No. 25 by The Baffler

K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R

No. 25

Con t e n t s : The Baffler, no. 25 Isolatoes

Friends in Low Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Veiled Pensioners of the Mystic Sofa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Brown Noser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Zapped by the Invisible World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dreams Incorporated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Earth Liberation Stunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

MARK DANCE Y

John Summers

Thomas Fr ank

Natasha Vargas-Cooper Barbar a Ehrenreich

Living the delayed life with Amway Matt Roth

Hugh McGr aw

Photo Graphic BR AD HOLL AND

Sizing Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Michael Northrup

Politics by Other Memes

World Processor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Noise from Nowhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Tip and Gip Sip and Quip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jacob Silver man

The cable news jihad against human intelligence Jason Linkins LILY PADUL A

The politics of never Chris Br ay

The None and the Many

Dallas Killers Club . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like Reality TV . . . . . . . . . . .

The Jim Crow Soft-Shoe Segregationists of St. George . . .

How JFK got shot Nicholson Baker STEPHEN KRONINGER

Todd VanDerWerff Tom Gogola

The Dollar Debauch

Brothers from Another Planet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris Lehmann

Reformers

4 1 The Baffler [no.25]

JebFest: The Education Miracle That Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t . . . . . . . . . . .

108

The Business of America is Dirty Tricks . . . . . . . . . . . . .

116

MICHAEL DUFF Y

Jennifer C. Berkshire

Meet the United States Chamber of Commerce Lee Fang

The None and the Many Hope and Ka-ching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

128

Slumming It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

136

Workers of the world, apply here Astr a Taylor

The gospel of wealth comes for Dharavi Daniel Brook

Story

Among Friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya

Solitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Melina K ameriÄ&#x2021;

Poems

from Book of Conceptual Anarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Peter Payack

146

41, 48

Route 202 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Maybe Next Time Around . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Edwin Fr ank

Joshua Moses

To Be Rid of a Rival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

155

Placard at the Los Angeles Excavation Site, 5002 A.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

164

Melissa Monroe

Elise Partridge

Pistols for Two

Soak the Rich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An exchange on capital, debt, and the future D avid Gr aeber and Thomas Piketty

City of Blight

Break on Through, Abbot Kinney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Venice, California Helaine Olen

In Memoriam

Seen Dave? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Patrick JB Flynn

R ANDALL ENOS

DAVID SUTER

148

STEVE BRODNER

156 166

LISA HANE Y

Exhibitions

3 73 Henrik Drescher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Briony Morrow-Cribbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Lewis Koch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Walter S. H. Hamady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Br ad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chris Labrooy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

HAZEL LEE SANTINO

The

Baffler [no.25] ! 5

Po l i t i c s b y O t h e r M e m e s

World Processor 3 Jacob Silverman

onsider the plight of the office drone: more gadgeted-out than ever, but still facing the same struggle for essential benefits, wages, and dignity that workers have for generations. Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress, forecasting a transformation of Information Age labor into irrepressible acts of impassioned fun. But we know all too well the painful truth about today’s ordinary work routines: they have become more, not less, routinized, soul-killing, and laden with drudgery. The contrast between the glum reality of cubicle labor and the captivating rhetoric of Internet liberation, which once seemed daft and risible, doesn’t anymore; now it’s only galling. In recent years, for instance, the term “creative” has been captured by advertising agencies, who’ve bestowed on it a capital C and made it into a noun, a coveted job title meant to signify Mad Men–style braggadocio. But all this businesscard-ready term usually denotes is someone who writes copy for Google AdWords or applies Photoshop filters to an image of an anatomically impossible woman in carnal embrace with a bottle of vodka. Even software programmers, once the Brahmins of the new economy, must contend with diminished status. The costs of launching a company have declined, so everyone is doing it. Direct your thanks to the glut of cheap engineering talent in Russia and India and the boom market in cloud computing, where a half-dozen companies control the digital infrastructure of hundreds of others, including Snapchat, Netflix, and the CIA. Please donate to your neighbor’s Kickstarter on your way out, and don’t mind the venture 20 1 The Baffler [no.25]

capitalists lazing nearby—they’ll still manage to get theirs, as bankers usually do. Every city hungry to attract high-spending digital workers, from Austin to New York to Chattanooga, now lays claim to its own Silicon district, and lavishes potential corporate recruits with tax breaks and face time with the mayor. But the cyber touts in city government suffer their own version of the digital workplace’s bait and switch. In place of, say, a stream of tax revenues to revive decrepit public transport, they’ll end up with a smartphone app that links commuters with gray-market taxi drivers. At the same time, disconsolate holders of humanities degrees, who once may have caught on in a human resources, customer service, or speechwriting department, have found their jobs outsourced or automated. A glut of digital labor markets—oDesk, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit—lets companies summon pliable workforces on demand (a postindustrial reserve army, you might say) and deploy them at the stroke of a cursor to perform tasks that in better days would have gone to full-time employees: checking on store displays, organizing documents, performing transcription, writing newsletters. Even translation has become digitized and highly distributed; users of the Duolingo language-learning app are unwittingly translating articles—gratis—for BuzzFeed, CNN, and other media giants. Such are the perverse rewards we reap when we permit tech culture to become our culture. The profits and power flow to the platform owners and their political sponsors. We get the surveillance, the data mining, the soaring inequality, and the canned pep talks from bosses who have been upsold on analytics software. Without Gchat, Twitter, and Face-

What happened to the dream of the creative workplace? Was it really a nightmare all along?

