No. 23 by The Baffler

No. 23

L O U B E AC H

Con t e n t s ( Th e B a f f l e r, n o. 23 ) Magical Thinking

Once Upon a Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Magic Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Buncombe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Daniel’s Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

S P E N C E R WA LTS

Thomas Sayers Ellis John Summers

David Gr aeber Daniel A aron

Landowners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Internment Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

James Agee

Jim Frederick

Photo Graphic

Safe Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E L E A N O R DAV I S

Today’s looks for tomorrow’s threats Paul Shambroom

Carnival of Buncombe

Academy Fight Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Networking into the Abyss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thomas Fr ank Susan Faludi

Inside the empty bubble of SXSW Interactive Jacob Silver man

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

Ann Friedman

High Low Washington

Street Legal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Good Enough for Government Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The national security state comes home Chris Br ay Conservatism in the tank Jim Newell

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen . . . . . . . . . 104 Liberalism in the tank Ken Silverstein

Vocabulary Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Basta ya que el Yanqui mande Dana Fr ank M A R K S . FI S H E R

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114

A Carnival of Buncombe

Stories

Bizness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dmitry Gorchev Adam Haslett

Poems

American Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex Dimitrov

63 S TE P H E N K RO N I N G E R

Without Which He Would Not Have Written His Greatest Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Story Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jelly Donut, NYC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here We Name Them ‘Way’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My Daughter Night Terrors the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Anis Shivani

Kiki Petrosino

Genine Lentine Ed Roberson

Farid Matuk

P E TE R K U P E R

A Monkey Could Do This (and) You and me are not friends, OK? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Simone White

Where Is It Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sharon Olds

137

Idols Abroad

A Nod to Ned Ludd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Richard Byr ne

On Wittgenstein’s Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

130

Sacking Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138

A letter from unified Europe Dubr avk a Ugrešić

How hipsters, expats, yummies, and smartphones ruined a city Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling

JA KO B H I N R I C H S

Americana

Sartre for Sartre’s Sake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Seth Colter Walls

Smile, Buster! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Farr an Nehme

152

Graphic Art

3 Michael Duffy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

Br ad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

P H I LI P B U R K E

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 5

Ca r n i va l of Buncom be

Academy Fight Song 3 Thomas Fr ank

his essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperitybringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry. The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the fouryear luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence. It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know. When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, 22 1 The Baffler [no.23]

always, that it is so very beautiful. And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen. Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.

College and Mammon Both Go back to the beginning, back to the days when people first understood a characterbuilding college diploma to be the ticket to middle-class success. We would forge a model republic of citizen-students, who would redeem the merit badges of academic achievement for spots in the upper reaches of corporate capitalism. The totems of the modern American striver were to be the University Credential and the Corner Office, and prosperity would reward the ablest. And so the story remains today, despite everything that has happened in the realms of the corporation and the university. We might worry from time to time about the liberal professors who infest the academy, but school is still where you go to “write your destiny,” to use President Obama’s 2010 description of education generally. Go to college, or else your destiny will be written by someone else. The bachelor’s degree that universities issue is a “credential” that’s “a prerequisite for 21st century jobs,” says the White House website.

S P E N C E R WA LTS

The university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

9 The

Baffler [no.23] ! 23

Ca r n i va l of Buncom be

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not 3 Susan Faludi

he congregation swooned as she bounded on stage, the prophet sealskin sleek in her black skinny ankle pants and black ballet flats, a lavalier microphone clipped to the V-neck of her black button-down sweater. “All right!! Let’s go!!” she exclaimed, throwing out her arms and pacing the platform before inspirational graphics of glossy young businesswomen in managerial action poses. “Super excited to have all of you here!!” “Whoo!!” the young women in the audience replied. The camera, which was livestreaming the event in the Menlo Park, California, auditorium to college campuses worldwide, panned the rows of well-heeled Stanford University econ majors and MBA candidates. Some clutched copies of the day’s hymnal: the speaker’s new book, which promised to dismantle “internal obstacles” preventing them from “acquiring power.” The atmosphere was TED-Talk-cum-tent-revival-cum-Mary-Kaycosmetics-convention. The salvation these adherents sought on this April day in 2013 was admittance to the pearly gates of the corporate corner office. “Stand up,” the prophet instructed, “if you’ve ever said out loud, to another human being—and you have to have said it out loud— ‘I am going to be the number one person in my field. I will be the CEO of a major company. I will be governor. I will be the number one person in my field.’” A small, although not inconsiderable, percentage of the young women rose to their feet. The speaker consoled those still seated; she, too, had once been one of them. When she was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, she confided, she had begged a year34 1 The Baffler [no.23]

