No. 24

No. 24

DAV I D M c L I M A N S

Con t e n t s ( The Baffler, no. 24 ) Under the Table

The Rites of Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Against Merit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Gabriel Zaid

ZO H A R L A Z A R

Jaron Lanier

12 13

SuccessitudesTM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

God’s Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Erik Simon

Photo Graphic

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The Real Toy Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

HENRIK DRESCHER

Michael Wolf

The Jig Is Up!

20

The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

David Gr aeber

A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a.k.a. Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barbar a Ehrenreich

The Billionaires’ Fantasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

M A R K S . FI S H E R

Gene Seymour

Hoard d’Oeuvres: Art of the 1 Percent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Rhonda Lieber man

Play, Dammit! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Heather Havrilesky

Rage Against the Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ian Bogost

The Dollar Debauch CHRIS MULLEN

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris Lehmann

Lackeys

4 1 The Baffler [no.24]

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63

76

88

96

104

Deal Me Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

126

The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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A stacked deck at the New York Times Alex Pareene

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

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10

Nerds on the Knife Edge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The triumph of Vice Anne Elizabeth Moore

The Jig Is Up !

Story

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Bcc: Dridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner

Poems

Chemical Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Timothy Donnelly

Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fanny Howe

Narcissus Tweets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Airea D. Matthews

Concerned Possibly Overly Concerned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with the Eagle Warehouse & Storage Company of Brooklyn 1893

Dar a Wier

It was the year we turned to dragons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Metta Sáma

What It Look Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Terr ance Hayes

A Poet’s Guide to the Assassination of JFK . . . . . . . . . . . [the Assassination of Poetry]

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87

94 137

156 169

Feminism for Them? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Tom Clancy, Military Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

Susan Faludi

Andrew Bacevich

Decently Downward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

An appointment with John O’Hara William T. Vollmann

Grave Dance

How Sweet Is It? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

George Scialabba

Xcerpt

Feminism for Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

M E LI N DA B EC K

161

Thomas Sayers Ellis

The Literary Playground

J O N ATH O N ROS E N

Floyd Dell

K ATH E R I N E S T R E E TE R

162 166 V I C TO R J U H A SZ

154

Graphic Art

3 Mark Dancey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Mark Wagner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

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

J OS E P H C IA R D I E L LO

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 5

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan 3 John Summers

E

ver since Mark Zuckerberg reappeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 and announced that this old city had growth potential after all, the region’s public officials have been eagerly positioning themselves to ride a wave of digital startup commerce.

The state’s Democratic governor, Deval Patrick, has been ardently lobbying corporate players in biotech to fall in with the Facebook titan and exploit the region’s educated workforce. Massachusetts House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo sent an open letter to Zuckerberg begging him to follow through on his comment and locate an office here. “A lot has changed in Massachusetts in the eight years since Facebook moved out,” DeLeo wrote. In 2012 legislators OK’d a $1 million “Talent Pipeline” to be run through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and allotted $50 million to a tech-and-science research matching fund, gilding an investment climate already rich with grant managers, laboratories, liberals, venture capitalists, and university degrees.

New York still has Wall Street, Phoenix has housing again, and for Shreveport, Louisiana, it’s all the way with shale gas. And what do Cambridge and Greater Boston have to offer? They call it the “Innovation Economy.”

It’s a neat utopia: an entire economy rigged to a framework of intellectual capital, from PhD to patent, with a startup model of rapid development taking hold of cities like Austin, Berkeley, Boulder, Las Vegas, Raleigh, and Seattle. Still, it was a Boston-area small business that successfully petitioned the White House to declare the first-ever “National Entrepreneurs’ Day” in 2010. The president 20 1 The Baffler [no.24]

proclaimed a whole “National Entrepreneurship Month” the following year (November, in case you are thinking of starting a company) and created the White House “Startup America” initiative, devoted to “cutting red tape and accelerating innovation from the lab to the marketplace.”

And it’s Cambridge where you can take a stroll on the “Entrepreneur Walk of Fame,” complete with stars for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Kendall Square, in MIT’s neighborhood, has seen Amazon, Biogen, Google, Microsoft, Novartis, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson all move in or expand their office parks, research facilities, or life science laboratories since 2012, joining companies with longstanding ties to the MIT meritocracy, such as Sanofi, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Draper Laboratory. The list goes on. So does the networking—or, as this scrum for a new, worlddefining synergy of big data, big pharma, and startups is elegantly known, the “clustering.”

The method is meant to wrest “competitive market advantage” (in the White House’s words) out of physical proximity.

“Clustering” has spun out a miniature knowledge economy of its own around here, with brands like General Catalyst, Koa Labs, Atlas Venture, Spark Capital, Intrepid Labs, Dogpatch Labs, and Sandbox. You can’t turn a corner without encountering some fair, summit, accelerator, catalyst, meetup, incubator, or kaffeeklatsch. News of the latest triumph at the hottest innovation center is hard to miss even for a moderate consumer of media gossip. (A tidbit: Someone at the MIT Media Lab founded Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 21

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i FREE THOUGHT

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? 3 David Gr aeber

M

y friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then leap to the next stalk and do the same thing. And so it proceeded, in a vast circle, with what must have been a vast expenditure of energy, for what seemed like absolutely no reason at all.

“All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder.

“Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?”

