No. 22 by The Baffler

No. 22

BRAD HOLLAND

Con t e n t s ( Th e B a f f l e r, n o. 2 2 ) Philosophical Intelligence Office

Negative Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Camera Shy, Blah, Blah, Blah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Slavoj Žižek

A Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 HENRIK DRESCHER

Dmitry Gorchev

Daniel’s Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11, 12

Daniel A aron

Hope Is a Kiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Peter K ayafas

Politics

To Galt’s Gulch They Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thomas Fr ank

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse . . . . . . 23 DAV I D S U TE R

David Gr aeber

Culture

The State of Stretching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Yoga in America Jorian Polis Schutz

Modem & Taboo

Passions of the Meritocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Marketpiece Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD Chris Br ay

Nicholas Kristof and Milton Friedman rescue the world Anne Elizabeth Moore R A N DA L L E N OS

The Meme Hustler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk Evgen y Morozov

66, 125

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Predator Drone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The United Sades of America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Heather Havrilesky

Jimmy Savile will see you now Christian Lorentzen M I C H A E L D U FF Y

4 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Hussein Ibish

Modem & Taboo

Poems

Diaspora: Breakfast with Mahmoud Darwish . . . . . . . . . .

Taverna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Grim Sleeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kristina K. Robinson Manohar Shetty Terese Svoboda

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

Underground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

John Keene

Di$claimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Accounting for the Damage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A my Gerstler

Jocelyn Burrell

Inside the House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Cathy Park Hong

Sphinx Infinitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

120

The Robots Are Coming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

124

Tyrone Williams Kyle Dargan

Stories

The Agony of Leaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mahesh R ao

R A L P H S TE A D M A N

111

Up in Birdland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Monica Hileman

Ancestors

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For his 100th birthday Thomas Ber nhard

148 JA M E S GA L L AG H E R

Graphic Art

Brad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Mark Dancey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steve Brodner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

DAV I D J O H N S O N

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 5

P OL I T IC S : Wa k e Up

Over the boom and through the bust . . .

To Galt’s Gulch They Go 3 Thomas Fr ank

here was a time when Atlas would frown and the world of nations would tremble. He was as mighty as Zeus and as petulant as a teenager. His wrath was irresistible, and he was easily provoked. Badmouth him and he might just drop his burden and walk away. Elect someone he didn’t approve of and he’d put a lightning bolt up your ass. Chile learned the hard way about minding the feelings of the business-class god. In 1970 that country selected as president one Salvador Allende, a socialist of the old school who quickly set about nationalizing banks, telecom concerns, and so on. American companies naturally feared these developments and laid plans to push the country down a different path. They would withdraw investments, executives mused; they would halt purchases of Chilean goods; and they would persuade others to do the same. President Richard Nixon, who was clearly thinking along the same lines, told his CIA director to “make the economy scream.” And scream it did. Still, these were the early days of collective capitalist action, and there was a certain brutality and clumsiness to the proceedings. Not every American firm doing business in Chile went along with the program—the high-minded banks, for example, squealed about their policy of “non-involvement in the political affairs of the countries where they do business.” And in the end, Atlas’s goals for the Southern Cone were achieved only by means of an ugly military coup. In later years, Atlas would grow more subtle in expressing himself, more refined. When François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981—another socialist pursuing an array of nationalizations and expanded rights for labor—there was no need for a junta 22 1 The Baffler [no.22]

DAV I D S U TE R

of generals to intervene. Mitterrand pumped the depressed French economy full of Keynesian stimulus, but his nationalizations were too much to take: the private sector simply refused to play along. The New York Times spoke of an “investment strike,” rich Frenchmen moved abroad, and Mitterrand himself moaned about a guerre sociale conducted by the bosses. This socialist was no Salvador Allende: he came into office at the head of a good-sized majority, he presided over one of the largest economies in the world, and he was fully committed to the American-led security program of the era. But none of that mattered to peevish Atlas. It took only two years for Mitterrand to capitulate. In 1983 he embarked on his famous economic U-turn, one of the most depressing episodes in the entire gloomy history of the neoliberal conquest. Economic orthodoxy re(Continued on top half of page 24.)