book editor to delete that information, “because most likely to succeed doesn’t get a date for the prom.” Those days were long gone, ever since she’d had her conversion on the road to Davos: she’d “leaned in” to her ambitions and enhanced her “likability”—and they could do the same. What’s more, if they took the “lean in” pledge, they might free themselves from some of those other pesky problems that hold women back in the workplace. “If you lean forward,” she said, “you will get yourself into a position where the organization you’re with values you a lot and is therefore willing to be more flexible. Or you’ll get promoted and then you’ll get paid more and you’ll be able to afford better child care.” If you “believe you have the skills to do anything” and “have the ambition to lead,” then you will “change the world” for women. “We get closer to the goal of true equality with every single one of you who leans in.” The pitch delivered, Lean In founder and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg summoned her deacon to close the deal. Rachel Thomas hustled onstage, a Sandberg Mini-Me in matching black ensemble (distinguished only by the color of her ballet flats and baubled necklace, both of which were gold). She’s Lean In’s president. (Before Lean In hit the bookstores, it was already a fully staffed operation, an organization purporting to be “a global community committed to encouraging and supporting women leaning in to their ambitions.”) “I really want to invite you to join our community!” Thomas told the assembled. “You’ll get daily inspiration and insights.” Joining “the community” was just a click

E L E A N O R DAV I S

There is no entry into Lean Inâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Emerald e-Kingdom except through the Facebook portal; Sandberg has kept her message of liberation confined within her own corporate brand.

9 The

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e

Networking into the Abyss Inside the empty bubble of SXSW Interactive 3 Jacob Silverman

or ten days each March, Austin, Texas, becomes suffused with an ambient hucksterism. It creeps into the city like a low-lying fog, concentrating in the downtown area, where numbing displays of corporate extravagance and desperate marketing stunts become the order of the day. Occasionally, this hucksterism condenses into one insufferable person, who comes to symbolize all that is wrong with South by Southwest Interactive, the tech-themed portion of the rapidly metastasizing SXSW festival—and, by extension, the vacuous blather of the technology industry itself. At this year’s SXSWi, I met several such types. At a bar called Javelina, I ran into a twenty-five-year-old employee of a social media startup, backed by Marc Andreessen’s high-flying venture capital firm. We were both attending yet another party hosted by yet another tech firm. When I told her I was a journalist, she showed her disgust by pantomiming a hand job. Why, she asked me, speech slurred almost beyond intelligibility, do we need journalism when we have social media? I met another person at an otherwise anodyne dinner for Israeli startups, where a dozen or so entrepreneurs presented their companies to potential investors and partners, along with a few journalists. To protect the guilty, I’ll call him Brian. In his late twenties and hailing from South Florida, Brian had the kind of hazy résumé that defines a number of unaffiliated SXSW participants. (While many SXSWi attendees, buoyed by expense accounts, are sent by their employers, 37 percent paid full freight this year.) He was some sort of entrepreneur or consultant, or a 52 1 The Baffler [no.23]

serial entrepreneur, someone who had helped launch others’ startups and was now working on his own. I learned this in fragments. When Brian first sat down at our table, gulping from what would be one of at least five glasses of red wine, I asked him what he did. “What do I do? I do many things,” he said, before flashing a wide smile, pleased with himself. “I prefer to ask people what they’re passionate about,” he said. “What are you passionate about?” It was a line he used on anyone who had the ill fortune to approach our table. He delivered it—and a windy, opaque explanation of the community-building website he was developing—with the stilted pacing of someone trying to make a much-practiced speech seem off the cuff. By the end of the evening, I still had little idea what Brian’s company did, though it sounded like some version of Facebook’s Pages feature. He hadn’t honed the sort of logline that is de rigueur at SXSW: “It’s like Twitter but for videos”; “It’s Tumblr meets Airbnb— but for business”; “It’s a place where people can meet and exchange career advice.” Like LinkedIn? “Yeah, but better.” I never learned what he was passionate about. None of us could stomach flipping the question around, as he clearly wanted us to. Finally, he stood up and reached out to shake hands. “Follow me on Twitter,” he said. “I’ll follow you back.” He stumbled to the door. I saw him enter the hallway and spin around, confused. A

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

During SXSW, Austin becomes a money-soaked mĂŠlange of hyper-consumerism and techno-utopianism.

