No. 28 by The Baffler

No. 28

MOHAMMED SAMI

DO NAT E

F LY N S T I T U T E

( P LE A S E )

THE BAFFLER FOUNDATION 9 Charitable as a Church! 9 thebaff ler.com/donate

No. 28

The journal that blunts

the cutting edge

MARK S . FISHER

No. 28 E DI T OR I N C H I E F

John Summers

9 F OU N DI N G E DI T OR

Thomas Frank S E N IOR E DI T OR

Chris Lehmann

9 DE SIG N A N D A R T DI R E C T OR

The Flynstitute PRODUC T ION A S SI S TA N T

Joan Flynn

9 M A N AGI N G E DI T OR

Lindsey Gilbert A S SI S TA N T E DI T OR

Lucie Elven L I T E R A RY E DI T OR

Anna Summers F IC T ION E DI T OR

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

To the foot soldiers in this particular campaign

of alienated artists and writers laying siege to cliché, battling the hirelings, apparatchiks, and gunboat hacks who fabricate conventional wisdom on war and peace, we salute you for your, er, service in the cause of baffling: Cassandra de Alba, Jerry Cohen, Dave Denison, Hamilton Fish, Mel Flashman, David Grewal, Liam Meyer, Ethan Miller, Carolyn Oliver, Antonina Palisano, Cat Powell, and Carol Rose of the ACLU of Massachusetts. And thanks to Orbit Books for the use of the excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s forthcoming novel, Aurora; to Sarah Hofstadter for allowing us to reprint the excerpt from Richard Hofstadter’s “Reflections on Violence in the United States”; to NB Publishers for Ingrid Jonker’s “Bitter-Berry Daybreak”; and to Lawrence Ferlinghetti for allowing us to reprint “A Parade Tirade.”

Kim Stanley Robinson P OE T RY E DI T OR

Edwin Frank R E S E A RC H E R

Emily Carroll

9 C ON T R I B U T I N G E DI T OR S

Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, David Graeber, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, George Scialabba, Astra Taylor, Catherine Tumber, Eugenia Williamson

9 C ON T R I B U T I N G A R T I S T S

Michael Duffy, Mark S. Fisher, Lisa Haney, Brad Holland, P. S. Mueller, Katherine Streeter

9 No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

9 PU BLISHER

Noah McCormack DI R E C T OR

Valerie Cortés OF F IC E M A N AG E R

Susan Hagner FIXER

Zachary Davis PUSHER

Aviel Kanter

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 F OU N DE R S

Thomas Frank and Keith White

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E x h i bit A 5 Brad Holland

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C on t e n t s : The Baffler, no. 28 Decl a r ations In Mayhem We Trust

The Blue and the Gray Zone

Chris Lehmann

Richard Kreitner

Captive Audiences Shawn Hamilton

Live Nice (or Else) Lindsey Gilbert

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The Bourne Identity

Mission Creeps

Andrew J. Bacevich Mark Dancey

Battle Hymns The Bullyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Pulpit

On the elementary structure of domination David Gr aeber

Cable News Charnel

Mayhem as a guide for living Alex Pareene

30 42 52

Apocalypse Soon

Town Hall on Terror

Yes, your gadgets are ineluctably engineering your doom Heather Havrilesky Noam Chomsky and K ade Crockford

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Mark Peterson

The Doll a r Debauch Having Their Cake and Eating Ours Too Chris Lehmann

Second Cit y The Obama library lands on Chicago Rick Perlstein

100

Fifth Column Now Streaming: The Plague Years

113

Weed, Whitewashed

122

Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia

130

More Titillated Than Thou

148

A. S. Hamr ah Niela Orr

Have Guns, Will Liberate

Inside the civic theology of arms-bearing Chase Madar

To Bear Arms

There Goes the Neighborhood

From the archive: Death Travels West, Watch Him Go Mike Newirth

PhotoGr a phic

In Amsterdam with the Singularity Corey Pein How the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market Ann Neumann

Battle Hymns

Poems It feels nice

Bitter-Berry Daybreak

New Life

Vinod Kumar Shukla Ingrid Jonker Jana Prikryl

School

Zbigniew Herbert

129

Lost Causes Motown Shakedown

172

A Study in Total Depravity

180

Owen Davis

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Ancestors Reflections on Violence in the United States Richard Hofstadter

Why Were We So Wild about Wildflowers?

