No. 32 by The Baffler

KEITH NEGLEY

No. 32

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No. 32

The journal that blunts

the cutting edge

No. 32

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

EDIT OR IN CHIEF

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

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

Dave Denison Lucie Elven A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R

Emily Carroll P O E T RY E D I T O R

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

Barbara Ehrenreich Susan Faludi Evgeny Morozov Rick Perlstein Kim Stanley Robinson George Scialabba Jacob Silverman Astra Taylor Catherine Tumber Eugenia Williamson

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

PU BLISHER

Noah McCormack PR E SIDEN T

Hamilton Fish EX ECU TI V E DIR ECT OR

Valerie Cortés

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

James White 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

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

Dolores Rothenberg

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 DING EDIT OR S

Thomas Frank and Keith White John Summers, editor in chief (2011–2016)

Acknowledgments Kind thanks to Cassandra de Alba, Ratik Asokan, Zachary Davis, Ben Hattem, and Daniel Moattar, who made the muzak possible.

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler. The Baffler, 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010, USA thebaff ler.com

2 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

Muzak of the Spheres R

are it is that the careworn American public casts its collective gaze heavenward—unless in desperate prayer for debt relief, affordable housing, non-extortionate college instruction, or any of the other fugitive comforts that our grand neoliberal consensus has catapulted into the unreachable empyrean. In the hushed and reverent darkness of the Baffler observatory, however, we hew closely to the counsel of that great socialist bon vivant Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” But what is it we see, exactly, when we take the measure of the cosmic vastness that engulfs us? Baffler 32, “Muzak of the Spheres,” is a mystic portal, yielding many strange paeans to unknown worlds. In “Material Issue,” Jackson Lears peers deeply into the Western metaphysical past and rescues a neglected tradition of animistic materialism—an account of physical being that bristles with new possibilities of life and profound implications for how we think about our planet and our pinched allotment of mortal time upon it. Barbara Ehrenreich, in “Displaced Deities,” supplies a puckish headcount of the many gods—greater and lesser—sent rudely packing by the unwavering certainties of scientific consensus. Sam Kriss takes deadly aim at the allied brittle dogmas of the New Atheist set, while Jonathon Sturgeon stalks the wild transcendentalist American raconteur who is forever trying to eat the universe. Astra Taylor delves into the untamed properties of nonhuman personhood, animal, vegetable, and corporate. You’ll even find your humble head Baffler pondering the spick-and-span

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

household gods that lord over the surprisingly totemistic cult of domestic order. Truly, we live in an epoch, and a New World, of many fearful signs and wonders. As R. W. B. Lewis famously wrote in the middle of the last century, “the American myth saw . . . a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first one had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World.” At the same time, the dismal specter of Trumpism is poised to swallow the fragile civic-republican myth of the New World’s promise whole, with corruption, vice, and reality-TV hucksterism spitting out only the rancid poison of Old World imperial decay. For the beckoning American cosmos to translate into anything resembling a usable past, we must resist all manner of authoritarian certainty, from truth-averse Trumpery to the feckless and arrogant bromides of scientism. And that’s why, in very diverse registers of historical argument, Rick Perlstein, Ann Neumann, and Jessa Crispin have all tendered invaluable cautions against the enormous condescension of posterity, be it the present, Trump-inflected quest for an eternally recurring modern political past or the sanitized vision of a predestined American empire. So join us, fearlessly Baffled fellow adventurers, as we stir groggily up from the gutters and scan the ever-shifting scene overhead, wondering all the while at the strange new worlds beneath our feet.t —Chris Lehmann the Baffler [no. 32] 1 3

T h e B a f f l e r ( no. 32) C on t e n t s

Th e Pat er n a l R e t u r n Skopje, City On the Make Alexander Clapp

Mu z a k of t h e S ph er e s

Father Worship Hamiltonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New World scripture

Improv-da How Palantir has made corporate orthodoxy out of experimental theater

Material Issue Reclaiming a living cosmos from the dead-end tradition of Western scientism