9 The

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e

All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go 3 Ann Friedman

n a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-butobligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a mission “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the glorified résumé-distribution service has become an essential stop for the professionally dissatisfied masses. The networking site burrows its way into users’ inboxes with updates spinning the gossamer dream of successful and frictionless advancement up the career ladder. Just add one crucial contact who’s only a few degrees removed from you (users are the perpetual Kevin Bacons in this party game), or update your skill set in a more marketfriendly fashion, and one of the site’s 187 million or so users will pluck you from a stalled career and offer professional redemption. LinkedIn promises to harness everything that’s great about a digital economy that so far has done more to limit than expand the professional prospects of its user-citizens. In reality, though, the job seeker tends to experience the insular world of LinkedIn connectivity as an irksome ritual of digital badgering. Instead of facing the prospect of interfacing professionally with a nine-figure user base with a renewed spring in their step, harried victims of economic redundancy are more likely to greet their latest LinkedIn updates with a muttered variation of, “Oh shit, I’d better send out some more résumés.” At which point, they’ll typically mark the noisome email nudge as “read” and relegate it to the trash folder. Which is why it’s always been a little tough 66 1 The Baffler [no.23]

to figure out what LinkedIn is for. The site’s initial appeal was as a sort of self-updating Rolodex—a way to keep track of ex-coworkers and friends-of-friends you met at networking happy hours. There’s the appearance of openness—you can “connect” with anyone!—but when users try to add a professional contact from whom they’re more than one degree removed, a warning pops up. “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies that you know them well,” the site chides, as though you’re a stalker in the making. It asks you to indicate how you know this person. Former coworker? Former classmate? Fine. “LinkedIn lets you invite colleagues, classmates, friends and business partners without entering their email addresses,” the site says. “However, recipients can indicate that they don’t know you. If they do, you’ll be asked to enter an email address with each future invitation.” You can try to lie your way through this firewall by indicating you’ve worked with someone when you haven’t—the equivalent of name-dropping someone you’ve only read about in management magazines. But odds are, you’ll be found out. I’d been confused, for instance, about numerous LinkedIn requests from publicists saying we’d “worked together” at a particular magazine. But when I clicked through to their profiles, I realized why they’d confidently asserted this professional alliance into being: the way to get to the next rung is to pretend you’re already there. If you don’t already know the person you’re trying to meet, you’re pretty much out of luck. This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of

J . D. K I N G

A century or so ago, critics worried that the rise of scientific management in the industrial workplace would deskill the American worker; now, in the postindustrial order of social-media-enabled employment, skills (or, you know, quasi-skills) multiply while jobs stagnate.

9 The

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wS T O R Y

The Act 3 Adam Haslett

he boy grows up in Toledo in the fifties, where his father works at the tire plant and for the union as a shop steward. He does well in school, studies hard, and on the advice of a teacher applies to a bunch of small, East Coast schools. His father thinks he should go to Ohio University or maybe Michigan. They fight about it, but not much, because when it comes down to it, his father is proud of how well his son has done, and he trusts his wife, who says these other places will give the boy more opportunities. For the first time, his father skips the Labor Day parade and spends that weekend driving his son eleven hours to the campus and helping him move into his dorm room. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much

L E W I S KO C H

to say to each other on the drive or across the table of the various diners they eat in, nor as they arrive at the college. Most of the other kids have come with both parents and more belongings. They are polite to the boy and his father in a way neither of them is used to, more like salespeople at a fancy department store than neighbors. Inevitably, the boy is eager for his father to leave, to get the awkwardness over with, and his father feels much the same. They shake hands in the parking lot, and the boy promises to phone his mother on Sundays. As heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unpacking in his room, the boy hears a knock at the door and looks up to see his dad. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something I meant to say, he The

Baffler [no.23] ! 79

Hi g h Lo w W a s h i n g t o n

Street Legal The national security state comes home 3 Chris Br ay

n the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities weren’t locked down, armored personnel carriers with police logos didn’t rumble in, and SWAT teams in combat uniforms and body armor didn’t storm through the suburbs for a loosely ordered set of (ultimately hapless) house-tohouse searches. Somehow, though, 2013 was the year it became appropriate to close cities, turning off taxis, buses, and trains and telling residents that the governor was suggesting— okay, strongly suggesting—that they not leave their homes until the police said so. One of those familiar moments in which officials ask the public to be on the lookout turned into a remarkable new moment in which officials ask the public to cease to exist in its public form so that the police can have the streets. And you’d better believe they had the streets. News photographs showed Boston emptied like the opening reel of The Last Man on Earth. The quaint idea that cities can be made safe by sharing public burdens in public space—by, in Jane Jacobs’s words, neighborly “eyes on the street”—vanished into an annihilated space in which the only players with a role in the maintenance of order were the mandarinate that makes social control its profession: the helicopters flying overhead, the military police conducting block-by-block

inspections, and the local media relaying their instructions.* Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described modern bureaucratic culture as a “garden culture,” a system of behavioral expectations that aims to make tidy flowerbeds of human societies: “It defines itself . . . through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order.” Pulling weeds, the bureaucracies of the modern order are restrained by “the pluralism of the human world,” that great enemy of order. How routine it felt—how uncontested it was—when the pluralism of the human world was simply told to go indoors until further notice.