P OL I T IC S : Ge t D ow n

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse 3 David Gr aeber

e used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense. Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt,

This article is an excerpt from The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

R A N DA L L E N OS

just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political lib(Continued on bottom half of page 24.) The

Baffler [no.22] ! 23

hCultur e

The State of Stretching Yoga in America 3 Jorian Polis Schutz

mid all the regimens available in America’s soul-cure marketplace, the unlikely maneuver of folding yourself into a pretzel and standing on your head for five minutes is more popular than ever. Some twenty million people practice yoga in more than twenty-five thousand studios scattered around the country. Yoga is booming—and decked out in the telltale chain studios, retailers, empire-building egomaniacs, and attendant litigation. If you have not tried yoga yourself, then you’ve surely heard of its amazing popularity and beneficence from middlebrow (or middle eye–brow) magazines, newspapers, sitcoms, and ad campaigns, which bring news of its aphrodisiac effects. You have probably heard of the elite yoga teachers, mountaintop gurus, and ancient sages, although you have probably not heard that nowadays most kick their earnings upstairs to corporate and cycle through franchises as part of the same class of journeyman laborers produced by other bastions of enlightenment. Yet many lives have been radically altered and improved, lifted out of the mire of physical malaise and the psycho-spiritual illnesses of the times, and there is no reason to believe that the present organization of the industry is natural or necessary. On the contrary! Yoga cultivates generosity of spirit, and its essence (and definition, in Sanskrit) is union. If our present swoon exhibits certain pathologies, these are probably not symptoms of yoga itself but of larger defeats that we have suffered, and continue to suffer, in our history of seeking union. When the labor movement failed in its pub38 1 The Baffler [no.22]

lic and communal dimension—when it lost its power to champion the union idea—the union idea migrated inward, toward the battered American soul. Once you would have discharged your suffering by joining a march for your (or other people’s) rights. Now you spend hours contorting yourself, suspending yourself upside down, sweating your brains out in private—in short, belaboring your body—as if in some sort of karmic redress of the visions of right living and livelihood that once marched in the streets, partially at the expense of personal practice. When one aspect (or posture) of union is overemphasized, the neglected aspect (or counterpose) is readied for primetime. In the more private arena of yoga today, you find our utopian forebears’ beloved community, with its effervescence, eternity, and spacelessness; you find their urge to dissolve the categories of past, present, and future, to know heaven on earth—so to speak. The yogic conception of union is an ideal state of being in which objective and subjective truths are fully consistent. You strip the world of layers of projection, free things from their fixed representations, and open yourself to what they might have to say or reflect. This is the path of “absorption” (samadhi), or identity with the superconsciousness that flows through the world and animates all living things, an idea that has resonated with seekers of all stripes, entering the American scene with particular gusto through the transcendentalists and the poetry of Walt Whitman. But there has always been a social and economic dimension to this goal, and so it has real parallels with, for instance, those midtwentieth-century classics—psychoanalysis

The yogic conception of union is an ideal state of being in which objective and subjective truths are fully consistent.

HENRIK DRESCHER

and Marxist theory—that attempt to free the self from psychological and historical attachments in order to manifest a new reality in which self and society can achieve greater harmony. Yet these movements have been all but eliminated from our midst, replaced by pundits and pills. After a half-century of enforced conformity to the mythical disunion of the Cold War—without and within—it is difficult to escape its reenactment in any domain. With the idea of union thus already besieged from multiple angles, yoga sings of a “body electric” firmly ensconced in a grid.

he private practice of yoga in America has dispensed with its ritual superstructure and strong sense of spiritual discipline. For thousands of years it was practiced primarily by men in monastic environments, or at the very least taught by teachers with monastic training. The matrix from which the practice developed is far closer to what we would recognize as religious fundamentalism than it is to the new age lifestyle, with its corresponding forms of sexual liberation and radical anti-authoritarianism. Brahmacharya (sexual abstinence) is one of the central yamas The

Baffler [no.22] ! 39

M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD INFLUENCE

Passions of the Meritocracy General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD 3 Chris Br ay Well, my goal tonight was twofold: first, to explain the changes we made in our Army in 2006; and, second, to give a speech that I’d like to think Irving Kristol might have enjoyed.

