No. 21 by The Baffler

No. 21

STEPHEN KRONINGER

Contents 1 Tower of Baffler

Only a Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Salvos

To the Precinct Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Long Con . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How theory met practice . . . and drove it absolutely crazy Thomas Fr ank Mail-order conservatism Rick Perlstein

Can’t Stop Believing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Magic and politics David Gr aeber

34, 70

Come On, Feel the Buzz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

High Church Hustle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex Pareene

CNBC’s televangelists Jason Linkins

The Dollar Debauch

Oh, the Irony! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris Lehmann

Into the Infinite

The Missionary Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barbar a Ehrenreich

Other People’s Problems

The Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dubr avk a Ugrešić

124 132

78, 95, 110, 120

Cities of Night. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Belén Fernández

Anything for the Libor Boys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

100

Call of the Wild. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

114

Christian Lorentzen

Detroit on screen Will Boisvert

The Rod of Correction

Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter? . . . . . . . . .

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Josh MacPhee

138

Your money and your life Notes & Quotes

The Lying Game. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Face Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Three Odd Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jim Newell

Ana Marie Cox

Manohar Shetty

Story

Invasion of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

George Singleton

146

Poems

Or Why the Assembly Disbanded as Before. . . . . . . . . . . . .

from California Tanka Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summit Meeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Equations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Roberto Tejada

Harryette Mullen Ton y Hoagland Kwame Dawes

Song of Whiteout and Blackache. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

108

Jeweler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

112

The Free World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

118

Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

159

Trifling Bureaucracies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

162 163

Ailish Hopper

Dante Micheaux

Camille R ankine

Fady Joudah

Car men Giménez Smith

Obituary

The Alternative Press in Retrospect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eugenia Williamson

Ancestors

If I Were President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

154

Baff lers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

166

C. Wright Mills

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To the Precinct Station

How theory met practice . . . and drove it absolutely crazy 3 Thomas Fr ank

here is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, D.C., reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years after the Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the bankers’ friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough. Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show, carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximizing shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to be a winner—the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the situation: Once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would have to conceal what they did. Your service to the 1 percent would no longer be something you could boast about without feeling the contempt of your fellow Metro passengers. A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panelist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that

they were part of a group. Another one of the panelists was moved to utter this riposte: What I would note, is that people can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards. . . . I would agree, an individualism that our society has definitely had inscribed upon it and continues to inscribe upon itself, “I can only speak for myself,” the “only” is operative there, and of course these spaces are being opened up . . .*

My heart dropped like a broken elevator. As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed.

is a danger,” the Slovenian philoso“T here pher Slavoj Žižek warned the Occupy

Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park last year, and he wasn’t referring to the New York Police Department. “Don’t fall in love with yourselves.” We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?

Žižek’s remarks appear in n+1 magazine’s Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, the first book, and one of the most eclectic, to appear on the subject of last year’s protests. That volume was eventually followed by numerous others ranging from speeches delivered to the encampments (Noam Chomsky’s Occupy) to historical considerations of the protest (Todd Gitlin’s Occupy Nation) to collective memoirs

* The speaker was Natasha Lennard, who was covering OWS for the New York Times but who was also clearly a sympathizer with the movement.

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The Long Con

Mail-order conservatism 3 Rick Perlstein

itt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasonedbut-overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity. Some Romney lies posit absences where there are obviously presences: his claim, for instance, that “President Obama doesn’t have a plan” to create jobs. Other Romney fabrications assert presences where there are absences. A clever bit of video editing can make it seem like Romney was enthusiastically received before the NAACP, when, in fact, he had been booed. There are lies, damned lies, statistics—like his assertion that his tax cut proposal won’t have any effect on the federal budget, which the Tax Policy Center called “not mathematically possible.” That frank dismissal vaulted the candidate into another category of lie, an attempt to bend time itself: Romney responded by calling that group “biased”; last year, he called them “objective.” There are outsourced lies, like this one from deep in my files: in 2007, Ann Romney told the right-wing site Newsmax.com that her husband had “always personally been prolife,” though Mitt had said in his 1994 Senate race, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” And then Ann admitted a few sentence later, “They say he flip22 1 The Baffler [no.21]

flopped on abortion. Well, you know what? He did change his mind.” And then there’s the most delicious kind of lie of them all, the kind that hoists the teller on his own petard as soon as a faintly curious auditor consults the record for occasions on which he’s said the opposite. Here the dossier of Mittdacity overfloweth. In 2012, for example, he said he took no more federal money for the Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games had taken; a decade earlier, however, he called the $410 million in federal money he bagged “a huge increase over anything ever done before.” There are more examples, so many more, but as I started to log and taxonomize them, their sheer volume threatened to crash my computer. (OK, I’m lying; I just stopped cataloging them, out of sheer fatigue.) You can check in at MSNBC’s Maddowblog for Steve Benen’s series “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity” for the current tally. He was at Volume XXXIX as of this writing, though I’m confident several more arrived while this magazine was at the printers. Volume XXVIII, posted early in August, listed twenty-eight separate lies. Then came the Republican convention, when his designated fibbing-mate Paul Ryan packed so many lies into his charismatic introduction to the nation that a Washington Post blogger assigned by his editor to write a piece on “the true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech” could find only one entrant for the “true” section; and his editor then had to concede that “even the definition of ‘true’ that we’re using is loose.” Pundits—that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too—have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character.

[ Both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?

M A R K DA N C E Y

And more power to them. But that’s not really my bag. I write long history books that are published with photos of presidents and presidential aspirants on the covers. The photos are to please the marketers: presidents sell. But my subject is not really powerful people; biography doesn’t much interest me. In my view, powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics. The leaders are easy to study; they stand still. We can amass reams on their pasts, catalog great quantities of data on what they say in the present. Grasping the shape of a mass public, though, is a more fugitive process. Publics are amorphous, protean, fuzzy; they don’t leave behind neat documentary trails. Studying the leaders they choose helps us see them more sharply. Political theorist James MacGregor Burns’s classic book Leadership explains that “leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain mo-

tives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers . . . in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.” Watching charismatic people try to seize their attention and win their allegiance becomes the intellectual whetstone. As political psychologist Harold Lasswell once put it, a successful aspirant to leadership is one whose “private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest.” Watching those private motives at work, the public they seek to convince comes into focus. All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them? An Oilfield in the Placenta In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to The

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Can’t Stop Believing Magic and politics [ pa r t 1] 3 David Gr aeber

oliticians are by definition dishonest. All politicians lie. But many observers of American politics agree that over the last few years, there has been something of a qualitative change in the magnitude of political dishonesty. In certain party precincts, at least, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to change the rules to allow for a level of flagrant, over-the-top lying about political opponents that we rarely see in other countries. Sarah Palin and her “death panels” pioneered the new style, but Michele Bachmann quickly took things to even more spectacular heights with her wild claims of government plots to impose sharia law on the United States or secret plans to abandon the dollar and replace it with the Chinese yuan. Mitt Romney didn’t top either Palin or Bachmann in the grandeur and magnificence of his lies, but he did try to make up for it in volume, having based his entire presidential campaign on an endless string of fabrications. Many of the lies coming out of the Republican side are, in fact, so brazen that it’s hard to see them as anything but conscious provocations. It’s as if their candidates have begun daring the media and the Democrats to openly call them liars. What are we to make of this? First of all, it can hardly be a coincidence that all three of the above-mentioned politicians are deeply religious. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are evangelicals; Romney has been a Mormon bishop. In these religious circles, belief and lies are matters referred inward to one’s internal state. That is why the religious supporters of such politicians remain untroubled when the media reveals their statements to be untrue. If anything, their supporters are likely to react indignantly toward any journalist who suggests lying is the result of conscious dishonesty. Charismatics and evangelicals embrace a form of Christianity in which faith 34 1 The Baffler [no.21]

is almost all there is to it. If you are speaking about people of faith, the ones who have opened themselves to the divine spirit, then there can be no questioning the purity of their intentions. And then some secular liberal elitist media type is calling them liars? What the Republican Right is performing is a theological version of an essentially magical style of political performance: they are whisking a universe into being through acts of conscious faith. The limit is that—as long as the other side isn’t stupid enough to echo Bob Dole’s famous “stop lying about my record!”— the magic works only on those who already see them as morally superior. For liberals, of course, all this means that Republicans live in a dream world of their own devising. They see themselves as the “realitybased community,” the folks that doggedly insist on gathering facts and figures and examining the world the way it really is. The origin of that phrase is telling in itself. It comes from a New York Times Magazine essay by onetime Wall Street Journal correspondent Ron Suskind. Called “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” the essay is, for the most part, an elaboration on the same point I just made, namely that for Bush’s fans, the purity of his inner convictions was what really mattered. But the passage that made Suskind famous was one in which he reports a conversation with an unnamed “senior adviser to Bush” that, he says, “gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency”: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way