9 Was the noble dream really a nightmare all along? This latter option seems the likeliest. After all, the dramatic downturn in the quality of white-collar labor hasn’t come about due to any slough in the core project of boosting worker productivity. Quite the opposite. As technology has advanced, so has productivity, just as the sunniest macroeconomic forecasters would expect. But the workers most responsible for carrying out improved routines of proLINDA WIENS | PROCESSED WORLD NO. 1 ductivity are reaping none of the gains. book—the great release valves of workaday It’s not just that technological innovaennui—the roofs of metropolitan skyscrapers tion has failed to bring about a more equitable, would surely be filled with pallid young faces, less labor-intensive society, contrary to the wondering about the quickest way down. predictions of our daring prophets of leisured abundance from the 1950s onward. It’s also The Theory of that the lords of capital have used the very the Sub-leisured Class promise of technological revolution to extract So what has happened, exactly, to the noble ever more value from workers. Stock indices dream of the creative workplace? Is it simply and corporate profits hover near all-time highs that the giddy, VC-fueled idealism of the first precisely because in the last forty years, most wave of web startups was always destined to Americans’ wages have barely kept up with income crashing down into the pinched, clockflation, much less increased in proportion with watching rounds of glorified make-work that their output. have long bloated the days of insurance clerks Technology, from an Excel spreadsheet to and budget auditors? Or is there some more an assembly-line robot, may make aspects of revealing and insidious dynamic at play here? our jobs easier. But that’s at most a collateral The

Baffler [no.25] ! 21

Po l i t i c s b y O t h e r M e m e s

Noise from Nowhere The cable news jihad against human intelligence 3 Jason Linkins

n Saturday, January 4, 2014, Melissa Harris-Perry, host of the eponymous MSNBC show, began her broadcast with a sober announcement: Without reservation or qualification, I apologize to the Romney family. Adults who enter into public life implicitly consent to having less privacy. But their families, and especially their children, should not be treated callously or thoughtlessly. My intention was not malicious, but I broke the ground rule that families are off-limits, and for that I am sorry.

Oh, dear. What happened? Well, a week earlier Harris-Perry had invited a group of comedians onto her show, in an attempt to “look back in laughter” at the year gone by. Among other things, Harris-Perry thought it would be fun for the comedians to take a glance at “a number of photos that caught our attention over the course of the year” and provide whimsical captions for them. One of the photos that had apparently done the trick was an image of Mitt Romney as paterfamilias, posing with his extended family of grandchildren. The twist was that one of said grandchildren is an adopted African American child—a solitary figure of color stranded in a sea of ultrawhite Mormon family togetherness. It was the sort of scene that seemed to call out for mischievous comment, and Harris-Perry and her panel wasted little time obliging. “One of these things is not like the others,” said actor Pia Glenn. Comedian Dean Obeidallah added, “I think this picture is great. It really sums up the diversity of the Re30 1 The Baffler [no.25]

publican Party, the RNC. At the convention, they find the one black person.” Harris-Perry, apropos of God knows what, mused about a future tryst between Romney’s adopted grandchild and North West, daughter of pop culture icons Kanye West and Kim Kardashian: “Can you imagine Mitt Romney and Kanye West as in-laws?” No, but it doesn’t take a genius to imagine what happened next—a fierce derecho of outrage from conservatives. So, to put a stop to the furor, Harris-Perry submitted herself to the mercy of her viewers and apologized. And this was no ordinary apology; she didn’t simply treat the Romney segment as an order of old business and move on to the day’s new quotient of overwrought liberal political comment. Instead, she did something that no one on television is permitted to—least of all, it seems, the purveyors of cable-ready punditry from fixed ideological vantage points. Melissa Harris-Perry took a time-out from her network’s perpetual certainty to survey the implications of her regrettable actions. She became self-aware, on the air. It was like watching someone describe an out-of-body experience, a moment in which she had become completely unmoored from the sturdy coordinates of her public identity. Like a fallen penitent in a Hawthorne story, Harris-Perry worried over the unthinkable character of her trespass, seeming to marvel at the strange utterances that had unaccountably issued forth from her sinful mouth. At bottom, the apology amounted to a plea to her viewers to see her as she now saw herself:

LILY PADUL A

Why think when you can feel? Why have simple emotions, when high dudgeon and lusty outrage offer such heroic highs?

9 The

Baffler [no.25] ! 31

Po l i t i c s b y O t h e r M e m e s

Tip and Gip Sip and Quip The politics of never 3 Chris Br ay

pen the book to the first page of the preface, and of course George Washington is sitting there on horseback, dreaming of his young nation and its glorious future. He’s there on the last page, too, looking down from a hillside at “this swamp along the Potomac,” boldly imagining the day when the muddy wasteland will become “the seat of a great new Republic.” But oh, reader, wouldn’t the great man’s bright and glowing eyes cloud over if he could see what we’ve become? Politicians aren’t pals anymore, and they aren’t behaving themselves. “Today we have government by tantrum,” and the District of Columbia is sullied. Chris Matthews is so heroically gifted at pumping out raw bilge that you would think the rest of the D.C. press corps could just retire and let the one roaring apparatus fill up all the cable TV shows and all the op-ed pages and all the clickbaitable lists on all the politics websites you look at every day but wish you didn’t. Identify the most obvious political idea in any given context, and then imagine the most obvious image you could use to illustra—nope, too late, Chris Matthews already got there. In his latest secretion, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (Simon & Schuster, 2013), Matthews describes a world in which we’ve lost the traditional decency and friendliness of American politics. Take a moment and read that sentence a few more times. As the title suggests, Matthews regards the Reagan administration as a high point, an age in which a pair of gifted leaders sat down together and agreed to make the world 42 1 The Baffler [no.25]

a better place. President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill were both Irish Americans, so they told jokes and stories to one another, so government happened, and it was all more or less wonderful. Really: The outsider and the insider: these two moved together in a remarkable, if sometimes rough, tandem. They argued mightily, each man belting out his separate, deeply cherished political philosophy—but then they would, both together, bow to the country’s judgment. Decisions were made, action taken, outcomes achieved. They honored the voters, respected the other’s role. Each guy liked to beat the other guy, not sabotage him. . . . Why, we wonder, can’t it be that way again?

By the time the book gets to its thin recitation of the Iran-Contra scandal, the scent of nostalgia has mostly been subsumed by the odor of bile—or, more to the point, by the odor of the Nicaraguan dead. But this is the effect only for readers; Matthews himself chugs along, telling chipper stories about the days when leaders made nice and American politics worked. By golly, we used to illegally ship weapons to Central American death squads—where did it all go wrong? If only we could get back to the start. As Matthews concludes, The worse things get in Washington—the more threats of shutdown weaken the country’s confidence in government; the more eleventh-hour stopgap deals come along to demoralize us; the more personal attacks are

STEPHEN KRONINGER

Chris Matthews is so heroically gifted at pumping out raw bilge that you would think the rest of the D.C. press corps could just retire.

