No. 31 by The Baffler

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No. 31

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No. 31

The journal that blunts

the cutting edge

No. 31

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

EDIT OR IN CHIEF

PU BLISHER

SEN IOR EDIT OR

P U B L I S H I N G C ON S U LTA N T

M A N AG I N G E D I T O R

PR E SIDEN T

John Summers Chris Lehmann Lindsey Gilbert

A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S

Dave Denison Lucie Elven

Noah McCormack Hamilton Fish Valerie Cortés

9 W EB DE V EL OPER A N D C ON T EN T M A NAGER

James White

A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R

AU D I E N C E D E V E L O PM E N T A S S O C I AT E

P O E T RY E D I T O R

D E V E L O PM E N T A N D E V E N T S M A N AG E R

C ON T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R S

F I N A N C E M A N AG E R

Emily Carroll

Nicole Terez Dutton Barbara Ehrenreich Susan Faludi David Graeber Evgeny Morozov Rick Perlstein George Scialabba Jacob Silverman Anna Summers Astra Taylor Catherine Tumber Eugenia Williamson

Hannah Gais Eliza Fish

Dolores Rothenberg

FIXER

Zachary Davis

9 PA S T P U B L I S H E R S

The MIT Press, 2012–2014 Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011 Greg Lane, 1993–2007

FOU N DER S

Thomas Frank and Keith White

FOU N DING EDIT OR

Thomas Frank

9 D E S IG N A N D A R T D I R E C T O R

Patrick JB Flynn

P R O D U C T I ON A S S I S TA N T

Joan Flynn

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Acknowledgments Cassandra de Alba, Daniel Moattar—we salute you. Thanks likewise to Kelly Burdick for chipping in ideas and to New York Review Books Classics for giving us permission to reprint from their forthcoming volume of Robert Walser writings.

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA | 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010 USA thebaff ler.com © 2 0 1 6 T H E B A F F L E R F O U N DAT IO N , I N C .

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History Fake Out W

e began this issue feeling idly curious about the once and future role of architecture in effectuating social change. But it was hard to take our eyes off the flesh-and-bloodied presidential candidates. The whole group seemed to be reaching for the imperium by peddling backward-looking, twentiethcentury visions of “greatness.” Pondering the reactionary spectacle produced this issue, Memory Holes, a constellation of essays, poems, and illustrations blinking urgent messages through distinctive places and imagined locations. In our sights are a Christian theme park in Florida; a fast-privatizing stretch of wilderness in Montana; a zone of strip clubs in Boston; a collection of time capsules in Southern California; and the Hotel du Parc in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland—the original host site of neoliberal economics— now on its way to the ash heap, courtesy of firster, birther, and anti-free trade fantasies of the good old days of yesteryear. That the architecture of memory has become so central to identity and revanchist nationalism in Europe isn’t so surprising. The backward-tending political reaction that it conjures is potent, though. As we learn in this issue, the espousal of history and tradition on the Hungarian right spins out into a never-ending persecution complex—a fantasy of belonging that works to justify the repression of all those outside of history’s charmed circle. As for Americans, gawd luv us, we were always a people who could make the most out of amnesia. Hollywood’s movie set designers, as this issue reminds us, have typically preferred creating a fake facade over setting down in a real location. Between Emerson’s fabled Party of Memory and Party of Hope, we chose heritage.

RALPH STEADMAN

As Memory Holes came together, it seemed hideously fitting that a man whose business model is memorializing his surname on luxury buildings, golf courses, and casinos had finally crossed over from gag candidate to the presumptive GOP nominee. I take it personally. On April 26, Republican primary voters in Adams County, Pennsylvania, where I was born and raised, went big for Trump. This part of the country encompasses what Sarah Palin calls “real America”; the good farmers living there are rural, white, and Protestant, descended from German and Scots-Irish frontier settlers. To the summer touring public, the county seat, Gettysburg, is a synecdoche for the idea of our nation’s noble, redemptive history, a locus of collective memory. Just before the GOP’s last contested national convention, in August 1976, Ronald Reagan took a break from lobbying Pennsylvania’s uncommitted party delegates to motor about the battlefield’s Union and Confederate markers, bronze monuments, and equestrian statues. But that sort of display would be pretty tame by Trump’s standards. Better to use a Trump-branded helicopter to ferry delegates over to the Gettysburg farm of his fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower for an anti-immigration stemwinder. After all, it was Ike’s “Operation Wetback” that deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrant workers in the 1950s. It already happened here, back in America’s golden age. —John Summers the Baffler [no. 31] 1 3

T h e B a f f l e r ( no. 31) C on t e n t s

K i l l i ng Ti m e History Fake Out John Summers

O z y m a n di a s

F rom t h e A rc h i v e The Nostalgia Gap Tom Vanderbilt

Rick Perlstein and Daniel Tucker

Mark Dancey

True Fakes on Location World-building, Hollywood-style

W(h)ither the New Sensibility?