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M I C H A E L D U FF Y

the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

For liberals, this passage confirmed everything they’d always wanted to believe. Buttons and T-shirts announcing “proud member of the reality-based community” soon appeared. The phrase became a shibboleth. But there

is reason to believe that even here, things are not exactly what they seem. There have since been other journalists pointing out that Suskind’s work often combines a suspiciously too-good-to-be-true quality with quotations whose sources, when they are identified, vehemently deny having said what he claims they said. Neither has anyone else ever claimed to have heard a Bush aide say anything remotely like this. It’s possible that Suskind himself just made the whole story up. Is the very idea of a “reality-based community” itself an extraordinary pretense? In fact, what is really striking about political debate The

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Come On, Feel the Buzz 3 Alex Pareene

ast June, Joe Williams, a reporter for the political newspaper and web news site Politico, said on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC talk show that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared comfortable only around white people. Conservative websites trawled through Williams’s Twitter feed and found other comments betraying a lack of respect for former Governor Romney, and Williams was quickly and rather publicly fired. Here’s how Politico’s founding editors Jim VandeHei and John Harris explained Williams’s cashiering in a company memo: Politico journalists have a clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias. This expectation extends to all of the public platforms in which we and our reporting and analysis appears, including cable TV and social media platforms like Twitter. Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams’s public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility. His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way. Joe has acknowledged that his appearance reflected a poor choice of words. This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them.

Unless, that is, Politico managers themselves disregard them. In August, Politico reporter David Catanese defended GOP Rep. Todd Akin’s bizarre lecture on where babies come from. Akin, running for U.S. Senate from Missouri, revealed that he believed a common conservative myth: that in the event of “legitimate rape,” the female body somehow prevents pregnancy from taking place, thus negating the need for a rape exemption from a prospective abortion ban. 38 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Catanese tweeted that the negative response to Akin’s comments was overblown, because “we all know what he was trying to say.” He continued digging, suggesting that Akin might have a point about this legitimate rape thing. After all, Catanese wrote, some unknown number of “reported” rapes are surely fake (though it’s not “PC” to admit as much), and it is certainly possible (not that he had checked out “the science”) that actual rapes are unlikely to lead to pregnancy. “The left is often 1st to shut down debate as ‘off limits’ when it deems so,” he finally tweeted. “Aren’t these moments supposed to open up a larger debate?” Catanese was reprimanded and taken off the Akin beat, but he kept his job. The difference between these two episodes speaks volumes about D.C.-based access journalism and the highly toxic, incestuous variant of it that Politico has perfected. Or to put things a bit more baldly: in all likelihood, David Catanese and Joe Williams suffered divergent professional fates because the leaders of Politico are more concerned about losing access to the Romney campaign than they are about losing access to victims of rape. How deep does this craving for access run? Well, the same month that Politico fired Williams, the daily published—in the news, not the opinion section—an article cobylined by founder Jim VandeHei and the paper’s star reporter and mascot, Mike Allen, arguing that the mainstream media were unfairly subjecting candidate Romney to greater scrutiny than they had trained on candidate Barack Obama in 2008. The evidence for this claim largely hinged on the authors’ forensic study of story placement. For instance, they noted that the New York Times had put a story about Ann Romney’s fancy dancing-horse hobby on A1 and a piece about David Maraniss’s new Obama biography on A15. This was, VandeHei and Allen wrote, obvious proof that conservative complaints of liberal media bias

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h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

The Lying Game 3 Jim Newell

n September 9, 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson, who had represented South Carolina’s Second District since 2001, shouted “YOU LIE!” at President Barack Obama while he was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress to boost support for his thenfoundering health care reform plan. You remember this, yes? Obama said, “The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” and then someone in the back of the chamber interrupted him and shouted, “YOU LIE!” The fury that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi bore on her face as she shot her head leftwards, toward the interruption, may have been the most natural, visceral expression of disdain we’ve ever seen from a United States lawmaker. All right, maybe the fainting reactions from the Washington pundit class did descend into self-parodic hyperbole—as though this single moment of disrespect to the president portended the five hundred years of unrelenting biblical apocalypse that, say, going to war with Iraq for no reason apparently didn’t—but you didn’t have to be a monarchist to see that Wilson’s outburst was objectively inappropriate. Hollerin’ nonsense at presidents during their addresses to joint sessions of Congress is downright boorish. So the question at the time seemed to be, would Congressman Joe Wilson resign immediately, decline to run for reelection, or lose his reelection bid? The answer turned out to be . . . Joe Wilson raised tons of money, and so did his opponent, and nothing changed. Only three days after the outburst, Ben Smith of Politico reported that disposable income had begun to fill up the coffers of candidates in South Carolina’s Second District: A source on Rep. Joe Wilson’s campaign says his fundraising has broken $1 million—and surpassed that of his Democratic rival, Rob Miller—since his outburst of “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to Congress Wednesday. The source said Wilson’s current tally is $1,005,021 from 18,859 donations amid a high-profile campaign on the Drudge Report and elsewhere telling conservatives that Wilson is “under attack” for his willingness to take on Obama.

By September 25—five days before the Q3 fundraising deadline—the National Republican Congressional Committee was asking Wilson to send a mass fundraising email on behalf of the party titled “The health care bill Pelosi doesn’t want you to read.” Wilson’s appeals to partisans turned him into a GOP cash cow. It’s not news that stupidity can advance an American political career. This is, after all, the country that elevated both Warren Harding and Richard Nixon to its highest office. But the case of Congressman Wilson showcases something new, both within our body politic and in 50 1 The Baffler [no.21]

A L A I N P I LO N

The magical Internet is now manufacturing national political brands, and the fundraising clout that goes with them, for confirmed morons. The

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High Church Hustle CNBC’s televangelists 3 Jason Linkins

risis is the stock-in-trade of the newsgathering business. Even in its present conglomerated state, American journalism lives or dies for scoops. In this competitive climate, you should be able to count on any news organization to report a world-shaking calamity in its broadest contours. So it’s impossible to imagine a TV news outlet reporting in late November 1963 that President John Kennedy’s visit to Dallas had drawn some suspicious activity in the area surrounding the Texas School Book Depository but that, on the whole, the event had marked a significant first step along the path toward reelection for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Yet that imaginary report would be roughly equivalent to the work of the market savants who direct programming at the cable business network CNBC. In 2008, the world they cover turned upside down. Toxic debt overwhelmed the paper prosperity of the early aughts. Several major investment banks went belly-up, and scores more took on the telltale pallor of the financial walking dead. National economies teetered on the brink of ruin. And there was CNBC’s best-known face of market prognostication, Mad Money host Jim Cramer, who reported the initial rumblings of the crisis in March 2008 as if he hadn’t noticed a thing amiss: “Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there?! NO, NO, NO! Bear Stearns is fine.” Six days later, Bear Stearns was dead, its balance sheets a flood of red ink, its spare parts consigned to the grim-faced government accountants who were to oversee the bailout of Wall Street for months to come. Bear’s early flameout was an unmistakable, and by this time entirely foreseeable, sign that more gruesome reckonings were in the offing. Since then, Cramer’s bellowed moment

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of bullishness on Bear Stearns has become a symbol of the failings of the business press to register even the smallest hint of trouble in the markets ahead of the mortgage crisis. The Cramer follies have been broadcast, over and over, as a specimen of how the bubble-manias spiraled doggedly upward, until thudding ingloriously to Earth. In many ways, though, the Cramer clip’s half-life is unfair: Cramer himself was just a cheerleader in the madness that caught most responsible observers of the financial system completely flatfooted. And more important, the focus on Cramer’s errant moment of stockpicking misses the bigger, truly bizarre tale of CNBC’s post-crash career. In the nearly half a decade since the Bear debacle, the leading cable source of business news has done its business in an alternate universe, behaving as though Wall Street were just another wronged party in the crisis, and not its principal author. In CNBC’s through-the-looking-glass version of events, socialist regulators are about to seize control of the American economy. And the heroic defenders of prosperity are the bankers and brokers of the stock market, who must now be saved from the expropriating regulators. The only sane path forward is to unleash the mighty, market-hewing hands of the Wall Street titans of commerce from the bonds of public-sector restraint. Or to once again adopt the imagery of disasters past: to right the foundering ship of prosperity, it must be steered headlong into an iceberg. Sinners Before an Angry Market The perversity that garlands CNBC’s news operation has deep roots. The cable news network that CNBC would eventually become has its origins in an ancient cable channel called the Satellite Program Network (SPN), which operated throughout the United States in the