A New England Democratic governor and Democratic mayor turned metropolitan Boston into cop Disneyland.

9 The disease of police militarization is usually diagnosed as a pathology of the political right: born in Richard Nixon’s hippie-loathing heart, nurtured by Ed Meese and Co. in the Reagan years, delivered from adolescence into the full blossom of adulthood during the Cheney administration. For years, liberalminded journalists have mocked the cartoonish sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, a far-right yahoo so beyond redemption that he

* The surviving member of the brotherly duo alleged to have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings was discovered out-

side the search perimeter after police lifted the lockdown and allowed residents of Watertown to go outside again. Leaving his house, a neighbor quickly spotted the person the police had been unable to locate, hunkered down in a boat stored in his backyard. Ordinary people are effective observers of their personal environments, when permitted to view them.

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M A R K S . FI S H E R

The

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n

Good Enough for Government Work Conservatism in the tank 3 Jim Newell

hen Sen. Jim DeMint, the upper chamber’s godfather of Tea Party nihilism, abruptly announced his retirement from his lawmaking career and his plans to take over as president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the consensus in Washington was that this was a step down for a guy who had never done all that much in the first place. For goodness’ sake, the pundits wailed, what legacy does this man think he’s leaving behind? What authorship can he claim for any significant—or, for that matter, trivial or failed—piece of legislation? He must be going from do-nothing legislator, the thinking went, to a sinecure outside the official branches of power purely for the money. The money! What a useless person that Jim DeMint is, and ever shall be. So far as it goes, this appraisal of DeMint’s legacy is accurate enough—he’s the sort of lawmaking mediocrity who makes, say, Montana’s onetime senator-cum-Abramoff-bagman Conrad Burns look like Daniel Webster. But measuring DeMint’s career move on the usual Washington grid of legislative achievement also completely misses the point. Just consider, in this regard, the verdict of—yes—the Heritage Foundation. According to Heritage Action for America’s first-ever legislative scorecard, released in August 2011, DeMint was the finest legislator in the federal government that year. “Heritage Action’s legislative scorecard isn’t graded on a curve—it is tough and we don’t apologize,” the new advocacy group, spun off from the Heritage Foundation proper, explained. “After all, we are

94 1 The Baffler [no.23]

conservatives, not tenured university professors.” Heh, indeed—and behold the ambitious sweep of the grading curve: With each vote cast in Congress, freedom either advances or recedes. Heritage Action’s new legislative scorecard allows Americans to see whether their Members of Congress are fighting for freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society. The scorecard is comprehensive, covering the full spectrum of conservatism, and includes legislative action on issues both large and small.

Jim DeMint scored a 99 percent on this proudly nonacademic report card, just edging out one of his Tea Party protégés, freshman Utah Sen. Mike Lee. Rounding out the top ten were DeMint’s other pupils, who similarly voted against most everything that had any chance of going anywhere that year. The whole curious DeMint affair bespeaks the ongoing shift of power in Washington away from the people’s business—and toward the ideological donor class. Heritage’s new advocacy shop, Heritage Action, brings the organization the sort of power that Washington’s predominant think tanks never previously considered theirs to wield: that of enforcing conservative ideological orthodoxy among lawmakers. Instead of handing them conservative policy research to inform decision-making, it’s issuing scorecards that gauge lawmakers’ ideological fealty to pet conservative causes—and ensuring that these scores get circulated far and wide among the powerful donors behind the conservative

S TE P H E N K RO N I N G E R

Welcome to the new incarnation of the “think tank” world, over which Jim DeMint—its ideal-type avatar—now presides.

9 movement. While technically separated from its ideological parents at the Heritage Foundation by its 501(c)(4) status, Heritage Action “seeks to convert the think tank’s more than 700,000 members into a potent political force,” according to an admiring notice in the National Review. As outgoing Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner described

Heritage’s two wings upon Heritage Action’s conception—riffing on a Ronald Reagan quotation—“The Heritage Foundation makes [politicians] see the light, Heritage Action makes them feel the heat.” Welcome to the new incarnation of the “think tank” world, over which Jim DeMint— its ideal-type avatar—now presides. Instead of The