Most of us, hearing this story, would insist on proof. How do we know the worm was playing? Perhaps the invisible circles it traced in the air were really just a search for some unknown sort of prey. Or a mating ritual. Can we prove they weren’t? Even if the worm was playing, how do we know this form of play did not serve some ultimately practical purpose: exercise, or self-training for some possible future inchworm emergency?

This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well. Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive suc50 1 The Baffler [no.24]

cess—unless one can absolutely prove that it isn’t, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by.

I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I’m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms— which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.

That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It’s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some longterm survival or reproductive function.

Despite all this, those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe.

And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs,

HENRIK DRESCHER

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 51

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i MEMOIR

A Thing or Two about a Thing or Two, a.k.a. Science 3 Barbar a Ehrenreich

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ationalists tend to frown upon group activities that seem to serve no evi dent biological or political purpose, like the drumming and masking so often indulged in by protest movements like Occupy Wall Street. Or, for a more historically venerable example, consider the reaction of European conquerors and missionaries to the shocking spectacles they encountered during the “age of exploration.” Almost everywhere they went—from Africa to the Western plains of America, from Polynesia to the Indian subcontinent—Europeans came across native peoples engaged in ecstatic rituals involving dancing, drumming, body-painting, masks, costumes, and feasting. Failing to notice the parallels between these exuberant native rituals and the traditional carnivals of Europe, missionaries tended to explain them as outbreaks of demonic possession, or as proof that the natives were not human at all, only “savages.”

Later, twentieth-century anthropologists bewailed the apparent waste of energy and resources represented by these ubiquitous practices, and not just the excesses of calorically profligate dances. Painstaking preparation went into the design of costumes and masks, the invention of new tunes and dance steps, the production of favorite foods—all representing sunk opportunity costs, in this zero-sum view: energies that might have been more rationally expended on hunting, gathering, or horticulture. There had to be some purpose, or at least some function, for these costly and economically nonproductive rituals, and anthropologists soon hit on the notion that they were re-

quired for “social cohesion.” Obviously, doing something together, something that was fun and sometimes ecstatic to the point of trance, deepens the ties among individuals, perhaps facilitating productive collective enterprises, such as agriculture or defense. This was fine, from the anthropological point of view, as long as the festivities remained “liminal,” as in Victor Turner’s judgment, or peripheral to a society’s more serious undertakings.

But social cohesion is hardly served by the more agonistic elements of traditional festivities. Even in the most peaceable, homogeneous cultures, there may be competition over dance steps and bodily decoration, as well as sexual rivalries and attempts to settle old scores. In the steeply class-divided towns of early modern Europe, carnivals and other festivities easily tipped over into rebellions against the local aristocracy, and while rebellions may represent social progress, they do not exactly represent “cohesion.” In the Caribbean, slaves seized on carnival as an occasion for uprisings, which is one reason colonialists came to fear the sound of drums. When I attended the 2008 carnival in Trinidad, I saw plenty of convivial dancing, singing, costuming, and playacting, but the blowout also ended with a body count of five, along with twenty wounded in shootings, stabbings, or beatings.

So maybe carnival and ecstatic rituals serve no rational purpose and have no single sociological “function.” They are just something that people do, and, judging from Neolithic rock art depicting circle and line dances, they are something that people have done for thousands of years. The best category for such The

Baffler [no.24] ! 59

H E N R I K A N D S O FIA D R E S C H E R

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 61

Th e Ji g Is Up !

E

xpect pop culture to define your politics, and you’ll probably get the politics you deserve. Hip-hop music may give you an outlet to vent joy and rage, but it’s not going to improve poor or outdated public schools. Fifty Shades of Grey may magnify your bedroom repertoire, but it won’t enable sexual equality in the workplace. And science fiction is no program for governing—or, as some would have it, for not governing. It’s there to give you dreams, ideas, and nightmares.

Yet there lately seems to be much (too much) in our political and financial culture that’s pilfered from the thick, wide corpus of science fiction (or SF, as devotees prefer to style it). Consider Jeff Bezos, the marketconquering overlord of Amazon, and now the Washington Post, who originally wanted to grace his online retail empire with the URL “MakeItSo.com”—an homage to the catchphrase popularized by Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bezos also famously has launched a side company, Blue Origin, dedicated to perfecting private space travel.

It boasts its own Federation-style coat of arms, above the Latin motto Gradatim Ferociter (Step by step, ferociously). Another Bezos vanity project involves the construction of a mammoth timepiece that will tick off the next ten thousand years of life on this planet, called the Clock of the Long Now, funded under the auspices of something called the Long Now Foundation.

Other well-heeled cyber-visionaries are likewise pursuing their own “Long Nows” designed to steer their empires toward a healthier and, need we add, wealthier future. PayPal cofounder Elon Musk is concocting a hyperloop high-speed train that will set you back $1.3 million for the privilege of inhabiting one of its passenger pods. Meanwhile, another PayPal titan, Peter Thiel, is bankrolling an exploratory round of “seasteading” experiments in libertarian utopian living—self-sustaining colonies of floating ragers against the state 64 1 The Baffler [no.24]

M A R K S . FI S H E R

machine, who will be freely indulging their sacred liberties as they luxuriate atop ocean waters under the international treaties of the sea, beyond the reach of any sovereign nation’s jurisdiction. And Google CEO Larry Page has recently announced another of the company’s trademark “moonshot” projects, which involves nothing less than the abolition of illness and death—a primordial recalibration of the human condition (or as SF fanboy Newt Gingrich might label it, social engineering) worthy of a plot outline from Robert A. Heinlein or Orson Scott Card.