Displaced Deities A reply

The Schmaltz in Our Stars

Jackson Lears

Peter Manseau

Barbar a Ehrenreich Talia Lavin

David V. Johnson

Village Atheists, Village Idiots Sam Kriss

Th e L ong A r m Thin Blue Spin How U.S. cops have raided social media

Time Bandits Why our political past is rarely prologue

Divine Indigestion The endlessly fabulized American self

72 82

Jonathon Sturgeon

A aron Miguel CantĂş

Rick Perlstein

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

4 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

Mu z a k of t h e S p h e r e s

Househol d G ods Madam Prescient Raising the spirit of American radicalism

Poe m s

Jessa Crispin

Hanif Willis-Abdurr aqib

Small Worlds The soul-deadening magic of tidying up

104

The Shock of the Crazed The hidden world of art brut

122

Long division at the dinner table

A n i m a l M agn e t is m

Womb Up, America Lucy Ellmann

The Higher Happiness George Scialabba

fr ancine j. harris

134 146 152

172

95 133 145

Song Charif Shanahan

159

Cristina de Middel

E x h i bi t A Atlas Smudged Danielle Chenette

S t ory

Scott Br adfield

Matt Hart

Afronauts

Ann Neumann

Dazzle Speaks with the Dead

Nothing Wrong with a Maple

P ho t o gr a ph ic

Th e R e a l A m er ic a Black Elk, Woke On the remaking of a Native American prophet

Ode to Lithium #419: Perfect Shir a Erlichman

J. C. Hallman

Astr a Taylor

Incendiary Art: The Body Patricia Smith

Chris Lehmann

Who Speaks for the Trees?

Kirk Franklin Has to Be in Every Rap Song from Now On

Ba f f l om at h y

160

81 182

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 5

Pho t o gra p h ic

Afronauts 3 Cristina de Middel

Remembering the National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;i.e., Zambiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s post-independence 1960s space program.

6 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

C R I S TI N A D E M I D D E L | I N S TIT U T E

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 7

T h e Pat e r n a l R e t u r n

Skopje, City On the Make 3 Alexander Clapp

“Skopje 2014” is a vast moneylaundering project, and Macedonians will be stuck with the debt.

8 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

itizens of Skopje have nicknamed Macedonia’s capital the “déjà vu city.” Visitors can instantly understand why. Everywhere former prime minister Nikola Gruevski—“Mr. Cut and Paste,” as his compatriots dubbed him—traveled on state visits, he would admire a particular world monument, return to Skopje, and replicate it. When Gruevski went to Paris in 2009, he was fascinated by the way islands of willow trees interrupted the flow of the Seine. So he had three exorbitantly priced trees dispatched from New Zealand and planted on specially erected platforms in the Vardar River. Hope, Love, and Faith—the names given to the trees at their dedication—slump weakly in the Balkan spring. When Gruevski went to Sydney later that year, he saw replicas of ancient galleons that had been converted into museums. So back home in Skopje, two concrete pirate ships—one a restaurant, one a hotel—are now parked on the right bank of the Vardar. A third vessel, currently a set of cement stilts in the water, will eventually offer a nightclub. Walk elsewhere around Skopje, and you can find an Epcotstyle assemblage of world landmarks: the Arc de Triomphe, the London Eye, the White House, the Pantheon, the Brandenburg Gate. “We pray that Gruevski doesn’t go to Venice,” one Skopjian told me. “We will be commuting to work in gondolas.” It’s never been easy to say exactly who the Macedonians are. The Republic of Macedonia was established in 1991 after the collapse of Yugoslavia. Bordered by Albania to the west and Greece to the south, the republic contains a large Albanian minority and engenders smoldering resentment from Greece, which claims the rightful use of the name Macedonia for its northern region. But Gruevski spent his decade in power trying to forge a distinct Macedonian identity. The grassroots reconstruction of the Macedonian capital is part of a project called “Skopje 2014.” As its name painfully reminds Macedonians, the initiative is now two years behind schedule; what’s more, it’s expected to cost them approximately one-tenth of their GDP. Gruevski saw “Skopje 2014” as a way to erase the capital’s Communist past and boost the Macedonian tourism industry, but the timing of the project was not lost on anyone: officials announced

VA N CO DZ A M BA S K I

“Skopje 2014” just two years after Greece denied Macedonia a place at the 2008 NATO Summit. For twenty-five years now, Greece has refused Macedonia entry into both the EU and NATO, insisting that “Macedonia” belongs to the Greeks. Converting his capital into a classical theme park was Gruevksi’s provocative attempt to show Greece—and the world—which small southeast European nation is the true inheritor of antiquity.