—Gen. David Petraeus, May 6, 2010,

speech to the American Enterprise Institute

t was an aberration, a break from the exemplary pattern, and so David Petraeus’s fall from power was a tragedy. At least that was the story in all the usual places. Once Petraeus loosened his legendary personal discipline long enough to let a biographer roll around under his desk, all the conventional armature of meritocratic achievement fell away as if by magic. As Tara McKelvey explained on The Atlantic’s website around the time the great general’s dalliance became public, Petraeus was like “a hero in a Shakespearean tragedy”: “Military men, and especially retired officers who head up the CIA, are supposed to be icy and methodical, even more so now that killing is done remotely through aerial drones. Journalists are supposed to cover these issues in a dispassionate way. Neither side is being honest, and the fact that he fell for her, and she for him, is a reminder of our common humanity.” In a less epic but still impressively pretentious register, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik counseled tolerance with all the chastened sagacity of a middle-aged oracle. “Desire,” he observed, “is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own.” It was all just a terrible mistake, and we 46 1 The Baffler [no.22]

shouldn’t judge. This is what happens when the American meritocracy finally repairs behind closed doors to go fuck itself.

Thrice Cursed In the narrative of the pundit class, Paula Broadwell was plowed by Cincinnatus. Or, to invoke the abstract formulations favored by the Gopnik set: a four-star narrative construct was caught last year rubbing its actual body on a particularly vigorous narrative constructor. The harsh light of public exposure thus brutally cut short the public service of a humble soul who had risen from obscurity to heal a clinically depressed military occupation. As the longtime journalist Thomas Ricks constructed his own pleasing version of the David Petraeus character, the general’s selection to command the war in Iraq “expressly was not the choice of the military. He was regarded by many of his peers as something of a thrice-cursed outlier—an officer with a doctorate from Princeton who also seemed to enjoy talking to reporters and even to politicians and who had made his peers look bad with his success leading the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul in 2003–4.” Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

This is what happens when the American meritocracy finally repairs behind closed doors to go fuck itself.

9 The

Baffler [no.22] ! 47

M o d e m & Ta b o o

Marketpiece Theater

( BAD TV

Nicholas Kristof and Milton Friedman rescue the world 3 Anne Elizabeth Moore

n one way or another, last year’s frenzied election spectacle offered an array of occasions for our coverage-battered electorate to return to one basic question: “Where on Earth did they get that idea?” It didn’t matter, really, if what occasioned the weary refrain was news of yet another drone attack, bizarre conjecture on the biological function of women’s bodies after sexual assault, or the working thesis that fully 47 percent of the voting public was made up of zombified robots hooked on the federal dole. Amid the genuine divisions wracking our republic, our bafflement over how the political class believes we—and the world—work was truly nonpartisan. As it was designed to be. For the consensus ideology guiding issues of policy and piety was designed for popularization, and then massdisseminated through the mass-est media of all: TV. The girders of our modern political, economic, and cultural structure can be seen clearly in a nicely bookended pair of television franchises—oddly enough, for the Romneyfied Right, both broadcast on PBS. The first is Free to Choose (1980), starring the Nobel Prize–winning, kindly seeming yet fire-breathing economist Milton Friedman. The second, flashier offering is Half the Sky (2012), starring Nicholas Kristof—the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist—in an instructive series about women’s central role in the great market order. The Friedman series presented neoliberal thought as nonpartisan—even apolitical—common sense, and thus the only reasonable path to global salvation. Kristof merely glosses the utopian vision Friedman put into action: the great man’s 56 1 The Baffler [no.22]

views are self-evident, it seems, a fait accompli only in need of a bit of pizzazz. Yet the beams upholding our political and economic beliefs are shoddily constructed of fluff and dreams, lies and unlikelihoods, ego and spite. Come, let us watch them crumble, together.