9 performed on cue for the cameras; the more nasty tweets—the more people who care about our republic look back to an idea of when the world worked the way it’s supposed to.

Days of Rage But let’s bring George Washington down from the high horse Matthews puts him on: American politics never worked that way, and no one ever thought it did. Joanne Freeman, a history professor at Yale, has written the best book of the last

twenty years about the political elites of the early American republic.* It’s about the ways they managed their hate and rage, the ways that they got through their days without too badly losing control of the feelings of disgust they had for one another. The rules were distinctly personal in this “maelstrom of discontent,” but they weren’t rules about being nice: they were rules about not getting shot. With their behavior regulated by the real possibility of violence, national political figures were expected to channel their interpersonal loathing down a few narrow paths; the code of hon-

* Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2001). The

Baffler [no.25] ! 43

The None and the Many KILLER BOOKS

Dallas Killers Club How JFK got shot 3 Nicholson Baker

here were three horrible public executions in 1963. The first came in February, when the prime minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassem, was shot by members of the Ba’ath party, to which the United States had furnished money and training. A film clip of Qassem’s corpse, held up by the hair, was shown on Iraqi television. “We came to power on a CIA train,” said one of the Ba’athist revolutionaries; the CIA’s Near East division chief later boasted, “We really had the Ts crossed on what was happening.” The second execution came in early November 1963: the president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was shot in the back of the head and stabbed with a bayonet, in a coup that was encouraged and monitored by the United States. President Kennedy was shocked at the news of Diem’s gruesome murder. “I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said. “I should never have given my consent to it.” But Kennedy sent a congratulatory cable to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to South Vietnam, who had been in the thick of the action. “With renewed appreciation for a fine job,” he wrote. The third execution came, of course, later that month, on November 22. I was six when it happened. I wasn’t in school because we were moving to a new house with an ivy-covered tree in front. My mother told me that somebody had tried to kill the president, who was at the hospital. I asked how, and she said that a bullet had hit the president’s head, probably injuring his brain. She used the word “brain.” I asked why, and she said she didn’t know. I sat on a patch of carpeting in an empty room, 50 1 The Baffler [no.25]

I was six when it happened. My mother told me that somebody had tried to kill the president.

9 believing that the president would still get better, because doctors are good and wounds heal. A little while later I learned that no, the president was dead. Since that day, till very recently, I’ve avoided thinking about this third assassination. Any time I saw the words “Lee Harvey Oswald” or “grassy knoll” or “Jack Ruby,” my mind quickly skipped away to other things. I didn’t go to see Oliver Stone’s JFK when it came out, and I didn’t read DeLillo’s Libra, or Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, or Posner’s Case Closed, or any of the dozens of mass-market paperbacks—many of them with lurid black covers and red titles—that I saw reviewed, blamed, praised. But eventually you have to face up to it somehow: a famous, smiling, waving New Englander, wearing a striped, monogrammed shirt, sitting in a long blue Lincoln Continental next to his smiling, waving wife, has his head blown open during a Texas parade. How could it happen? He was a good-looking person, with an attractive family and an incredible plume of hair, and although he wasn’t a very effective or even, at times, a very well-intentioned president—he increased the number of thermonuclear warheads, more than doubled the budget for chemical and biological weapons,

MICHAEL DUFFY

The

Baffler [no.25] ! 51

The None and the Many BOOB TUBED

Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like Reality TV 3 Todd VanDerWerff

t’s one of the more curious features of our age of culture-war spectacle that, just as Americans are all set to retreat into the comforting, formulaic pleasures of our mass entertainments, we’re suddenly riven by the news that we’re also employing them as platforms for some ideological agenda or another. The most recent case in point was last winter’s uproar over the ignorant, homophobic tirade that Phil Robertson, star of the hit A&E reality TV franchise Duck Dynasty, unleashed to a reporter from GQ. Robertson’s outburst was little more than a rehash of talking points well trod by the evangelical right, from the claim that sodomy segues directly to bestiality to the prophecy that gays will not come into possession of the Kingdom of God. But to hear them come from a gruff-talking and otherwise beloved televisual symbol of Louisiana’s backwoods working class, as opposed to the likes of Rick Santorum or Ralph Reed, was enough to summon the pseudopopulist rhetoric of cultural confrontation in ampedup form. After A&E executives suspended Robertson over his comments, conservative political leaders from Sarah Palin to Bobby Jindal rallied to the defense of his free-speech rights in the workplace—protections that, by the way, our courts have routinely denied to Americans and that, in any event, are almost laughably inapt for someone tasked with adopting a largely scripted identity for the sake of lifestyle titillation. The great Duck Dynasty culture war skirmish ran its course soon enough. Robertson was grudgingly reinstated to the show’s cast, and he seems to have agreed, just as grudg64 1 The Baffler [no.25]

ingly, to keep his bigoted views out of range of reporters’ voice recorders. The blowback from the whole contretemps was likewise predictable, and served to confirm what no end of opinion polls and failed gay-marriage bans have already demonstrated: gay bashing is no longer a very popular or respectable American pastime. In January 2014, the month after the Robertson fracas began, Duck Dynasty ratings plummeted 28 percent. While the culture-war maneuvers of the Robertson scandal weren’t especially edifying, they did help to lay bare the distempers that make Duck Dynasty essential viewing in the first place. And they get at the great taboo subject that reality TV flirts with continually without ever airing in the light of day: the complicated tensions surrounding class privilege in America.

You Hand in Your Ticket to Go Watch the Geeks It’s easy, of course, to make sport of the boom in reality television. The cynical premise lurking behind many reality franchises—We’ll make you famous, so long as you are prepared to gratuitously humiliate yourself before an audience of millions—confirms all the gruesome stereotypes about the Hollywood power elite that you’d find in a novel by Nathanael West or Bruce Wagner. And the content of most reality shows caroms between overt class voyeurism (on either the upper or lower reaches of the social ladder) and the sort of tabloid-style indignation summed up by the familiar tagline that daytime talk shows have bequeathed to our common tongue: Oh no she didn’t!

GR AHAM ROUMIEU

Why doesn’t the reality genre traffic more directly in the economic reality of its subjects’ lives?