Skopje’s very own Arc de Triomphe, constructed in 2011, colored by protesters.

Empire Burlesque Traditionally, Skopje’s built environment has said more about its conquerors than its inhabitants. A few years ago, Macedonian television aired a documentary about an elderly woman who lived on what is now Makedonia Street. Even though she never vacated the apartment, she saw her address change four times in her lifetime: from Boulevard Petr to Boulevard Czarov to Boulevard Marshal Tito to Makedonia Street. The city around her, meanwhile, had been ravaged by the Second World War—and, in 1963, flattened by an earthquake that destroyed 75 to 80 percent of its buildings and left the hands of the old railway station clock stuck at 5:17, where they remain to this day. For a brief period, Skopje became one of the largest construction sites on Earth. Belgrade and Moscow and Washington competed to give aid. The task of designing “new Skopje” went to a Japanese architect, Kenzo Tange, who left the city an austere jumble of concrete cylinders and utilitarian housing blocks. the Baffler [no. 32] 1 9

“Only the best for Macedonia!”

Despite all this construction and reconstruction, the gritty incongruities of the Bala biker named Ivo said, kans have never left Skopje. Walking at night in gesturing toward a €1 million the suburbs, I watched teenagers race BMWs under the desperate grayness of Commustatue of a groveling beggar. nist-era apartment buildings. During the day, I visited the old Albanian and Turkish neighborhoods on the left bank of the Vardar. I crossed the Stone Bridge—a sturdy construction where, for three days in 1689, the anti-Ottoman rebel Karposh was impaled, kebab-like, on a stake until his insides dematerialized. Across the bridge, huddled beneath crumbling Justinian fortifications, is Čaršija, a slope of terracotta roofs pierced with minarets and laced with stone alleyways. I passed an antique shop that sells Yugoslav Army trench coats. Men in white skullcaps played backgammon, plucked at a çiftelia, chain-drank tea out of hourglass cups, and put off their obligations until nesër, “tomorrow.” Just outside Skopje, I visited Shutka, one of the largest gypsy communities in Europe and the only one in the world that still uses Romani—the traditional language of gypsies—as its official language. Many Shutka gypsies still live in the corrugated iron shacks constructed by U.S. Army engineers in 1963. Above them loom the stark yellow highrises of Amdi Bajram, the local strongman whose unorthodox methods of securing votes were recently laid bare by WikiLeaks. Election morning, thousands of left-footed shoes were distributed to Roma voters with the promise that if Bajram won the election by nightfall, right-footed shoes would also be distributed. Everywhere in Shutka, I saw the gypsies’ haphazard attempts at sedentary existence: the clothes hung from a string and washed with a hose, the rusted-out truck bed doubling as a vegetable garden, the scrap metal bartered for bread. On a nearby telephone pole, posters advertised a Sunday goose fight. Back in the city center, I met some of the new citizenry. Almost all the “Skopje 2014” statues were cast in pure Florentine bronze. “Only the best for Macedonia!” a biker named Ivo said, gesturing toward a €1 million statue of a groveling beggar. Opposite the beggar, a €1.5 million bronze shoe shiner polishes away. “An actual shoe shiner here would need to work thirty thousand days to purchase that,” Ivo said, and then rode away. I crossed back over the Vardar to the Archaeological Museum. The “Bridge of Civilizations” is lined with legends from the Macedonian past. What would Gabriel, the somber-looking Byzantine hermit on my right, think of Paionia, the pagan priestess supplicating the Olympians on my left? And what punishment would Alexander the Great mete out to the men who cast the statue of him suckling at his mother’s breast?