These ambitious, mogul-driven projects all mimic one of science fiction’s raisons d’être: the deeply satisfying literary exercise of world-building—i.e., imagining a fully selfcontained set of planets, space colonies, and social relations (human, post-human, or other-than-human) that operate on radically different principles from the ones we know, or affect to know.

One of the major benefits of this imaginative process, which likely began back when

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i ASSHOLES

Hoard d’ Oeuvres Art of the 1 percent 3 Rhonda Lieberman When you’ve got the big house, and you’re driving a Jaguar, what differentiates you from every asshole dentist in the Valley?

Art was a way for Eli to distinguish himself.

A

—Shelley De Angelus, Eli Broad’s former curator

rt collecting is the most esteemed form of shopping in our culture

today.

Thorstein Veblen saw conspicuous consumers as throwbacks—creatures ruled by primitive drives of predation and emulation.

Yet the fashion-victimized accumulators of pelf with the historical equivalents of a big house and a Jaguar have always been pillars of society. In the age of landed gentry and indentured servants, Veblen notes, “vulgarly productive occupations” were stigmatized with the “marks of poverty and subjection,” while predatory exploits were considered “honorific,” a sign of “pecuniary strength.”

Our neo-Gilded Age, like Veblen’s merely Gilded one, is marked by a predatory culture permitting the feral rich to ravage the productive economy—seizing all the wealth for themselves and creating the most severe levels of income inequality since the onset of the Great Depression. While predators of yore awed rival chieftains with booty, harems, and slaves, today’s Masters of the Universe raid companies, fire workers, extract rents, divert huge amounts of capital out of the economy to uglify our world—and hoard the pelts of middleclass pensions, pay, and life prospects in their mansions, private kunsthalles, and yachts in the form of blue-chip (and capital-A) Art. 76 1 The Baffler [no.24]

These feats of “pecuniary strength,” while socially worthless and detrimental to productivity, are merely “reputable,” as Veblen would explain in his trademark academic deadpan.

For maximum prestige, the true distinctionseeking Master of the Universe must outdo rival assholes in conspicuous consumption.

And in today’s digital economy, you can monitor this primal battle of achieving egos as it unfolds in real time, on computer screens.

At auction, you watch incomparable works of art vanish into exchange value: all that’s solid truly melts into air. The spectacle of yen, dollars, and euros mounting on the screen climaxes in the money shot: the sale price. Juicy sums are applauded, with murmurs of approval for the really big ones. The cult of wealth cheers as art launders the antisocial spoils of exploitation into status symbols, entrée to classy social circles, and even the solemn mantle of philanthropy. Fabulous.

The handy Forbes list of “billionaires with a passion for art” abounds with finance types with hoards worth more than $500 million.

There is, for example, Henry Kravis of the storied Kohlberg Kravis Roberts takeover firm that minted billions in worthless junk bond paper during the 1980s. These days, Kravis’s honorific predations fund his passion for impressionist and contemporary art, and like many a robber baron from the last Gilded Age, he now has a wing of the Met named after him. Hedge fund manager Steven Cohen breaks spending records for splashy pieces: in 2004 he doled out $8 million for Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a thirteen-foot shark

CHRIS MULLEN

The American spirit is “to take the opportunity that we have in this country to grow and learn . . . and to help other people,� explains Alice Walton, a woman whose family wealth is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.

9 The

Baffler [no.24] ! 77

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i C H I LD’ S P L AY

Play, Dammit!

3 Heather Havrilesky

T

he vigorous exhortation to “play” now haunts every corner of our culture. Typically issued as an imperative along with words like breathe and meditate and dance and celebrate, the word play, in its catchall generic form, has a curious way of repelling the senses, conjuring as it does all manner of mandatory frivolity, most of it horribly twee and doggedly futile.

Yet Johan Huizinga, the Dutch cultural theorist who tirelessly examined “the play element in culture,” asserted that the one defining feature of play is that it’s voluntary. “Play to order is no longer play,” he declared flatly. “It could at best be a forcible imitation of it.”

What would Huizinga make of the many forcible imitations of genuine, self-actualizing play that now overrun American culture like a pack of angry, corn-syrup-addled toddlers? When NBC can simply lease a building and fill it with money for something called The Million Second Quiz, the results feel much closer to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? than to the harmless charms of Password or Match Game ’75. Can the sinister-clown fits of sexual selfredefinition now convulsing the brand known as Miley Cyrus really qualify as “fun”? When the young-adult pop-culture sensations of the moment oscillate between the grisly rigors of Call of Duty and The Hunger Games, it’s clear that a perverse imp of destruction lurks at the heart of the supposedly carefree franchises of American amusement.

A second-order definition of play, Huizinga notes, is its close correspondence to the serious adult activities of work. “Play must serve something which is not play,” he observes—which is why so many children’s pastimes openly mimic adult pursuits, from the near-universal rituals of doll nurture to 88 1 The Baffler [no.24]

games that reenact the aims and provisional alliances of war-making.