18 36

James Howard Kunstler

Poe m s Sorrow Is My Own Yard

The Slippery Slopes A dispatch from the birthplace of neoliberalism

All the Answers I Ask

Exit Planning

78 96

A mber A’lee Frost

The Naked City You can no longer get there from here Melissa Gir a Gr ant

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Martha McCollough David Winter

Artemisia Mourns Her Husband

Ola Morris Innset

Confession Booth The trouble with the trauma industry

Danniel Schoonebeek

Why so angry, Bluto?

Thomas Geoghegan

148

Metropolitan Museum of Rot 168 The shrinking future of the American City

Nathan C. Martin

134

Rochelle Gurstein

Tom Carson

Where the Wild Things Aren’t: National Parks

Knock Yourselves Out “Punching up” in American comedy Ben Schwartz

M e mory Hol e s Memoryland

123

Heather Havrilesky

C on v er s at ion Tick Tock

Delusion at the Gastropub On the foodie devolution

Sar ah Pearl Heard

After I Die Miriam Bird Greenberg

Narrated by Leonard Nimoy Michael Lynch

106

Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley

48 84 95 114 147 167

Me mory Hol e s

S t or i e s Spring Remember This The Precious One Robert Walser

Drums of Zaragoza Joe Dunthor ne

Wi l d G o ose C h a se

49 58 178 160

P ho t o G r a ph ic Industrial Landscape Bernhard Lang

A: Fr ances Jetter

B: Michael War aksa C: Jennifer Small D: Martin Mayo

Susan Faludi

E: Br ad Holland

Info-Sca m Hotdogs in Zion A day of revelations at Orlando’s Christian theme park

Lucy Ellmann

E x h i bi t ions

Wag t h e D o g m a Pity, O God, the Republican What America can learn from Hungary’s “Viktator”

116

Birdies of America

F: Henrik Drescher

Ba f f l om at h y

8 35 69 113 133 184 180

Jacob Silver man

R a bbl e Rouse Our Friends Who Live Across the Sea

Astr a Taylor

S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG

the Baffler [no. 31] 1 5

FROM THE ARCHIVE

| The Baffler no. 5 (1993)

The Nostalgia Gap We find ourselves in the strange condition

of time sped up—a shrinking of the future to look back on the past. The rise of a global media network means that events, styles, trends, fashion, and other sources of future nostalgia are disseminated instantly, and as each new trend is promoted and participated in, a previous one is made obsolete. Culture, like technology and consumer goods, is now run on an assumption of planned obsolescence. “In the eighties,” Robert Hughes wrote, “bulimia, that neurotic cycle of gorge and puke, the driven consumption and regurgitation of images and reputations, became our main cultural metaphor.” The speed of consumption has accelerated to the point where things that happened only a few years ago already seem laughably archaic, distant from memory and covered by a creeping nostalgia. In the face of this “instant-” or “hyper-” nostalgia, such recent events as the “grunge” movement, the Savings and Loan scandal, or the “Earth Summit” in Rio seem like quaint, if not embarrassing, relics of a simpler age.

Nostalgia is a form of propaganda, an

exercise in laughter and forgetting, in which the right visual iconography and perceived authenticity can create a longing for an existence which is no longer possible and was in fact never possible. The popularity of the Reagan presidency amongst younger voters was driven by this manufactured nostalgia, as his White House “character” was based on a mixture of the unfettered Cold War hardliner, the tough lawman of Hollywood Westerns, and a traditional religious “family man.” The fact that he was twice divorced 6 1 the Baffler [no. 31]

and rarely attended church seemed a peripheral issue. As Garry Wills argued, the power of Reagan’s appeal lay in “the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute. Because of that, we will a belief in all his stories.” The triumph of this will jettisons all hopes for what Walter Benjamin called “revolutionary nostalgia”; namely, an attempt to counter the present political order through an active summoning of the traditions of the oppressed in previous generations. Surveying the present, this vision appears pathetically inadequate. Nostalgia, like most forms of consciousness in late capitalist society, has been sanitized and streamlined for market competition, and to stray outside its confines is a risky endeavor. History becomes, in the infamous phrase, “just another lifestyle choice.” The correct cuttings and pastings of fashion, the consumption of products whose value has been wildly inflated in the retro market: the most banal efforts of the heroic consumer are rendered as some artistic “statement.” One exudes the stylistic elements of an era without bearing any of its historical costs. The fashion lines of Ralph Lauren, for example, conjure images of the old untamed West, the graceful reign of colonialism in Africa, the splendor of pre-revolutionary Russia, or the realm of the stately English manor. In the Safari line, for example, Lauren’s empire of nostalgia offers its participants a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Serengeti; lost in any of this aesthetic splendor is the notion of what

JA S O N M U R P H Y

The most banal efforts of the heroic consumer are rendered as some artistic “statement.” One exudes the stylistic elements of an era without bearing any of its historical costs.