10 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

VA N CO DZ A M BA S K I

Free Fall in Marble Next to the Prosecutor’s Office—a spaceship structure that looks like it’s ripped from the pages of Vitruvius—I encountered the nine muses idling beneath a glitzy Corinthian portico. Tiny speakers attached to their heads emitted intermittent high-pitch rings to ward off descending pigeons. On top of the nearby government buildings, where the state decided against putting bronze Macedonians, I spotted the clay Macedonians. Their exact identities are contested by the locals. “Surely it’s the stepmother of Saint Cyril’s second-cousin. We haven’t yet commemorated her,” a Macedonian joked to me. Very few statues in “Skopje 2014” are of ethnic Albanians, who make up a quarter of Macedonia’s population. The centerpiece of “Skopje 2014” is the “Warrior on a Horse”— an eight-story triumphal column featuring Alexander the Great atop Bucephalus, his horse. From the circular platform on which Bucephalus rears his front legs, a shower of rain falls into a basin that simultaneously shoots water up in an elaborate choreography of jet streams, some of them vomited out of the mouths of roaring lions. During the day, police are assigned to the fountain to prevent gypsies from using it as a bathtub. At dusk, as Skopjians retreat through the square on their way home from work, gilded lampposts blare Wagner, the theme score from E.T., and Bing Crosby Christmas tunes. At

During this spring’s Colorful Revolution, Skopjians took up their paint slingshots to protest what they call “Gruevism”—a regime of corruption, surveillance, and rampant spending.

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 11

T h e Pat e r n a l R e t u r n night, the fountain doubles as a light show: Alexander charges atop a revolving halo of rainbow skylights. We know that Gruevski designed much of “Skopje 2014” because he has said so himself. In February 2015, opposition parties in Macedonia revealed that Gruevski had been conducting the largest illegal surveillance program in Europe since the dismantling of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Over a four-year period, the government recorded the telephone conversations of some twenty thousand handpicked Macedonians. The beauty of the program was that it also swept up Gruevski himself in the surveillance net—and the substance of his conversations led the European Union to intervene in Macedonia last summer and force his resignation. The wiretaps laid bare much of the xenophobia, criminality, and corruption well known to the long-suffering citizens of the Balkans. There were long discussions of rampant nepotism and Olympianscale kickback schemes. There was an exchange in which Gruevski explained his decision to park his €600,000 Mercedes outside Skopje, where reporters could not see it. There were racist rants about Albanians and plans to falsify electoral ballots—and even a bid to cover up a murder. But amid all this cronyism and mayhem, the wiretaps also revealed Gruevski carefully pondering the architectural craft. “No, the columns we saw on our trip to Washington were Classical columns,” he reprimands an adviser at one point. “I want Baroque for Skopje.” In another tape, he insists that all marble balconies in Skopje must be no more, and no less, than “two-and-a-half meters long.” “Behind the Universal Hall, I want a fountain. Like that one from Rome,” he says in still another conversation. The new telecommunications tower, he warns an underling, must be done “with marble, not some plaster that looks like marble.”

Public Art, Without the Public The wiretaps revealed, as well, what Gruevski’s opponents had suspected for years: “Skopje 2014” is a vast money-laundering project. Construction contracts were handed out to party loyalists. Gruevski exploited a curious loophole to enrich himself. After all, how can you really put a price tag on something so ineffably, and so subjectively, beautiful as a statue of a shoe shiner? For almost everything in “Skopje 2014,” the Macedonian state deliberately paid at least two or three times the cost of construction and materials. Banks provided Gruevski the loans; Gruevski’s party will likely receive its duly appointed 5 percent kickback on every construction project; Macedonians—and their grandchildren—will be stuck with the debt. 12 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