What We All Want The economic mythology born in Free to Choose was conceived in 1977, when Bob Chitester, general manager of the Erie, Pennsylvania, PBS affiliate, approached Friedman about filming a free-market counterpoint to liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s series The Age of Uncertainty, then airing on the network. Friedman jumped at the chance; history was made. In ten hour-long episodes, he laid out the principles of what came to be called Reaganomics—and later, the globalized order of neoliberal free trade. A year after the show’s first broadcast in 1980—with Friedman acting as unofficial economic adviser to the newly elected president— Reagan met with U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher; the two world leaders entered their own special relationship (the actual diplomatic term)—busting unions, slashing taxes, and privatizing substantial swaths of the public sector. The alliance was merely the first and highest-profile affirmation of Friedman’s new world order. Today, leaders of former socialist and communist states commonly claim that Free to Choose furnished the conceptual building blocks for their reforms. The reach of Friedman’s television show marked, among other things, the triumph of market Orwellianism. Once Free to Choose

The Friedman series presented neoliberal thought as nonpartisan common senseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the only reasonable path to global salvation. Kristof merely glosses the utopian vision Friedman put into action.

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 57

M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD IDEA

The Meme Hustler Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk 3 Evgeny Morozov

hile the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. This is not to deny that many of our latest gadgets and apps are fantastic. But to fixate on technological innovation alone is to miss the more subtle—and more consequential—ways in which a clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason. In the last decade or so, Silicon Valley has triggered its own wave of linguistic innovation, a wave so massive that a completely new way to analyze and describe the world—a silicon mentality of sorts—has emerged in its wake. The old language has been rendered useless; our pre-Internet vocabulary, we are told, needs an upgrade. Fortunately, Silicon Valley, that never-drying well of shoddy concepts and dubious paradigms—from wiki-everything to i-something, from e-nothing to open-anything—is ready to help. Like a good priest, it’s always there to console us with the promise of a better future, a glitzier roadmap, a sleeker vocabulary.

66 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Silicon Valley has always had a thing for priests; Steve Jobs was the cranky pope it deserved. Today, having mastered the art of four-hour workweeks and gluten-free lunches in outdoor cafeterias, our digital ministers are beginning to preach on subjects far beyond the funky world of drones, 3-D printers, and smart toothbrushes. That we would eventually be robbed of a meaningful language to discuss technology was entirely predictable. That the conceptual imperialism of Silicon Valley would also pollute the rest of our vocabulary wasn’t.

A clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason.

9 The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with reli-

P H I LI P B U R K E

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 67

M o d e m & Ta b o o

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism

( BAD BOOK

3 Heather Havrilesky

hile we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly disguises her essential self in order to win the heart of a prince (The Little Mermaid). In another, a hooker with a heart of gold navigates her way to a happy ending by offering some happy endings of her own (Pretty Woman). Or there’s the sassy secretary who shakes her moneymaker all the way to the corner office (Working Girl). Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper. Forget that E. L. James’s threebook series captures the intricacies of BDSM about as effectively as a “Whip Me!” Barbie doll decked out in a ball gag, dog collar, and assless leather chaps. Although admirers of the series sometimes credit it with liberating female desire by reimagining pornography for ordinary women (and introducing them to the unmatched thrills of leather riding crops and hard spankings), the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names. No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performanceenhancing drugs. Just as magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ul76 1 The Baffler [no.22]

timate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.

So Brazen The fantasy life of Fifty Shades certainly isn’t focused on the sublime erotic encounter. The sex becomes hopelessly repetitive sometime around the third or fourth of the novels’ countless, monotonously naughty encounters. Each dalliance begins with the same provocative come-on: the naive college graduate Anastasia and the dashing mogul Christian describe their desire to each other with all of the charmless unpredictability of servers mouthing their prescribed scripts at an Australian-themed steakhouse. Awkward openers (“I think we’ve done enough talking for now,” “Now let’s get you inside and naked”) conjure the raw provocation of “How about a Bloomin’ Onion to get you started?” Even tougher to take are the coy responses (“Oh my!” “Why, Mrs. Grey, you have a dirty, dirty mouth!” “You’re insatiable and so brazen”), repeated with gusto despite a total lack of shock value in evidence. Readerly expectations tick up ever so slightly as Grey issues some bossy commands—Stand here! Undress! Bend over! Spread your legs!—which seem at first blush to foretell a curve in the carnal road. But no such luck. Give or take a blindfold here or a butt plug there, the same hands explore the same places in the same ways with the same results.