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1980s. For most of its heady run, the programming on SPN was gleefully schizophrenic—a mix of odd game shows, niche programming, and hoary, low-budget movies. (Fun fact: one of the network’s offerings was a show called Moscow Meridian, hosted by French-born Soviet mouthpiece Vladimir Pozner.) The channel ended up in the hands of NBC, which relaunched it as the Consumer News and Business Channel in April 1989. Two years later, CNBC cornered the stocks-and-shares cable audience when it absorbed its much larger rival, the Financial News Network. The first thing a casual CNBC viewer notes today is neither the network’s ideological distortions nor its blown market prognostications. Rather, it’s the network’s trademark

riot of visual stimuli—the frenetic sort of data presentation that might make sense in an aphasic’s ward. Crawling tickers and swooshing graphics depicting real-time market analysis frame an array of hosts who provide an unnervingly overcaffeinated profusion of jabber. It’s quite hard to describe to someone who’s never taken it in—I reckon that it’s the aural-visual equivalent of receiving a frenzy of information live from the jock strap of one of the light-cyclists from the “Tron” movies while tweaking on Adderall. Also, for good measure, you are a werewolf. This stimulus overload makes CNBC more visually arresting than the drier incantations of its chief competitor, Bloomberg Television. And when you go beyond the viThe

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Can’t Stop Believing Magic and politics [ pa r t 2 ] 3 David Gr aeber

mid all the routine distortions, opportunistic half-truths, and fanciful ideologies that now make up the political discourse, any honest interlocutor has to wrestle with the question of how self-deception functions as a self-administered belief system. Students of the art of propaganda have long noted its close formal mimicry of empirical science, but the problem of mendacious packaging doesn’t account for the deeper quandaries of self-conscious belief in one’s own preferred form of propaganda. The conventional formulation of the problem asks how some people can make themselves believe something that looks illusory to other people. But this formulation assumes people can’t be wrong about what they believe. Is it possible to think that you do believe something when, in fact, you don’t, or to think that you don’t believe something when, in fact, you do? Actually, there is an entire strain of thought dedicated to understanding how this might be possible. The term fetishism appears to have been coined by European merchants working in West Africa, in order to explain how their African counterparts made business deals. This was back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Europeans were after gold, mostly before they began trading in slaves. It seems that in many African port towns at that time, it was possible to improvise a new god to fit the commercial occasion; you could bring together some beads, feathers, and bits of rare wood, or just pick up any peculiar or significant-looking object you happened to find along the beach, and then consecrate it with a mutual oath. More elaborate fetishes that served to protect whole communities could consist of sculptures, often strikingly beautiful, into which the contracting parties could force nails, thus angering the newly created god to ensure it was in a 70 1 The Baffler [no.21]

proper mood to punish transgressors. But for a mere business deal with a foreigner, even an interesting piece of driftwood would do. The act of swearing the oath transformed the object into a divine power capable of wreaking terrible destruction on anyone who violated his new commitments. The power of the new god was the power of their agreement. All of this was just one step away from saying the object was a god because the humans said it was, but everyone would insist that, no, in fact, the objects were now vested with terrible invisible power. And if some unexpected catastrophe did befall one of the contracting parties—which was not at all uncommon as Europeans were constantly getting wrecked in storms or dying of malarial fever—someone could always say it never would have happened had the dead men not somehow broken their word. Did African merchants really believe in the power of their fetishes? Many seemed to think they did, even if they often acted as if fetishes were just a convenient commercial expedient. But the world of magical charms is full of such paradoxes. What is absolutely certain is that Europeans, used to thinking in theological terms, simply could not get their minds around this practice. As a result they tended to project their own confusion onto the Africans. Soon the very existence of fetishes was being held out as proof that Africans were profoundly confused about spiritual matters; European philosophers began arguing that fetishism represented the lowest possible stage of religion, one at which the fetishist was willing to worship absolutely anything, since he had no systematic theology at all. Before long, of course, European figures like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud began asking, But are we really all that different? As Marx noted, Western history is a story of our

[

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creating things and then falling down before our own creations and worshipping them like gods. In the Middle Ages we did it with wafers, chalices, and reliquaries. Now we do it with money and consumer goods. Hence Marx’s famous argument about commodity fetishism. We are constantly manufacturing objects for our use or convenience, and then speaking of them as if they were charged with some strange, supernatural power that makes them capable of acting on their own accord— largely because, from an immediate practical perspective, that might as well be true. When a commodity trader reads the Wall

Street Journal and learns that gold is doing this, oil or pork bellies doing that, or that money is fleeing this market and migrating somewhere else, does he believe what he reads? Certainly he doesn’t think he does. There would be absolutely no point in taking the trader aside and explaining that gold and oil are really inanimate objects that can’t do anything. The response would be pure exasperation. Obviously it’s just a figure of speech. What do you take me for, some kind of moron? But in every practical sense, he does believe it, because every day he goes out on the trading floor and acts as if it were true.t The

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Ob i t u a ry

The A lternative Press In Retrospect 3 Eugenia Williamson

n August, LA Weekly published something so incendiary that it yielded a bigger online readership than nearly anything else the paper had recently published. The piece in question, the result of the combined efforts of a half-dozen LA Weekly staffers working under the direction of music editor Ben Westhoff, gave rise to heated debate, death threats, and at least one Tumblr, which, during its short life, bore the unambiguous name “Ben Westhoff Can Suck My Dick.” It was a neat trick: LA Weekly managed to conjure so much controversy with limited context, hardly any content, and the lowest possible stakes. “20 Worst Hipster Bands: The Complete List” was an exercise in pure attitudinizing. Many of the bands it mocked—Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire—are so superannuated that even thirtysomething rock fans should know they aren’t anywhere near hip. Writing for the website Bullet Media, music critic Luke O’Neil sneeringly praised Westhoff and company for their prescience: “A lot of these bands didn’t even exist back in 2005 when this must have been written, a time when the concept of hipster band jokes seemed fresh.” But the prefab familiarity of the outrage was precisely the point. The formulaic presentation of random derision—or praise—is the premier linkbait currency of the Internet. The content-free listicle is among the most reliable offerings in the web-specific genre of ersatz journalism, as you can learn via a quick search of “hipster lists.” There you will behold, just for starters, entries from the Huffington Post (“Top 10 Hipsterhoods”), BuzzFeed (“11 Tired Hipster Fashion Trends That Are All Over Instagram”), and Yahoo (“Six Best Careers for Hipsters”). The only novelty here is that the alt-weekly is now locked into the same tawdry chase for pageview exposure that has driven the de facto war on the human attention span at shops such as BuzzFeed, HuffPo, and Yahoo. And Ben Westhoff, for one, didn’t have to wait long to see how this career strategy paid off. A week after his linkbait listicle made the rounds, Village Voice Media—the corporation that owns LA Weekly and twelve other alt-weeklies, including the Voice—promoted him to senior music editor of all their outlets. Just days prior to Westhoff’s elevation, the chain fired Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston. As New York Times media reporter David Carr noted (in a blog, of course), Johnston consistently “resisted the kinds of light, easily consumable items, like Top 10 lists and photo compilations, that tend to draw the most traffic online.” Although Westhoff, on the other hand, has dabbled in nuance—he is the author of last year’s Dirty South, a book roundly praised for its thoughtful analysis of Southern rap—he’s making top editorial dollar for, well, something else altogether. As alt-weeklies scramble to adapt the web model of attitudinizing 72 1 The Baffler [no.21]

P. S . M U E L L ER

over distant popcult targets, they move further away from entertainment writing. In one recent, all-too-representative print edition of LA Weekly, readers of the music section found listings, featured listings, a one-page profile of a national Pitchfork-approved act, and a one-page article about local music. The anodyne, earnest writing seems like an afterthought—designed, like the listings section, to deliver bland information with a minimum of offense. (It’s true that Westhoff’s trademark listicles—in addition to the worst hipster bands, there were grandiose entries such as the best musicians of all time, in any genre—aim to provoke controversy, but they, too, are written in effortless afterthought style; snidely packaged afterthoughts, but afterthoughts nonetheless.) A piece about a former department store turned underground nightclub focuses on the question of the space’s legality and employs the phrases “whimsically nicknamed” and “smashing success”; another, about the band Divine Fits, leads with the aging rockers “snacking on pita chips and hummus.” Elsewhere in that week’s LA Weekly, the editor-in-chief profiles an Angeleno who takes nice photos and shares them with Instagram, and a columnist laments the miseries of being single in her thirties. Notably absent: reportage. Although the city of Los Angeles’ dysfunctional school system and city government would certainly provide ample news fodder for robust feature coverage, and—for fuck’s sake!—Hollywood and the entertainment industry are right there, the print edition of LA Weekly contains just one certifiable news story per issue. This stolid aversion to criticism and reportage is endemic across the alt-weekly publishing industry—and it’s one of the structural reasons that the industry as we’ve long known it now seems ready to disappear. A few weeks after Village Voice Media appointed a list-monger to oversee its music coverage, it created a new holdings company, disengaged from its adult services website (which has been linked to child

The formulaic presentation of random derision—or praise—is the premier linkbait currency of the Internet.