9 Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” the mourning for what one has by one’s own action destroyed. The Safari line laments the passing of the colonial era as if it were some natural thing, part of a grand existing order, a system that has wafted away on the gentle breeze of history and not through its inherent instability. Rather than confront the undefined future or the insecure present, the current seventies revivalists reincarnate the culture we once loved (Top 40, network television), then reacted against (with punk, independent

film making), then came to love again (but with a safe, jaded sense of camp). We have 1970s parties to both mock and worship that final decade of real innocence (for our generation, the 1980s were imagined innocence), and you get the discomforting impression that we might rather be in that decade. But more often than not, what is romanticized is “the way we never were,” and history, the one thing that the media-constructed “twentysomething” generation honestly shares, is lost amidst the celebrating.t —Tom Vanderbilt the Baffler [no. 31] 1 7

E x h i b i t A â&#x20AC;˘ Frances Jetter

The Hole.

8 1 the Baffler [no. 31]

C on v e r s at ion

Tick Tock 3 Rick Perlstein and Daniel Tucker

Southern California has always been a place confused about time.

The people there escaped the dead hand of the past in municipalities that they conjured, ex nihilo, out of orange groves, and where they built—as Nathanael West mocked in The Day of the Locust—houses resembling “Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages.” Southern Californians designed rockets by day, then at night burrowed in basement rec rooms, plotting the repeal of the twentieth century. They also backed the ascension of Ronald Reagan, who was the consummate embodiment of their contradictions. A new film by Daniel Tucker, Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country, seeks to capture this warped confusion of temporalities. It takes off from the moment at the 1976 Republican convention when the losing candidate, Reagan, allegedly with total spontaneity, stole the show with a brief speech whose central image was a time capsule to be opened in one hundred years, on the nation’s “tricentennial,” for which he said he had been tasked with writing a letter to be enclosed therein. I spoke to Tucker by phone in April.

DA N I E L T U C K E R

“ Tomorrow’s Past” time capsule at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

Rick Perlstein: The thought that occurred to me while watching the film is that sometimes discussing the future can be a way of evading the present and the past. Did you think about that as you were pulling together these meditations on future-ness? Daniel Tucker: I think that it’s a great point. My interest in the project has really focused in on the rhetoric of the future. And the rhetoric of the future is deployed both toward very specific visions and toward broad generalities and fantasies that have no grounding in reality whatsoever. Further to your point, there is a strong element of evasion, a way that the rhetoric of the future becomes a cloak that simultaneously conjures some idea of the future, but something entirely vague that people can project anything they want onto. So it is a very light-in-content future imaginary. RP: And a funny part of the film: when people are called on—or businesses are called on—to contribute to this tricentennial time capsule, their paucity of imagination turns out to be almost comical. the Baffler [no. 31] 1 9

A child’s casket—that would serve as the time capsule to be placed underneath the Ronald Reagan Federal Building!

DT: Yes, absolutely. You know, the thing that is hilarious and incredible about time capsules is they are obviously a completely unregulated and informal practice. So they have all the formality and ceremony of a burial event, but as far as what actually constitutes a time capsule, it’s a completely open-ended practice. The pivotal discovery of researching this film was writing a formal letter to the Griffith Park observatory [in Los Angeles] asking, “I know you have a tricentennial time capsule. Do you know if by chance Ronald Reagan wrote a letter for it?” And it just so happened that in 1976, the executive director actually had kept the contents list of the time capsule. It is a rare thing to keep the contents list outside of a time capsule. And he says, “Sure enough, there’s a letter from Ronald Reagan in here. And there’s a bunch of other stuff in here!” So we end up going down this incredible laundry list. You know: TV dinners, and six packs of beer, and shoes from Cher, and denim jeans, and the like. And, as you say, the most base-level promotional materials from organizations. RP: Do you know that the whole idea of the tricentennial was a promotional idea of the right-wing oil conglomerate ARCO? DT: I had discovered that while working on this video! That ARCO had done a time capsule and solicited all these visions for the future. Coming across some of these children’s drawings of spaceships on Mars and those kind of things—in some ways they’re not that far from Reagan’s own projections into the future. RP: “Where we’re going we don’t need roads”—you show Reagan quoting that from Back to the Future in one of his speeches. DT: Exactly. His channeling of that kind of image is so interesting to me because so often, when you’re having an ideological debate about libertarianism or free-market fundamentalism, the first sticking point is, “Well, don’t you drive on roads? Libertarianism isn’t viable!” And sure enough, the president of the United States says we won’t even need ’em. RP: Tell me about the baby casket. DT: One of the things that interested me early on in the research was an article I found in the Los Angeles Times. It had run in 1997, and it was about this Reagan enthusiast who was working on a time capsule for the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in Orange County. And the article made a reference to him not really being able to afford a time capsule. He found them to be very expensive—the kind

