No16 by The Baffler

No. 16

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. 'Thomas 'Frank 7Janiel1V!:eburn Jamie JY31ven Nifk Cohen 'Dubravka Ugresic IV,nneth 1-&1 Cukier Steve 'Featherflone Paul Maliszewski 7Jan IV,lly JV,vin Mattson 'Dubravka Ugresic

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VOLUME 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS ESSAYS Shrill and Shriller In Memoriam: HLM Facts on the Ground The Bubble that Tony Built Literature and Democracy Starving to Death on Red Herring Same as the Old Boss Flexibility and Its Discontents Childish Things Go West, Everyone Long Live Socialist Realism!

69 83

89 93

COLUMNS THE LITERARY VAUDEVILLE

Pop Goes the Weasel The PowerPoint Potboiler

LAna Marie Cox 29 . Jim Arndorfer 32

FICTION What Jane Wore to Jamaica

.(gurie Weeks 25

POETRY Wal-Mart Epigram #1 Wal-Mart Epigram #2 Park America Dream December 2, 2002 December 3, 2002

73ernadette Mayer 73ernadette Mayer . LAndrea 73rady Juliana Spahr . Juliana Spahr

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The The The The The The The The The The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER BAFFLER BAFFLER BAFFLER BAFFLER BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER The As we sent this issue of THE BAFFLER toBAFFLER press in June The BAFFLER The BAFFLER 2003, we began reconstruction of the Experimental The BAFFLER on the The Station: 6100 Blackstone, our headquartersBAFFLER The BAFFLER The BAFFLER South Side of Chicago. We're pouring the concrete BAFFLER BAFFLER and gening ready for the steel. Ifluck and money hold BAFFLER BAFFLER out, the roof should be on by winter. BAFFLER By the time this issue reaches subscribers and bookstores, another fine BAFFLER product will be available-our book Boob Jubilee, an anthology of writing we published around the turn of the millennium. The potentates at w.w. Norton, our publisher, have promised to send us on a short book tour of the East Coast and the Midwest. We're still in negotiations over the red meat and liquor riders to the deal. Once those details are seen to, we'll fix the dates and post infurmation on our Web site, thebaffler.com.

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SHRILL AND SHRILLER by 'Thomas 'Frank

As A PUBLISHING TREND, the New Economy r1.didn't survive the stock market collapse. But the politics of the bubble are more popular with book-buyers today than ever. Some changes have occurred, of course: The bestselling books of the Nineties swaggered with optimism. They were absolutely convinced that the free-market system had somehow won the day; that through the divine intercession of the Internet or "globalization" or the Nasdaq or the freely expressed choice of the peoples of the world or some other awesome force of historical inevitability, all alternatives to the social order preferred by Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had been nullified-for every society and for all times. The free-market faith is still with us; what's gone is the optimism. Today conservative authors speak to us in tones of angry discontent, nicely complementing the monthly statement from Charles Schwab that shows our account off by 60 percent since the start of the year. The popular conservative books of 2002 and 2003 are positively furious with the world, lashing out at everyone who has made life unpleasant for Americans in recent years-with one exception: those who puffed the New Economy bubble. In fact, one of last year's best-selling angry books- What s So Great About America (Regnery, 2002), a defense of American institutions whose real object is to associate liberals with Muslim terroristssprang from the fecund word-processor of none other than Dinesh D'Souza, whom we last encountered as the author of The Virtue of Prosperity, a work of New Economy theology that he had the bad luck to publish in the fall of 2000.

While D'Souza's earlier volume was full of inventive justifications for laissez-faire capitalism, his current effort offers but one simple assertion in this regard: Laissez-faire capitalism was the true target of the 9/n terrorists; therefore laissez-faire capitalism deserves the reverence of all good patriots. And that pretty much settles all questions economic fur the new generation of conservatives. Ann Coulter, for example, dismisses the Enron story-the second-largest corporate bankruptcy in history, remember-as a transparent distraction pumped out by the scheming liberal media. G. Gordon Liddy, in a book bearing the wistful title When I was a Kid, This was a Free Country (Regnery, 2002), asserts-despite mountains of evidence and judicial findings-that the California electric deregulation disaster can be entirely attributed to state interference in free markets. Other than that, nothing. If they can't talk about the Dow's stately ascent to 36,000, they don't want to be bothered with economics at all. After the last comparable stock market collapse Americans wanted to hear a great deal about economics. In particular, they developed an appetite for books vilifying the corporate world. Best-sellers of the 1930S like The Robber Barons and America's Sixty Families traced the ugly history of the great private fortunes; The Coming Struggle for Power looked forward with relish to capitalisms judgment day. The crash and subsequent depression effectively destroyed conservatism in America for the next thirty years. This time around, what Americans hunger for are books vilifying liberals. "Liberal Lies About the American Right" is the subtitle of Ann Coulter's best-selling book, Slander 3

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(Crown, 2002). "Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism" is the subtitle and stated objective of Sean Hannity's best-selling book Let Freedom Ring (Regan Books, 2002). "Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language, and Culture," is the subtitle of Michael Savage's best-selling The Savage Nation (WND Books, 2003). We may be living through a once-in-a-lifetime foul-up, the sort of situation that demands activist government and an expanded welfare state, but what these authors are after is the final destruction of the party identified with activist government and the welfare state. And their grassroots popularity should not be doubted. When I tried to borrow Coulter's manifesto from the public library of Johnson County, Kansas, I was told that even though the library had prudently chosen to stock seventeen copies, the waiting list was thirty-eight names long. Hard economic times, it seems, now drive Americans even further away from liberalism. Interestingly, none of the books I've mentioned, except for Liddy's, indicts liberals for their economic views. Rather, what liberals are guilty of is lying, fornicating, spreading propaganda, sowing divisiveness, disrespecting the flag, and, of course, stabbing our armed fOrces in the back. Clearly liberals are bad news, a menace to public safety. In an interview with the New York Observer, Coulter expressed a heartfelt desire to live in a "world without liberals." She has some rather uncivil ideas about how to bring that Utopia about. "If Americans knew what [liberals] really believed," Coulter writes in Slander, "the public would boil them in oil." (In the previous paragraph, with the blithe blindness to contradiction that marks the true believer, Coulter had warned against the danger of a liberal Inquisition.) "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too," she said in a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2002. "Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors." (Coulter's new book-too new to be included here-is called, simply, Treason. She will no doubt be accepting

applications for firing squad positions as you read this.) But just who are these damnable pests, these liberals? Even Coulter won't say for sure, since doing so would present an obvious narrative problem: How can you complain so bitterly about liberals and blame so much on liberals when liberals have pretty much been routed from American political life? The age of the liberal consensus ended with a bang in 1968, thirty-five years ago, after the Republican Party figured out how to split off huge chunks of the old Roosevelt coalition. Republican candidates have won, mostly in landslides, in six out of the nine presidential elections since then. Since the Mondale disaster of 1984 virtually no American running for high office has described themselves as a liberal. The word itself has become electoral poison. Bill Clinton, who figures in each of these texts as a liberal of Luciferian cunning and charisma, actually came out of that wing of the Democratic party which

Shrill and Shriller

pushes constantly for surrender to the GOP on the economic front. As did Al Gore, and Joe Lieberman, and Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe. And even these "New Democrats" can't win elections to save their lives. Nevertheless, each of the angry conservative books of the last few years turns on the bizarre conceit that conservatives are the victims of systematic persecution by all-powerful liberals. According to Ann Coulter, "the left," which she also calls "the well-organized conspiratorial left," commands such "mind-boggling resources" that it is able to persuade the public of just about anything it wishes. Liberals are just as firmly in control of the nation as they were in the 1960s; they are still culpable whenever anything goes wrong. And how do we know that these liberals have all this power? Because, as each of these books proves beyond a doubt, liberals call conservatives names. Sean Hannity, for example, offers page after page of snippets from speeches and remarks on TV, occasionally interjecting deploring statements of his own such as, "The rhetoric never stops, and sometimes its tone gets absolutely out of hand." Ann Coulter, for her part, takes the trouble to collate the liberal name-calling into neat chapters organized by theme: There's one in which conservatives are assailed for being stupid, another in which they are derided for being racist, and so on. Although economics doesn't matter to her, she is able to find something immensely significant and revealing about the phenomenon of liberals badmouthing conservatives in letters to the editor and TV talk shows: Liberals call conservatives names, she reasons, because they "think the good life consists of being able to sneer at other people as inferior." The fact that liberals sneer means liberals are arrogant. Liberals are imperious. Liberals think they are better than other people. "They are United States senators, New York Times editors, news anchors, and TV personalities," she writes. They are also nearly everyone in book publishing, book writing, and retail book selling; nearly everyone in movie making and movie reviewing; nearly everyone in education; and nearly everyone in journalism.

In short, liberals are the elite. They are the ruling class.

The strange quiescence of the American public in the face of recent corporate shenanigans is a topic of no inconsiderable pundit wonder these days. We have recently endured a catastrophic stock market collapse and numerous other record-setting examples of free-market failure, and yet Americans are in no mood to take revenge on the culprits or even to halt their long, failed experiment in deregulation, deunionization, and privatization. On the contrary, we just handed over control of the Senate-and with it, the last of the three branches of government-to the Republicans, the party of the free-market system and the rich. Here is David Brooks telling readers of the New York Times why this happened: "Many Americans admire the rich. They don't see society as a conflict zone between the rich and poor." America is a place "incredibly inhospitable to class-based politics." In fact, Americans have an insatiable appetite for class-based politics. David Brooks's career is proof of it. Without class-based politics there would be no Limbaugh, no Hannity, no O'Reilly. Clever books and essays about Bobos and blue states and NASCAR Dads would find no readers. Without class-based politics, our TV and AM radio would have all the color and hubbub of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. No, Americans are nutty for class-based politics. What is missing is a certain side speaking its piece. Where is the drumbeat against Bush's budget? Where are the tumbrels for our corporate malefactors? Classbased politics rules prime time, but it only takes one form: plangent and endless griping about culture. Class, to hear the best-selling and mostwatched experts on the subject tell it, is a matter not of wealth or financial position, but of attitude, learning, and taste. This peculiar conceit has been a staple on the American scene since the Great Backlash began in 1968; it is on

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full display on the Fox News Channel every night of the week; it runs throughout our business magazines and our charismatic churches; it rivals the self-help genre in our bookstores. It is everywhere, bristling with the righteous anger of the downtrodden, the disrespected, the ignored. In the absence of any other variety of class animus, it is the default language of populist dissent, circa 2003. Liberals are "elitists who are hostile to our values," writes Sean Hannity in the course of a screed on the (imaginary) liberal campaigns against the Pledge ofAllegiance and the Declaration of Independence. "That's the whole point of being a liberal: to feel superior to people with less money," seethes Ann Coulter. Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals' worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs. Every pernicious idea to come down the pike is instantly embraced by liberals to show how powerful they are. Liberals hate society and want to bring it down to reinforce their sense of invincibility. Secure in the knowledge that their beachfront haciendas will still be standing when the smoke clears, they giddily fiddle with the linle people's rules and morals.

To instantiate this thesis Coulter turns to what's on TV. See, there's all sorts of filth. See, there's the literary crowd hobnobbing with criminals. We know the "liberal elite" hate the common people because of what they broadcast, what they write in their precious magazines. We know that the GOP is the true party of the workers, since the hard-bitten Republi-

can leader Tom Delay is "more likely to have a beer with a trucker" than the wealthy Senator Barbara Boxer of California. We know it because the two social possibilities of American life are mimicking the liberal "beautiful people" of Hollywood or embracing "the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races," that favorite litmus test of the populist right. Apparently, there is no bad turn a conservative may not do unto his road dawg in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer. Ann Coulter's case is instructive. A daughter of the creamy New York suburb of New Canaan, she grew up in what she describes as a happy right-wing family headed by a lawyer who, in 1984, helped engineer a landmark union decertification (i.e., total destruction of a bargaining unit) for the greater glory of the Phelps Dodge mining interests. This coup was one of the earliest fruits of the anti-union policies of the Reagan administration, which over the years have done so much to shrink the power of organized labor and to rain down blessings on the inhabitants of New Canaan and their upper-bracket brethren across the nation. Coulter was there at the union-busting creation-"for the union to be going on strike at that point was just absurd," she says-but she insists nonetheless that discussions of that aspect of social class are simply a figment of liberal propaganda. To believe that "Democrats are the Party of the People and Republicans the Party of the Powerful" is to embrace a "preposterous conceit," a historical fiction that Coulter simply cannot begin to fathom. In saying this, Coulter is not referring to the cold shoulder that Bill Clinton's New Democrats have turned to the labor movement: Like most conservatives, she believes that Clinton was in fact a man of the radical left. What she is referring to is, again, the fact that the haughty hedonists of Hollywood are largely Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, drink beer, go to church, and own guns; they are, ipso facto, the true representatives of the common man. Economics simply do not count in her world. Applying this logic to the hot topic of campaign finance laws, Coulter

Shrill and Shriller finds that everyone else has the story upside down. Soft money doesn't distort things in favor of the wealthy; what it does is permit "ordinary people to participate in public political debate by contributing to political campaigns." This is why "liberals are terrified" of soft money: They are haunted by the specter of the common people rallying to their right-wing heroes.

Having annexed the language of social class, Coulter proceeds to sketch out a map of the culture industry that, in its bleakness and mechanical determinism, makes the Daily WOrker look subtle. Other conservatives like to talk about "bias" in the news; Coulter, on the other hand, prefers sterner phrases like "the opinion cartel" or "the monopoly media." The media isn't just slanted imperceptibly to the left: It's a propaganda tool pure and simple. "Liberals explicitly view the dissemination of news in America as a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination," she tells us. And the power of these media liberals is awesome indeed. According to Coulter the culture industry doesn't just misjudge the outside political world; it is a liberal tool for controlling the outside political world. Take for example the tale of the lecherous Senator Bob Packwood, a Republican who happened to be pro-choice on the abortion question, and who, Coulter claims, therefore enjoyed lavish praise from the media and a free pass on his compulsive harassment of female employees. "The fairy tale between Packwood and the media, however, came to a tragic end the second feminists didn't need him anymore," Coulter argues. Clinton had been elected, therefore the Senate was no longer needed to prevent pro-lifers from becoming Supreme Court justices, therefore Packwood was "dispensable," and therefore the media destroyed him. Coulter produces no journalistic confessions or other direct evidence to back this assertion, relying instead on the fact

that one event came after the other-that Clinton's swearing-in was followed (two and a half years later) by the media frenzy that ultimately led to Packwood's resignation. There can obviously be no coincidences in the well-ordered world of the media high command, ceaselessly and inexorably picking off the enemies of liberalism whenever the opportunities present. So Coulter simply takes the point as proved and goes on from there: "If the media's puppets ever diverge from the party line or otherwise become dispensable, people will start to notice things .... The media will tolerate any disreputable behavior in order to win. Principle is nothing to liberals. Winning is everything."

But winning what? Coulter's theories are riddled with dozens of holes, distortions, and errors, * but as a system her thinking is plausible up to this point. What are the liberals' motives? What is it the liberal media wants to win? In the old-school media critique, of course, the answer was always money. What twisted the news was always the power of advertisers, the profit-seeking publishers, the obscene demands of Wall Street. Coulter may throw around terms like "cartel" and "monopoly" when describing the culture industry, but these are strictly metaphorical. She is most certainly not calling on some trust-busting attorney general to take a sledge-

*It is not my purpose here to catalog Coulter's many errors or trace the bastard lineage of her ideas. For those pieces of the puzzle see Chris Lehmann's essay in BAFFLER 14 and Eric Alterman's book, What Liberal Media?

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hammer to General Electric or AOL Time Warner or the Murdoch interests. Never! In the backlash world, remember, economics need not apply. Coulter comes closest to telling us what it is liberals want to "win" in her discussion of the book publishing industry, for which she reserves particularly spiteful denunciations. That there are epidemic problems in book publishing is a fact nobody denies: Far too many books today are poorly written, poorly copyedited, and poorly fact-checked even while publishers hand out lucrative advances to undeserving celebrities like Jack Welch. As it happens, these problems have been examined in some detail by Andre Schiffrin, the head of the New Press, who traces them convincingly to the industry's corporatization. Quality publishing houses, Schiffrin points out, run by literate people who are concerned with public enlightenment, who are content with small margins, and who are willing to nurture unknown authors while they work their way up to profitability, have virtually disappeared from the American scene, swept away by the ruthless bottom-liners of Bertelsmann, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. The slow, inexorable death of quality publishing in America is no secret or mystery: In fact, as I was writing this story, Random House (part of the Bertelsmann empire along with Doubleday, Knopf, and Anchor) saw fit to fire the editor of its flagship line and merge it with a publisher of cheap paperbacks, strictly for reasons of profitability. Coulter deals with all this by laughing at it. The idea that market forces might have some negative cultural effect strikes her as so farfetched she cannot be bothered even to discuss it. The problems of publishing arise, rather, ftom sheer, willful liberalism, trying to reproduce itself for no purpose larger than its own existence. Publishers pay big advances and hustle out shoddy books simply because they are liberals, and because they want "to provide [other] liberals with lifetime sinecures." Business-page news stories on Random House may not mention as a selling point the unit's possibilities as a moneysluice to liberals, but if Coulter is to be believed,

that is its sole purpose nonetheless. How does Coulter know this? Because a number of conservative books which eventually sold well were at first rejected by certain mainstream publishers. The conspiracy extends to book reviewers: Coulter quotes from hostile reviews of conservative books and juxtaposes them with so-there remarks about how well the books sold. The conspiracy extends to bookstores: Coulter recounts how a single shop in Harvard Square didn't give prominent display space to The Real Anita Hill (whose author, as it happens, has since recanted a good part of its contents) but how it still sold better than the book purporting to refute it. It is tempting to dismiss all of this as another manifestation of super-touchy conservative crankiness, something akin to G. Gordon Liddy's best-selling lamentations of the lost joys of leaf-burning and bird-killing. After all, there is in truth no author, conservative or liberal, who hasn't been disappointed by the response to his work of editors and reviewers and bookstores. What's more, as anyone in the publishing industry can attest, there is today tremendous pressure on editors to accept and hustle into stores precisely the sort of griping conservative tract of which Slander is the preeminent example. It is the corporate-cultural trend of the moment, just as waxing hallucinatory about day-trading or e-commerce was the favorite flavor of 1999. But the liberal-bias critique is far more than just another gripe with the world, something that we might clear up by showing Coulter the facts. Indeed, in her strenuous efforts to shift the blame for our botched culture from market forces to the "conspiratorial" liberal drive to "win," Coulter shows us how far from the world of facts the backlash has wandered. Liberalism for her isn't a product of social forces; it is a social force, subject to a determinism all its own, as rigid and mechanical as anything dreamed up by the Marxists of the Thirties. Liberals tell the news and publish the books and make the movies the way they do not because it sells ads or it pleases the boss or it's cheaper that way; they do it because they

Shrill and Shriller

are liberals, because it helps other liberals, it elects liberals to public office, it promises to convert the world to liberalism. For a surprisingly large part of the American population, there's nothing strange about this assertion. That's just the way the world is. A few years ago, while the impeachment trial of president Clinton was under way, I paid a visit to a relative of mine who is a steady consumer of best-selling conservative books of the Liddy/ CoulteriHannity variety. We watched the proceedings on TV together, and at some point I made a comment mocking the clothes worn by the House impeachment managers. (They were all wearing blue suits and red ties.) Not only did my relative resent the joke, he had an explanation for it: I had been inflructed to think that by the Democratic Party. I was following orders. This is the logical terminus of backlash antiintellectualism. When you have rejected all the accepted social science methods for understanding the way things work; when you can't talk straight about social class, when you can't acknowledge that free market forces mightn't always be for the best, when you can't admit the validity of certain basic historical truths (such as, with Coulter, the Democratic Party's historical identification with labor and the Republicans' with business), these blunt tools are all you're left with: Journalists and sociologists and historians and musicians and photographers do what they do because they are liberals. And liberals lie. They can't help it, maybe, since they're "programmed" that way (Coulter compares liberals to robots and to animals, with mechanically predictable responses to stimuli), but nonetheless everything they do is a simple expression of partisan loyalty, an attempt to "program" others, to spread the liberal disease, and thus to "win." Which of course they never do.

