No15

No. 15

B

The

$750

AFFLER

TheBAFFLE~ VOLUME I

NUMBER

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TABLE OF CONTENTS ESSAYS Taunting Violation In the Good Old Wallow Time They Live!

Making Babies the American Girl Way What About Me? Universal 571 .

Build It and They Will Pay Charles the Excellent Heat Wave A Percentage Game

. 'Thomas <Frank Ian Urbina & Chris 'Toensing . 1tlson Smith . Tmi 1(epsalis . Sharon O''Dair J'D. Connor . lAndrew 'Friedman . c5Wartha 13ayne . eric KJjnenberg Paul c5Waliszewski

3 19 27 29

39 45 51 59

65 89

COLUMNS THE ROD OF CORRECTION

Cogito Oprah Sum

Chris .(shmann 13

THE LITERARY VAUDEVILLE

Cop Shoot Cop My Love Is a Free Free Market

<.Mike'l'feuirth 71 . Jim lArndorftr 75

CORDON SANITAIRE

Ronald Reagan Fans Can't Be Wrong!

44,000,000

FICTION Memory for Forgetfulness Springs POETRY Columbo in San Cristobal Junk After Rejection Idle Music Is the Devi!'s Band

Seth Sanders & c5Wike O''Flaherty 79 c5Wahmoud 'Darwish 23 eileen <:Myles 35 'David Perry 37 'Benjamin 'Friedlander 44 . Chris Stroffolino 57 . 'Daniel 130uchard 64

ART COVER: 'Thasnai Sethaseree. INTERIOR: lAmy <.Abshier-'R(yes, 'Brian Chippendale, emily 'Flake, .(sif goldberg, K(.ith lferzik, lArt Young.

We finished this issue in November 2002, shuttling between Dan Raeburn's pied-a-terre in the fashionable Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago and our spread in Woodlawn. More than a year has passed since our last issue. We beg your pardon, but we've been busy homesteading. Our old building is still but a shell. Tumbleweeds blow across its dirt floor, and a nice group of youngsters called the People's Republic of Delicious Food have put up a tipi.

We just sold the steer we grazed in there since last spring.

Greg and Diamonds should be done with the smokehouse in time for hog-killing season. The trailer we ordered from Indiana is a real beaut. It has heat, unlike the one poor Wong Lee and Dan Peterman got.

We were able ro procure that trailer, and to publish again, thanks to the generosity of BAFFLER supporters across the globe who comributed to the Baffier Recovery Fund, attended one of our benefit concens, or otherwise helped us out in the aftermath of the fire that destroyed our office. It is no exaggeration to say that we were overwhelmed with support and good wishes from all quarters (excluding those in the City of Chicago who are in charge of graming building permits).

We have many people to thank for helping us get through our troubles. Five concerts in three cities were organized for our benefit. The shows wem on due to the hard work of Steve Laymon, William B. Mollard, Terri Kapsalis, John Corbett, Tim Tuten, and Katie Nicholson Tuten; thanks also to the generous managers of Tonic in New York and Chicago's Hideout and Empty Bottle. Jennifer Farrell of Starshaped press donated design and printing of invitations. The musicians who performed at each event are true friends, and we want to express our appreciation to Janet Bean, the Dishes, the Downwinders, the Goblins, David Grubbs, Harvester, I Am the World Trade Cemer, Mason Jennings, Barbara Manning and the Go-Luckys, the Moore Brothers, Robert Nedelkoff, D.]. Tone B. Nimble, Archer Prewitt (twine time), Sam Prekop, Mark Sheehy, Tim and Andy from Silkworm, Eddy Torres, and the Ken Vandermark Five.

We are especially grateful to the several hundred individuals who made comributions, and we have decided to acknowledge their generosity privately. Rick MacArthur of Harpers Magazine deserves special memion. A gift from the Lannan Foundation was thoughtful and completely unexpected.

Thank you all. We are glad to be back.

~

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P.O. BOX CHICAGO

thebajJler. com Publisher

Cjreg fiJne Associate Publisher

Emily Vogt Editor

7homas Cf'rank Managing Editor

"'Diamonds" 'Dave lMulcahey Associate Editors

lMichael Szalay <.Matt Weiland Fiction Editor

Solveig ~lson Poetry Editor

Jennifer lMoxley Contributing Editor

Chrifly lMacJjmahan Subscriptions to THE BAFFLER cost US$24 per year, postpaid, in the United States, and can be purchased by check at the address at right or by credit card at thebaffler.com and 1-888-387-8947.

The cover image of Mai Jalearnpura is from a photo which appeared in Dichan magazine No. 432, February 1995, and is used with kind permission.

Copy Editor

Cjeorge ffodak Designer

'Daniel %£burn Founders

All coments copyright ©2002 by THE BAFFLER. ISSN 1059-9789 ISBN 1-888984-15-5 Nothing in this or any BAFFLER may be reprinted in any form without the Publisher's written permission.

All rights reserved. Primed in Canada.

7homas Cf'rank K£ith White

DOWN AND OUT IN THE RED ZONE by 'Thomas 'Frank "MAYBE NO SUPER BOWL will ever be as important as No. XXXVI," thundered an editorial in New Orleans magazine last February, "because this one is about national confidence." And so it was. Super Bowl XXXVI was to be played only five months after the catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, fout months after powdered anthrax appeared in the mail of prominent U.S. senators, and mere weeks after the Enron bankruptcy. The army was hunting down terrorists overseas, the FBI was casting a wide dragnet for evildoers here at home, there were long, panicky security lines at airports. The warm, safe old world was coming apart, but the greatest TV spectacle of them all would stand like Gibraltar, replenish our faith in our nation's ability to sell itself beer, cars, chips, and all manner of online services.

Number XXXVI was significant in even more ways than these, however. Football is mock combat, and the great game's mystical connection to American military prowess was more important than ever. "Nations that have produced good athletes have also been able to produce good soldiers," continued that editorial in New Orleans. "The infrastructure that can make great quarterbacks can also make great field commanders. The wealth and technology that makes domed stadiums, instant replay and satellite hookups possible can also manufacture stealth fighters, infrared viewing and unmanned spy planes."

This was to be a Super Bowl with a noble purpose, and its organizers, who have always longed to drape this most grotesque of corporate extravaganzas in the flag, had finally re-

ceived the go-ahead. Scrapping the event's original Mardi Gras theme, they grabbed for Old Glory with both hands, working it into nearly every aspect of the proceedings. The new logo for Super Bowl XXXVI was a map of the U.S.A. in stars and stripes; the new theme was "Heroes, Hope, and Homeland."

Red, white, and blue trinkets were hastily manufactured to replace the original orange and black ones, but there is no logo like a discarded logo and the obsolete pins and pens and bobbleheads that had been cranked out before 9/n relentlessly made their way out into the broad stream of commerce, given away to reporters as curiosities or offered to the public as "collectibles."

There is another mystical aspect to the Super Bowl that I should probably mention.

The great game is actually thought by some superstitious few to be a helpful economic indicator, like the consumer confidence index or the number of new housing starts. In years when an NFC team wins the game, it is believed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will go up. When the AFC entrant prevails (which they haven't done too regularly since the gloomy years of the 1970S), the Dow is

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THE BAFFLER

overvalued and heading for a fall. Naturally I am an AFC partisan, both by temperament and (more importantly) by the accident of birth: I am from Kansas City, and the team to which my loyalties were forever assigned are the chronically troubled Chiefs.

I went to the Super Bowl in 2002 not merely to see what this oracular event looked like at first hand, but to sample the Super Bowl experience, to see how Americans partied and played in these jittery times. The first thing I noticed on arriving in New Orleans was the military presence, the knots of soldiers dressed for business in camouflage and M-r6s who milled throughout the convention center. The Super Bowl had been declared a "National Special Security Event," the Louisiana National Guard had been called out, entire streets had been closed off, and journalists wishing to move from areas of lesser to greater security had to run an intimidating gauntlet of bag-searches and credentialchecks. At our moment of crisis, they were here to see to it that our Super Bowl would stand tall, would assure us that order still reigned. But what order, exactly?

They weren't just there to protect the great game itself, all those troops and the private security guards that accompanied them. They were there, at great public expense, to secure the entire "Week of Game," the carnival of press conferences, parties, celebrity photo-ops, and staged news events that leads up to the big game. For athletes, agents, team owners, sportswriters, media types, and PR people from all the branches of corporate America upon which the sports world symbiotically thrives (automaking, brewing, advertising, gambling, etc.), Week of Game serves as an unofficial convention, a place where brands can be puffed and talent pimped to hundreds of potential clients. New Economy gurus used to rave about the NFL as an organization that was pure brand identity, that produced nothing tangible, only a narrative for us to embrace, a lesson for us to learn, and Week of Game serves as the annual reunion for the brand's vast extended family.

It was after 6 P.M. on the Wednesday of Week of Game when I arrived, and the soldiers guarding the New Orleans convention center didn't want to let me into the mediacredential booth. It seems one had to have credentials already in order to get inside and talk to the credentialing people. I ignored the maze of nylon ropes and went in anyway. The NFL folks staffing the booth didn't mind. In fact, they were strangely giddy: All their high-tech preparations for the week had failed, they told me. My photo, which I had carefully e-mailedthem, had been lost. It would have to be taken again, and also would I please write down all the information I had sent in months before on this blank slip of paper? They would take it on faith that I was an actual reporter for a magazine.

Once credentialed, I stepped up to the hospitality table dispensing press kits and other trinkets, and here I ran headlong into a wall of gravity and seriousness. On my way into the building I had seen a reporter for a big city daily newspaper running for a complimentary media-only shuttle bus, wearing a complimentary Super Bowl hat and clutching two complimentary Super Bowl briefcases that overflowed with gracious helpings of even more complimentary Super Bowl swag.

If that was what the Super Bowl was about, then I wanted swag, too. But-wipe that smile offyour face, Frank!-I was not a reporter for a big city daily. I was not in television, nor on the radio, nor even on the Internet. My brand-new laminated dogtag revealed that I was with Harper's Magazine, a highbrow publication that only a few people I encountered during Week of Game had ever heard of. In Super Bowl media land,

Down and Out in the Red Zone

where a Terry Bradshaw or a John Madden might walk through at any moment, this credential put me at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. The sweet Southern drawl of the woman at the hospitality desk soured noticeably as she read my tag aloud. She gaped with utter disbelief at my request to be ourfitted like the reporter I had seen outside.

Yes, I could ride around on the shurtle bus, but no, I would certainly not receive a helping of complimentary Super Bowl swag. And, no, she would not divulge where the official party was being held that night. She backed her chair away and stared at me with perceptible contempt. In talking to me, she was losing valuable hospitality time that could be put to better use, enhancing the stay of someone whose pleasure really mattered.

This, I would find, was a typical reaction from the belles of the bowl game. In a world where every blank space screamed out for a corporate logo, where every free soda pop came courtesy of someone, where every contest, every statistic, every punt pass & kick was sponsored by some generous deity, the right people wore their rightness visibly and with pride. Their clothes marked them with the name of their media outlet or corporate employer or team "organization." They were driven to events in stretch limousines or in the Cadillac Escalade pickup trucks that circulated constantly during Week of Game, the ones with Super Bowl logos and "genuine leather" tags still attached to the seats. Their

5

seating was always upgraded, their experiences surpassed expectations, their credentials quickly trumped any length of nylon rope.

And yet my station in Super Bowl life still afforded me certain privileges. There was, for example, the open bar for journalists on the second story of the convention center, where burly security guards kept out riffraff like radio engineers and where the Crown Royal and the Chivas Regal poured freely into the plastic cups of reporters great and small. In the corner of this room, opposite a gigantic television that was always tuned to one sporting event or another, stood a 1981 vintage Galaga machine whose waves of predictably advancing bogeys I found far more interesting than some press conference detailing the pointless co-branding deal that the NFL had just struck with some soccer team in Japan.

(I probably shouldn't knock all NFL press conferences. It was an NFL press conference that afforded me my one Walker Percy Moviegoer moment while in New Orleans, that let me experience the sensual apprehension of the simulacrum. I was watching the big TV in the media lounge as ESPN broadcast a press conference with the coach of the St. Louis Rams, the overwhelming favorite to win the Super Bowl. Not realizing that this pseudo-event was actually taking place right across the hall, I wandered out the door and into the very thing itself.)

And then there were the official Super Bowl media parties like the one I attended at

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THE BAFFLER

the New Orleans city museum, where elaborate precautions were taken to keep us media people segregated from the undistinguished masses of tourists and city dwellers. Since shuttle buses, even of the most official variety, weren't permitted on certain streets of the French Quarter, we were dropped off a block away from the party site, ushered by the ubiquitous security guards down a narrow alley, past people dining in a courtyard (a yellow nylon-strap rope had been set up to keep them there), and finally into the museum proper, where the sportswriters and VIPs enjoyed all manner of highly authentic music and food. Sipping complimentary plastic cups of Glenlivet before a vast painting of Andrew Jackson's 1815 victory over the British, a tourism official offered to supply me with a list of restaurants and bars where celebrities were scheduled to appear the next day. Standing in the tiny courtyard of the museum, I was instructed in the fine points of pageant life by two beauty queens dressed in jeweled crowns and sashes ("Miss Louisiana" and "Miss Teen Louisiana"). Their accents marked them as members of the New Orleans upper crust, and they spoke in the scrubbed, high-minded phrases that we all know from the Miss America cliche, but before long I learned that they weren't on the top-tier pageant circuit after all. The big contest that would decide their league's champion was to be held not in Atlantic City but in Gary, Indiana.

Many steps down the pageant hierarchy were the women of the Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion brand, always in groups of five or six plus a male handler, who could be found wandering hither and yon through the media center apparently uninhibited by the complex rules of access and credentials. Like the football players themselves, they were easily distinguished from afar by their wildly improbable bodies, which grew more freakish the closer one came: Each of them was diminutive and rail thin, but with voluminous breasts erupting from their skinny chests. And each one seemed to have adopted

a different trick for accentuating this feature: a cantilevered red-white-and-blue bra; a military-style shoulders-back posture; or a fartoo-small jacket with the zipper pulled halfway up, causing the breasts to protrude like two footballs in an overpacked duffel bag.

It was never quite clear what the anatomically improbable Hawaiian Tropic women were doing at Week of Game. But when asked this or any other question-this was, after all, a gathering of media people-the models would turn the tables on their interlocutor with a sort of eroticized pity. The beauty pageant in which they were competing may not have drawn the approval of the matrons of Metairie, but on the food chain of physique they outranked all of us the way Yin Diesel outranks Rowan Atkinson. You're a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press?

Awww.that.skind of cute. lt is a social hierarchy that most people leave behind after high school. But in the corporate carnival that was Week of Game it was in full coercive effect just the way you remember it, a fact which was made absolutely clear to me when I showed up one night for a

Down and Out in the Red Zone

party at a French Quarter club called "Opulence." My colleagues and I had been duly invited to the fabulous goings-on, but we quickly discovered that absolutely no one was being admitted. We waited outside in the drizzling rain while a throng of angry frat boys pushed and churned outside the door, one of them, a battered straw hat on his head and his eyes shallow as a cow's, continually trying to pick a fight with the security guard.

Some time later I came across a copy of the ad that had drawn them all to the gates of Opulence: "Hawaiian Tropic Beauties â&#x20AC;˘ NFL Superstars. Two Hour Open Bar," it promised. Of course they had come; like clueless Okies promised great jobs in California, they had driven hours to get here. With the guys who screwed the Okies, however, there was a tangible financial motive. But what could explain the engineering of this colossal pile-up?

Was there an invisible economy of celebrity in which one's notoriety or Qrating was somehow augmented by the size-times-frustration of the crowd of hapless mooks that one left milling outside the door? Were there extra points if the fans snapped and started fighting? Were there penalties for taunting?

After a full hour of waiting, one of my colleagues made contact with an accomplice inside and, thanks to the intercession of a kindly Hawaiian Tropic model, we gained entrance to the exalted space within. There was no open bar, but a party attended by the models and a number of St. Louis Rams was most definitely under way. A sports radio producer pointed out for me the various athletes in the throng. The biggest stars among them had evidently secured private party rooms from which they occasionally ventured out: in one of these I caught a glimpse of a famous retired quarterback, one of the heroes of my youth. In the fluorescent light of the crowded dance floor the distended lips and manicured nails of the Hawaiian Tropic women glowed pale green like a speedometer.

A guy with a video camera followed a pair of women in tight pants, filming their asses as they walked. The OJ spun a wall-shaking

7

number delineating the joy of the blow job while several players got a little public frottage against the proffered hip-huggers of the stacked babes. Three blonde debutantes, bobbing modestly on a platform at one end of the dance floor, became instant exhibitionists whenever the video camera was turned their way, caressing and licking each other while trying hard not to take their eyes off the lens.

Complete, hermetic self-absorption was the erotic motif on the other side of the room, where a brunette dressed entirely in black vinyl stood, expressionless, staring, and spread-eagle astride a catwalk, moving only slightly over the course of the evening.

I think it was while attending a press conference on a co-branding scheme between the NFL and Cadillac that I really started to dislike the sports reporters at Week of Game.

The chairman of Cadillac was drawing the mandatory parallel between the Super Bowl and patriotism, he was saying things like, "Cadillac and the NFL are two powerful historic brands," and bloviating about the TV commercial that was to run during the game featuring-for the very first time in a TV commercial!-the music of Led Zeppelin.

He was followed by MVPs from Super Bowls past who enthused pallidly about the Escalade SUV, recalling the cars and vacations and other corporate gifts they received back in the day, and noting their inferiority to the gifts that are given out today (i.e., a Cadillac Escalade SUV). The room was filled with maybe two or three hundred sportswriters, TV crews, photographers, and (of course) a

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THE BAFFLER

detachment of fierce-looking guards, and for all the colorful style and cynicism gathered in the room, nobody piped up and said, "This is bullshit" or "What the hell does this have to do with football?"

Where was the famous adversarial culture of the press? Gone, it would seem, with the rules that prevented journalists from accepting freebies from subjects. Cheerleaders lacking only miniskirts and pom-poms, the sportswriters had become a part of the NFL brand universe. In the Media Center you'd see them relaxing in the big armchairs set up for them by the NFL, watching endless loops of Super Bowls past on the big TVs, munching on comp potato chips and swigging comp soda pop and leaving the trash for the comp cleaning staff. In the journalists' lounge upstairs you'd see them standing in long lines for some deep-fried mystery compo Oh, they could be plenty adversarial as individuals, all right. When I went to dinner with them they'd laugh off the very idea of knowing the difference between zinfandel and merlot as effeminate stuff; when a group of them came into the empty lounge where the bartender and I were watching an old movie, they'd switch the TV to some obscure college game without even asking. But when the NFL brass shook hands with whomever they were co-branding at the moment, these guys eagerly scurried up to the front of the press conference, fifteen or twenty of them with cameras at the ready, so they could capture the scene for eternity while the two suits held the pose, hands clasped and smiles fixed .

Whatever actual spons-related work was done during Week of Game took place on

"Radio Row," the hall of the convention center where every sports-talk radio station in America was doing a live feed. A primal din of exaggerated working-class accents and unfamiliar jingles arose from the folding tables that had been set up there, along with snatches of esoteric arguments about football technicalities and the puzzling in-jokes of beloved on-air duos you've never heard of.

To listeners at home, perhaps, the reports from Radio Row sound fresh and exciting.

But radio veterans regard Week of Game with a sort of horror: With airtime to fill and no real news to discuss, they open their microphones to just about anyone who walks through the convention center. This has transformed Radio Row into a week-long parade of hucksters, salesmen, sponsored beauties, and washed-up athletes who were big in the days before athletes made millions of dollars and who now peddle self-published memoirs or hand-painted football cards. A few years ago, I was told, the group that recorded "Who Let the Dogs Out" showed up at Week of Game and made a stop at each booth in Radio Row, performing the same snippet of their trademark harmonies for the listeners in Cincinnati, then Spokane, then Sacramento, and so on, the a capella chorus slowly making its way down the hall.

In the highest demand on Radio Row were those athletes scheduled to play in the Super Bow!. These princely beings ambled nonchalantly down the corridor accompanied by entourages, the bigger stars bringing entourages composed of other celebrities. TV commentators like Joe Theismann were a close second in desirability. It was not uncommon here to see a radio personality interviewing a TV personality.

I sat down with the crew of a Chicago sports station as they broadcast a daily call-in show. I had met the manic host of the program the evening before, when he had taken a large group of Chicagoans out for steaks at Morcon's, had ordered so many bottles of 1994 Dom Perignon (both for his own entourage and for a table of mystery men across the

Down and Out in the Red Zone

room) that the restaurant ran out of it, and then had picked up the massive bill even though he barely knew several of the people in the group. He was, in some ways, the precise opposite of the sports media type I was growing to loathe. While the press corps lived for comps, he was astonishingly generous.

While most reporters and radio workers come straight out of college, he had been a hot dog vendor. And while nearly everyone at Week of Game, just like nearly every stockbroker I have ever met, sported a few fake working-class turns of phrase, his dialect was pure hardened Chicagoese. Most important, this radio host took his listeners seriously, carefully writing down their phoned-in predictions for the upcoming game; for the flood tide of official bullshit that swamped Week of Game he had a healthy contempt.

Sitting at his table while he delivered two hours of frenetic, intricately detailed chatter, I was briefly able to escape my lowly station in Week of Game and observe the workings of the brothel of the brands from a buyer's perspective. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to see House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt salute the Super Bowl as a "wholesome game" that was "good for America." But I did come across a person from the nearby D-Day museum pitching a connection between the

9

newly patrioticized Super Bowl and World War II. For the most part, though, the subject was sports, as the athletes' wives and the agents' assistants-blonder, slightly more modestly clad versions of the basic Hawaiian Tropic prototype-secured time for their charges on the Chicago airwaves. Wide receiver Qadry Ismail, much in demand for his easy humor, wandered casually from table to table. A controversial between-jobs quarterback shared his opinion that the key to life was "success, leadership, competitiveness, and faith in the Good Lord." An athlete wearing a caramel-colored sweatsuit and a diamondencrusted crucifix sauntered by, impossible to ignore. "Frank!" the producer hissed. "Go find out who that is!"

Upstairs the NFL people were holding a press conference to announce the "Class of 2002," this year's inductees into the football Hall of Fame. As each winner's name was read, a five-foot-high reproduction of his football card was set up before the media throng, with the Topps logo prominently added, of course. One of the inductees was reached by telephone, and the reporters held their tape recorders up the loudspeaker to capture the great man's words. When he stopped to take questions , he was quickly asked whether the team he played for was the best ever. We know it was a great team, but what we need to figure out is whether it was the best collection of football players ever, better than, say, that one team from two decades later. Out in the hallway a reporter read the names of the chosen to a colleague over a cell phone and told him how to frame the story: "There's toughness, there's compet.. ,) ltIveness ....

Using my own cellphone, I was finally able to reach the organizers of a party being thrown that night by Maxim magazine. They informed me that I had to pony up $500 if I wanted to attend the party proper, but that they would gladly comp me a space on the "red carpet." And what did that mean? I would be permitted to stand by the door and observe the celebrities as they arrived.

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THE BAFFLER

Fuck that. There were so many celebrities and camera crews loose in this town that media frenzies were erupting spontaneously.

Out on Canal Street I saw the mayor of Boston surrounded instantly by cameras and reporters as he tried to walk the ten feet from his hotel to his waiting limo. What appeared to be a Mardi Gras parade and was even being filmed as such turned out to be a bunch of drunken college students, brought together by some fleeting enthusiasm that soon dissipated. A massive SUV rolled slowly by, an Escalade outfitted with four video screens, each one on and the volume all the way up, even though the driver was alone in the car. There went a stretch Lexus. A stretch PT Cruiser. A stretch Chevy pickup. My companions spotted Bonnie Bernstein of CBS puffing resolutely down the street. A columnist for USA Today smiled and waved.

There was a table of ESPN guys in the Palace Cafe. A table of old guys with Super Bowl rings. A pimply teenager passed by drinking from a container shaped like a hand grenade.

Then a guy who had a full-sized goldfish bowl hanging from his neck, sucking up the pale green contents through a Silly Straw.

The rap diva Lavish was promoting her latest effort with handbills that depicted her at a table littered with hundred dollar bills, stock certificates, and a gold fountain pen with which she had evidently been signing them.

An ad on a bus stop welcomed me to New Orleans on behalf of the Cash Money Millionaires.

The bar at the New Orleans Harrah's casino features a night sky painted on the ceiling and a series of majestic bas-relief friezes depicting the history of jazz. (One of them is marked "Fusion.") In the casino's capacious auditorium on the Saturday of Week of Game the Hawaiian Tropic women were preparing for their beauty contest. Dressed only in bikinis, they walked around among the dark-suited VIPs, hugging celebrities and sitting on laps for official photographs. A DJ

played favorites like "Shake Your Ass" and "If You're Sexy and You Know It" while makeshift bars hooked the journos up with complimentary Maker's Mark. Once again the video cameras had their customary effect, instantly transforming filmees into slatterns, inspiring them to mount raised platforms and grind with all the lewdness they could summon. Standing well clear of the velvet ropes of what he called the "look but don't touch" zone, a radio personality from Texas tried to explain for me the still-mysterious connection between Hawaiian Tropic and the Super Bowl: He'd heard that maybe the women are all represented by this one agent. Who was in turn connected to the big game. Who really cared, though. What mattered was that red, white, and blue bunting decorated the room, the hors d'oeuvres were comped, and on a giant American flag behind the stage was projected the simple declaration, "Athletes First."

On Bourbon Street so many people had jammed themselves into the celebrated space between the old colonial buildings that walking became impossible. Out in the crush Patriots fans were taunting Rams fans. Rams fans were congratulating one another for siding with the obviously superior team. The men in the throng were middle-aged and surprisingly well-groomed, in neatly clipped hair and oxford shirts and expensive football team jackets. The women were wearing stylish leather coats, designer sunglasses, and the sort of bob that was fashionable among Southern sorority women in the Eighties. In the shops you heard them arguing with proprietors over Patek Philippe watches; in the street they carried paper cups of beer and clustered wherever someone had heeded the time-honored cry to "show us your tits," raising their state-of-the-art video cameras to peep over the thick mass of surrounding oglers, bagging another treasured memory

Down and Out in the Red Zone

II

that could be savored later in the media room of the suburban estate. Overhead, on one of those typical French Quarter wrought-iron balconies, a line of men in T-shirts and leather jackets bellowed for tit. So obese that their bellies actually hung over the iron railing, they nonetheless kept leaning forward to cajole or taunt or throw things, and each time the railing would shake and start to give, but then snap back. The distinguished crowd scrambled drunkenly for beads. They took up the call from so many different points that it achieved an uncanny echoing effect, rising above the ordinary clamor and noise. "Your tits!" they cried. "Your tits ... your tits ... your tits!"

The tenth-largest yacht in the world, Tatoosh is the property of the world's thirdwealthiest man, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Easily the Most Important of all the VIPs that assembled in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, Allen had-by parking his big, big boat so conspicuously-neatly dropped an ace of trump on the week-long pre-game competition. What's more, he wasn't charging $500 to take a look. Anyone in town could have a red-carpet view of the comings and goings of this cash money billionaire merely for the price of an oyster po' boy. And to judge by the excited buzz among the crowd, plutocracy made for a better spectator sport than did booty-shaking swimsuit modelsmaybe even better than football itself. After all, this was what it was all about. This was the sight that put all the pieces in place, that made it all make sense: We sweat and grunt and type and choke and drive and fake enthusiasm and film and cook and serve and lift and run and pour and smile and dance and suck so that this one man can enjoy ease and pleasure beyond imagining.

The three-hundred-foot yacht Tatoosh, of Antiguan registry, was moored strategically in the Mississippi River, directly in from of New Orleans' new Riverwalk Mall. On its decks, men in logo-embroidered button-down shirts could be seen sauntering easily about, while two stretch limousines idled on the wharf, awaiting the passengers' pleasure. Up on the veranda a growing crowd, hailing from all corners of afHuent American suburbia, studied the vessel with awestruck admiration.

Families asked strangers to take their picture with the yacht in the background; kids marveled at the helicopter on board and speculated about the fun the unknown owner must have with his two (not one, but two!) SeaDoos, which were clearly visible on the deck.

A man excitedly described the scene on his cellphone: "Must have more money than God, whoever he is."

I watched the Super Bowl at home. On a bigscreen TV and with a six-pack of beer at my side. There may even have been pizza; I don't recall. In fact, I only clearly remember three things at all about the game itself. First, the animated soldiers that were used to introduce each player's stats, pushing a tiny animated button to make the numbers appear and then turning and snapping off a perfect animated salute. Second, the halftime show in which Bono of the Irish band U-2 covered himself with an American flag, ran laps around a makeshift stage to the faked enthusiasm of a trucked-in audience, and, while the names of the 9/11 victims scrolled down the TV screen, worked himself up to the brink of some sort of ecstasy of virtue, like Bernini's Saint Theresa. Third, the AFC squad administered a world-class humiliation to the heavily favored NFC team. _

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American in the PoHcritical Condition

T

has long been the most disreputable desire in the great sensorium of our culture, since sating it usually means short-circuiting a host of other, more lucrative reflexes in the consumer body politic. From the solons of civic journalism to the touts of the tech market, criticism is the one form of information that is just a little too free. This goes double for all the weights and measures of the critical vocabulary-the ranking of content and audiences, the groupings of high and low forms of expression, and most of all, the scandalous notion that some kinds of culture could actually be better than others.