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The Code [pa rt 1] 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić

ou need to know how to talk to these small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star, Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she acquitted herself with exceptional humility, declaring with complete sincerity that she’d fallen in love with Bosnia; that Bosnia had suffered terribly in a war started by the Serbs; yes, of course, she added, the whole region had suffered too, in its own way. But she really got them when she said that she made the film (not without cinematic merit) to showcase Bosnia’s suffering to the world. Her words cooled the gaping Bosnian wound like a balm. She was a hit with everyone, the men in particular, so much so that no one noticed that her deferential manner was the kind you put on when talking to children. With an unfailing human instinct, Angelina Jolie unlocked the code. She kissed the finger slammed in the drawer, gave the naughty drawer a good smack, naughty, naughty drawer, and the evil spirits slunk away. The Croats and Serbs waited in line with outstretched pinkie fingers, and I’m pretty sure that, at least in their heads, the Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians, and Montenegrins were all there lining up somewhere too. Angelina Jolie blew them an air kiss. The Serbs were pissed and beat their fists in the dung heap: they’d expected more than just air. If the rules of political correctness prevent us from abusing ethnic, national, racial, gender, and other types of difference—all unreliable in any case—and we’re looking for something to fall back on, there’s always the code. Social groups, tribes, sects, gangs, religious communities, mafia structures, families, Internet fan clubs—they’re all characterized by codes of behavior, written and unwritten, conscious and unconscious, enduring and susceptible to change, respected and disrespected. If not by a code of social behavior, how might we explain why Americans—just for example—almost never bellyache when meeting an acquaintance, but rather portray their lot in life as shiny and good, while Croats and other Yugozone* residents can’t wait to start bitching the second they clap eyes on someone they know. If they’re not whining about their personal problems—a toothache, a bad haircut, the long line at the post office that morning, a neighbor who turns his TV up too loud, a relative who landed in the hospital, their kid who got an F at school—then they’ll be bitching about rising prices. There’s an authenticity to the bitterness there, because prices seem to * The Yugozone is my coinage for the region encompassing the disintegrated and disappeared

former Yugoslavia. Someone recently came up with the term “Yugosphere,” and although the meaning is the same, I still prefer Yugozone.

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go up every day. The thing is, however, the bitcher-in-question gives you the impression that the price rises are directed at him personally. His bitching and our attendant commiserations work like morphine on him. It’s like Yugozone residents spend their lives wandering around with a little finger outstretched, just waiting for someone to blow on it and give it a kiss. And when someone does, presto, the pain disappears as if it’d never been there. Yugozone residents, the men in particular, all behave in a similar manner toward their leaders. The genius of Slobodan Milošević wasn’t that he said, C’mon, let's go smash some Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians, but that with an unfailing fatherly impulse he put his finger on the code and promised Serbs: No one will dare beat you again. The genius of Franjo Tuđman was not that he created the Croatian state, but the way he delicately positioned himself among the Croats, the very same way Milošević positioned himself among the Serbs. And Tuđman could even boast the advantage of a doctoral title. Yugozone residents love “doctors” and “generals” (it’s in our ganglions is how my former countrymen like to put it, just because they like the word ganglions), because only “doctors” and “generals” can decree—sorry, I meant guarantee—that everything will be as it should. This explains a square in downtown Zagreb being called Dr. Franjo Tuđman Square, the doctoral honorific probably making the square a world first. Although a number of doctors and generals, beloved leaders of the Yugozone peoples, have met inglorious ends—one currently languishes in a Hague jail (Dr. Radovan Karadžić), another in a Zagreb jail (Dr. Ivo Sanader)—their political successors rely on the same code. Current Croatian President Dr. Ivo Josipović recently encouraged the almost half a million unemployed and disenfranchised Croats with the following: “Look after your health and fight for your rights.” While this sort of tripe would sink anyone else on earth into a deep despair, Croatian workers took solace and comfort.

If the rules of political correctness prevent us from abusing ethnic, national, racial, gender, and other types of difference—all unreliable in any case—and we’re looking for something to fall back on, there’s always the code.

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Cities of Night 3 Belén Fernández

n 2009, the American economist Paul Romer took to the prestigious forum of the TED Talks (that would be “technology, entertainment, design,” for you unfortunate creative-class have-nots) to explain how to solve world poverty. Where old-economy governments once sowed scarcity and corruption with their outmoded ideas of sovereignty and economic nationalism, today you can simply plug in new-economy investors and create administrative zones called “charter cities.” And my, how they will prosper. As Romer lays things out in “Why the World Needs Charter Cities,” poor countries suffer from a typical case of “bad rules.” The solution, of course, is to adopt better rules that ensure private-sector success. Or, as Romer tried to put the idea across in TEDspeak: “If we can keep innovating in our space of rules, and particularly innovate in the sense of coming up with rules for changing rules so we don’t get stuck with bad rules, then we can keep moving progress forward.” Right. But how do these magical innovations work, exactly? Romer instructs his listeners to ponder the former British colony of Hong Kong, which, when viewed from space at night, looks brighter than mainland China—all because the country had operated under “rules that were copied from working market economies of the time and administered by the British.” And since nocturnal illumination is a sturdy sign of individual economic well-being, the TED-branded moral is clear: “In a sense, Britain inadvertently—through its actions in Hong Kong—did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.” Of course, given this particular island nation’s history, Romer was smart to insert that coy “inadvertently” into his celebration of Britain’s economic legacy. Prior to a landmark series of anti-colonial youth riots in 1967, Hong Kong was known as “the sweatshop 84 1 The Baffler [no.21]

colony.” Still, Romer knows that the less inadvertent features of the charter cities plan— the bankrolling of overseas development via corporate schemes of governance, for example—can prompt negative visceral reactions to perceived colonialism, and so he warns his audience that “the kind of emotions that come up when we start to think about these things can get in the way, can make us pull back, can shut down our ability and our interest in trying to explore new ideas.” In the cloistered social world envisioned on the TED stage, charter cities are hives of rulebased innovation around the Western record of colonial exploitation—an old idea!—while colonialism itself becomes chiefly a function of attitude: The thing that was bad about colonialism . . . is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This [charter city] model is all about choices, both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places, and choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension.

In practical terms, as Romer goes on to explain, the fundamental choice available to non-leaders in this novel scheme is whether or not to immigrate to a charter city; they do not have a say in whether their leaders partition and auction off national territory to corporate sponsors to govern by remote control. Nor will the inhabitants who choose to immigrate be burdened with the cumbersome choices that come with regularly scheduled elections; the idea is to phase in such luxuries gradually, as they are earned via other metrics of investor performance. It’s meanwhile safe to assume that, were the Chinese to build a charter city in half of Paul Romer’s house and give him the option of living in the other half of it, he might well be hailing this incursion as something other than an “antidote to coercion and condescension.”