But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry. Franchised recreation of the Dave & Buster’s variety cruelly turns both game-playing and drinking into an exercise in perfunctory high-fiving. (Imagine the multilayered Walk of Shame awaiting singles who let their judgments become clouded enough to hook up after a night of two-player Dream Raiders and vodka-spiked “Snow Cones.”)

The mirror image of this play-as-drudgery problem is Silicon Valley’s utopian vision of all-purpose “gamification.” The notion of converting social goods into digital playthings is a beguiling goal for lucre-sniffing software designers. But as a solution to the inequalities of wealth, education, and life chances that are now sinking whatever remains of the American middle class, the deployment of game incentives—chits for losing weight, acing a school exam, or mentoring an at-risk kid—is less empowering than demeaning. (And that’s not to mention what tokenizing otherwise internally generated emotional rewards does to our understanding of our place in the increasingly bewildering high-capitalist maze.) Here the idea of play isn’t so much serving non-play pursuits as mastering them—fostering the illusion that the stubborn social ills of our day can be miniaturized, incentivized, and frothed up into delectably familiar morsels of privi-

L AU R I E ROS E N WA L D

Anxious to be reassured of their unique-snowflake status, “rejuveniles� find sustenance in rock-paper-scissors tournaments, Zombie Tag matches, and kickball leagues.

9 The

Baffler [no.24] ! 89

Th e Ji g Is Up ! i SNOT- NOSE SWIN DLES

Rage Against the Machines The real danger of videogames isn’t violence; it’s swindling 3 Ian Bogost

A

fter Adam Lanza gunned down twenty children, six staff members, and himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in late 2012, authorities began the kind of forensic investigation reserved for airplane crashes and sites of murderous terrorism. The details of Lanza’s life become catalogues of potential deviancy. He had made his bed that December morning. His armoire held five matching tan shirts and five pairs of khaki pants. An empty cereal bowl flanked damaged computer parts on his desk. And as any veteran of America’s periodic sagas of horror and grief wrought by young white men would expect, the investigators announced they had found the black box, the clue to the riddle, salvaged from the abyss: “thousands of dollars worth of graphically violent videogames,” according to one media report, inside the Newtown home Lanza shared with his mother, whom he also killed.

The announcement played perfectly into the hands of the consensus view. After all, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre had delivered a statement following the Newtown massacre in a desperate attempt to stiff-arm gun control regulation efforts. In it, he called out “vicious, violent videogames with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and Splatterhouse” as evidence of a “callous, corrupt, and corrupting shadow industry,” which was the real cause of violent slaughters like Lanza’s. Television news shows had fallen into line and ran segments about local Newtown children voluntarily forsaking videogames. Vice president Joseph Biden had 96 1 The Baffler [no.24]

established a gun violence task force, inviting media executives from film and game companies to White House briefings to answer for themselves.

And now shades of Wayne LaPierre’s diatribe fell across leadership-class opinion like a closing curtain, the audience murmur on the last act of the indescribable mystery. Videogames made him do it. Newtown’s aftermath offered another example of the bipartisan view that videogames are stimulants to the most pernicious real-world depravities imaginable, their fantasy violence cutting a hole in America’s soul.

The Columbine massacre, you may recall, was a watershed moment in this particular blame game. The murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were known to play Doom, the first-person shooter that effectively inaugurated that genre and that was later licensed to the U.S. military for training purposes. Adam Lanza hadn’t forgotten. Even if Lanza didn’t carry out the Sandy Hook murders under the influence of videogames, the investigation said he had “an obsession” with Columbine, a connection that allows the specter of videogames in the backdoor of the demonology.

Doom was the plaything of Harris and Klebold, but it wasn’t the first game to attract unwanted publicity. Mortal Kombat ignited controversy in 1993, six years before Columbine, over its absurdly gory depictions of hand-tohand combat and its lethal finishing moves, called “fatalities.” And the original moral panic over violence in videogames came decades earlier, via the 1976 coin-operated game Death

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 97

v Th e

Doll a r Deb auch

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse 3 Chris Lehmann

B

y any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt.

Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity.

Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively marketbased reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace.

In one dismal week this past spring, for example, a virtually unregulated fertilizer facility immolated several blocks of West, Texas, claiming at least fourteen lives (a number that would have been much higher had the junior high school adjoining the site been in session at the time of the explosion), while a shoddily constructed and militantly unregulated complex of textile factories collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, with a death toll of more than 1,100 workers.

In the face of all this catastrophism, the 104 1 The Baffler [no.24]

placid certainties of neoliberal ideology rattle on as though nothing has happened. Remarkably, our governing elites have decided to greet a moment of existential reckoning for most of their guiding dogmas by incanting with redoubled force the basic catechism of the neoliberal faith: reduced government spending, full privatization of social goods formerly administered by the public sphere, and a socialization of risk for the upper class.

When the jobs economy ground to a functional halt, our leadership class first adopted an anemic stimulus plan, and then embarked on a death spiral of austerity-minded bids to decommission government spending at the very moment it was most urgently required— measures seemingly designed to undo whatever prospective gains the stimulus might have yielded. It’s a bit as though the board of directors of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the tsunami-ravaged Japanese interior decided to go on a reactor-building spree on a floodplain, or on the lip of an active volcano.