At the Radiobar Café, I met a group called the Raspeani Skopjani, the “Singing Skopjians.” Its fifteen members used to gather every Sunday morning to sing in protest against different aspects of Gruevski’s authoritarianism. “To say that ‘Skopje 2014’ is ugly is to completely miss the point. It completely defies the concept of public space, how a community gathers. Many citizens here refuse to walk through their own downtown. They feel insulted,” one singer, Ivana Dragsiqi, told me. “Gruevski controls the papers and the news stations. His police stomp out our rallies. We had to come up with an asymmetrical form of protest.” Raspeani Skopjani got their inspiration from Horkestar, a chorus in Serbia that protests Aleksandar Vučić’s authoritarianism. From Skopje, the idea has spread: nearly every former Yugoslav country now has a chorus of protesters. They’ve hosted one another on a rotating basis. Each Singing Skopjians ballad is tailored to a different complaint against the government. To protest the Macedonian Church’s spending habits, they gathered outside the Church of St. Clement of Ohrid and sang Janis Joplin’s immortal refrain, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” When Gruevski began cutting down the trees lining Ilindenska Boulevard, they sang Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song.” “The tragedy is that Skopje was a truly international city,” Filip Jovanovski, a singer, told me. “At the height of the Cold War, in 1963, the world came together here to help us rebuild. Poland gifted us an art museum. London lent us double-decker buses. Romania gave us a hospital.” Together Filip and I walked opposite the government building where Gruevski was building the headquarters for MEPSO, the “Electricity Transmission System Operator of Macedonia.” We watched as workers laid a thin layer of gleaming white plaster over cold blocks of rebar and concrete. The plaster, one of them told us, had tiny bits of glass in it, “so that the building glows when lit up at night.” The finished half of the Electricity Transmission System resembled a Doric Greek temple; the unfinished half resembled a prison complex. “Our government puts on a pluralistic, democratic face to the world,” Filip said. “But underneath, we’re the same regime we were under Tito. Skopje is Gruevski’s Potemkin village.” In one of the final wiretapped conversations released to the public, Gruevski is heard ordering his culture minister not to appear at any parliamentary sessions that might attempt to prosecute the architects of “Skopje 2014.” “If we’re asked about ‘Skopje 2014,’” he says, “we will lose the next election.” Most Skopjians I met would be content with that—and maybe another (nonfatal) earthquake thrown in for good measure.t the Baffler [no. 32] 1 13

Kirk Franklin Has to Be in Every Rap Song from Now On 6 Hanif Willis-Abdurr aqib I, too, have craned my neck / under a shower head that is not my own / & let melodies from heaven rattle the tiles in the bathroom of a stranger / like the tiles were gently placed there / by my own hands / & I insist on this small comfort / even though I know I cannot sing / because my grandmother also could not sing / & this did not stop her from shouting out Ms. Mahalia / over a kitchen sink full of dishes / even after the packs of cigarettes finally came to collect / & left with one of her lungs in their palms / & even then she would still send us to the corner store / where they knew our family’s name / & have us sneak her cigarettes back home / inside the Sunday paper / so that my father wouldn’t know / & with the change we would buy cassette singles / & sing along to Whitney Houston on the school bus out loud / during the gang war 90s / & last night I went to the corner store to buy smokes / for a woman who was waiting for me in a bed / with sheets that I could never afford / & I do not know what it is to crave smoke / but I do know what it is to crave the touch of a smoker / & want to hold them close until morning / & this is how I know the holy ghost lives inside of whatever is blown from the lips of the last person you kissed / & what I’m mostly saying is that I know of no secular black people / I know of no black people who are not being prayed for by someone somewhere / & so maybe all of my skinfolk actually are my kinfolk / if all I require is a meal to be shared / a bounty to be praised in silence / but for the small choir behind us / of everyone who we have loved / in spite of their singing / & I need gospel wherever it chooses to come for me / nestled in between two unholy verses / or in the harsh & scattered whistles of breath running from a grandmother’s lips in her last nights of sleep / or in the small ashtrays found hidden under the bed upon her leaving / & the small white mountains built inside, each humming their own dying notes