10 1 the Baffler [no. 31]

DA N I E L T U C K E R | A RC H I V E

Ronald Reagan, burying a nation’s hopes.

of pre-packaged ones. So he had enlisted a local funeral home director to donate a casket. But not just any casket—a child’s casket. That would serve as the time capsule to be placed underneath the Ronald Reagan Federal Building! While I was working on the project, I was based out of an art center called the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, less than four blocks away from the federal building. So I knew that while working on this project I would, at the very least, go and poke around and see if I could find the location of the time capsule or find this guy. Sure enough, I ended up tracking down the guy, after the people at the federal building told me there was no such time capsule buried on their property. I tracked him down, this local public historian named Tim Rush, and Tim revealed to me over the course of our conversation that the time capsule never actually got buried; that in fact it kind of fell by the wayside, and he lost all the contents in the process. And then over the course of working on the film, he thinks that he’s found them. Then we go to document him revealing the contents of the time capsule— RP: Which is like the opening of a time capsule! DT: Exactly. And then sure enough, by the end of the six weeks between when he discovered them and when we made the visit, he could not find the box of time capsule contents yet again. the Baffler [no. 31] 1 11

C on v e r s at ion RP: You interview the guy who was pretty much one of Reagan’s campaign managers in 1976, who’s not a minor figure! Peter Hannaford, who died last year. I’m pretty well convinced that a central part of this now-founding myth of the Reagan legend, that he gave this spontaneous speech about the time capsule, is BS—that it was all negotiated in advance, and the idea that he was reluctant to do this was dubious at best. So you may have been lied to by Mr. Hannaford.

The practice of burying time capsules, while it’s adorned with all sorts of ceremonial significance, is literally as informal as burying a box in the ground.

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DT: I pressed him from a few different angles, and he laid out the official line. One of the interesting things about finding my way through this project: several years before, I had interviewed you and [historian of conservatism] Greg Schneider for another video that I’m working on about Karl Hess. I asked you both individually, “Do you know anything about this letter that Reagan references in ’76?” And interestingly, both of you, I think, said something like, “No, never came across it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it never existed, he made stuff up like that all the time.” And so when I was starting out on this project, I was fully prepared to think that the time capsule was a complete invention. And then, when I start poking around, I find at least somewhat verifiable evidence that there was in fact a letter for a tricentennial time capsule in Los Angeles! But whether it existed, it doesn’t matter, because the brilliant part of it was to conjure up a rhetorical vision of the future—a very open-ended image, granted. And ultimately, that’s the real outcome. Because nobody who is living, and certainly nobody who was living in 1976, was ever going to see that letter, whether it existed or not. RP: One of the ironic tropes of your film is that people keep on having a hard time honoring the past’s contract with the future: either they can’t find the buried time capsules, or they break ’em open anyway, or they never buried it in the first place! DT: [Laughs] It’s a great point. The practice of burying time capsules, while it’s adorned with all sorts of ceremonial significance, is something that is literally as informal as burying a box in the ground. And there is nothing to keep someone from being antsy and going and digging it up. On the other hand, the other phenomenon I became quite interested in is how many time capsules have been lost forever. Lost to people’s memory. In fact, in the course of the project, I came across one city, Corona, California, that claimed to have misplaced seventeen time capsules dating back to the 1930s. At one point they made an effort to dig up the time capsules in the 1980s, and they said, “Well, we just tore up a bunch of concrete and could never find anything.”t

Pho t o G ra p h ic

Industrial Landscape 3 Bernhard Lang

Aerial photographs of the Tagebau Hambach coal mine, Germany.

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BERNHARD LANG

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Pho t o G ra p h ic At nearly 1,200 feet deep, the Tagebau Hambach open-pit mine is one of the biggest holes in Europe.

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BERNHARD LANG

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Me mory Hol e s 3 Mark Dancey

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