When the populist right was young and frisky in the late 1960s, it developed its critique of "liberal media bias" as one among many fronts in the culture war. There was always something factually tenuous about the complaint, since the most objective expression of the media's politics-a given newspaper's endorsements during campaigns-has persistently revealed a Republican tilt to the industry, not a Democratic one. Since then the bias critique has become ever less connected to reality. After all, the American news media continues to rely on Wall Street stock analysts as impartial economic authorities on every imaginable subject; and by far the greatest, costliest, silliest media distortion of the last decade was the myth of a "New Economy," that vision of a capitalist golden age that sent so many off to plank down their life savings on Amazon, Enron, and JDS Uniphase. For all these reasons, responsible Republicans of the old school never dared to put too much weight on the "liberal bias" charge: It was safe only as long as it was reserved for filigree around the edges of an occasional campaign speech. To take it more seriously would be to sail off into a world of paranoia and conspiracy theory. Today conservatism has arrived in that dark place. Even as American journalism lurches palpably to the right, even as the financial-press fantasies of the previous decade collapse around our ears, still the best-selling right-wing media critics go from shrill to shriller, from charges of "bias" to charges of outright "left-wing indoctrination." The bias critique is less true than ever, and yet conservatives rely on it more and more. It has migrated from the periphery to the very center of the backlash worldview. It is the assertion on which all else rests. Conservatives have been forced to this position, ironically, by their own success. Clinton is out of the picture, as are labor unions and other troublesome grassroots movements. They can hardly blame things on Communists anymore. The Democrats gave up the battle on most critical issues during the 1990S, and then proceeded to get wiped out at the polls. Business is back in the saddle, taxes are falling, reg-

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ulations are crumbling, and the very wealthy are enjoying the best years for being very wealthy since the 1920S. But the right can't simply declare victory and get out. It must have a haughty and despicable adversary so that its battle on behalf of the humble and victimized can continue. And the media-that infinitely malleable malefactor, upon which any evil design can be projected-is the only plausible oppressor left. Not only plausible: The existence of profound, all-corrupting liberal bias is an absolute ontological necessity if conservatism is to make any sense. The Great Backlash began with the coming together of two very different political factions: traditional business Republicans, with their faith in the free market, and working class "middle Americans," the Reagan Democrats who signed on to preserve family values. For the latter group the experience has been a bummer all around. All they have to show for their thirty-odd years of Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like

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King Farouk-and, of course, a shit culture whose moral free-fall continues without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years. By all rights these people should be at the traditional Republicans' throats. After all, how can you lament the shabby state of American public life while blithely giving business a free hand to do as it likes? How can you reconcile the two clashing halves of the conservative mind? By believing in "bias," that's how. Alone among the many, many businesses of the world, the backlash thinkers insist, the culture industry does not respond to market forces. It does the ugly things that it does because it is honeycombed with robotic, alien liberals, trying to drip their corrosive liberalism into our ears. Bias exists because it mull exist in order for the rest of contemporary conservatism to be true. As in Saint Anselm's proof of the existence of God, which flummoxed generations of our ancestors, it simply cannot be any other way. Bias has to be; therefore it is .â&#x20AC;˘

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IN MEMORIAM: HLM by 'Daniel1V!,eburn

ENRY LOUIS MENCKEN was the greatest American journalist of the last century and possibly the best writer of American English ever. He was also an asshole, and it is for the latter quality that we are doomed to remember him, if we remember him at all. Ask an educated layperson about Mencken and she will perhaps recall one of the dead libertarian's pungent aphorisms, if she has the stomach. ("Misogynist," for starters: ''A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.") Ask any collegiate aspirant who HLM was and s/he will know only what s/he is required to know: basically, that Mencken was a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic old homophobe-which, in fact, he was. Unfortunately, a minority of writers persist in reading the SOB anyway. Worse, some of these writers are of the leftist persuasion. 'like me, for example, and take this magazine. The pendulous B of the Baffler logo is bogarted from the double-S logo of the Smart Set, the raffish magazine through which Mencken enlightened the hip literati of the nineteenteens. The typographic grid of this page is swiped from The American Mercury, the august magazine Mencken co-founded and through which he defined the next decade and, by extension, all American literature and criticism since. I cop to this because I am the typographer who did the pilfering, down to the last fancypants ligature. Those baffled by our admiration for a conservative should recall how Walter Lippmann described Mencken's power: "He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live." We take HLM as our strongest, most bitter tonic. A swig of his venom was good for what ailed America in the Twenties, when Mencken single-

handedly mounted, waged, and won a war against the goody-two-shoes then lording over the nationalliterature. With the force of his ridicule Mencken gave the heave-ho to the bluenoses and replaced them with an earthier bunch that included Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis. In doing so Mencken blazed a trail that has been followed by every American naturalist and realist since. Along the way he also helped to mock Prohibition out of existence, winning for himself the huzzahs of boozehounds worldwide. His mission accomplished, Mencken then turned his guns on politics, where he saw a different kind of patrician threat to our national character. Mencken began his war on Franklin D. Roosevelt using essentially the same battle plan as before. He argued that in economics, as in books, any attempt to better the masses was quackery. For Mencken, the New Deal was like a book full of too much Uplift: condescending, oppressive, unrealistic and unnatural. Better to let sleeping dogs lie and let unemployment lines be, as well as his tax bill. Of course, Mencken put none of this meekly or dryly. He dressed up his callousness as common sense and boomed it from the rooftops. However, this time HLM's troops did not line up behind him, mainly because they were in the soup line. Mencken's war on liberalism proved to be his Waterloo. His popularity shrank to the point where wags referred to him as "the late H. L. Mencken." His actual death and the subsequent publication of his dyspeptic diary have not revived his standing. For the most part, today's university-based arbiters of cultural memory want nothing to do with the man. Mter a decade or two on the ropes, Mencken's

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rep as an iconoclast is on the canvas and the count is at eight, now nine. But before we count out the late HLM, we should let at least one scene from his life flash before us. In 1927 a Memphis newspaper ran an editorial denouncing Mencken. This in itself was scarcely unusual: Editorial assaults on HLM were so common in those days that in 1928 the Palm Beach News proclaimed him "the most universally hated man in the United States." Much of this hatred emanated from the South, thanks in large part to "The Sahara of the Bozart," Mencken's famous 1920 assessment of the cultural attainments of their beloved Dixie: Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboeplayer, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany, and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the "progress" it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.

The only reason we remember the Memphis newspaper's outraged defense of the Southland is because a poor teenager named Richard Wright just happened to see it. Wright had never heard of Mencken before, but he figured that if crackers hated the man that much, he could not be all bad. Wright was not allowed to use the Memphis library, but he finagled a valid card and forged the following note, which he quietly passed over the counter to a suspicious librarian: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by HL. Mencken?" To the great benefit of American letters, the bookmarm consented and loaned Wright A Book of Prefoces-a word Wright did not yet know how to pronounce-as well as a volume of Mencken's Prejudices. (Years later, Wright deadpanned, "I knew what that word meant.") When Wright returned to his rented room he opened Prejudices. "I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences," he recounted. "Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pic-

tured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen ... denouncing everything American ... laughing ... mocking God, authority ... This man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.... I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it." At that moment, said Wright, he as a writer was born. Thirteen years later, when Wright published Native Son, librarians across the South banned it. When Wright published his autobiography, Black Boy, the US. Senate passed a resolution declaring it obscene. Today, if you visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and turn Menckens copy of Black Boy to page 217, you will see the quotations above marked in Mencken's distinctive hand. Contempt for censors and Ku Kluxers was perhaps the only opinion the black socialist had in common with the white conservative. Mencken always maintained that he was a German, not an American, and he facetiously rued that he was born in this alien land. His most famous railings were directed against the One Hundred Per Cent American, and I need not replay any of his greatest hits against the booboisie. But I can't resist. Here is an opening salvo from the third series of Mencken's Prejudices: Here I stand, unshaken and undespairing, a loyal and devoted Americano, even a chauvinist, paying taxes without complaint, obeying all laws that are physiologically obeyable ... [and] avoiding all commerce with men sworn to overthrow the government ... Here am I, contentedly and even smugly basking beneath the Stars and Stripes, a bener citizen, I daresay, and certainly a less murmurous and exigent one, than thousands who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and Anti-Saloon league, and choke with emotion when the band plays "The StarSpangled Banner," and believe with the faith of littie children that one of Our Boys, taken at random, could dispose in a fair fight of ten Englishmen, twenty Germans, thirty Frogs, forty Wops, fifty Japs, or a hundred Bolsheviki.

Excuse me while I shake off the irony. Today the author of a taunt this fearless would be

In Memoriam: HLM

anything but a conservative. What distinguishes Mencken's treason, aside from its humor, is that he was not only un-American, he was antiAmerican, and that, at the risk of being too pat, is what made him all-American. Mencken never intended to define dissent. He never intended to be a hero to the left or to the right. He set the cone for ferocious literary irony because his neighbors and his government left him no choice: He wrote the words above, from "On Being An American:' following World War I, when we treated German-Americans like him as shamelessly as we are now treating Arab-Americans. The blast above is the one that inspired Fred Hobson, on the last page of his 650-page anvil, Mencken: A Lifo (Random House, 1994), to sum up Mencken as "our nay-saying Whitman." Hobson's unorthodox conclusion rings true, in a foxy way. The amped-up style of Mencken's youth clearly owes its galloping rhythm to Whitman, although Mencken salted his prose heavily with Ring Lardner and made no bones about sounding like his idol, Mark Twain. What makes Hobson's comparison crafty is the way it acknowledges HLM's leastaired prejudice-namely, homophobia-at the same time as it recognizes Mencken's admiration fur old Walt. Mencken did declare Whitman to be "the greatest poet that America has ever produced," but he is doubtless scratching frantically at his casket after being equated

with the hairy sensualist. Alas, the reader finds herself wishing that Hobson took more digs like this at his subject. Fair is fair, and Hobson has every right to jab at Mencken, because Mencken made his living tarring and feathering guys like Hobson: "In my case [Hobson writes] a southerner, a professor of literature, a political liberal, and an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt." Only if Hobson were a follower of Mary Baker Eddy or Carry Nation could he merit more of the late HLM's scorn. That scorn is the thistle that Hobson seeks to grasp. "It is not principally with (Mencken's] thought ... that I am concerned in this biography;' he writes. "Rather, it is with ... what Mencken himself called his 'prejudices' and with the role they played in his life." Hence the 650 pages, which, when treating the corpus of HLM's prejudices, is an admirable feat of compression. Mencken did not believe in equality between anyone and he did not believe in democracy at all. In 1920 he defined democracy as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." Thirty-six years later, at the end of his career, he described it as a game in which "one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-and both commonly succeed, and are right." Now that our politics are a tweedledee two-party system, our free market

In Memoriam: HLM

simist loathed democracy but covered it with gusto for more than forty years. ("It provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind," he shrugged.) The self-styled libertine guffawed loudest at the booboisie, perhaps because he lived a Victorian life and died in the same middle-class house he was born in-"a mama's boy," hoots Teachout. Mencken snorted at all humanitarians and members of The Uplift because he believed that science and medicine, not justice and equality, would elevate mankind-and he clung to this naive belief through two world wars and into the atomic age.

Even Mencken's prejudices were ass backwards. A common axiom is that a bad man is a better person when he is writing, i.e., being an artist, than when he is being all too human. Not Mencken. On paper he was more often than not an ogre, albeit a most eloquent ogre. But in life Henry Mencken showed a humanity and a liberality incongruent with his HLM persona. As he dashed off hundreds of blatant and eugenic statements about the people whom he referred to, in his lighter moods, as Aframericans, he was also publishing more black writers than any white editor of his time. In fact, during Mencken's last six years at The American Mercury, he published the black journalist George Schuyler more than any other writer, white or black. While he was earning his reputation as our most unrepentant bachelor and

misogynist he was also fighting against Emma Goldman's deportation and paying her hospital bills. Then there is his anti-Semitism. Boy, is there anti-Semitism. And yet some of his best friends .... At the core of all these paradoxes is class, that most denied of all American bugbears and the prejudice that made HLM write like a racist, sexist anti-Semite even as he lambasted the bigots of his day. It is Hobson who corrals this biggest bull, and for that, he gets the blue ribbon. Not that it takes a genius to spot social class as Mencken's numero uno obsession. "The capital defect in the culture of These States," he wrote in "The National Letters," is the lack of a civilized aristocracy, secure in its position, animated by an intelligent curiosity, skeptical of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the mob, and delighting in the barrie of ideas for its own sake. The word I use, despite the qualifying adjective, has got itself meanings, of course, that I by no means intend to convey. Any mention of an aristocracy, to a public fed upon democratic fustian, is bound to bring up images of stockbrokers' wives lolling obscenely in opera boxes, or of haughty Englishmen slaughtering whole generations of grouse in an inordinate and incomprehensible manner, or of bogus counts coming over to work their magic upon the daughters of breakfast-food and bathtub kings. This misconception belongs to the general American tradition. Its depth and extent are constantly revealed by the naIve assumption that the so-called fashionable folk of the large cities-chieBy wealthy industrials in the interior-decorator and country-dub stage of culture-constitute an aristocracy.

Reading this, and knowing that Teachout read it and scores of other passages just as bald (and true), one has to wonder how class managed to escape 1eachouts athletic tally of HLM's other failings. Perhaps 1eachout was simply too busy lashing Mencken for the rest of his insensitivities to notice the snobbery under his nose. Or perhaps Teachout tactfully underplayed Mencken's hauteur, which contradicts the rights fiction that it is the party of the true yolk. Either way, Teachout blew his chance to resolve all those tangy ambiguities. Class, understood according to Mencken's maverick notion of intellectual aristocracy, explains his apparent contradictions. Class was the reason he willingly drew the ire of his

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loutish neighbors by dining with educated black writers in his home; class was also the reason he referred to the poor people who lived in the alleys behind his house as "blackamoors," ''coons,'' and "darkies." He found them all inferior, albeit for different reasons. Class was the reason that Mencken wrote an editorial in 1938 calling for unrestricted immigration of cultured German Jews-"an undoubtedly superior group" -while sneering that the lumpen Jews of Poland and Romania should be sent to Russia. Class was the reason Mencken lampooned Midwesterners ("Scandinavians run to all bone and no brain"), Southerners ("oakies, lintheads, hill-billies and other anthropoids"), Yankees ("old maids, male and female"), and, of course, the scrabbling Babbittry. Class was also at the heart of Mencken's hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mencken voted for the aristocratic Dem in 1932-FDR was a "gentleman," he wrote-but he denounced him ferociously once he displayed a different kind of noblesse and initiated the New Deal. Class was also at the core ofHLM's beef with democracy. Mencken believed that democracy was based on envy, on the poor man's urge to get his hand in the wallet of the hard-working burgher. This absurdity needs no rebuttal. But Mencken's analysis of exactly how democracy fails itself merits a hearty "Hear, hear": Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them .... There is a form of human striving that is understood by democratic man ... and that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends inevitably, despite its theoretical infamy, to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient.

Take the word "plutocracy" and substitute "corporation," and you can hear the tonic chord within Mencken's orchestrated BS. Put simply, democracy fails when it elevates business over brains.