Baffler [no.23] ! 95

Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen Liberalism in the tank 3 Ken Silverstein

ry to conjure up the dullest, most vapid intellectual experience you can possibly imagine. A Matthew Perry film festival. A boxed set of Kenny G’s entire discography. Al Gore “in conversation” with Wolf Blitzer. Now imagine something worse. Far, far worse. Once you’ve hit the speculative bottom of the unexamined life, you’d be hard pressed to outdo Thomas Friedman holding forth on “Climate Change and the Arab Spring.” What’s still more disturbing is that Friedman’s maunderings—unlike the foregoing litany of intellectual failures—actually took place, and were recorded for posterity, during a panel event this February at the Center for American Progress, America’s most influential liberal think tank. The great globalizing muse of the New York Times op-ed page was joined on stage by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton University professor and former State Department deputy to Hillary Clinton. You may be assured that the trite speculations came fast, flat, and furious. Between numerous mentions of his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded (not to be confused with 2005’s The World Is Flat), Freidman offered a mix of insights, delivered with his trademark flair for anecdotage in the vein of a Mad Libs pamphlet. Friedman informed the audience, for example, that algebra is an Arabic word—and so clearly the challenge ahead for the tumultuous Arab world is to integrate algebra as

well as Islam into its emerging governments. He then went on to sagely counsel the crowd that understanding the Islamic world requires examining ethnic and religious divisions, as opposed to more recent national rivalries—as though no one else had ever heard about the nearly 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shia split that emerged after Muhammad’s death. The banalities were also interspersed, inevitably, with generous helpings of buzzwords. The world, you see, has gone in rapidfire increments from being “connected” to “interconnected” to “interdependent.” And in a gratuitous show of his own high-tech interdependency, Friedman delivered his remarks with an open laptop balanced on his lap—a prop that he hardly glanced at during the ninety-minute event. Anne-Marie Slaughter, likewise, wasted little time getting into the zeitgeisty swing of things. At one point she and Friedman nodded their heads in approval as moderator Michael Werz, a CAP senior fellow, cited an article Slaughter wrote two years ago in which she proposed that tennis, not chess, provided the better framework for viewing contemporary world politics, given that the weather and other random factors may affect the spin and pace of the ball being played. Sadly, my research assistant Diego AreneMorley,* who just completed his freshman year at Brown, decimated the analogy, noting

* A rene-Morley did not attend the event but watched a video of it. Despite having only recently been hired and receiving a

relatively decent wage, Arene-Morley expressed great bitterness and seemed prepared to quit when I asked him to watch the Friedman video.

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M A R K DA N C E Y

The world of liberal think tanks has been upended, ever so gently, by a steady onrush of corporate funding— and corporate-friendly policy agendas.

9 that the choice of sport “was particularly poor, given that chess is regarded as a more complex and variable game than tennis, which is . . . simply back and forth.” At the event Slaughter herself appeared to concede that tennis was not the most appropriate metaphor and

offered a new one. “We simply have to move from states to networks of many, many different actors,” she said. “I want to see the world the way the millennials see the world. They look at the world like the Internet, not a chess game.” Almost as if she knew that somewhere The

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n

Vocabulary Lessons Basta ya que el Yanqui mande 3 Dana Fr ank

efore, my Spanish wasn’t so bad; but it wasn’t so good, either. I could go a month in Honduras without speaking English and more or less communicate anything I wanted, if dubiously, although every once in a while I’d land in a pit where I didn’t know the words at all—kitchen implements, say, or anything related to the legal system. I specialized: I could do a three-hour historical interview with a trade union leader in his eighties and catch every word. I had mastered gerente (manager) and contrato colectivo (collective bargaining agreement) and, of course, sindicato (labor union). I’d get stumped only by amusing leftover words from the United Fruit Company if I couldn’t see them in print, like watchiman or los nylon (gloves) or, my favorite, bulldozero (bulldozer operator). Then, at 5:30 a.m. the morning of June 28, 2009, I plunged into a pit so huge and so dark and so endless that it was—and still is—far beyond any words I had ever learned or imagined having to learn. I already knew the biggest, most important word: golpe (coup, or blow). But that morning, the radio said golpe de estado—the full phrase, “a blow to the state”—a coup d’état. As in, a violent overthrow of constitutional order.

hree months earlier, in April 2009, I’d learned encuesta (survey) when Honduran president Manuel Zelaya put a public opinion poll on the ballot for that Sunday, June 28, asking voters in a cuarta urna (fourth ballot box) if they wanted to elect delegates the following November for a constituyente, or constitutional convention, to take place in 2010 or 2011. Zelaya, a member of the Hon114 1 The Baffler [no.23]

duran elite himself, had been democratically elected in 2005, and gradually inched leftward to ally himself with the other Left and CenterLeft governments in Latin America, including those in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. When he pushed too far for many in his own party, the oligarchs and military leaders who had long ruled Honduras balked, and sent in the troops that morning—invading Zelaya’s house before dawn and packing him off in his pajamas to Costa Rica, with the full collusion of the Supreme Court and most of the Honduran Congress. With golpe de estado also came golpista— which translates, clunkily, as “coup perpetrator”—the all-purpose word Hondurans suddenly spat out to describe anyone on the other side of the chasm that opened up in one day, tearing apart families and neighborhoods and the whole country. I myself came to use it so much that I kept forgetting non-Spanish speakers didn’t know what it meant. Opposing the golpistas, a movement arose to combat the coup and defend constitutional order: la Resistencia (the Resistance). Suddenly millions of Hondurans sounded like an underground movement in France during World War II. From that morning forward, much to absolutely everyone’s surprise on all sides, people poured into the streets to try to reverse the coup. A mass social movement came together within hours, naming itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular. I learned movimiento amplio (broad movement) to describe this new coalition, unprecedented in Honduran history, of the labor, women’s, indigenous rights, LGBTI, and Afro-Indigenous movements; human rights groups; Zelaya’s loyalists from the