At the same time that criticism looks ever more retrograde (and, in the post 9tn polis, unpatriotic), its distant cousin, taste, is everywhere. As fops and critics are flogged off the American scene, faith in mass judgment spontaneously rises. Taste is the great property of consumer sovereignty, the maker of market demand, and, to hear a growing chorus of postideological sachems tell it, taste has swallowed whole all prior schemes of social rank and differentiation. Conservative pundit Joseph Epstein, in his recent book Snobbery: The American Version, charts the triumph of uptrending American tastes-and the swarthy, striving middle class that makes taste matter so much-by casually waving away all mere material determinants of social rank in America. "Somehow measuring other people-above, below-from a middle-class perspective seems an irrelevance in the world we now live in, and therefore without much point." Oddly, though, the flattening of material hierarchy somehow reinforces cultural HE CRITICAL IMPULSE

snobbery, the means by which we parade and protect our hard-won and vigorously contested taste: "Taste ranks high in the scheme of what we value-higher perhaps than anything else-and gives our lives a nervous quality, " Epstein declaims in a typically sweeping aside. But taste is no longer "what people in possession of social power said it was"; it has, rather, become massified and massaged into shape by "the professional tastemakers, those editors, designers, decorators, museum curators, critics, etiquette handbook writers, movie and television producers ... who ignite fads, set trends, keep the rest of us ... guessing, hopping, jumping."

Taste is, in other words, a simple contractual exchange between free agents and their hired advisers. "Snobbery ... doesn't seem to be carried on in anything like the traditional context of social class," Epstein argues. "In snobbery, as in so much else in contemporary America, everyone is in business for him- or herself."

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, David Brooks has likewise hailed, as part of his neverending ritual discovery of the "Bobo" class, the downward redistribution of snobbishness.

Brooks, a colleague of Epstein's at The Weekly Standard, claims that "we have democratized elitism in this country .... Everybody gets to be an aristocrat now. And the number of social structures is infinite. You can be an outlaw-biker aristocrat, a corporate real-estate aristocrat, an X Games aristocrat, a Pentecostal minister aristocrat. ... And everybody can be a snob, because everybody can look down from the heights of his mountaintop at the millions of poor saps who are less accomplished."

Reassurance is the primary aim of such pundit patter. Class, it tells us, is not a matter

13

14

THE BAFFLER

of widening wealth and income gaps, narrowing access to public goods such as education and health care, or-least of all-the relations of power in the workplace. It is rather, a mere posture of the self, to be taken up or relinquished as casually as one's outlaw-biker persona, and limited only by the "infinite" range of consumer taste preferences. Funny thing about this "infinite" selection of choices, though: To judge by Brooks's pop sociology, it generates remarkably flat and stereotyped portraits of the American character. Rather than bothering to write even anecdotal depictions of our actual shifting social attitudes, Brooks simply gives us an imaginary portrait of ideal-type lifestyle snobs: A lesbian community college professor, besotted with authentic Latino culture-trinkets, and a suburban dad, obsessed with college football and parking spaces. We have infinite choices, it seems, only so long as we choose to be a character from the Drew Carey Show.

Such is the final payoff of this skylarking school of social commentary. Taste has acquired paramount importance to conservative thinkers because taste is impervious to criticism-Brooks and Epstein's lifestyle menageries are insular, solipsistic groupings, addressing no issue or public that doesn't also proceed from their own principles of consumer self-selection.

Although this conservative fantasy may not square with reality in most parts of American life, it does describe with eerie accuracy both the thought and experiences of the cultural/ academic left, a truly enfeoffed lifestyle enclave, which speaks only to itself in its own professional argot. The difference (and it is a slight one) is that leftish academia imagines itself a collection of heroic anti-snobs, adjudicating cultural disputes on behalf of entire disenfranchised taste communities. Long before the lifestyle-spotters on the right got into the act, after all, the cultural studies movement had been conducting a decades-long retreat from meaningful quality judgments, hailing no end of cynically produced masscult product as emblems of audience-appro-

priated dissent and subversion. Nominally, of course, these iconoclasts occupy the opposite pole in these debates that the sunny rightward snob-spotters do: They want to infuse trivial taste choices with at least a whiff of ideological conflict. But the exercise in each case yields identical results.

While the conservative reflex is to elevate us all as consumer-aristocrats, the leftish impulse is to empower us all as fans. Take, for example, Hop on Pop, a doorstop-sized anthology of writings from "the first generation of cultural scholars to be able to take for granted that popular culture can be studied on its own terms." This giddy self-image in turn prompts the book's editors, Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, to compose a "manifesto for a new cultural studies," which is largely devoted to reiterating all the weary shibboleths of the old culture studies. But the authors do press one novel claim: that as sinecured culture critics, they need no longer be encumbered by the act of criticism. For not only do they form a new generation of cultural scholars, they are those purest and bravest of culture-war foot soldiers: They are fans. The intellectual and the fan "remain too closely related for a clean separation," they write. Nevertheless-oh the indignity!-"as academics, we are told that our affective relations to popular texts must be cast aside so we may fully understand 'how they work on us.'" The solution, of course, is to "embrace our immediate engagement of

The Rod ofCorreClion

popular culture as the source of our knowledge and the motivating force behind our projects"-though how one embraces an engagement, even an immediate one, is a cognitive puzzle on the order of lassoing a cloud.

But never mind. The thing is, you see, that "being a fan represents a collective cultural and political identity which links us to other communities. Our cultural preferences and allegiances, no less than our racial, sexual, and political identities, are difficult to shed when we write."

Alas, they do not lie. As any casual detour into a Star Trek convention or a Phish show will quickly demonstrate, people who stake their identities on their fandom make for rather monotonous company, and so it is with most of the essays in Hop on Pop. There are earnest meditations on the "participatory" nature of karaoke clubs, on the sexualized performance aesthetic of professional wrestling, on the subcultures of Myst and lo-fi. And with the introduction of each feeble, tiny taste community comes the same grand claims to agency, authenticity and liberatory promise, so that the whole enterprise starts to feel a bit like trying to film a sequel of Jurassic Park inside a terrarium. Here, for example, is co-editor Shattuc, describing the rhetorical savvy of daytime TV talk show audiences: The talk show relied [in making its arguments] on the tangible proofs offered by emotional testimonies and bodily signs (laughter, facial expressions and tears). These are the forms of argument available to the nonexperts or underclasses .... In this postmodern age of simulations talk shows of the 1980s demanded a belief in the authenticity of lived experience as a social truth. Perhaps such direct appeal to raw emotion is what makes the educated middle class so uncomfortable with the so-called "oprahfication" of America. As one Oprah audience member stated on April 14, I994, "Don't tell me how to feel. I am my experience."

Cog ito Oprah sum.

There is a world of dishonest condescension (not to mention a galaxy of anti-intellectualism) in Shattuc's assertion that "nonexpens" as well as the unwashed "underclass" rely on the "authenticity of lived experience,"

15

"raw emotion," and "bodily signs" to express themselves. The main point, though, is that the claim at the heart of Shattuc's apologia, like the inviolate lifestyle determinism of Messrs. Epstein and Brooks, admits no point of critical entry. Who, after all, doesn't believe in their lived experience or use gestures to make points, and what in those broadly asserted conditions is worthy of any public attention or debate? Suggesting that any of the hundreds of obvious objections to these assertions arise merely from "educated middleclass" discomfort is another pernicious canard, steeped in crude psychic reductionism-particularly since no end of educated middle-class writers, from Elizabeth Wurtzel to Dave Eggers, have also written self-narrated accounts of their own critic-resistant expenences.

The crowning gesture of critical disarmament comes from the United Kingdom, where writers and critics once hewed rather reliably to class coordinates in matters of taste. But ever since the Birmingham School midwifed the birth of cultural studies, British academics have been in frenzied search of the political subjectivity buried beneath the trivial stuff of culture preference. And so the New Left Review, a magazine generally not given to such enthusiasms, has been raging with debates over the efforts of art theorists Dave Beech and John Roberts to push beyond both the critical theory and cultural studies movements to the lowest levels of aesthetic-cum-political praxis. But even though Beech and Roberts take great pains to distance themselves from the theoretical labors

16

THE BAFFLER

of the cultstuds, their actual argument reads as though it's a transcription of Roland Barthes on an especially bad acid trip. Beech and Roberts come to praise the philistine-or at least to theorize his revolutionary cultural position, and their labors, together with responses from several British leftist critics also published in the New Left Review, are collected in one of the most depressing and reader-hostile tomes in a long left tradition of glum insularity, The PhiliHine Controversy.

The philistine, they argue, "is partisan of the excluded pleasures, the excluded body and 'inappropriate' forms of attention. The philistine refuses to take a disinterested stance towards a culture which stands as a judge over the philistine's pleasure without the philistilles consent.

Never mind that the philistine, by definition, refuses to do much of anything. Indeed, as several of Beech and Roberts' interlocutors point out, when described this way, the philistine is largely an ideal type, and as a strict proposition doesn't seem to exist. Yet this is perhaps the philistine's strongest selling point-since, like Shattuc's noble Oprahwatching savages, the philistine can be the obliging repository for no end of reveries on the part of enterprising interpreters, and doesn't complicate matters by speaking for him- or herself So, yes, "the philistine defence of the voluptuous body bursts the banks of the decorum of aesthetic experience," and ipso facto "we arrive at the political."

And also at sado-masochistic porn. Having somehow, using only his channel changer, managed to overthrow bourgeois notions that identified certain sexual practices as perversions, the philistine now boldly brings us to the brink of "an inclusive, anti-moralistic and generous sensitivity to the untold variety of desire and play .... The perverse has moved out of the shadows .... In an important sense, pleasure (and pain) and politics are not what they were in the 1970S and early 1980s, when it seemed that taking pleasure in what was harmful or not in your best interests, was to be challenged as bad faith or false consciousâ&#x20AC;˘

1

"

ness." Now we know better. Today, hallelujah, "pleasures and pastimes can no longer be challenged in this way." The shortest path to revolutionary consciousness, we now know, is a convenient matter of gorging all your lesser appetites, either on your AM dial or with your sweaty remote pointed at the Spice Channel. It follows that philistine modes of attention-for instance, the love of distraction, dissipation, relaxation and idle thrills-cannot be so confidently censured for being culturally impoverished, politically worthless, and philosophically deluded .... The culturally downgraded activities of cultural inattention find a new political status and role. That is, if the philistine is not someone who exhibits certain traits but enjoys particular kinds of pleasures, then he or she is not imprisoned by distraction, dissipation, relaxation and idle thrills. Instead, philistine modes of attention become subject to choice, modification, customization just as much as ironization.

And where might these choices and this new political status find characteristic expression, you ask? Why, in "TV viewing, radiolistening, moviegoing, watching football and sex-shop browsing." The revolution's not only been televised-it's bound, gagged, nodding off, and drooling.

One is tempted-Good Lord, is one tempted-to dismiss this kind of race-to-thebottom cultural posturing as a remote British analogue to Alan Sokal's famed Social Text hoax, an effort to discredit the whole fatuous cultstud enterprise by claiming to find ultrarevolutionary qualities in the most obviously reactionary corners of life. But there's a stubborn sticking point in Beech and Roberts's philistine special pleading: the notion of cultural choice as the pre-eminent political virtue going. This is also the pleasing fiction that animates the musings of Epstein, Brooks, and Shattuc and Co.: A host of grandly leveling market forces have turned us loose into a realm of gloriously shifting identities and unassailable, freely chosen taste preferences.

But the awkward fact about social class is that it is about economics, about the foreclosure of choice, about living in worlds we do not make. While we dream happy dreams of

The Rod of CorreClion

X-games snobs, Oprah empowerment and porno-radicalism, the market conducts an ugly siege of our public lives. More and more of our economic and political institutions are being hollowed out and removed from any possible exercise of civic volition: education, affordable housing, welfare-even prisonsare all private growth markets, and often the subject of outright corporate takeover. Wage and job protections-to say nothing, in many instances, of the basic right to form bargaining units-are dead letters in most American

workplaces. Pensions, financial services, employee compensation and household debt are the playthings of lobbying concerns and investors and the political leadership they bribe. These are not matters of taste or consumer self-image; simply to apprehend the scale of the present sacking of the public sphere demands an act of criticism. And in an age when everybody's empowered, nobody's a critic. _

-Chris .ÂŤhmann

IN THE GOOD OLD WALLOW TIME

by Ian Urbina and Chris %ensing (n) A muddy area or one filled with dull used by animals for wallowing; a Hate of degradation or degeneracy. (v) To roll oneself about in an indolent or ungainly manner.

WALLOW -

As MORE than 500 U.S. troops disembarked 1"1. in the Philippines last February, double that number were suiting up on the other side of the world for one of Washington's more secretive and bizarre tribal rituals. The exclusive Military Order of the Carabao, founded in 1900 by American soldiers who fought in the Philippines in the first years of the American Empire, was holding its I02nd Annual Wallow. Named after the mud-loving water buffalo of the Far East, the Carabaos have much to celebrate these days. Thanks to Operation Enduring Freedom, endless acres of lush new pasture have opened up.

"This year was totally different," one attendee told us. "With the current White House and all the overseas activity, military confidence is way up. I can't tell you how many excited comments there were about the new budgetary reality." Former CIA director James Schlesinger, recipient of the Carabaos' 2002 Distinguished Service Award, summed it up well in his acceptance speech: "Someone once said that war is hell and peace is heaven.

But we know that the opposite is true: war is heaven and peace is hell." The good times were back, and more than a thousand Carabaos and handpicked guests brayed their approval, leaving us to wonder whether an imperial renaissance is upon us.

Held this year at the swanky Omni Shoreham Hotel, the Carabao Wallow attracts top military brass as well as a bull-necked assortment of politicos and eager defense contrac-

tors. Those not in black tie or military dress uniform don a kilt for the four-hour extravaganza. Among the guests, called Hombres, there are precious few women. As recently as 1995, a Carabao scandalized the Herd by arriving with his wife in tow. The couple was forced to eat in the hall.

The evening's entertainment includes a selection of songs, lovingly composed and performed by members of the Herd, satirizing public figures and current events, with particular emphasis on the lily-livered liberals and their endless efforts to cut the Pentagon's budget boodle. "It's the military-industrial complex's answer to the Gridiron," as one Wallow regular described it.

Ditties like "Big Bad Bin Laden" and ''An Afghan Lullaby" aired contemporary concerns, while "Base Closing Blues" evoked the mournful spirit of a blessedly bygone era. But with the greatest appropriation windfall in U.S. military history inching toward approval, it seemed entirely appropriate that this year's major dramatic theme was Star wars. "Rummy Skywalker" and "Darth Biden" provided the catchiest lyrics. "Colin Solo's Solo" drew an appreciative response from the crowd, and "Princess Condoleia," a stirring ode to unilateralism, was affecting indeed, even with a white guy playing Condoleezza Rice.

Good laughs and stiff drinks were had by all. Many who lived nearby preferred to stay in the hotel: "rather than driving home to their wives, they could just stumble upstairs to their rooms, bottle in hand," one onlooker reported. Most guests ignored the instructions to leave the bottles on the table after dinner, a policy initiated several years ago

20

THE BAFFLER

after a Carabao allegedly absconded with a lifetime supply of expensive booze.

This year's guest list didn't feature the usual heavy hitters-what with the war on terror being waged wide and far. Though invited to the Wallow, Capt. George W. Bush, USAF Reserve, did not attend. Nor did Colin Powell, who sat unobtrusively in the banquet hall in 2000. But the geriatric Sen. Strom Thurmond wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Joining him at the head table were, among others, Schlesinger and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs Vice Chair, and Air Force Secretary James Roche, both Carabaos, played gracious hosts at their own tables.

Once seated at his preassigned table, each tipsy reveler readied himself for a traditional rite: the bellowing of the Carabao anthem.

By this point, the room was thick with smoke-every place setting had been adorned with an authentic Cuban cigar. A disembodied voice calmly requested "Gentlemen, please turn to your songbooks" and the Marine Corps Band seated to the side picked up a lusty tune. The Carabaos, most of whom seemed to know the words by heart, launched into the first stanza, ferociously banging their fists on the tables at each and every chorus: In the days of dopey dreams-happy, peaceful Philippines, When the bolomen were busy all night long.

When ladrones would steal and lie, and Americanos die, Then you hear the soldiers sing this evening song: CHORUS:

D amn, damn, damn the insurrectos!

Cross-eyed Kakiac Ladrones!

Underneath the starry ÂŁlag, civilize 'em with a Krag, And return us to our own beloved homes!

Social customs there were few, ladies all would smoke and chew, And the men did things the padres said were wrong.

They did things that weren't nice, but the padres cut no ice, So you heard the soldiers sing this evening song: CHORUS

Underneath a nipa thatch, where the lazy chickens scratch, only refuge after hiking all day long.

When I lay me down and slept, slimy lizards o'er me crept, Then you heard the soldiers sing this evening song: CHORUS

Insurrectos come and go, but there's one thing we now know: Filipinos are among our fondest friends.

Though we love them to the hilt, still and all we love the lilt Of this Soldier's Song whose memory never ends: Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos!

Cross-eyed Kakiac Ladrones!

Though we used to hate their hides, Time has turned a lot of tides, Which is why we sang the song in dulcet tones!

Fiery musical manifestoes like this one are hard to come by these days outside of museum displays. And "The Soldier's Song" is by no means short on history. Its dulcet tones were first hummed by the "hikers"-soldiers dispatched to the Philippines in 1899 by President William McKinley to bring the Filipino independence movement to heel. Wielding smokeless Krag riRes, the forebears of today's Herd trampled what they called the "Philippine Insurrection" under heavy hoof. Historians estimate that 16,000 Filipino guerrillas and 200,000 civilians-in addition to 10,000 American soldiers-were killed in a campaign that dragged on until 1916. As in a later colonial adventure in Southeast Asia, U.S. commanders made few distinctions between

In the Good Old Wallow Time

21

"amigo" and "insurrecto." Villagers who did government hundreds of dollars so that its not enter "reconcentration camps" similar to employees could mingle with the Wallowers.

Vietnam's "strategic hamlets" were considered This wasn't a new stunt. The same year, the fair game by Carabao bulls. multimillion-dollar defense contractor had Though untufHed by the continued Ameri- run up the taxpayers' tab while pressing the can occupation of the Philippines, President flesh at the Iron Gate Dinner in New York, a Woodrow Wilson waged a halfhearted cam- similar function hosted by the Air Force Aspaign against "The Soldier's Song" in 1914, sociation. publicly lambasting the Order for its insults In 1999, the presence of independent counto Filipinos. He loftily reminded the sel Ken Starr at the Wallow created a bit of a Carabaos of "the high conscience with which stir. With the evening's first toast to Bill Clinthey ought to put duty above personal indul- ton, then grudgingly acknowledged as comgence, and to think of themselves as responsi- mander-in-chief, all eyes watched Starr for ble men and trusted soldiers, even while they signs of insubordination. As glasses were are amusing themselves as diners out." When raised, Starr dutifully stood, uttering the reqno one listened, Wilson blocked his Secretary uisite "Hear, hear." He did not, however, of the Navy from accepting a promotion to salute.

But the 2002 Carabao model need not be lead bull of the Herd. Ironically, the offending anthem's lyrics had been softened just so circumspect. For now, as the Herd sang at several months before Wilson heard it (the the Omni Shoreham, we live: original chorus went, "Damn, Damn, Damn In the Good Old Wallow Time, the Filipinos"). Although not otherwise disIn the Good Old Wallow Time, tinguished as a crusader against racism, WilEach Bull and Calf, Will sing and laugh, son may well have been an early specimen of ~ we pass the flowing stein. the hated liberal-milquetoast type, the sort of We'll recall the ways guy Carabao idol Donald Rumsfeld would Of the Empire Days, In Song and toast and rhyme. have stuffed in a gym locker had they been For the Herd is all together together at Princeton.

In the Good Old Wallow Time .â&#x20AC;˘ "The Soldier's Song" emerged mostly unscathed from this early encounter with diplomatic propriety, only to meet with another ... WAAi J.I~'S~JN~ slight alteration in the early Nineties. A guest 1"0 SAY JSfrom this year's Wallow recounted the sad tale 1-1 'Z~ of a "shit-for-brains" who invited a friend from the Filipino government to the annual WI'f.U A r,..,.lV'\!. sing-along. The Filipino, duly horrified, promptly filed a complaint, while the unlucky Carabao was abruptly thinned from the Herd. Following this incident, the above stanza lauding the Filipinos as "our fondest friends" was added. The only foreigner registered for the 2002 Wallow was a Saudi lieutenant colonel named Nayef Al Saud.

For the most part, the Herd thunders in closely guarded seclusion. Apart from the obituaries, the last time a Carabao reared an antlered head in the press was in 1983, when General Dynamics was caught billing the

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MEMORY FOR FORGETFULNESS AUGUST, BEIRUT, 1982 by rYvIahmoud <Darwish

C

should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma. It is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul. And coffee is a habit which, along with the cigarette, must be joined with another habit-the newspaper.

Where is the newspaper? It's six o'clock in the morning, and I'm in hell itself. But the news is that which is read, not heard. And before it is recorded, the event is not exactly an event. I know a researcher in Israeli affairs who kept denying the "rumor" that Beirut was under siege simply because what he read was not the truth unless it was written in Hebrew. And since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn't acknowledge that Beirut was under siege. But this is not a madness I suffer from. For me, the morning paper is an addiction. Where is the newspaper?

The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of creation. Where are they going to strike next?

Where are they not going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: "Merit cigarettes-more aroma, less nicotine!" "Citizen watches-for the correct time!" "Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure is!"

"Health mineral water-health from a high mountain!" But where is the water? IncreasOFFEE

ing coyness from the women announcers on Radio Monte Carlo, who sound as if they've just emerged from taking a bath or from an exciting bedroom: "Intensive bombardment of Beirut." Intensive bombardment of Beirut!

Is this aired as an ordinary news item about an ordinary day in an ordinary war in an ordinary newscast? I move the dial to the BBe. Deadly lukewarm voices of announcers smoking pipes within hearing of the listeners.

Voices broadcast over shortwave and magnified to a medium wave that transforms them into repulsive vocal caricatures: "Our correspondent says it would appear to cautious observers that what appears of what is gradually becoming clearer when the spokesman is enabled except for the difficulty in getting in touch with the events, which would perhaps indicate that both warring parties are no doubt trying especially not to mention a certain ambiguity which may reveal fighter planes with unknown pilots circling over if we want to be accurate for it might confirm that some people are now appearing in beautiful clothes." A formal Arabic with correct information, ending with a song by Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab in colloquial Arabic with the correct emotion: "Either come see me, or tell me where to meet you/Or else tell me where to go, to leave you alone."

Identically monotonous voices. Sand describing sea. Eloquent voices beyond reproach, describing death as they would the weather, and not as they would a horse or motorcycle race.

Excerpted from Memory for Forgetfolness: AuguH, Beirut, I982. Copyright ŠI995 by the Regents of the University of California. Used with permission.

23

24

THE BAFFLER

What am I searching for? I open the door several times, but find no newspaper. Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?

That's not quite right. The one looking for a paper in the midst of this hell is running from a solitary to a collective death. He's looking for a pair of human eyes, for a shared silence or reciprocal talk. He's looking for some kind of participation in this death, for a witness who can give evidence, for a gravestone over a corpse, for the bearer of news about the fall of a horse, for a language of speech and silence, and for a less boring wait for certain death. For what this steel and these iron beasts are screaming is that no one will be left in peace, and no one will count our dead.

I'm lying to myself: I have no need to search for a description of my surroundings or my leaky interiors. The truth of the matter is that I am terrified of falling among the ruins, prey to a moaning no one can hear.

And that is painful. Painful to the extent of my feeling the pain as if the event had actually happened. I'm now there, in the rubble. I feel the pain of the animal crushed inside me.

I cry out in pain but no one hears me. This is a phantom pain, coming from an opposite direction-out of what might happen. Some of those hit in the leg continue to feel pain there for several years after amputation. They reach out to feel the pain in a place where there is no longer a limb. This phantom, imaginary pain may pursue them to the end of their days. As for me, I feel the pain of an injury that hasn't happened. My legs have been crushed under the rubble.

These are my forebodings. Perhaps it won't be a rocket that'll kill me in a flash, without my being aware. Perhaps a wall will slowly, slowly fallon me, and my suffering will be endless, with no one to hear my cries for help. It may crush my leg, my arm, or my skull. Or it may sit over my chest, and I'll stay alive for several days in which no one will have the time to search for the remains

of another being. Perhaps splinters from my glasses will lodge in my eyes and blind me.

My side may be pierced by a metal rod, or I may be forgotten in the crush of mangled flesh left behind in the rubble.

But why am I so concerned with what will happen to my corpse and where it will end up? I don't know. I want a well-organized funeral, in which they'll put my body whole, not mangled, in a wooden coffin wrapped in a flag with the four colors clearly visible (even if their names come from a line of poetry whose sounds don't signify their meanings), carried on the shoulders of my friends and those of my friends who are my enemies.

And I want wreaths of red and yellow roses. I don't want the cheap pink color, and I don't want violets, because they spread the smell of death. And I want a radio announcer who's not a chatterer, whose voice is not too throaty, and who can put on a convincing show of sadness. Between tapes carrying my words, I want him to make little speeches. I want a calm, orderly funeral; and I want it big, that leave-taking, unlike meeting, may be beautiful. How good is the fortune of the recently dead on the first day of mourning, when the mourners compete in praise of them! They're knights for a day, loved for a day, and innocent for that day. No slander, no curses, and no envy. It'll be even better for me, because I've no wife or children. That'll save friends the effort of having to put on the long, sad act that doesn't end until the widow feels compassion for the mourner. It'll also save the children the indignity of having to stand at the doors of institutions run by tribal bureaucracies. It's good that I'm alone, alone,

Memory for Forgetfulness

25

alone. For that reason my funeral will be free well as the simple souls who have chosen to of charge, no one having to keep an account stay in Beirut, to devote their days to the of reciprocal courtesy, so that after the fu- search for enough water to fill a twenty-liter neral those who walked in the procession can can in this downpour of bombs, to extend go back to their daily affairs. I want a funeral the moment of resistance and steadfastness with an elegant coffin, from which I can peep into history, and to pay the price with their out over the mourners, just as the playwright flesh in the battle against exploding metal.

Tawfiq aI-Hakim wanted to do. I want to Heroism is here in this very part of divided sneak a look at how they stand, walk, and Beirut in this burning summer. It is West sigh and how they convert their spittle into Beirut. He who dies here does not die by tears. I also want to eavesdrop on their mock- chance. Rather he who lives, lives by chance, ing comments: "He was a womanizer." "He because not one span of earth has been was a dandy in his choice of clothes." "The spared the rockets and not one spot where rugs in his house are so plush you sink into you can take a step has been saved from an them up to your knees." "He had a palace on explosion. But I don't want to die under the the French Riviera, a villa in Spain, and a se- rubble. I want to die in the open street.

Suddenly, worms, made famous in a cercret bank account in Zurich. And he kept a private plane, secretly, and five luxury cars in tain novel, spread before me. Worms arranga garage in Beirut." "We don't know if he had ing themselves in rigid order into rows aca yacht in Greece, but he had enough sea cording to color and type to consume a shells in his house to build a whole refugee corpse, stripping flesh off bone in a few mincamp." "He used to lie to women." "The poet utes. Just one raid. Two raids, and nothing's is dead, and his poetry with him. What's left left except the skeleton. Worms that come of him? His role is finished, and we're done from nowhere, from the earth, from the with his legend. He took his poetry with him corpse itself. The corpse consumes itself by and disappeared. Anyway, his nose was long, means of a well-organized army rising from and his tongue." I'll hear even harsher stuff within it in a few moments. Surely, it's a picthan this, once the imagination has been let ture that empties a man of heroism and flesh, loose. I'll smile in my coffin and try to say, thrusting him into the nakedness of absurd "Enough!" I'll try to come back to life, but I destiny, into absolute absurdity, into total won't be able. nothingness; a picture that peels the song from the praise of death and from the escape But to die here-no! I don't want to die into flight. Was it to overcome the ugliness of under the rubble. I'll pretend I'm going down this fact that the human imagination-the to the street to look for a newspaper. Fear is inhabitant of the corpse-opened a space to shameful in the midst of this fever of heroism save the spirit from this nothingness? Is this erupting from the people-from those on the the solution proposed by religion and poetry? front line whose names we don't know, as Perhaps. Perhaps. _

"Life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest."-Toni Morrison The Bloodworth Orphans Leon Forrest "Forrest's own kinetic prose style, now incendiary, now cool, is virtually wired for sound."- Marpessa Dawn O utlaw, Village voice Paper $18.00

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden Leon Forrest ''A visionary, thoughtful first novel."

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

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THEY LIVE! by

~lson

The ban on NIH financing has had the collateral effect of relegating the technology to the private sector, where embryo research can ptoceed unencumbered.

-from a New York Times Magazine story on stem-cell research, January 30, 2000.

Bag by Dolce & Gabbana ... Suit by DKNY ...

Shofts by Polo Jeans ... Sneakers by Nike.

-from illustration credits, same article.

I

sitting down to dinner when I heard a soft tapping at my apartment door. Opening it warily I found myself gaping up at a sultry giantess in a strapless cocktail dress. Eight feet tall at least, she glowered down at me with a look of woozy, carnal hunger. "Occupant," she moaned, shoving her way into the room and slamming the door behind her. "Oh, Occupant, Occupant!"

I staggered back, sizing her up. Nothing on her curvaceous exterior revealed where she'd come from, what she wanted. For a moment she stood there, searching my face. Her head tilted. Her eyes moistened. Then she pounced, clutching me in her powerful arms and lowering her lips to my ear. "Let me do it for you," she whispered, crushing me closer. "Let me switch you."

I wriggled, cursing. What a fool I was! I'd already been switched by more phone companies than I cared to remember, and that was the least of it! In the last week alone I'd been bagged by two insurance plans, three vacations cruises, and enough magazine subscriptions to close a landfill. I was maxed on every card. I was burnt out. I needed sleep. Yet night after night they came, always at dinnertime. Coaxing, pleading, seizing you by the lapels and slamming you onto the bed. Why WAS JUST

Smith wasn't there a law? Why could nothing be done to stop them?