Unfortunately, this warning will float over the bloated head of today's conservative, who is high on the delusion that a liberal wizardry is masterminding our schools, our newsrooms, and our culture. But conservatives need to know that Mencken hated the business class-hated them-even more than he hated his notorious foes. Leave it to Mencken to pull off that paradox. Of the businessmen of the Twenties, Mencken roared, "Such swine were and are my enemies even more plainly than the Communists, not only because they devoted themselves to robbing me, but also and more importantly because their intolerable hoggishness raised the boobery in revolt, and the ensuing revolt threatened to ruin me even more certainly." Teachout acknowledges HLM's apostasy, but then adds weakly, "Yet he preferred [businessmen] to politicians." Given Mencken's feelings about both groups, this is a bit like saying that, were Mencken given a choice between the noose and the electric chair, Mencken preferred the noose. Teachout's distinction is moot, anyway, now that our executive branch is just that-executives-our politicians are businessmen and our businessmen are politicians. And whom do we have to thank for this boondoggle? Libertarians: the same people who claim to carryon HLM's tradition. We need not speculate what HLM would say about the state of our democracy under the current Chief Executive. He already said it three quarters of a century ago, and his bad medicine is still cathartic: One cannot observe [democracy] objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself-its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. _

FACTS ON THE GROUND by Jamie IVJlven

N THE MORNING of January 7, Morton Walker went, as he often does, to the Chicago Bee Branch Public Library at 36th and State Street, across from the Stateway Gardens public housing development. He and a friend, Mike Fuller, were walking on State Street when an unmarked police car driving on the sidewalk approached them. Three plainclothes officers got out and ordered them to put their hands on the car. One officer checked their IDs, while the other two searched Morton and Mike. The officers, Morton later learned, were members of the Special Operations Section of the Chicago Police Department. The one who searched him was named Milton. Once their names had been run and had cleared, Officer Milton said, "I'm gonna give you guys a pass today, but I don't want to see you out here no more. Tell your buddies: State Street is closed. There'll be nobody walking or standing on State Street. From 35th to 39th is off limits." Morton thought this might be a security measure, since President Bush was scheduled to appear before the Economic Club of Chicago at the Sheraton Hotel that afternoon to announce his plan for massive tax cuts. Morton asked Officer Milton whether that was why they were clearing the street. "No, this is from now on," he replied. "There'll be no more standing on State Street. Go over to Federal if you want to hang out." "There's nothing over there but a bunch of drug dealers," Morton told him. "We're not concentrating over there," Milton

said. "We're concentrating on State Street. We're shutting it down." When the police released him, Morton proceeded to the library and signed up for a computer. He's one of the regulars at the Bee Branch. For Morton, who is forty years old and grew up at Stateway, the Bee Branch has provided a setting in which he can continue the education he pursued in prison. He was released from prison in 1999, after serving nine years of a twelve-year sentence for criminal sexual assault. (The Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial; he accepted a plea bargain and immediate release.) While incarcerated he got his GED. He went on to take college courses in a program offered by Roosevelt University. When he was released from prison, he received his BA degree with the class of 2000. The title of his senior thesis was "Urban Renewal: A Minority Nightmare." At the library that day Morton met up with his friend Shawn Baldwin. Shawn, too, is forty and grew up in the neighborhood. Currently homeless, he stays at a nearby shelter. He and Morton became friends over the last few months as they worked side by side at the computer terminals in the library and shared their knowledge of the Internet. "He learned from me, and I learned from him," Shawn told me. "That's how we got to know each other." Morton and Shawn feel welcome at the Bee Branch. "Everyone knows who we are," said Shawn. He particularly appreciates the hospitality of the security guard, Miss King. "She knows who are the troublemakers and who are

This story originally appeared in The Vtew From The Ground (viewfromtheground.com), a venture in inner-city samizdat published from one of the surviving Stateway high-rises.

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the ones who come in there to get information from the computers or from the library itself' One of the attractions of the Bee Branch, according to Shawn, is that "they have Dell computers with Pentium 4 processors." The two men use the computers to check their e-mail, search for jobs, and explore the Internet. Morton likes to play chess on the computer. Shawn has a passion for the game SimCity. Morton and Shawn were signed up for computers from I to 3 P.M. While waiting his turn at the computer, Morton read newspapers and magazines. It is perhaps a comment on the daily realities of being a black male on the streets of a public housing community that he didn't mention his encounter with the police to Shawn. "It was nothing to bring out in conversation," he said. At ten minutes before I P.M., the men stepped outside to share a cigarette-they had one between them-before beginning their computer sessions. As they stood in the doorway of the public library, Officer Milton and his crew drove up on the sidewalk, ordered them to put their hands up against the wall, and handcuffed them. Motton and Shawn tried to explain that they weren't allowed to smoke in the library, that they had just stepped outside for a few minutes. "We got a place where you ain't gonna be able to smoke," said one of the officers. "You didn't go to the library when you was in school," Officer Milton taunted them. "What are you doing there now?" Morton and Shawn were placed in a police van. Three other men were arrested on State Street at the same time. All were middle-aged. The police joked that they had arrested "the gray-haired gang." The men were taken to the Second District police station at 51st and Wentworth, where they were held for fifteen hours. Arrested at I P.M., they were not released until 4 A.M. While they were held, others charged with relatively serious crimes came through and were released. "Everyone in the police station knew who we were," Morton said. "So they must have told them, 'Let those guys sit for a while.' "

Morton and Shawn were charged with disorderly conduct, which a city ordinance defines as: [failing] to obey a lawful order of dispersal by a person known by him to be a peace officer under circumstances where three or more persons are committing acts of disorderly conduct in the immediate vicinity, which acts are likely to cause substantial harm or serious inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.

The arrest report in Shawn's case states: AlOs [arresting officers] observed Shawn Baldwin on several occasions loitering in the 3600 S State street area with several other male black subjects. AlOs did advise subjects to disperse several times to no avail. AlOs placed above offender under attest.

What is striking about this report is that the arresting officer makes no effort to present the offense-the acts "likely to cause substantial harm or serious inconvenience, annoyance or alarm"-as anything more than the presence of black males walking and talking on the street.

What Morton and Shawn didn't know at this point was that their arrest on the threshold of the public library was not an instance of abusive policing by individual officers. It was the result of an order that had come directly from the highest authority in the city-Mayor Richard M. Daley. It was an application of an official policy of the city known as the "State Street Coverage Initiative." Beginning the day Morton was arrested, police maintained a continual presence on the street-all three watches, around the clock, seven days a week. The increased police presence was directed not at the drug trade that carries on conspicuously in the open air lobbies of the high-rises but at the presence of community members on the street. Officers assigned to the State Street Coverage Initiative made arrests for loitering and issued tickets for jaywalking within sight of open drug dealing. Officers came into the Bee Branch Library and told the librarians to close the bathrooms. Police cars cruised up and down the street. On January 10, with temperatures in the low twenties and heavy snow falling, I observed five police vehicles within one block: four squad cars

Facts on the Ground

with their Mars lights flashing and an unmarked car. Two of the squad cars, side by side and facing in opposite directions, blocked the entrance to the Park District facility, which is one of the three venues for the common life of the community (the Bee Branch and the street itself are the other two). It was as if martial law had been declared on a block and a half of the South Side. (The siege eventually lifted on March 21, when for the first time in months, there was no visible police presence on the 3700 block of South State Street. I later learned that police personnel had been deployed downtown because of anti-war protests.) Conversations with police-from administrators to officers on the street-yielded a remarkably consistent account of the origins of the operation: En route to or from a function somewhere on the South Side, Mayor Daley was driven down State Street. From his limousine he saw people hanging out on the street. He did not see any police. Upset, he ordered Police Superintendent Terry Hillard to clean up South State Street. The rationale for the mayor's directive, as it was understood and filtered down through the ranks, was not to protect neighborhood residents from crime but to make the area attractive to developers. The City of Chicago is in the midst of a massive overhaul of its public housing. Under the Chicago Housing Authority's "Plan for Transformation," initiated in 1999, all 53 high-rises in 14 family developments across the city are to be demolished within the next few years-thus far, more than half have been razed-and the sites are to be redeveloped by private developers into "mixed income communities." Once the largest concentration of public housing in the nation, the South State Street "corridor" is now a vast expanse of urban prairie in which occasional high-rises stand in lonely isolation like landlocked ships. The twenty-eight high-rises that comprised the Robert Taylor Homes have been reduced to five; only two of the original eight Stateway high-rises remain, and one of them will be closed and demolished by the end of the year.

This restructuring of the city dwarfs the urban renewal of the Fifties and Sixties. It entails the forced relocation of fourteen thousand families, some of whom will have to move repeatedly. It has profound implications not only for public housing residents but for all Chicagoans. Beneath the self-congratulatory hum about "community development," there is a deep silence about fundamental issues that touch the soul of the democracy. When HUD approved the Plan for Transformation, it granted a series of waivers from federal regulation that, taken together, give the city substantial local control. With local control comes local accountability. There are, however, few mechanisms in place to hold the city accountable. No elected official consistently speaks on behalf of public housing residents. Press coverage is, at best, intermittent. Academics have shown little interest. Non-profits and philanthropies have been largely ineffectual in deepening public understanding of what is at stake. The upshot is that the most marginalized, disenfranchised citizens in the city confront great concentrated political and economic power with virtually no mediating structures. Our present discourse about public housing is governed by a crude symbolic equation: CHA high-rises represent assorted urban evils, and the wrecking ball represents "progress." This is public policy by subtraction. A development such as Stateway Gardens is not seen as a complex community that has evolved in its own ways under conditions of abandonment, but as a failed "project" to be erased. The public rhetoric sings of inclusion. The reality on the ground IS a purge. Several civic organizations have brought a federal lawsuit challenging the Plan for Transformation on the grounds that the relocation process is reinforcing patterns of segregation in the city and that residents undergoing relocation have not been provided with adequate supportive services. The report of an independent monitor, released earlier this year, was sharply critical of the chaotic relocation process, the inadequate services, and what it characterized as a lack of "candor" on the part

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of the housing authority. The lawsuit and the report accept the framework of the plan but challenge its implementation, raising unavoidable questions about its essential purposes and character. Judged as a strategy for addressing the needs of public housing residents, it has been ineffective. It has, however, been remarkably successful as a strategy for disappearing people, places, and issues.

In the vestibule of the Chicago Bee Branch Library, a painting extends from wall to wall over the entrance. It evokes a busy street scene during the heyday of the Black Metropolis. Looking closely at the painting, it is apparent that it represents the two-block stretch of South State Street on the other side of the library door. Central to the cityscape is the library itself, a pale green Art Deco building that was then the office of the Chicago Bee, one of two newspapers serving the Mrican-American community in Chicago. Also prominent in the painting is the other surviving landmark on the street, the Overton Hygienic Building, a block to the north, which originally housed a cosmetics company. Between these two anchors, there is a shoe repair shop, a men's clothing store, a cleaner, a "general merchandise" store, a restaurant and bar, a cab stand, a women's clothing store, a meat and poultry shop, a hat shop, a produce store, and a newsstand. The street is crowded with people walking, shopping, talking, and enjoying the day. A moving truck and men with pushcarts make their way through the human traffic. Full of color and movement, the painting offers a vision of urban vitality and neighborly conviviality: the pleasures of the street. Today, when you step out of the library on to State Street, you encounter a scene strikingly different from the bright animation of the painting. On the east side of the street, amid boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots, are a handful of small businesses-a laundromat, a pool hall, a sandwich shop, a liquor store, a grocery store. On the west side of the street, the two surviving Stateway Gardens high-rises-a ten-

story building on State and a seventeen-story building on Federal-stand alone in the open space created by the razing of their neighbors. It always amazes me to encounter analyses of this or that aspect of inner city life-family dynamics, drug use, street gangs, or whateverin which the catastrophic impact of the disappearance of work is not mentioned. Before the catastrophe, the land on which Stateway stands was the most densely populated area of the city, the heart of the old Black Metropolis, "the promised land" to which Southern blacks came for jobs and found jobs. I once heard Congressman Danny Davis remark that when he first came to the city, "You could wake up in the morning, roll over in bed, think job, and you'd have a job." Today unemployment at Stateway is estimated at roughly 90 percent. This figure is deceptive, in that it does not reflect the economy of hustle in which many labor-an economy that includes not only the drug dealer but also the junk man, the alley mechanic, the peddler, the woman doing hair weaves, the man selling nachos from his apartment, or the street-corner entrepreneurs selling "loose squares" (single cigarettes). But it does suggest the extent of the catastrophe that struck this part of the South Side. And now "transformation" is in progress. High-rise ghettoes of concentrated public housing built in the Fifties and Sixties within the boundaries of the old "Black Belt" are being replaced by an invisible ghetto of vulnerable, inadequately housed families conveniently relocated outside our field of vision. This process of land clearance and dispersal has been facilitated by the criminalization of places such as Stateway Gardens. Decades of mass incarceration for nonviolent drug-related crimes, coupled with the logic of guilt by association embodied in HUD eviction policies, have had the effect of criminalizing entire communities. We are conditioned to see the residents of such places not as prospective neighbors in a restructured city but as a violent population that must be removed from the land before it can be "settled." Because the excluded are described as "criminals" rather. than

Facts on the Ground

"blacks," it is possible to hide from ourselves the character and antecedents of what we are doing. Against this background, the State Street Coverage Initiative can be seen, in its way, as a defining moment-a glimpse into the inner workings of the machinery of disappearance. The high-rises on State Street have almost all been razed, but on a two block stretch in this post-apocalyptic landscape people for whom there is no place in our glorious civic renaissance congregate. And so Mayor Daley ordered his superintendent of police to disappear them. Their crime? Being black and poor and visible. Not surprisingly, this operation has caused considerable disaffection within the Police Department. The only officer I talked with who was positive about it was a crossing guard who, I suspect, welcomed having company at her lonely post. Senior police personnel told me they hoped citizens would complain about the operation. An officer in the Public Housing Section described it as "overkill." It's not a matter of law enforcement, he said, it's a matter of "pleasing the boss"-the mayor. Another said that the State Street operation undermined the efforts he and his colleagues have been making to build positive relationships with residents.

Although Morton Walker no longer lives at Stateway, it remains part of him. He lives further south now with a woman he knew as a child at Stateway. The building where he used to

live-3517 South Federal-was razed last year, but his identity remains grounded at Stateway. "We're territorial," he told me. "I come back to people I know. Old friends. This is my home." What, I wonder, would Mayor Daley see, as his limousine rolled by, if he were to look out at Morton talking with a friend in front of the Bee Branch Library? Would he see a citizen of this City of Neighborhoods-a Chicagoan passionately attached to his roots? Would he see a devoted patron of the Chicago Public Library system? "It tears you up," Morton told me after his arrest. "I've been walking these streets for forty years. Now this happens. I don't get to protect myself by saying, 'I'm from here.' 'So what? It's time for you to leave.' With all this crashing down, I don't even think its safe to come back any more." A week and a half after Morton was arrested, Pete Haywood was standing on State Street by the Stateway Gardens management office. A lifetime resident of Stateway, Pete is a member of the resident council and was most recently employed by the property management firm. A police car containing three white officers drove up. "What are you doing standing there?" one of the officers asked. Before Pete could respond, the officers continued. "Don't you know?" he said. "This ain't CHA no more. It's the white man's land now. You can't stand there." â&#x20AC;˘

WHAT JANE WORE TO JAMAICA by fgurie Weeks

from the subway into the miasma of workers, men striding superbly in their splendid suits streaming currents of thick-headedness and cologne, ripe to bursting with self-confidence and generalized contempt, lost in thought no doubt of cigars growing cold on their tongues, the snaky veil of hatred and self-defense filming their eyeballs behind which circulated thoughts like should they buy a speedboat or what? I headed for the museum, gasping for breath in the sea of worker garments, the snickering tangerine suits on the women, the judgmental black jackets, the blast of hatred from a psychedelic scarf, the vicious frantic click rising to my ears of spiked heels on the sidewalk. We reached the curb and I waited in the swell of colors and perfume for the light to change. A woman turned toward me, the plastic and velvet parrot applique on her sweatshirt the visual equivalent of a mallet in the face. Look both ways, step from the curb, and have the following thoughts as you stumble through the cross walk. Fear of death. I was 7 in my bed gazing out the window at the lilac twilight, summer moonlight snowing down, aching with death and sadness, I just could not wrap my mind around the fact that I could cease to exist. Calm yourself down, tell yourself, say Everybody dies, of course you will die someday, something will definitely get you, only question is when and with what degree of horribleness, whether at the hands of dad, priest, or guidance counselor; serial killer, boyfriend, or doctor; suicide, accident, disease, botched tumor removal at hands of a salesman operating the equipment. Baby ain't no way you're getting out of this one alive and it's going to be bad cuz you're a girl. Relax. MERGING

None of us knows when, though that thought makes it hard to unwind, fills me in fact with tension and a sense of the need for ceaseless vigilance. I fought the impulse to get down on my knees on the asphalt, cowering with my arms protecting my head. You must detach, I thought, shut down, hit "D" for Denial, I don't care, it's fine, everything's fine, cuz me no fucking care, just need soy milk in box, focus on the body's tiny, incessant needs. Soy milk prevents osteoporosis and cancer, or something. Cancer. Oh my god. Well you can always kill yourself to escape the fear. Think all these things as, terrified, you approach the midpoint of the crosswalk, on your way to the far shore of the street. Engaged in my ruminations I glanced at the "God Bless America Nail, Tanning, and Hair Salon," the sign written in enormous flowery script, and next to that the little business "Crafts & Talk," that you went down a couple of steps from the sidewalk to enter, I always looked in the window, but never saw ladies sitting at a table knitting and chatting, which of course is what the sign would lead you to expect. 14th Street in winter, cold and windy, the flinty white sidewalk and its glare, sunlight bounced up from its surface like glass, hard, struck your eyes in shards, in summer it was more melty, like now. Vis-a-vis the sunlight, 1'm thinking pinwheels. For years my body ambulated through the streets like Ms. Pacman, chewing things up, inhaling, almost always in a state of panic. Places I have gone on my own two legs, swinging my legs across the sidewalk, the bricks towering around me feel like they're in my skin, rubbing against it. Places I have gone: across the avenues to score drugs, at all times of the day and night; to 2),