P E TE R K U P E R

Every day, I was assaulted by a long barrage of verbsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;ultimar, matar, liquidar, tirotear (to shoot up), ametrallar (to machine gun)â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all of which meant to kill, including ultimar a machetazos (to slice up with machete blows).

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h Idols Abroad FRAME BREAKER

A Nod to Ned Ludd 3 Richard Byrne But to return to the Luddites. The danger is of the most imminent kind. I would hang about a score in the country, and send off ship loads to Botany Bay; and if there were no other means of checking the treasonable practices which are carried on in the Sunday newspapers, I would suspend the Habeas Corpus. Shut up these bellows-blowers, and the fire may, perhaps, go out.

—Robert Southey (future British poet laureate),

in a letter to his brother, Tom Southey, May 12, 1812

obert Southey and his fellow reactionaries were right to be affrighted in May 1812. The day before he wrote the passage above, British prime minister Spencer Perceval had been gunned down in Parliament. And while it quickly became apparent that Perceval’s murder was the work of a lone assailant—and a businessman, at that—the machine wreckers who went by the name of Luddites had been sending death threats to Perceval and others for months. The destructive swath cut by the Luddites—who smashed hundreds of knitting frames that made stockings and later attacked gig mills and shearing frames—posed such a threat to public order that thousands of troops had already been sent to occupy the centers of machine-wrecking discontent in Nottingham and Leeds. Majorities in both houses of Parliament were spooked so badly by this highly organized campaign of violence against property that they pushed through a bill making Luddism a capital offense. Flash forward two hundred years. Today’s Luddites (or, as they often self-identify, “neo-Luddites”) pose no threat at all. Their public salvos against technology embrace knotty nuances and eschew the bare knuckles. There’s a touch of Bartleby the Scrivener to them: if this be the future, they’d definitely prefer not to. Yet the disquiet apparent even in a watered-down and largely nonconfrontational Luddism still packs a punch, if only in the Luddites’ refusal to bow down before the tech class’s vision of a benevolent, inevitable march toward Total Information Awareness. In the straitened and highly ritualized discourse of tech boosterism, “Luddite” has become a catchall dirty word for anything that stands in its way. The specter of Luddism is raised and stigmatized again and again as a crank persuasion—the province of the Unabomber and a handful of aging sports columnists loudly proclaiming their contempt 120 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

B R IA N S TAU FFE R

How did it come to pass that Luddism is now almost exclusively remembered as a barely rational movement of rampant machine breaking?

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h Idols Abroad COPPER THIEVES

On Wittgenstein’s Steps A letter from unified Europe 3

Dubr avka Ugrešić

igeons are crazy about public sculptures. For pigeons there’s no greater happiness than perching down on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that, for some reason, people are crazy about public sculptures too. Last year, unidentified vandals attacked a sculpture of Marija Jurić Zagorka, a Croatian journalist and novelist. Zagorka’s literary production never got its due in her lifetime or for many years after her death in 1957. Had it not been for the efforts of the Zagreb Center for Women’s Studies, which, inter alia, had a statue erected in her honor in downtown Zagreb, her work would today be forgotten. The vandals sawed off the bronze umbrella on which the bronzed authoress stood leaning in repose, the Center for Women’s Studies whipped up a media frenzy, and the city fathers promptly committed to appropriating funds for a new umbrella. Appalled by the ugly incident, many Zagreb residents laid old umbrellas at the statue’s feet. There you go, that’s canonization for you! Croats may not be pigeons, but they still suffer a fatal attraction for public monuments. Since Croatian independence in 1991, many monuments to the victims of fascism have suffered damage; those keeping score have tallied up a total of 2,965 attacks. The majority took place in the immediate post-independence years, a time of anti-Yugoslav, anti-Serbian, and anti-Communist hysteria, meaning the new authorities had a fair degree of empathy for vandal passions provoked by collective Croatian traumas. In historical perspective, the Croatian reaction confirmed a paradox: trauma is greatest where there is least cause. Anti-Communist hysteria proved most vehement where Communism itself had been most benign. Twenty years ago many monuments by the well-known sculptor Vojin Bakić were destroyed (his monument on Petrova Gora is a pearl of international monumental architecture), yet the authorities were again benevolent toward the vandals. Vojin Bakić was, after all, a Croatian Serb. In contrast, back then and still today, any “vandal” tempted to burn the Croatian flag would have to reckon with a substantial fine. 130 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