Surely we could have seen it coming. Hadn't every new technology followed the same ineluctable course? Printing, photography, telephones, television-not to mention the Internet, which had slid from boundless frontier to commercial sprawl virtually overnight. Why should the Genome Project have been any different? Wasn't it obvious from the beginning that what all that coding, splicing, cloning, and cell farming would unleash was the most virulent advertising medium ever to shill the planet?

As I struggled in the behemoth's clasp, I thought back bitterly to those early ethics debates. Are we playing God? What does it mean to be human? Not once did any ethicist answer that being human might one day mean being targeted, bearhugged, and wrestled to the kitchen floor by shameless, oversized "offers" biodesigned in Madison Avenue laboratories.

Like everything else, it just overcrept us.

The first generation seemed harmless enough.

A few pumped-up zygotes warbling jingles.

Then came the prototypes. Like the blonde who limped up to me on the street one day.

"Congratulations!" she cried tonelessly. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she squirted me with toothpaste. As the genomarketing industry grew, all the basic phenotypes were soon crowding into circulation: the raving price slashers, the hithering temptresses, the big growly buddies itching to manhandle you into a Chevy truck. They mobbed the subways at rush hour. They cornered you at check-out stands, plucking your sleeve and spewing enthusiasm.

27

THE BAFFLER

The more numerous they became, the more vulgar they grew. The studio geneticists began juicing them up with inhibitioninhibiting enzymes. Some lolled against phone booths, dropping their shoulder straps and hissing brand names. Others cruised the buses wearing nothing but their underwear and a sullen sneer. Half the time you had no idea what they wanted. I remember with a shudder one dark night as I hurried past a stretch of Upper East Side boutiques. From every side, gaunt beauties scowled. Suddenly an apparition blocked my path-a famished creature in the throes of some unspeakable vehemence. She glared, thrust her pelvis at me, and spat out the command: Versace!

In public, of course, they couldn't forcibly detain you. So the law said anyway. But once "invited" over the threshold, anything went.

And with the new sizing hormones they'd grown craftier than a hospital virus. Tiny inveiglers dropped out of magazines into your lap-wriggling, wheedling, grabbing for your wallet. These, at least, you could just step on and toss into the garbage, nobody the wiser.

Not so easy with a cunning bruiser of a longdistance phone plan. As I writhed, the desperate offer started pouring on the squeeze. I thought my ribs would crack. With a sudden twist I broke free and stumbled across the kitchen. She smoothed her dress, shooting me a hurt, kittenish look. "Pretty please," she growled, inching closer. "I can make your dreams come true, even that fantasy about competitive local rates."

Sure, I had the right to refuse. "Just zip them up and push them out the door," said the industry apologists. But it wasn't quite that easy. For one thing, you couldn't charge them with trespass. They weren't people, after all. They were brands. They had legal rights people could only dream of. Take the case of that Bible Belt farmer who picked up his shotgun and blasted one, some lurid torso in designer skivvies who'd wriggled in through the screen door during the family's Sunday dinner. The corporate lawyers made a trophy of the poor rube, nailing him with landmark

convictions for censorship, trademark violation, and product tampering.

Consumer advocates howled for legislation. But what was Congress about to dowith every committee chaired by staunch right-to-market-lifers? Not that "staunch" had much to do with it. These were lawmakers, after all, who couldn't say no to a hog lobbyist with a sweaty handshake. So how much noble statesmanship could you expect with the American Genomarketer's Council churning out hoards of gorgeous, anatomically enhanced "appeals." They stormed Capitol Hill, "appealing" their way through coats and ties like a tornado through a laundry line, and not one comma of legislation ever slipped out of subcommittee.

That left consumers like me on our own, backed into the corner by marketing campaigns twice our size. As I tried for the door the big promo made a sweeping grab for me.

I dodged behind the kitchen table, shoving her hard. That triggered the standard warning. She wailed like a rollercoaster full of goats, "I am a form of free speech! I am protected by the First Amendment! I am part of a vibrant economy! I am ...." Suddenly her jaw snapped shut. Her eyes narrowed and her lips curled in a businesslike leer. She crouched, rolled her shoulders, and began easing toward me, hands gesturing with the "c'mon" taunt of a wrestler.

As we circled the table grimly, I saw myself funneling down the timeless spiral: humanity caught and dragged back, back, back to the same tawdry depths by each advancing technology. Where was my pride, my power of self-denial? "Listen," I said sternly, rising to my full human height. "You're a very attractive offer. But it's late. I'm tired. And frankly I really can't afford ...."

"Cant' aJJVn ,n:;., d....? Cant' aJJun ,n:;., d....?" . , she mImicked, with a sarcastic mew. Raising one eyebrow, she reached back slowly and cracked the door. A seething mass of forms came grinning, slithering, clawing their way over the threshold. My God ... the credit cards! _

MAKING BABIES THE AMERICAN GIRL速 WAY by 'Terri fV!psalis

W

HAT CATCHES my attention is the look in the girl's eyes, combined with the doll clutched to her ten-year-old belly. All in all, it is a normal enough sight: a suburban family out for a day of shopping on Chicago's Magnificent Mile. But the girl has the look of one possessed. She leads the parade and is clearly the focus of the day's outing. I pass them and turn a corner, only to come upon yet another girl, a couple of years younger, cradling a doll whose blonde locks seem clipped from her own. The girl and her doll wear identical blue jumpers. A camera dangles from her mother's wrist. They are headed in the same direction as the group I had passed, and this girl, like the other, has the dazed look of a pilgrim too long on the road.

I cross the street: another girl, same scenario.

She too carries a doll, not unlike the other two dolls, but with a different hair color to match her owner's. Has some kind of odd convention come to town? Or are they all bound for a Jerry Springer shoot somewhere nearby: Girls with doll disorders, and the families who support them? This girl's mother points across the street, and her daughter's body seems to rise a foot off the sidewalk, her inflated smile giving her a helium-lift. There it is. Girl Xanadu. The Taj McDol!. American Girl Place.

American Girl dolls had been around long before this singular boutique opened in 1998. A co-worker at a women's health clinic first showed me a catalog nearly a decade ago, bringing me up to speed on the latest rage among pre-pubescent girls. Another coworker chimed in, regarding her daughter's favorites. They complained about the steep

prices and sheer number of collectibles, but as good liberals, they commended the dolls' diversity. Finally, there was a doll company that was responsive to ethnic differences, offering Asian, Latina, and other dolls of color.

We discussed these newfangled poppets in the staff room that doubles as a storage area for tanks of frozen sperm. These tanks, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to two-foottall circumcised Caucasian penises, arrive via FedEx from sperm banks around the country.

The tanks stand in front of the copy machine, awaiting summonses from pre-ovulatory alternative insemination clients. We often use the tanks as makeshift stools and did so that day while paging through the glossy American Girl catalog.

Pleasant Rowland founded the company that makes the dolls in 1986. She sold it to Mattei in 1998, for $700,000,000. Earnings grow from year to year, with the American Girl catalog roping in more than two-thirds of the income. The first sixty or so pages of the catalog are dedicated to the American Girls Collection, a line of dolls that comes complete with a name and a personal history, accessories and storybooks. There's the 1854 pioneer girl, Kirsten, whose family immigrated from Sweden. There's former slave girl Addy, whose family escaped to the North.

There's Samantha, a Victorian orphan of means, and Josefina, "an hispanic girl of heart and hope." Their lives are further sketched in picture books, telling tales of school, summertime, and birthdays. Each book, naturally, serves as advertising for the outfits and accessories featured within. You can buy

29

30

THE BAFFLER

them all, from Kirsten's summer dress with straw hat to Josefina's pet baby goat Sombrita.

These American Girl dolls are a new breed.

They're neither pudgy, round babies nor busty Barbies. They're post-potty trained, pre-adolescent girls, closer in proportion and size to a life-size infant than a foot-long Barbie. When you make a purchase from the American Girl collection, you're not just buying a doll, you're buying a plausible life history. Juan Garcia, a history professor at the University of Arizona, is quoted in the catalog as vouching for the authenticity of the Hispanic doll: "The books and products that accompany Josefina richly capture and re-create a significant time, place, and heritage in New Mexican history that young people seldom learn about." Such knowledge does not come cheap. Josefina's New Mexican Table & Chairs are $75, her Feast Day Finery is $22, and her Heirloom Accessories go for $12. As Josefina's complete collection costs $925, only a few youngsters will have the opportunity to get the whole story.

The catalog is extensive, with at least eight pages dedicated to each of the six dolls in the collection. Every outfit, piece of furniture, and accessory is described, complete with teasers about the school, summer, and birthday narratives found in the accompanying books. Rather than arriving as a blank slate, each doll comes pre-endowed and packaged with personal milestones and memories.

That's not the end of it. Girls can purchase their own outfits to match those of their dolls. Under the caption "Dress Like Your Doll," a young, apparently Latina girl is pictured modeling the same camisa, petticoat, skirt, and rebozo that Josefina wears on the opposite page. A black girl appears beside doll Addy, in a matching striped pink dress. A light-skinned brunette in a white nightie is pictured holding light-skinned brunette Samantha in a white nightie. The catalog encourages girls to pick dolls that look like them, selecting skin, hair, and eye color as close as possible to their own.

Choosing a true look-alike, the girl can then

step, fully outfitted, into the doll's elaborate narrative.

When I started working in the alternative insemination program at a women's health center in Chicago nearly a decade ago, it was my job to make sure we had up-to-date sperm bank catalogs and donor profiles. Donor catalogs are composed of profiles that provide the information a consumer uses to choose a donor. All donors, who don't actually "donate" but are in fact paid for their semen, are anonymous, identified only by alpha-numeric codes.

Begun nearly twenty-five years ago-when "unmarried" women were often refused access to insemination, or made to undergo a battery of psychological tests to prove they'd make "fit mothers"-our program was and is solely for lesbians and other women without male partners. In the early Nineties, donor profiles were mainly straightforward, focusing on what was termed "physical characteristics": blood type, height, weight, eye color, ethnicity, religion, and personal and family medical history. (I'd never thought of religion as a "physical characteristic," but it was always there on the list, as if fundamental to a consumer's decision.) You'd know, for example, that donor F645 was English and Portuguese, 6'r" and 160 pounds, an atheist with A positive blood, brown hair, hazel eyes, and a fair complexion. Some banks included what was deemed "personal information" such as hobbies and talents. These items always struck me as funny, but I supposed that the fact that F645 was interested in "sports and game theory" might somehow whet a client's interest. It never crossed my mind that someone might think such characteristics were genetic and therefore heritable.

Since the mid-Nineties many banks have expanded these profiles. Some now include essays written by donors. Printed either in a script-like font, or handwritten, they present a donor's response to questions like: Why do you want to be a sperm donor? If we could

Making Babies the American Girl mzy

31

sperm bank to provide photographs of their donors. Introduced in 1994, Photo Files"" include short and long profiles as well as three 4x6" photos of the donor: $35 each. In 1996, Xytex started offering BabyFilesâ&#x201E;˘ which contain the same written information as PhotoFiles but, in place of current photos of the donor, 8 x 10" reproductions of donors' baby pictures. Xytex explains that "BabyFiles are helpful for those who have concerns about how their baby might look."

Xytex also keeps what may be considered the ultimate file on donors by permanently preserving "donor cells that can be used as a complete chemical record of genetics." The program is aptly titled Patriarch'" Genetic Tracking. According to Xytex, this genetic archive is maintained in case future progeny ever "need" such genetic information. What this means is left open and will certainly shift over time. As will, undoubtedly, the cost of access to such information.

Fairfax Cryobank, based in Virginia, hopes to lure customers with long profiles that include the donor's "personality type" as dicpass on a message to the recipients of your tated by the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. semen, what would that message be? Where Fairfax is also the first bank I know of to would you like to travel and why? What is offer an exclusive, higher-priced sperm line, your ultimate ambition or goal in life? Some listed separately from other donors. Named go even further and provide information "Fairfax Doctorate," this line includes semen about the donor's math skills, mechanical from donors who have completed or are comability, athletic talent, favorite sport, favorite pleting doctoral degrees. This new sperm line type of music, artistic ability, and favorite follows in the footsteps of the Repository for foods, color, or pets. Some include SAT Germinal Choice, a bank run by the famous scores and GPAs. Today's sperm consumer eugenicist Robert Graham whose goal is to shops not just for an exponential number of "improve humankind by gradually increasing DNA dollops with flagellae, but for a per- the proportion of advantageous genes in the sonal history, personal interests, wishes and human gene pool" by featuring donors with dreams. A postgraduate degree, a "personality genius-level IQs. Fairfax gives Graham's vitype," and a personal essay are just some of sion a free-market twist by asserting that the new spermatic accessories. sperm from men with doctorates is more Such information comes at a price. Xytex, valuable (and therefore more costly) than a sperm bank based in Georgia, offers short rank-and-file sperm. profiles that include basic information and But while the logic of marketing has been brief medical histories. The first five are free; enthusiastically embraced by the sperm merafter that, each costs $2. Long donor profiles chants, the usual cautions and warning labels that include personal essays and supplemental are nowhere to be found. You won't come information cost $10 each. Xytex was the first across any notices stating, "Your child may

32

THE BAFFLER

not turn out the way you think." The sperm industry takes advantage of the widespread bio-determinist belief that genes are the basis for future behavior and simply hopes the sperm consumer will forget that what she is purchasing is a spot of DNA that can combine with her own in myriad configurations and that a future baby will be subject to any number of environmental and social factors.

Instead, the implicit suggestion is that she is purchasing a homunculus, a mini-man to be implanted into her uterus and emerge fully accessorized-and who, once grown, will play the guitar, like dogs, and be an intuitive, thoughtful extrovert with a Ph.D. in math.

What the reproduction industry promises are designer babies. Already, genetic testing allows the consumer to determine whether individual embryos created prior to in-vitro fertilization have a predisposition for genetic conditions such as Down's syndrome. You simply eliminate the ones that do and implant the ones that don't. Similarly, any genetic trait could theoretically be selected for or against before birth. With the claim that we have identified the genes that "cause" such "traits" as obesity and homosexuality, it won't be long before you can order up a thin, heterosexual baby with good spatial skills, eliminating the risk of a fat, dyslexic lesbian. You will be able to design a baby, selecting from a long list of specifications, the way you order a coffee at Starbucks. Making a baby the old way will be as outmoded as ordering coffee with cream and sugar.

Many of the clients I see in the insemination program are thoroughly exhausted by the stressful process of choosing sperm. Some become obsessed with picking the right donor.

They feel they're not provided enough information. One client couldn't understand why she knew that a donor had a tenor voice, but not whether he'd ever been to jail. Another joked that what she really wanted to know was if her donor was good at Scrabble. As one said, "It's a lot different than choosing a new car."

But American Girl customers, soon to be of reproductive age, will be just the kind of shoppers ready to meet the challenge. They're already familiar with the basic process, as matching doll traits isn't so different from matching donor traits. The consumer pays for a narrative-whether Xytex's Photo File or Addy's birthday storybook-which in turn advertises and sells more product.

After all, what are dolls except instruments for simulating mothering? You can care for, burp, and diaper them, and truck them around. And the selection process has grown ever more complex. Long gone are the days when all baby dolls looked pretty much the same. At most, you could choose one with eyes that could shut, or one with a little pee hole.

They were almost entirely white and fair.

Back then, having babies was fairly straightforward as well, at least if you were married and heterosexual. Either you could, or you couldn't. Today those who can't, whether due to infertility or lack of access to gametes, have options-as long as they have the money to pay for it.

So too with shopping for dolls. Choosing the right doll, with her attendant characteristics, history, and accessories, is the first part of the mothering simulation, a practice run for the later experience of choosing a sperm and designing a real baby. The American Girl line provides girls with the skills to be good future consumers in the reproductive technologies market.

As that market grows and changes, American Girl stays consistently ahead of the curve.

Consider the American Girl Today line: twenty dolls without distinguishing dress or accompanying stories. They have varied skin tones, hair, and eye colors. Not unlike sperm donors, these dolls are identified by ordering codes rather than given names: GT 20D has light skin, blonde hair, and gray eyes; GT 18A has dark skin, textured black hair, and light brown eyes.

The idea here is for the consumer to make this blank-slate doll into whomever she pleases. The catalog reads, "She's an Ameri-

Making Babies the American Girl1%y

33

the twinning occurs at the phenotypic level, but in an age of genetic obsession, will the genotypic be far behind? The My Twinn line uses a girl's hair sample in order to match texture and color, but before too very long this same hair sample could be used by others to extract DNA for a not altogether different purpose.

can Girl like you! ... Her adventures are your adventures. Her dreams are your dreams.

This is her moment in history, and your moment, too." Whereas the original American Girl Collection asks the buyer to step into Addy's nightie or Samantha's tea dress-Girl imitates Doll-the American Girl Today line reverses the fantasy: Doll imitates Girl. Each customer is encouraged to pick her match from the twenty-doll lineup. As with purchased genetic material, these dolls are the raw material onto which the consumer can then impose her own dreams and activities, thanks to accessories galore, including a Mini Macintosh computer, soccer gear, or an American Girl Horse and Riding Outfit.

The doll peddlers even offer a product analogous to cloning. My Twinn '" dolls, available by mail order, take the great leap forward to this most accurate of all reproductive techniques. Mail in a girl's photo, a personal profile form, a hair sample, and $128.95, and in four weeks you will receive a poseable doll with that girl's individual facial features, including matching eyes, skin, and hair. Matching doll and girl outfits and accessories are, naturally, available for purchase. With dolls, of course,

Back on the Magnificent Mile, I follow the dazed girls, their dolls, and families into American Girl Place. Inside, consumers wander around, nearly hushed, as if at a museum.

Girls stand agog in front of glass cases, eyeing the accessories they've seen in catalogs. After passing display after display of the historical dolls, I happen upon the glass case containing all 20 American Girl Today dolls, with their GT ordering numbers, dressed in identical red vinyl jumpers and plaid tights, and lined up like little soldiers ready for some kind of odd battle. Transfixed as any of the other customers, I realize that the reproduction industry has a lot to learn from American Girl's marketing strategies. While sperm and egg banks' sales soar and fertility clinics haul in the big out-of-pocket medical bucks, perhaps they should consider opening a retail showplace of their own.

As I step onto the escalator, I see that American Girl Place has a cafe where girls can have tea with their dolls. Why couldn't a fertility corporation-call it American Baby Place-have a cafe where a customer could have tea with an egg or sperm donor? I see a marquee, advertising American Girl Place's $25-a-ticket live musical, written and performed by real American girls. Perhaps American Baby Place could offer the "American Clones Revue," a live musical written and performed by clones and their DNA doubles, where one could chat with the cast after the show, and where droves of dreamyeyed consumers, having packed their American Girl collections off to the attic years before, could line up, money in hand, to order a clone of their very own. _

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SPRINGS

by Eileen e.Myles

I

long ago that I started remembering myself from a movie. Walking around in circles in a widely striped tan and white turtleneck sweater in the middle of the winter when I was 32. I had that one basic shape. Looking around, confused, nothing to do. I kept looking in mirrors. I didn't know who I was. It was the middle of winter. I had gone to this place in the country to write. I think. That was the excuse for everything I'd ever done, but also you had been wanting to get away. I found someone walking down the street who had somewhere for us to go away to, his house in the country, out in East Hampton, in Springs where all those old painters went after they lived in New York.

You can live there in February. Great.

I went away obediently, waiting for you, and then I learned in a few days about how you were betraying me back in New York, and I howled and screamed on the phone, I cried and cried and then I just walked around. I looked in this mirror and I looked in that. Is this how you start to get old I wondered. There was nothing in me I noticed when I looked at my face in the mirror. I think I never thought of anyone as mine before, so betrayal had not been possible until this moment.

My friend David couldn't have been happier that I had landed here in this little house in the middle of winter. It was his hometown, this place, and he was going to tell me all about his life there, he would take me out for a ride in my friend's truck which I was unable to drive because it was a standard, a stick people in New York say. I had been living in New York for eight years then but I T's so DAMN

still secretly thought in the language of Boston, or maybe even of my family, and in my family a car was a standard. And my mother didn't like to drive it and I didn't either. We took this blue truck out on the snowy streets and we had booze in our laps, beers and probably a pint of something or other, and we had our cigarettes, and David would narrate the streets for me as if one looked different from the rest. They were all windy and curly and tree laden, and he was proud of his town because his family had lived here for generations and he was practically an old man and I for some reason was one of David's favorite people in the world and he had taken time off from work in New York to show me around. I was always dreading David's company a little bit because he talked and talked and he barely seemed to notice if you were listening or not, he was so happy you were there, someone that he liked as much as he liked me. I was a door. Friends are always that, some kind of door that people can't open themselves and then you come along easily doing the thing that is stuck or you look like someone else, someone they lost and they've been dying to open that door for years. Here I am. I would berate myself, I often do, for my passivity. I am so interested in what other people want. I practically have my fangs hanging out over their appetite. Either mine is very small or so hidden because it was crushed time and again, so I only like secret and invisible things that are mine, absolutely totally and utterly mine like the secret world in which I write. It looks just like this world, but that's what's so perfect about my work. I set up a little world that is just

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THE BAFFLER

little broken perfect slabs of the world we know, but in these perfect broken pieces that are mine, I am king. Not half king, but whole king. I breathe the world I know and make and everyone is in it, but I am alone. It is total and cruel. It is a brand of selfishness I am utterly capable of. Otherwise I will give you my shirt or my chair. Even my body. But this one thing is absolutely mine and if it is a thing you care about I completely shine, and I shined for David like that and he wanted it.

So David would do anything for me. Loan me my rent, feed me, always always always bring me booze, kill me with it, but because he wanted it he married me. And I had no choice about that.

In this moment of him visiting-because he was a man in his late forties who was just about to start seriously dying of alcoholismwhat it meant was that I would hear him shitting his guts out in the morning and I would hate him so much because I didn't do that yet, not lately, and he would come out grinning and make some gruff joke about the brown coming down and suggest we start drinking immediately. But what he did early in the morning was even weirder. He would make me a cup of strong milky coffee with tons of sugar. And he would put a powdered donut on a plate right near it. He had probably been up all night, or maybe I had slept with him. It seemed to me I had been asleep forever, and he was up to no good, far away from me, being an alcoholic, but probably he was right next to me, probably had been fucking me just a little bit before-I didn't remember and now he was enacting a drama from the early part of his life. He smiled and explained that his grandfather on the Edwards side was a fisherman and he would get up very early but he always made coffee for his wife. She liked it like this, he smiled, with three sugars and a sweet roll very much like this, maybe this is the one because the grandfather might have bought it from the same Springs general store. I just looked at his drunk red face in the morning light and of course the lamp next to the bed was on so I

could clearly see my fisherman's wife breakfast and I just thought oh god and went to sleep for another four hours and he was traipsing in the woods by then and I dumped the coffee down the sink and I threw that donut out.

But David was gone. This was Monday or Tuesday. He was off at work. Everyone in the world had a job or a purpose. I was someone, I knew that, but I couldn't make out who.

I got on Mark's old bike and rode up to that bar he showed me. If you get really desperate you can have a drink in there. The bartender's name was Jerry. He owes me a favor, Mark winked. Everyone owed Mark a favor. For a long time I thought he knew everyone in New York. I'd go hang out with him the first year I was in town when I'd hang out with anyone. We'd be marching up steps and Mark would grin his little grin and we'd sit down on some green couch and usually there'd be electric guitars hanging around. Are they in a band, I asked as we headed down the stairs. No he smiled his quiet smile barely a word. I spent a lot of time talking with girlfriends who I thought hated me-she knows I'm a lesbian, I thought. Mark was a coke dealer. I can't remember when I finally figured that out. It was like the big gaping hole in a lot of people. Like someone would teach and have a loft and have a lot of friends but there was just this extra thing like a private joke. Where does he get all his money, I asked, because I was just figuring out that some people are rich and some are not. People would raise their eyebrows and look away. It was never

Springs

like one person was a dealer. Everyone was a dealer. I was probably the only person that didn't know. Which was always the way I was special. Maybe the poet part was just a thing I put on the not knowing. Probably some poets know, but their poetry's different. Mine is the work of one who doesn't know. Even when I leave somebody, I'm later informed, no you got dumped.

I like living in my hole, usually. But tonight I traveled to the Birches. I was wearing these corduroy pants, probably the last ones I ever wore because all future ones reminded me of these, the last. I stole them out of his girlfriend's closet, these grey fiorucci jeans.

They fit me really good. I guess maybe the sweater was hers too. I'm not sure. What I have is time.

It was deep blue riding down the street, deep blue through the trees. Snow on the ground. I had just finished the last of the scotch David left. Then I drank half a beer. I looked at Mark's note and figured I could probably get his friend to give me some drinks. I had $3.75 I had scrounged around the house. They had a big bowl of change on the floor too but so far only Chris had taken from that. I would do it later. I was dull, dumb. The world was so much more beautiful than me. I wish I could ride forever instead of having to go to the Birches. I stepped in the bar and noticed immediately that I was the only woman in there. I knew what to do. Nothing. Hi Jerry, I'm Eileen, I'm Mark's friend. He wiped his hand and leaned forward giving me his hairy paw. The

37

hockey game was on. He was handsome. Hey I'm kind of in a jam, I'm waiting for a check and it hasn't come and maybe since you know Mark I could get a couple a drinks on credit.

He took this in the way bartenders turn to stone so you don't know where your words went. He gave me his arm then he gave me his back, then he turned again, handing me a five-dollar bill. This was a very limited yes.

But no bartender can stand the sight of a woman unable to drink and drink and drink.

At a certain point in her life a woman is good for business or even just keeps the night interesting. So he would tap on the bar erratically and say this one's on me. Then I would look at him like stone. Because male desire is predictable as alcoholism. She'll drink anything. He'd fuck anyone. It's a true story.â&#x20AC;˘

COLUMBO IN SAN CRISTOBAL People he told the truth to didn't trust him brained by a frying pan & "just woke up there" Without a tale to tell to death or nail to hang his hat onthus we honor Amerigo Merry-go-round to the right of the roadside shrine to the saint of dead bugs Later, sitting collected in study one among many little clay animals I've got a history and a notebook Coffee on the table the old whistling chess master calls "ja la derecha!" on his way out.

- 'David Perry

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WHAT ABOUT ME? MEMOIRS OF AN ACADEMIC READING ACADEMIC MEMOIRS

by Sharon O''IJair

A NYONE who's spent time at a university I\. knows what a deeply schizophrenic institution it is. Stridently oppositional and dedicated to cutting-edge research, American universities are also slow moving, riddled with annoying rules, conservatories of the past. Berkeley may have spawned the Free Speech Movement and the New Historicism, but even in the late Eighties, it was almost impossible to do a dissertation on a living author-because, well, you know, a tradition of work on such a person doesn't exist and such a dissertation by definition can't be rigorous.

What, exactly, would you read about Borges or Mamet?

Today Berkeley students, and hundreds of others, are permitted to produce such dissertations, and we know why: democratization.

Finding suitable topics for all those dissertations is like breaking down all those terrible barriers between high and low cultures, or like encouraging ordinary professors to write their memoirs.

Yes: memoirs, books that used to be written mainly by people who were in some way exceptional-path breakers and presidents or their lieutenants and enablers. Such memoirs are still being produced today: Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince or Is She Coming Too?: Memoirs ofa Lady Hunter. But as befits a demotic culture, in which, we are assured, even the everyday is exceptional, hot sellers on Amazon.com include Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse and Every

Day Wtzs New Years Eve: Memoirs of a Saloon Keeper. We can even read a memoir of amnesia, PaIl Forgetting.

And we can also read memoirs of life in the

academy. We can read lots of memoirs of life in the academy. Published mainly by university presses, academic memoirs have become a fad, and like any fad, this one has a history.

It began in the late Eighties in a professors' writing support group at Duke University, then one of the hottest English departments in the country. All of the group's members were women, I'm sad to say, and quite a group they were-Alice Kaplan, Jane Tompkins, Cathy N. Davidson, and Mariana Torgovnick-each experimenting with memoir after having produced significant, and often highly theoretical, scholarly work. It was once more to the typewriter, girls, but this time, forget theory and scholarship: "write with feeling!"

Ideally, fads should be short, like the urban cowboy or the lounge swinger or-what about me?-the wearing of suede saddle shoes, a fad I started while in junior high.

But this one doesn't want to go away. As with so much in the academy-multiculturalism, speech codes, postructuralist theory-the fad for memoir writing has trickled down the institutional hierarchy. Academics of lesser prestige and power tend to accept the authority of their betters, and so the appearance of Kaplan's French Lessons in 1993 and Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway in 1994 led inevitably to, among others, Leaving Pipe Shop

by Deborah E. McDowell (University of Virginia) in 1996, Nightbloom by Mary Cappello (University of Rhode Island) in 1998, and Scenes of InHruClion by Michael Awkward (University of Pennsylvania) in 1999. Thinking, naturally enough, that writing about oneself is a lot more fun and certainly much

39

40

THE BAFFLER

easier than writing about Austen's prose or Auden's prosody, the $40,000 professors and the $65,000 professors imitated the $IOO,OOO professors and we are now awash in memoirs.

How long will it be, I wonder, before I find on my desk a dissertation turned "tenure book" that is a memoir of graduate school?

Of course, if this fad for academic memoirs persists, it will do so for a number of institutional and cultural reasons, not just because of the fundamentally glacial and imitative nature of change in the academy. As is faddish to say nowadays, this fad is overdetermined. A good thing, too, because if I had to "tease out" and "proportion" the "causality" behind it, this magazine would run out of paper. Being a professor myself, however, I can't help but ask a question, actually two questions: Do the professors' memoirs set them apart from the demotic or make them part of it? Is Alice Kaplan like the trauma junkie or the Persian prince?