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work and home from work; to the supermarket; AA meetings; to the rivers, both the Hudson and the East; to visit my brother down on Wall Street, to poetry readings and performances; to get my hair cut and colored; to rehearsals, to the discos, to the apartments of girls 1'm in love with who don't love me back. Now in the crosswalk the air around me hemorrhaged neon from the skirts and blouses of the workers, lifting me vertiginously on its surge. I felt nauseous, I felt faint. I wanted Jane. I wanted Jane walking beside me, chainsmoking after yoga, Jane of the striated muscles and psychotic clothing, attire of humor and madness, not the madness of self-conscious eccentrics who got themselves up in costumes that shouted I Am An Eccentric, but clothes that were at once the product of a highly developed personal aesthetic and deeply not giving a fuck. Once, following a horrid night for us both of cocaine snorting and anxiety attacks with no heroin to calm us down, either because it wasn't available or we were being good, probably the former, Jane bounded from the bed after approximately eight minutes of a fitful, fibrillating sleep. She had to catch a cab to the airport, she was meeting friends in Jamaica, it was cheap this time of year, and she cried, "God, 1'm hung over. I was so lonely and sad in the bed! Should I wear all red on the plane?" I too had been lonely and sad, nay miserable, myself, out here on the vinyl couch, I had been isolated and afraid as my heart galloped against my esophagus and the mistreated dog in the apartment below wept into the airshaft outside Jane's kitchen window. We had retired the snorting equipment around 4 A.M. and the clock inched toward 4:30 then 5 after Jane abandoned me for the bedroom and I lay on the couch, the movement of the clock hands measured according to the number per minute of my accelerated heartbeats, the dog's melancholy tune slid up the bricks through the window screen and along the carpet, gliding up over the cushions into my ears and pooled behind my eyes, stuck, I couldn't cry but if I ever did they would be the tears of a dog, and I drank beer after beer from the six-pack on the

carpet to try and choke down panic, listening to Jane toss and cough in the bedroom, and now I wanted to say to Jane, Well if you were so lonely and sad why didn't you have me come and get in the bed with you? But of course I couldn't say this, because if she'd wanted me in the bed, I reasoned, she would certainly have asked. Jane knew that at any given moment all she had to do was utter the command and I was at her service. On the other hand, perhaps that was the problem: maybe she was trying to tell me now that she'd wanted me in the bed but been too shy to ask. Either too shy or not in the mood; perhaps she was saying I wish you were braver, more assertive, could read my mind, were more of a top and less of a bottom. Perhaps she was saying, 1'm sick of driving this car. You take over the wheel. This I doubted. The crushing fact was Jane was lonely and sad in spite of my presence; my person, who loved her, did nothing for her, did not make her feel better in the world. She was telling me, You were here, so very close, yet still I was sad and lonely, perhaps your presence even deepened my isolation. On the other hand, I reflected as Jane searched frantically for her wallet, she could have been commenting simply on the horrors cocaine visited upon your brain chemistry, taking you chemically to an arid, skeletal place of abandonment and despair, a Burroughsian Place of Dead Roads that existed entirely independent of your life circumstance, a place to be found exclusively at the bottom of a cocaine spiral, a place always and only purely chemical, nothing could feel this bad without the intervention of cocaine, for, no matter what atrocities a person was enduring, for example a Tutsi being stabbed with a machete by a Hutu, the correctly functioning brain would always secrete endorphins and other morphine-like natural opiates designed to put you into shock, or a trance. So there was reason to believe that the horror of the cocaine low had no correlative in the real world; on the other hand an argument could be made that the horror of the cocaine low was perhaps evidence of the true world; perhaps our endorphins were shielding us

What Jane WOre to Jamaica

from the unrelievedly grim nature of reality. Perhaps unfiltered, the world was a place of unbearable agony and anguish and pain, perhaps the cocaine low presented to us the true nature of being embodied. Possibly then cocaine was the ultimate drug of insight for it prevented your brain from rescuing you from reality, horrid to think of, but my point in this chapter is what Jane wore to Jamaica. I stood in the living room locked into sadness and dread while Jane rushed around pushing things into a cheap nylon bag. I loved the green bag, shaped like a sausage, that Jane was stuffing, loved Jane for knowing one could go out and purchase a green nylon bag in which to tote your belongings. It was always this way for me: any time the beloved showed they could do any ordinary task in the real world, something everybody in the world did every day as a matter of course, it deepened their mystery for me and made me crazy with love. Not unlike the suffering Tutsi I would be stabbed, only this time with love and admiration, to the point of collapse. For I was not like them, these doers of the ordinary. Invariably, for instance, it never occurred to me until the moment of departure that one of the salient characteristics of the journey was the travel bag or suitcase; until it came time for actual packing, the concept of the suitcase never crossed my mind. Consequently the packing frenzy in the hour prior to leaving for the airport always consisted of me

shoving books and clothing into a ridiculously heavy ancient bag with a broken handle, a remnant of some long-ago excursion to a Salvation Army. Once the suitcase was jammed to bursting, due to the inappropriate amounts of shit I shoved into it, hair mousse, illicit pills and vitamins, Zip drives and blowdryers and highlighter pens, extra notebooks and photos, scissors and penknives, eye shadows, lip liners, envelopes for the numerous letters I planned to write and never did, bills I somehow imagined being able to pay once free of the vortex oflesbian mental illness and poverty that was my apartment, I envisioned cash materializing in the enchanted zone of my destination, several kinds of boots and pants, preparation for all occasions, once the suitcase was jammed and had to be unpacked again to get it to close, I always vowed to get a really good bag first thing when I returned from the trip; and when I returned from the trip I always forgot about suitcases entirely until the next frenzied hour before departure. Jane rushed around stuffing the bag and when she was ready to go, I thinking of kissing her in spite of the iron vibrations that shook my toxic frame, I felt electrocuted and rusting, weepy, when Jane was ready to go she put on a bright red pair of pants and a soft threadbare red T-shirt, the shirt a paler shade of red but of the same family of reds as the pants which were a cheap cotton, wrinkled, Jane's green eyes with their black fringe were

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practically swollen shut, her skin was mottled from our night of terror and abuse and her spiky tomcat hair or pelt shot into many conflicting directions and never had she looked more beautiful to me as she swiped some lipstick across her mouth, glamorous and poignant in the Picasso painting which was her desperate and humorous and hung over face, I couldn't believe she was going to Jamaica, I couldn't believe she could walk. But she bounded down the steps with the green nylon bag, there was a hole in the seat of her red pants, her tennis shoes were cracked and chipped, lanky streak in the red rags she brushed my cheek with a kiss, flowed into a cab and was gone, I left to gray hangover on the sidewalk, free-radical swarm encircling my ankles, self-inflicted toxin feeding frenzy devouring my serotonin, my soul. I reached the end of the crosswalk and was swept up to the sidewalk in the crowd. Smoking a cig across

the street from the Metropolitan Museum, each cell in my body buzzed, a microscopic wasp. White dress wI black polka dots and art earrings (black roses on wire), combat boots, purple eye shadow. Skirt blows up. Sometimes I kinda like it, but cellulite. Where was Jane. Hot out, breezy, blue sky I guess but huge gray buildings all around, fortresses of wealth. Suddenly Jane materialized in the crowd; she stepped to the curb across from me and lit a cigarette. My dad is dead but I have an art photo of Jane leaning across the sand, the horizon tilted, that's how you know it's an Art Photo, Jane an angular painting in her black swimsuit against the azure sky, her head slightly turned, looking away from me, laughing against a slanted sky. Now here she was across from me, alive, smiling, smoking. Jane lived and I would enter the museum with her, a living work of art. The light changed and I stepped again into the street.â&#x20AC;˘