138

Exhibitions

Aram Ilyich Khachaturian

146

B: Carl Dunn

Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev

158

Mikhail Arkadyevich Svetlov

170

Implements

179

A Parade Tirade

216

Michael Ruby Lev Ozerov Lev Ozerov Lev Ozerov

Arvind Krishna Mehrotr a Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Stories

Side Boob and Insensibility

Lucy Ellmann

Life after Death

140

Fountain

160

Terry Bisson Mark Jacobs

D: Eric Hanson

3 18 83 222

Ba fflom athy

218

UnFunny

224

A: Br ad Holland C: Tomi Ungerer

Zohar Lazar

From Aurora

Kim Stanley Robinson

187

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” —D. H. Lawrence

STUART GOLDENBERG

TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 5

D e c l a r at ion s In Mayhem We Trust Long before the triumph of Stand Your Ground gun legislation, the overlapping Grand Guignols of the Iraq invasion and ISIS’s rise, or the release of the latest cinematic blood orgy at the multiplex, America’s political id was drenched in blood. Call it the uncivil society—especially since we typically wreak the most destructive sort of violence under the agreeable enabling conceit of the millennial civilizing mission. We tried—half-heartedly, it’s true—to Christianize and Anglicize the native North American population, but found it much simpler in the long run to slaughter, dispossess, and relocate them onto arid inland Bantustans. We sought to discipline Africandescended slaves under the paternalist (and again, perversely Christian) precepts of unremunerated labor, but reached for the rod, the whip, and the noose at the first sign of resistance. We then slaughtered a good portion of our inestimably more privileged white male population in a Civil War that freed the slaves as a near afterthought— and proceeded, in its typically murderous epilogue, to confine black Americans within a polity of systemic discrimination and organized racial terror for the next century. 6 1 TheBaffler [no. 28]

We devised all manner of new, American-branded mayhem during our long passage from a frontier republic into, well, a frontier mass republic, as historian Richard Hofstadter notes in a strikingly timely essay abridged in this issue: lynchings, riots, vigilantism, and political assassinations, along with garden-variety domestic knifings, shootings, and bludgeonings carried out on a scale of gruesomeness pretty much unprecedented in the soi-disant civilized West. If we were to sum up the general logic of social control in our uncivil society, we could do worse than quote Ernest Borgnine’s churlish aside in the camp-western classic Johnny Guitar (1954). Having just plunged a knife into the back of an associate, Borgnine shakes his head and ruefully barks in the general direction of the corpse that he’s freshly minted, “Some people just won’t listen.”

In the pages of The Baffler no. 28, we give the last word to the hapless souls targeted for elimination by our nation of hot-headed, carnagehappy Borgnines. David Graeber goes to the heart of the perverse social contract dictating that deserters and war-resisters be typecast as

cowards and finds its deeper psychic antecedents in the casual brutalities of the schoolyard. A. S. Hamrah scopes out the cult of the Zombie Apocalypse and descries a self-hating, consumerist fantasia in its flesh-eating cortex. Heather Havrilesky sizes up the new face of high-tech warfare and finds that it bears a distressing resemblance to the workaday commerce of our gadget-happy world. Along the way, there are

There are rumors of dissent in the tightly scripted American war of all against all.

9 rumors of dissent in the tightly scripted American war of all against all, be they in Noam Chomsky and Kade Crockford’s unsettling anatomy of the death-dealing trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or in the placid muse of the Amishthemed romance novel. Hey, in our fast-unspooling uncivil society, poised as it is to implode at the next carelessly weaponized keystroke, you take your fugitive visions of peace and quiet wherever you can find them.t —Chris Lehmann

R ALPH STEADMAN

TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 7

D e c l a r at ion s The Blue and the Gray Zone

Early on a Saturday morning

in May, I pulled off a highway in northern Virginia and drove into an imagineered Civil War past. Across from a stately old plantation stood some reconstructed slave quarters, and just past them I found the designated encampment. On this particular day, Sully Historic Site— “an oasis of the past,” as its website boasts—was the recon point for a group of equestrian reenactors arriving for the weekend’s big event: a commemoration of the Grand Review of the Armies on the 150th anniversary of that final, ceremonial mustering of the victorious Union forces as they prepared to demobilize and return home. Taking place over two days in May 1865, the original Grand Review was a victory lap for Northern soldiers relieved to have emerged from the war in one piece. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman led some 150,000 troops in a procession from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. President Abraham Lincoln had been dead just over a month; the black mourning banners had been taken down only a few days earlier. “It was the moral