The professors themselves would probably plump for the trauma junkie, and for the usual reason: They think producing memoirs is progressive, empowering, subversive. "Autobiography is fundamentally a democratic enterprise," writes Nancy K. Miller of CUNY in Bequefl and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death. Elsewhere she writes that "the memoir craze feeds the hunger for a different, or a least a more interesting life." Maybe so! But if so-and this is a big if-then we should be reading memoirs by "different" and "more interesting" people than ourselves. We should be reading the life stories of people who don't bore us by lecturing at us, and who craft elegant, fast-paced sentences and paragraphs.

And when you think of such people, do you immediately light upon those who taught you in college? Your professors? Not on your life. Not even for $24.95, which is a bargain, compared to what college cost. And why? Because there are hidden costs: with academics, you might not get a memoir, exactly. You might get an "autocritography," or what Awkward calls a "self-reflexive, self-consciously academic act" that accounts for the "individ-

ual, social, and institutional conditions that help to produce a scholar and, hence, his or her professional concerns."

And not only that-not only are you likely to get a text written from a specific "social position" or "cultural location"-but you are likely to get more of the political and ethical pedantry you thought you left behind years ago. Miller, for instance, can't just write a beautiful or even disturbing description of coming to terms with her father's death. As "a middle-aged therapized intellectual," Miller must persuade us that writing about her upper-middle-class life "is not. .. terminal 'moi-ism,' as it's been called" but rather provides "a rendez-vous, as it were, with the other." Her memoir constantly insists that what she's doing is somehow generous: We readers may not have won Guggenheim fellowships that allow us to write our own memoirs, so she will let us tag along with her, the "other," as she recalls her elite education,

What About Me?

her success in the academy, and her frustrations with her parents, who don't respect her ambitions or achievements.

In what seems a different vein altogether, but isn't, Jane Gallop of the University of Wisconsin sets out "to produce a sensation" by writing a book called FeminiH Accused of Sexual Harassment. The feminist so accused is Gallop herself, but as she well knows, little about FeminiH Accused is sensational. Prudes may be shocked by the language the Distinguished Professor uses to describe her own efforts in graduate school-"I learned and excelled; I desired and I fucked my teachers"but a few fucks in a text do not a sensation make. Nor does the self-dramatizing accusation of Gallop's title: Even if the feminist was "accused of sexual harassment," she wasn't convicted, even by a university, much less a court of law, and only in the hothouse atmosphere of academic feminism would it be considered harassment to make a spectacle of oneself. For that is all that Gallop did, first by declaring at an academic conference that "graduate students are my sexual preference" and then, later that night, by kissing a female graduate student in a lesbian bar. Whew! & Gallop confesses, it was all performance, performance that took her back to 1971, to her days as a student when feminism was new and exciting and seemed to offer both sexual and intellectual liberation.

Ah, 1971! In 1971-and what about me?-I was still in high school, but I'm nearly a contemporary of Gallop's and feminism didn't light my fire, either sexual or intellectual.

Thank God, because I'd hate to think I'd wake up twenty-five years later writing books defending my "admittedly ... outrageous" behavior by proposing that the "most intense ... and productive... pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, a 'consensual amorous relationship.'" Thank God, because as pedagogical practice, the sexualized classroom is, at best, profoundly fuckedup and, at worst, tyrannical, irrational, and dangerous. The idea itself is only put forward, like the book itself, to justifY the pro-

41

fessor's behavior, not to protect collegiate, or more specifically for Gallop, graduate education. And after reading FeminiH Accused, you can't help but wonder, with essayist William Gass, whether there are any motives for memoir-writing "that aren't tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification?"

There's certainly a lot of conceit in the memoirs I have read over the past few years.

Consider Kaplan's evocation of the spirit of her father's death: "I asked my mother what happened to people after they died. 'Jews do not believe in an afterlife. We believe that people live on through their achievements.'

That year in school, third grade, I racked up sixty book reports." It is shameful, I believe, to mock an evocation of a father's deathand parents' deaths loom large in academic memoirs-so I won't. I'll mock instead the causality implied in Kaplan's achievement of racking up sixty book reports. Daddy dies; book reports follow; girl's achievement mimics her father's, who "was a lawyer at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials where they punished Nazi war criminals." But what about me? I will tell you: In second grade, my dad didn't die, he wasn't a lawyer at Nuremberg, and I still wrote with fat pencils. But I did read II4 books that year, tops in my class, and for my effort I received another book,

The Man Who WalkedAround the World. II5.

The memoirist's conceit is banal and therefore boring. It says, if you aren't one of us, you know people like us and, probably, you hated us: We read II5 books while you read thirty; we learned the multiplication tables first and best, hogging the gold stars; and, in high school, we made it impossible for you to pass chemistry lab. As Tompkins puts it in A Life in School, "I always knew the answer, so why not get credit for it?" Torgovnick recounts how she skipped a grade, "a not uncommon occurrence," she tells us, "for 'gifted' youngsters," for those whose "IQ is genius level." Never mind Torgovnick's implication that she wasn't really gifted, accomplished by placing quotation marks around the word;

42

THE BAFFLER

what I want to know is if her school district had kindergarten for the gifted. And if so, was this the result of a healthier tax base? No wonder-and what about me?-I am an academic flyweight: I had to suffer through three whole grades with the giftless!

If you hated us, at least you could take comfort in the fact that we were nerds, an accusation Frank Lentricchia (Duke) puts into the mouths of his own daughters: "You showed us all those Scorsese movies because you want to tell us this is who you are, but this is not who you are because you read books all the time .... You're not the Don, Dad, you're the nerd of Little Italy." Lentricchia is hardly unique in this. All of us were nerds, and we still are. We read books all the time. And we always have. Black, white, working-class, upper-class, as children we always had our noses in books. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Harvard) could read and write before he started first grade, and McDowell "couldn't wait to learn to read." Tompkins, too, "wanted to read so badly that I ... made my mother teach me some fundamentals while I was still in kindergarten." At age eight, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (CUNy) was already "really a 'book-worm,'" according to her eleven-year-old sister. And me-what about mer-well, my mother, who was fortyfour when I was born, loved to say that I was the easiest of her children to care for, because I was always sitting on the floor in a corner reading books.

Nerds also love school-another reason you probably hated us. Any sensible person, any person with a political consciousness, knew that school was to be resisted if not avoided at all costs. Most of us had to read Althusser in graduate school to discover that school is a particularly ugly Institutional State Apparatus, because we were the kids who liked school from day one. James Phelan of Ohio State "always liked school." For Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois at Chicago, "school was where I was most at home." By second grade, says Gates, school "was entirely my world; there wasn't anything

I couldn't learn." And when you like school, when school feels like home, eventually you realize there's no reason to leave, so you don't.

You become one of those people, like Lentricchia, who has never really worked: "If you never leave school, which I never did, maybe you never work." And what about me? Well, I never left school either, and except for summer jobs in high school and college, I have never really worked. Often I never leave the house, just like Lentricchia. Frankly, I'd like to retire, but, as my sister says, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, "you're already retired."

If you are one of us-the nerd of wherever, a professor at a university, with an elite graduate degree-these memoirs bore you because you have been there and done that, or you have been there and done some of thatknocking off book reports, skipping grades, getting teased for being an uncoordinated runt or for being uninterested in pom-poms and make-up. Being valedictorian; finding your working-class or Hispanic self woefully out of place at Stanford or Princeton; realizing that social life is much better in college than in high school-boys actually think you are cute! Discovering that graduate study with Paul de Man isn't at all like teaching French to undergraduates at a state university; being denied tenure at a posh college even though you were still a straight-A girl and did the work right if not the socializing.

Getting therapy. And then, beating the denial of tenure, that professional death sentence, with two more books, a better job, and the chance to rub it in their stuck-up WASP noses. Getting therapy, because socializing is still a problem.

Been there and done that. Yet if academic memoirs are banal and boring, if most people have no reason to read these "self-reflexive academic acts," then why are they being written? Why is memoir-writing all the rage in the academy? What are the reasons behind all this telling of all? Consider, first, the cultural imperative to confess: telling all is entertainment, hugely profitable entertainment at

What About Me?

that. Besides Jerry, Jenny, Ricki, and Montel, we can watch the former mayor of New York presiding over The People's Court. ''Are you stupid?" he bellows at the defendant or in another case, the plaintiff. Another judge, Judy, is enough of a big gavel to be spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Even the Animal Planet channel airs its own courtroom series, focusing, I guess, on disputes over pets, their inopportune droppings or vocalizations. If the personal is the political, then a lot of political work occurs on TV, at all hours of the day, every day.

Such "political" work goes on in the universities as well, which is another reason why so many tenured English professors not at the top of their profession have followed the lead of the Duke group and gotten personal in print, if not with Ricki. These days, most English departments are organizational nightmares. At my state university, for example, the English department includes the fields of creative writing, literary history and criticism, rhetoric and composition, and applied linguistics. We deliver John Barth at night, Stephen Greenblatt in the late afternoon, and freshman comp each semester at all hours of

43

the day. Our faculty includes poets and social scientists, the applied linguists who co-author far too many articles the literary critics and creative writers have no idea how to read, let alone judge.

If there is a center to this universe, it is solipsism. What about me? Undergraduates write compositions about their summer vacations or their sundry oppressions, because just as Tompkins believes "a male standard of rationality" rigs the game of epistemology against her, so, too, does the Chicago Manual of Style rig the game of argument against our poorly educated freshmen, both black and white. The creative writers, both faculty and students, tell us about themselves in the fancy dress of form. Eight times a year, creative writers from other places arrive on campus to read about their selves. And so it doesn't surprise me that among the lit-critics, who are most likely to be lifers-stuck in this dreary town until retirement-a few say to themselves, "I can do as well as this" and give up footnotes forever in an effort to have more fun. It's not as bad as other options-becoming Professor Deadwood, for instance, or Professor Letch.

In contrast to my department, however, are other English departments, like Duke's, where the center still holds and ambition still reigns, and where writing a memoir doesn't express despair or a mid-life crisis. What do you do when you are forty years old and tenured in one of the hottest English departments in the country? Write about yourself because it is more fun? I don't think so. No, for them, composing the memoir is another move in the professional game, a game the memoirist wants to win. You can tell this because these professors don't just write their memoirs; they write essays justifying, and thus promoting, the writing of their memoirs. Tompkins published "Me and My Shadow" -a seminal essay in the effort to justify the merging of the personal into the professional-in 1987 in a major journal of literary theory, New Literary HiHory. Two years later, Miller published "My Father's

44

THE BAFFLER

Penis" as the afterword to Refiguring the Father: New FeminiH Readings of Patriarchy; in 1997, she published "Public Statements, Private Lives: Academic Memoirs for the Nineties" in the prestigious feminist journal Signs; and in the fall of 2000, she published "But Enough About Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?" in The Yale Journal of Criticism.

In "Me and My Shadow," Tompkins confesses that her desire to write about her feelings is partly an attempt to reduce her "intellectual dependence" on her husband, Stanley Fish, and partly an attempt to change the rules of the game so as to favor her: "An epistemology which excludes emotions from the process of attaining knowledge radically undercuts women's epistemic authority .... No wonder I felt so uncomfortable in the postures academic prose forced me to assume; it was like wearing men's jeans." I want to say, "Hey, Jane, divorce him!" Not only because Tompkins says one of her motives in marrying Fish was to become a "player" but also because-and what about me?-that's what I did, when I tired of wrangling with my husband about epistemology and scientific method and laissez-faire economics. Since my ex hated conceding me a point, it was wrangling that reminded me of playing Over-theLine against the neighborhood boys years ago: they would cheat in order not to lose to a couple of girls. And isn't that what it's about, Jane, having the game rigged so you lose?

Then again, while Tompkins may not like men's jeans, many women-me, for instance -look good and feel comfortable in them.

And sometimes, increasingly often, women win at Over-the-Line and epistemological argument. The point, however, is not that "we" should play "their" game; nor is it that "their" game is "objective," not rigged in their favor, so that all these complaints are bogus. Rather, I would argue-and I hereby do argue-that what's at issue is winning rather than losing.

We're intellectuals. We like to win, and winning is what our game is about. First gold stars, then full professorships. I know the answers, so why not get credit for it? As Sedg-

JUNK Why is the midnight rain So much more soothing Than a dripping sink?

Though downward stains Of rust are how we think To cling to life sometimes Oxidized by pleasure We're metallic to the bone Easily bent, or stretched thin As wire, conducting heat by breath alone The torture is exquisite When you're sliding down the drain Numbed by a heart's measure And a fortune in your veins

- 'Benjamin

~riedlander

wick confesses-and this is a woman who thinks her shrink may be stupid-"I was awfully competitive." We'll do almost anything to win. Some of us will do more. We're smart and we're competitive, and if we are teaching in the hottest English department in the country, we are not one with the masses. Like the Persian prince, we are of the elite, but unlike the Persian prince, we don't command millions of dollars or millions of lives, and no one cares that in elementary school we wet our pants while getting lOOS on our tests. But what about me? I'm not teaching in the hottest English department in the country, so you can be sure I managed to score lOa without wetting my pants. _

UNIVERSAL 571 BREAKING A STUDIO'S CODE

by J 'lJ. Connor

T

opportunities for product placement in World War II movies, Coke bottles excepted. Universal Pictures found a way around this obstacle by casting Jon Bon Jovi in its big-budget summer 2000 submarine adventure U-57I at the same time that Island Records (a division of Universal Music) was releasing his first new album in years.

Bon Jovi's double-barreled resurrection drew attention across the buzz spectrum. Entertainment Tonight chimed in, as did Access Hollywood and even ESPN, which put the king of coif in a Jersey-themed SportsCenter commercial. All Bon Jovi had to do to draw all that attention was appear in the film. He certainly didn't have to act. One of the biggest rock stars of the Eighties gets blown off the deck of a sub without a second thought.

Slippery when wet, dude.

The mismatch between Bon Jovi's music stardom and his lowly role in U-5P mirrored the problems then facing his corporate paymaster, Universal, as it sought to digest all the unwieldy properties it had acquired during the culture industry mergers of the Nineties. In fact, the story of U-5P-both the story behind the movie and the story the movie tells-constitutes an eerily detailed symbolic effort to grapple with the management problems that media conglomerates face. Bon Jovi is only the most obvious instance of corporate cross-promotion in a film that was itself a relentless product placement for the corporation that made it.

The tangled corporate story begins in 1998, when Seagram, which owned Universal at the time U-57I was made, bought PolyHERE ARE NOT MANY

gram, acqulflng, among other things, Bon Jovi and the rest of Island Records. Yes, a bold new media conglomerate was a-borning, but the deal seemed cursed. A culture clash between the different units that were brought together was evident from the outset, and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the Seagram heir that everyone calls "Effer," pushed through a brutal restructuring in order to achieve $300 million in cost savings that he had promised Wall Street. Morale was low. Agents threatened to withhold material from the new conglomerate's record labels if the company couldn't guarantee the distribution systems would mesh in time.

That was bad enough. But along with Polygram's record companies, Seagram also got Polygram Filmed Entertainment, which it didn't really want, and which it proceeded to break up and auction off piecemeal, absorbing a considerable loss along the way.

Still, one tiny piece of the Polygram protectorate was considered so valuable that it had to be kept: Working Title films, the most successful British production company of the Nineties. The unit is known for movies involving some sort of UK/U.S. interchange

(Four Weddings, Notting Hill, The Matchmaker, The Borrowers, Bridget Jones' Diary) all of which seek to answer one burning question: What is it about Britain that makes rich Americans drool so? Alternately, Working Title produces tepid paeans to Britishness such as Elizabeth (1998) and Plunkett & Macleane (1999), which serve up yet another eternal question: What is it that makes Great Britain so darn Great?

Working Title was considered a British na-

45

THE BAFFLER

tional treasure; it couldn't simply be liquidated like the others. But it wasn't clear how Effer was going to keep the unit happy and well-fed, nor was it clear how he was going to pull the Seagram/Universal conglomerate out of the M&A gutter.

It turned out he couldn't. Only eight months after acquiring Polygram, Seagram/ Universal quietly put itself on the block, along with Working Title, Island, and all the troublesome rest. In January 1999, shortly before shooting began on U-S7I, Vttriety published a long account of the studio's troubles-"It's truly Bosnia over here," one producer said-and its frantic efforts to find a financing partner for the big-budget subma. . nne mOVIe. Universal went about finding this partner in a rather curious way: It tied the financing of U-SJI -a single movie, and a sure bet-to the Working Title unit-a much bigger investment and a much bigger gamble. Only someone willing to bankroll Working Title would get to share in the submarine film. In May 1999 Universal found the partner it was looking for, and inked a cofinancing deal with Canal+, the media arm of the giant French conglomerate Vivendi. U-SJI was the bait; Working Title was the appetizer; Universal itself would be the main course.

It is sometimes a challenge to follow the dizzying game of international media monopoly. But it's important to try to keep it straight. After all, this is what real Hollywood production looks like. It's not Darryl Zanuck firing off memos and yelling into a phone. And yet today's dizzying corporate whirl is just as important to the people who write and direct movies as were the gruff manners of the old-style studio chiefs to the writers and directors of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. Big-studio movies have been selfreflexive for a long time. Think of Singin' in the Rain, or What Makes Sammy Run, or the 1950 Columbia movie In a Lonely Place, where Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter unhappy with ... Columbia. Billy Wilder wallowed in Hollywood's past in Sunset

Boulevard (Paramount, 1950) and made an enduring fetish of the Paramount gate, which continued to show up in such unlikely places as The Godfather (Paramount, 1972), and the TV show Happy Days. In fact, Hollywood movies have been so stuffed with references to Hollywood business methods that the the Coen brothers satirized this cliche in Barton Fink, which featured a caricature of none other than Zanuck himself The studios that mattered then are the ones that matter now-they are, after all, the majors. But worries over the course of corporate destiny are more diffuse these days.

Caught between the demands of the story and the demands of their bosses, moviemakers try to tailor the story to fit the bosses, whoever they happen to be this week. This practice in turn furnishes the bosses with flattering objets d'art that explain their actions to themselves and to the world. U-SJI is one of these films; it is the Golden Bowl of the dying days of the great media mergers.

Vivendi had its own story to take into account. When 39-year-old Jean-Marie Messier, the legendary leader of France's "red-blooded capitalists," became chairman of the national water utility Compagnie Generale des Eaux (CGE) in 1996, he was determined to transform that monopoly with a free-market face into-what else?-a global media power. Just as Effer Bronfman channeled the enormous profits Seagram reaped from its liquor business into a media empire, so Messier drew on a steady stream of sewage and spring water to build his own. The ambitious Messier couldn't simply sell off the old-economy utility side, no matter how much he wanted to, since that was where the money came from. But he did use the water money to buy the French media conglomerate Havas, which owned nearly half of the TV network Canal+, all of the Larousse publishing house, the news magazine L'Express, and to enter into a range of joint ventures with companies all over the map. Naturally all this corporate swashbuckling required a stylish new moniker: CGE ell mortel Vive "Vivendi''!

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merger was leaked, the L.A. Times described the combo as "bourbon and water."

U-S7I 's significance as corporate art becomes even clearer when we put it in a different context. At the same time Universal was shopping the submarine film, it was also looking for partners for Erin Brockovich.

Now, which movie looks like a better sell to a giant French water company-the one that features the largest rainstorm in film history, the one that reaches its climax when a sailor sacrifices his life to close a valve, or the one in which an intrepid investigator makes a giant American utility company pay millions for polluting the groundwater?

This backstory becomes significant, both financially and artistically, when we start to consider the critical issue of corporate counship, the endless search for a mergermate in which nearly every company is always engaged. For mergers to be tax free, they have to be consummated with stock, nor cash. So when the deal is done you're either going to be bossing or working for the other side; you can't just take the money and run. This is why companies think about compatibility all the time. They are always on the prowl for attractive partners: Lew Wasserman's MCA talent agency spent years farming out its players to Universal before taking it over; Time Warner let AOL pay it millions for You've Got Mail before the two decided to merge.

Seagram had the same objective in mind when it was making U-S7I. It wanted a mate: a cash partner in making the movie first, a stock partner in all the big things later. And in fact , the partnership that came together over U-S7I led directly to a get-to-know-you breakfast meeting between Bronfman and Messier in October 1999. A croissant or two later and they were dreamily discussing a $40 billion merger. Then in January, when the announcement of the AOL-Time Warner deal set off a new round of megamergers, Effer and Messier quickly came to terms.

When news of the Vivendi-Universal mega-

II. For any reader of the industry trades, "u" means Universal, the way "the Lion" means MGM and "prexy" means president. The submarine is an obvious symbol for the corporation, and the movie itself-with its unlikely plot involving American sailors who board and steam away in a German submarine-is an allegory of its impending merger with a European conglomerate.

U-S7I tells two stories, each designed to appeal to a different corporate audience: "the mission" -stealing the Enigma decoding machine that's in the German sub; and "the professional" -testing Executive Officer Tyler's (Matthew McConaughey) fitness for command. Mission films tend to be fairly formulaic. There are always two factions: the "mechanics," the ones who do their usual job, and the "intelligence," the ones with temporary control. ("He's the boss. Whatever he wants, he gets," the pooh-bah will say.) There is mutual mistrust, some tense moments when the mechanics act smart and the intelligence guys act brave, and then mutual respect. This nifty criss-cross makes the mission film ideal for thinking about changes in ownership and control.

In U-S7I, this story is intertwined with the (equally formulaic) tale of McConaughey's professional maturation. Here the standard narrative runs like this: Someone wants (0 be

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And what kind of placement is it? Alin charge but is held back. A convenient emergency then puts him in charge and he though it might conceivably persuade some muddles his way into deserving the acciden- weird someone to buy a fifth of VO. , that's tal rank. The professional film is ideal for clearly not the intention here. The briefly thinking about the sentimental subject of glimpsed bottle of VO. is more institutional than consumer advertising-it's for those corporate leadership.

The movie's becoming-a-Ieader story was who know that Universal and Seagram are obviously designed to appeal to Effer Bronf- the same thing. ("VO" was Seagram's ticker man. Long derided by the business press as a symbol in addition to being its flagship prodstars truck rich kid, Bronfman's capitalistic uct.) Like the Bloods drinking Coke in Boyz bona fides had been in question since he first N the Hood (Coke sold Columbia to Sony got involved in the movie business. Bronf- while the film was in production) or the man had just finished proving his managerial Jurassic Park poster on the wall in Erin Brockmettle when the submarine film was okayed, ovich (both Universal pictures), this is a little firing both Universal CEO Frank Biondi and bit of self-synergy, a moment when we catch Universal Pictures CEO Casey Silver in less a media conglomerate looking in the mirror than two weeks. The variety headline must and saying "} love you." Or, in this case, a have screamed out at the scriptwriters as they moment when a canny director tells the boss worked: "With Biondi out, pressure's on of all bosses the same thing.

Bronfman to turn U around." The article Eventually, of course, McConaughey/Bronfwent on, barely disguising its doubts: "Bronf- man manages to turn the U around, to sink man said he had 'learned a lot' in the three the Germans, to earn his command, and to years since Seagram acquired a majority stake refute Barry Diller's stinging charge that Effer in Universal and felt able to do the job him- is just "a third-generation bimbo." The "proself' Effer needed bucking up. fessional" plot, like Bon Jovi's appearance, On the Collector's Edition DVD of U-5P, seems calculated for maximum obviousness. writer/director Jonathan Mostow recalls how The "mission" plot of U-571 involves overhe rewrote McConaughey's entrance after the coming two obstacles. First, can Americans actor was cast. Originally, McConaughey's operate a German U-boat? Second, can they character was supposed to arrive at a swanky get the Enigma decoding machine back to party drunk and with "a floozie" on his arm, their base without the Germans finding out? but to capture the actor's "inherent nobility," The first is a question of translation, which in Mostow gave him a stag entrance. "That's the Hollywood context is the eternal quesnot like you," his captain's wife chides. (Hav- tion: can foreigners run a studio? It's someing one's leadership undermined by a playboy thing Japanese parent companies have failed reputation is, of course, a species of humiliation painfully familiar to Effer Bronfman: Bronfman Sr. once famously asked his son if Seagram was buying MGM stock "just so you can get laid.") Then, after McConaughey discovers that the fatherly Bill Paxton has "torpedoed" his bid for a command of his own, he heads out on the porch, where he drinks-not the beer h e has promised to have

with the enlisted men, but a bottle of Seagram's VO. Only thanks to a last-minute rewrite was this inspired bit of product placement made possible.

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to do; something Canadian Seagram was failing to do.

But U-57I remains optimistic about the possibilities of foreign takeovers. This is, in fact, one of the most prominent themes of the film. When the Americans first approach the German U-boat, the ultracompetent sailor played by Jake Noseworthy shouts out in German: "We're all mechanics. And we're highly trained." The Nazis are convinced, trade jokes with the Americans, and proceed to get shot all to hell. The immediate effect of this is a bunch of dead Germans, but the symbolic payoff is a new American togetherness. The intelligence guys and the submariners are one big happy. This is identityformation, Hollywood-style.

Below decks, Noseworthy-on the DVD director Mostow calls him his onscreen persona-runs around the German control room, translating the names of all the Vivendiesque valves. Noseworthy is the figure in which the two mission teams, i.e., the two media conglomerates, are crossed. He is "half-German," a human coproduction. He is also the radioman, which means he turns words into beeps and beeps into words, a human translation machine. And once he's told the Americans what the valves are for, they can spin them.

These spinning valves are the overriding visual motif of U-57I. There are gears and levers and gauges on the submarine as well, but there are dozens and dozens of valves, which must be spun, usually in pairs. Every couple minutes or so in the sub control room, an actor will grab a pair of bright red valves and spin like mad.

This frantic synchronized spinning is what critics used to call "baring the device," reminding us what we're looking at and where the money comes from. The hand-spun valves of U-57I echo the old-fashioned process of editing on a flatbed or the whirling spools of a projector. There is even a shot in the DVD's "on location" documentary in which valves from the sub are placed in front of film canisters so that we can register the five-spoke design they share.

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All the pieces of U-57I -from the plot and the characters to the design and the editingmight seem like they come out of Submarine Movies For Dummies, but each has its place in the overarching allegory of the contemporary Hollywood system: director surrogates, corporate surrogates, stand-ins for the apparatus, stand-ins for the megamoguls. The allegory is everywhere at once.

Which brings us to the final piece of the mission plot: secrecy. If the Germans know the Enigma has been stolen, they will simply change the machines, making the theft almost pointless. To keep themselves hidden, the Americans do the things people do in submarine movies: they dive below crush depth, they sweat out depth charges, they surface unexpectedly, they blow up a destroyer's radio room with a spectacular shot.

But if this seems all too generic, it also underscores the finesse and control of the submarine's crew as well as the film's makers. For the latter, controlling the allegory is crucial.

The dominant artistic issue in Hollywood over the last quarter century has been controlling the boundary between surface and depth, backstory and plot line, the allegorical and the literal. The peekaboo periscopes, shark fins, and icebergs remind us that someone determines when the boundary will be broken, when the sub will surface, when the latent will be made manifest.

Hollywood's compulsion to insert the medium into the message flops brutally when the allegory becomes too obvious. Think of the terribly unfunny Siskel and Ebert parody in Godzilla or the disastrous Tinseltown "sendups" from the big studios: Howard the Duck, The Pickle, The LaH Allion Hero, or Burn Hollywood Burn. When the in-joke becomes the only joke, no one laughs. (Less disastrous, but still quite bad, are movies like America's Sweethearts, Get Shorty, and Bowfinger; they make The Player's achievement even more remarkable.)

This may seem like so much undecipherable code. But the movie, of course, is about encryption. And while the encryption device,

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the Enigma machine, looks like a typewriter-a nostalgic script-generator-the guts of it are a series of unseen rotors, the invisible echoes of the spinning valves. The message the U-57I sends out on the Enigma is "Send help." But the coded message of U-57I is that there is nothing so different about running a waterworks and running a Hollywood studio.

The film's efforts to appeal to Vivendi-a water company on the way to being a media conglomerate with its own Hollywood studio-come through even in the details. Remember, the original UniversallCanal+ deal to cofinance U-57I also bankrolled the great English hope Working Title. In the final version of the film, however, all things British are systematically eliminated. As we all remember from the brief controversy that attended its release, U-57I credits American sailors for a feat that was actually pulled off by the Royal Navy even before America entered the war. It was originally supposed to end with a kind of symbolic payback when the raft of survivors catch sight of the British coast. But Mostow went back into the computer months later and substituted a U.S. Navy seaplane in the rescue role.

As for Working Tide, it took its big postmerger paycheck and did some very cheeky sulking. Yet another U.S./UK pas-de-deux was made, only this time the pudgy American woman pretended to be British and the British man proved he was a cad by sleeping with a terribly thin American in order to save the company (or so he says). Much more could be said about Bridget Jones' Diary, but the film is the summa of Working Title's frisson of British national pride and self-loathing.

Albion: land of tarts and vicars.

III. Shortly after U-57I opened, Vivendi and Universal officially merged. Vivendi joined the tradition of the wettest Hollywood studio, the one built by a man named Wasserman, whose fortunes were determined by the success of Jaws and the failure of Waterworld.

When the new Vivendi-Universal executive

team met at the Deauville ("Watertown") Festival of American Film in September 2000, they naturally screened U-57I. Synergy was in the air.

But the debt burden that forced Effer to sell only got worse. V-U sold off the Seagram liquor business, but the deal took time. It tried to sell off the waterworks but could find no buyers who were acceptable to the French government. This kept it from completing its acquisition of Canal+, as French law prohibits combinations between industrial and media corporations (of the GE-NBC kind).