9 The

Baffler [no.25] ! 65

The None and the Many WHITE BLIGHT

The Jim Crow Soft-Shoe Segregationists of St. George 3 Tom Gogola

he Mall of Louisiana is a sprawling, indoor-outdoor retail complex whose commodity affiliations run the gamut from a tucked-away Spencer’s sin emporium to an ever-bustling Chick-fil-A in the food court. There’s a smattering of region-specific shops, including one called Storyville, which offers ersatz totems of the heyday of New Orleans jazz life. It shares the name of, but exactly nothing else about, the neighborhood where Louis Armstrong grew up. But this blandified memorial to a far livelier cultural past does have totemic significance of its own. Located in the suburban settlement of St. George, the Mall of Louisiana—and most particularly, the millions in tax revenue it generates—was, until recently, ground zero in a fiercely pitched battle over the economic, political, and racial makeup of Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital city. This May, the Baton Rouge city council voted to annex the mall firmly within the city’s borders—thus claiming for the majority-black city one of the key economic prizes that had been in the sights of a new cohort of affluent (and mostly white) would-be municipal secessionists. But that setback for the region’s secessionist forces is unlikely to slow the momentum of their movement, which thrives on a powerful compound of free-market development stratagems, movement-conservative swagger, and new-millennial racial animus. St. George, like many of the predominantly white and well-off communities that have sprung up along the New South’s exurban interior, has drawn a steady stream of salaried professional workers away from the commercial

74 1 The Baffler [no.25]

center of Baton Rouge, which hosts not only the state government, but also Louisiana State University. According to the regional-development playbook touted by social prophets such as Richard Florida, the capital city should be a magnet for the Information Age’s knowledge elite, who are known to savor the funky authenticity of subculture-friendly communities. But there’s, you know, Storyville the mall logo and then there’s Storyville the legendary urban neighborhood. Baton Rouge may have attractive research and lobbying concerns, and a robust jobs economy, but a quarter of the population there is living in poverty. Fifty-five percent is black. These trends have continued in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 landfall. Up to four hundred thousand storm evacuees, mostly from New Orleans, fled to Baton Rouge, and some never left. Many of them, too, are poor and black. So in recent months, the professional class of St. George has grown restive. Baton Rouge’s rump southern suburb is now looking to put itself on the map as a new city, steeped in the great American first principles of piety and untrammeled free enterprise. Incorporation activists have been collecting signatures in a petition drive to put the issue to a vote—a vote that, under state law, would be limited to residents of St. George. Anticipating a favorable outcome, a local group, with image-and-branding help from a staunchly conservative media-consulting firm, has already launched a website heralding the arrival of the City of St. George. Nominally, the secession movement in St. George is about schools and local control. The architects of the incorporation plan

R ANDALL ENOS

Enter TPG Capital, very, very quietly, stage right.

9 The

Baffler [no.25] ! 75

v Th e

Doll a r Deb auch

Brothers from Another Planet 3 Chris Lehmann

hether we like it or not, the big idea behind American democracy is to make us like each other more. It’s a faintly embarrassing dimension of our social experiment, carved out of the crack-up of the original British colonies, that the great theorists and practitioners of new world order in America were looking for something more than political independence. They sought to create a basis for the small-r republican ideal of fraternity: a territorially limited, widely participatory, and socially equitable economy made up principally of small producers— home manufacturers, merchants, and farmers. Only on such a basis, the theory went, could America be prevented from regressing into anarchy, despotism, or worse. But things didn’t exactly go as planned. Come the Jacksonian age, the legal interpreters of the U.S. Constitution, spurred on by the directives of a fast-consolidating national and corporate economy, ratcheted the whole enterprise upward into something that many of the founders would have seen as a blatant contradiction in terms: a “commercial republic,” as the jurisprudence of the Federalist-onthe-make John Marshall (echoing the political rhetoric of his close political ally Daniel Webster) had it. The Federalists’ great work of constitutional revisionism posed as a hard-bitten brand of realism—a way to revise the airy abstractions of the rights of man and the cradle of liberty so as to make them reflect how the world putatively works. In reality, though, the Federalists’ commercial republic was just utopianism of a different stripe, one that posited a monad-style assemblage of rationally self-interested market actors at the vanguard

86 1 The Baffler [no.25]

of American social relations and then remade the nation’s founding political sensibility in their image. Employing the iron-clad, twodimensional reasoning of judicial review, the jurisprudence of the emerging corporate age effectively rendered the social heart of the republic so much bread-and-circuses shadow play. The lower-born, militia-serving citizenry of civic republican lore gave way to the countinghouse and the bond trader. Thomas Paine’s revolutionary cry for a “brotherhood of man” no longer served any clear purpose in an age that was much closer in spirit to a Cornelius Vanderbilt—or, on the receiving end of the Market Revolution’s less-than-tender mercies, a Bartleby the Scrivener. So it takes a good deal of work, and no small amount of the old optimism of the will, to begin reengaging with the fraternal ideal in any substantive fashion. “Social media” is every bit the same contradiction in terms that the “commercial republic” of the nineteenth century was—and yet there it sits in its undisturbed glory, rationalizing the many utopian putsches of our own new-millennial Market Revolution. Our social media has converted “friend” into a verb, transacted in the space of a keystroke, while also somehow contriving to make “following” and “unfollowing” badges of fraternity. Surely there must be some more coherent way to summon the battered spirit of American fraternity than to continue miniaturizing it into nothingness— or worse, perhaps, the melancholy, pixelated vapor trail of a retweet or a “Like” button. And it’s not as if you can look for help in the many high-concept simulacra of fraternity burbling through the placid brooks of our academically respectable and politically

DAVID SUTER

Fraternity, like solidarity, its twentieth-century cousin, becomes a hushed and forlorn echo of American politics past.

9 opportunistic social commentary. You have your communitarian theorists, peddling requiems for an unmourned age of procedurally recursive Deweyite daydreaming. You have your wonky theorists of the neoliberal “nudge,” your difference-trimming think tanks in hot pursuit of an ever-mythical postideological pragmatism at the heart of a still-more mythical American “vital center.”

