would be assigned official housing “more or less at the time of your arrival.” Six months later, they were still sharing a room divided by an old bedsheet with another young family. “Big-shot promises, short-range results,” the other wife would say to Hansi as they leaned over their kerosene stoves on either side of the sheet, cooking dinner. “My husband is the same.” “Speak for yourself,” Hansi would reply as she pumped the little handle furiously to reignite the flame. A breeze was blowing through the door, which they left open during the day to disperse the fumes. “My husband—” “Works for the Government of India. The most powerful institution in the world, I know. Then why are you still living in a place in which one wall doubles as a handkerchief for the children?” “Speak for yourself,” Hansi said again, mumbling this time. Sant Ram began to leave for the museum earlier. “The heat,” he said to his wife. “You would know if you had to cycle across the city every day.” “All right, but don’t forget to ask Pant Sahab about housing,” Hansi whispered to him on his way out so the other wife wouldn’t hear. “You remind me every day, how could I forget?” he said as he mounted his bicycle. “Did you say something?” she called after him. He shook his head and waved. A few hours later, he was sitting on his rattan stool in the textile gallery. If only it were socially acceptable to marry pieces of furniture, he thought. His stool had served him loyally throughout these months, never questioning or reminding him of anything. He yawned and stretched his body, flexing his dangling feet
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to touch the floor with the tip of his shoes. Absently, he pulled a strand of rattan from the base of his stool and began to chew on it. The door of the gallery opened. Sant Ram turned. A young woman in a tie-dye salwarkameez stood in the entrance. Never mind furniture, Sant Ram thought. I just married the wrong woman. With a hearty puff the visitor blew a strand of thick, black hair out of her face and made a beeline for the brocades, clutching a sketchbook and box of colored pencils to her chest. She looked around. Sant Ram jumped up from his stool and brought it over to where she stood. “Thank you, bhaiyya,” she said with a smile and sat down.
A shiver ran through Sant Ram’s body. He glanced at the young lady’s behind lodged comfortably in the seat that had held his own sorry cheeks only moments before. He hovered around, watching the floral patterns behind the glass pane take shape on her sheet of paper. “Are you a famous painter, Madam?” “No.” “A famous actress with a flair for painting?” “Daddy says actresses are all body, no brains.” “You should tell your Daddy that his own daughter is all actress plus brains.” She giggled and turned to face Sant Ram. The Baffler ( No. 20) ! 145
A n c e s t or s
Life and Times of a Libertine 3 Christopher Lasch
P H OTO G R A P H CO U RT E SY C H R I S TO P H E R L A S C H E S TAT E
M
y subject lies before me like a patient awaiting the knife— my fair country, ravaged bride of the wilderness, struggling to bring forth a new civilization. This is no normal birth: the mother is still no more than a girl: her hips are too narrow; surgery is indicated. The intercom crackles up and down the corridors of the vast metropolitan hospital: “Calling Dr. Fox! Dr. Fox to the delivery room!” I hurry to the operating table, the master-surgeon, calm in the midst of confusion. One of the nurses weeps in a corner. The young intern confides, in an undertone everyone can hear, that the case is hopeless. The bride moans rhythmically; she looks up at the surgeon, her eyes full of hope and fear. Dr. Fox issues crisp instructions; the others take heart from his quiet command of the situation. The patient’s heart-beat stabilizes. Other life signs return. The surgeon’s eyes over his mask betray no hint of emotion. He Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) wrote this satirical novel in the summer of 1973 in a cottage in back of his family’s Vermont vacation home. As Lasch later told an interviewer, he considered his novel while he was writing it “a devastating, witty send-up of American politics,” but his publisher didn’t agree, and soon enough he abandoned the project to the drawer. This excerpt from chapter one—the first time any part of the manuscript has been published—introduces the protagonist, Harold Fox. The rest of the novel chronicles Fox’s rise to prominence in Cold War America and his fall from grace as a member of the “Richard Trixie” administration during the “Watershed” scandal. All Lasch manuscripts © Nell Lasch and courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library. —Jeff Ludwig The
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BRAD HOLLAND