Once hailed as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, Messier was now being mocked as a self-aggrandizing buffoon. His 2000 autobiography J6Mcom ("Jean-Marie Messier, Moi-Meme, Maitre du Monde") was exhibit A here.

When the internet economy reached crush depth, Messier got fired. He was forced out when Charles Bronfman, the silent but deadly uncle, convinced the guardians of French capitalism on the Vivendi board to turn against J 6M's bold experiment in bubblenomics.

Vivendi, always playing catch-up, had been the last of the megaconglomerates to form.

But it may well be the first to get broken up.

The plan now, as far as anyone can tell, is to keep Canal+ and the utilities in French hands and sell Universal-the studio, the theme parks, and the music company-to "the Americans." The leading candidate to take over the Universal operation is none other than Barry Diller, Effer's eternal dance partner. If it comes to pass, this will be Diller's third stint in charge of a major studio (he previously ran Paramount and Fox), one where the biggest film in production is called Terminator 3, directed by Jonathan Mostow.

Reason to go to the movies again. _

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL PAY A PRIMER ON GUGGENOMICS by l/fndrew 'Friedman

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the Basque city of Bilbao ceased simply to be a depressed industrial town with a terrorism problem and became synonymous with a miraculous new building, architect Frank Gehry's Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim Museum. This glittering edifice, clad in titanium scales, promised not only that the Basques had embraced tourism as a way out of their political and economic troubles, but also that a new day was dawning for architecture and urbanism. Bilbao was to be the White City of the twenty-first century, a bright beacon of what a New York Times headline called "Gehry's Vision of Renovating Democracy."

No sooner was the thing built, however, than the Basques started to learn what Gehry's vision was costing them. In his book N 1997,

Chronicle of a SeduBion: The Guggenheim Bilbao, Joseba Zulaika dissects the deal under which the museum was built. It's a story of uneven power relations, mortgaged urban futures, and fiscal chicanery, most of which cannot be told by official sources because their agreement contains a clause forbidding public disclosure. But it seems that after a year of secret negotiations, the Guggenheim stuck the city-which lost 40,000 jobs with the demise of its largest steel plant, and which still struggles with 25 percent unemployment-with a stiff bill. By 2000, Zulaika writes, the Basques were in for $250 million-that's $700 for each Bilbao resident.

On top of that, the local government is committed to a perpetual public subsidy of $7 to $14 million a year.

"Meanwhile," Zulaika notes, "the funds going to the Guggenheim were immediately

slashed from [public] subsidies for Basque culture, which pays for libraries, cinema, theater, art, literature, popular crafts, and publications." The Bilbao museum has no local artistic director and no permanent collection of its own. It comes off like the New York Guggenheim's garage, filled with outtakes from its vaults and sporadically supplemented with exhibits on such subjects as motorcycles and Gehry himself (designed by the architect) months after they've been shown in New York. What you won't see at Bilbao is much in the way of local Basque art, much less new Spanish art.

But the city does have a remarkable and shiny building. It sits on the banks of the fetid Nervion River where an abandoned lumber mill used to be, next to an elevated highway-a nice confluence of its architect's fascination with urban misery and with movement. The museum showcases a conventional American interpretation of the modern art canon, and it attracts a lot of international tourists who would otherwise have passed Bilbao by. Once they have taken in the grandeur of Gehry's achievement, visitors may reflect on what a rum thing it is that you can travel the world over and see the same packaged art shows, as if you were on a tour of college freshman dorm rooms. Critical observers might even be led to wonder why international museum culture reminds them so much of international finance. Why all these partnerships with Deutsche Bank, Hugo Boss, and Samsung?

The man to know in this connection is Thomas Krens. He is director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a motorcycle-

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riding, Yale-trained media-hound who for a decade has zoomed willfully over the most sacred tenets of museum culture. Since taking command in 1988, Krens has sold off major paintings from the Guggenheim collection, staged exhibitions devoted to major corporate donors such as Armani, and floated massive bond issues, using parts of the collection as collateral, to finance his network of satellites in Venice, New York, Berlin, and Bilbao.

Like other financiers, Krens has been overreached himself a little bit of late. Surprised by the blow to tourism dealt by September II and the wider recession, and just after he'd opened two new Guggenheims in a casino in Las Vegas, Krens solemnly proclaimed late last year that his new goal was to "go into 2002 with a balanced budget." He fired 80 employees (a fifth of his staff), immediately shuttered the SoHo Guggenheim, and promised more layoffs to come. Upcoming exhibits were shelved, and an exhibit called "Brazil: Body & Soul" extended. Finance experts at other museums nodded their heads approvingly as the Krens model of the debtburdened, centrally managed global museum chain seemed finally to have foundered on the shoals of market austerity. Even the new Frank Gehry museum, due to be built on the formerly industrial piers of the East River in Lower Manhattan, a project the Guggenheim had boasted about for two years in a series of Frank Gehry "exhibits," faced mortal danger.

But in January 2002, with the Brazil exhibit still hanging in gloomy New York, Krens cheerfully jetted down to sunny Rio de Janeiro and, with that city's mayor at his side, announced the coming of a new Guggenheim Brazil. The people of Rio had kindly offered to pay $2 million for a "viability" study and already generously set aside $120 million to build the museum, to be designed

by French auteur Jean Nouvel in the city's rundown port district. The Guggenheim had inked the deal with Rio officials the previous November, at about the time Krens was axing his employees and murmuring somberly to

the press about the grim realities of austerity.

The contrast offers a wonderful illustration of the harsh machinations at the heart of Guggenheim economics-secure public financing for capital-generating museums in a decentralized network of deindustrialized cities, dump assets when necessary, and punish workforces in the isolated cultural fiefdoms as needed. In the hagiographic hysteria of the bubble decade, the museum's expansion and relentless branding filtered down to us mortals as brave new architecture wrapped in the noble rhetoric of urban renewal and art for the people. As it turns out, the "miracle of Bilbao" wasn't so much about a new, flexible architecture. It was about flexible accumulation.

Paired together, Krens and Gehry have perhaps had the largest single impact on the modern museum in fifty years. While both are cast as breaking totally with a past defined by fixed notions of a museum's relationship to the state and even to form itself, their innovations are better thought of as extensions of the logic of capitalism into the deregulated plastic economy of the Nineties.

No surprise, then, that Enron, that paragon of the bubble years, loved and paid them both. As onetime CEO Jeffrey Skilling wrote for the catalog that accompanied a recent Enron-financed Gehry retrospective: Enron shares Mr. Gehry's ongoing search for the moment of truth, the moment when the functional approach to a problem becomes infused with the artistry that produces a truly innovative solution. This is the search Enron embarks on every day by questioning the conventional to change business paradigms and create new markets that will shape the New Economy. It is the shared sense of challenge that we admire most in Frank Gehry.

The moment of truth has arrived. Krens's global strategy rested on a simple innovation: taking high culture downmarket by making art accessible to the masses. But his shrewdest insight was to recognize the profit potential afforded by the drama of deindustrialization in struggling first-world cities. Curators at big museums of modern art in the late Eighties could not figure out how to keep 20th-

Build It and They Will Pay

century greatest hits on constant display while also making some gesture toward showing new art. Krens solved the problem by ignoring the art altogether. By expanding the curatorial style outside the museum walls, he realized that the scenography of broken cities could be the art, stage sets for disseminating the thrill of gentrification to the masses. You could stretch the museum's current collection to keep the branches filled, make up the difference with high-concept traveling displays of borrowed art and consumer gadgets, keep operating costs low by running the show from New York, and win cover charges from tourists on the global circuit two, three, and four times. True, only so many world cities care to have their highbrow aspirations hijacked by a cash-hungry American interloper.

But there were plenty of smaller cities ravaged by capital flight eager to play along.

From the architect's point of view, Krens's new concept was irresistible. Consider what Bilbao did for Gehry's image. Once a middling practitioner of mildly interesting office parks and shopping malls best viewed from the freeway, Gehry had won over the postmodernist faithful in 1978 by wrapping his house in chain-link fence and, gasp, breaking the modernist box. By the late Eighties, he was solidly situated as the pet architect of the Los Angeles elite. Like many in the art world, his clients seemed to love him as much for his up-by-the-bootstraps life narrative of ethnic progress as for his often menacing, frequently ironic buildings. The catalog for his

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first retrospective at the Walker Art Center in 1986 told how his grandmother had worked as a "foreman" in her father's iron foundry in Poland and, in a tale repeated ad nauseum, kept carp for gefilte fish in the bathtub, influencing Gehry's weirdly obsessive love of fish forms later in life. The main visual innovation at Bilbao-the curve-was an extension of these fish forms.

Yet, from the day the first lucky "insiders" were spirited over to the construction site to shudder at the majesty of the museum's unfinished skeleton, Gehry and Krens beamed themselves into a ceaseless feedback loop of mutual stroking that shows no signs of slowing. Before we knew it, Gehry's bag of tricks -the paint-by-numbers box breaking, the harsh unfinished forms, the cute emphasis on the mass-produced materials of cheap-andquick construction-had been conjured into a heretofore unseen "sculptural" and "improvisational" style. Suddenly he held "the power to communicate with everyman." He was "the Michael Jordan of bricks and mortar," yet also somehow the Jackson Pollock, madly crunching up cut paper to feel out his forms, scribbling incomprehensible expressionistic sketches on airplanes in fits of inspired American individuality and freedom. With its sheath of shimmering titanium that ripples in a strong wind, the Bilbao museum was a perfect surface upon which Krens could project his wider global ambitions. Gehry was such a good choice for the project precisely because he is par excellence the architect of surface.

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For years, Gehry had been recycling "the elements of a decayed and polarized urban landscape ... into a light and airy expression of a happy lifestyle," as Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz. But his most anti-urban gestures-a 1981 plan to slam a suspension bridge through the upper floors of the World Trade Center comes to mind-derived from his shallow sense of the city. Even before he started working regularly for Disney, a heavy thrust in his architecture stressed outsized, eye-catching Disney-scaled set pieces. He lived by the playful ad-world notion that blasting big images into a city's visual terrain is far-out fantasy, not visual pollution. Designing a fish restaurant-hey, what about making the building into a giant fish? An aerospace museum-let's snap a Lockheed F104 on the fa<;:ade!

Gehry boosters prattle on about the supposed sensitivity to context of the gigantic museum with the long dinosaur tail at Bilbao, the intense "sense of place." But the museum only raises the bar on the basic look-atme theatricality that has always distinguished Gehry's work. Bilbao takes the art of the lure as its prime imperative, disgorging its fantastic waves and sheets onto the street. By slapping down a snappy visual image but then taking the extra step of unraveling it, the edifice could be more than entertainment-it could be art, even freedom! But, as critic Hal Foster wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Gehry's "freedom is mostly a franchise in which he represents freedom more than enacts it." In other words, this is movie democracy at its best, gluing us slack-jawed to our seats, as Gehry expresses himself by crushing a parade of gigantic snakes, gigantic severed horse heads, gigantic fish, and gigantic silver ribbons on top of our collective heads.

Bilbao piques tourists with its curious modern ruins. They can browse the funky decay along the industrially polluted river or pop in for a snack at the high-priced restaurant (much was made of the fact that Gehry, who also dabbles in smaller consumer goods, designed the chairs). They wouldn't want to

linger too long inside, though, amid the pointless scaffolding and fractured sight lines, which alternate with fairly traditional, if large, gallery spaces to create an anxiety-inspiring place. The basic ugliness of the interiors, in fact, confirms how little they matter.

If the Guggenheim Bilbao, which towers over the city, is contextual in any sense, if it carries the life of its site into its form, it is in an unnervingly cynical way. For its cataclysmically stacked, collided, and crumpled forms not only pun on the nearby smokestacks and cranes; they seem, incredibly, to be Gehry's whimsical idea of visually rendering the tumultuous and violent process by which a once-working industrial waterfront is brought to heel-an actual enactment of the grim process that the Guggenheim makes a point of capitalizing upon.

Many in the architecture world these days consider it bad form to let something as coarse and lowbrow as industrial process intrude on their hallowed and untouchable surfaces. A few dutiful rhetorical nods to a "sense of place" are tolerated, but the building of buildings is to convey the breezy grace of symbolic gesture. Gehry's most conspicuous triumph at Bilbao was, once and for all, to pull the concerns of architecture back to the spectacular surface and foster a profession-wide obsession with the "skin" of buildings. But he also accomplished a second feat, little noted but surely as significant a repudiation of the industrial: By means of digital technology, he dealt a blow to the building trades in their long-running turf war with architects. He accomplished this with his extensive use of CATIA, a computer-assisted design program manufactured for the aerospace and automotive industries by Dassault Systemes and marketed by IBM, which, thanks to the publicity it received at Bilbao, is already changing the way buildings are built and who builds them.

Gehry first used CATIA to design a chainmesh fish sculpture on top of a 150,000square-foot mall for the 1992 Olympic village in Barcelona. But he realized its full potential

Build It and They Will Pay

at Bilbao. Many critics of CATIA dwell on the coldness of the concept of digitalized design, but to do so is to miss the most critical reason the computer made Bilbao possible.

As the financial press likes to say, it "reduced capital costs." CATIA allowed Gehry to design complex structural pieces, once modeled and worked out by hand, by simply plugging a series of coordinates into a computer. The computer then figured out all matters of structural stresses once determined by the building trades, vastly shortening the length of time it would otherwise have taken to build the thing.

This is the major benefit of the program for architects-CATIA is a means of deskilling the ornery building trades and slicing labor hours in favor of the pure vision and billable hours of the architect. The program ushers in a Tron-like world of numerically controlled laser-cutters, water-jet slicers and routers, multi-axis milling machines, laser-positioning devices, robots, and 3D modeling that permits architects to circumvent the normal rounds of competitive construction procurement by predesigning pieces for preselected vendors who agree to their terms. For Bilbao, Gehry modeled his designs on CATIA in his Santa Monica studio, then transmitted the specs to subcontractors in Spain who had to go to one of IBM's "CATIA competency centers" to learn how to decode and use the program. Thus, while CATIA reduces labor costs, it also brings heretofore independent contractors under the aegis of technical know-how controlled by big multinationals like IBM. No wonder IBM and Dassault, like Enron,

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love Frank Gehry. As financial backers of the Guggenheim's Gehry retrospective, the companies released a joint press release filled with fanciful evocations of the master from Santa Monica, and themselves as his helpmate.

"True artists experience great personal pain in their undaunted persuit [sic] of excellence," Ed Petrozelli, general manager, IBM Product Lifecycle Management observed. "Our function, from a technology standpoint, is to increase the ability of artists to focus on their designs, and to liberate them to experiment more freely by removing mechanical concerns from the creative process."

How those who make their living by such fusty "mechanical concerns" will fare under this new rationalization is another matter. If there was any doubt that Taylorist impulses lurked behind Gehry's technophilia, a speech he made upon receiving the Royal Gold Medal in London in 2000, as reported in The Architells' Journal made his intentions plain.

In his conversations about CAT lA, Gehry typically sticks to how it liberates his craft.

But in this speech, he lost his cool. He proclaimed that CATIA had given architects the chance to wrestle the title of "master builder" from their enemies in the building trades, and then went on snippishly about how architects have been "infantilized" by contractors and made "the little woman" of the construction process.

"The miracle of the computer turns that around," he said. "There is such a degree of accuracy that contractors are not at a great risk if they just follow the instructions. We are working with lawyers and insurers in America to reach a position where the architect becomes the responsible party in the equation. There is a great opportunity for our profession to become the master builder again."

Will these Howard Roark fantasies save Gehry from being the bitch of the construction industry? It's unclear, but this kind of talk should dispel any notion that Krens and Gehry simply provide local jobs and help local governments turn hard luck of the industrial sort

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into a chance for service-sector rebirth. In reality, far from salving the wounds inflicted by capital, the Guggenheim model offers more of the same. In Bilbao we may observe the ethnic Krensing reserved for 21st century urbanism.

Krens's geocultural strategy is a wonder to behold, as liquid and mobile and protean as capital itself. After Venice, he went to an old manufacturing loft in SoHo; after SoHo to an old lumber mill in Bilbao, after Bilbao to an old bank building in Berlin, after Berlin to a casino in Vegas. Like capital, he has a palpable "creative" effect. AI; he exports the American model of culture as lucrative private deal, he expects governments to wise up and slash their social contracts, opening as a result more opportunities for privatization orchestrated by Krens. AI; he explained to Art News in 1998: We live in a complex cultural environment. Governments are wanting to get out of the cultural support business. You have more government support for culture in Europe, but proportionately it's coming to the same conclusions as in the U.S.: If you're trying to make a budget balance with a IO percent or 15 percent unemployment rate, culture is one of the first things you cut out, because the constituency for culture tends to be relatively small.

Sound familiar? This appeal to sensible economics, hard choices, market austerity, and balanced budgets is remarkably similar to arguments made by Enron and all manner of other corporate hijackers to redistribute massive public subsidies, asset ownership, and control of whole swaths of the economy into more profitable private hands. One possible consequence of the Guggenheim's big money tactics, as the director of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City never tires of pointing out, is that museums' tax-free nonprofit status may be jeopardized over the long term. That would drag even lofty holdouts into Krens's shark pit. And what happens if the Guggenheim pulls out of a satellite museum that is not building up its own collection and talent to secure its future?

What will the Basques have to show for their money then?

The danger in pointing the finger at Krens, of course, is giving a pass to other museums that make similarly sly corporate moves-not to mention the raw exploits that gathered the hoards that fund all our philanthropic foundations, fellowships, and cultural institutions.

What separates Thomas Krens from major league sports franchises that extort new stadiums from nervous hometowns? He's taking it worldwide. But he's pretty good at the subsidy racket at home, too, as is evident in the recent deal for the new Guggenheim New York City, which was to be the grand showcase of his and Gehry's brand of new urbanism. In 2001, amid a crisis in affordable housing, rising homelessness, poorly funded parks, gutted social services, and underpaid teachers instructing crowded classes in crumbling schools, New York officials magnanimously dedicated $700 million for the project. Gehry returned the favor by phoning in a design that was contemptuous, even by his standards. AI; it happens, the city no longer has the money, and in any case it's hard to imagine that his clever idea-planting the destroyed remnant of a skyscraper on top of a pile of twisted steel-will get off the ground any time soon.

It would be nice to think that the Gehry moment will pass. His aestheticization of damage, his cynical predilection for replaying a city's trauma on its own landscape, like the Coney Island rides of yesteryear that charged impoverished tenement dwellers to watch the reenactment of a burning tenement-who needs it? Sadly, a lot of cities around the world believe they can't do without it. At last count, more than a hundred had put in a bid to get a Guggenheim of their very own. _

After RejeClion

57

AFTER REJECTION Everyone in my photo collection Looks as if they're saying "Don't point that thing at me" So I screen all calls from friends But answer when salesmen and creditors call To indulge my many hang-ups I write polite letters to Tommy Hilfiger Imploring him to make more baggy pants And lessen the competition.

Once I get gnawing, I grab armfuls of dirt From some community garden About to be bulldozed to make way for another condom, Drop it in the bathtub and turn on the showerhead To have some mud to mate with.

I plant corn on graves until Hendrix Or at least Charlie Parker comes back to play taps And deer hold "Take Back the Night" rallies in the suburbs.

The population bomb explodes backwards.

I remove enough fat to get my ribs back Without Eve ... and her promises ...

Then I turn on the heat and kneel before the coffee girls The better to pop the pimple you call earth And ram a couple of bottling plants Down the carbonated throat of the sky Until the sun comes in, bright but cold Like the city I'm trying to escape with paint Or by being shipped in on hand trucks like live lobsters No one can handle till the head chef Rings up a striking basketball player Who could use a little cash (if this takes awhile, good; let them know hunger in their bibs) Who ends up liking the job so much It's the end of sports as we know it.

Then Saturn shines as bright and big as the moon And it's not even dark enough to be warm yet.

Mostly, though, I watch dust motes, and see I cannot be consumed unless I'm consuming.

-Chris Strojfolino

Waiting for Foucault, Still ,

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CHARLES THE EXCELLENT by 0'vfartha 13ayne

I

into the second dinner service; smartly dressed plates of venison and salmon and heirloom cabbage still marched out the kitchen's swinging doors with brio.

But the world-famous chef had pulled me away. He led me to a dimly lit nook and, summoning up two glasses of white burgundy from a waiter, gestured toward the sofa. We sat. He flattered my writing and introduced me to his mother, who was passing through with a group of tennis friends. I flushed at his praise.

He expounded on his theories of excellence and achievement, then escorted me to his second-floor office, where he read from scores of thank-you cards sent by students who'd come through the four-star restaurant. He asked me where I'd gone to college and the evening began to take on the tenor of a very long but not unpleasant first date. He majored in philosophy too! We have so much in common!

And then there, in the darkened office, softly lit by the street lamps and maybe even the moon, he confessed to me, "I am a libertarian capitalist." 1, sodden with foie gras and fine wine, could only nod. But I knew it would never work out.

T WAS LATE

"It's all about excellence," begins Charlie Trotter's first cookbook, "or at least working toward excellence. Early on in your approach to cooking-or to running a restaurant-you have to determine whether or not you are willing to commit fully and completely to the idea of the pursuit of excellence. I have always looked at it this way: if you strive like crazy for perfection-an all-out assault on total perfection-at the very least you will hit a high level of excellence, and then you might be able to sleep at night."

In October 2001 an item appeared in the Chicago Sun- Times that caused a stir in certain quarters. Trotter-chef, owner, and figurehead of the tony Lincoln Park restaurant that bears his name-had announced that he was thinking of taking some time off.

He didn't know if the restaurant would be open a year from now. If it was, he couldn't say that he would be involved. He wanted to walk the Great Wall of China, read Kafka and Thoreau, and just generally chill out. (A year later the restaurant remains, but the scuttlebutt around town is that he's headed for London by year's end.)

For a 42-year-old white man at the top of his game, such midlife musings aren't unusual. But coming from Trotter, a man once named the second-meanest person in town by Chicago magazine and who's built his reputation on the dogged pursuit of perfection at all costs, it came as something of a shock.

Two years ago I dined at Charlie Trotter's with a friend. We'd come into some money, a celebration was in order, and-curious-I made a reservation. The restaurant takes bookings four weeks in advance for weekday

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evenings, and two months in advance for weekends. A meal runs around $125 per person for the food alone. Wine can easily double the tab. In the six weeks between that phone call and T-day, I had a lot of time to think about what we were doing.

I'm not exactly a foodie. I mean, I like food. Who doesn't? But I frequent the same four restaurants, most within walking distance of my house, where the average tab is maybe $10 per person. What were we doing?

Were we just buying into established standards of what constitutes a good time, a just reward? Could we really justifY blowing our windfall on seven small courses of wildly sauced food?

Charlie Trotter, a culinary school dropout from Wilmette, opened his eponymous restaurant in Chicago in 1987, at the tender age of 27. Charlie Trotter, named after Charlie Parker and himself a jazz fan, sees the concept of the multicourse fixed-price tasting menu as something vaguely akin to musical improvisation. Charlie Trotter, "the Michael Jordan of cooking," has snared multiple championship rings for his team. The James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Wine Service Award, 1993 and 2002; Outstanding Chef Award, 1999; Outstanding Restaurant Award, 2000; and Outstanding Service Award, 2002; Wine Spellator's Best Restaurant in the World for Wine and Food, 1998 (but just Best Restaurant in the United States in 2000).

I knew full well that a meal at Charlie Trotter's is a dizzying parade of exquisitely prepared food, rigorously assembled and fastidiously garnished. You are warned to set aside four hours for the dining experience. No hard liquor is served; jackets are required. It starts with a complimentary amuse gueleFrench for "amuse the mouth." It is not explained how, in a $125 fixed price meal, it is determined that this bite of caviar-of diver scallop, of morel flan-is, in fact, free.

Trotter champions the use of the freshest organic and local produce. He flies in freerange meat and line-caught fish from around the globe. Every fig, every leek, every lobster

is inspected upon delivery. He's pioneered the use of vegetable-juice-based vinaigrettes and light, emulsified broths for flavor, scorning the classical chef's reliance on butter and cream. Furthermore, the flowers in the dining room are ruthlessly fresh, and each course arrives on a different china pattern. Wine is served in crystal Reidel stemware and the walls are covered with custom-woven fabric.

I knew that Charlie Trotter has a thing about lint. Maddened by the unpredictable appearance of loose fuzzies on his otherwise immaculate dining room carpets, he fretted over possible solutions. Breaking out the Dustbuster in the middle of dinner service was out of the question, and even a discreet dip on the part of a watchful waiter was deemed too distracting. Finally, inspiration: waiters at the restaurant wear double-sided tape on the bottom of their shoes.

I knew all this because in the weeks leading up to that dinner I'd started reading the collected Trotter hagiography. Charlie Trotter is more than just a chef, you see; he's a branded multimedia industry. In addition to his eponymous cookbooks-each crammed with page after full-color page of impossibly glistening polysyllabic food fantasies-he's got his own PBS series, The Cooking Sessions with Charlie Trotter, with accompanying guidebook, and has written himself into the big yellow zeitgeist with Gourmet Cookingfor Dummies. He has a line of spices and December 2000 saw the long-awaited debut of Trotter's to Go, a gourmet takeout shop in Lincoln Park.

He's also inspired two business primers, Paul Clarke's Lessons in Excellence from Charlie Trotter (1999) and Edmund Lawler's fawning Lessons in Service (2001), in which the chef's rules for living are examined in minute detail and then applied to corporate conduct.

"To be a superb leader," writes Clarke, "you don't have to be sensationally charismaticbut you do need to act as a truly passionate and inspirational model for your staff all day, every day." How passionate and inspirational is Trotter? Clarke cites this voice-mail message left by the chef for his staff while on a

Charles the Excellent

business trip: "The wine bottles on the upper left-hand rack, third row from the left, are out of chronological order. Please see that they are reorganized according to the vintage year. Also, the cups next to the cappuccino machine are spotted."

On the appointed day we arrived at the townhouse restaurant in dreary November rain. The valet strode over, opened the car door, escorted us to the front stairs under an oversized umbrella, then ran around in front of us to open the discreetly marked door. Inside, the hostess took our coats and almost immediately we were seated by a solicitous waiter who pulled the table out for me to slide onto the banquette, then pushed it back asking, "Is that all right?" It was a nice table, in the second-floor balcony dining room. A low partition and an elaborate floral arrangement separated us from our neighbors. The room was austere, conservative, and a little frumpy.

Food arrived; we ate. Each dish was announced by the waiter with affectless clarity.

Slow-roasted Scottish salmon with saffron-infused cauliflower puree, wilted arugula, and a spicy cucumber and chive emulsion. Muscovy duck breast with duck leg con fit, collard greens, porcini mushrooms, and roasted parsnips. When I got up to go to the bathroom a hand appeared and opened the door for me. When I returned to the table a fresh, folded napkin awaited; the old, soiled, flawed napkin was gone.

Then came the wine. A shiraz, recommended by the waiter. Served the way it's

supposed to be-a small puddle at the bottom of a very large, ballooning glass. I lifted it to take a sip and my nose-my whole face-plunged in. It was overwhelming. I would have gladly forgone the rest of dinner for another glass of this wine. I didn't get to examine the soles of the waiter's shoes, but I bought it-I bought it all.

And yet, we were disappointed. It was all too too, and our spirits flagged. As the townhouse door closed behind us three hours and $370 later, we felt oddly deflated. Almost depressed. Weeks later, after trying to pinpoint the source of my discontent and running over and over the exquisite service, the micromanaged attention to detail, the broad white plates set with precisely machined food constructions-hot pink salmon under a neon green layer of chive-cucumber froth, two small pieces of lamb propped up on mounds of cabbage and accessorized with swooshes of bean puree, a complimentary ramekin of fresh ricotta topped with dark, wet huckleberries-I decided to write up the whole experience for the Chicago Reader, where I work. The piece (fair but critical; it did note that the lamb was barely lukewarm) ran accompanied by a drawing of the diminutive Trotter perched atop a pedestal, right hand tucked into the breast of his chef's jacket, a waiter cowering in the background.

Two days after the story appeared, Charlie Trotter invited me over. He'd read my article and responded, as a good CEO should, with prompt and decisive action, sending a letter via messenger the day the paper hit the streets inviting me to spend a day in the hallowed kitchen as a "guest chef"-a privilege usually extended to those with the resources to purchase such access at a charity auction-in order "to better understand what we do here at the restaurant." After I RSVP'd in the affirmative, he sent me flowers. Two exquisite arrangements-understated and tasteful yet clearly expensive-arrived at my office by lunch. The tulips were from Charlie; the lilies were-enigmatically-from the florist.

"With highest regards," read the card. I was

THE BAFFLER

floored, but, based on my research, I shouldn't have expected anything less.

Management gurus from grandpappy Tom Peters on down to hopeful sycophants like Clarke and Lawler, the authors of the aforementioned Trotter-inspired texts, are fond of lessons about the importance of utter servility before the customer. Embrace your critics, say the masters, and be prepared to do it on your knees. Thus, Lessons in Service is full of anecdotes about employees who've comped problem diners $400 bottles of wine, driven guests home in their own cars when cabs were in short supply, and given away their ties to admiring patrons. These examples of abasement in service of the elusive goal of "excellence" are framed as instances of employee empowerment and creative problemsolving-but it's worth noting that it's not Trotter driving guests home at 2 A.M.

On the appointed day I'm ushered to the upstairs office and instructed to fill out a waiver absolving the restaurant of liability should I stab myself with a paring knife. In short order I'm given a white apron, chef's jacket, and paper toque, ushered into the kitchen, and left in the custody of a sous chef in her late twenties or early thirties. Let's call her Kristin. Kristin worked for Andersen Consulting until one day, a few years back, she'd had an epiphany and followed the call to culinary school. When she asked how I'd wound up in the kitchen, I said I'd written an article-that mean article-about your boss. This whole "pursuit of excellence" business, I ventured, it seems like he's just setting himself up for failure.