HENRIK DRESCHER

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The Dream of Dorian Gray 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [pa rt 2]

he shows me a photograph. In the photo are children from her class, the image taken at the end of the school year. She points to a sweet little face. “Dora’s the prettiest in the class,” she says. Dora’s a little girl with long blond hair. My eight-year-old niece has short brown hair. She’s staring at the photo, but she’s all ears. I wonder what I should tell her. I know that responding with questions like “But is Dora smart?” or “Is she a nice person?” won’t help any in getting my message across. It won’t help if I say, “No, I think you’re the prettiest.” There’s some kind of consensus in her class that Dora is the prettiest, and there’s no disabusing her of this. The virus of insecurity has already wormed its way inside her. “You’re right, Dora’s got pretty ears,” I reply, though you can’t see her ears in the photo. Lookism is a widespread and devastatingly powerful prejudice based on a person’s physical appearance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful of course, to have it placed in the same category as racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism. It’s a word with plenty of synonyms—aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination—all signifying the same discriminatory practice: fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the ugly are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners. When I was my niece’s age, other little girls seemed more beautiful to me, too. Lidija had auburn hair and bushy eyebrows. Zlatica a light, translucent complexion, with tiny bluish veins below the surface. Jasminka full lips and oval baby teeth, shiny like silky candies. It was back then, in elementary school, that we all got it into our heads that the prettiest girl in the class was also the best little girl. With time the grind of everyday life bumped the painful subject of physical appearance from our list of priorities. The dream about the frog that turns into a princess, and those thousands of before-and-after photos that we absorbed like thirsty sponges, they worked in parallel, shunting our unconsciousness toward a hazy future in which we’d leave the miserable before far behind, and the desired after would last forever. In the meanwhile, small women’s sizes have become smaller, skinny women skinnier, cosmetic surgery more popular, and clothes

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

Lookism has plenty of synonyms— aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination— all signifying the same discriminatory practice: fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the ugly are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners.

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Anything for the Libor Boys 3 Christian Lorentzen

n a Tuesday evening last July, I was walking south across the Thames over the Millennium Bridge. The entrance to the Tate Modern was blocked off with police tape, and a blue tarp was spread across the ground. Under it was the corpse of someone who’d jumped from the members’ bar five floors up. A Tate membership costs £60 a year, and many members work within walking distance of the museum, just across the river in the City, the primary zone of banking here since the late sixteenth century. A few days later, the London press reported that the body under the tarp belonged to Michael Foreman, forty-eight years old, married, a passionate trombonist, frequent visitor to Hong Kong, and senior bank manager for HSBC. Foreman’s suicide and its dramatic staging caused at least one onlooker to vomit and left a musician about to go on in the Tanks, the Tate’s newly opened exhibition space, too traumatized to perform. But no one learned anything more about why the banker took his own life—he might have been distressed over personal problems, professional troubles, or Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull For the Love of God, which the Tate was featuring as part of its popular Hirst retrospective. In a sense, the mystery of Foreman’s death didn’t matter. All summer long, the bankers of London were locked into a different kind of Totentanz, pantomiming their profession’s moral vacuity. They were making headlines as interest-rate riggers at Barclays, Mexican drug-money launderers at HSBC, and accomplices to the systematic violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran at Standard Chartered. By August the cascade of financial news had become so relentlessly grim that the British began spitting bile across the Atlantic, displaying all the telltale symptoms of a persecution complex. “I think it’s a concerted effort that’s been organized at the top of the U.S. government,” Labour MP John Mann

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told the BBC. “This is Washington trying to win a commercial battle to have trading from London shifted to New York.” An unnamed Standard Chartered group director, quoted in a New York State Department of Financial Services filing against the bank, put things a bit more succinctly: “You f---ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?” Meanwhile, the rest of the world, or at least some of its better athletes, had come to town, and the Olympics had pushed the bankers off the front pages of every London paper but the Financial Times. The Friday after Foreman jumped, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremonies offered an image of Britain that ran from The Wind in the Willows through Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Chariots of Fire, and Harry Potter, with nods to the Industrial Revolution, the National Health Service, the Tube, the Thames, black cabs, classic rock, the invention of ultrasound, the first clicks of the World Wide Web, and the fact that not all Britons are white. Stuntmen dressed as James Bond and Queen Elizabeth II jumped from a helicopter. Most reactions chimed with that of BBC sportswriter Tom Fordyce, who called the ceremonies “so gloriously daft, so cynicism-squashingly charming and—well, so much pinch-yourself fun.” Other critics weren’t so inclined to gush. The Conservative MP Aidan Burley, who last year embarrassed his party by attending a Nazi-themed bachelor party in the French Alps, called the proceedings “leftie multicultural crap” on Twitter, and was told off for his somewhat vile honesty by Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson. But the novelist and essayist Jenny Diski, writing on the blog of the London Review of Books (where I work), confirmed that Burley had a point: “I’m pretty sure that nothing more overtly political or antagonistic to government policy could have been staged

S P E N C E R WA LTS

The bankers of London were locked into a different kind of Totentanz, pantomiming their professionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s moral vacuity. They were making headlines as interest-rate riggers at Barclays, Mexican drug-money launderers at HSBC, and accomplices to the systematic violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran. The

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A Middle Finger 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [Pa rt 3 ]

often go shopping in Amsterdam’s Osdorp neighborhood, mainly because I enjoy the long bike ride through the park on the way there. But the chance to head out on my bike isn’t the only reason. I sit there in a café surrounded by drab residential buildings and shops, my gaze set on a sculpture of an ugly stone coil simulating a gush of water into a perennially dry fountain. There are countless Dutch housing estates built in the sixties like this one. Today they’re home to immigrants and to elderly Dutch who in a distant time swallowed the line about prosperous, functioning social housing, and all the rest that goes with it. We eventually come to love our own unfortunate choices, particularly if righting them requires too great an effort. I sit there in a café with a depressing view, with a dishwater coffee, and waiters like you don’t even get in Montenegro anymore. There’s a lovely café with a calming view of the lake barely a hundred meters from here. Why, then, do I slouch in this one? I do it for the three, four, or five specimens I encounter here; it depends on the anthropologist’s luck. I imagine that I’m here on a secret research mission, that I’m on a periodic follow-up visit to confirm previous results. The men are all around my age, my “countrymen”—a word that makes me wince. Every morning they descend from their apartments in the surrounding tower blocks, landing here like paratroopers. My ear, a keen hunter for spoken nuance, remains bizarrely tone-deaf, unable to discern the region they’re from. Maybe because they’re too much from some former Yugoslav backwoods. Their garishness and stubborn typologies eliminate linguistic or ethnic specificities; they’re simply sons of the culture in which they grew into the men they are today. Their clothes and gait give them away. Their faces are sponges that have soaked up the faces of the men they grew up alongside, one imprinted on the other. These faces bear the traces of fathers and grandfathers, maternal and paternal uncles, men from the neighborhood or village, from their army days, from their local bars, from their workplaces, the faces of their countrymen, friends, men you see in the newspaper, on the TV screen, the faces of politicians, generals, soldiers, murderers, criminals, thieves, the faces of all those who brought them here, to Amsterdam’s Osdorp, where every day they descend from their apartments like paratroopers to drink their morning coffee among their own, because they don’t have anyone else but their own. This is the ground they’ve been allocated. It’s a rare occasion they make it downtown; they’re not that keen in any case, curiosity’s not their strong point. So they sit on their chairs, legs spread wide, faces radiating sovereignty over the territory conquered, bodies suggesting they’ve planted their flag. “Historically” settled, they liberate their hands from their pockets 110 1 The Baffler [no.21]

and gesticulate wildly. They rarely smile, but snigger often. A snigger is their defense, it’s how they get one over each other, hide a momentary defeat. They’re not capable of engaging in conversation of any length or depth, not even with their own; they’ve never learned. A snigger is a reprieve, an eraser with which they wipe clean what’s been said, their own speech or that of another; a snigger turns everything into a josh. They frequently let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, spurring each other on, approving or condemning, a backslap and circle jerk. Ehee-heee . . . They know everything, they’ve always known everything, no one needs to explain anything to them; they know it all too well. The first phrase out of their mouths is: I’ve always said . . . They talk about money, politics, sports. Sometimes they lose it a little, and sniggering as they go, exchange information about the horrors of health checks, prostate and rectal exams, and the like. They rarely mention womDAV I D M c LI M A N S en, and if they do, it’s to take the piss out of each other, like schoolboys. Eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-heee. They don’t know what they’re doing here, but they’ll be going back, they’ve got a share in a house, an apartment, a bit of land somewhere, it’ll be enough to survive on. The Dutchies will throw them a crumb or two, which by God they deserve, having blessed this country with their arrival. They drink coffee or slurp beer from the bottle, swap what they’ve read in the papers from down there, pick over the bones of Milošević, Tuđman, the present, Karadžić, Mladić, the future . . . When’s down there getting into Europe? (What the fuck do you care? You’re already in Europe!) They’re the real victims of the war, and, adding insult to injury, they messed up their choice of country—they went from a small one to a smaller one, Christ, you can’t even see the sun or moon from here. The Poles get ahead better than they do (Goes without saying. Poles are like Jews), even the Bulgarians are doing better (Maybe so, but only the Bulgarian Turks, you didn’t know the Turkish mafia runs everything here?), only Bulgarians would clean Dutch toilets, they wouldn’t do it dead. They’re the ones sucking the big one, sifting about here not knowing why, and down there everything’s going for a song, everything’s been stolen or sold, foreigners have bought up the coast, and now they’re schlinging their schlongs, raving and partying, pollut-

A snigger is a reprieve, an eraser with which they wipe clean what’s been said, their own speech or that of another; a snigger turns everything into a josh. They frequently let out an eee-he-hee, heeeeh-hee, spurring each other on, approving or condemning, a backslap and circle jerk.