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MEREDITH TIBBETTS | STARS AND STRIPES

Reenactors mix costume and technology as they watch troops march in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2015.

sublimity of the scene which lifted it above all other spectacles witnessed in our time,” an observer recalled. But the Review did not include any of the 200,000 men, mostly escaped or emancipated slaves, who had served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the war. Their late entry into combat helped break the war’s stalemate, but just days before the Grand Review, military officials sent away the only USCT regiment in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., to patrol the border with French-occupied Mexico. Here was the appealing premise of the event in May: while most reenactments mimic the past as closely as possible, the Grand Review Victory Parade, as it was

called, aimed to “correct a great wrong in history” by inviting USCT reenactors and descendants to march as their ancestors could not. It offered a reenactment produced by and for the representatives of those with the most plausible claim to recognition as the “winners” of the Civil War.

It speaks volumes about the rickety state of our national memory that even some participants in the Grand Review commemoration seemed to be only dimly aware that it had been convened to publicize (and, symbolically, to rectify) a tremendous historical wrong. Within minutes of our meeting at the campsite, Barry, an elderly soybean farmer who drove in from Iowa, proudly told me that he volunteers to give presenta-

tions on “the Southern side of the war” to schoolchildren across the country. He points out to their teachers that Common Core standards in national education policy represent the same kind of illegitimate imposition of federal power that caused the War Between the States. Barry firmly believes another war is coming. “How many weapons you got?” he asked me. I told him my domestic arsenal is bare. “You ain’t gonna fare well,” was his oddly jovial reply. When I mentioned offhandedly that the event’s host and organizer was the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum, Barry just stared at me blankly.

A few hours later, as I stood outside the museum, I met a young reenactor and volunteer named James, a descendant of both slaves and slave owners, who offered a different account of the war’s legacy. James told me that just two days earlier he had been walking to work—“wearing a shirt and tie, mind you”—when, immediately in front of him, one white man robbed another and took off. The victim yelled “Thief!” but instead of chasing the assailant, two cops stand-

Your average reenactor tends to worship war.

ing nearby shoved James up against a brick wall, assuming he was the perp. “Reenacting the Civil War, to me, is a blow to the myth of white supremacy in this country,” James said. “It gives you a different image. The USCT were black men with rifles, and they changed the world.”

At the Mall in D.C. the next

morning, it became grimly apparent that his was an unpopular opinion. The event’s organizers had projected that as many as ten thousand reenactors were expected to turn out, but that count appeared to be off by at least several thousand. Even the spectators on Pennsylvania Avenue

COURTESY OF MARIANNE BOESK Y GALLERY

Barnaby Furnas, Antietam 1, 2007. TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 9

D e c l a r at ion s were often outnumbered by pedestrians and tourists who seemed serenely oblivious to the black men in blue marching with muskets and singing “John Brown’s Body,” a display of true moral sublimity if there is such a thing. I can’t be sure that what looked almost like a boycott of the Grand Review Victory Parade was actually a repudiation of the event’s pro-USCT revisionism—the reenactment was staged three weeks after Baltimore was convulsed with the Freddie Gray protests—but it’s a safe bet that the sparse attendance stemmed from the reluctance of Confederate sympathizers in the reenactment community to “galvanize” and swap their gray uniforms for blue. Then again, there may be an even simpler explanation: the Grand Review marked the inauguration of peace, while your average reenactor tends to worship war. At the end of the parade route—in Freedom Plaza, near the White House—a crowd gathered around a replica grandstand, many in period costume, including an exquisite Frederick Douglass. In an online posting months before the event, the museum had solicited “requests for period impressions to be a part of the Reviewing Stand.” But the organizers had added one caveat: “No Lincolns please.”t —Richard Kreitner