You’ve got your prim, all-purpose pleas for greater “civility” (or its creepier homiletic variant, “civil religion”), your ritual bemoanings of “hyperpartisanship” in a political culture chronically incapable of getting even the simplest things done, even as it’s funded on an ever more Caligulan scale. Then you’ve got your libertarian Nobelists, busy managing the acceptable bounds of economic debate, The

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wS T O R Y

Among Friends 3 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

’m a direct person, always smirking and poking fun when we all get together at Marisha and Serge’s on Fridays. Everybody comes. If one of us misses a Friday, it’s because he or she couldn’t get away, or has been banished by the enraged Marisha or the entire gang. Andrey the informer, for example, was banished for a long time after socking Serge in the eye, that’s right. Can you imagine? Serge, our bright star, our precious genius! Serge has figured out the working principle of flying saucers. I looked at his calculations: some universal point of departure, some this, some that—a bunch of nonsense, if you ask me, and I’m very smart. You see, Serge doesn’t read about his subject. He relies on intuition—a mistake, in my opinion. Some time ago he intuited a way to increase the energy efficiency of a steam engine from fifteen to seventy percent—a miracle. He was feted, presented to the members of the Academy of Science. One academician came to his senses and pointed out that this very principle was discovered a hundred years ago and described in a college textbook on page such and such; the same textbook explains why it doesn’t work. The miracle was canceled; seventy percent became thirty-six, also purely theoretical, but by this point a special unit had been set up at the academy to study Serge’s so-called discovery, and Serge was invited to be the head. A mass rejoicing among our friends followed—Serge didn’t even have a PhD! But Serge chose to stay at his miserable job in the Oceanography Institute, because they had been planning an expedition with stops in Boston, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Montreal—six months of sun and freedom— and Serge hoped to go too. The thirty-six percent unit, in the mean96 1 The Baffler [no.25]

time, began operating at a leisurely pace. They fetched Serge once or twice for a consultation, but soon got the hang of the utopian project: to replace all modern technology with an impossibly efficient steam engine. This stupendous goal was to be accomplished by five people jammed into a single room, who divided work hours between cafeteria and smoking room. In addition, the head of the unit, who was hired instead of Serge and did have a PhD, was having a child on the side any moment, and the parents of the woman had filed a complaint against him. He spent his workdays screaming on the phone in the same room with the other staff. Our Lenka was the lab assistant there; she told us all the gossip. As far as Lenka could tell, no one once mentioned Serge’s principle. All that had been accomplished was a draft of an application to use the lab for three hours after midnight when the building is closed, as if anyone were going to be there. Serge’s bid for sun and freedom also came to nothing. In his Party questionnaire he wrote that he wasn’t a member of the Komsomol, but in his original job application he had written that he was. The Party committee responsible for approving everyone who went abroad compared the paperwork and discovered that Serge had simply stopped paying his dues, just like that, and that couldn’t be fixed by anything, so the committee didn’t admit him. All this was told to us by Andrey, who also worked there, and who stopped by Marisha’s one Friday night, drank some vodka, and then revealed in a fit of honesty that he’d promised to inform on the other members of that expedition—that’s how the Party committee had admitted him. He said we shouldn’t tell him anything, even though he

HAZEL LEE SANTINO

Every Friday we come, as though magnetized, to the little apartment on Stulin Street.

9 The

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Re f o r m e r s

JebFest: The Education Miracle That Isn’t 3 Jennifer C. Berkshire

eb Bush’s annual education summit has dents first, Bush’s FEE cuts a distinctive figbarely begun, but already the scholarure. Started by the former Florida governor ship window at the Sheraton Boston is doin 2008, FEE assumes that business leaders ing a brisk business. It’s an early morning in know exactly what it is that the nation’s longOctober, and elected officials are lined up outsuffering schoolchildren need to succeed. It side of the space that usually serves as the hotherefore follows, you see, that elected offitel coatroom. They are applying for payments cials of both parties should serve as the handthat will cover the cost of their travel to Boston maids of these captains of industry. The main and back, along with two nights at the hotel: job, for elected officials and policy professioncityscape or Charles River views, their choice. als alike, is to clear the educational scene of These scholarships are a sweet deal—esthe failed and destructive conceits of publicpecially if you’re, say, a local school board sector pedagogy so that business can deliver member who rarely gets to experience an allthe goods. For the kids, you understand. expenses-paid junket. They’re also, if not il On stage, Jeb, who resembles less an aspirlegal, then somewhere between ash grey and ing presidential candidate than a higher-end gunmetal on the ethics spectrum. In fact, just Rotarian, serves up the education-reform equivalent of red meat. Our classrooms are one day before the summit, advocacy group mired in mediocrity, he laments—a sad and ProgressNow New Mexico filed a complaint sorry state that jeopardizes America’s status with the IRS alleging that Bush’s Foundation as the most dominant nation on earth. Worse for Excellence in Education, known in all seriousness as FEE, had failed to disclose payyet, those invested in the status quo of failments to public officials on its tax forms. The ure—an enormous army into which he lumps the nation’s 3.3 million teachIRS requires nonprofits to Jeb is serving up ers—are fighting harder than report payments for public ever to keep it. He gazes out officials’ travel and entertainthe education-reform ment if they exceed $1,000. over the tops of his specta Such arcane niceties of equivalent of red meat. cles, shaking his head slowly, nonprofit compliance are far morosely: “Empires do not afield from the main event go quietly into the night.” today, however. The grand ballroom has been But there’s good news, too, and lest his audiabuzz all morning because the man of the hour, ence slump into despair, Bush morphs into Jeb Bush himself, is about to take the stage. the shiny-suited salesman whose products are The National Summit on Education Reform, guaranteed to put us on a path to excellence— a.k.a. JebFest 2013, is officially under way. if only we’d let them. Even in the comically overcrowded land The products are familiar: more charter scape of organizations seeking to fix our failed schools, more vouchers, more tax-credit scholand failing public schools and at last put stuarships (a complex boondoggle in which corpo-

108 1 The Baffler [no.25]