~~!&1~~~~fH~.~~~~.~fH~~~~fH~

THE LITERARY VAUDEVILLE

~~~.~

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be ... one of the investigating FBI agents. So much for law and order. HERE'S A BLURB from the New rork Times Patterson's core product line, the nurseryon the cover of the paperback edition of rhyme titled Alex Cross books, features horrific James Patterson's Violets Are Blue, proclaiming violence to both women and the English lanPatterson to be "one of America's most influen- guage. Violets Are Blue begins, in a scene typitial authors." Like many such testimonials, the blurb cal of the series, with Cross musing upon the is both edited and taken out of context. What body of his dead girlfriend. She's been killed by is remarkable, though, is how little needed to be Cross's nemesis, a man who seeks to terrify the excised from the original review, which read as world under the oddly generic alias "Masterfollows: "Face it. James Patterson is one of mind" (in Patterson-land, the bad guys all seem to adopt overbroad brands): "The lower body America's most influential authors." And face it we must. Though Patterson lacks was covered with blood. He'd used a knife. the media presence of John Grisham or Tom He'd punished Betsey with it." What are Cross's thoughts on this tragedy? Clancy, he outsells both of them. According to his publisher, the AOL Time Warner Book His eyes drift to "Betsey's service revolver. BeGroup, Patterson is the best-selling fiction side it was a printed reminder for her next writer in the world. Fourteen of his twenty shooting qualifier at the FBI range. The irony novels-all the books he's written since 1992- stung." 1'1l say. have hit number one. The JeHer, his latest, was Patterson's plots hit you over the head with number five on Amazon's bestseller list a their obviousness, but not before they've dulled month before it came out. Estimates of Patter- your senses through sheer repetition and inanity. son's annual income range from the mindbog- Evil geniuses rip off disguises with a regularity gling-$25 million-to the truly insane-$50 not seen outside of Mission Impossible, and pasmillion. He is not only review-proof, he is re- sages meant to be portentous drop with a thud cession-proof on the page: Cross frets at one point that his Patterson has not garnered such success be- stalker/nemesis might "at any minute ... call, or cause he is a better writer than his colleagues. fax, or email." Frustrated by the cat-and-mouse Though he works in many genres-he's dab- games of this canny foe-who goes by a parbled in science fiction, tear-jerkers, and histori- ticularly unlikely nom de crime-Cross can cal romances in addition to his two detective only fulminate, "His pattern was to do the unseries-he brings the same tin ear and blunt expected. The goddamn Weasel!" Patterson force to all of them. To say his plots are ''cookie- characters are forever engaging in such pedancutter" is to insult cookies. Here's a sample of tic internal monologues, as if to dictate the the plots he's forced upon readers in one of his reader's very thought processes. "Victims hung detective series: Serial killer stalks beautiful by feet from oak tree. Why hung?" muses women and turns out to be ... one of the inves- Cross in Violets Are Blue. "Bodies naked and tigating policemen. Serial kidnapper abducts covered with blood. Why naked?" Prose lifeless rich children and turns out to be ... one of the and lumpy. Why published? Cliches come fast and heavy in Patterson's investigating Secret Service agents. Serial bank robber terrorizes the country and turns out to work, where people are killed in a "senseless POP GOES THE WEASEL

THE BAFFLER

drive-by shooting" or by "brutal, senseless murders." Someone can declare that he "ran like the wind" or solemnly intone that "this time it was personal." The media hounds covering a controversial figure are, indeed, "all over him like a cheap suit," while a consultant to the FBI, describing a suspect, cuts to the quick-and-easy: ''As I've heard them say in the movies, 'He's a student of the game: " Patterson's stylistic signature, the tack that distinguishes his insta-prose from that of, say, Danielle Steel or Jonathan Kellerman, is to piggyback on commercial culture at every turn, allowing years of advertising and brand-building by others to substitute for description. Patterson's narration reads like an issue of Entertainment Weekly, though not quite as breezy and glib: A protagonist observes that a police officer "looked something like the TV weatherman Willard Scott" while another "reminded me a little of Michael Douglas in his dark-hero cop roles." A character finds courage to face down a murderer by remembering "Sergeant Esterhaus's words in Hill Street Blues: Let's be careful out there." A lawyer earning a paltry sum is "not exactly Mitch McDeere in The Firm." A handsome man is said to have "resembled Bono from the Irish rock group U2." And an interior monologue about the future of a romance between Alex Cross and another troubled but sincere loner prompts Cross to offer this parallel: "I thought of the book and movie The Prince ofTides. " At times, Patterson's reliance on the easy shorthand of commercial culture can lead to a sort of lifestyle meltdown, as in this list of what draws together the lovers in Patterson's romance novel, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas: He liked a lot of the same things Katie did, or so he said. Ally McBeal, The Practice, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Girl with the Pearl Earring... Vintage black-and-white photos, oil paintings that they found at flea markets. Trips to NoLita (North of Little Italy) and Williamsburg (the new SoHo) ... They both treasured Sunday afternoons at her apartment ... with Katie reading the Times from cover to cover, and Matt revising his poems.

Revising his poems? One gets downright woozy picturing the actual human characters

inhabiting such pastiches of taste preferences. Still, the passage does underline a key feature in Patterson's success story: His novels are not so much studies in characters as litanies of brands.

A distracting tic, to put it mildly, to have pop culture touchstones stand in for legible character development. But it is something much uglier to use racial identity in the same way. We know Alex Cross is black not because of anything Cross says, does or thinks; we know it because Patterson tells us so-which is to say because Cross buys what black consumers buy. In one chase for a fugitive kidnapper, Cross dons a Million Man March T-shirt, spots an Arrested Development poster, and compliments a pal on "a raggy Kangol hat." Attempts to get inside the head of his black character seem to lead only to easy, politically correct stereotyping. Describing Cross on a trip to North Carolina, Patterson projects: "Tobacco farms had spotted all through here once upon a time. Slave farms. The blood and bones of my ancestors." Are you feeling his righteousness yet? "They had been abducted," he explains, helpfully. ''Against their will." As opposed to, you know, all that voluntary abduction that went on in the days of slavery. The tendency to see individuals as the sum total of the brands they consume is one we identify with the big thinkers of the advertising world, and it should come as no surprise that this is, in fact, where James Patterson got his start. As a vice president at the giant J. Walter Thompson agency, Patterson played critical roles in various campaigns to induce people to think of themselves as a "Toys 'R' Us Kid" and to call one's bologna by a first name, "O-S-CA-R," and a second, "M-AY-E-R." To dream about being a real artist and finally getting away from all this shallow marketing stuff is

The Literary Vaudeville

something of a cliche on Madison Avenue; when Patterson made his break with advertising, however, he brought the marketing stuff right along with him. He had been writing fiction in his spare time since 1976, but bestseller status escaped him. In 1992, Patterson finally turned his day-job know-how into moonlighting gold. His book for that year, Along Came a Spider, was as much a product of market research as imagination. Patterson claims the book itself wasn't that different from the ones before it. He admits, however, that he chose to make the main character, Cross, black because, according to market research he had done at Thompson, people believe that blacks in authority positions are "imbued with a certain 'moral superiority' over other Americans." More important than the book's content, says Patterson, was what came after it was written. His agent sent the manuscript to movie and television producers a full year before it was submitted for publication. "The next week we had bids from four publishers," recounted Patterson recently. "The book had gone from 'who needs another manuscript' to 'this is a hot manuscript.' " Little, Brown and Company, publisher of his other books and a subsidiary of the corporate entity then known as Time Warner, paid handsomely to retain him, offering $1 million for the rights to Spider and a sequel. Pleased with the deal, Patterson told reporters with admirable forthrightness, "I wanted a commitment to me as an author and even as a brand." Patterson also convinced Little, Brown to do its first-ever TV ad for Spider; he greased the wheels slightly by both designing the spot and paying for its production out of his own pocket-about $15,000 worth of chutzpah. Little, Brown paid for the airtime. The clip lacked the infectiousness of his Oscar Mayer work; it was only fifteen seconds long and consisted of a spider crawling across the screen and a voiceover intoning, "You can stop waiting for the next Silence of the Lambs. " The book debuted at number nine on the New YOrk Times bestseller list. Patterson retired from advertising in 1998,

but he continued to use the techniques he learned selling processed lunchmeat to sell processed prose. In an essay in the Los Angeles Times about his transition from adman to fulltime author, he confided that "everything I learned at J. Walter Thompson ... turn[ed] out to be valuable to me in this second career." Predictably, Patterson sees himself as a maverick for his unapologetic approach to book selling, boasting how he "dared to talk with the publisher about 'synergy' between book jacket, promotion, advertising, book tours, and even foreign editions."

But does a knack for salesmanship really make one a rebel? By that time, "synergy" was already becoming a pat phrase throughout the media world. To get attention solely on that basis an author would really have to whore himself creatively. A quicker route to press coverage, to judge by the ritual pillorying of Oprahphobe Jonathan Franzen, is to reject the pre-printed dance card offered by publicists. Still, Patterson's boast does offer a clue to how, exactly, he has become one of America's most influential authors. Few people care about how Patterson writes; they pay attention to him because of how he sells. His books are backed by elaborate multimedia campaigns that now regularly include TV ads along with a two-stage promotional schedule that forces bookstores to keep Patterson up front. He has helped to perfect the concept of the book series as a single, ongoing product with his helpfully mnemonic Cross titles-Kiss the Girls, jack & jill, Roses Are Red, as well as Violets Are Blue. His sister series, "The Women's Murder Club," has titles even easier to keep straight: 1fl

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to Die has been followed with 2nd Chance. (Such Mad Lib titling schemes have their drawbacks. Patterson's latest Cross book bears the graceless moniker Four Blind Mice because, a Little, Brown publicist admitted, the publisher feared that readers might mistake the more familiar "Three Blind Mice" as a new title in the other series.) Patterson sold the right to create original works based on Alex Cross to Paramount for $20 million. His books have been the basis for two movies and a television miniseries. Already thinking ubiquity in the early Nineties, Patterson signed up with the William Morris Agency to create, in the words of his agent, a "character who could appear in print at the same time the character appears on screen. It's really cool." Only in our present culture industry would a literary agent speak with admiration about the instantaneous obsolescence of the written word. But it's entirely apt that he do so with the flattened lexicon of a teenage boy. Patterson himself insists that the books themselves aren't affected by his constant self-promotional campaign, or even by subtle focusgrouping. He admits he's changed the endings to two of his books based on feedback from chain store buyers, but when pressed on this, Patterson offers a glib excuse: "I said, 'Let me write another chapter and see what we think.' This is not Madame Bovary." Like everyone else in marketing, Patterson likes to say that "the key to a brand is trust," or, "If there is such a thing as a James Patterson brand, the key word is trust." Readers, says Patterson, "can trust that my books will be hard to put down" or "trust... that I will deliver a very commercial book that you won't find disappointing." One thing they evidently can't count on is that the item in question will actually be the work of the man whose name is on the cover. Since the late Nineties-when he became a full-time "writer"-Patterson has turned to coauthors and other helpers to produce his works. Some of them are credited on the cover-one Andrew Gross contributed to both 2nd Chance and The feHer-while others are recognized

more covertly in the acknowledgments. Readers either don't notice or don't care; it hasn't affected his sales. And that's the critical thing in Patterson's world. Eventually the literary product and the strategies used to market it become indistinguishable-or, at least, studies in mutual mimicry. His books promote his other books, his movies, and his audio tapes. Reading a Patterson book is not an end in itself but an experience designed to get you to buy the next book. On one level, this strategy is as old as gente fiction-from Dickens to ErIe Stanley Gardner, cliffhanger endings and tricked-out sequels have attracted loyal readerships. But Patterson has gone far beyond his crudely marketed predecessors, refining the technique so thoroughly as to bear out the pomo shibboleth that the author is dead. And he has, to a striking degree, taken his characters and plots with him. _ -LAna Marie Cox

THE POWERPOINT POTBOILER Terry Waghorn, The SyHem: A Story ofIntrigue and Market Domination (Perseus Publishing, 2002).

of any airport bookseller and you're sure to see the management manifesto du jour jammed against the latest techno(or psycho-, political, or crime-) thriller. The pulp purveyors know the tastes of the business class well: If they're not looking for the killer insight, they're looking for a more sublime rendering of the competitive warfare that consumes their days. But which to choose: trying to find an edge or getting a few moments of well-deserved escape? In this era of widespread executive time poverty, that zero-sum choice is CAN THE KIOSKS

The Literary vaudeville

a tough call. Credit Terry Waghorn, a "thought leader on business strategy and corporate renewal" for KPMG, for combining these two genres in The SyHem. Splattered with blood and explanatory charts, and suffused with consultant-flavored prose, The SyHem brings dry theory to life through a crackling tale of "intrigue and market domination." The body count doesn't approach the levels of, say, the latest installment of Rogue \Wirrior, but there is enough gunplay to satisfy all but the most bloodthirsty armchair Rambo. The SyHem tells the story of Timothy E. Hunt and David Atkinson as they struggle to transform lumbering conglomerate Quenetics, which is facing a loss of faith by the market, into the "most powerful Web-based company the world has ever seen." (There are plenty of quaint, so-1999 moments like this.) Some of their enemies are also willing to kill to get their hands on the breakthrough job development technology that would put Quenetics, basically a temp company, on top. The host of foes to be swayed, snookered, or snuffed out includes imperious pension-fund managers, a comically inept Italian-American hit man from Chicago, a sinister Iranian assassin, a murderously jealous executive, and some numerically challenged reporters. Perhaps the most dangerous character of all is David's half-sister Shannon. She, a part owner of Quenetics and 100 percent man-eater, possesses "the body of an aerobics instructor and the face of a cover girl"the sort of femme fatale business travelers can easily recognize from the erotic thrillers that run late at night on hotel cable. David and Timothy get a hint of the dark forces ranged against them when they nearly succumb to the contaminated air someone has put in their scuba tanks. (Diving is the executive leisure-time activity that brought the duo together: They met off Cozumel sometime back and hit it off because "they were both highly successful businessmen with a passion for life and the possibility to live it to the fullest.") Having survived death in their wetsuits, things don't get much better when they return home to Boston, where takeover threats loom,

a trusted aide is whacked, and, most ominously, Quenetics's share price starts falling. It's too much for David, who takes to swilling snifter after snifter of cognac in his suburban mansion. That leaves rescuing Quenetics to Timothy. Fortunately, this hero has already tangled with the caprices of fortune. His parents had been killed "in a mysterious car accident" days before his thirty-third birthday, bequeathing him "two homes, a yacht, a fleet of luxury cars, a $600 million company, and a mountain of debt that was on the verge of collapse." Against seemingly insurmountable odds, Timothy broke up this troubled legacy, sold it, and plowed the proceeds into venture capital schemes. Out of this crucible emerged a billionaire with "ample time for traveling, skiing, rock-climbing, snowboarding, cycling, or diving, and going out with a series of women while fastidiously avoiding settling down with any of them." To save Quenetics, Timothy focuses on a simple mantra (helpfully italicized and highlighted in the text so the reader can remember it, too): Focus, Fortify, and Foster Futurity. To translate: Stick to what you're best at, differentiate yourself from the competition, and don't get complacent. Pretty solid management theory. Here's how Timothy applies it: Quenetics will ditch its ancillary units and focus on its temp-sorry, "interim staffing"-business. Using technology developed by one ofTimothy's other businesses, Quenetics will "own" the concept of self-development by marketing an online service to companies that allows their employees to learn job skills, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and (with the help of headhunters) figure out their market price. As David enthuses, it's a "thinking machine that, over time, would get to know more about the person using it than that person would know about themselves." Talk about fostering futurity! This new technology would quantify a company's intellectual capital, which would make it, like other capital, fungible. It could be bought and sold as if it were any other asset, with attendant futures trading and arbitrage-an arrangement that would end, no doubt, with some schemers

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manipulating the market to a degree that would make the Enron crew look like pikers. (But that's getting ahead of the author.) Mesmerized by visions of human capital auctions, Tim can't see any downside to his creation. He forges fixedly forward and ignores the doubters and haters who dismiss his beloved invention as pie in the sky-technologically impossible! Orwellian! Too intimidating for technophobes! (But a more fundamental question remains unasked: Why would a company buy his gizmo, when it would make it easy for its employees to find out what they're really worth?) Not to ruin the surprise, but Tim triumphs over these skeptics. He also survives-barely -a more deadly attack, thanks to his Natty Bumppo-like hearing, which picks up the sound of a snapping twig, allowing him to make a last-second evasive move. He is wounded, but he gets the satisfaction of watching a SWAT team (called in by his security advisor) take out his nemesis. "The assassin's head seemed to disintegrate before his eyes." The novel ends with PowerPoint slides detailing Tim's paradigm-rocking product (la-

beled as "Supplementary material for Tim and David's upcoming speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce"-finally the big time!). Unfortunately, the reader will wait in vain to find out how well Quenetics's self-development product serves its customers. One thrills to think of what it might do in the hands of some Jack Welch type looking to inspire that productivity-enhancing atmosphere of insecurity. But perhaps Waghorn is saving that stuff for the sequels. Lord knows, there's plenty of grist here. How about a little blowback from Quenetics's old-economy business? Maybe some pissed-off Rust Belters could invade David's McMansion to thank him for helping to bust their strike back in '94? Or, maybe Tim could take some hot lead on the slopes from a middle manager canned for having too Iowan "affiliative score"? There's plenty of two-fisted corporate morality tales to be told. And the losers can lose, over and over. Why not let our laissez faire nightmares bleed into our corporate intrigue novels? Don't our business travelers deserve the very best? _

-Jim Arndorfer

THE BUBBLE THAT TONY BUILT by Nifk Cohen

London and follow the Thames a few miles east of the city center, you will see a giant bubble as worthless and discredited as the bubble puffed up not long ago in the investment banks upstream. Britain's Millennium Dome is now as good a reminder of the facile Utopianism of the fin-de-siecle boom as a safety deposit box filled with Enron share certificates. As the 1990S mania built to its climax, Tony Blair's New Labor government decided that a great celebration should be held in a purpose-built dome. Neither Blair nor anyone else could say with certainty what was being celebrated (beyond the turning of the millennium) or how whatever it was should be celebrated. They were, however, certain that the Dome would be enormous. As its opening approached, the British were told that the Dome would be able to hold "eighteen thousand double-decker buses," or "thirteen Albert Halls," or "3.8 billion pints of beer," or "the Eiffel Tower on its side." If you were minded to pick up the Dome, carry it to the CanadianAmerican border, and place it upside down under Niagara Falls, the PR people said, you would gasp as you checked your watch and saw that it took "ten minutes to fill." The brilliant design (by Mike Davies of the Richard Rogers Partnership) passed the sternest test for a new building: it was imprinted on the British popular mind before construction had finished. David Hockney said Davies:" creation would be "most beautiful left empty." What in retrospect looks like a sensible suggestion was ignored. The Dome needed to be furnished beF YOU VISIT

cause it had an ambitious task to perform. "The overall purpose of all Millennium activity," explained New Labor's special advisers shortly after they reached office, is to reenergize the Nation. The ultimate aim of the Company, therefore, is to change perceptions, more specifically: • to raise the self-esteem of the individual; • to engender a sense of pride in the wider community; • to enhance the worlds view of the Nation.

Note the grandeur of the ambition: The Dome was to be a tonic for a surly public and an instrument of fOreign policy. Note, too, the hubristic capital N in Nation at a moment when devolution and poverty, among other forces, undermined national unity. Brussels ran much of domestic policy; Washington directed much of foreign policy; corporate interests dominated Whitehall; and the Blair clique dominated the Labor Party and, by extension, the national Parliament. It was hard not to join those who dismissed the Dome as meretricious, so clueless was the government to the national fragmentation it was presiding over. "What is the Dome for?" asked Jacques Chirac on a visit to Britain. The answer for intellectuals and hacks alike was zilch. The Dome, wrote Ian Sinclair, a London literateur, is a "Disneyland on-message" that had "nothing to do with bemused citizens." Yet if you could bring yourself to study it closely the Dome had plenty to say about the condition of the citizens of fin-de-siecle Britain. The most blaring message was the solid conti-

Nick Cohen writes for the Guardian. This essay is an edited extract from his book Pretty Straight Guys, which will be published by Faber & Faber in October.

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nuity between Old Conservatives and New Labor. The Dome and the National Lottery that supported it were the creations of John Major's Tory government. His peculiar brand of humbug was to invoke Orwell's decency and national unity while promoting the concentration of unelected power and the commercialization of everyday life that undermined both. There was nothing New Labor liked less than being accused of carrying on the ancien regime. Major stood for warm maids and old beer; his successors professed to believe in modernity. Yet, as the minutes of cabinet discussions of the Dome show, New Labor's governing style was monarchical from the start. Soon after taking office, Blair's cabinet made no secret of its skepticism about the leftover Tory scheme. "[The Dome is] London-based, the objectives are not clear, and it is not durable," said Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the second most powerful man in the government. "It's public money, and if anything goes wrong it will all come back to us." Clare Short, the International Development Minister, was even more prescient: "This will be a political disaster." But Blair had other ideas. His Clintonian sales pitch in the 1997 election was a new Britain, young, cool, and plugged into the Net. The Dome would symbolize that new Britain, a "young country" ready to dash into the new century with vigor and aplomb. Blair's colleagues worried. What was the Dome meant to be? Was it Disney? Was it an expo? A theme park? There were two impressive precedents. The Great Exhibition of 1851 told the world of the benevolent possibilities of science and manufacturing. A century later, the Festival of Britain reflected the optimism and solidarity of the generation which survived the Second World War. But what did deindustrializing Britain have to tell the world-or itselfat the turn of the millennium? Michael Grade, one of several media grandees co-opted to advise on the Domes contents, handled the question with a convenient postmodern cop-out. The Dome wasn't trying to achieve anything, he replied; there was no message delivered