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JOSEPH BLOUGH | LEGOS®

Captive Audiences The social myths spurring

on the American incarceration state all revolve around the vague, civically agreeable method of stigmatizing the offender, segregating the wrongdoer, and establishing a clear divide between “us” and “them.” We need to keep locking up criminals, after all, in order to continue perpetuating our superstition that these bad seeds are nothing like us. Out of sight, out of our minds—and theirs. When we do get glimpses of criminals who resemble “us,” or the most powerful of us, like investment bankers or political apparatchiks—or local heroes made good/bad, like Dennis Hastert—they tend to dodge incarceration. What are we to make of our popcult fascination with

life behind bars? Netflix’s original series Orange Is the New Black, whose third season was premiering at the time of this writing, is hardly the only messenger of American contradiction, but the show has organized a whole cast around an unseemly fetish for watching prisoners enact lives that are in no sense their own. The series, set in a women’s prison, explores the ubiquity of incarceration with a fish-out-of-water story—a pampered young woman’s journey of self-discovery, no less. In 2013 it was the network’s most popular show in the United States and Europe. Producer Kevin Beggs has called it a “sardonic look at America’s huge prison system,” a system “people

around the world laugh at.” Heh. It is a dreary melodrama, fabulously accessorized. Elle magazine has featured the cast of OITNB decked out in the latest couture, “flaunt[ing] Spring’s modern, feminine silhouettes” (whatever that means). British Vogue has showcased a signature orange sweater, pants, and hoodie combo, which, for a combined cost of $1,500, enables anyone to don the look of the American

a cell. The good citizens of Jefferson City, Missouri, for example, pay for the privilege of trading in their personal belongings, eating jail food, and sleeping on a jail bed. The money goes into the municipal incarceration budget. All participants receive a mug shot and a commemorative T-shirt. Residents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, donate their freedom in jail staycays to get the “bugs” and “kinks” out of new facilities and have been noticed passing their

ing thirty-five to fifty pounds. Yes, just like the inmates. Prisons are built out of sight—and miniaturized versions of a police state proliferate in pop consciousness. Lego, the iconic children’s toy manufacturer, now markets jails and prisons. For about $125, about two-thirds of a week’s salary for the average minimum wage worker, one can purchase the Lego Prisoner Transporter set ($24.99) and the Lego Police Station ($99.99), complete with

What are we to make of our popcult fascination with life behind bars? prison-industrial complex without the inconvenience of going to prison. Quoth the tastemakers, of the series’ protagonist: “Piper Chapman’s utility basics stand the test of time—literally.”

But Orange Is the New Black

adroitly dramatizes the spooky fantasy world that’s long surrounded prisons in America, the “land of the free.” Admiration for the glamorous lifestyles of the helplessly incarcerated in our technologically advanced correctional complexes has long drawn voyeurs to participate in prison staycays—a singularly perverse form of escapism during which members of the respectable public pay for the one-night-only thrill of pretending to be trapped inside

“time served” on Facebook and Instagram. But prison life in America’s distorted reflection of itself is even more than a gauzy background for Instagram selfies; it’s also, weirdly, a prototype of the Taylorite quest for perfect civilian fitness. In Men’s Fitness you can read about the Felon Fitness Workout Program, a health hustle that occurred to defense attorney William Kroger upon him noticing that a few months in prison really “did wonders” for his clients’ physiques. Better still, the lack of a monthly gym membership, or the money to pay for one, poses no problem for the program’s devotees. Like the inmates, they can “use magazines and bedsheets to construct their own set of dumbbells” weigh-

policemen, criminals, police vehicles, a police station, and jail cells. Prisoners, if they are so lucky, can escape from inside the Police Station by means of a “flip-down toilet hatch” and make a quick getaway in a vehicle waiting nearby, which can then be apprehended by assorted police cars, along with a helicopter. Of course, if mom or dad buys the Police Station with the jail, then Junior is stuck with a police station and a jail. He can reimagine the jail on the moon, which is also available in Legoland, but he’s built a jail, and now he owns a jail and has to live with it and with the awareness of all of the other things he can’t have instead. That, you see, is the way life is in the Big House.t —Shawn Hamilton TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 11