V I C TO R K E R LOW

What Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs.

9 The

Baffler [no.22] ! 77

M o d e m & Ta b o o

Predator Drone

( IN PLAIN SIGHT

Jimmy Savile will see you now 3 Christian Lorentzen

hat Americans call “track suits” and “tank tops” the British call “shell suits” and “string vests.” These terms are important to keep in mind in the case of Jimmy Savile, because his typical outfit consisted of a garish shell suit over a matching string vest. Savile, who died in October 2011 at age eightyfour, gained immense celebrity in Britain as a disc jockey, television host, newspaper columnist, wrestler, runner, cyclist, and fundraiser for charitable causes. When news of his rampant pedophilia over four decades—long the subject of rumor—broke last September, one of his accusers speculated that he wore the shell suits because it made it all the easier for him to pull his pants down. That rough-and-ready image of arousal and discharge may jibe with the crude notions of “chav” youth culture propagated by the British media for the past fifteen years—and Savile seemed in his last years to be casting himself as an elderly mascot for the stereotype. But it flies in the face of many things we presume to know about the post-Victorian society of Savile’s actual youth. The heirs to the repression of the late nineteenth century are supposed to be supremely discomfited by the idea of sex— and supremely weird in finding alternate ways of releasing all the unaddressed sexual tension percolating in their brains. (See Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott’s 1971 comedy No Sex Please, We’re British, about a middle-class couple besieged by an onslaught of pornography, a crossroads along the way from repressed Victorian Britain to the Blighty of Page 3 girls and pedophile-obsessed tabloids of today, when Britain is ranked first in promiscuity

84 1 The Baffler [no.22]

among large industrialized nations.) In reality, though, Victorian repression has always bred Victorian double standards, whereby privileged men are permitted most any form of pleasurable release precisely on the grounds of their unappeasable animal urges. Public repression has long abetted private impunity in this, the mother of all repressed Protestant empires. And the sordid tale of Jimmy Savile’s predatory sexual career is nothing if not a story of impunity. The initial results of Britain’s first comprehensive police investigation into the celebrity TV presenter’s past have uncovered more than 450 accusations of molestation and rape, mostly from girls in their early teens at the time of the assaults, but from about 80 boys and men as well. Savile was a pioneer in the art of getting rich off the new youth culture, but he was interested in more than money and adulation, exploiting the permissive aura of the sixties pop scene to maximize his access to vulnerable children. And in a twist on repressed British rectitude, Savile also used his later career as a sponsor of medical charities and philanthropies to continue preying on young, admiring Britons—this time of a more eleemosynary disposition. The Savile scandal shows how rapidly and thoroughly the highest reaches of British society—all the way to Buckingham Palace— could be infiltrated by an enterprising sexual predator bent on multiplying his conquests, one who practically flaunted his pedophilic predilections during his long career in the limelight. Savile was able to become one of Britain’s best-loved, most ingratiating celeb-

R A L P H S TE A D M A N

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 85

M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD SEX

The United Sades of America 3 Hussein Ibish

DAV I D J O H N S O N

ot long after I took refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of Washington, I visited one of D.C.’s landmark bookstores, Politics & Prose—a literary venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the conceit that they’re browsing and shopping in a vaguely subversive fashion. But as I walked up to join the store’s cultivated and edgy communitas, I committed a terrible error: I asked a clerk where I might find the works of the Marquis de Sade. My request made its way up through an increasingly consternated group of shop assistants; I had to repeat it several times