"Oh really?" she said, and laid down her knife. "I'd like to say a few things about excellence ifI may."

I was expecting to chop, not to jot, so unfortunately the particulars of her testimonial to the virtues of excellence are a hazy memory. Something rhapsodic about the challenge of being the best she could be, every

day, surrounded by like-minded compatriots.

But I do recall the fanatic's gleam in her eye.

Her enthusiasm for Charlie Corps was echoed by Jennifer, a pastry chef produced a few hours later to address a group of high school students participating in the restaurant's Culinary Education Program. "Jennifer," said Trotter, "would you tell our guests what 'excellence' means to you?"

"Certainly, Chef," she replied, and you could hear the capital "c."

I spent eight hours in Trotter's kitchen, chopping parsley, pitting fruit, and trying to stay out of the way. The kitchen staff is uniformly young and fresh-faced and all business. "No leaning," Kristin admonished, as I rested my hips on the cutting board. I straightened up, chastened. "Do you need anything?," asked the chef de cuisine, repeatedly. "Mineral water? Juice? Champagne?" None of the bona fide members of Team Charlie were indulging; I declined.

Trotter materialized in the second hour, shaking my hand (which was, itself, strangely, shaking) and thanking me for coming. "Have you seen the store yet?" he asked earnestly as he took his leave. "You should really see the store." Ninety seconds later a brisk, cheerful woman appeared at my elbow. "Chef Trotter wants you to see the store. Why don't you come with me."

Later, as I gouged out the seeds from a football-sized passion fruit, the solicitous chef de cuisine reappeared at my shoulder bearing a spoonful of grits. He popped it in my mouth, and watched as I rolled them around on my tongue. "Makes you want to change careers, eh?" he grinned. They were creamy and dense and really, really good. They were also ridiculously pedigreed-organically grown and milled, I was informed, on a 300year-old millstone in West Virginia-another brick in the construction of this temple to consumer privilege. My grits, I can say, arelike my pottery and my hand-knit sweater and my secret vacation spot in the Yucatan-

Charles the Excellent

special; not like everyone else's; and I have the taste and education, not to mention the capital, to seek out, procure, and consume them.

This notion is reinforced when I'm taken to observe the Culinary Education Project in action, a program that, in addition to providing scholarships to promising culinary students, also offers two weekly meals at which high school kids are treated to an afternoon's immersion in fine cuisine, table manners, and the power of positive thinking. In an article on the project in the trade magazine Chef Trotter references the chaos theory trope that "if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Alps of Switzerland, two months later it will be experienced as a tsunami in Japan." Similarly, he believes, exposure to his platform of excellence will seed discipline and drive in the students' later lives.

It's an interesting question, what makes some people "disadvantaged" while others are excellence-prone. Is it mostly to do with impediments such as poverty, horrendous public schools, violence, and society's general indifference to their welfare? Or is it all about atritude? And what really can the well-meaning well-co-do actually do about it?

When Charlie started talking politics, I remembered Paul Clarke's admiring revelation that Trotter encourages his staff to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, so as "to better understand integrity and commitment." I haven't read the book, but the 1949 King Vidor movie is a hoot, featuring Gary Cooper in a scenery-chewing performance as Rand's hero, architect Howard Roark, who destroys his own building rather than water down his vision with the ideas of weaker men.

Rand's philosophy centers around the imperative of self-actualization. Freedom to fully exercise one's creative potential is the only thing worth a damn in life, and if absolute self-interest is the ticket, then so be it.

She championed the employment of rational self-interest in the service of capitalism, and had no truck with the liberal welfare state; private charity will take appropriate care of social ills.

This logic threads its way through many aspects of the Charlie Trotter experience. The Culinary Education Project, in its promise to sanctify the children by admitting them to the realm of the virtuous-this luxury temple maintained by its priests' careful adherence to the doctrine of discipline and minutiae-is a good example. I am all in favor of scholarships and broadening experiences.

Let's even grant Charlie his butterfly-effect miracle. But what of the other teens who pass through the dining room, who carefully sip their vegetable juice vinaigrettes, poke nervously at their venison loin, and dutifully write their thank you notes the next day. The whole exercise may well just serve to reinforce a social order where some folks care that their grits are ground on a 30o-year-old grindstone and others just plain like grits.

The cult of excellence, when applied to Trotter-style gastronomy, squeezes the joie de vivre out of dining along with the butter.

Trotter is the merciless, impossible-to-please capitalist every captain of industry thinks he should be. Though his staff strives to adopt his style (no leaning!), they are (to take it from those who haven't "made the cut") as intimidated as they are empowered, and perpetually anxious about serving and indulging others. Trotter is no good-time Charlie; the regime of idealism and virtue that rules his restaurant must be a terrible strain. I wonder ifhumanity ever infiltrates the kitchen .â&#x20AC;˘

THE BAFFLER

IDLE MUSIC IS THE DEVIL'S BAND This is how I learned to stop hating the smug and arrogant, complicit folk inside the rampant suburban ubiquitous vehicles.

This is how I taught myself that my hatred of their crass lifestyles of mobile and sanitized sport and corporate offices burned more energy than necessary and my low-grade, high-minded hatred must stop tho it conflict with or contradict the President's policy.

This is how I realized that, despite the spacious righteousness in which I transported my endless and oblique hatred in an easy-rollover luxury, my hatred could easily and mistakenly crush a less vitriolic man in an icy accident.

This is when I learned my hatred, like war clouds that gather over a blue gulf, is bad for the environment.

And this is how I came to decide to call Jesus on His cell phone.

Jesus works in Somerville at the Somerville Theater where He takes tickets today for the early show: THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. I thought He said the Somerville Fears and I asked my Lord who starred in the film. In the trailer, as Jesus described it, a nuclear bomb "goes off" and without giving too much away Jesus knew the kernel of my question was an urgent fear of nuclear war between Pakistan and India.

What side does Jesus come down on when millions of Hindus and Moslems are on the brink of mutual incineration?

This is how I came to know Jesus is also

politically disenfranchised.

-7Janiel 'Bouchard

HEAT WAVE DEATH COMES TO THE CITY OF EXTREMES by eric Kjjnenberg It's hot. It's very hot. We all have our little problems bur let's not blow it out of proportion ....

We go ro extremes in Chicago. And that's why people like Chicago. We go to extremes.

-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, July 17, 1995

T

HURSDAY, JULY 13, 1995 was the hottest day in Chicago's history, with the temperature rising to 106 degrees and the heat index (a measure of heat and humidity) topping 120. On July 14 the temperature broke 100 again, and persistent tropical heat kept Chicago sweltering through the weekend.

But the climate is only one of the reasons that Joseph Lazcko, a sixty-eight-year-old man of Hungarian descent, died alone in his Northwest Side apartment in the days that followed. Although he kept to himself, Lazcko apparently staved off loneliness by collecting his neighbors' unwanted mail and filling his home with phone books, old newspapers, and shoddy furniture. Lazcko preserved order amid the chaos of broken radios and piled seat cushions by keeping a calendar, in which he recorded the daily temperature and noted the news stories that moved him. On July 15 he entered "94 degrees" in the book. On July 16 he was dead.

Aside from the calendar, the investigators from the Cook County Public Administrator's office who searched Lazcko's home for information about friends or family to notify found only a few signs of social life. Lazcko kept a couple of letters sent to him from Hungary in the Eighties; a bank statement showing that his last withdrawal, on July I, Excerpted from Heat permission.

~ve.

Copyright

Š2002

brought his account down to less than a thousand dollars; letters concerning lawsuits in which he had been involved years before; and an Easter card he had written in 1991 but never sent. Most of Lazcko's papers were taken to the public administrator's office, and the staff would later use them in their efforts to track down someone who could claim his possessions.

Cook County officials brought Lazcko's corpse to the morgue, where the staff was racing to keep up with the intake. After examining the body, pathologists determined that Lazcko had died of artherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heat stress. They penned these findings on Lazcko's death certificate, entered his records into a computer database, and moved his body into storage. The office waited for Lazcko's next of kin to take care of his remains, but no one ever came. As a recipient of public assistance Lazcko was eligible for burial subsidies from the state, and when it became clear that the body would never be claimed, a public agency interred him in a cemetery nearby.

Solitary in life, Lazcko was joined in death by some five hundred Chicago residents who succumbed to the heat wave and were also taken to the medical examiner's office for autopsies. The final death toll reached 739 for that week in July, making the event the deadliest heat wave in recorded U.S. history. Most of the victims, like Joseph Lazcko, came into contact with the two things that might have saved them, air conditioning and attention

by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted by

66

THE BAFFLER

from state agencies, only after their bodies were delivered to the morgue. Some of the victims perished with company nearby. But the majority died alone, behind locked doors and sealed windows that entombed them in suffocating private spaces where visitors came infrequently and the air was heavy and still.

The bodies of roughly 170 of the victims went unclaimed until the public administrator's office launched a campaign to seek out relatives. Even then, almost one-third of the cases never moved beyond the public office.

The personal possessions of dozens of the heat wave victims, including Lazcko, remain filed in cardboard boxes at the county building today.

Given the attention that we pay to spectacular and camera-ready disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, it is surprising that more Americans die in heat waves than in all other extreme weather events combined. Heat waves receive little public attention not only because they fail to generate the massive property damage and fantastic images produced by other storms, but also because their victims are mainly social outcasts-the elderly, the poor, and the isolated.

Silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people, the social conditions that make heat waves so deadly simply do not register with the media or its audience. Despite the unprecedented death toll of the 1995 heat wave, Chicago's collective response to the trauma has been marked by a will not to know the reasons that so many people died.

This was clearly evident in the city's immediate reaction. From the public statements of Mayor Richard M. Daley to local TV newscasts, the heat wave was depicted as nothing more than a freakish disaster that drove home the timeless moral lesson of nature's power and human frailty. As the county medical examiner reported the first wave of deaths, the mayor advised reporters not to "blow it out of proportion," and then disputed the scientific legitimacy of the medical examiner's findings. "Every day people die of natural causes," Daley said at a news conference on

July 18. "You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of hear. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat." No one, of course, had made such a sweeping claim. But journalists loved the story of conflict between the mayor and the medical examiner, and the bizarre question of whether the heat deaths were "really real," to use the phrase that became popular that week, remains a part of the heat wave's history today.

Others simply blamed the victims. Daniel Alvarez, the city's human services commissioner, explained that "we're talking about people who die because they neglect themselves." The Chicago Sun- Times would soon reveal that the city failed even to implement its own heat-emergency plan, but Alvarez insisted that "we did everything possible. But some people didn't want to even open their doors to us." Months later, when the Mayor's Commission on Extreme Weather Conditions published its findings, such high-minded ex-

Heat wave

cuses remained the norm. The commission's main conclusions: "Government alone cannot do it all," and "those most at risk may be least likely to want or accept help." Ultimately, the commission decided, the heat wave was "a unique meteorological event," an act of God for which there was no defense.

In fact, what happened in Chicago was more than a natural disaster, and its story is more than just a colorful illustration of the human condition. The 1995 heat wave was a social drama that made visible a set of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive: the literal isolation of a growing population of old, poor, and vulnerable city dwellers; the degradation of urban hotel residences and senior housing complexes; the deterioration of public services thanks to privatization and the "reinvention of government"; and the abject deprivation of "no-go" neighborhoods abandoned by businesses and dropped from the safety net of the state.

The physiological causes of death in the heat wave were obvious. What Chicago needed was a social autopsy, a study of the institutions and relationships that permitted this catastrophe.

It's difficult to understand at first how a prosperous American city in the Nineties could find itself in such a state of crisis. These were boom years for cities like Chicago, insisted the celebratory journalism of the New Economy. Everything looked rosy. Stock prices soared, spawning a lovable bunch of "middleclass" millionaires who built condos and McMansions along city streets. Urban glamour zones replete with chain coffeehouses, bookstores, twee retro furniture shops, and expensive restaurants sprouted up in places professionals had long considered "off the map."

Suburbanites flooded back into the city and property values rose accordingly. Mayor Daley decorated the streets with planters, trees, wrought-iron fences, and designer street lamps, giving new gloss to affluent neighborhoods and tourist destinations. Wrecking crews knocked down the infamous public housing projects and cleared the way for de-

velopment. Welfare rolls plummeted along with the funds for social service programs, and pundits announced that these were signs of success. Unemployment levels droppedespecially when we removed the two million or so people in prison from the labor statistics.

The homeless were cleared off the streets. All that was squalid melted into air.

But putting problems out of sight is not the same as solving them. In a dramatic return of the suppressed, hundreds of the people whom the city had removed from view showed up at the county morgue during the heat wave, and this time around they were impossible to overlook. The morgue typically receives about seventeen bodies per day. By the third day of the heat wave it was receiving more bodies than it could handle, and the staff of fourteen pathologists worked marathon shifts to keep up. A long line of police vehicles carrying dead bodies formed outside, some waiting up to three hours. "It's like an assembly line in there," one officer said.

On July 15, 365 Chicagoans died, and the morgue was swamped. The owner of a local meatpacking firm volunteered to bring his fleet of giant refrigerated trucks to the morgue to store the excess cadavers. But the trucks filled up quickly and dozens of bodies remained scattered around the office. The crew brought more trucks through the weekend until there were nine altogether. Parked in the morgue's lot, the trucks were surrounded by police wagons, radio and television vans, hearses, and private cars. Images of the horrifying scene appeared on front pages and TV screens around the world.

How was such a grotesque tragedy possible in the flourishing city? Who were these people? Why had no one noticed the victims when they were still alive?

Primarily, the victims were elderly, with seventy-three percent of the heat-related casualties accounted for by people over the age of sixty-five. African-Americans had the highest proportional death rates of any ethnoracial group. Latinos, on the other hand, suffered only two percent of the heat wave

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deaths. The geography of mortality during the heat wave was hauntingly similar to the everyday organization of urban inequality.

The greatest concentrations of death were on the south and west sides of the city, in depleted, largely black areas already afflicted by widespread unemployment, abject poverty, institutional abandonment, and massive depopulation.

What allowed the disaster to happen is a more complicated story, a tale of misguided social policy and institutionalized indifference. But before we proceed, let's give the city the credit it deserves: Chicago's Department on Aging was among the first city programs in America to focus specifically on the urban elderly, and it offers an impressive range of services. But by the mid-Nineties the elderly population was mushrooming and the department's funding was shrinking so severely that it turned to private foundations for support. So while the state of Illinois ran a budget surplus and while the Chicago Police Department grew to historic levels, the Department on Aging reduced its full-time staff and began to rely on part-time and temporary employees. Curiously, putting city contracts on an entrepreneurial basis provided a p erverse incentive for agencies to underestimate the costs of services and overestimate their capacity to provide them. The agencies I studied had bargained themselves into responsibilities that they were strained to provide and had taken on or inherited case loads that required more resources than they could afford. The results are obvious: The dereliction of Chicago's elderly poor was virtually a structural certainty.

Similarly, the entrepreneurial model also encouraged agencies to understand themselves as purveyors of information about city services to citizens who are expected to become smart shoppers of public goods. Driven by the idea that consumers of city services will not act effectively unless they have good information, city agencies regularly hire expensive advertising firms to publicize their work. As officials explain it, Chicago residents who need public assistance must be able to make choices about the services they want and the programs they prefer. In principle the concept-known, ironically, as "empowerment"-appeals to those frustrated by old-style political bureaucracies, but in fact the market-model of government simply doesn't work without an unlikely amount of activism on the part of the population in question-in this case elderly people who are isolated and frail.

According to local social workers and case managers that I spoke to, Chicago residents with the lowest levels of education, the weakest ties to mainstream institutions such as government agencies and churches, and the least resources are also the worst prepared to claim the public benefits-from health care to prescription drugs to Social Security income-to which they are entitled. In order to take advantage of public services in the entrepreneurial age one must aggressively seek out public goods, persistently demand them after being turned away on the first try, and enjoy easy access to information and service providers. As welfare historian Robert Halpern has pointed out, "Those most in need of supportive services are precisely those least likely to have access to or to participate in them." A system of service delivery that only rewards the most capable obviously makes these problems even more severe.

During the Nineties, however, not even the best-connected city residents knew where to appeal for assistance in securing the most basic goods: power and water. This was because Chicago, like many cities, had adopted a market-model strategy for punishing con-

HeatWlve

sumers who were delinquent on their bills, while Congress slashed the budget of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). The combination placed the elderly poor in a permanent energy crisis.

With energy costs rising, government subsidies declining, and incomes fixed, seniors were hit hard with utility bills. While the average Illinois family spends roughly 6 percent of its income on heat during winter months, for low-income families keeping warm takes nearly 35 percent. Summertime utility bills would be just as large if everyone used air conditioning. This is why people in pilot programs to provide air conditioners to the poor have often sold the units rather than install them. But the everyday energy crisis was pressing even during moderate temperatures.

The most impoverished seniors I spent time with kept their lights off during the day, letting the television, their most consistent source of companionship, illuminate their rooms. The threat of losing power altogether sentenced these seniors to forms of insecurity so fundamental that most of us would find them intolerable. And yet for most of us their daily crisis was invisible.

Initiated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1978 and fully implemented in 1980, LIHEAP is a relic of an age we were supposedly leaving behind.

The program's budget was consistently cut in the early Nineties, leaving Illinois, like most other states with severe winters, unable to provide energy subsidies in summer. According to workers for Chicago Department on Aging, LIHEAP was the program that almost all of their clients needed but could never get.

LIHEAP was also the sort of program detested by critics of redistributive social policies, and Republicans have spent years campaigning to eliminate energy subsidies for the poor. During the week ofJuly 17, 1995, as the Chicago heat wave deaths were still being counted, the U.S. Senate debated a bill to end the LIHEAP program altogether, settling instead on a cutting its budget again. A few momhs later the u.s. House of Representa-

tives refused to vote on a funding bill for Education, Health and Human Services unless they could eliminate LIHEAP entirely.

Again, the firebrands of the Gingrich revolution settled for a budget cut. None of this seems to have arisen from a real philosophical hostility to federal spending: In fact, during the same term that Congress slashed energy support for the poor, it expanded the federal government's commitment to subsidize insurance companies and homeowners who suffer property damage in natural disasters.

The heat was bad during July of 1995> but the weather should not be our main concern.

What made the heat so deadly were social factors: the isolation of the aged due to social withdrawal and the privatization of everyday life; extreme inequality; and the segregation of affluence from poverty that allows for a blithe but false vision of urban splendor. But it was a political factor-our acceptance of such inequities, even in a disaster-that sealed the victims' fate.

Advances in medical science, health care, and pension programs have extended the typical American life span, but society has not moved apace. The population of senior citizens who live alone and isolated in cities has been growing considerably in recent years.

There are no easy solutions to the challenges posed by the aging and atomizing of society, but it is dear that current strategies to provide social protection by "empowering" the poor or the elderly with choices in the market of goods and services does not work.

THE BAFFLER

For many Americans, though, this failure is invisible. Its consequences are manifested in distant neighborhoods far from the plush enclaves where marketing execs get together with software consultants to ponder the vexing issues of irony and authenticity. Although there is surely some substance behind all the happy rhetoric about America's urban revitalization in recent years, it is important to remember that what we built was not "urban" in the usual sense. What we have seen is a secession of the successful, a city of extremes in which the rich simply opt out of environments in which they might have to encounter stark deprivation and suffering. Again Chicago led the way, making admirably rapid progress in demolishing its notorious housing projects and eliminating the sight of disrepair even before developing a plan for rehousing the thousands of families displaced in the process. The fate of the former residents is simply not part of the public conversation on the matter. Invisibility awaits them. Those few who have remained in touch with re-

searchers report that they now live in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods similar to the projects except in one crucial respect: they are on the margins of the city, out of sight to the yuppies and buppies now taking their place.

Since the people who have sequestered themselves in affiuent zones also direct the agencies assigned to solve these problems, it is no surprise that government has done little to help. The Florida politicos who stole the White House and promised to pare down "excessive" social programs have not hesitated to request federal support when a hurricane topples houses and hotels that private developers built in harm's way. They happily accept taxpayer handouts when the trouble is theirs. By contrast, the deaths of hundreds of Chicagoans in a heat wave simply do not register. High winds destroy valuable property.

Heat waves kill the expendable poor. The ways we respond to these forces of naturepersonally, socially, and politically-reveal who we are and what we value today.â&#x20AC;˘

"You spent our whole credit card bill at Dusty Groove again? I'm going home to mother!"

Sure the lady's upset-and with good reason-but you can't blame the guy!

With the best prices on the internet for jazz, funk, soul, and other hard to find music, it's easy to get carried away when shopping at dustygroove.com. The folks at Dusty Groove made him feel right at home and ready to open his wallet-with top-shelf customer service, easy payment methods, and super-

fast shipping to all parts of the globe. Soon, he found that in the time it took him to order just one or two CDs from one of those slower companies, Dusty Groove filled up his shopping cart-and his mailbox-with an unbelievably huge selection of music.

And who knows? Maybe that music will be enough to get him through the lonely hours while his wife's back at her mother's!

dustvgroove.com.

COP SHOOT COP Randall Sullivan, Labyrinth: A Detetlive InveJligates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., The Implication of Death Row Records' Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal (Arlantic Monthly Press, 2002) .

Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Rolf of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America (Bloomsbury, 2002).

S

OMEWHERE in the jangled consciousness of many American law enforcement officials last September II must have been the sudden, literary realization of the sheer waste and folly of our twenty-year war on drugs.

Curiously, though, the most persuasive exposition of this theme comes not in another commemorative volume about the terrorist horror, but in a book on gangsta rap, the booty-thumping bane of every cop on the block. Randall Sullivan's stated objective in his book, Labyrinth, is to look into the stillunsolved 1997 murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. But what he unearths is a sleazy milieu of corrupt cops and criminal businessmen which-far from being some virus unique to LA-is a template for the way cultural capitalism works today.

Sullivan opens on a scene of moody public violence like a late-century noir, only real-life and loaded with the dread of racial caricature. An enraged black '''full-on gangbanger'" in an SUV chases down a white doper (greasy locks, pot-leaf hat) in a beater, only to find he's quicker on the trigger. The year was 1997; both men, it turned out, were with the LAPD; the deceased was off-duty officer Kevin Gaines, the one who shot him was undercover detective Frank Lyga, who swore he'd never seen Gaines before.

Detective Russell Poole of the RobberyHomicide Division (RHO), who was as-

signed to untangle the mess, feared at first that he'd stumbled into a racial police feud, thanks to early rumors that Lyga was "part of a white supremacist group." But the truth was that a handful of Gaines' friends on the force had visited witnesses in order to "'dirty up Lyga,'" to change their minds about what they saw and what forensic evidence confirmed: that Gaines was the aggressor. All of which was suppressed, though, when the city cut a deal with Gaines' family in order, some say, to avoid airing the embarrassing matter any further.

Poole's investigation of the Gaines-Lyga incident revealed a bizarre backstory: Gaines had been cited for numerous incidents of gun-wielding road rage; he'd even called in a false 9II report (on himself), and then assaulted the responding patrol, apparently hoping to provoke a lawsuit-worthy beatdown of the Rodney King variety. Poole wondered why Gaines was still a cop, since '''[AJny civilian who did what Gaines did would have faced prison time.'" Even more suspicious was the vehicle Gaines died in. A green SUV, "the vehicle of choice for both Crips and Bloods," it was registered to Knightlife, a production company owned by Suge Knight's Death Row Records. Gaines, it turns out, was something of a Death Row fanatic. His police locker was decorated with pictures of Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur, and he was dating Knight's ex-wife when he died. Gaines wasn't just an ordinary fan , however, and he wasn't alone: Poole eventually uncovered a clique of young LAPD officers who performed extracurricular "security" work for Death Row Records that superseded their public service responsibility.

While the Gaines-Lyga shooting seemed at first to evoke the familiar template of LAPD

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racism, what it actually exposed was an equally dangerous and pervasive form of corruption arising from the drug war. Double-dealing officers who would ordinarily be drummed off the force thrive in the compromised milieu of urban drug enforcement. Their sensibilities are distorted by an unforgiving gangsta street culture-in Gaines' case, by his bizarre obeisance to the all-too-authentic gangsta world of Death Row Records-which, in turn, would not exist without the racially oriented, government sanctioned moral panic of the drug war. And as we learn from the police scandals described in Labyrinth, this underground drug economy, with all its money and flash, is today a more seductive and transforming force than even the most punitive initiatives of the guardians of order.

Gaines' fatal misadventure was not the result of some covert rivalry with Lyga, it now appears, but rather symptomatic of a broad change among younger officers. After steeping for decades in the fetid stew of resentment generated by the drug war, urban law enforcement has become ruthlessly atomized.

With every officer out for himself, a corruption more invisible and malign than the "arm" once ubiquitous in Chicago and New York has emerged. The key to the corruption is the drug war's potential profits for police forces, through simple old-style payoffs and through the ability of rogue cops to hijack or participate in drug deals themselves, via the "sanctioned" capture of vast quantities of loot.

Thanks to the omnibus "anti-crime" bills of the mid-Eighties which launched the drug war, law enforcement agencies in the Nineties found they could pursue the assets of individuals in civil courts, with their lower burdens of proof, even when those individuals were not criminally charged. These civil-forfeiture windfalls in turn allowed departments to both drastically expand their tactical capabilities and to evade normal bureaucratic oversight while doing so. The potential for corruption was massive, and the estrangement of police from the communities being policed grew and grew.

Sullivan ably separates such issues of law enforcement integrity and the real costs of the drug war from the cacophony generated

by Death Row, "the gangsta rap label run by real gangstas." The story of the record label is fascinating in its own right, however. Death Row's battle for market share with Pufl}r Combs' imitative Bad Boy label ignited an "East Coast-West Coast" rap feud that was comical at first but which soon dissolved into actual violence, including the unsolved murders of Death Row's Shakur and Bad Boy's Biggie Smalls. While the second killing was immediately interpreted as payback for the first, some observers have pointed to Shakur's estrangement from his benefactor as a possible motive for Knight's involvement in both acts. In Sullivan's view, Knight was more than the personification of rap chaos: he represented an alarming new business nexus in which cultural entrepreneurship, criminal and corporate financing, and corrupt law enforcement walked hand in hand.

The Literary Vaudeville

Sullivan examines Death Row's early association with a variety of colorful figures, including the Mob Piru Bloods, who ramped up the violence surrounding Knight, and Michael "Harry-O" Harris, an imprisoned cocaine profiteer. Their underworld contributions, though, paled next to the investments of Time Warner, their subsidiary Interscope, and Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s MCA-Universal. In the arena of corporatized culture, it now seems, dealers and sharks may sit at the same table.

Labyrinth follows Poole's investigation of the Gaines-Lyga shooting and then the brazen public murder of Biggie Smalls on Wilshire Boulevard in March 1997. Smalls' killing resembled Shakur's streets ide execution in Las Vegas six months earlier, and by mid-97, Shakur's murder had led investigators to an LAPD officer with ties to Death Row, who was mysteriously allowed to resign "in lieu of dismissal."* Meanwhile, a separate LAPD "civil abatement" investigation of the Death Row studio, triggered by complaints from the local homeowners' association following "an astronomical increase in the number of assaults, auto thefts and armed robberies," confirmed that still more cops were moonlighting for the label. Yet Poole was repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to expand either the Gaines-Lyga or the Smalls investigations into a comprehensive inquiry.

Poole's investigation did clarifY some links between Death Rowand Gaines' circle, including a particularly scary rogue cop, David Mack, who was arrested for a $700,000 bank robbery after his teller girlfriend was detected

* As this issue went to press, followers of the Biggie-

Tupac investigations were startled by a Los Angeles Times investigative report which concluded that the Notorious B.I.G. offered $1 million and his own pistol for Shakur's murder to gang members, including one who'd been publicly humiliated by Shakur and his associates hours before. While the Times' scenario is plausible, it is improbable: besides suggesting that a grievance, murder-conspiracy meeting, and murder occurred with remarkable rapidity, it fails to explain why a celebrity at the height of his fame would take such a wild risk. Even if this Grand Guignol revenge scenario turns out to be accurate, however, it does not challenge the basic findings of Labyrinth.

73

for ordering the outsized sum. Poole's findings were soon engulfed by the Byzantine mess known as "Ramparts" or "CRASH" (the latter one of California law enforcement's trademark acronyms, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, the tactical teams whose heavy hand was noted years ago in Mike Davis' City of Quartz.) Ramparts turned upon the confessions of disgraced officer Rafael Perez, Mack's former partner.

(Among other things, the pair were implicated in at least one "throw down" shooting, in which cops shoot first and then plant weapons on suspects.) Although Mack was by then linked to the Death Row investigation, Perez was sequestered within the department's disciplinary structure once the magnitude of his wrongdoing became apparent.

Perez first came under suspicion in 1998, for stealing evidence-inventoried cocaine: "Perez had for some time been taking advantage of the LAPD's absurdly loose system for checking out drugs as court evidence." Perez's final theft was a pound of coke inventoried by Frank Lyga, interpreted as a revenge ploy for the Gaines shooting.

Following Perez's arrest for the cocaine thefts, Poole attempted to link him to the Smalls murder and vigilante violence against gangbangers by Ramparts officers. His superiors derailed this investigative approach, however, after Perez's hasty trial resulted in a hung jury. Perez then accepted a sweetheart deal for testimony against other officers. He sang obligingly, but excepting a few specimens of untrammeled brutality, Perez's allegations fell apart when he failed five lie-detector exams.