D e c l a r at ion s Live Nice (or Else) “Mean Stinks!” is Procter

& Gamble’s campaign to stomp out bullying, sponsored by Secret deodorant. Why deodorant? Why not? Cause-related marketing is at least as old as aluminium zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly. And as Monica Lewinsky said in her TED Talk in March, “We’ve got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.” If empathy can be manufactured via product-driven bromides, then the world’s largest beauty-and-personalcare goods supplier will try. The Mean Stinks! campaign radiates pap through a chipper website and a team of motivational speakers who focus on “girl-to-girl” bullying—because “girl bullying is different,” and also, hey, girls wear Secret. “Only girls can end mean,” Mean Stinks! teaches, and here are some of the ways: Paint a mural— a “wall of nice.” Paint your fingernails—blue, the official color of bullying awareness. Office Depot has turned its back-to-school catalog into a clearinghouse of brave, bully-shaming maxims. There’s a line of “Be Kind” Sharpies in assorted candy colors (25 percent of the proceeds go to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation), not to mention One Direction–

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branded notebooks bearing “Live Nice” slogans next to photographs of Harry Styles’s dewy, brooding face. This is corporate marketing culture at its most selfconsciously progressive, using its powers to mind-fuck an impressionable young nation for good, for a change. Two years ago, an Office Depot anti-bullying PSA won a Clio Award. “Cause marketing is good for the cause, for the community, for the consumer, and for the company,” Scott Woodward, SEW Branded’s CEO and chief

ERIC HANSON

creative officer, wrote in the Huffington Post. “A win-win is achieved for everyone.”

That “creative officers” have

turned bullying prevention into the equivalent of a treacly Care Bears episode comes as no big shock; Secret’s goal, after all, is to get Ooh-La-La Lavender into the pits of our nation’s preteens. Still, over here in the body politic, the rest of us have to contend with the ineffectual ooze of niceness that antibullying campaigns tend to leave in their wake. Take the Bully Project, which was founded by documentary filmmaker and former Obama advertising hand Lee Hirsch with the aim of “changing a culture of bullying into one of empathy and action.” The first step: “Join the movement.” You can tell you are joining a movement because you are required to enter your email address, and because you can purchase from the Bully Project store that universal talisman of awareness-raising: a bright, rubbery bracelet stamped with an inspiriting message à la Livestrong. In much the same fashion that Office Depot talks of anti-bullying while pressing Sharpies on students, movements like Hirsch’s practice

“Creative officers” have turned bullying prevention into the equivalent of a treacly Care Bears episode.

ERIC HANSON

a kind of bait and switch. Action is promised, awareness is promoted—but results are evanescent. Hirsch’s 2012 documentary Bully tells the stories of five American kids who were bullied in heartland public schools; two of them committed suicide. Watch the film, and you get a powerful sock in the gut, but also the sensationalized message that bullying somehow leads directly to teen suicide with no stops in between, along with a growing sense that “bullying” now is sanitized code for gender- or sexualitybased discrimination. Just combat these problems with the familiar liberal toolkit of “awareness,” we’re told,

and they will be patiently instructed away, one email form, PSA, or deodorant stick at a time.

Missing from this pat for-

mula is the same ingredient that’s usually AWOL from ignorance-vanquishing liberal campaigns against bias: the awkward fact of unequal social power. The sustained imbalances of power that set seed to bullying don’t spring up by natural accident as troubled teens lash out at school. Instead, they are subtly encouraged by an imperative to turn out graduates who will keep our class and income inequalities safely as they are: wide, cruel, and

overawing. Bullies may be the villains in online crusades and co-marketing campaigns across the land, but in the more stalwartly Darwinian reaches of our high school corridors and college campuses, they’re widely adulated success stories. But if you take the advice of Mean Stinks!—use your nail polish, “Tease Your Hair, Not Your Friends”—you’ll look “nice,” at least, as you’re taunted and pummeled. The nonconfrontational message of Secret’s limited-edition Mean Stinks! body spray is in sync with the product itself: it smells a little like citrus as it dissipates in the air.t —Lindsey Gilbert TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 13

FROM THE ARCHIVE

| The Baffler no. 14 (2001)

From Death Travels West, Watch Him Go

BRIAN CHIPPENDALE

What few victories we have achieved in our scorched-earth War on Drugs—and what constitutes a victory in a nation where booze and pills are God-given rights, where “winners” do use cocaine and where the chemical apprenticeship of college is every middle class youth’s long-sought reward?—are dwarfed by the loss of public safety and the erosion of privacy. It is impossible to separate this war from the gun morass. Manufacturers on every tier benefit, from the “Ring of Fire” .25s that are sized to teenage hands, to companies