14 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

T h e Pat e r n a l R e t u r n

Father Worship Hamilton’s New World scripture 3 Peter Manseau

Two years before he was shot in the chest, and two centuries before

he became an unlikely pop icon, Alexander Hamilton wondered how religion might be used to win elections. Suggesting that politics could not rely “merely on the reason of men,” the nation’s first Treasury secretary proposed the creation of a “Christian Constitutional Society” designed to appeal to an emotion-driven electorate by uniting a defense of Christianity and the U.S. Constitution. The passions incited by faith, Hamilton believed, could be harnessed to “combat our political foes.” This plan may have been a sincere product of late-blooming piety on the part of the embattled Founding Father, or it may have been a cynical ploy. Either way, one thing is certain: such sharp-eyed deployments of spiritual sympathies would not play as well on Broadway as rap-battle policy debates. So it’s no surprise that the religiosity of the “ten-dollar founding father” in Hamilton: An American Musical is mostly limited to personal appeals in times of duress: a somber search for solace through prayer after the death of his son, along with some NSFW intercessory pleading when femme fatale Maria Reynolds leads him to her bed. “Lord,” Hamilton croons in vain, “show me how to say no to this.” There’s just one other cameo for religious sentiment in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer-, Grammy-, and Tony-winning blockbuster. It comes as Hamilton is helping George Washington write his famed farewell address. A quotation from the Book of Micah presages the peace and hard-earned repose awaiting the retiring president, but that’s where the piety stops. Hamilton’s real-life suggestion that Washington make a case that “national morality” requires “a generally received and divinely authoritative Religion” ends up on the cutting-room floor, just like the Christian Constitutional Society, and for probably the same reason: it plays poorly with the kids. “Religion and morality are essential props,” Hamilton wrote in his draft of Washington’s Farewell Address. “In vain does he claim the praise of patriotism, who labors to subvert or undermine these great pillars of human happiness.” Even with a killer breakbeat, this invocation of

Even with a killer breakbeat, biblically sanctioned social control could never be cool.

the Baffler [no. 32] 1 15

Hamilton is an altar call for would-be patriots previously too burdened by ambivalence to fully embrace the American faith.

9 the awesome power of biblically sanctioned social control could never be cool. Much has been said about how casting minorities as icons of Independence makes Hamilton “the story of America then, told by America now,” but its relationship to belief is the more subtle act of cultural reimagining. Miranda’s ingenious retelling of Revolutionary-era U.S. history studiously ignores common eighteenth-century notions of the role religion should play in society, replacing them with the fully privatized faith of today. Yet despite the play’s stalwart separation of church and founding statesmen, there remains something about Hamilton that strikes a religious nerve: namely, the way that its various canny subversions of the popular imagery of the Founding era ultimately reaffirm the American creation myth. The musical’s off-the-charts popularity stems from more than Miranda’s catchy hooks and inventive lyrics. As Hamilton continues to swell into a bona-fide reflection of the zeitgeist, one underlying factor seems most responsible for its rise: Miranda’s fable of the republic’s founding offers a way to take part in the cult of sacred history without the usual birthright credentials and ritual obeisances. This is no mere hip-hopera; it’s an altar call for would-be patriots previously 16 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

too burdened by ambivalence to fully embrace the American faith. The favored avatars of this faith may change with the times, but its creed does not. The birth of the nation remains our One True God. The Revolution, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers serve as something of a trinity establishing the culture’s unquittable cosmology and incontestable truth. Seen this way, Hamilton is less a new vision of the past than a translation of the sacred stories of American civil religion into the vernacular—in this case, the lingua franca of contemporary pop culture, a mashup of hiphop, R&B, rock, and show tune samples. And like any vernacular rendering of a text considered holy and immutable, it is at once radical on the surface and retrograde underneath—the best example in years of how a dominant worldview adapts to survive social change. the Baffler [no. 32] 1 17