Meanwhile, Detective Poole's unblemished career began to fray between the conflicting directives: He had to clear his cases, but not draw attention to police involvement in drug dealing, the rappers' murders, or the activities of Death Row. But the connections were inescapable, even though the department refused to do a forensic examination of Mack's black Monte Carlo 55-the primal gangsta ride, and the choice of Smalls' shooter-and

74

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also failed to explore Mack's possession of thousands of rounds of the same obscure German-made ammunition that killed Smalls.

Nevertheless, Poole developed a concise theory of the murder implicating Mack, who was ID'd at the crime scene, and his college friend Harry Billups, a dead ringer for the composite sketch of the Smalls shooter, and the first to visit Mack following his robbery arrest. Furthermore, Poole's interview of Shakur's former bodyguard pinpointed Gaines, Mack, and Perez as regulars at Suge Knight's "private parties." Yet the LAPD ensured the rogue cops met separate fates: Perez could be paroled as early as 2005, and Mack may well have a bank robbery stash awaiting his eventual release. Their sentences, combined with Perez's mendacity, allowed the LAPD to hurl a containment net over their own internal investigation.

As for Poole, a white cop repeatedly cited for his compassion in murder investigations in African-American and Latino neighborhoods: When he filed reports that portrayed "a contamination of the LAPD that ... spread from a crew of black cops affiliated with Death Row Records into the Rampart CRASH unit," they were rejected, and he was asked to leave RHD. Poole resigned following the prosecutors' deal with Perez which, he thinks, halts further progress on the Ramparts and Smalls investigations. Eleven months later, Poole filed a civil lawsuit against the LA police chief and the LAPD. Poole and Sullivan blame "liberal racism" for the lenient treatment afforded this clique of rogue officers who were mostly AfricanAmerican. And clearly the LAPD will do nearly anything to avoid a reprise of the Rodney King disaster. More important in all this, though, are the opportunities for malfeasance that the drug war presents to officers who believe their deeds are sanctioned by the overall chaos and futility of drug-suppression policing. "Freelancers who made their own rules," these rogue cops "became untethered from such niceties as due process and probable cause. The worst of them were the best exam-

pIes of how the War on Drugs had ravaged law enforcement in the U.S." Gangsta rap has sold well in the hinterlands since Straight Outta Compton because it presents a thrilling, intensely realized, and also parodic vision of the gravest social pathologies of the poor and minority communities. In Sullivan's book we see these same abstractions of commerce and violence, many years later, now infecting the players on both sides of the drug war.

Angelenos looking for a longer-term perspective on the links between crime and the culture industry should consider Gus Russo's

The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America, a scrupulously presented business chronology of the remarkable reach of Messrs. Accardo, Ricca, Giancana, et al. Starting with AI Capone's beer wars, Russo traces the Outfit's persistent incursions into the "upperworld" of legitimate business. Capone's Depression-era successors became obsessed with proto-corporate discretion in their hunt for "the new booze," muscling in on businesses which would allow them upper-class gentility even as it built a system of corruption that ruled Chicago for some forty years.

In the Thirties and Forties, the Outfit's financial specialist Murray Humphries engineered takeovers of laundry chains and dairies; by the Fifties, the Outfit's "silent partners" included Western Union and AT&T and the cowed and compromised Hollywood studios. Similarly, the Outfit's early interest in mechanical vending created the local slot machine, pinball, and jukebox industry; their investment in the latter led to gangster influence in the nascent pop music culture of the Forties and Fifties, as surely as the experiences of a later generation of gangsters propelled the hip hop juggernaut.

The Literary Vaudeville

Indeed, details aside, these books tell startlingly similar stories: of enterprising individuals pilloried by class and ethnicity, who developed perverse business plans in concert with a legal and corporate upperworld that held the upstarts in contempt. Chicago syndicate leader Sam Giancana, for example, recognized the radical power of selective violence in the business arena in ways similar to Suge Knight's followers. Knight's alleged looting of artists from other labels, and oddhanded accounting practices with those artists, were likewise reminiscent of organized crime's own cornering of the market in jukeboxes and crooners.

Both books provide astonishing glimpses of the violence and schemes of "secret" America, one sepia-tinged as a Chicago typewriter, one postmodern as a Glock 9. Yet beyond the colorful antics of true crime they also imply that for all the skills and overkill of America's law enforcement structure, we have not yet established a way to police desire. We cannot fight addiction (a state of absolute wanting captured so long ago in the urban setting of The Man With The Golden Arm), nor the desire for base entertainment and release from mortality so well marketed throughout the Rust Belt by the Outfit through mid-century. And while law enforcement's ideas on self-policing have not moved much beyond the "one bad apple" thesis, the small cells of rogue cops centered around drug interdiction have grown more adept and violent in the last fifteen years. The world of the corrupt Ramparts cops in LA had precursors in the seductive, blustering insider's culture of police forces in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Miami. In trying to criminalize inchoate desire-as in the prohibition years which spawned the Outfit, and the last twenty years of the drug war-we create great shows: dynamic entries, enormous prison sentences, villains of swarthy and fearsome visage, the gangbangers and hypes, the rappers and dealers, the easily condemned and telegenic American villains of our own streets. But it was all shown as fraudulent last September.

75

Meanwhile, the pUllltlVe and arbitrary drug war regime, combined with its massive profitability, continue to bring mutations in the tactics of the players. Urban-style drug crime is exploding in rural America, for example, which will surely soon lead to a heavy-handed backlash. Much of this drug crime-not just in the sticks, but in the suburbs, those bastions of privilege-now revolves around innovative use of dangerous drugs which must be considered as "crack analogues," including deliberate misuse of the synthetic opiate OxyContin, widespread grassroots manufacture of methamphetamine, the cult popularity of animal tranquilizers like Ketamine, and the explosive mainstream popularity of Ecstasy.

Should the drug war continue for another twenty years in its present form, it will render the national landscape unrecognizable. If actual drug usage were prosecuted accurately with unforgiving "mandatory minimum" sentencing, huge numbers of wage-earning taxpayers in our hospitality, entertainment, advertising, and sports industries would disappear overnight. In rural areas as well as the burbs, the war itself is the ironic catalyst, transforming the doomed Shakur's "Thug Life" into something more than escapist fantasy: into a mutable philosophy of belligerence, with a ready-made soundtrack, legitimately attainable capitalist goals, and untold martyrs, the killed and imprisoned, languishing within memory's jail. _

-c..:Mike

~wirth

MY LOVE IS A FREE FREE MARKET Russell Roberts, The Invisible Heart (The MIT Press, 2001).

nUSSELL ROBERTS is that rare bird of the Rdismal science, the public economist.

While his colleagues glory in mathematical obscurantism, shrouding even the most patent of observations in indecipherable formulae, Roberts sings hosanna in low-church tones to the democratic blessings of free markets.

THE BAFFLER

From his sinecure at Washington University, he cranks out op-eds for the St. Louis PoHDispatch and commentaries for National Public Radio, condemning government meddling or touting the virtues ofWal-Mart. His rhetorical gifts are not to be discounted. "(M}any of the poorest Americans live better than the robber barons of the 19th century," went one memorable argument in the PoHDispatch. "Hardship in 1880 was surviving the winter. Today it's surviving without highspeed Internet access." Pithy and accessible, it's a mode of argument that knocks 'em dead on talk radio and in Objectivist chat rooms.

Like other libertarians, Roberts started to feel his oats as the millennium dawned. But where many of his comrades' proselytic impulses took a messianic turn, his shifted to the lyrical, as is evident in his 2001 opus The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. The tide does not mislead: This book is in fact a love story, and it's about a guy who's really into the theory of free markets. If unsettling visuals are flitting through your mind, relax.

There is no sex in this Harlequinized Platonic dialogue. The hottest action is the Fabiosized sloppy kiss the author delivers to the spirit of bare-knuckled capitalism.

That's fortunate, because literature is not ready for the sort of relations Sam Gordon and Laura Silver would have. Sam and Laura are teachers at the Edwards School, a private high school in Washington, D.C., that caters to the spawn of the power elite. Laura teaches English, including the Romantic poets, and is full of fuzzy, half-formed thoughts about how everyone should be entitled to free health care and other gratuities. Sam, meanwhile, teaches economics and holds only crystalline opinions. Air bags, the New Deal, lawyers, food stamps, regulators, anti-globalizers, and Michael Douglas are bad; the market divine.

Sam does have some interpersonal issues.

He's the kind of guy who wears a tie bearing tiny cameos of Adam Smith and delivers rhapsodic filibusters about classical economics. When he's up, he can be sentimental and warm ("There's an invisible heart at the core

of the marketplace," he gushes, "serving the customer and doing it joyously"). He can even be a wild man ("I love that no one's in control," he enthuses, again in re markets) .

But when he's down in the dumps, Sam is all about Nixonian self-pity and narcissism. "(I}f you had my views, you would be lonely and embattled," he pouts to Laura, "but you could take solace in being right." What's not to hate about this guy?

Naturally, Laura at first finds Sam a bit creepy and boorish, but slowly she understands, and perhaps even sympathizes with, his struggle. Poor Sam! How he suffers as his beloved capitalist system is attacked in movies and TV shows controlled by gigantic media conglomerates. Meanwhile, a senator is scheming to have Sam purged from the Edwards School for teaching heresy to his daughter (who, in a sadly underdeveloped storyline, appears to have a crush on the teacher-the girl can't help it!). Things get worse at a party at Laura's parents' house, where her preening liberal lawyer of a brother provokes Sam into a blow-up. (Sam later reflects that Andrew's "linking of Milton Friedman with 'Neanderthal' pushed him over the edge.") Bit by bit, Laura comes to recognize in Sam nothing less than the quintessential hero of the romance novel, the Rebel.

Like most literary rebels, Sam is misunderstood. He is not just some flinty misanthrope. He wants the world to be a better place, wants the poor to be helped, everyone to be happy. He just doesn't want the govern-

The Literary Vaudeville

ment involved, because the market will get the job done and done right. CEOs will do the right thing because the market will punish them if they do mischief If people aren't taxed to provide for those whom capitalism leaves behind, the benevolent hand of the market will guide altruistic individuals to do the job. "I'm in favor of helping the poor," Sam pleads. "I don't want people to go hungry. I just don't think it's right to force people, even selfish people, to give." But more than being an efficient transaction engine, the free market also permits self-realization and actualization. Sam rejoices in factory closings because deindustrialization saves the children of blue-collar drudges from inheriting dead-end lives. As he explains to Laura: Because factories get moved to Mexico and others are shut down, capital and creativity are unleashed to open new fields , new jobs and new opportunities .... (Since 1950) We have replaced those jobs with opportunities in computers, information technology, telecommunications and the myriad of new industries of American excellence. Imagine how much poorer we would be if we insisted on keeping all the jobs in manufacturing from 1950 and not letting those factories close.

Passages such as this, larded throughout the book, provide ample amusement for the sophisticated reader. Those with a less developed sense of camp, however, will bristle as Sam gets the best of his simple-minded inamorata. Indeed, Laura's training in English literature, good for affairs of heart and hearth, provides no guide to the understanding of the material world. Sadly, she never summons William Blake in her arguments.

Ditto The Jungle, the U.S.A. trilogy, or even any number of John Grisham novels. Instead she dumbly ponders Sam's mind-bending homilies, like this one on the brutality of working conditions at the turn of the century: What was the alternative to those hardships? We could have given them money to ease the eco-

.

--.

77

nomic butden. But that money would have had to come from somewhere. We could have legislated shorter hours and better working conditions, but that would have meant lower wages, fewer jobs, and less productivity. If we had gone to the extreme and shielded those men and their families from economic hardship, we would have eliminated the suffering. We also would have eliminated the incredible growth that transformed America over the last century.

While it's always heartening to see an economist recognize other people's suffering, it's more than a little disturbing to consider that Sam represents the way Roberts and his ilk think when they're at home. Milton Friedman and Amity Shlaes, among others, render perfunctory blurb praise for Roberts on the novel's back cover. Oddly enough, none seems to recognize the author's almost heroic accomplishment-Borgesian, really-of creating a parallel universe in which an unreconstructed laissez-fairista is an outsider in the home of K Street, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Cato, and Heritage.

Maybe it's because such a make-believe world is the only one in which a libertarian may live.

Ah, but what a difference a couple of years make. Wage and wealth polarization, hollowed-out pension funds, economic dislocation, eroding security-these and other hallmarks of the young 21st century might put a kink in lissome Laura's pretty brow. What a sequel we might have now. (I don't want to give anything away, but the novel leaves Sam and Laura in a sort of open-ended, noncommittal thing.) After Enron, after World Com, after the creative destruction of billions in retirement savings, maybe Laura could find her voice. Maybe Sam could lose his job and his 40I(K), and have to move in with her. Maybe they could play that game where she's the Nanny State. _

- Jim cArndorfer

Council • #2020. Chicago. Illinois 60601·2417 • (312) 422·5580 • ihc@prairie.org OUNCIL IS A. NO,.,'''Orir EDUC ATIONAL ORGANIZATION ISOI {CP) OEOICAT(O TO fOSTEfUNCii . T" .. OUGH IfS CULTUftE IN WH ICH THE HUt1AN I TlE~ AM It. VITAL "AU or THE liVES 0 ' INOIYIOUALS "NO COMMUNITIES .

RONALD REAGAN FANS CAN'T BE WRONG!

44,000,000

Rock and the Backlash People used to look on their music listening as separate from their other life, but that just isn't true. I want to say, and to insist, that the music you listen to shapes your life.

-John Sinclair, leader of the White Panther Party, in a 1970 prison interview

T

HE Los ANGELES COLISEUM, October 9, 1981, nearly a year after Ronald Reagan's election. The Rolling Stones are touring behind the dull Tattoo You album. Their performances are memorable mainly for the way Mick Jagger, wearing football pants, is hoisted above the fans' heads in a cherrypicker at the finale. The Stones' stage also moves around on wheels, displaying considerably more personality than their recent records. Prince, their hand-picked opening act, is everything the Stones once were. Described that year as "a prophet of sexual anarchy," he fuses dance music with hard rock guitar and has just finished recording a song where he asks "Am I black or white? .. Am I straight or gay?" It's no surprise the Stones like him: they've always been up-front about their connections to black music. They may not have played much blues since the Sixties but they happily admit to copping moves and inspiration, and they've picked important black acts, ranging from Otis Redding to Living Colour, to open for them. And the Stones' story is supposed to be the story of rock: "The blues had a baby, and they called it rock 'n' roll." Something weird and ugly about that story will become clear tonight.

We've all heard the story of rock 'n' roll as a racial meeting ground, but it's a story with a bad conscience: the minstrel show. In the

nineteenth-century South, white people shed their inhibitions by dressing up as coal-black minstrels for other whites. File that away as a foul relic of a forgotten cracker past, but it keeps coming back: The first talking movie Hollywood ever made, The Jazz Singer, just happens to have been about a minstrel. More specifically, it's about a Jewish guy shedding his inhibitions and his synagogue past by donning blackface: the first music ever heard in an American movie was AI Jolson's greasepainted "Toot-toot-tootsie." Jolson's character goes on to assimilate and address the mainstream, to become successful and widely loved. The first sound movie is about an outsider putting on a black mask to become a real American.

At the LA Coliseum the Rolling Stones are updating Jolson's story. They're outsiders to the American mainstream in a different way-they're English-but like Jolson they won that mainstream over playing black to white audiences. If rock is a place where white and black forged a unique American voice together, the people using and listening to that voice since the Sixties have mostly been white. It's made for fantastic, and awful, art: Every time Mick Jagger pouts sassily through "Brown Sugar," you can see minstrel ghosts.

It makes each retelling of the story of rock 'n' roll either a little disturbing or a little fake.

The Stones are a little disturbing. Their fans, generally as white as the Stones themselves, tend to prefer them to their black ancestors and contemporaries. And while the Stones' black support acts have usually gone over well, by the Eighties there was something didactic about their choices: It was as though Stones fans ought to be exposed to someone like Prince. He's absorbed twenty more years of black music into his sound. He

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isn't just down with Robert Johnson, Little Richard and Muddy Waters; he's down with Donna Summer, Funkadelic, and James Brown. Stones fans think he's disco. Or they think he's gay.

That night in 1981 Prince takes the stage and is immediately met with shouts of "nigger" and volleys of Michelob. He plays his allotted 20 minutes and splits. Rock may have black roots; these fans may have dozens of blues songs tucked away at home (at least on Stones and Zep albums), but they didn't come to hear a sexually ambiguous black man playing something that both black and white people might actually listen to. Cue imaginary soundtrack-audience members shaking their booties, enthusiastically casting ballots for Reagan to the tune of "Jumpin' Jack Flash," and pan to a letter to the Los Angeles Times that reads like the Monster from the Rock-Critical Id: You obviously are a fan of that faggot nigger group our you wouldn't've lied about it. I just wanted you to know that us w.A.S.P. Rock n rollers pay to see white performers and not niggers, faggots our tawdry critics like yourself President Reagan has proven once and for all that liberals, niggers, fags, and minorities are out. Thank god for that. I can sure bet your ass on one thing, prince wont open up for the stones next time around.

This demented drivel, reprinted in Greil Marcus's book In the FasciH Bathroom, could be mistaken for a KKK plant, but the angry Stones fans were for real. How the hell did we get here from Woodstock, and exactly what did Reagan have to do with it? According to the story of rock 'n' roll, its fusion of sex and self-expression was to be shared by black and white, not by mean-spirited crackers who can't spell. According to the story of rock 'n' roll, the 1981 Rolling Stones concert makes no sense.

But maybe the story of rock 'n' roll needs to be changed. Consider the racial angle: It is widely believed that rock 'n' roll and the civil rights movement followed parallel histories.

Mter all, 1964 was the year of both the Beatles and the Civil Rights Act. But then the paths started to diverge. The later Sixties may

have promised liberation and equality, but they delivered further racial separation. Before that decade, Republicans, the party of Lincoln, were sometimes stronger backers of civil rights than were Democrats. In 1960, polled voters saw no difference between Democrats and Republicans on race issues. By 1968, after the rise of Black Power and three years of catastrophic urban riots, there was no doubt about the difference: the Republicans had become the white people's party they are today. They won the White House in that year and in so many subsequent years by exploiting Southern and working-class whites' fears. It can't be a mere coincidence that rock started to signify white at the same time.

The Rolling Stones weren't Republicans, and they almost certainly rejected the bitter politics of the backlash, but to Stones fans the world looked very different. The bigotry on display at that 1981 Stones concert epitomized the shifts underway in American politics and pop culture. It's no accident that the division of U.S. politics along racial lines went hand in hand with the triumph of rock 'n' roll. More than any other art form, rock gave young white people in the Seventies a sense of who they were. In an age of deepening racial backlash and social fragmentation, rock helped divide America.

Consider the Rocker Let us first consider the rocker. Not an uncanny Fifties originator like Little Richard, Elvis, or Chuck Berry. No, consider the Seventies rocker: a bloated, complacent mugwump, lavished with money, drugs, studio time, and what our boys fighting in Vietnam liked to call "poon-tang." Imagine a tender young Cameron Crowe reverently asking him about his work's social significance. Imagine the coke glazing the star's brainpan shiny as he begins to expound.

And consider the Seventies rock audience: free-living rugged individuals doing their thing, heads chockablock with aphorisms like "Whatever floats your boat!" and "lookin' out for #1," tear-assing down the freeway in cus-

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tomized vans with bumper stickers that read, "Gas, Grass or Ass: Nobody Rides for Free."

A far cry from "Blowin' in the Wind," surely, but these dippy Seventies images are just as close to the heart of rock "n' roll as any of the respectable visions of the Sixties. Seventies rockers were rebels for the sheer fun of it; their pose was an aesthetic choice. How does this translate into politics? Critics have generally interpreted aesthetic choices the way diviners used to tell the gods' will from animal entrails, reading people's deepest commitments directly off of the songs they like.

In Invisible Republic, for example, critic Greil Marcus imagines a judgment day where everyone will have to answer for which song they like best, since their musical choices reveal who they really are.

If they do, it's thanks to two of the towering figures of the 1960s, Bob Dylan and Barry Goldwater. What ties the prophetic bard and the far-right demagogue together is the way both rock and race helped to pull politics and identity free from the gravity of class. By the end of the Sixties, noneconomic factors had become drastically more important in determining people's politics. The traditional constituents of the left-poor whites, working-class ethnics-were moving to the Republicans en masse. In 1960, votes cast in the poorest white areas of Southern cities were twenty-two percent more Democratic than those in the richest white areas; by 1964 they were virtually indistinguishable. In the North the change would take a little longer, but would have still greater consequences.

Dylan and Goldwater shared one more thing: converted Jews who joined the dominant American religion of Protestantism, they came out of AI Jolson's synagogue and doffed their identities for the drama of the mainstream.

We have missed rock's real impact because our cultural interpreters have tended to read its politics directly off of the music or the lives of musicians (Bob Dylan's lyrics, Neil Young's voting record). This naive, wishful impulse reaches some kind of end point in a

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1995 essay by rock critic Ann Powers, written on the morning of the Gingrich revolution in Congress, in which she theorizes desperately about "the path that leads from being a Pearl Jam fan to volunteering at a center for child abuse victims." A nice thought, but how many have actually traveled that path? Powers doesn't bother to find out. It is simply assumed, or ardently hoped, that, like some flannel-clad Pied Piper of Gen-X dissidence, Eddie Vedder will lead the kids to the barricades. It's typical of how critics make rock seem important: They eschew the dirty work of history for acts of political mystification.

The Invisible Republic with a Single Ass Intellectuals naturally want to see the art they love change the world. And it does, but seldom the way they want it to.

One of the earliest and noblest of these utopian visions of pop was advanced by Harry Smith, the collector-savant whose 1952 Anthology ofAmerican Folk Music taught a generation of hipsters and critics what music

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could be and do. Organized by theme, not race or genre, Smith's Anthology showed how poor people's music flowed around racial lines. It conjured up what Greil Marcus, inheritor of Smith's democratic vision, referred to as an "invisible republic, " an imagined community of farmers and the working class of all colors that existed on vinyl. Outside of the cities, Smith argued, musical reality wasn't organized by race. Underneath our misconceptions and Jim Crow laws, we're a people with a shared culture.

The grand hope of thinkers like Smith or Marcus was that music would enable us to recognize what we had in common. fu an act of imagination, it worked. But there's a reason you can tell the difference between the music of the black John Hurt of Avalon, Mississippi, and the white Dock Boggs of Norton, Virginia. They came from societies and ers beating the hell out of their keyboards, regions that were legally, often physically seg- had more to do with each other stylistically regated. Rigid institutional barriers served to than either had to do with the dazzling cool keep them apart. To cloak that iron curtain in of guitarists like Buddy Holly and Chuck the fog of an invisible republic or a "secret Berry. Doo-wop was both black and Italian, public" is a generous, hopeful, and produc- something you couldn't say about any later tive act. It's also an act of political mystifica- rock genre. Song forms lost the racial marktion. As long as you're listening to the ings that had crusted over them: it's not just records, the visible republic, the public re- that white people were playing R&B and black people were pounding out country public fades out.

If the Anthology prophesied a racial re- riffs; they'd always done that. What was cruunion, a recognition of what we had in com- cial was that now, everyone knew they were mon, rock 'n' roll realized it in the public doing it. Reflection on that fact helped usher arena. Whatever else may be wrong with the in new realities. White parents fretted over usual story, the impact of the cultural conver- Elvis and Jerry Lee; about black parents less is gence in Fifties rock has not been underesti- generally said. The left wing's imagined racial mated. Before then the recording industry, utopia of the Sixties happened all right-but with its "race" and "hillbilly" records in- in the Fifties, a period popularly memorialtended for separate black and white audi- ized in Leave It to Beaver reruns and postences, had helped divide the two musical cul- cards of gleaming, secretly angry robot tures as surely as segregation helped divide housewives. That's why Elvis meant so much: the people. But in the early Forties, blacks Millions could actually see Blues shouter and whites began to score hits with each oth- Wynonie Harris's sneer and thrust coming ers' songs. In the Fifties the sheer fact of this from a working-class white man's mouth and was publicly recognized as a thing called rock hips. He was the invisible republic, in public, 'n' roll. with a single ass. fu the two cultures reunited in the popular But Elvis's ass didn't desegregate America. imagination, style began to trump race. Little It was the grueling battles leading up to the Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, lustful preach- Civil Rights Act that did that.

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How the Beatles Became White The Beatles were the first major rock band composed of record collectors, and it was no accident that they started out as the most R&B-sounding white group in years. Cutting their teeth as a cover band in Germany, they dug hard-edged American sounds, especially Fifties rock, which by 1963 was already slightly unfashionable. They arrived during a period when black music had gone mostly underground; a pretty, pop-inflected version (;:he Drifters, the Shirelles) stayed on the charts. But while the Beatles brought black music back to an American audience, they were also huge fans of the Everly Brothers, the main source of their harmonies, and Buddy Holly. It was some of the rawest R&B white audiences in America had heard in years, and it was played by Englishmen.

The Beatles' alien edge, their omnivorous fandom and distance from the original sources, was crucial to their accomplishment. Like their cinematic contemporaries in the French New Wave, they "got" American culture in a way the natives never could. The Beatles forged a version of American rock that had never existed. Americans picked up on the Beatles' outsider status and their polite, English-boy vibe. The Fab Four were more welcome in mainstream white America than Elvis ever was, and they could draw the same bloodcurdling shrieks from teenaged girls without shaking their hips.

Distance and love didn't just define the Beatles' music; it also let their "dumb" love songs come off as culture, winning the hearts and minds of white elites. It was through this victory that rock gained its class of interpreters, the critics who would have turned up their noses and flipped their folk anthologies a decade earlier. While early rockers starred in exploitation movies that made critics think they were simpletons, the Beatles sandbagged cultural gatekeepers with the self-mocking humor of A Hard Day's Night (1964). Rubber Soul (1965), the first art rock record, was Real European Culture.

Meanwhile, actual living black people had

abandoned the rock sound in a cultural inversion of white flight. Otis Redding and a few others still had the old sound, but the guitars of the Fifties were giving way to the vocally based music of Motown and Sam Cooke: Sixties soul. Guitars faded permanently into the background of black music.

In 1968 politically oriented youth culture hit an extreme of radicalism as the prominent rock groups hit an extreme of sophistication.

For the white riots of Paris in 1968, the Beatles and Stones produced the massively orchestrated, ambivalent hits "Revolution #1" and "Street Fighting Man." The Beatles song sounded like something that should be hanging in a gallery, and the Stones used something like ten overdubbed acoustic guitars to produce their record's tough sound.

While the top pop bands produced towering masterpieces of indirection and artifice, the avant garde of youth culture foamed at the mouth and made sure everyone saw them doing it. By adopting all ten planks of the Black Panther platform as the first plank of their platform and following it with their own call for a "total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including dope, guns and fucking in the streets," the White Panther party symbolically incorporated everything the "silent majority" hated about black separatism. It was never really clear what the Black Panthers thought about the move, but its significance for the average white person was obvious. The platform was reprinted in 1969 and mailed to every registered voter in Ann Arbor by Republican Mayoral hopeful Jack J. Garris.

While white partisans in the culture wars used images of black unrest for their own ends, black music was also evolving in an increasingly distinctive direction. In 1967, James Brown began cutting R&B down to a minimal, quivering core and building it back up again. On "Cold Sweat" and "I Can't Stand Myself," Brown's band improvised in the studio over shouted changes as he adlibbed soul catchphrases. The seat-of-thepants vibe recalled Elvis in the Sun Studios,

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Country divided the rock audience the but the lexicon of exclamations-"good God!" "lemme hearya," "Uhh," "Can I scream, same way it divided Wenner and Christgau.

Bobby?" 'oww!'~signified black the way For more intellectual listeners country may have been a way of finding the musical roots Bob Dylan's nasal whine signified white.

"Cold Sweat" hit number seven on the pop rock had left behind, but to most fans (and charts and topped the R&B charts, but with to liberal critics), it was a way of telling the "I Can't Stand Myself" the gulf became clear. counterculture to fuck off and die. The topThe new thing, in and of itself, was not racial: selling country single in the year of AltaThe band that performed it, the Dapps, was mont, Woodstock and the Days of Rage was composed entirely of white men. The most Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee," a innovative tune Brown had yet recorded, it middle finger to hippies everywhere. Haghad no verse or chorus, no discernible song gard wrote the song after driving past a small structure, just flux in a single, stuttering town and imagining it as a place where nogroove. Every word of the vocal was impro- body did drugs or had student protests: "We vised. It threw down the gauntlet to the don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/And we Anglo-American ballad form, the structure don't take our trips on LSD/We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street/We like black and white music had always shared.

It seems ironic now that Brown was a Nixon livin' right and bein' free." Haggard, who ensupporter, down with the administration's joyed a wide spectrum of illegal drugs him"black capitalism" program, but in fact self, was pleasantly surprised when the song Brown's political agenda chimed perfectly became his first number one hit. He was even with the mood of cultural nationalism one more surprised when conservatives led by heard in his art. Black people-and black country music fan Richard Nixon adopted it music-didn't need to integrate: They could as an anthem, thereby alienating a number of and should make it on their own. Among his fans.

Bohemian delight in country as super-aublack activists these years marked the move from integration to nationalism; centuries of thentic roots music bogged down fast. Lush pent-up frustration combusted as the contin- records by the Byrds and Flying Burrito uing tenacity of racial barriers became evi- Brothers integrated country harmonies and dent. The faction that inspired the White themes with wry irony but never sold. It took Panthers was no longer coming to the Man a band of Californians named after a generic with hat in hand-they wanted to set his national symbol to turn country into mainfront lawn on fire. The term "race riot" was stream rock: In 1972, the Eagles released their resemanticized from "a white pogrom against first album. Although "Take it Easy" and blacks" to "black people burning cities."