before they fully registered what I was asking for. At that point, I was told to leave the store immediately. The scene concluded on a perfect grace note when I was sternly conducted to the store’s exit by a female employee who was obviously French. It was as if I had asked for a how-to manual for murder, kidnapping, or child abuse—or, at a minimum, the most objectionable form of pornography. That scene spoke volumes about the curious legacy of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the great and demented aristocratic theorist of unrestrained desire, in our own republic of consumer longing. Here, in the self-regarding intellectual center of a city justly famed for the free play of unleashed personal ambition and the basest kinds of instrumental manipulation of others, Sade was a fourletter word. Nor can I say that I was entirely taken aback by this reception; as I completed work on my doctorate, my professors took me aside to warn me that I should never attempt to teach any of Sade’s work until I was securely tenured—and even then, they stressed, I should proceed with enormous caution. On one level, of course, it’s clear enough why Sade and his work make people squeamish: that was often his goal. To a degree not even rivaled by Sigmund Freud and other later explorers of the id (and its indispensible partner, the sadistic superego), Sade seemed to insist that the darkest, most destructive urges of humanity are core elements of our nature—that the drive to inflict pain, to dominate, even to murder, needs to be affirmed as part of the same complex of erotic and creative desires that keep human society viable and individuals “free.” This is perhaps why, despite the careful strictures against uttering his name—let The

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wS T O R Y

The Agony of Leaves 3 Mahesh Rao

do not want to beat about this bush or that bush. I will say it straight: I am not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone other than my wife. I was always faithful to Lata and she will certainly vouch for that, wherever she is resting now. I am from a decent family; I have a good position in the community; I have clean hands. Unfortunately for me, I am in love with my daughter-in-law. And without a doubt, it is love. It is necessary to say this to challenge the obvious conclusion, that my predicament is a matter of lust and libido. The problem is society, which over and above everything else, has a filthy mind. People will say: look at the dirty bugger, he has no shame, how could he even think such a thing? What I would say in response is this: look at my track record and my intentions, look at my character. After such an examination, only a clean chit can be the result. But it is my bad luck that things are not so simple.

very morning Meera and I sit on the verandah with our coffee, just like Lata and I did the time we went to Kodaikanal. Meera scans the paper and I scan her, although not in a way that would make her feel uncomfortable. My son Vikram usually sleeps till late, so it is just the two of us, apart from Venu running back and forth from the kitchen. That boy never walks. Meera reads out some interesting tit-bit: “Principal absconds with student and college cook.” Then she gives me a half-smile and shakes

RALPH GIBSON

her head in that special way: what will people do next? The smile that also means: what will we do next? Long after our second cup, when the paper has slid onto the floor and Venu has trotted off into the kitchen garden, we continue to sit here, staring at the slopes. There is no need for this type of attendance on her part or on mine, but we do it anyway, feeling something between thrill and anxiety. “I really need to have my bath and start the day,” she often says, not moving. “The day is not going anywhere,” I say. In a few weeks the rains will be here and the water will smash against every side of the bungalow. I suppose then we will have to go back inside. But I am not going to think The

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wS T O R Y

Up in Birdland 3 Monica Hileman

hey could eat and not care about bad cholesterol, heart disease, or cancer. They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again. No more wearing a mouth guard at night to keep the teeth from grinding. No more worrying how to stretch the money ’til the end of the month. Knowing the finite contour of their future—the very word that had taken on such weight and dread—freed them from all that. It would be like a vacation, only instead of having to go back to the coupon clipping, not knowing for how long or how bad it would get, they could relax and meet the end together, on their own terms. They walked past the Perfect Finish Expo, the gold pyramid of the Pharaoh’s Rest Haven. Fred and Sylvia exchanged a glance. “Do they mummify you?” he whispered as they walked into the little Swiss chalet, where a Nordic-looking gentleman welcomed them. Alpine Haven, located in the Rockies, overlooked a river and, depending on the season, offered hiking and canoe trips or sleigh rides and skiing, the diversions of nearby Aspen, and a variety of lavish spa treatments. Françoise, in the quaint French provincial booth next door, encouraged them to consider that they could meander down country lanes, wander the very fields and hillsides immortalized by the Impressionists, do all the painting or sightseeing they wanted, or do nothing but enjoy the best wine and cuisine in the world. Fred had spent a summer in Paris many years ago and had always wanted to go back and visit the South of France, but could they afford it? Thinking of how long it

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had been since she’d picked up a brush, Sylvia sighed and shook her head. Politely, they thanked her and moved on. Suspended over the long aisles that stretched across the cavernous convention center, a rippling banner promised, The Best End of Life Experience. Many of the booths had little fountains, the sound of gently pouring water or soft New Age music playing, scenes of forests and palm trees. Cruise the Caribbean. Run Naked in Brazil. Find It in the Himalayas. The Mariposa Haven in Costa Rica had walls made of plants and rooms full of butterflies. The sales representatives, a former Miss Universe, graciously assured them that they would have an unforgettable experience, then hesitated and quickly called their attention to the video showing laughing guests zipping The