STEVE BRODNER

rations can claim a fistful of tax deductions by giving money to nonprofits that grant private-school scholarships). But it’s when Jeb starts talking about technology that he really takes flight. It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards

who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs The

Baffler [no.25] ! 109

Re f o r m e r s

The Business of America is Dirty Tricks Meet the United States Chamber of Commerce 3 Lee Fang

ny glance at the inert state of political progress in our market-addled age has to leave even the most dogged investigator a bit bewildered. We live, after all, in an era of economic and ideological drift—of street occupations and ballot-box insurgencies. Yet our institutions of national government remain in shameful fealty to a laissezfaire fantasy. With metronomic predictability, the wise men of Washington preach austerity amid a raging jobs recession and wish away the bulwarks of economic security that make life in these United States (barely) tolerable for fixed-income retirees and poor people who have had the unpardonable bad taste to fall ill. As major manufacturing metropolises go bankrupt, as wages continue to go south while productivity climbs, as mortgages and pension plans are pillaged by the bailed-out banking class, we are trapped in a political consensus that urges government continually to shrink and depicts tax increases on the rich as an unholy abomination against the market’s righteous will. Why, for God’s sake? One answer comes from a place that few Americans spend much time thinking about: the stodgy and terminally respectable U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group best known for its civic booster speeches and “young entrepreneur” scholarships. What has the U.S. Chamber of Commerce done to advance the undoing of the American middle-class dream? One might ask, far more efficiently, what the Chamber hasn’t done along these lines. The group, which commands an 116 1 The Baffler [no.25]

annual budget of more than $200 million covering six legal sub-entities, has proven a diehard foe of federal health care reform, global warming legislation, rational tax policy, and virtually any piece of legislation not designed to feather the nest of a plutocrat. And thanks to its little-noted recent makeover as a corporate sluicegate for soft-money campaign contributions, this formerly milquetoast business lobby is probably the main reason that the Tea Party will hold domestic policymaking in a functional state of suspended animation for the foreseeable future. At the moment, the D.C. media claims the Chamber is “at war” with the far-right fringe of the Republican establishment. The government shutdown, the conventional wisdom goes, split the business community from Tea Party leaders. Yet a closer examination of the record shows that little has changed; the right wing of the GOP still benefits from the Chamber’s largesse. In March the Chamber presented awards to dozens of lawmakers for championing the “Spirit of Enterprise.” The awardees included many leaders of the hostage-taking last fall. And true to form, while pledging to reporters that they would oppose the proponents of the shutdown in their election campaigns, the Chamber has already aired campaign advertisements in favor of GOP congressmen who voted to shutter the federal government. The Koch brothers may get most of the credit for funding the antigovernment right, but the Chamber funded a large number of

LISA HANE Y

What has the Chamber of Commerce done to advance the undoing of the American middle-class dream? One might ask what it hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t done.

9 The

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Re f o r m e r s

Hope and Ka-ching Workers of the world, apply here 3 Astr a Taylor

veryone is equal at New Era Windows Cooperative, a factory on the southwest side of Chicago. There is no owner to answer to because everyone is an owner; there are no outside shareholders to choose a board of directors. There is no boss because the workers fired him. I paid a visit to the New Era plant, housed in a towering building full of commercial warehouses, to celebrate its grand opening on May 9, 2013. The air was heavy with nervous anticipation and pride. Assigned to decorating duty, I noticed one of the workers, an older fellow who rarely spoke or smiled, redoing my handiwork, rearranging props so they framed the podium symmetrically and rehanging the New Era banner so it was perfectly straight and the knots were evenly spaced. By 3 p.m. about fifty people had arrived—friends and family, union representatives, and local officials—filling a room that had been dark and cavernous only a few months before. The workers had installed lighting and painted the walls, mapped and cut drains in the cement floor, rigged the wiring, and transported massive window-building machines from across town on their own, saving themselves the tens of thousands of dollars it would have cost to hire outside movers. “We used to make windows, and now we can make factories,” said Melvin “Ricky” Maclin, who grew up a sharecropper in Tennessee. When it came time to cut the ribbon, all the workers lent a hand, an attempt to symbolize the difference between New Era and everywhere else they had worked. There are at least 150 million members 128 1 The Baffler [no.25]

of cooperatives in the United States, if you include retail, housing, agricultural, electrical, insurance, and most other types of coops. Eleven thousand American companies are owned wholly or in part by their workers through employee stock-ownership plans. Where these two groups intersect and go even further is in the four hundred worker cooperatives that exist in this country, enterprises that are owned by members and democratically run. As for cooperative factories, New Era is a rarity, among the only operations of its kind in the United States.

he story of New Era begins in late 2008, when workers occupied the newly closed Chicago factory of Republic Windows and Doors, demanding the severance and vacation pay they argued they were due under the law. Along with representatives of their union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the workers had been staking out the building around the clock, watching and following mysterious trucks hauling away machines and office furniture, confirming their suspicion that the business was not really being shut down at all but rather moved to another state where wages were lower and unions nonexistent. When the closing was officially announced, Republic’s 250 employees, some of whom had clocked thirty years on the job, were given three days notice of their termination. A group of workers decided to risk arrest and refused to go home, blocking anyone from moving or selling the plant’s remaining assets; they didn’t leave for almost a week.

ARTHUR BULLERS

The workers of New Era Windows Cooperative, along with Brendan Martin, at right, of the Working World.

Their timing was good. It was the first sitdown strike in many years, and thanks to the financial crisis and bank bailouts, the public was in no mood for the usual explanations from company management. The unionized Chicago police declined to drag the workers off the property, and soon local, and then national, politicians were falling over themselves to show support. (“I think they’re absolutely right,” said president-elect Barack Obama when a reporter asked for his thoughts on the issue.) Both the Right and the Left rallied to the workers’ defense: the occupation was praised by Fox News and immortalized in

Michael Moore’s film Capitalism: A Love Story. Labor activists and corporate executives alike believed the sit-down was a harbinger of things to come, a revival of the moribund labor movement. To appease a public they believed was ready for blood, the company’s bankers quickly granted a settlement, and victory was declared (though workers had to wait until last December to see Republic’s ex-chief, Richard Gillman, finally slapped with a four-year prison sentence for theft). Before long, the publicity attracted the hip CEO of a company called Serious Materials, who believed he could enThe