So now, five years into a crippling economic downturn without even the conceptual framework for a genuine, broad-based, jobs-driven recovery shored up by boosts in federal spending and public services, the public legacy of these times appears to be a long series of metaphoric euphemisms for brainlocked policy inertia: the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the shutdown, the grand bargain. Laid side by side, all these coinages bring to mind the claustrophobic imagery of a kidnapping montage from a noir gangster film—and it is, indeed, no great exaggeration to say that the imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a

v

The imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a grinding, miniaturizing agenda of neoliberal market idolatry.

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

The

Baffler [no.24] ! 105

wS T O R Y

Bcc: Dridge 3 Paul Maliszewski and J. Wagner B: There’s an asp.

A: I follow you.

B: You knew?

A: No. B: But you follow; you do follow.

A: Yes, now.

B: I see.

A: I failed to mention that reportedly there was some mix-up. Maybe I should have said this in the meeting just now, to everyone. It’s nothing to concern yourself with, just some irregularities along the way, the way we normally do business, you know. I had assumed we would just make adjustments to the policies later, but given the circumstances with endless qualifications and the turgid pace of the operation, we decided against it. So, going forward, we should probably consider other avenues when we’re employing such usages, even in increments, piecemeal, even if we’re going by the letter, as it were. I was hoping to nail all this down today, but perhaps there are other matters we may have to think of before getting to this.

B: I don’t understand. You told me you were going to move a mountain—your words—to get this done, and now you say there was a mix-up, reportedly? Does Dridge know?

A: We tried to push forward in the usual direction, but the mix-up was more than a mountain, ultimately, though this would have to be measured. Ideally, what we’d need are more well-adjusted people, seemingly pointed in the right direction, and working together with a purpose. Certainly, these purposes still need be created, identified. Well, identified and then created. In that order. I was put in the position of addressing the complexities to staff and others, and yet there is always something missing from the discussion, 118 1 The Baffler [no.24]

things which can never be fully understood, itemized, processed. You know the drill.

B: We can get you more people—Krill, Mawktock, whoever—that’s not a problem.

But I need to know a) how many people you need, and b) is there a managerial oversight problem operating here that more people is not going to fix, because c) we still need this done now. Dridge is asking.

A: Reportedly, some of the people are not well adjusted, as I implied previously, and it is not yet certain what this all entails—for instance, if the well-adjustment is to the present situation of the operation, or whether they are behind or ahead of the adjustment sought. None of these expected adjustments are actually in the handbook, which needs revision, or even a new chapter, as here, or several. We are certainly aware that this needs to be done. We are on the same page on this, certainly, though one assumes at one’s peril, as the handbook makes clear in chapter four, and even, to a less threatening extent, in chapter nine. The managerial oversight is going to be tackled, as they say, in the next meeting, I believe, by the managers themselves. We feel, or they feel, I should say, that that is their job, really, and I can’t say that I blame them.

B: Who is not well adjusted, reportedly?

Krill, who? And to what? To being mismanaged? To being poorly led by uninspired Captains who do not possess the intestinal wherewithal to whip the staff into line—just really whip them all—and get us that Total Effort we’re going to need on this one?

A: In a word, yes. To being not well adjusted to the adjustment levels of the managers, who are, to different degrees, not managing the operation or themselves properly. A few

J O N ATH O N ROS E N

Do we not all go tinkle? Do we not all go boop-boop? Do we not all sit there straining over our turds, crouching like animals on the bowl?

9 seem to have risen too quickly to the positions, and so there is the thought among two or three that these few may themselves not be properly well adjusted, at least not to the standards heretofore thought consistent with the level they are at. Likewise, however, and to the point, there seems to be disagreement about this level and what it means. Again, a handbook, or something like what we are hammering down here, for instance, might well put us on a path, a lighted path, perhaps, toward understanding what they are really

trying to get at first, so from there we can go forward. Because we intend to move forward.

There’s no dispute there—at least none that I’m aware of.

B: Are you well adjusted, do you think?

A: I don’t follow. What are you getting at?

B: I’m just trying to identify the problem here, the Whole Problem, so I can get a handle on it and then we can together strategize some solutions. I believe, as I’m sure you do as well, that “The Only Good Conversation Is an Honest Conversation,” and so I want to The

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Deal Me Out A stacked deck at the New York Times 3 Alex Pareene

T

he New York Times, as everybody knows, is the premier source of authoritative journalism in the world’s most powerful formal democracy. Among the paper’s storied achievements are its courageous, pathbreaking coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the release of the Pentagon Papers in defiance of a prior restraint order in 1971, and investigative coups on everything from the abuses of money in politics to the disastrous course of the war in Afghanistan. It has also, along the way, committed travesties like Judith Miller’s misreporting of WMDs allegedly in the possession of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the long run of stories plucked out of thin air by serial fabricator Jayson Blair, and the paper’s bafflingly exhaustive coverage of the consumption habits of would-be bohemians in certain East River–adjacent neighborhoods. But the Times mostly takes its self-assigned mission to be the nation’s “newspaper of record” seriously.