from above for the public to understand. Topdown elitist sermons from a patronizing and paternalistic past had been discarded. "In 1851 and 1951 the great and the good created wonderful tableaux, then lifted the curtain and allowed the great unwashed to have a peep at how great their leaders were," he sneered, showing a frankly elitist contempt for his wiser predecessors. This show is different. Here it is the people themselves who are the fOcus. It says: "Think about your own life." The people are in charge. They can make their own mistakes. They are not being told what to be or how to act. What the Dome is saying to them is: "Here you are, folks. Here are the choices. You decide."

Grade was trapped in the mentality of the capitalist bubble of the Nineties. The peculiar cant of the times held that the new economic order-in which wage inequality surpassed all hitherto recorded extremes-actually empowered the unwashed. The patter worked well in the media businesses. Grade, as head of Channel 4, and his contemporaries at the BBC, could abandon the standards of public service broadcasting by posing as democrats who gave the public what it wanted. The conceit was infectious. Grade couldn't stop pretending to himself and others that he was freeing the masses rather than wasting their time and money. ("The fulks," had they been consulted, might have spent the money on hospitals, or parks, or to replace flogged-off school playing fields, or on anything that might have lasted.) In spite of their pseudodemocratic language of antielitism, the Dome's apologists couldn't hide the fact that the project was as hierarchical as any from the discredited past. As it happens, the Dome was built by funds from the Lottery, a tax on the stupid and desperate. If financing had been left to the private sector, there would have been no exhibition. But Michael Heseltine, John Major's deputy Prime Minister, and then Peter Mandelson, Blair's favorite minister, were determined to draw in business nonetheless. Their motives were ideological. The lottery might have provided the necessary funds, but Tories and Blairites agreed that nothing is worth having

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without corporate sponsorship. So Dome zones were designed expressly for the private sector. British Telecom said it would help only if its corporate image was enhanced. Exhibits on the theme of "talking" were promised to please it. Adrian Horsford, the company's sponsorship director, explained his control of the national showcase thus: "When the Talk Zone opened there were some things we were not happy with, but we put those right. We were quite closely involved with the development." The Corporation of London, a rotten borough that represents City bankers rather than Londoners, was given a space called the "Transaction Zone." The name was later changed to the brutally simple "Money," a tide the crassest of agitprop revolutionaries couldn't have bettered. Other companies were more subtle. "A highlight of the Dome," explained the administrators in October 1999, "will be the McDonald's Our Town Story, where for 210 days people will perform and exhibit their town's past, present, and future." Our Town Theatre was the one genuinely national corner of the exhibition. Every school was invited to produce a play. The best won the right to perform their work in the

Dome. Oddly, no civil servant or minister worried that the direction of what might have been a touching exploration of local histories was passed to an American multinational. (McDonald's spent the 1990S trying to silence the protests of two green activists with an incredibly disproportionate claim for damages in a libel action. At the end of the longest trial in British history, Mr. Justice Bell ruled that the evidence he had heard amply substantiated the activists' claim that the company targeted "susceptible young children to bring in custom, both their own and that of their parents.") Once Blair decided the Dome must be raised, Labor politicians silenced their doubts and pretended to agree with him. But Britain's fearlessly independent press could not be silenced. Rupert Murdoch's Sun attacked the Dome for wasting public money that might be better spent on the National Health Service. The government was horrified. It had wooed Murdoch's NewsCorp with the eagerness of a fortune-hunting hussy chasing a filthy-rich old man, and Blair thought the engagement had been announced. A modus vivendi had been established: New Labor would do nothing to

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stop the expansion of Murdoch's business interests. Murdoch would instruct his Tory journalists to toe the New Labor line. Andrew Neil, a former editor of Murdoch's Sunday Times, recalled for the Observer how the courtship began. Blair told him, "How we treat Murdoch:" media interests when we are in power depends on how his newspapers treat the Labor Party in the run up to the election and after we are in government." Murdoch noticed Blair's arousal. He responded in Der Spiegel with, "I could even imagine myself supporting the British Labor leader, Tony Blair." Blair registered the comehither look and began to exert himself In July 1995 he made a fifty-hour round trip so he could address Murdoch and his editors at a NewsCorp "leadership conference" in Australia. The Blair-Murdoch nuptials were key to the fortunes of New Labor. In years past, the Murdoch press had smeared Labor candidate Michael Foot with the vile and ludicrous accusation that he was a KGB "agent of influence" and had then been forced to issue an expensive apology. Neil Kinnock, Foot's successor, was traduced daily. Foot and Kinnock were threats to media monopolists. Blair, on the other hand, flew across the world to assure Murdoch that his Labor party was submissive-it would be whatever NewsCorp wanted it to be. The party had embraced the market, Blair told the assembled execs, because "the old solutions of rigid economic planning and state control won't work." In Utopian capitalist theory, markets are the enemies of rigidity because, thanks to competition, firms that don't bend to the desires of the consumer disappear. But in capitalist practice-and this, really, is basic stuff which even the leaders of New Labor ought to have been able to get their heads around by the age of thirteen, or, tops, fifteen-competition also ensures that capitalism tends to rigid monopoly. Successful companies wipe out existing rivals and have the resources to stifle fresh competitors at birth. In its 1992 election manifesto, Labor (as it then was) recognized that media conglomerates poisoned free societies. A handful of companies must not be allowed to limit

democratic debate, it said, by buying up and closing down the platfurms for dissenting voices. Labor promised, "We will safeguard press freedom [and] establish an urgent inquiry by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission into the concentration of media ownership." Nowhere was ownership more concentrated than in the hands of Rupert Murdoch. He controlled the Sun, the News ofthe World, the Times, the Sunday Times, and the BSkyB satellite network. The latter held the greatest potential. Murdoch had the enticing possibility that he could own the satellites that delivered television to Britain and, by extension, decide which channels should be broadcast. He had proved already that he was happy to use the ownership of satellites to censor if his profits were threatened. Murdoch closed BBC World Service TV broadcasts to Asia from his Star satellite. The BBC's honest reporting on China had to be silenced because it was embarrassing China's market-Leninist dictatorship, whose goodwill Murdoch needed if he was to be free to milk a billion Chinese consumers. Blair dropped all his party's nonsense about freedom of the press and breaking up monopolies, and in 1995 took New Labor (as it had become) way to the right of the Tories. To the slight surprise of those who thought the Labor movement still had a purpose to it, Blair condemned the Conservative government for try-

The Bubble that Tony Built ing to tighten the regulations on limiting the ownership of TV stations by newspaper magnates. His complaint was not that the Tories had failed to go far enough, but that they had gone too far. New Labor was now closer to Murdoch than the aging brute's old Tory friends. In its conferences, its revolving door for corporate types, and its fake populist style, Blairism was "sticky with Murdoch," an old Laborite told me who became sick of the prostitution of a party she had served all her life. Murdoch was delighted. Intelligent rightwingers knew the Tories couldn't stay in power forever. What was essential was that conservatism continued when Conservative governments fell. Blair promised regime change without a change in the regime's policies. The Tories, the Sun said in the run-up to the 1997 election, were "tired, divided, and rudderless." The British needed "a leader with vision, purpose and courage who can inspire them and fire their imagination. The Sun believes that man is Tony Blair." The relationship had been consummated with more love than is usual in these encounters. The Dome, however, wasn't a guest at the wedding. Its managers feared that it had become a zone of licensed bickering on a par with the European Union or fair treatment of homosexuals. Conservative journalists who had submitted to the change in line without a resignation were to be allowed a little fun at its expense. How could Murdoch be persuaded to muzzle his yapping dogs? His family suggested an answer. The fiercely meritocratic Murdoch, who had spent his life laying into the nepotism of the old British establishment, had recently made a brilliant business decision about the management of BSkyB. The entrepreneur discovered that the most qualified person to fill the post

of general manager (broadcasting) was his own daughter, Elisabeth. The Murdoch sprog was stepping out with Matthew Freud, a PR man on the Dome's executive committee. By midFebruary 1998, the Sun's criticisms had become savage, and much of the rest of the press was following its lead. Freud knew what he had to do. "I talked to Liz about it," he recalled, "and then had a few minutes with Murdoch in L.A." Murdoch was won over by his daughter's intended. He promised Freud he would give the Dome ÂŁ12 million in sponsorship on the serendipitous grounds that he and Her Majesty's Government were both in the entertainment business. Freud then savored "the nicest call I've ever made." He rang Rebekah Wade, the Sun's deputy editor and told her the Dome was now the Murdoch family's pet project. "You may be interested to know," he began. "Oh fuck!" Wade cried, and then produced an inspiring display of editorial independence by executing a swift "reverse ferret," as U-turns are known at the Sun. * On January 12, 1998, just before Freud lobbied Murdoch, the Sun thundered: "This waste of public money should be axed, for that's what public opinion wants .... That damned Dome has disaster written allover it." Five days later, it returned to its theme. "The Dome has all the makings of the biggest white elephant ever. What a terrible monument to the human ego." But on February 23, just after Freud charmed Murdoch, the Sun's thunder disappeared as fast as a summer storm. "There is beginning to be an air of excitement about the Millennium Experience," it noted with enthusiasm. In the past the Sun had been its "fiercest critic," but now it realized that "griping about it will achieve nothing. Instead we should all get behind it and ensure it is a success." Murdoch made the compliant Wade edi-

*In How the Emperor Got His Clothes (Crown Business, 2002), Neil Chenoweth explains: "Kelvin McKenzie, probably the world's greatest tabloid editor (certainly the most obnoxious), used to stalk the newsroom [of the Sun] urging his reporters generally to annoy the powers that be, ro 'put a ferret up their trousers.' He would do this until the moment it became dear that in the course of making up stories, inventing quotes, invading peoples privacy and stepping on toes, the Sun had committed some truly hideous solecism-like running the wrong lottery numberswhen he would rush back [0 the newsroom shouting, 'Reverse ferret!' This is the survival moment, when a tabloid changes course in a blink without any reduction in speed, volume, or moral outrage."

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tor of the News ofthe World shortly afterwards, and of the Sun in 2003. Every good girl deserves a favor. Murdoch was as jarring a choice as McDonald's as a sponsor for Britain's national celebration. He's an Australian who became an American. His British media interests have paid virtually no corporation tax since 1987, for all their affected concern for the underfunded National Health Service. The Murdoch press made profits of about ÂŁI.J billion between 1987 and 2002. It is impossible to be precise, but the Observer calculated that if corporation tax had been paid at prevailing rates, the Inland Revenue would have collected about ÂŁ250 million-enough for seven new hospitals and two hundred new primary schools. As with McDonald's, no one in authority wanted to dwell on the unhelpful detail. Later, when the Dome's failures became too well known for even the Sun to cover up, the Murdoch papers reversed the reversal of the ferret and went for the Dome fOr wasting the public funds to which they did not contribute. (And proved, once again, that governments can't buy Murdochthey can merely rent him.)

The creepy relations between the Dome and global capitalism implied that it was little more than an easy vindication of the Marxist theory that the economic base determines the cultural superstructure. In truth, neither Marxist materialism nor any other philosophy that relies on intelligible links between cause and effect could account for all of its contents. Many slipped their moorings to reason and floated away on a giddy swell. The exhibitions of 1851 and 1951 allowed industry to display inventions that would transform the spectators' lives. The Dome's attempt to revive the energy of the past in deindustrialized Britain descended into absurdity as raddled mutton was dressed and. redressed. New Labor allowed the public a preview of the Dome contents in 1998 when it unveiled powerhouse::uk [sic]. The powerhouse was four giant interlinked drums with inflat-

able walls, which were plonked in Horse Guards Parade. Architects explained that the designers had chosen a "pneumatic inflatable structure" because "its transient and dynamic nature" contrasted with "the formality of the traditional government buildings" in Whitehall. Among the exhibits shown to visiting heads of state were an orthopedic overshoe for cattle and a device for trapping cockroaches in talcum powder. Maybe the organizers looked at these unnerving innovations and realized that new technology wouldn't do, or maybe not. For whatever reason, they filled the void in the Dome with images of insipid concern and pain-free dissent rather than the triumphs of British manufacturing. The Learning Zone presented a rotating video wall in which a huge library turned into a forest and back again. Whether visitors were meant to worry about the loss of woodland to the publishing industry, or celebrate the transformation of timber into knowledge, or nod and move on, or nod off for that matter, was as unclear to the viewer as it was, presumably, to the designers. A mock-up of a Victorian amusement park promised traditional fun for all the family. Its old-time movie machines, though, presented images of environmental decay. No one could explain the connection. The Dome's official historian came closest when he revealed that the creators of the amusement park were drunk when inspiration hit them. The Mind Zone was meant to be filled with Britart from the Watersports School. But in one of their better decisions, the sponsors rejected "Piss Flowers" by Helen Chadwick, a series of bronze moulds the artist took in Canada from cavities left after she peed in the snow. Her holes were replaced by an enormous Perspex case filled with tens of thousands ofleafcutter ants. The designers claimed that they symbolized "communal, instinctive minds, working together, carrying bright flecks of leaf along paths designed to resemble the tracks of a silicon chip." And what, at the height of the dot-com bubble, could be more fitting than a celebration in the Dome of the miraculous

The Bubble that Tony Built

chips? In their native South America, leaf-cutter ants are better known for their appetites than their symbolic representation of the Internet. Each ant can carry five hundred times its body weight in chopped leaves. About a million live in each colony. When they get hungry, they march in unstoppable columns. The ant armies strip trees in the rain forest and munch their way through the crops of destitute peasants-an apt representation of the regimented style of the New Labor administration, as it happens. The Dome's star turn, however, was "Spirit Level," a celebration of something most Britons care nothing about: religion. The few who did, however, were in power and willing to believe in anything and everything. The Dome was to show that twenty-first century religion retained all of its irrational power. Bishops began to complain that there was a God-shaped hole in the Dome which must be filled, and Blair's underlings knew that the Prime Minister was obsessed with traditional religions, while his wife would go along with the promotion of any superstition, however potty. * A zone called "Soul" was designed by Eva Jiricna to appease them. Like the First Lady, Jiricna had a penchant for pyramids. Hers was to have a smokyglass exterior that reflected all that was going on around it. Inside the visitor was to be confronted with white walls and bright lights. The space under the floor's toughened-glass tiles would be flooded so the punters would feel they were walking on water. Simple benches were to line the walls. These would encourage visitors, Jiricna explained, to "holds hands and think what they have in common rather than

look at historic clues to what went wrong." The minimalist interior would be "a contemplative space" which rejected established faiths because, the designer elaborated, "to me religion is dogma .... Religion often cuts off other people's wings. And people, or at least their souls, want to fly. If you don't want war on your hands, you have ro rise above religion." Poor soppy Eva didn't stand a chance. She had a war on her hands-a war she could only lose. Jennie Page, chief executive of the New Millennium Experience Company, was having none of this New Age tosh. She was a regular churchgoer herself and, in any case, knew that Downing Street, Buckingham and Lambeth Palaces, the Tory Parry, and the Daily Telegraph wanted traditional religion, too. "It was clear to me from Day One that we needed to accommodate dogma," said Page. "Soul" was first renamed "Spirit Level" and then "The Faith Zone." The top of Jiricnas pyramid was snipped off. Mini-

'It wasn't until the Dome had closed that the public began to realize how nutty the Blairs' religion was. Cherie Blairs Catholicism and Tony Blairs Anglo-Catholicism and interest in Islam were gateways to a spirit world in which paganism, Ouija board tapping, pseudo-science, and New Age quackery went along with more traditional smells and bells. The Times was the first to shine a light on their mysteries when it broke the srory of what the Blairs did during their stay at the Maroma Hotel, a pricey retreat on Mexicos Caribbean coast. The terrifying tale begins with Mrs. Blair taking her husband by the hand and leading him along the beach to a "'femazcal," a steam bath based on an allegedly Aztec design, which was enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a New Age therapist. She told them the pyramid was a womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs became one with "Mother Earth." They saw the shapes of phantom animals in the steam and experienced "inner-feelings and visions." As they smeared each other with melon, papaya, and mud from the jungle, they confronted their fears and emitted a primal scream. The joyous agonies of "rebirth" were upon them. The ceremony over, the prime minister and first lady waded into the sea and cleaned themselves up as best they could.

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malism was forgotten as all kinds of knickknacks were bunged into her pure space. Prince Charles, next at bat as Defender of the Faith, was determined that the Dome should affirm "the essential unity of religion and the commonality of core values essential for sane, balanced, and responsible living in any age." Page bent her knee to the twittering royal. She ordered that "The Faith Zone" (formerly "Soul" and "Spirit Level") should be re-rechistened "Faith Zone." The definite article was purged, we were told, because the "the" was thought to imply that there was one faith, established Anglicanism, which was more important than the others, Judaism, Islam, Zorastrianism and the like. The dogma the Dome had a place for was therefore the ecumenical dogma that all established faiths were kind of one. Twiddling with titles could not distract Peter Mandelson, the minister in charge, from his real problem. Faith Zone, like all the other zones, had to have a business sponsor because everyone agreed that the market was great and good. But no business could see the competitive advantage in consorting with religion in a godless land. One Dome manager confessed to praying before bedtime to the Good Lord for a capitalist to save him. Salvation came in the form of the Hinduja brothers. They were, obviously, Hindus. But Srichand Hinduja said he was with Charles Windsor and believed in the "shared values of each faith." He wanted the Dome to recognize that the human race must sow the seeds for "peace development and cooperation." Interesting sentiments, given the lines of business Srichand and his family were in. As with so many other billionaires' piles, it was difficult to pin down the origins of the Hindujas' wealth with precision. The brothers-Srichand and Gopichand in London, Prakash in Geneva, and Ashok in Bombay-were the sons of Paramand Hinduja, a Hindu who fled Pakistan to escape the slaughter in the faith-zones of partition. He died in 1971, leaving his sons $1 million and some land in Iran. The boys turned their relatively modest inheritance into a fortune. They supplied prerevolutionary Iran

with BoUywood films and India with Iranian crude oil. They owned 40 percent of Ashok Leyland, the Indian truck maker and had the rights to market the Gulf Oil brand outside Britain. But first and foremost the brothers were financiers and traders in India, Europe, the Gulf, and the United States. Weapons deals plumped their portfolio. They represented Bofors, the Swedish armaments combine, in Iran and India, and negotiated the sale of German submarines to the Indian Navy. Although the Sunday Times Rich List had Srichand and Gopichand as the joint eighth richest people in Britain in 1999, the title was misleading in several respects. London was Srichand's and Gopichand's base. They had a home in Carlton House Terrace, a short carriage ride from Buckingham Palace, and an office round the corner in Haymarket. But their wealth was based overseas, as was the employment it sustained. They had no significant investments in Britain. If aU this makes Gopichand and Srichand sound suspect, they didn't appear that way to the Westminster village. They were ascetics as adept as any Blairite at delivering the concerned platitudes of the pious. They shared their fortunes in common; they rejected alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine (yes, yes, fine, I accept this isn't a strong point for the defense); and they gave generously to charities on three continents through the Hinduja Foundation. I saw them at a diplomatic reception, and they were polite and keen to meet new people, particularly if the new person in the room was a politician. The brothers knew George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. The Queen condescended to make their acquaintance. They graced Conservative fundraising parties for Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Edward Heath, before finding, along with many other rich men, that the transition from Conservative to Labor could be profitable and painless. The Hindujas and the new government were all over each other. Stephen Byers visited them to discuss joint ventures between India and Powergen when he was trade secretary. Patricia Hewitt, the e-commerce minister, popped into their mansion in