The

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Call of the Wild Detroit on screen 3 Will Boisvert

fter so many decades spent languishing in the shadows of depopulation and deindustrialization, Detroit is finally ready for its close-up. It’s become one of the most filmed places on earth, a tableau, in the words of a Time magazine photo essay, of “beautiful, horrible decline.” Empty skyscrapers cling to their elegance; ruined mansions gaze forlornly through burnt-out windows; the iconic slab of the Michigan Central train station, where mutating automobiles battled at the climax of Transformers, rears up like a giant tombstone. No film documentarian with a camera and a theory about the direction that civilization is heading can bear to pass this up—or afford to, since it offers for free the kind of striking postapocalyptic visuals that would normally require a CGI shop. Detroit has become a mythic landscape to the filmmakers who have flocked to the city, and they’ve invested it with the most potent of American mythologies, positing the city as the new frontier. The myth thrives, as in the French documentary Detroit: Ville Sauvage, on images of the city’s urban prairies, the fields of waisthigh grass where neighborhoods once stood— a terrain much like the plains that pioneers traversed on their treks out West. And as with any frontier, Detroit seems to offer limitless freedom to reinvent society and self and recapture imaginary pasts. The eruption of prairie has struck Green ideologues as an antidote to industrial blight and a path back to agrarian values; so it is in Grown in Detroit, a Dutch film that celebrates the city’s ofttoasted urban farming movement by following students at a school for pregnant teens as they are taught to raise crops, tend goats, and reclaim their souls from fast food. Detroit Bike City, a Critical Mass manifesto, pedals an in-your-face victory lap around the Motor 114 1 The Baffler [no.21]

City’s crestfallen car culture. Countless docs chronicle the artists and bohemians who have flocked to the city as a tabula rasa for installations and scenes, with lofts so cheap as to be almost literally free. Stoking their heady sense of liberation are the shuttered, crumbling factories that lie all about, Ozymandian remnants of once-mighty industries now withered and impotent, smashed idols testifying mutely to the overthrow of the old order. The city has therefore attracted no less an anarchist than Jackass star Johnny Knoxville; in Detroit Lives he surveys the city’s cool underground night spots and hangs out with hipsters, savoring the cultural provocations as he would an exploding latrine. Even filmmakers who see past Detroit’s bleak-chic blank spaces to its perpetual hardship and threadbare public services can get in on the frontier spirit. So it is with Burn, a helmet-cam vérité-style doc that follows the city’s firefighters in their rattletrap engines as they fight an arson plague. Indeed, with joblessness, derelict housing, and gnawing insecurity the new normal, the country that so long shunned Detroit has embraced it as America’s Ruin, symbol of a now-universal embattled grittiness that never gives up despite never succeeding. The ennoblement was made official by Clint Eastwood in his celebrated “Halftime in America” ad for Chrysler during this year’s Super Bowl. “The people of Detroit know a little something about this,” Eastwood rasped of the high unemployment that his audience had forgotten about during game time. “But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. . . . The world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.” Eastwood got the ad because of his 2008 movie Gran Torino, in which he played retired Polish-American autoworker Walt Kowalski, the last white man in De-

D E TRO P IA | TO N Y H A R D M O N

Stoking their heady sense of liberation are the shuttered, crumbling factories that lie all about, Ozymandian remnants of once-mighty industries now withered and impotent, smashed idols testifying mutely to the overthrow of the old order.

9 troit, defending his lawn against black, Latino, and Hmong gangbangers. It’s an oddly fitting contemporary coda for Hollywood’s last Western star, letting him wave his guns on an urban frontier where a dwindling police presence opens the way for direct action. Walt ends up crucifying himself and passing the titular cherry-red Ford muscle car on like a blazing torch of Americanism to the next generation of immigrant strivers.

new documentary, Detropia, surveys these strands of Detroit mythology with a critical eye, an absorbing visual style, and a salutary attention to the vicious economics behind the city’s sublime disrepair. Directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a native of suburban Detroit, and benefitting from the fine cinematography of Tony Hardmon and Craig Atkinson, the film regales viewers with images that are by now clichés of the ruins-porn genre, but invests them with an unabashed aesthetic intensity that feels fresh. We see a tenor singing arias in the echoing, vine-covered interior of the train station, a wrecking claw shredding a house that seems as flimsy as cardboard, a rippling urban meadow complete with pheasant and coyote. We spelunk through the dark, debris-choked halls of a grand apartment building until a window suddenly opens out on the gorgeous vista of downtown looming above the prairie. We happen upon men “scrapping” copper from a derelict factory at night, blowtorches lighting their tense faces as if in a Caravaggio painting. We take in a carnival parade of mainly white The

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O TH E R P E OPLE’S P ROBL E M S

Who Is Timmy Monster? [ Pa rt 4 ] 3D ubr avka Ugrešić

omeone in my building in otherwise docile Amsterdam has been terrorizing the rest of us. How? Simple. Late at night and early in the morning the mystery man (or woman?) starts shunting furniture around his apartment. That’s our best guess as to what’s going on; we’ve got no way to be sure. There’s just this ghastly scraping that penetrates every floor and apartment, its effect like an electric shock. We all think the racket’s coming from the apartment directly above us. We suspect each other, and the more vociferous among us knock on doors, wag their fingers, and leave warning notes. We all plead innocence—no, it’s not us. When the mystery man cranks up his racket, we vent our distress on the central heating pipes that connect all the apartments. The scraping falls silent for a second, as if it’s got the message, and then the torture erupts again, more brazenly than before. We’re at war. And what drives us most insane is that we don’t know who our enemy is. For months we’ve been walking around with cupped ears, leaning against walls, none the wiser as to who’s behind the damn scraping. Yes, we’re at war. Our fears multiply from one day to the next. They arrive as a scraping that makes the walls of our apartments quiver, they arrive via the television screen, the telephone, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter; the more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fueled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch. I meet up with an acquaintance. She’s approaching sixty, two adult sons. She and her husband are modest Dutch folk. For a time she worked as a teacher, and then she started doing charitable work teaching young Moroccans Dutch. She does so firm in her belief that the cultivation of neighborly relations, a smile on the dial, and small interventions make life on planet Earth a little more bearable. She was telling me about a new course she’d just been on: touch therapy, something between tapping therapy and haptonomy. She does it with Moroccan kids, boys mostly, the kind who mark the territory out front of their tower blocks until late into the night, brawling and stealing, dishing out beatings and dreaming up childish ways of making others’ lives hell. Sometimes it’s shitting on a neighbor’s doorstep, other times it’s pissing up the door. “What do you do with them?” I ask. “I tap them a little, give them a hug, like a mother would her baby. Touch reduces aggression, you know that.” I look at my acquaintance—her face radiating a somewhat unhealthy enthusiasm—and I’m not sure what to make of it all.

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DAV I D M c LI M A N S

There’s definitely something not right with humanity. Some psychopath from Belgrade bought a little girl from her father for a thousand euros. Why? So he could rape her on a daily basis. In Texas a twelve-year-old strangled a four-year-old with a skipping rope. Senior high students from Karlovac raped a classmate with a chair leg. A fifty-year-old from Zagreb garroted his seventy-seven-year-old mother with a piece of wire. In a Croatian village a grandson twice set fire to his grandfather’s house, and eventually pummeled him to death. A husband and wife with a three-year-old jumped from the sixth floor of a Belgrade hotel. A Frenchman bundled his three-year-old son into the washing machine and turned it on. Why? The kid had been naughty. Yes, there’s definitely something not right with humanity. We each haul an invisible psychiatric couch along with us. We seek understanding, yet few are ready to understand others. There’s only the market, ever ready to offer comfort. With every new year that rolls around, more and more people have started wishing each other Happy New Fear. The words fear and stress have entered our everyday lexicon, like bread and milk. Fear of an itch, fear of the dark, fear of noise, fear of madness, fear of pain, fear of open space, fear of enclosed space, fear of the road, fear of crossing the road, fear of sharp objects, fear of cats, fear of the opinions of others, fear of dust, fear of driving, fear of insult, fear of looking up, fear of people, fear of anger, fear of floods, fear of touch, fear of bees, fear of amputation, fear of numbers, fear of fire, fear of falling, fear of thunder, fear of asymmetrical objects, fear of ruins, fear of failure, fear of filth, fear of loneliness, fear of flying, fear of microbes, fear of steps, fear of depth, fear of change, fear of mirrors, fear of bats, fear of money, fear of food, fear of theft, fear of sleeping, fear of the grave, fear of sweating, fear of glass, fear of animal fur, fear of crowds, fear of knowledge, epistemophobia, fear of ideas, ideophobia, fear of speech, laliophobia, fear of words, logophobia, fear of memories, mnemophobia, fear of everything new, neophobia, fear of everything, pantophobia . . .