How, then, to account for the Times’ reliably market-prostrate, counter-informative— and immensely profitable—online clearinghouse of financial news and commentary, DealBook? This stand-alone digital product, which launched as a branded blog in 2006, is the brainchild—and, in unprecedented ways, the meal ticket—of the paper’s longtime financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Sorkin is something of a prototype of how industry reporters have evolved into digital entrepreneurs. In the industrial age, robber barons leveraged their way into journalism via the mogul-vanity career path of yellow press lords. But where your William Randolph Hearsts and Colonel Robert McCor126 1 The Baffler [no.24]

micks dragooned the mass-circulation daily press largely to ornament mythologies of their own self-made, earth-hewing genius, today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Sorkin mold are trafficking in a more tenuous and ambitious confidence game: the fiction that the superstructure of our investment sector serves any useful economic purpose.

Given the scope of this cognitive challenge, and Sorkin’s unique role as the project’s founder, mascot, and reporter, DealBook is unusually attuned to the sensitive task of vetting the public image of Wall Street—almost certainly the most spectacularly failed complex of institutions in American life today. To observe how this demanding task plays out in DealBook’s pages, take a close look at two of Sorkin’s columns on Goldman Sachs back in 2011, when it appeared that some culpability might finally attach to the bank’s shady activities in the run-up to the mortgage meltdown.

In the first column, dated April 18, 2011, Sorkin accused Goldman of lying. Sorkin— sounding wounded, maybe even betrayed— wondered why Goldman had misrepresented its brilliant-but-double-dealing bet against the housing market in 2007. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found copious evidence that Goldman was “shorting” the residential mortgage market as it had begun to fall apart that year. The investment bank had anchored its shorting strategy in its analysis that the complex securities that Wall Street had built around residential mortgages and then proceeded to produce, sell, and hoard for years would soon plummet in value.

In Senate testimony, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein insisted that the firm hadn’t sold

A L A I N P I LO N

Today’s niche-minded media entrepreneurs in the Andrew Ross Sorkin mold are trafficking in a confidence game: the fiction that our investment sector serves any useful purpose.

9 short. But the Goldman emails the subcommittee obtained and summarized in its report told a different story.

“The findings of the Congressional report are straightforward and damning,” Sorkin wrote in that first column, citing a certain em-

barrassing discrepancy in the quotational record. In 2007, Goldman officials had told the Securities and Exchange Commission that “during most of 2007, we maintained a net short subprime position and therefore stood to benefit from declining prices in the mortThe

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The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke The triumph of Vice 3 Anne Elizabeth Moore

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hirteen-year-old Milly Dowler, a perky schoolgirl from Surrey, England, never intended to be the undoing of mighty News Corp. The global media conglomerate—famously helmed by expat Australian Rupert Murdoch—had, in Dowler’s day, owned or held major shares in more than 250 separate media companies worldwide, including newspapers, film studios, radio stations, book publishers, and cable and television networks.

But one spring afternoon in 2002, the tawny-haired tween set off a sequence of events that would end Murdoch’s beloved company.

(Spoiler alert: He gets his vengeance.)

That Thursday, Dowler, in her school’s required mini-and-tie uniform, left campus with a pal, grabbed a snack, and disappeared.

White girl in distress? This was News of the World’s beat. The Murdoch-owned British tabloid—his first media acquisition outside of Australia—was then in the midst of a salacious run of features outing accused pedophiles. The series started after the murder of eight-yearold Sarah Payne by a convicted sex offender in 2000; the paper’s track record of publishing the names and photographs of rumored sex offenders without attribution or verification prompted police officials to denounce the vigilante-style coverage as “grossly irresponsible” and resulted in more than one violent attack on an innocent. Dowler’s disappearance made the perfect follow-up, and the rag’s coverage spawned so much media attention that southern U.K. grade-schoolers were under claustrophobic parental supervision for months.

138 1 The Baffler [no.24]

When Dowler’s body was discovered a half-year later, the disappearance was reclassified as a murder. It would be six more years before police identified a suspect—and nine total before Levi Bellfield was convicted of the crime. An aggressive, pudgy man, Bellfield had a history of asking girlfriends to dress up as schoolgirls, of driving past bus stops and leering at tweens, of threatening blondes with violence, and of sexual assault.

By 2011 he had already been convicted of the murders of two young women and the attempted murder of a third.

During the trial, the Guardian reported that the girl’s voicemail had been hacked close to a decade earlier by a private investigator on contract with News of the World. Other phone taps emerged—of Prince William and Sarah Payne’s mother, among many others. Scandalous headlines, even in the non-tabloid press, voiced the mounting public outrage over the intrusion of privacy the paper had committed against victims of violent crime. Blame kept finding new perches. Reporters were fired, and editors quit; executives got arrested. Police, and then members of Parliament, were implicated. Even James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and then-CEO of News Corp.’s Europe and Asia operations—was later revealed to have given a former footballer $1.4 million USD in hush money, proving that corruption and malfeasance went all the way to the top of Murdoch’s empire.

To date, the Guardian reports 79 arrests relating to alleged bribes of public officials as-

M E LI N DA B EC K

The

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Playground

Feminism for Them?

3 Susan Faludi

Dell was the socialist who didn’t stuff your brain with -isms, the avant-gardist who spurned affectation, the intellectual who despised dogma and egg-headed bloviation.

9

T

o those casually acquainted with the bad-boy bohemianism of Floyd Dell, the literary radical and “prose laureate of Greenwich Village” may seem an example of the idealist who is better at theory than at practice—like Thomas Jefferson on slavery. Or, in feminist terms, he seems an early example of a declared male ally who is a better friend of women’s equality than of women themselves.