The Bubble that Tony Built Bombay when she was on an official visit to India. Clare Short, Chris Smith, and Robin Cook all listened respectfully to their advice. But it was Mandelson who needed them most and knew them best. "I asked, can we do something in the Dome?" Srichand said in I999, explaining the Hinduja's offer of £I million to underwrite the costs of Faith Zone. "Mandelson started coming to our functions and receptions. He is sharp, decisive, and has a good grasp of the issues. Every businessman likes politicians like that." Much of the promised money was never spent. Once the free tickets for corporate entertaining and the tax advantages were deducted, the Hindujas' outlay was about £350,000. The same phenomenon could be seen elsewhere in the Dome. In the first of a series of progressively more incredulous and alarmed reports, the National Audit Office estimated that the Dome was £45 million short of its sponsorship target. The gap had to be plugged by yet more Lottery grants. Nevertheless, the Hindujas' help made the best of an embarrassing situation, and the government showed its gratitude on the night of November 3, I999. The Prime Minister and his wife joined Mandelson, Charles Kennedy, Jeffrey Archer and three thousand other guests at a Hinduja Diwali party at Alexandra Palace. Mrs. Blair was dressed to ingratiate. She wore an orange and white silk churidar kameez-a sari-style wrap covered by a puff-sleeved jacket-and a jewel on her forehead. Srichand's daughter picked the costume from the collection of Nita Lulla, one of the best British Indian designers. Distinguished guests applauded the Hindujas for their broadmindedness and philanthropy. Lowlier souls moaned. "Everyone around me thought it was bit tacky," Zia Sardar, a friend at the bash, told me later. "The place was heaving and we were left parched and struggling to get a drink. David Frost came on and made a few bad jokes. Blair made a speech I've heard him give to ethnic minorities before. Cherie's dress was too flashily Bollywood." The booze may have been pitiful and the company atrocious, bur the

grumpiest partygoer couldn't object when they were invited to sign the "Hinduja Pledge." The assembled revelers solemnly bound themselves to strive for tolerance and peace in the next century. Who could object to such a wellmeaning, if somewhat saccharine, sentiment? If the Dome was about anything, wasn't tolerance and peace its ambition? Srichand thought so. He said he was happy to support the ecumenical mission statement of Faith Zone because, "I don't agree when we talk about Hindus or Christians, because we are all human beings. It's only which faith people follow that has created differences between us." His analysis was too narrow. To be picky, there's not only faith. The struggles for temporal power-and for control of the weapons that secure it-have their part in creating differences. As the world was soon to find out.•

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LITERATURE AND DEMOCRACY by 7Aibravka Ugresic

NE OF THE MOST ENDURING stereotypes stuck in the heads of citizens of Western democracies is the idea that people in the former Communist systems were mere numbers deprived of individual freedom. Now that the Communist countries have been shattered like cheap cups, it is time that the stereotypes about them should be broken as well, although stereotypes are the hardest things to throw out. With stereotypes we feel less alone. Maxim Gorky's slogan-Man, how proud a sound!-had more influence on the individual liberation of the East European masses than the French Revolution. Every citizen of a Western democracy who happened to find himself in one of the former totalitarian regimes will admit that there were many things that puzzled him. I presume that restaurants provided his first insight into Communist relations. Our Westerner certainly remembers those gloomy waiters who hissed curt replies through clenched teeth while waving a napkin as though they were about to hit their customer with it. Those hours of waiting for the food he had ordered, before eating it, his nerves thoroughly frayed, as though it were the sacred host. The way he wondered in horror why waiters weren't waiters and why a shop assistant (the one who had shouted at him after he had waited patiently in line for three hours) wasn't a shop assistant. Why? Because the idea of the equality of all people in this world is deeply Communist and because both the waiter and the shop assistant had drunk in Man, how proud a sound! with their mother's milk. I am sure that the waiter

was writing a novel at the time and felt more like a novelist temporarily employed in the catering trade than a waiter, while the shop assistant painted in her spare time and saw herself as Rembrandt with a job on the side. In the former Yugoslavia (although maybe its unfair to use a country that collapsed as an example), there was a Union of Yugoslav Writers and a parallel, properly registered Union of Yugoslav Amateur Writers. The president of that union was an electrician by trade. How do I know? I read one of his novels with great enjoyment. Today all those countries are practicing postCommunist democracy, as though following a textbook. Waiters are really waiters now; they will polish your shoes for you with the abovementioned napkin if you need it. It doesn't occur to shop assistants to be rude; on the contrary, they will offer you extra services in their free time, without you even asking. Meanwhile, the slogan Man, how proud a sound! seems to have moved to the West, where it belongs. I find myself watching a TV interview with a prostitute. ''I'm not a prostitute, I'm a pleasure activist," said the prostitute. Then I read an interview with Radovan Karadzic, who destroyed the entire city of Sarajevo. "I'm not a monster, I'm a writer," said Karadzic with conviction. On TV I recently saw that a twelveyear-old child has published a book. "From my earliest childhood, I knew I was going to be a writer," she said confidently. What can I say, life in the world of literary democracy has seriously shaken my self-esteem.

This essay, along with "Long Live Socialist Realism" (page 93), is excerpted from Thank You for Not Reading, published by Dalkey Archive Press.

THE BAFFLER

I suddenly no longer know what my profession is. I don't know who I am or where to go. I really don't feel like going to Parnassus. I don't feel like jostling with cooks and electricians there. I have nothing against cooks and electricians, of course. We're all equal-man, whether a cook or an electrician or a writer, is always a proud sound. But Parnassus has become a cheap trade union rest horne, and I do have some experience with that kind of collective hedonism. I really don't feel like sharing tinned meat paste and dry bread with some novel-writing chauffeur. And I wouldn't go to that other mountain either, Olympus, even if! were invited. That's where the newfangled gods hang out, megawriters, literary tycoons, Hollywood Prousts, coddled by the Muses, those zealous employees of the leisure industry. And then suddenly, in the middle of my identity crisis, I am struck by the realization, like a thunderbolt from the sky, that I am an activifl and that in fact I have never been anything else. I have spent night after night with Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy just to penetrate

the secrets of my future craft. I sweated under James Joyce just to master the most sophisticated literary skills. I went to bed with lots of writers, even Russians, even two writers at once, Ilf and Petrov, just to learn the sweet strategies of seduction. I slept with Dumas, Rabelais, and Hasek in order to learn the techniques of achieving literary satisfaction. I spent nights with lots of people and nothing was foreign to me: old men, women, children, homosexuals. Victor Hugo and Marina Tsvetaeva, and Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde. And when I felt ready, I detached myself from my teachers and set to work. I softened clumsy words with my own saliva in order to stimulate some grumpy literary client. I stripped, writhed, enticed-what didn't I do to force my reader's greasy hand to turn the next page of my book! I tenderly licked and nibbled his ear just to force it, that big fat ear, to prick up and open a passage to the seductive gurgling of my words. What is that if not activism? Yes, I am the real pleasure activist! And I won't let anyone take the dignity of my profession away from me. _

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STARVING TO DEATH ON RED HERRING by JV,nneth 1YÂŁal Cukier

o GET A DOLLOP of what the dot-com days were about for those of us in the hot new field of New Economy journalism, consider this vignette: In the fall of 1999, when I was working as European editor of a publication called Red Herring, I was asked to speak at a conference in two days' time, in Interlaken, Switzerland. I was busy but I acquiesced. The next day I flew to Zurich, where a waiting Mercedes spirited me to the Victoria-Jungfrau, one of the finest hotels in the world. After our panel discussion, the event organizer invited me to chopper with him and a few others through the Alps to the top of a glacier and pop a magnum of champagne. We ended up riding back to the airport in the Bentley of one the British speakers (always a mystery to me as to how the car came to be in Switzerland). From Zurich I then puddle-jumped to Geneva for a ten-day telecom trade show, interrupted by a three-day side-trip to Monaco for a venture capital conference, where, to complete the motif of the moment, I helicoptered to and from the airport and stayed at the Hotel Les Bains, where guests receive special passes into the casino. Back in Geneva to moderate a panel at the trade show, I caught a flight to San Francisco for a hastily called oneday editorial strategy meeting. This isn't an attempt to impress but to explain. No excess seemed too extravagant during the boom years, and no deprivation seemed too extreme when it all fell apart. My two-week jaunt through Switzerland was, indeed, typical in many ways. There was that time, in the fall of 2000, when I shared a bumpy ride beside Baron Eric de Rothschild touring Palestinian factories in Ramallah and

then scrambled to a private airstrip in the middle of England for a three-hour interview with Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier. Then to California to speak on a panel, and then yet another editorial meeting to talk strategy. I kept detailed journals and records from the time. I figured that if I wasn't going to be the chronicler of the carnival-that honor would go to others more enmeshed in the era such as celebrity investor James Cramer and new media entrepreneur Michael Wolff-then perhaps I would at least be prepared to write its epitaph. Call it my dot-com post-coitum funk. Others went into it with the same idea. The difficulty-as we all learned, and as James Ledbetter points out in Starving to Death on $200 Million (Public Affairs, 2003), his memoir of those years-was that if you ventured too close you got infected, but if you kept your distance you couldn't understand it. Ledbetter had a good seat. As it happens, he was stationed in the same city as me, editing the InduHry Standard Europe from south of the Thames while I watched the show from Covent Garden. Comparisons between our publications were drawn regularly by London's digerati (which earns me a cameo on page 200 of Ledbetter's account). We met once, in January 2001, a few days before I left Red Herringand a few months before the Internet industry would completely collapse, taking our branch of journalism with it. The Standard's demise followed in August 2001. Today the carcass of Red Herring litters the landscape as well: The magazine closed down in February 2003, on the eve of its 10th anniversary issue. And now Ledbetter's book arrives as a tangible reminder that for magazines, like

THE BAFFLER

rock stars, it's better to burn out than to fade away. More to the point, it reminds us of a time when reporters were rock stars. Even the most outrageous office anecdotes never became legendary at Red Herring, because we all took them for granted and they were continually outdone. One reporter, after pulling an all-nighter to complete a cover

story, was told to take a weeklong vacation and expense it all-whereupon he set out for a private island in the Caribbean and amassed an $8,000 bill. Then there was the case of the reporter who rode to a private airstrip with some venture capitalists he interviewed and decided simply to continue the chat in the air, and grab a commercial flight back from wherever he happened to land. That one might have been apocryphal, but it seemed natural to me when I heard it in 2000. At the magazine's offices in San Francisco, weekly half-hour back massages were de rigueur. Yoga classes were held at noon. One day some dot-corn startup sent lunches over for the entire staff-and instead of sending them back on ethical grounds, employees griped on the internal mailing list over who got what. As the staff grew the magazine's human resources department ballooned, developing its own logo and printing it on pens and Post-it notes. Staffers were paid $500 for every person they recommended who got hired, and the lucky one who reeled in the most new employees got a mountain bike. As it all wound down, the human resources department continued to give local delis hundreds of free lunch bags printed with Red Herring recruitment ads, even when layoffs were planned. We held conferences at tony hotels like the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. Rock stars really did hang out with us. The US. ambassador to Britain carne to one of my cocktail parties. The fashion photographer Helmut Newton snapped a cover for us. Herb Ritts did another, of a naked, semi-exposed Pamela Anderson, which was said to cost something approaching $100,000 and which went unused since it was so tacky (in order to justify the expense, we used the photo on a special, smallrun edition). For the annual employee picnic in 2000, the company rented out Pacific Bell Park, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants, where a few hundred employees and guests took batting practice, gorged themselves, and gulped made-to-order smoothies along the firstbase line. For its Christmas party, Red Herring rented out the San Francisco City Hall. Meanwhile, from my London base, I was making

Starving to Death on Red Herring around four international trips a month and appearing on television almost once a week. Lavished with such sumptuousness, I tried to run the other way. I went on a wacky Spartan diet-most people thought I looked ill because of it-where I consumed only rice, miso soup, and freshly squeezed juice. I often ate alone, searching for sanctuary in my austerity. In this world of asinine luxuries, my body was reacting the same way as my mind: rejecting it all from an innate sense of guilt. My reaction reached its physio-psychological climax one day during the Cannes Film Festival, when, after breaking the regime to dine at a Michelin three-star restaurant, I immediately vomited. My behavior wasn't extraordinary. Everyone touched by the torrent of money had to come to terms with it somehow. Some understood it was a transient thing and took it in a healthy way. Others didn't.

James Ledbetter writes about the whirl not as one complicit in the madness but as journalists like to imagine they do their job-outside the subject of inquiry, above it. This turns out to be problematic, since the technology press was going from covering the story to being the story. From the outside, the story appeared mainly to be the matter of insane competition between the "New Economy" magazines, which bulked up to hundreds of pages per issue as the advertising flowed. From the inside, the story was the historic bid by the tech magazines to move up the media food chain: Not content to be mere trade publications for the computer industry, they dreamed of becoming mainstream business titles. James Cramer's TheStreet.com, for instance, made no secret of wanting to be the "Dow Jones of the twenty-first century"-their executives applied the phrase liberally. The InduHry Standard, as Ledbetter writes, aimed to be "a younger, hipper Business week." The senior editors at Red Herring modeled the magazine on The EconomiH, with a splash of Utnity Fair for

flavor. Wired, the granddaddy of mass-market tech titles, was considered vulnerable since it was more lifestyle- than business-minded. FaH Company geared itself to that pathetic stratum of middle managers who fed off the tech industry, flattering its readers as "Road Warriors." Business 2.o--with its tagline, "New Economy, New Rules, New Leaders"-aimed even lower, offering formulaic "how-to" articles accompanied by a sausage-shaped mascot. Time Warners late entry into the sweepstakes, a publication it unashamedly named eCompanyNow, aimed at those middle-aged organization men who knew they didn't "get it" but knew they had to pretend that they did. For most readers, however, these different magazines seemed basically the same. What sustained us was myth. The new economy press believed in a sort of manifest media destiny, that we had discovered the pattern of history-technology coupled with capital-that was now driving progress and the world economy. We compared ourselves to other magazines that defined and transcended their era, such as Playboy and Rolling Stone, but with one big difference: We were not only "present at the creation," we were the creators, too. When a magazine of ambition and self-importance dies, it suffers an "ironic echo and cackling aftermath," in the words of former New Yorker writer Renata Adler, as its oncelofty principles are perverted and then turned against itselE No one remembers today and no one cares, but Red Herring was actually fuunded on the principle of skepticism about the technology industry. The magazine was created in 1993, before tech-talk went mainstream, and it avoided covering the Internet during the initial hype-up of 1995-1998. "There Is No New Economy," a 1997 editorial declared. In 1999, the founding editors published The Internet Bubble, which foretold the crash and coined the term ''dot-bomb.'' Behind all that, though, was a less flattering reality. Herring old-timers watched aghast as hot pink covers rolled off the presses in the summer of 2000. Where we had once prided ourselves for being sober guardians of the clas-

THE BAFFLER

sic Silicon Valley values of hard work and big risk, the new neon hue signaled a gaudy arriviste feeling. Then there was the piece about celebrities who launched dot-com companies, which aimed at retail investors caught up in the bubble rather than the serious venture capitalists we usually targeted. We chided Business 2.0 for publishing the same article in two different issues (they justified it by claiming they had many new readers since it first appeared); later, we did the same thing-twice. Ledbetter relishes that one in his recollections, justifiably. By the time the Herring was reprinting its own stories, I had already left, but I was still able to watch the demise from the inside. I was accidentally kept on the internal e-mail list for months, which afforded me a box-seat view of the annihilation. The tone of the e-mails changed dramatically. Where a spirit of cooperation and friendliness once prevailed, now there was panic, anger, recrimination. Someone in the office was stealing things from people's desks, and the e-mails started to sound like a police blotter. As the financial situation worsened, more rounds of layoffs came. When the long-serving editor was pushed aside in 2002, he compared his tenure to The New Yorker under "Wallace Shawn," a particularly ironic mistake since William Shawn had been famous for his high standards of accuracy. Then, when they shuttered Red Herring for good in February 2003, the co-founder's final column celebrated the magazine's "string editorial product." Sic, alas. Ironic echo had met cackling aftermath. My own downfall similarly mocked my past achievements. I had cashed out of Red Herring in February 2001 to become the technology editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Old Economy: security, stability, slouching toward suburbia. But being a knowledge worker in the information society still has its risks. Within ten months, I was not only a business-tech writer at a time when The Story was over, but a Journal-man made redundant after the quarterly earnings cascaded southward and Dow Jones & Company had to take bold steps to please Wall Street.

WAL-MART EPIGRAM #1 if! told you once I told you a thousand times we're not buying it! put it back!

-13ernadette Mayer

I remember that in the chaos to leave London for Hong Kong, I scooped up all the business cards I had gleaned over the previous eighteen months. I had amassed more than 1,300, but I could only recall about two out of every ten people-and for each card, I had presumably exchanged one of my own. Examining them now, the companies and colors and jaunty logos on the cards seem to me of another world, whooshing past like Gatsby's shirts. Starving to Death on $200 Million doesn't nod toward myth, it sticks to The InduHry Standard itself, and like the times it describes, it steers clear of history or grander meaning. Created in 1998 by the trade publishing group IDG and John Battelle, the youthful, charismatic managing editor of Wired in its earlyNineties heyday, the Standard sold the most advertising of any publication in America in 2000. It ran smart and critical pieces on the Internet industry, won awards, and published some terrific minds who turned their attention to the sector. Yet by mid-2001 it was bankrupt. Did it die due to its own extravagances and mismanagement, or because the ad market dried up and its publisher pulled the plug rather than risk supporting it in lean times? Ledbetter admits to a variety of factors, but ultimately finds the blood on IDG's hands. It killed the magazine, he argues, to retain millions in deferred tax-liability assets. On a purely narrative level, Ledbetter's book could be better. The characters never appear liresize, and the story never transcends the InduHry

Starving to Death on Red Herring

to savor the inside look at a former rival but

WAL-MART EPIGRAM #2 Phil and I went to one of the marts and bought a rug like we're supposed to only thing is it's purple, we're not married, the rug is the wrong size and my name is Bernadette

-13ernadette Mayer

Standard itself to make broader, more substantial points about the dot-com bubble, the tech press, or the u.s. magazine industry. The first reviewers-in a few cases former Standard contributors-raced to say there was too little sex and too little San Francisco in Ledbetter's account, and they're right. It's a lost opportunity, because it was precisely the superficial things that typified the era. Not that Ledbetter completely neglects the atmospherics. He recounts how Battelle, "practically in tears," uncharacteristically exploded at a bartender at the magazine's Christmas party in 2000, as it all began to unravel. He describes the London bureau, post-layoffs, as "some slowly rotting colonial outpost from a Graham Greene novel." Where Ledbetter captures the New Economy in its essence, however, is in a way he probably didn't intend. His description of the magazine's over-the-top, costly conference in Madrid in May 2000 is delicious because he lets it drop that he didn't actually attend. That strikes at the heart of the time: We were all so busy working-even if racing after illusions, be it an IPa or a hot news story-that we ended up missing everything. I may be too close to the subject to be fair. Reading Ledbetter's book made me queasy. It was like looking back at an old yearbook and feeling embarrassed by the dated images and bad haircuts and wide collars and naIve personal reflections-and then noticing it's not your yearbook but someone else's. I expected

discovered instead that I just couldn't give a damn. As it happens, I never read my journals from those days. I considered doing so for this review, but I couldn't out of apathy. The feeling was only reinforced by reading Ledbetter's blurbs, which come from-who else?-James Cramer and Michael Wolff. The same people who glamorized it all to begin with. Their words, reeking of an unctuous, formulaic hype, sound as phony as the era Ledbetter tries to debunk. Wolff's language is straight from a book marketer's script: "dot-com mania," "rise and fall," "sharp and knowing look," "gold rush," and "how it fell apart." Cramer leaves no cliche unturned: ''eyewitness,'' ''one of the greatest ragsto-riches stories," "I can't believe the stuff... but I know I have to," "roller coaster," "one thing's for sure," "business thriller," "start to finish." That Ledbetter's book is meant to expose the idiocy of the time rather than revel in it makes the presence of blurbs insulting. After the irony, the cackling. Perhaps this is the fate of all things that absorb our passions. When news of Red Herrings death broke in February 2003, it provoked an odd feeling for lots of people who used to read it regularly. They hadn't realized the magazine had still been publishing. Surely it, like the Standard, had died earlier, they thought. The truth is, it had. _

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SAME AS THE OLD BOSS by Steve 'FeatherHone

you will about the New Economy, that tired old tart, for me the dot-com bubble rocked. I got onboard in 1996, when the smart money was placing bets that two years later paid off fifty-to-one. That kind of action was way out of my league, but by the time the Nasdaq collapsed I was a public relations director in Manhattan's financial district. And I was getting paid a healthy multiple of what I made in my previous career as a housepainter (with an MFA) in a Rust Belt city whose name is always preceded by the phrase ''economically depressed." My job during the bubble was to get the money people interested in companies like MrWakeup.com. Remember them? No? Okay, how about Pets. com? Sure, you remember that one. The cute sock puppet. Commercials during the Super Bowl. I had nothing to do with that. But guess which dot-com is still around? That's right, Mr.Wakeup. Why? If I knew, my personal assistant would be writing this essay. A better question is: Where did my six-figure salary go? My apartment with the great view of the World Trade Center? And why am I back in Economically Depressed making less than I did as a graduate student? The short answer is simple. I got laid off. I could have moved on to another PR gig, I suppose, but I didn't. The peculiar features of the New Economy workplace that made such work tolerable, chief among them mobility, vaporized along with my stock options. At the height of the boom there was always a better job, a bigger paycheck, or a cooler boss across town. It was possible to believe that humanity-humane dispositions, humanities degrees-actually had some value in the corporate world. To AY WHAT