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like Colt that have fitted law enforcement agencies with devices better suited to Omaha Beach in 1944. Meanwhile, police tacticians increasingly elevate doctrines of force over all else: dozens of our bleak, postindustrial towns now field fully armored assault teams, carrying the ubiquitous $1200 Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun; a generation of young cops has come up with no compunction against using “no knock” warrants whenever possible; a class of administrators has learned how to use asset forfeiture to acquire land and funds that frequently vanish within insular departments; and also, visible only on the margins, the millions we have profitably incarcerated. The public sees nothing wrong with such “extreme” law enforcement—witness the already wearily accepted police tactic of using pepper or tear gas to torment protesters— ensuring that the new playbook will become the norm and that civil life will degrade into something approaching the TV-ready spectacle. Many shall become acquainted with

BRIAN CHIPPENDALE

the battering ram’s crash, with the tiny apartments filled with immigrants or blacks or working folk, with the glinting MP5s, fine German tools of perfect precision.

Even so, in this age of downsized civil liber-

ties, one feels a perverse empathy for the foot soldiers, the urban cops, and for those who patrol an increasingly tattered, volatile exurbia. Unwilling to face the politicized darkness of their work, the enforcers face instead a combination of weapon-clogged environments, a spreading population of the “controlled”—the poor, immigrants, those with addictions or criminal records—and immediate public approbation, whether earned or otherwise, in the event of a “bad day.” If some cops are racists or sadists, experience suggests a stout majority are not. But law enforcement by definition is dictated from above, and to get a glimpse of the future one need only examine the “resurgent” New York, where it’s an open NYPD secret that the statistical demands of Giuliani and Safir, as much as macho tac-squad culture, were behind the deaths of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. Firepower is routinely chosen over less lethal options, from baton takedowns to beanbag guns, and if

Dorismond’s shooting occurred during the proverbial struggle, it was still instigated by the weird “pressure point” tactics of “Operation Condor,” which evidently presumes that any African American male under seventy sells marijuana in his spare time. One can only imagine an NYPD initiative in which hardened cops dressed as Rastafarians hit up Phish fans, rave kids, and Wall Street interns for Ecstasy and LSD, and nothing is what it seems. It’s hard to deny that the national love of guns is wreathed in a bloodthirstiness that somehow negates the caution of millions of responsible gun owners; is choked with a quickening rage that, from the penny-ante fascism of spree killers to the “acceptable” casualties of the Drug War, is fast approaching conflagration. How long will the nation remain lost to this violent dream of itself? We may be haunted by the bland, suburban familiarity of those grainy stills from Columbine, but the NRA and its industry backers will continue to ensure that the blood of the poor, unkempt, and tawdry will continue to flow in the streets among the distinctive 9 mm shell casings. It is the grease in the gears of the gun machine.t —Mike Newirth TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 15

D e c l a r at ion s The Bourne Identity A hundred years ago,

Randolph Bourne was a hot property—an intellectual wunderkind who was taking the American intellectual scene by storm. Bourne was the complete package: brilliant, charismatic, filled with social energy, and exquisitely attuned to the moment. Bourne’s essays appeared in leading periodicals like The Atlantic, The Dial, and The New Republic back when magazines set the American political and cultural agenda. Admirers considered him a visionary, an exponent of a humane new cosmopolitanism. True freedom and real democracy, he believed and exemplified, implied a spirit of tolerance, generosity, and creativity consummated in what he called “the beloved community.” Barely two years after writing these words, Bourne became persona non grata. His offense involved not personal scandal—no violence, fraud, embezzlement, or sexual shenanigans—but something much, much worse: when the climate of opinion abruptly shifted, he refused to follow. They zigged, he zagged. While other members of the New York intelligentsia were swooning at the prospect of 16 1 TheBaffler [no. 28]

DAVID JOHNSON

waging a war to end all wars that would make the world safe for democracy, Bourne dared to dissent. For this, they shut him out of virtually all the journals in which he had been publishing, and all respectable outlets generally. A year after his ostracism, Randolph Bourne was dead at thirty-two, felled by the terrible influenza pandemic of 1918. That his premature passing cut short a career so full of promise must remain an eternal cause of regret. That in the brief time allotted him Bourne courageously stuck to his principles should

The state engages in a never-ending quest for power—taxing, policing, stoking rumors of war.

elicit gratitude. In the intervening century, his critique of Woodrow Wilson’s war has acquired greater salience. At Cineplexes and in pulp fiction, the derring-do of Jason Bourne may entertain, but it’s the insights of the all-but forgotten Randolph, the prophet without a Hollywood deal,

that remind us who we once were and aspired to become.