Dell’s plentiful and painful adulteries were well known in his circle; he was nearly as famed for his extramarital dalliances as his politics.

(Dorothy Day tartly noted that his “love encounters should really take place on the stage of the Hippodrome before a packed house.”) And despite his full-throated defense of equality within marriage, Dell tended to sort the actual women in his life into “girls” (i.e., mistresses) or long-suffering mother hens (i.e., wives), a division that suited—or rather, justified—a cheating heart. “It was now accepted as a fact about me that I fell in love with other girls,” he wrote later about one of his many philanderings during his first marriage to Margery Currey, “and taken, it would seem, by my wife as a fact that had to be adjusted to with tolerance—a tolerance so extreme in its generosity that I was before long in another and then another love affair.” When he trotted out a hypothetical Lothario in his July 1914 essay in The Masses, “Feminism for Men,” did he know he was looking in the mirror?

There was once a man—I don’t pretend to approve of him—who had a wife and also a sweetheart, and he liked the sweetheart so much better than the wife that he persuaded his wife to divorce him, and then married the sweetheart; whereupon he simply had to get another sweetheart, because it was just the same as it had been before. The poor fellow never could figure it out.

In short, the leading male champion of feminism suffered, as his biographer Douglas Clayton delicately put it, from “inconsistent attitudes towards women.” Yet, however contradicted by his personal behavior, Dell’s defense of women’s emancipation stands solid, a model of clarity and farsightedness, a powerful avowal of the need for feminism in his age or, for that matter, a century later, in ours.

Reading Dell, whether on the moral corrosions of the capitalist marketplace or the mental contortions of industrial warmongers, is a thrilling, wake-the-hell-up experience—like being blasted out of an overheated room onto an ocean shore in January. He was the socialist who didn’t stuff your brain with -isms, the avant-gardist who spurned affectation, the intellectual who despised dogma and egg-headed blovi148 1 The Baffler [no.24]

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We have redefined feminism as women’s right to be owned by the system, to be owned as much as men have been owned.

9 K ATH E R I N E S T R E E TE R

ation, the leftist who wrote with wit and panache—the one who deemed Marxism’s grand unifying theories “rigor mortis to the mind.” His work is modern in the best sense of the term: direct, undithering, free of cant and theory. (He would never have gotten tenure in the po-mo academy, though he could have penned a scorching takedown of the poststructuralist professoriate.) And, most of all, radical. Whatever the topic, he aimed for the root. Dell was always after the superstructure that his literary diving rod perceived deep beneath the political flap du jour.

Which is what happened when he turned his piercing eye on women’s condition. Dell proposed that the battle between the sexes was a surface manifestation of a deeper, bloodier conflict, a struggle enlisting both men and women to defend “the soul” against the slave raiders of capitalism. He saw women in the vanguard, shock troops in a war that would unshackle men as well. Women’s liberation, in his plain distillation, would “make it possible for the first time for men to be free.” As long as The

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Playground

Tom Clancy, Military Man 3 Andrew J. Bacevich

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ord of Tom Clancy’s passing in October reached me at a local gym. Peddling away on an elliptical trainer, I welcomed the distraction of this “breaking news” story as it swept across a bank of video monitors suspended above the cardio machines. On cable networks and local stations, anchors were soon competing with one another to help viewers grasp the story’s significance. Winning the competition (and perhaps an audition with Fox News) was the young newsreader who solemnly announced that “one of America’s greatest writers” had just died at the relatively early age of sixty-six.

Of course, Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator. Both satisfy a quantitative definition of eminence. Although political historians are unlikely to rank Cruz alongside Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, his recent twenty-one-hour-long denunciation of Obamacare, delivered before a near-empty Senate chamber, demonstrated a capacity for narcissistic logorrhea rare even by Washington standards.

So too with Clancy. Up in the literary Great Beyond, Faulkner and Hemingway won’t be inviting him for drinks. Yet, as with Ted Cruz, once Clancy got going there was no shutting him up. Following a slow start, the works of fiction and nonfiction that he wrote, cowrote, or attached his moniker to numbered in the dozens. Some seventeen Clancy novels made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, starting with his breakthrough thriller The Hunt for Red October. A slew of titles written by others appeared with his imprimatur. Thus, for example, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Choke Point or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath.

Similarly, on those occasions when Clancy partnered with some retired U.S. four-star to craft the officer’s memoirs, the result was a tome “by” Tom Clancy “with” General So-and-So, the difference in font size signaling who was the bigger cheese. And then there is Tom Clancy’s Military Reference series, another product line in the realm of fictive nonfiction. Each title—Fighter Wing, for example, or Armored Cav— promises a Clancy-led “guided tour” of what really goes on in the elite corners of the United States military.

Clancy did for military pop-lit what Starbucks did for the preparation of caffeinated beverages: he launched a sprawling, massively profitable industrial enterprise that simultaneously serves and cultivates an insatiable customer base. Whether the item consumed provides much in terms of nourishment is utterly beside the point. That it tastes yummy going down more than suffices to keep customers coming back.

Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator.