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Re f o r m e r s

Slumming It The gospel of wealth comes for Dharavi 3 Daniel Brook

n a speech to the financial elite of India delivered in Mumbai in 2010, president Barack Obama opted for an unusual form of flattery. He saluted “all the Mumbaikars who get up every day in this City of Dreams to forge a better life for their children—from the boardrooms of world-class Indian companies to the shops in the winding alleys of Dharavi.” It was a notable name-check. Despite the president’s mangled pronunciation, his audience of well-heeled Mumbaikars all knew what Obama was talking about. Dharavi is their metropolis’s most famous slum. Were Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to come to America and do the same— hail the impoverished workfare mothers of Anacostia while on a state visit to Washington, say, or give a shout-out to the tenants of Harlem’s housing projects during a speech on Wall Street—it would be an uncomfortable moment. But, of course, it would never happen. If Singh’s speechwriters tried to throw in a mention of a famous impoverished neighborhood, higher-ups would surely excise it. The American myth of equal opportunity is greatly cherished, they would inform the prime minister, so in the interest of being a gracious guest, let’s not mention the places that call it into question. But Obama’s tribute to Dharavi went over remarkably well. Those present at the tony U.S.-India Business Council summit seem to have taken it as the compliment he intended it to be. By the time the president sang the praises of Asia’s largest slum, as it’s known (although these days Karachi’s Orangi neighbor136 1 The Baffler [no.25]

hood is challenging it for that dubious distinction), the ideological precedent for this sort of thing was well established. Through a decade of academic apologetics and media mythologizing, Dharavi had been transmuted from India’s most shameful urban space—the warren of exploitation, filth, and disease that it plainly is—to the pride of Mumbai. Prince Charles had visited Dharavi on a postcolonial inspec-

ADAM FERGUSON | VII

Mumbai’s Dharavi, the most crowded slum in India—six hundred thousand people in five hundred acres—occupies some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

tion tour in 2003. (Prince Andrew would follow in 2012.) A cover story in National Geographic had presented Dharavi as a place of audacious dreamers. The Wall Street Journal had recommended Dharavi’s “dusty, bustling” leather goods market to “adventurous shop-

pers in search of true bargains,” and the New York Times had advised visitors to the Indian financial capital to take in Dharavi’s “hives of entrepreneurship,” where toil the “majority of Mumbaikars [who], of course, cannot afford nightclubs or cool boutiques.” By 2010 The

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wS T O R Y

Solitude 3 Melina Kamerić

’ve got money. But money means nothing. I have no visa. So I can’t leave the airport. I can’t take the express train to Vienna. So I drink Viennese coffee and eat Sachertorte. I’ll be trapped in Terminal C for a full seven hours. How many perfumes can you try out in the duty free shop for seven hours? How many gifts can you buy? Mozart candies. Refrigerator magnets. Mozart candies. More perfume. Coffee. I read yesterday’s paper. I hate being alone. At the airport. I hate being alone anywhere. I people-watch. I drink another coffee. The coffee makes me pee. I go to the toilet for the third time. And I’ve been here just an hour. Airports are catalogs of destiny. I watch people. I imagine stories. Who goes where. And why. And to whom? And to what? It makes it easier for me. I enter the toilet for the fourth time. A girl stands in front of the mirror. I have no idea why, but I feel an acute urge to ask how she is. She stands there with a suitcase and I know she’s been there an hour. I know because I watch people. I’ve seen her every time I’ve been to the toilet. I wash my hands next to her. And then, in a quiet, unobtrusive way, watching my reflection in the mirror, she says to me in poor English, “You are pretty.” I look her in the face and think, Oh God . . . she’s crying. “Where are you flying?” I ask her. “I don’t know . . .” she says. And tears roll down her cheeks. A scarf tied under her chin absorbs them. “Are you alone?” I ask the silliest possible question. We are all alone. 146 1 The Baffler [no.25]

“Yes . . . he left and told me to wait for him . . . here in the toilet . . .” I fear the answer . . . but still I ask, “And when did he leave you?” “Two days ago . . .” I feel my stomach clench. “Are you hungry?” She nods. I take her hand and lead her from the toilet. Her name is Fatma. Fatma’s stomach hurts. Fatma cries. Fatma is from Somalia. And I . . . I would have screamed. She takes a pill for the pain. She cries more. Quietly. Tears roll down her cheeks. She doesn’t know if she has a passport. He may have it. But he left. And told her to wait for him. In the toilet. She pulls a birth certificate from her pocket. Folded and worn. She’s twenty-one years old. And she says, “He will come back, Inshallah.” Her big watery eyes grow even bigger and wetter when she sees the people from airport security. She clutches my hand and waits for them to pass. She is afraid. Afraid of what will happen when they arrest her. She asks me if there’s a refugee camp in Bosnia. She asks me if Bosnia is in America. She cries. She says, “He’s coming, Inshallah!” She doesn’t want me to go with her to the police. She doesn’t know what she’ll say to him if he returns for her. I ask her, “Where did he bring you from?” She doesn’t know. She shrugs. She says, “I have no parents. Dead. I have a brother. But I don’t know if he’s alive.” And again she cries. Quietly. I forget everything. And time passes. Fatma cries.

JENSINE ECK WALL

They page me: “Last call for passenger Kamerić!” I leave Fatma in the toilet. I give her a phone number. I hug her. Fatma cries. Now I must leave. I hug her tightly. And I feel completely empty. I understand nothing. Nothing. Not solitude. Not sadness. Fatma remains. Alone. In the toilet at the Vienna airport, with sandwiches I crammed into her pockets and a crumpled Somalian birth certificate. And then I think, God keeps her. And her faith.

he contacts me ten days later. Finally someone from Vienna airport security noticed a young, beautiful woman who’d

been crying in the toilet for five days. Fatma no longer cries. She says they told her she’ll get asylum. She says I’m a good friend. I say, “Take care Fatma, may God protect you. And keep in touch, Fatma.” And then I slowly understand what solitude is. Solitude isn’t sitting alone in the airport in Vienna and wondering if someone will be waiting when you touch down at home. Solitude is the phone in the asylum center from which you call the only number you have.t Translated from the Bosnian by Jennifer H. Zoble. The