The more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fueled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch.

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Oh, the Irony! 3 Chris Lehmann

n the long-ago time of the nineties, tech markets boomed and day traders roamed the far horizon. Neoliberal trade policies flattened the globe; centrist Third Way statesmen rolled up budget surpluses and doled out tax cuts. The pop-cultural soundtrack to this cheerful abundance was a mood of studied irony. Artists, musicians, and writers dwelled lovingly on the coy telescripts, broad sitcom humor, and emotional guile of their not-toodistant youths, exposing the hollow conceits behind it all with a gentle, telltale whimsy. And the crown prince of that sweet ironic caesura was Dave Eggers. Eggers was a rarity in the slacker-fied precincts of nineties irony: a savvy self-marketer and an institution builder. At the center of his many enterprises was the brand called Dave Eggers. After launching an arch popcult monthly called Might (the name was its own pointed study in irony, suggesting both the inherent power and precariousness of cultcrit ventures), Eggers published his great reputation-making work. It was, naturally, a memoir, bearing the ironic title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The memoir opens with the irony-resistant story of Eggers’s family; both of his parents died of cancer within six weeks of each other, while Dave was still in college. It fell largely to the young man to raise his elementary-school-age brother, Toph; in the great tradition of American literary self-reinvention, the two traumatized brothers headed west—to the San Francisco Bay area, where Dave underwent his own passage into the rites of nineties adulthood with young Toph looking over his shoulder. Other bad things happen in the memoir, but the bulk of the action is devoted to songs of the Eggersian self: measured purely on the basis of page count, a single baroque account of the author’s audition to be on the then-buzzy MTV reality 124 1 The Baffler [no.21]

franchise The Real World far outweighs the spare and moving chronicle of his parents’ death. The final scene of the book is a tableau of Dave and Toph playing Frisbee alongside the Pacific Ocean and pondering the limitless expanse of the future. This, in a nutshell, was Eggers’s optimism of the ironic will: when life dealt him unimaginable loss, he hurled a plastic disc into the air. As the many fond reveries of nineties culture have collapsed, Eggers, like the rest of us, has had to square up to many more unpleasant social facts. His follow-up 2002 novel, bravely titled You Shall Know Our Velocity, was a gloss of sorts on the runaway success of A Heartbreaking Work—this time, the central characters faced down the awful unfairness of life by giving away large sums of money on a weeklong world tour. (This trope of privileged youthful flight later took Eggers into his first foray into screenwriting, Away We Go, to truly dreadful effect.) He went on to found the quite worthy 826 National foundation in San Francisco and several satellite cities to support young writers in poverty. He also launched the twee satirical website known as Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency; a separate McSweeney’s indiepublishing imprint soon followed, as did The Believer, a literary magazine produced by, for, and about young writers. A later novel, What is the What, and his 2009 nonfiction book Zeitoun movingly evoked the experience of exile, displacement, and deprivation: the former work hinged on the fictionalized odyssey of a young Sudanese refugee, and the latter recounted the horrific story of a Syrian immigrant detained by paramilitary forces in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The avatar of the ironic sensibility had, in short, done one of the most unironic things imaginable: he had grown a social conscience. Now that the McSweeney’s empire has outlasted the plum economic circumstances

V I C TO R K E R LOW

The avatar of the ironic sensibility had, in short, done one of the most unironic things imaginable: he had grown a social conscience. The

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s Into

the Infinite

The Missionary Position 3 Barbar a Ehrenreich

ost critics have regarded Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in much the same way that Arthur Miller probably thought of Marilyn Monroe—gorgeous, but intellectually way out of her depth. No one denies the film’s visual glory, which begins the moment a giant chalk-white alien strides out into the Icelandic wasteland, guzzles some gunk from a can, and splits open to release thousands of wriggling worm-like DNA strands into a waterfall. But when it comes to metaphysical coherence, the critical consensus is that Prometheus has nothing to offer. “There are no revelations,” the New York Times opines, “only what are called, in the cynical jargon of commercial storytelling, ‘reveals,’ bits of momentarily surprising information bereft of meaning or resonance.” In its refusal to offer an adequate accounting of the universe and our place in it, the film can even be accused of anti-intellectualism. “We were never really in the realm of working out logical solutions to difficult problems,” Geoffrey O’Brien complains in the New York Review of Books, just a “cauldron” of “juicily irrational ingredients.” But Prometheus does have a clear-cut metaphysical proposition to offer, one so terrible as to be almost inadmissible. Consider the basic plot, minus the many alien invasions of human flesh, the references to corporate greed and alien WMDs, and the enigma of the devious HAL-like android: Guided by archeological clues found in prehistoric rock art, a group of humans set out on a trilliondollar expedition to visit the planet (actually a moon) that the giant white alien came from. There, among innumerable horrors, since under its bleak surface this moon seems to be a breeding ground for lethal predators of the dark and squirmy variety, they find a cryogenically preserved clone or sibling of that original alien “creator” who seeded earth with DNA. The humans foolishly awaken 132 1 The Baffler [no.21]

him, perhaps expecting some sort of seminar on the purpose of life. Instead, the alien starts knocking heads off and strides away to resume his pre-nap project of traveling to and destroying the planet earth. This, and not the DIY abortion of a squid-like alien fetus, is the emotional climax of the film, the point when Noomi Rapace screams at the homicidal alien, “I need to know why! What did we do wrong? Why do you hate us?” True, we don’t know whether the big white aliens are gods, manifestations of a single God, or operatives working for some higher power. But just how much theological clarity can you expect from a Hollywood action film? It doesn’t take any great imaginative leap to see that Scott and his writers are confronting us with the possibility that there may be a God, and that He (or She or It or They) is not good. This is not atheism. It is a strand of religious dissidence that usually flies well under the radar of both philosophers and cultural critics. For example, it took about five years before the critics noticed that Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy His Dark Materials was not just about a dodgy or unreliable God, but about one who is actively malevolent. Atheism has become a respectable intellectual position, in some settings almost de rigueur, but as Bernard Schweizer explains in his enlightening 2010 book Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, morally inspired opposition to God remains almost too radical to acknowledge. How many of Elie Wiesel’s admirers know that he said, “Although I know I will never defeat God, I still fight him”? Or that Rebecca West declaimed that “the human will should [not] be degraded by bowing to this master criminal,” and that she was echoing a sentiment already expressed by Zora Neale Hurston? Barred from more respectable realms of speculation, the idea of an un-good God has been pretty much left to propagate in the

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Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter? 3 Josh MacPhee

t least twice a week I get an email asking for support for a new project via Kickstarter. More often than not I pledge money, wanting to act in solidarity with friends and acquaintances with giant ideas but small bank accounts. And Kickstarter, once a promising platform for artists and other cultural producers to raise money, has become the go-to tool for fundraising by writers, artists, designers, political activists, and even popular musicians and award-winning filmmakers. As more friends use it, and as I cough up more and more money with every visit to the website, it seems a good time to try to crack it open to see how it works—and who it really works for. The basics are easy to understand. You have a project that requires financial help to realize. You choose an amount you want to raise, make a short video advertising the future project, and then post it on Kickstarter.com as a “campaign.” In order to entice people into supporting this campaign—or, in the site’s parlance, to become “backers”—you offer “rewards”: goods and services people will receive if they pledge money. Generally, the more money a backer pledges, the more valuable the reward. If you reach your fundraising goal within a fixed time period, between one and sixty days, then the money is yours. If you fail to raise the full amount, you don’t get any of the money; you just get sad. Crowd-sourced, or community-based, funding models are not new. Bake sales and lemonade stands have been around for a while, funding everything from Parent Teacher Associations to small-town historical societies. As a kid, I went door to door selling Christmas wreaths for the Boy Scouts, and most of us have gained at least five pounds eating Girl Scout Cookies. The value that Kickstarter adds to these relative138 1 The Baffler [no.21]