Crucial among those

insights is the imperative of distinguishing between country and state. To Bourne, the former is benign, the latter anything but. Country, in Bourne’s lexicon, is nearly synonymous with civilization. It implies a way of life, based on shared language, customs, and culture. The modern state, by contrast, is a “repository of force.” It exists for one purpose alone: to impose its will. Toward that end, the state engages in a never-ending quest for power, conducted chiefly at the country’s expense—taxing, policing, stoking rumors of war. The country flourishes in an environment that permits and even encourages nonconformity. The state seeks compliance, deference, and regimentation. Prior to the twentieth century, the people of the United States had demonstrated a strong preference for country over state, with few inclined to confuse the two. As citizens of a republic, Americans had eyed the development of European states warily. Even if they had obeyed the state’s authority, Bourne wrote, they had done so “grumblingly.” In this earlier era, the state held “no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it.” Why live in a fetid swamp like Wash-

ington, D.C., over Boston or Cincinnati or San Francisco, or any of the wide-open spaces in between? With remarkable prescience, Bourne sensed that involving the United States in the macabre European dance of self-destruction known as the Great War was going to change all that. Welcoming the “pestilence” of war meant that militaristic attitudes and a hankering to wield power would spring up like “poisonous mushrooms,” he wrote. War would exalt state above country. Once that occurred, Bourne believed, there was no going back. Sanctifying the state would inevitably sanctify those who ruled, and ordinary Americans would persuade themselves that to obey orders handed down from on high was to perform

a duty benefiting “society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us.” Through “the war-situation,” the state would become “an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class,” with plutocracy the result. Eclipsing Boston, Cincinnati, and San Francisco, Washington would command the center of the national stage. This prospect filled Bourne with alarm. Yet the more passionately he assailed Wilson’s war policies, the more quickly his own influence waned—even as Wilson himself was inventing pretexts to suppress antiwar sentiment and orchestrating a campaign of “white terror” against pacifists, radicals, and ethnic groups suddenly deemed suspect. Though

D R AW I N G R O O M

WALTER GURBO

TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 17

E x h i bit B 5 Carl Dunn

18 1 TheBaffler [no. 28]

unheeded, Bourne’s warnings had proven all too apt. No single explanation exists for the disordered state of American democracy today, vividly displayed on a daily basis in Washington, D.C., and refracted through media outlets that serve chiefly to normalize practices once viewed as wrong or at least embarrassing but now simply taken for granted. Unbridled partisanship, enshrined privilege, and catering to moneyed interests: these define the present-day American political system. The political class running the show has kept the United States permanently on a war footing, an emergency all the more astonishing in that it provokes remarkably little controversy. Evidence that war is making America a better country—safer, freer, more prosperous—is hard to come by. Evidence that war works to the benefit of the state and its clients is available in abundance: in the size of the national security apparatus, in the bottom line of weapons manufacturers, in the deference paid to those in Washington who claim that there is no alternative but to press on to the next battlefield. Randolph Bourne saw it coming. “War is the health of the state,” he famously observed. He was right then. He remains right today.t —Andrew J. Bacevich

It feels nice 3 Vinod Kumar Shukla It feels nice To sit under a tree. It leads to The internal world. In the internal world Is the internal forest. Roots and more roots, A forest of roots. Roots growing out of roots, And more coming out of them. On the topmost branch Of a root Sits the internal bird Making internal sounds. I keep losing my way In the forest, keep finding it. There are in roots no flowers or leaves, Spring is my season, not autumn. This is why the flowers have bloomed, A few, Just as I wanted them to. It feels nice to be back In the outside world. To find the way to it, Sit under a tree.

Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. TheBaffler [no. 28] ! 19