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Pist ol s f or Two

Soak the Rich An exchange on capital, debt, and the future 3 David Gr aeber and Thomas Piketty This exchange is from a conversation in Paris between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. It was held at the École Normale Supérieure; moderated by Joseph Confavreux and Jade Lindgaard; edited by Edwy Plenel; first published by the French magazine Mediapart last October; and translated from the French for The Baffler by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Moderators: You both appear to think that the prevailing economic and financial system has run its course, and cannot endure much longer in its present form. I would like to ask each of you to explain why. Thomas Piketty: I am not sure that we are on the eve of a collapse of the system, at least not from a purely economic viewpoint. A lot depends on political reactions and on the ability of the elites to persuade the rest of the population that the present situation is acceptable. If an effective apparatus of persuasion is in place, there is no reason why the system should not continue to exist as it is. I do not believe that strictly economic factors can precipitate its fall. Karl Marx thought that the falling rate of profit would inevitably bring about the fall of the capitalist system. In a sense, I am more pessimistic than Marx, because even given a stable rate of return on capital, say around 5 percent on average, and steady growth, wealth would continue to concentrate, and the rate of accumulation of inherited wealth would go on increasing. But, in itself, this does not mean an eco148 1 The Baffler [no.25]

nomic collapse will occur. My thesis is thus different from Marx’s, and also from David Graeber’s. An explosion of debt, especially American debt, is certainly happening, as we have all observed, but at the same time there is a vast increase in capital—an increase far greater than that of total debt. The creation of net wealth is thus positive, because capital growth surpasses even the increase in debt. I am not saying that this is necessarily a good thing. I am saying that there is no purely economic justification for claiming that this phenomenon entails the collapse of the system. Moderators: But you still say the level of inequality has become intolerable? Piketty: Yes. But there again, the apparatus of persuasion—or of repression, or a combination of the two, depending on what country you are considering—may allow the present situation to persist. A century ago, despite universal suffrage, the elites of the industrialized countries succeeded in preventing any progressive taxes. It took World War I to bring about a progressive income tax. David Graeber: But the indebtedness of one person has to imply the enrichment of another, don’t you think? Piketty: That is an interesting question. I loved your book, by the way. The only criticism I would have is that capital cannot be reduced to debt. It is true that more debt for some, public or private, is bound to increase the resources of others. But you do not directly address possible differences

C .K . WILDE

The

Baffler [no.25] ! 149

City of Blight

Break on Through, Abbot Kinney Venice, California 3 Helaine Olen

ne can think of gentrifying neighborhoods as the real estate equivalent of Ernest Hemingway’s bankrupt veteran in The Sun Also Rises. Change occurs gradually and then suddenly. Once upon a time, places like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, San Francisco’s Mission District, and Washington’s U Street Corridor were working-class neighborhoods. At some point, artists began to move in. The company was congenial and the price was right. They were able to get by selling handbeaded jewelry and living in the back of the shops, or working as political activists for low-paying, likely futile left-wing causes. We didn’t need to sell out to the man here. Then word gets out about the charm of the place. The next thing you know, it’s an artsthemed shopping mall. But no one can really say how and when it happened. Consider Venice, California, the Los Angeles beach community. It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when it became a playground for the upper classes. When I asked residents and business owners during a visit last summer what was happening to them, a surprising number blamed GQ , of all things. That’s because in 2012 the magazine that tells men how-to-shop-but-still-be-men proclaimed one of Venice’s main thoroughfares, Abbot Kinney Boulevard—which bisects the community for more than a mile beginning a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean—“The Coolest Block in America.” “Just about everything in GQ’s Style Bible (plus delicious cocktails and a swim) can be had on Abbot Kinney Boulevard,” GQ enthused about the rapidly gentrifying street,

156 1 The Baffler [no.25]

You can bike! Go to the beach! Shop! Enjoy the ocean breezes! Spend time on “the coolest block in America.”

9 calling out the “limited-edition sneaks from Japan (leopard print, yo!)” for sale at Waraku and describing the Jack Spade men’s shop—located in a turn-of-the-century bungalow—as “a groovy love shack” where customers can play Ping-Pong in the front yard. To be fair, GQ is a pleasure-industry tip sheet and not, say, a magazine that wants its readers to think about the meaning of it all. Its Venice recommendation didn’t need to mention the community’s past, when it was simultaneously a boho retreat and the site of gang warfare. Moreover, such celebrations are usually forgotten the day they are printed. This one, however, was not. The already substantial crowds exploded, led by a surge of twentysomethings hoping to find a combined shopping and party-time experience—so much so that LA Weekly, yet another arbiter of on-the-edge cool, proclaimed Venice’s shopping strip one of “Los Angeles’ Douchiest Neighborhoods.” As Weekly writer Dennis Romero put it, “Abbot Kinney is not so much a neighborhood as an exception to any concept of Venice as a place where artists, surfers, African Americans and Latinos used to rule.” Sigh.

K AREN BALL ARD

“Mr. X,” a muscleman regular on the Venice, California, boardwalk, shows off his stars and stripes.

Trout Salad, but Please Hold the Homeless Perhaps Venice’s final act began in 2008, when Gjelina opened on Abbot Kinney Blvd. Here was your typical glam-hip restaurant, this one known for its “nouveau-peasant fare,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. The reviews were excellent, and it immediately attracted long lines and fame (or notoriety) for a no-substitutions policy so intense that the unthinkable happened. A very pregnant diner by the name of Victoria Beckham—a.k.a. Posh Spice—was turned down by management when she requested Gjelina’s $13 small-plate smoked trout salad but asked that a number of the regular parts—grapefruit, avocados, lemon, and red onion—be laid to the side. International headlines ensued.

Success attracts imitators. Other high-end farm-to-table restaurants soon followed, advancing down Abbot Kinney and onto nearby Rose Avenue, where they elbow up against social-service organizations. The homeless now walk by the chic outdoor patio at Superba Snack Bar, wheeling shopping carts filled with their belongings. At the corner of Lincoln Boulevard and Rose, a 48,000-square-foot Whole Foods shares a strip mall with a Laundromat and a 99 Cents Only store. “Skid Rose, meet Restaurant Rose,” wrote a scribe for the Los Angeles Times. And then, in 2011, Google arrived and began snatching up property, moving more than four hundred employees into a campus near the beach. For Google, the artists and hipsters of Venice are the perfect prop, a way of The

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The None a nd the Ma ny

No.