ly common fundraising models is threefold. First, it provides software tools that make it easy to plug your campaign into existing online social networks, primarily Facebook. Second, Kickstarter offers a clean interface and a convenient payment mechanism, giving your project a gloss of professionalism it might otherwise lack. Third, Kickstarter links projects through its website, so people who help fund your project might also click on a completely different film project and become a “backer.” This means your own project may get support from strangers far outside your direct personal networks. These three features are why setting up a Kickstarter page seems so much more efficient than setting up a bake sale. More efficient, and more necessary than ever. Since the eighties, state funding for the arts has dwindled, and we cultural producers have turned toward private foundations for grants. Now many of us are exhausted by an endless cycle of grant applications to foundations where who you know is more important than how interesting your project is. Kickstarter, meanwhile, has announced that it’s distributing more arts funding than the National Endowment for the Arts. According to bloggers at InformationDiet.com and the Los Angeles Times, while Kickstarter is looking at facilitating the funding of $150 million in projects (compared to the NEA’s funding of $146 million) in 2012, at least a quarter of the money is going into technology development and product design projects—nothing that could honestly be considered the arts. Even so, Kickstarter still looks to be a promising and seemingly innovative way to raise funds. Hundreds of friends and acquaintances are trying it out. But any time there is a suggestion of free money, we should get suspicious.

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T O R Y

Invasion of Grenada 3 George Singleton

aybe we weren’t meant to be foster parents. It’s important to learn these things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed us up for the project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn’t have firearms scattered around the house or booze bottles within reach. That we didn’t keep Pine-Sol bottles on the floor, or rat traps. I’m sure they looked into our backgrounds enough to conclude we weren’t child pornographers, dope smokers, domestic batterers, gunrunners, arsonists, that sort of thing. I had some questionable decisions in my past, but nothing worse than anyone else. Vandalism, mostly. Trespassing. I’d been married before, too young, and the vandalism and trespassing involved her. But I wasn’t violent, or a repeat offender. I walked onto my ex-wife’s property once, spray-painted cheater on the side of her house, then left. I spray-painted that, plus bitch and two-timer and whore and Eduardo—really? on the side of what used to be my van. I don’t want to think I’m a racist, but it hurt my ego that she’d fallen in love with a Venezuelan over me. “It’s kind of like being on-call 24/6,” our personal social worker came to tell Bonita and me. I’ll be the first to admit that maybe I married Bonita just because she sounded like she might be Venezuelan, too. She’s not. She’s from West Virginia [insert joke here]. When I met Bonita—at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America Trade Show up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, inside the old racetrack—that’s how she introduced herself, “I’m from West Virginia [insert joke here].” When I told her I lived 127 miles from Myrtle Beach, you’d’ve thought I asked her to move in with me to a five-bedroom mansion in some place like Orlando or Knoxville. For what it’s worth, her West Virginia daddy owned a driving range outside Buckhannon, but he couldn’t make it to Mid146 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America because of a bout of black lung he contracted from breathing in the vicinity of coal mines; so he sent Bonita. She and I had no choice but to fall in love, what with all the complimentary range balls, hand towels, ball markers, and divot repair tools handed out, not to mention the free symposiums that involved everything from fescue to front wheel pickers to tee line turf. When a man began to speak about the importance of ball washers, we couldn’t take it anymore and retired to my motel room, where I had a bottle of Smirnoff. I’ll jump ahead and say that I visited Bonita a few times up in West Virginia, her daddy died, she sold the land to one of those mining companies, and so on. She moved down to Calloustown soon after and helped me watch my hometown disintegrate into near ghosttown status once the younger kids moved away and the older ones died, once the mill closed, and so on. I’m not complaining. The social worker said, “It’s like 24/6 instead of 24/7 because we won’t take children away from their biological parents on a Sunday. We don’t want any child growing up and thinking anything bad about Sundays. You know how maybe your momma dies on Arbor Day, and from then on for the rest of your life you hate trees? That’s how we feel about taking a kid away from abusive parents on a Sunday. Most parents get caught abusing on Saturdays anyway, or Tuesdays. I don’t know why those two days. Someone did a study and concluded that, you know.” Her name was Alberta. Bonita had met the woman at one of those kitchen appliance parties. They noticed they both had names that ended in -ta, and started meeting up at an Applebee’s out by the interstate on Thursdays and calling each other plain old “Ta”; when they encountered one another sometimes you heard “Ta-ta,” like that, kind of racy. “We’re ready,” Bonita had said.

SU-K YUNG LEE

Here’s the situation: Sometimes children had to be taken away from their parents and sent to a safe place for anywhere from one day to a month. It’s called “temporary protective custody,” just like when somebody in prison tattletales on a gang member and the next thing you know the tattletale’s got about six thousand death threats. It should be called something else, if you ask me, but I don’t know what. It should be called something else just so children don’t feel as though they have something in common with prison tattletales for the rest of their lives. “You need to have diapers handy at all time,

and Gerber’s. These kids coming in might be six months old, they may be fifteen. Boys and girls. So you might need to have some tampons in your medicine cabinet, too,” Alberta said. This conversation took place in our den, in our wood-framed house, which sat on two acres of land with another twelve across the road where the driving range stood. My father had started Calloustown Driving Range back in the sixties after he realized that nothing— corn, soybeans, tomatoes, tobacco, whatever—would grow in his soil. When Bonita came into my life she said, “Why don’t we call it the Calloustown Practice Range? That way The

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A n c e s t or s

If I Were President 3 C. Wright Mills

he new President, like all Presidents before him, began his office by throwing out men unlike himself and by gathering around him men of similar views. But Mills also got two other types into his official and unofficial family of advisors. Some men of very different but still intelligent views he felt might by their opposition sharpen his own views and make his administration aware of a fuller range of fact and possibility. And then, just for laughs and to remind himself of the need to remain sane, he induced a few of the old types—he seemed especially to favor generals and admirals—to sit in on the virtually continuous round table (sometimes private, sometimes public) which he instituted at the heart of the government. When these crackpots became unbearably boring or too shrill in their paranoic hysteria; or when they talked too much or refused to talk at all—merely glowering and grumping—he changed them. It may be that the behavior of these men in the presence of ideas did more than any other thing to discredit all that they stood for; they were laughed out of American power. It was of course predicted that since Mills had been a professor he would probably recruit a lot of professors. He did try, but it turned out that there were two kinds of college professors: smart ones and dumb ones. The smart ones were smart in the same way that anyone is smart, although they usually knew more, having spent more time at it. The dumb ones likewise, although perhaps a little more lazy than most and certainly more pretentious. Every Sunday afternoon, for three hours or so, the round table became altogether public. It went on the air. Each week its personnel changed somewhat depending on the topic, but generally about half of its dozen or so members were in the government and half were not. Entirely unrehearsed and extremely animated, this round table came to serve at least five domestic purposes: by means of their conduct on it, new men were recruited for government work, etc. Many of the key policies of the new administration first came to life in a phrase, an idea, an argument. The general idea of the permanent peace economy, for example, was first outlined by a young economist from California who literally talked continuously for the full three hours. And of course the round table was the prime official means of public information. The transcript was edited into a tighter form and most Monday papers carried it in full. Once a month it became a pamphlet. C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) laid down this incomplete manuscript—published here for the first time—sometime after the 1956 publication of The Power Elite. “What would it mean for the outlook and policies of the USA were its elite to wake up tomorrow morning altogether rid of the military metaphysics, miraculously cured of crackpot realism?” Mills asked in a short preface. “What would I do if I were President of the United States? I am tired of dodging this old question. I am going to answer it.”

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But something else began after some six months to come about. Because of the intellectual quality of these discussions—and because of the results of decisions which they saw first take form here, many people came to realize that decisions affecting the way they live are after all made by some changing bunch of men, not by “governments” or some other sort of abstract forces, and so they began to want to get in on the act; they began to take these discussions very seriously, and in this they were encouraged. Before, there had been so-called public opinion polls—a crude and mechanical technique by which the statistics of superficial “opinions” were taken for the opinion of the public. These now became obsolete, as genuine publics of discussion began to form in various towns and sections of larger cities. After several discussions of some issue, international, national, or local propositions were formulated and debated, and an ingenious system of summarizing and reporting these over once a month on a national scale was devised. Probably what kept it alive, what created and maintained such an active public discussion, was the fact that these propositions were not only debated: they became the subjects of the President’s round table The

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SAM LU B ICZ