L E W I S KO C H

didn’t pay monuments much mind until I discovered a surprising truth: most people engage in vandalism for the cash, not out of ideological or aesthetic conviction. Everyone in Holland knows who’s most enamored with copper and bronze. Yes, the Poles. In February of last year statues were stolen from atop graves in the Dutch settlements of Norg and Vries. Rheden lost a statue of the writer Simon Carmiggelt, and, wary of new thefts, Dutch officials spirited a statue of Queen Beatrix into storage. A couple of years ago a public sculpture of a mother and child, erected to honor the memory of victims of the Second World War, was stolen from Marienberg. In 2007 a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker was stolen in Laren. The cities of Zwolle and Nijmegen recently resolved to put their public statues in safekeeping, and in Eindhoven the police have fitted public sculptures with GPS units. If sculptures from Eindhoven go walkies, police will know where to find them. The list of Polish sins is long: anything with a glint of copper is a target for Polish thieves. If the trains aren’t running, it’s because the Poles have ripped out the copper cables. If there’s a power outage, it’s because the Poles have pilfered the cables from a few windmills, the pride of the Dutch national landscape. If a remnant from the First World War explodes in the Ypres region, it’s because the Poles (ah, those moles!) have been burrowing in the fields in search of copper.

Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate.

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hIdols

Abroad POOR PEOPLE

Sacking Berlin How hipsters, expats, yummies, and smartphones ruined a city 3 Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling

Berlin’s whimsy and play have been branded by the SPD, sold to venture capital, and dangled before its residents via the Yummie Net.

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t’s easy to talk about lost Golden Ages in Berlin. Everyone has their own romanticized era: louche Weimar Berlin before the Nazis, Iggy and Bowie’s seventies Berlin before the Wall fell, or maybe the squatter’s Berlin of the good old nineties. So when people start complaining that something has changed in the city, it’s tempting to dismiss it as insider one-upmanship, the old game of “I was here when.” And yet something has felt different in recent years. Berlin has always hosted poverty better than other European capitals, but this time around, Berlin has embraced an economic model that makes poverty pay. The idea is to cash in on Berlin’s cachet by branding it as a “Creative City”—but it is also, to judge by what has happened, to gut public services, to sell off public housing, and to strategize about new ways of turning taste into profit. This new Berlin is a city where imaginative expression supports, directly or indirectly, a grand scheme for making a small number of people rich. One of these days, some lucky Berliners and expats will finally attract venture capital from London, Palo Alto, and Boston. But the others—the scenic poor and the clever unemployeds who make the city so attractive—will find it ever more difficult to make ends meet. There is nothing novel about this story. Berlin’s dream is the same fantasy that is embraced by out-of-the-way metro areas all across the United States. But the stakes in Berlin are higher than in most places. For one thing, when our story begins, Berlin was broker than almost any other Western European city, living on the life support of government transfers. In 2005, unemployment peaked at a Depressionesque 19 percent, and the city’s debt had doubled. In the mid-aughts, Berlin was not bailing out Athens. Berlin was Athens. It was here, in this economically stagnant metropolis, that mayor Klaus Wowereit, affectionately known as “Wowi,” stood at City Hall and laid out a ten-year plan for the city. He began by denouncing striking transit workers for “attempting to cripple public life,” but went on to dream big for the city he called “poor but sexy.” He imagined a future when a hipper working class would thrive unburdened by unions: “I imagine one thousand women and men of all ages gathering for a World Congress of Creatives. The designers who live here will deliver

JA KO B H I N R I C H S

their ideas to the world’s biggest corporations,” and “Berlin will be the mecca for the creative class.” A theme song for the city’s new ten-million-euro marketing campaign was available for download: an eightsecond ringtone designed by a techno DJ with a vaguely Turkish trill and an echoing call to “be Berlin, be Berlin, be Berlin.” Less than a mile away, one of the city’s most recognizable icons was being demolished. The enormous steel-and-glass Palace of the Republic, built by East Germany in the mid-seventies, had been a uniquely socialist megaplex, containing the hall of the national legislature alongside a theater, a bowling alley, and an ice cream parlor. The city rejected various appeals to restore and reuse the building, and the last concrete columns fell at the end of 2008. As demolition concluded, a blue-andwhite cube arose facing the empty site—a “Temporary Art Hall” that The