"Peaceful Easy Feeling" didn't exactly reverThe rock backlash began with the most berate with the angst of the truck-driving symbolically white music around: country. In man, their cautious rhythms and airbrushed 1968 Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner, spirit made the songs feel as white as Nixon after studying the moves of Bob Dylan, the in briefs. The Eagles sat around a cozy-lookByrds, the Beau Brummels, and the Band, ing campfire on the cover, and they rocked declared the newly hip country and western gently but confidently. And that was the to be "the soul music of white people." "The main point. music of reconciliation," it was supposed to If the Eagles stood for white isolation, funk heal and reunite a pop audience torn by poli- was its black counterpart. James Brown's intics-but by now it went without saying that troduction of polyrhythms, extended improvthat audience was limited to just one race. isations, and repetition made white audiences Robert Christgau called it: "the gimmick of an offer they couldn't help but refuse. His the year." new forms had drawn a line in the sand, an

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aesthetic negritude that could stand for Black Power the second you heard it.

By the early Seventies, the musical integration rock promised had been reversed. While artists and critics still saw the connections, the audiences were sealed off from each other.

Music alone could never explain it, because white and black musicians were still enthusiastically drawing on each other's heritages: brilliant rednecks like Lynyrd Skynyrd drank deep of soul music and black superheroes like Funkadelic did significant heavy metal axe damage. But nobody could imagine Skynyrd's heavy guitars and soul harmonies as anything but white: Funkadelic's heavy guitars and soul harmonies sounded irreducibly black.

The Importance ofBeing Vinnie If musical integration was dead in the water, social integration wasn't looking much better.

Society was re-segregating just as music had.

The causes were different, but the big picture was similar. Carelessly conceived social programs like busing angered working-class whites and left black people ambivalent. In a vicious circle, white flight bled cities of crucial resources, and the resulting social breakdown triggered further flight; in extreme cases like Detroit, large sections of the city were left uninhabited altogether.

Urban working-class whites resented the suburbanites who they thought had concocted busing: "They can experiment on us because they don't have to live here." Democratic delegations started to squeeze out urban ethnics in favor of blacks, women, and welleducated men. Liberals were never curious about why the white working class didn't get it. They'd mutter something about the manufacture of consent and get back to whatever business was at hand.

But for hard-nosed political observers, the answers weren't so obscure. Wrote Chicago Sun- Times columnist Mike Royko in 1972: "Anybody who would reform Chicago's Democratic Party by dropping the white ethnic would probably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach." The same chain re-

action that divided electoral politics along racial lines was reorganizing white voters along class lines, pushing the working class to the right.

Left thinking in this period played into the backlash by becoming its mirror image. Leftist hopes were embodied in characters like Vinnie, who was described in Christopher Lasch's The True and Only Heaven as the only student in the white working-class neighborhood of Charlestown who was willing to be bused to black Roxbury.

Held up as a model of racial enlightenment in an account of the busing crisis by Pamela Bullard and Judith Stoia, Boston television reporters, Vinnie might better have been seen as a model of social mobility and cultural expatriation. As Martha Bayles noted in a perceptive review, Vinnie was a hero for Bullard and Stoia because he was "jUSt like us."

"Unlike his backward and ignorant neighbors, he wants to go to Harvard. Unlike his insular

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neighbors, he intends to leave Charlestown and never come back. ... Unlike his sexually repressed neighbors, he sees no harm in unmarried girls having babies .... The point is that Bullard and Stoia, in their zeal to show how busing has cured Vinnie of racial prejudice, show also how it has cured him of numerous other beliefs and values.

Instead of describing a Charlestown boy who has overcome racism, they describe a Charlestown boy who has overcome Charlestown."

All through the Seventies rock critics were discovering their own Vinnies, working-class types as enlightened as they were. Of these imaginary bridgers of the great chasm, Bruce Springsteen was undoubtedly the best known and most widely theorized. A sophisticated singer-songwriter with actual working-class cred, he represented a solution to the isolation felt by upper-middle-class liberals, who were starting to realize that the left now belonged almost exclusively to people like them.

The problem hit rock critics especially hard.

They had labored in the Sixties to portray rock as an art form that was both radical and popular. But by the early Seventies, these two halves of the formula had come apart, and rock crits wrung their hands over the split between the smart, progressive elite and the dumb, rockin', fun-loving proles. Making

matters worse, the music's swaggering, streetlevel vitality now rested exclusively with the hard rock bands like Grand Funk and Foghat. Kiss, not the Band, was the group working-class kids congregated to see in the vast communal space of sports arenas. On the surface it looked collective, proletarianprogressive. But the only social conflicts the music talked about were those involving unappreciative girlfriends who had spurned the mighty mojo. Hard rock's vision of collective transcendence revolved not around barricades and workers' councils but Quaaludes and Wild Turkey.

By contrast, the singer-songwriter music favored by the critics used a subtle palette to portray complex, plausible characters and relationships. It was upper-middle-class in every respect, from its genteel tastefulness to the kind of people it talked about. When Joni Mitchell and other singer-songwriter acts played a benefit for McGovern, the critics would squirm at the sight of the elite musicians rubbing up against elite fans and elite causes. The sensitive artifles were just too much like the critics to feel authentic.

Springsteen, on the other hand, promised to resolve this embarrassing dilemma. He seemed both to speak to the working class that was fleeing the Democrats and the cities, and to do so in an intelligent, progressive way. Problem solved. Jon Landau, Rolling Stone's music editor and the most influential rock critic in America, described him simply as the "Rock and Roll future."

It took a critic as off-kilter as Richard Meltzer to notice that Springsteen didn't just draw on but invented a more innocent and promising time before the country ripped apart. His fantasies were the musical equivalent of American Graffiti. And in the political context of the mid-Seventies, they were brilliant acts of evasion. Instead of confronting the fragmentation of rock, the racial divide, Springsteen tried to go back to some putative pure source of rock and bring it back with its pan-racial innocence intact. But as Meltzer knew, you can never step in the same river

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twice. (Springsteen's studied political ambiguity played a much grander second act in the mid-Eighties, when Reagan himself appropriated the Boss's "Born in the U.S.A." Springsteen, probably wary of alienating a big chunk of his audience, distanced himself from the president's co-optation in the cagiest possible way.)

In 1975, Springsteen's Born to Run came out. In the months of preparation leading up to the album's release, the Boss had been hysterically anxious about living up to the apocalyptic expectations generated by writers like Landau. Springsteen's record company had plastered the "Rock and Roll future" line all over its ads. But how can you a be a naive, working-class folk artist and spontaneously generate exactly what a sophisticated rockcritical intelligentsia is hoping for? The most direct way, obviously, is to allow a member of that intelligentsia to produce your album, and that's what Springsteen did. Born to Run, produced by Jon Landau, did indeed make Springsteen the future of rock 'n' roll: Within weeks of the album's release, he was on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

In 1975, Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, was forcibly evacuated by the Khmer Rouge. A Time/Life photographer captured a pile of shoes on the sidewalk of the empty city, thrown out of a ransacked house. This was what Springsteen's stories about Big Balls Billy and Weak-Kneed Willie missed: his characters wanted to leave the city too, but just because they felt bad. They hadn't been decapitated. And this was what the terminal music of the Seventies obsessed on: cities without people at all, the backlash war of all against all reaching a logical endpoint of mutual annihilation. Punk was that terminal music, and the terminal form of punk was the Los Angeles variety, which returned again and again to these images: Cambodia, Uganda, the Neutron Bomb.

In 2002 it's possible to see both Springsteen and Punk as flavors of Seventies escape: Run away or kill them all, either way you don't have to deal with all these intractably different ass-

holes. Punk rock also followed Springsteen's imaginary-conservative strategy: the big point of the Ramones was that rock had deviated from its pre-hippie purity. But while Bruce tried to revive that purity through nostalgia, the Ramones' raw, simple sound captured the harsh Seventies reality. The murderous, rejected hustler in "53rd and 3rd" was the kind of person the heroes of Born to Run sped past in their souped-up car, fleeing toward the Boss's imaginary all-nite burger stand.

Punk was also the first white rock music to confront the racial divide and take it as a fact of life. Though scarcely a racist, Joey Ramone was nonetheless the first white rock singer to not even pretend to be black. This signaled an end to the bad faith, an end to the gross spectacle of arena blues acts parading a minstrel show to a mook audience, and also an end to the narcissistic self-righteousness of the singer-songwriters pretending to be bluesmen, to be down with the migrant workers.

Punks like the Ramones, the Dictators, and X projected a razor-sharp sense of place because they had stopped pretending. But this also meant that the most creative form of rock had definitively cut itself off from black musIC. Punk's frankness about race bled over into winking acceptance of the racial divide. The guys in Cleveland's Electric Eels danced with each other in working-class bars just to pick fights, but when they used lines from a KKK pamphlet, did it matter that "Let's pull the triggers on the niggers" was blank irony, that there were probably no black people in the club? "We're just showing you the way things are" was a clever aesthetic strategy and a great cover story for racially separatist music, from punk to rap. The Ramones pounded out pseudo-fascist songs like "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World" and "Mercenary," but it's hard to remember exactly who they were trying to piss off. The answer is pathetic: like their buddies who wrote for New York's Punk magazine, they had managed to convince themselves that hippies were the dominant oppressive force in society. You could only

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believe something that stupid if your cultural Dreaming ofMotley erne Shouting Racial Epithets at -war Orphans horizons ended at the New York rock scene.

The one thing that punks, hard rockers, As different as they were, something united and fat old right-wingers could get behind all the Seventies rock styles: a bedlam of genwas disco. They all hated it. In fact, disco eralized social animosity that found its politiwas the most hated genre in the history of cal expression in the Nixon-Reagan backlash. popular music-and the most socially inclu- Disco's luxury aspirations, hard rock's macho sive since the Fifties. Pioneered by gay, fe- fantasies, the singer-songwriters' narcissism, male, Latin, and black audiences, disco also punk's dystopias: These weren't random reached into the white working class, sym- choices based on individual consumer bolized by Tony Manero, John Travolta's char- whimsy but statements of commitmentacter in Saturday Night Fever. According to commitment to a way of being in the world, the Sixties line that inclusiveness is progres- a new politics where class is off the radar and sive, disco should have been the most revolu- everything is about identity. tionary music yet.

If rock changed the way people act politiBut it wasn't. Disco united races and sexu- cally, it wasn't because it told them what to alities solely as consumers, rallying everyone do or softened them up for the "right" mesaround fashion and pleasures that were en- sage. It worked because it did what it was so thusiastically of the moment. It wasn't just good at: It changed the way they saw themthe velvet rope in Studio 54 that kept out selves. Everybody agrees that rock expanded people who weren't pretty or important-it our possibilities for self-definition. The cripwas the whole disco style, based on an ideal pling mistake has been to assume that all that of luxury and sophistication. The music itself wonderful rockin' self-definition was the natwas stripped of affective content, the point ural ally of Sixties-style liberatory politics. being to generate a sensual heat shorn of The real story of rock isn't just how it specific emotions. This was best exemplified made us free and let us sing our own song, by the ethereal iciness of Giorgio Moroder's but how it became white at the same time. famous Donna Summer mixes, which aspired As American politics began to revolve more to be totally fonllionaL¡ soul music without the and more around race in the Sixties, rock soul. Naturally, it was politically complacent. helped to peel identity away from involunIf the white backlash is really about the tary economic positions. In the Seventies you death of class politics in America, multiracial couldn't just be a worker or a white man, you disco is still all about the backlash. This is had to be an individual, a consumer, a memthe paradox that pins the tail on the donkey: ber of a subculture: into hard rock, stock car It's not despite disco's integration but because racing, or faux-redneck Urban Cowboy bullof it that disco is quintessential backlash pop. shit. The Stones may not have known it, so Disco fans weren't united by shared ideals, close were they to the heart of the spectacle economic conditions or political commit- that they couldn't see its size or shape, but ments-they all just grooved to the same their fans were well aware that by 1981 rock thing. Here integration was just another fad. had become a flavor of white .â&#x20AC;˘ -Seth Sanders and CMike O'%herty

A PERCENTAGE GAME

by Paul CMaliszewski

T

HE MANAGEMENT of Political Risk Services Group was feeling giddy. A journalist from Scientific American had just called about doing a story on the firm, its founders, and their prized formula for forecasting the climate for business and investment in over one hundred countries. The excitement in the office was palpable. The company's quarters in a drab office building in Syracuse were small and cramped, the walls and doors thin, so news-any news, good or bad, from someone getting fired to minor updates on someone else's mysterious cough-spread fast, from the director to the skeleton crew editorial department where I worked full-time as a writer/researcher.

When the call came, in December 1998, I was the company's only writer/researcher. My immediate boss, the managing editor, and I worked in one short spur off the main hallway, in a series of three small rooms done up in grad-student utilitarian, a style characterized mostly by manila file folders, thick binders, and piles of paper, newspaper and magazine clippings. There were stacks of paper on the floor and piles on the desks and tables. If a chair wasn't occupied, it was judged useful for holding more paper. Shelving, some of it pressed board, some of it the rickety metal variety, lined the walls, each shelf overburdened with reference books featuring uninviting titles- World Development

Indicators I996, World Development Indicators I997, Who's Who International. We shared what space we had with a harried information technology specialist who handled all the programming tasks, maintained a statistical database for the reports, and patiently an-

swered every cry of "server's down" and "my e-mail won't send." I sat in the corner, with my back to a woman who worked part-time badgering embassies for up-to-date rosters of their countries' political leadership and compiling economic figures. She and I had to sit so closely to each other that the backs of our chairs nearly touched, so that it was difficult for me to stand without bumping into her.

As she worked, she commented approvingly, excitedly even, whenever a country, say Ghana, showed even the smallest increase in the percentage of citizens identifying themselves as Christian. From our room, the news spread to the production and marketing departments down the hall that we, PRS, were to be prominently featured and glowingly represented in an article in Scientific American.

In an industry dominated by a few heavyweights-Moody's, Standard & Poor's, Barclay's, and the Economist's Intelligence Unit -this small company in Syracuse had always been something of an underdog. But what the company lacked in immediate name recognition, it tried to make up for with its academic credentials. PRS wasn't slick or corporate, though it sometimes tried to be, with at best uneven results, as when it paid for thousands of credit-card-sized stress gauges ("Prevent Future Stress, Call PRS!") for sales representatives to hand out as gimmicks at trade shows and business meetings. No, PRS was scrappier than the heavyweights. It eschewed polish for practicality. It published its reports straight from Microsoft Word documents and had them printed in black and white on ordinary photocopier paper.

Founded in 1979 by William Coplin and

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Michael O'Leary, two political science professors at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Policy, PRS had over the years grown from a two-person consulting business into a part-time employer of graduate students, then into a firm substantial enough to attract and, in time, be acquired

by Lloyd's of London-all on the strength of its reports and forecasts about the everchanging climate for global business.

PRS as I remember it, before the merger with Lloyd's, 1 was a company perpetually in search of a public relations coup. Marketing managers seemed to come and go, a series of go-getters and big talkers with the key, they said, to raising the company's profile. They were always chasing promises from a friend of a friend that an associate at the Wall Street Journal was going to take a look at the possibility of perhaps mentioning one of PRS's forecasts in an upcoming article-maybe.

These Wall Street Journal name-checks would never appear, and never be mentioned again, and the marketing brain trust would move on to other ideas-promoting the firm more aggressively among university libraries, or figuring out what to do with this Worldwide Web that is supposed to be the future.

When Rodger Doyle, the journalist at Scientific American and the author of a series of pieces for that magazine about statistics and statistical analysis, contacted the PRS and said he wanted his article to focus on the professors' system of prognostication, it was a genuine surprise. This was PRS's public relations coup, and it had fallen right into management's lap. Having Scientific American validate the work of PRS was news indeed-sort I The merger with Lloyd's didn't result in any windfall for me or my colleagues at PRS. The new bosses went on a whirlwind tour of their slightly larger empire, stopping briefly in Syracuse. They were friendly, and we were friendly back. They liked what we were doing, and we were glad. A few weeks later, they asked the director to do them the favor of cutting the staff. In those leaner times, one full-time writer/researcher was one too many. Under the new regime, the managing editor alone would put together more than one hundred reports, relying only on occasional and part-time assistance from the Christian-counter. I was redundant.

of like having a scientist validate the work of a political scientist. It just didn't happen all that often. As I sat at my desk, stunned to learn that someone considered our work even slightly serious, let alone scientific, the director called a meeting for the managing editor and marketing manager to discuss how they might most profitably exploit Scientific American's seal of approval. The mood in the office had brightened, but I could not share the excitement. I wrote some of the reports Rodger Doyle would be passing judgment on, and I was not at all confident of their scientific merit.

My understanding of scientific inquiry is admittedly basic but sound. I went over the scientific method in my mind, comparing the work of scientists to what we did at PRS. Scientists formed a hypothesis, fashioned an experiment to test it, careful to isolate variables while holding some quantities constant, observed the course of the experiment dispassionately, and then drew conclusions from only what was observed. I, on the other hand, cribbed from U.S. State Department reports, paraphrased insights from articles published in The EconomiH, and tried to keep my eyes open while reading the peach-colored pages of The Financial Times. That didn't get me even in the rough vicinity of a scientific method, unless they had completely revised the thing since I learned about it in school.

Then there was the credential issue. We were, in the editorial department of PRS, two former grad students, me with a recently minted fiction-writing degree and my boss, a Ph.D. student in history who quit before completing his dissertation, a work that was to lay out the labor histories of four central New York corporations, including Kodak.

On my first day on the job, the managing editor and I sat in the break room, which looked like an uneasy cross between a social studies classroom and a college dorm room, with a map of the world hanging on the wall and a refrigerator, for the whole company to use, that came up about as high as my kneecaps. Between going over various orien-

A Percentage Game

tation materials and completing paperwork, my boss told me he left school in Binghamton, moved north to Syracuse with his wife and intended, for more than a year, to complete his degree from afar. When he realized he was spending less time on his book and more time listening to Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy for daily doses of self-prescribed aggravation and confirmation that the world was, indeed, going to hell, he started looking for work, and came, in time, to PRS. I asked if he still intended to finish his degree, saying that I'd heard quite a few dissertations described to me over the years and couldn't think of one that sounded as clearcut or, for that matter, more in need of someone to write it. He looked down at the table and shook his head at the thought of returning to his dissertation. "I used to be a Marxist," he said. "Now I'm a cynic."

Cynics or not, we were not scientists, my boss and 1. We weren't even political scientists, and yet the body of the reports, all the researching and writing, was left largely to us.

The founding professors, while prominently listed on every PRS publication and piece of promotional literature, had very little involvement in the creation of the reports. Coplin came in to work once a week to chat with the managing editor and usually was gone, bidding his good-byes, less than fifteen minutes later. O'Leary, teaching at the time for a Syracuse program in England with no apparent plans to return to central New York, looked at the forecasts and offered terse suggestions. Two weeks after I started my job, the managing editor entrusted me with writing the front end of the Bangladesh report. I wrote everything but the forecast. Needless to say-or perhaps it needs to be said-I have never traveled to Bangladesh. I had almost no familiarity with the country, its people, or its politics. I had no grasp of the language. E-mailing the Bangladeshi embassy in Washington, D.C. in search of biographical information about the country's political leaders, I hoped only that they spoke and wrote English, since Altavista's Babelfish, a

91

simple and quite limited Web-based translation program that, sad to say, I actually did use, didn't offer Bengali-to-English as one of its options. I fashioned the Bangladesh report out of a thin tissue of assorted clippings from newspapers and magazines and the State Department's country reports, available free on the Internet. The report's main ingredient was PRS's own report from the year before.

"Tranquility, Turmoil, and Chaos for International Business," Doyle's overly generous appraisal of PRS's "system for measuring and forecasting domestic turmoil" published in the February 1999 issue of Scientific American, offers a rather different picture of what goes on at PRS. The suggestion that PRS measures turmoil in all the countries of the world for which it publishes reports is a bit misleading, particularly if it is assumed that there is a team of PRS representatives, on the ground, turning in reports based on what they observe. There was and is no team of PRS agents fanning out across the globe to

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collect intelligence. Mostly, there was just the managing editor and I, doing futile string searches on the Internet and trying to make sense of some splinter political party's website. Sure, PRS relied on other organizations' reports on turmoil. For example, I read the monthly survey of unrest and turmoil published by Pinkerton (yes, that Pinkerton, the firm that used to employ its agents to infiltrate and bust up unions, among other things). But to say even that Pinkerton measures turmoil would be misleading. Pinkerton catalogs labor strikes, terrorist attacks, incidents of westerners being held for ransom, and the like. That's measuring of a kind, and I suppose, strikes, attacks, and kidnappings can be tallied, but it relies on Pinkerton to measure objectively. The fact is they don't: Pinkerton concerns itself exclusively with tur- Library of Congress, and an adjunct in ecomoil that affects capital. That is, they are as- nomics at Brandeis. Our newest Middle East siduous about reporting crime against west- expert, who wrote the report on Iraq as a test ern businesspeople but scarcely mention of his abilities, served in the first Gulf War crime levels in the general population. That and now lived in Arizona. Contacting him methodology produces a certain view of the was not always easy, as he didn't have a teleturmoil in a country, true, but it is by no phone and could only correspond, he said, means a complete picture. If I set out today during the hours that his public library was to measure people's heights but ended up open and at times when another patron wasn't only measuring the length of their legs, I already using the library's computer.

By the time I put the finishing touches on couldn't claim to be studying anything but legs. Pinkerton measures toes and claims the Bangladesh report, knowing not much their work represents a whole body. The PRS more about the country than when I started, reports suffer from the same error.

I had mastered the form of the PRS report.

According to Doyle, PRS relies on reports First was the numbing syntax, what might be from "more than two hundred specialists." called State Department-ese, into which each I'm not sure who these specialists were, or report must be translated, a language that where their reports were kept, or how I man- could make an Encyclopedia Britannica artiaged not to meet at least one of them, or, cle on "plate tectonics" seem engaging by more to the point, how PRS arrived at such a comparison. A typical PRS report answered wildly exaggerated figure, unless they counted the most important questions on the minds the many writers for Reuters, The Financial of Westerners with money (Are there bandits?

Times, and The EconomiH as honorary spe- Are bribes necessary? Are the country's bureaucialists for PRS, seeing as how we leaned on crats personable and solicitous?). It breezed them all for information. I knew of only a through a few thousand years of history, alsmall handful of senior advisers. They in- ways allotting one or two paragraphs to postcluded a retired ambassador, a few professors World War II history. Then it served up capscattered about the United States, a private sule biographies of all the easily identifiable consultant-for-hire for businesses looking to political leaders, biographies that were as thin move operations to Mrica, a researcher at the and dryas crackers and, like the bulk of the

A Percentage Game

reports, paid particular attention to how receptive the politicians and political parties were to foreign investment, how impressed they could be expected to be at pearls falling from the mouths of CEOs, how willing to do tricks for a steady influx of U.S. dollars.

The reports' chief quality was equivocation. When I turned in a first draft of one report, the managing editor told me not to try so hard to say something definitive. The reports could be likened to a wily, trusted adviser to a prince, well-studied in Machiavelli, always speaking in hushed tones and vague, euphemistic constructions, ever mindful of the danger of saying much of anything very clearly for fear of being wrong. This adviser would be old enough to have seen a parade of younger and brasher counselors come and gO.2 Hemming and hawing like Polonius with a poli sci degree for about fifty generously spaced and amply margined pages per country, the reports were always couched in conditional phrases or hiding out behind safe probabilities. We never, the managing editor gave me to understand, want to pin ourselves down with too many specifics and details.

Just give an overview.

Bleary-eyed from the generalities I was finding it increasingly easy to write and worried about my newfound ability to say not very much at great length, I suffered a pang of doubt that came down to one question: Who are we even writing these reports for? I stood up and walked next door to see the managing editor. I had to lean into his office, Coplin and O'Leary have written several books together, including Quantitative Techniques in Foreign Policy Analysis and Forecafling, a kind of ur-text for PRS, written four years before they founded the company, and Everyman's Prince: A Guide to UnderHanding Your Political Problems, a book whose title and central conceit makes my Machiavelli analogy almost uncomfortably explicit. ''Although it is rightfully considered a classic, The Prince was written to endear the author to the autocratic political rulers of semicivilized principalities located in what is now Italy," they write. "In this connection, if no other, we claim ancestry to Machiavelli, for this book was written by two twentieth-century political scientists trying to endear themselves to anyone (autocrat or not) who have [sic] to solve political problems."

2

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as a trail of papers on the floor prevented me from going much further and, anyway, the other chair had a stack of books on it. He smiled at my question, turned from his monitor, and leaned back in his chair and began to dilate on this troublesome matter. He pictured himself writing for some junior executive, he said, who is due in thirty minutes to go to a meeting to discuss the corporation possibly moving to Peru or Poland or Portugal. The executive wants to seem intelligent but he doesn't have a lot of time to study. He needs to read something and read something quickly that can give him two or three intelligent things to say and make everyone around the table think he's smart, at least for five minutes. I returned to my desk and tried to imagine one junior executive I was helping to appear, in brief bursts, halfway sharp. To my continual surprise while I worked at PRS, the reports remained quite popular with readers.

Still, my problem with the reports went deeper than artful hedging. PRS promised to provide objective analysis of the political, economic, and social conditions of a given country, but its reports-in keeping with the company's founders-offered unswerving obedience to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund. PRS's analytical criteria were essentially the IMP's wish list of prescribed reforms for a country: Will the country privatize state-owned industries, deregulate all that's regulated, allow Western money to flow in and out without penalty, ensure that debt is no greater than a certain percentage of the GOP, create a stock market after the New York model, increase transparency in all bureaucratic work? PRS's forecast for the future of, say, Romania was less a forecast for what might happen in the country and more an evaluation of who in Romania right now best adheres to the IMP's set of ideological assumptions and how powerful that individual or party is. Romania's forecast is gloomy if it isn't doing enough to satisfy the IMF and, in turn, PRS. Romania's forecast improves when its government starts to behave more to the IMP's liking.

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THE BAFFLER

The governments and the news media in these countries are well aware of the forecasts, and they do worry about where they stand. When PRS dropped Puerto Rico to twenty-second place in its yearly ranking of the best countries for investors, down from an all-time high of seventh place in 1994, a reporter from EI Nuevo Dia phoned a few days later to interview the managing editor about this alarming turn of events. The reporter may not have known that PRS had no researchers based in Puerto Rico. It's safe to say he didn't know our research staff consisted of a failed historian, a fiction writer, and the keeper of an international evangelical scorecard. Nonetheless, he took our report at its word and accepted our expertise as unassailable. Rather than inquiring about PRS's authority to pass judgment on his country, he asked officials in his government to address themselves to our expert opinion.

The limitations of this sort of analysis become evident by taking a look at PRS's reports for Argentina. The 2000 and 2001 reports are almost indistinguishable. The language in the section "measuring" turmoil is identical, word for word, in many places.

Neither report betrays even an inkling of the possibility of events on the order of the allout meltdown, the national riots, the ensuing governmental collapse, and the failure of President Fernando de la Rtia's administration to steady the country's economy, events that made front-page news in January 2002. Not that the PRS report was wrong. Once, while talking to me about the matter of being right versus being precise, the managing editor disclosed to me the secret, as he saw it, of every PRS report. The reports forecast the future of every government as a percentage, and not even the most stable-seeming government ever receives a 100 percent likelihood that it will see the end of the eighteen-month and five-year forecast periods. "That way," he said, "we're never wrong." It's a game of percentages, a world of "likely" and "perhaps" and "if." Like that crafty, mealy-mouthed adviser to the prince with which PRS's founders

identify, the reports simply can't be wrong.

The 2001 report on Argentina forecast a 55 percent probability that the president would lead the country for the next eighteen months (down from 60 percent from the 2000 report). As it happens, De la Rtia was swept out of office and replaced. PRS thought he was more likely than not to remain in power. PRS was right on the money yet again.

In all its reports, PRS subscribed to a certain ideology based on arguable assumptions-for example, that the privatization of a range of state functions is important to the health of developing countries. These assumptions dictate, in part, what variables PRS studies (a country's privatization plans are an important component to all the reports and forecasts). An essentially ideological calculus then produces an evaluation based on those variables (more privatization is good, less privatization is bad). Is there any way that the analysis that results can be called objective? And does this machine really constitute a "system for measuring and forecasting"? Is it even remotely fair? _

13affWmathy cMartha 'Bayne is a writer and editor at the Chicago Reader. She often dines on tater tots.

'Daniel 730uchard lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is the author of Diminutive Revolutions.

Eileen 0Wyles is a poet who lives in New York and a novelist who teaches fiction at the University of California. She recently published two books of poetry, Skies and on my way, and a novel, Cool For You. She is currently working on a novel called The Inferno.

J 'D. Connor is working on a book about Hollywood movies in the age of megamergers. He got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and is currently the "Fray" editor for Slate.

Sharon O'Dair teaches English at the University of Alabama and is author of Class,

cMahmoud 'Darwish is the author of 20 volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming collection Unfortunately, It Wtzs Paradise. In 2001 Darwish received the Lannan Foundation's Prize for Cultural Freedom.

'David Perry lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of Range Finder.

<Benjamin 'Friedlander is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine. His latest book is A Knot is Not a Tangle.

Critics, Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wtzrs.

Thasnai Sethaseree is an artist living in Chicago. His recent projects include Thailand Is Not My Idea (Bangkok, Osaka, and Chicago) and Peneakaraad (Chicago). He is currently participating in the "Under Construction" exhibition at the Asia Center in Tokyo.

'Terri 1V1Psalis is the author of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. She teaches at the School of

Chris 'Toensing is the editor of The Middle EaHReport.

the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ian Urbina is a journalist in Washington, D.c. based at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

Eric KJjnenberg is a professor of sociology at NYU.

The drawings of the late, great cArt Young are featured throughout this issue. Young's cartoons appeared in many early 20th-century periodicals, most notably The Masses.