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Ancestors

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud For his 100th birthday 3 Thomas Bernhard

enerable Assembly, The saying goes that we honor poets only when they are dead, when the lid of the burial vault or the wet mound of earth has definitively separated him from us, when the creator of lyrical poems, having suffered in hardship and misery—as it is so beautifully and disconcertingly put in the obituaries of inferior spirits—has given up his spirit. And as God would have it, there will appear a national office that will begin leafing through its address book, and so the work of posterity gets underway. Then come the laurels and “laurel-ettes,” and an amusing intercourse develops between wine tavern and ministry until the record of the poet either disappears or someone has resolved to publish his works. There are celebrations and pomp, the pensum of the dead is discovered, dragged into the light—the poet is “staged”—mainly just to stave off boredom, which is what one is actually being paid for. And so (in our country!) it is not the poet who is honored, but rather the gentleman from the cultural office who delivers the greeting, the Honorable Sir, Executor of Poetry; the actor, the performer. Many a Hölderlin or Georg Trakl would turn over in his grave from so much contrived, grafted culture, from so much art-market talk from which nothing but indecency emerges! This is about remembering Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. Thank God he was a Frenchman! Let us then believe in the power and the glory of the poetic word, let us believe in the everlasting life of the spirit, in the resilience of images (of the dead and visions), as they emerge from between the pages of a few great men, exceptions of the sort that appear just once or twice in a century. Let’s not deceive ourselves: the mighty, thrilling, stirring, and calming, the enduring; these do not grow like common sorrel in a summer field! Such great verse, to which humanity owes its glimpse into the depths, does not emerge

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote this lecture—published in English for the first time here—for Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) one-hundredth birthday. Bernhard was twenty-three when he delivered it at the Hotel Pitter in Salzburg before a small audience that called itself the “Bergen Circle.” It was first published in the May 14, 2009, issue of the German newspaper Die Zeit, and recently included in an anthology of Bernhard’s writings, Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Bernhard’s account of Rimbaud’s life and work is riddled with brazen exaggerations and inaccuracies (Verlaine did love more than the “poetic strength” of his “brother”; Rimbaud was in Yemen for three years before moving to Harare, etc.) of the sort that would become the Austrian writer’s literary trademark. “Without exaggerating,” Bernhard once told a journalist, “you can’t say anything.”

148 1 The Baffler [no.22]

The orgy, the denunciation of the tumor that is hatred, the poem of Parisian human vice, everything in him was outrage, and when he walked along the river, â&#x20AC;&#x153;it took him hours to calm down inside.â&#x20AC;?

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The

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r Graphic Art |

Steve Brodner

5) Aaron refuses to

plead guilty to charges that carry $1 million in fines and 35 years in federal prison. 6) Ortiz and Heymann 1) Aaron Swartz,

decide to make an example of him. They bleed him dry of resources and stamina.

24-year-old democracy activist, downloads a large cache from the digital academic library JSTOR via MIT systems, technically violating their terms of service.

7) Despite pleas for mercy, and awareness that their victim suffers from depression, they terrorize him for 18 months. MIT presses for prison, refusing to agree to a plea deal.

2) JSTOR decides it will

not press charges. MIT, however, refuses to withdraw, breaking with its heralded open campus, open network ethos. 3) “Stealing is stealing,” says U.S. Atty Carmen Ortiz, who assigns assistant U.S. Atty Stephen Heymann to the case.

9) Aaron’s father says he was “killed by the government,” with a helping hand from MIT.

4) Ortiz and Heymann,

a zealot in the service of power, claim to see no difference between freeing publicly funded knowledge and, say, credit card theft.

8) Aaron, now 26, depressed, scared, and broken as intended, commits suicide in his Crown Heights apartment in New York.

11 10) Ortiz and Heymann

are exposed as menaces to public safety. 11) MIT investigates itself.

12) Aaron loses his life. We lose a friend.

The

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