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in uniform or who inhabit the “black world,” whether as CIA agents or members of highly specialized units such as Delta Force or SEAL Team Six. What’s worth recalling is that the prevailing view of America’s warriors was not always so favorable. In the wake of Vietnam, shortly before Clancy burst onto the scene, the books that sold and the scripts attracting Hollywood’s attention told a different story. Those inhabiting positions of responsibility in the United States military were either venal careerists or bunglers out of their depth. Those on the front lines were victims or saps. When it came to military-themed accessories, the preferred logo was FTA. The

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Playground

Decently Downward An appointment with John O’Hara 3 William T. Vollmann Books Discussed John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2013; first published 1934).

John O’Hara, BUtterfield 8 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1935).

John O’Hara, Ten North Frederick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014; first published 1955).

John O’Hara, The New York Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1932–1966).

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ohn O’Hara’s themes are alcoholism, infidelity, rape, perversion, child molestation, the yearning for power and financial security (many who knew the author believed this to be his own basic preoccupation), the instability of love and passion, the effects of economic substructures on the superstructures of private life (in method, if certainly not in ideology, he resembles a Marxist), boardroom and statehouse politics, and the secret corruptions of families.

In many respects he is a cruel writer; not only does he portray quotidian cruelty unblinkingly and intimately, but his portrayals themselves can be cruel. While critics often prefer his short stories to his novels, my preference is the reverse of theirs. For me, a writer’s highest business is the creation of some kind of empathy, and O’Hara’s short stories rarely permit him to do more than cast his contemptuously bloodshot gaze on a situation, evoking revulsion or pity, perhaps, but nothing more.

To be sure, in the stories you will find any number of strange types, such as the sprightly, obese, sexually deviant, not unsympathetic dancer-actor-clown of “The Portly Gentleman,” or the vicious, stupid, smalltime gangsters of “The Sun-Dodgers,” usually encountered at some revealing and decisive moment. A few of these tales—I’m thinking of the bitter brilliance of “It’s Mental Work” or the cheap perversions and double-crosses of “A Phase of Life”—are as effective as the best of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver. Yet it is only in the novels that O’Hara takes a longer look at his strange characters, showing them in the grip of corrosive social crosscurrents.

L

ike most cynics, O’Hara wishes things were different, and he sometimes conveys extreme compassion for the poor, lost, and lonely. But an O’Hara narrative is typically one of failure.

“Of course life is not made up of many good things; at least we don’t make milestones out of the good things as much as we do the bad,” says the narrator of BUtterfield 8 (1935), O’Hara’s second novel. The details vary from one case to another, but it’s always essentially the same trajectory. After reading one or two O’Hara books, we can guess how things will turn out.

Imagine a man in the driver’s seat of whichever automobile best represents his time and class (count on O’Hara to know the model).

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O’Hara’s short stories rarely permit him to do more than cast his contemptuously bloodshot gaze on a situation, evoking revulsion or pity but nothing more.

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Da nce

How Sweet Is It? 3 George Scialabba

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Hirschman revived the eighteenthcentury idea of doux commerce, or the civilizing effects of nascent capitalism.

9

166 1 The Baffler [no.24]

suppose you’re not entirely responsible for your obituary notices. When Albert Hirschman died in December 2012, the time-servers leaped in to claim his legacy, from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker to Cass Sunstein in the New York Review of Books to the anonymous Economist. Hirschman was their idea of a hero: solid empirical work (in development economics) early in his career, and wide-ranging reflections (mostly intellectual history) later on, sprinkled with allusions to literature and philosophy. He was civilized, polite, and imperturbable, his indignation always muted, his passions always hedged, his criticisms never quite grasping the root.

He had a left-wing youth, which found honorable expression in the Spanish Civil War and the Great Anti-Fascist War, and which he never noisily renounced but more or less quietly abandoned. The fifties effectively smothered him, as they did all but a very few academic social scientists.

One of Hirschman’s most popular essays, “Rival Views of Market Society,” revived the eighteenth-century idea of doux commerce, or the civilizing effects of nascent capitalism. “It is almost a general rule,” Montesquieu wrote in L’Esprit des Lois (1748), “that wherever manners are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, manners are gentle. . . . Commerce polishes and softens barbaric ways.”

Condorcet agreed; even the radical Thomas Paine argued that commerce “is the greatest approach towards universal civilization that has yet been made.”

How so? An obscure eighteenth-century writer explained: “Commerce . . . makes him who was proud and haughty suddenly turn supple, bending, and serviceable. Through commerce man learns to deliberate, to be honest, to acquire manners, to be prudent and reserved in both thought and action. Perceiving the need to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least takes care to appear decent and serious. . . . He avoids scandal for fear of damaging his credit rating.” He might have been channeling the dime-a-dozen contemporary conservative pundits who preach virtue to the poor and congratulate the rich: William Kristol, William Bennett, Charles Murray, George Will, David Brooks.

Some writers get downright sentimental. The nineteenth-century social theorist Georg Simmel waxed lyrical about competition, comparing it to courtship. It “compels the wooer . . . to go out to the wooed, come close to him, establish ties with him, find out his strengths and weaknesses and adjust to them. . . . Again and again

u

“Modern capitalist life is love-saturated.”

Sure it is.

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DAV I D J O H N S O N

it achieves what usually only love can do: it divines the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them.”

The economic historian Deirdre McCloskey takes this rhetoric over the top and around the bend: “Markets and even the muchmaligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a traditional village. Modern capitalist life is love-saturated.” Sure it is.

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