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Americana

Sartre for Sartre’s Sake 3 Seth Colter Walls

ean-Paul Sartre’s chief political fidelity was not pledged to Communism, or Marxism, or even the amorphous spirit of May ’68 (with which he was sometimes associated)—but rather to a program of constant self-revision. In a 1969 interview, Sartre provided a cheerful example of his propensity for containing disputatious multitudes. Taking stock of some of his earlier outbursts on behalf of revolutionary purism, the philosopher-novelist-playwright exclaimed: “When I read this, I said to myself: ‘It’s incredible, I actually believed that!’” In other words, Sartre demanded the freedom to be crazily wrong, and then to notice this reality according to his own timetable. Ronald Aronson, the coeditor of We Have Only This Life to Live, a new collection of Sartre’s nonfiction, writes in his introduction that Sartre was fond of “over-the-top analyses” and was continually at pains to remind the world that “situations and people can change.” They do, and one can, of course—but even fans of Sartre must grapple with the obvious flights from accuracy that crop up in his writing. So the surprise of this new collection is that its most impressive writing is Sartre’s reported journalism—specifically from his journey to the United States in the first half of 1945 for Combat, the French Resistance journal edited by Albert Camus. The costs were shared by Le Figaro, for which Sartre also filed some dispatches, though his chief challenge was to explain to Combat’s revolutionary readership just what he was seeing in newly ascendant America. Here now, for the first time in any English collection of Sartre’s nonfiction, we have seven of those Combat dispatches, grouped under the heading “On the American Working Class.” Happily, some of the accounts that Sartre gathered during his six-month, winter-into-summer stay on American soil read well. His instruments of detection are not faultless, but when they’re locked in, they resonate strongly, even from beyond the grave. None of them approach the fact-filled, clickable slideshows that now pour forth from the public-intellectual regions of digital journalism—which is, of course, what makes them all the more memorable. His assessment of the bleak condition of American health care, for instance, is surprisingly topical, at least for those of us eager to figure out not just how much we might save under a government-regulated private insurance system, but also what we might soon expect, in a collective-national-unconscious sense, from the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975 New York Review Books, $24.95, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

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Sartre demanded the freedom to be crazily wrong, and then to notice this reality according to his own timetable.

DAV I D J O H N S O N

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Americana

Smile, Buster! 3 Farr an Nehme The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection Kino, Blu-ray box set, fourteen discs, $299.95

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arly in 1917 Buster Keaton left the vaudeville act he’d been performing with his parents since he was a toddler. Joseph Keaton would toss his acrobatic young son over furniture, into backdrops, and on at least one memorable occasion, right into a group of hecklers. Buster had enjoyed himself for years, but his father’s drinking steadily worsened; keeping a straight face while being thrown around by an unpredictable alcoholic was no way to earn a living. Keaton was twenty-one and a star on the circuit, but canny enough to see his future in the flickers. Already in 1917, motion pictures were an industry, with studios like Paramount and Fox up and running; already great artists were at work in the United States, including D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. So when he was asked years later about this momentous decision, Keaton never touted his own foresight or described the movies as a chance for vaster stardom. He maintained that the possibilities of film itself had been inducement enough. “The making of a motion picture started to fascinate me immediately,” he told film historian Kevin Brownlow, “so I stuck with them.” Keaton often said one of his first acts was to take a camera apart. With Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Keaton made two-reel comedies, taking steadily more responsibility until World War I intervened. After army service in France that was mostly behind the lines, and probably not as dangerous as his vaudeville act, he returned to work with Arbuckle. The apprenticeship lasted less than three years—all the prep Keaton needed to grow into one of the most dazzling comic filmmakers of all time. In 1919, producing mogul Joe Schenck (who later became Keaton’s brother-in-law) gave the comic his own studio. The nineteen shorts and eight features that Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in from 1920 to 1928 are included in Kino Lorber’s new fourteen-disc Blu-ray set, The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection. Also included are The Saphead (1920), Keaton’s first lead in a feature, and Lost Keaton, sixteen talkie shorts that Buster made at the cut-rate Educational Pictures in the mid-1930s. In addition to the lustrous detail of Blu-ray transfers, there’s a feast of extras: audio commentaries; still galleries and location tours; part of Man’s Genesis, a D. W. Griffith misfire sent up by Keaton’s Three Ages (1923); a shot-by-shot deconstruction of the waterfall finale in Our Hospitality (1923) that nearly drowned Keaton; so-called enhanced digital versions; and on and on. But look, it only seems overwhelming. I can happily report that with early rising and a family willing to order takeout, the whole thing can be devoured in a matter of days.

In a film era heavily dependent on eyes, Buster had the best: dark, widespaced, heavylidded.

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r Graphic Art |

Michael Duffy

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L O U B E AC H