T h e Pat e r n a l R e t u r n In its marketing materials, as well as in the title of the bestselling book about the show, Hamilton is frequently called a revolution. A more apt trope would be a Reformation. After all, the sixteenth-century religious upheaval that arguably gave birth to the American experiment sprang forth from a vernacular shift in popular worship. And this shift, too, was legitimized through a vision of wider access to the foundational stories of a civilization. Exactly five hundred years before Hamilton rewired the nation’s mythology for the disaffected, the Dutch theologian and humanist Desiderius Erasmus imagined a world in which access to sacred books was not limited to the learned few. “Would that they were translated into each and every language so that they might be read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens,” Erasmus wrote in 1516. “Would that the farmer might sing snatches of scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of scripture to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveler might lighten with stories from scripture the weariness of his journey.” Building on Erasmus’s vision a few years later, Martin Luther undertook his translation of the New Testament into German, first published in 1522, knowing that replacing one language with another was not enough. He believed that the meaning of the text had become dangerously detached from the lives of common believers, and saw the task of the translator as a gently didactic one: i.e., to encourage Christians to see themselves and hear echoes of their voices in the pages of holy writ. Defending his process of translation, Luther insisted that creating this sense of recognition was essential even when it departed from the text’s literal meaning. “We must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common person in the market about this,” he wrote. “We must be guided by their tongue, the manner of their speech, and do our translating accordingly. Then they will understand it and recognize that we are speaking German to them.” In the same fashion, persuading audience members that they recognize stories and people from which they have become alienated is Hamilton’s not-so-secret sauce. Its creator sounds a lot like Luther when he recounts the charged moment of recognition that set him on the path to chronicling Alexander Hamilton’s life in the light of contemporary immigrant experience. Here’s Miranda, explaining to The Atlantic his decision to undertake a Reformation-style recasting of the Hamilton story as he read Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography: “When he gets to New York, I was like, ‘I know this guy.’ I’ve met so many versions of this guy, and it’s the guy who comes to this country and is like, 18 1 the Baffler [no. 32]

‘I am going to work six jobs if you’re only working one. I’m gonna make a life for myself here.’” And the show extends this same basic translation method to every Founder it depicts. In the original Broadway cast, Leslie Odom Jr.’s Aaron Burr was a smooth Mos Def. Christopher Jackson’s George Washington was John Legend crossed with Dr. Dre. When Daveed Diggs made his second-act entrance as Thomas Jefferson in rockstar purple, he was meant to evoke Prince. The point of all these associations is not just to amp up the production’s entertainment value. As Diggs has described his earliest introduction to the show—his conversion narrative, if you prefer—he was jolted into recognition by the same mystic powers that imbued Luther’s Bible translation: language and characterization creating a set of associations allowing the text to resonate with his experience of daily life. The first time I did a workshop of it, Chris Jackson was playing George Washington, and it changed everything the first time I heard him sing

Like any vernacular rendering of a text considered holy and immutable, Hamilton is at once radical on the surface and retrograde

as George Washington. Because he was so clearly George Washington.

underneath.

So all of a sudden, this guy that I know really well, we’ve been freestyl-

ing together for years, and, I know his family, I know his kids, I know his wife—this is George Washington! A regular person who looks like people who I know, who has many successes and many failures and is not a perfect human being but is a great, great man. All of a sudden I have a real connection to this Founding Father who’s been the dude on the money for so long. . . . If something similar to that is happening for people who come see the show, the effect really is profound, because that gives me a type of ownership over the history of this country that I didn’t have before.

But ownership of history can be tricky. Inevitably, Luther’s vernacular protest against ecclesial authority succeeded long enough to undermine itself, coming over time to replicate many of the very things it rejected. Luther’s anti-papal vision of a “priesthood of all believers” wound up ratifying the still-more exclusive doctrine of predestination, and his disdain for literalism when it came to translating the Bible gave way to the rote fetishization of scripture itself. Erasmus’s dream of farmers and weavers singing snatches of scripture at their ploughs and shuttles never made the benefits of faith equally accessible to all. And so, too, with the new civic faith enshrined in Hamilton: we may have found a few new songs to sing about the gods of our troubled history, but when it comes to the stories we count on to tell us who we are, we remain caught in an endless refrain.t the Baffler [no. 32] 1 19