put it another way, it was possible to believe that there really was a New Economy. Naturally, I wasn't there to be admired for my humanity; like the other kids I was there to get paid. I wanted an interesting job that subsidized an interesting life. When I got what I wanted I did good work. When I didn't, I quit. I wasn't unique by any means. The New Economy attracted a lot of people like me, concentrated them in a few select places like Manhattan, and fed them glorious stories about their value proposition to the organization. For a while I migrated from one technology company to the next. But no sooner would I have the pictures on my desk organized than Utopia would be laid waste, and it would be time to move on. Why did these workplace wonderlands turn overnight into corporate gulags? This question is at the center of Andrew Ross's new ethnographic study, No-Collar: The Humane WOrkplace and Its Hidden CoHs (Basic Books, 2002). Ross, director of American Studies at New York University, is well known as a sophisticated observer of cultural trends. With Silicon Alley in his backyard, he was destined eventually to enter the frenzy of Digital Age meaning-making. Oddly enough, by the time he chose to do so-on a "hunch" that the commercial media hadn't been telling the whole story about the dot-commers-the stalls were being taken down at the fair. In November 2000, six months after the Nasdaq crashed, Ross set up shop in the headquarters of Razorfish, a "bleedingedge" Silicon Alley firm. He remained there for sixteen long months, chatting with employees, going to parties, and scrutinizing the office decor. His gleanings make for interesting reading even if the zeitgeist has moved on.

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Ross believes there is-or was-a distinct "profile of work in the knowledge industries," as exemplified in the bohemians of Silicon Alley. He traces the lineage of these "nonconformist" no-collar workers back to roots in nineteenth-century artisan and craft traditions. At the same time he contrasts no-collar ideals and practices-"high tech skills," "aptitude for problem-solving," "autonomy in a data-rich workplace purged of rigid supervision and lifestyle discrimination"-with parallel traditions of the industrial assembly line worker and, later, the faceless "Organization Man." However revolutionary Silicon Alley technologies claimed to be, Ross suggests, the mentality of the workers who employed these technologies arose from a centuries-old struggle over what work is and what it could be. It certainly is no easy task to frame such a singular and fleeting moment, with its booming bourgeois-utopian rhetoric about erasing the old ways of conducting business and remaking everyday life. It was a moment that coined, circulated, and bankrupted a new language every financial quarter. Invented terms like "dot-com," once signifiers for everything new and profitable, are now bit players in cheap morality tales about New Economy hubris. Wisely, Ross sidesteps the tired debate about New Economy jobs: Were they "the workplace equivalent of the Big Rock Candy Mountains" or "a con job" designed to "extract long working hours and maximum enthusiasm from an impressionable and vulnerable workforce"? The important question, Ross concludes, "will be about the legacy of the kind of work environment" that flourished for a few short years at the end of the millennium. Unfortunately, Ross's field of observation is far too narrow to answer this question. He bases his research on Razorfish and, to a lesser extent, on 36ohiphop.com, paradigmatic cool places for cool people to work. * He takes great pains to defend these choices, yet he seems at a loss to situate them in the vast field of possible

New Economy subjects. He neglects, moreover, to give much detail about what it is exactly that Razorfish's employees do, a peculiar omission for a study of workplace culture. Maybe that's because his default analytical mode is psychological, not material. What you do isn't as important as how you feel or what you think. Ross caters to Razorfish employees past the point of sympathy, and perhaps even identifies with them. He dotes on some of them as he might on his favorite seminar students. At the same time, he doesn't listen to his new Silicon Alley friends with the same skepticism he reserves for Wall Street and the hype merchants who inflated the dot-com bubble. As a result, his analysis is strangely nuanced, almost fussy, but too thin to support his broad claims about the "nature of work" in the "digital economy."

My experience at a handful of companies during the bubble does not make me a management expert, but I did gain a few hard-won insights. One of them is this: Bible Belt patriarchy suits New Economy firms just as well as no-collar humanism. I know this because the employer that plucked me out of the house-painting trade was just such a company. According to Ross's criteria, Garmin International, a designer and manufacturer of GPS satellite navigation equipment, had all the makings of a worker's paradise. Similar to Internet companies, its business was based on new technologies first developed by the Department of Defense. It was more nimble than its top-heavy defense contractor competitors. And its headquarters resembled the "high-tech office parks in the outer suburbs" (as Ross describes them) that nurtured the no-collar mentality before it became associated exclusively with urban newmedia start-ups. But when it was founded in the late Eighties by two engineers, Garmin didn't set out to break the rules. This was Kansas, not Silicon

*36ohiphop.com, a Web site produced by "topnotch writers, recruited at the top of their game from the music and media indusuies," as Ross puts it, was part of rap impresario Russell Simmons' efforts to "fulfill the political promise of hip hop." He fulfilled it quite handsomely by cashing in his equity before the bubble burst.

Same As the Old Boss

Valley. Gary Burrell and Min Kao-the eye. My jaw ached from chronic tension. And I eponymous "Gar" and "Min"-recreated what lost twenty-five pounds of ladder-lifting musthey already knew: a top-down corporate bu- cle from sitting on my ass all day. At night I reaucracy with strict hierarchies and a culture zoned out in front of the television. On the built on Christian family values. Marketing, weekend I hung out at a coffee shop with other advertising, and any profession tainted by cre- dilettantes or went to the movies. Mentally and ative enterprise was a necessary evil, best ac- physically, I was fading away. But I was good at complished in-house, where Dad, the efficient my job. At the end of my first year I received a engineer, could keep a tight rein on things. The $3,500 raise, a promotion to "senior media liaiInternet was less a promotional tool than a son," and, thanks to a new floor plan, a cubicle playground for idle hands and minds. I was outside Jon's office door. one of only a handful of employees authorized for Internet access, and I had to write a memo explaining why I needed it to do my job. In preparation for my first interview with the public relations manager (Sherry) and the marketing director Gon), I scrubbed the paint from my hands, bought a suit, and flew to Kansas City. On the plane I pored over the materials I'd collected on GPS technology as if I were studying for an exam. But my preparations were for naught. They didn't care how much I knew about GPS. They weren't impressed with my master's degree. And they had local prospects with a lot more experience. What set me apart were my working-class roots; I was the only candidate who knew anything about hunting and fishing. Garmin wanted someone to help it crack the "outdoors" market: hunters Lacking a reference point, I had no reason to and backpackers who might otherwise die of think Garmin wasn't a good job. It was stable. exposure without handheld electronic gizmos The benefits were competitive. Business was to lead them safely back to their SUVs. Three weeks after the interview I woke up booming. Loyalty and hard work were reon the bare floor of my midtown Kansas City warded with small but predictable salary inapartment and started life as a public relations creases. And working for a high-tech manufacspecialist. Garmin headquarters was brand turer in a country that worshiped gadgets lent new, a sparkling granite and tinted glass fac;:ade a certain dash to the most mundane chores. wrapped around two stories of concrete on the My father, a high-school-educated city police edge of the prairie in Olathe, twenty-five miles captain who ran a small construction business from downtown. There was a soybean field on when he wasn't on patrol, had gritted his teeth one side. On the other, acres of black asphalt through my graduate school years, wondering ringed by wind-burned saplings anchored to when I was going to become a responsible member of society. For the first time in my life the earth with wire. Counting from the moment I locked my he seemed proud of what I did. Writing was at apartment door to when I returned home after best a hobby, an indulgence. I didn't agree with a slow commute, I spent nearly twelve hours a this view, but I inherited it all the same. I also day at work. It took me six months to accli- inherited a "maverick brand of individualism" mate. I developed a nervous twitch in my left that Ross attributes to artisans and bohemian

THE BAFFLER

no-collar workers, although mine owed more know any more about PR than me. Certainly to my father's mad-dog libertarian streak. If I she couldn't claim a fair share of the work. We needed a real job to maintain some measure of were peers in all but one sense-she was the social and self-respect, I would find one that boss. In that respect there was only one answer. "Yeah, I do." gave me a longer leash. Wrong answer. Sherry's face froze. Her hands Like some kind of double agent, I started calling New York City headhunters from a gas started to shake. Her mouth opened but no station payphone across the street, whispering words came out. So I decided to dig the hole into the receiver and scanning Garmins smoked deeper. "It's not like we're in the Army, Sherry. I don't glass windows for signs of countersurveillance. By this time I had assumed responsibility for have to do something just because you order managing Garmin's PR across all markets, me to. You're not my superior. You're my boss, leaving Sherry, my immediate boss, free to pur- but you're not my superior." sue two-week shopping junkets to New York Jon's forehead hit the desk. City under the guise of company press trips. Whatever nominal authority she held over me-and she enjoyed nothing more than wielding authority-began to crumble. More often New York City chose me as much as I chose it, than not I reported to Jon in direct rebuke to although I wasn't aware of the various furces at Sherry. It wasn't personal. I just didn't see the play. As Ross explains it, the growth of New point in reporting the details of my work to Economy jobs in urban areas was based upon her so she could claim it as her own in her fre- a "ready supply of underemployed creative workers, an available network of Web-based quent closed-door coffee klatches with Jon. On one such occasion Sherry appeared at skills pioneered by urban artists, and a tempomy cubicle entrance and demanded to know rary supply of substandard office space at dewhy I'd informed Jon of a big "hit" that IQ fina- pressed rental prices." My career trajectory had gled on network television (any mention of a more to do with the "cycles of real estate specuGarmin product in the press as the result ofPR lation" in the city's garment district that gave outreach was called a hit). Clicking closed the rise to Silicon Alley than it did my particular browser window I'd been using to search for experience or disposition. Lucky me. Silicon Alley was in full swing in November jobs, I spun around in my chair, and, affecting the most nonchalant tone I could muster, said, 1998 when I arrived at LobsenzStevens (we "Because I thought he'd want to know:' called it "LS"), a mid-sized PR agency with a Sherry stormed into Jon's office. A minute small technology practice. Every PR agency in later Jon poked his head out and asked me to the city, no matter their specialty-health care, come in. His face was pale. He hated conflict say, or financial services-was positioning itbut this one had been brewing fur months and self to cash in on the dot-com boom. What's he knew it. This was no longer a spat between more, venture capital firms often required their children that could be handled with firm and clients to employ PR agencies to promote their loving paternalism. investments and give them the gloss of legitiAfter briefing me on Sherry's complaints macy. It's no wonder technology divisions and corporate protocol, Jon opened the floor to sprouted up overnight in agencies across the city. Sherry, who was visibly upset. She sat with her No one wanted to be left out of the bonanza. A lot of us PR flacks worked hard at somearms folded across her chest, lips drawn into a tight, trembling line. thing we didn't understand. I was one of them, "Do you see me as a peer?" a foot soldier in what Ross calls the "army of It was a trick question. We were the same pundits and shills promising redemption, salage. And at this point she couldn't claim to vation, and transcendence." We were recruited

Same As the Old Boss

from every field, no experience necessary. The only skill required of us was a thick skin. Our clients paid big bucks for our ignorance, and sometimes they understood less about what they were doing than we did. In this environment the results they expected were never defined, and everything could be renegotiated at the end of the month after the invoices went out. Business was good. LSs eleventh floor offices were a far cry from the sleek office utopias that Ross explores in No-Collar. The ceiling tiles were stained brown from leaky pipes. The interior offices were simple drywall boxes crammed with files of indeterminate age and organization. The rumpled carpet and uneven floors caused people to stumble and smudge the hallways with their fingerprints. Steam radiators clanked and hissed in every corner, and every office had its own climate that, when adjusted for comfort, negatively affected the climate elsewhere on the floor. The receptionist had the demeanor of a Long Island tollbooth attendant. She was famous for dropping client calls on transfer and taking two-hour lunch breaks. The network crashed so often that rebooting became a coffee break occasion. Computer problems? It was best to work around it rather than incurring the systems administrator's wrath. But I loved it-all of it. I felt like a test subject sprung from the laboratory into the glorious chaos of the real world, free from the behavioral modification system of punishments and rewards practiced at Garmin. Nancy, the VP of LS's technology practice, was a former Julliard-trained violinist and member of what Ross calls "a distinctive community of early Internet users, hackers, technohobbyists, and Web enthusiasts," with two books about Internet culture to her credit. However, she didn't share the "anticapitalist" sentiment or have "bitter misgivings about the commercialization of the Internet" that Ross ascribes to her old school colleagues, many of whom were busy launching downtown dotcoms. Her job was to parlay her connections into new business, for which she received a percentage of the take. I took the job at LS because

I thought I could learn something from her. But I wouldn't have the chance. Half the original team left LS soon after I arrived, including Nancy. By default I took over leadership of LS's technology division with a 25 percent raise and a promotion to "management supervisor" in charge of two junior account executives and a handful of exasperated clients. Leaving aside the additional money and responsibility, if someone would have pulled me out of my cubicle at Garmin and told me that I'd soon have an office with windows that opened onto Park Avenue, I would've laughed. If they told me I'd leave it two months later for another job, I'd say they were crazy. But I did leave LS, and then left the job that I left LS for in less than a year.

A051

Without the media to hype our hype, PR was worthless. We measured our value and based our fees in the amount of ink and airtime our clients received, whether or not it resulted from our efforts. Scores of new magazines, television and radio programs, and Web sites were hungry for content about "fast companies" to break up all those advertising pages they were selling to those same fast companies. Without the old media to promote them, Silicon Alley firms were just so many Flash animations blinking in the digital void of the Web. Yet, in every chapter of No-Collar, Ross dis-

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plays a curious contempt, second only to his hatred of Wall Street, for the "media circus" that ignored important issues in favor of reporting on "IPO fever, soaring stock valuations, and insta-millionaires." He has a good point, if not an especially remarkable one. Does Ross honestly expect, say, Business week to run special features on the history of the humane workplace, complete with footnotes and references to Marx? Of course not. That's why we have tenured critics to illuminate the dark, neglected corners of popular culture. I'm all for bashing the PR business and our media doppelgangers. But it needs to be done right. The bubble was a two-way street. Hype and promotion played a crucial role in making the speculators rich, but it also underwrote the fortunes of the Silicon Alley firms that Ross uses for examples, along with the perks and self-important attitudes. But for Ross, the media is merely a crude purveyor of fast-food stories penned by "celebrity-porn journalists" who never went beyond reporting about "gimmicky workplace trappings" that appealed to "public curiosity, suspicion, and occasionally, ridicule" of new media companies. There are rhetorical echoes between Ross and Jeff Dachis, the colorful co-founder of Razorfish, who described his competition this way to CNETnews.com: You can go to "McWeb" or whatever, but thats not what we deliver. We're the haute cuisine in a premier custom solution shop every time. You can't box innovation. You can't put boundaries around inventing and reinventing the world. It doesn't work like that-and if it does, you become a commodity. So all of those guys will become a commodity and we will continue to be the premier service provider that we are.

It would be difficult to find another Silicon Alley company that benefited more from media hype and self-promotion than Razorfish. Not that Ross, a premier service provider in his own right, was fooled by any of it-all the overheated journalism, that is. As for the hype that passed for normal conversation with the company's executives and employees, Ross is somewhat less than objective. A fortunate coincidence put Ross together with a Razorfish manager on a conference panel in Amsterdam.

They hit it off and she invited Ross to stop by the office. After years of lurking on Web bulletin boards and searching the press in vain for "an adequate description of how employees executed their work on a daily basis," Ross soon found himself standing in lobby of a highflying Silicon Alley firm, admiring the "cerebral" decor for its evocation of "the ur-garage of Hewlett-Packard fame." You will search No-Collar in vain for a description of what Razorfish employees actually did on a daily basis, but you will learn how cool they are to hang out with. On a visit to Razorfish's hip new London quarters, Ross's antennae, ever tuned to the pop culture frequency, can be counted on to identify the "light, bouncy trance" soundtrack playing in the background. Turning the dial to the history channel, there's Ross placing the building in its proper context, from the stink of its "medieval heyday" as a meat market to today's neighborhood of "sleek cappuccino bars and pricey wine stores." On the talk show channel, Ross banters with a Razorfish employee who gives the dish on Razorfish's owners: " 'Over here ... Jeff and Craig were always seen as a pair of wankers.' " But there's no channel dedicated to actual work. Ross is more concerned with the fragile feelings of the no-collar knowledge worker, not the work itself In many ways Ross and "the

Same As the Old Boss

golden children of Razorfish" are a match made utation designing and building Web sites. in heaven. Due to the nature of their work, Ra- Think of it as responsible for applying the zorfish employees were mostly well-educated, finishing touches on a complicated three-tier white, privileged, middle- and upper-class wedding cake: a highly visible and creative young people of a mild artistic bent one might task, but one that accounted for a mere fraction call "quirky." Sort of like NYU students. They of the result. This analogy isn't meant to dialso have quite a lot of time on their hands. (In minish the role Razorfish or any other design February 2001, in the middle of Ross's tenure firm played in the New Economy. But if Ross at Razorfish, the chief financial officer reported intends to sample a representative slice of the that the company;' utilization rate-the amount IT workplace he needs to go much deeper of billable time employees spent on client proj- than sticking his finger in the frosting. Granted, the engineers who performed the ects-was just above 30 percent. An average company, by Wall Street standards, would have "grunt work of Web-enabling bulky databases" a utilization rate at least double that.) No-Col- haven't developed the sort of ironic sensibility lar relies heavily on idle Razorfish employees that Ross mines to great effect all throughout whose nimble fluency in the postmodern bazaar No-Collar. They don't own burlesque clubs of self-expression allows Ross to draw all man- where they entertain Ross with "delicious rouner of conclusions about the New Economy tines" and carryon debates "over martinis" about how "the counterculture was duped into workplace. When CEO Jeff Dachis tells Bob Simon of thinking they are not working for corporate Sixty Minutes II that Razorfish has "recontex- America." Nor do they invite him to exclusive tualized what it is to be a services business," "fringe happenings" to watch them DJ in their Ross doesn't hear the song of a well-spoken off-hours. Engineers are rather boring, literalhuckster. He hears the plaintive "voice of a minded people. That might explain why Ross, company in an uncertain business landscape, on a visit to Razorfish's Boston offices, a "back where the identity of firms could mutate from end" database integration shop called I-Cube quarter to quarter. .. the voice of a juvenile in- before Razorfish acquired it, buddies-up to the dustry trying to establish its legitimacy by only freelance poet in the building for an interadopting the lexicon of business English." The view about the seating preferences of Web deNew Age slacker musings of Razorfish's "lead signers, after which Ross heads off to the kitchen technology evangelist" about the "Taoist ... to document the tell-tale presence of "Nutrimetaphysics of engineering and hacking" pro- gen cereal bars, Ritz Bitz sandwiches, M&M's, vide a convenient jumping-off point for Ross Hunts Potato Chips." to discuss the historical tensions between "the Ross's methods would be familiar to any producer economy of yore" and the new "spin nineteenth-century anthropologist. The natives economy." One self-described "rule breaker"- provide him evidence of what he already susin charge of hanging drawing paper on the pects to be true. Little surprises him and he walls so doodling employees could fill it with sees reflections of himself everywhere. And "survivor art that [was] ... a genre-and-a-half nothing is more titillating than participating in upstream from the artwork of convicts on tribal rituals. In a subchapter devoted to dedeath row" -is, in Ross's view, executing a new scribing a Razorfish holiday party "loaded with generation of motivational management tech- wry symbolism," Ross rubs elbows with a niques "that took their cue from the art of viral young woman "who was the one of the very marketing." These kids would be wise to use few people [he'd] met from a working-class Ross as a job reference. background." That doesn't prevent her from No matter how Ross tries to spin the com- appearing to Ross-or performing for Rosspany, Razorfish was always a "front end" design as if she were an honors student invited to a firm. It made its fortune and sustained its rep- faculty shindig. In an effort to impress her

THE BAFFLER

hosts, she "expertly flicked her scarlet boa back over her shoulder" and, commenting on the party's stuffy downtown Wall Street location, she sniffed, "It's just like a Princeton eating club." Oh dear me, such a naughty wit!

The banter was just as rarefied in the PR trade, but no one took it seriously after the client left the conference room. At the last agency I worked for, the senior managers were no better than thieves. If they could've fleeced clients by using life-sized cardboard cutouts to provide the illusion of a fully staffed agency, they would've done it. I went back to the corporate side as a PR manager for a company I'll call "EducatedGuess," a fast-growing Web integration firm with a lofty pre-Internet pedigree and brand new offices on Times Square.

Stability wasn't a feature of the no-collar workplace, as Ross observes, "nor did strong institutional ties or company commitments rank very highly on the list of no-collar priorities." This was especially true in marketing departments. Our know-how was transportable from one job to the next, regardless of what the company did. Unlike Web designers or programmers, our skills weren't threatened by automation with the latest software release or outsourcing to programmers in India. As long as the bull market remained strong, we could go anywhere at any time. Turnover occurred at light speed. My first act as PR manager was to fire EducatedGuess's PR agency and hire an assistant. Senior management soon added another layer between themselves and the rank-and-file by hiring a marketing VP. Kerry, the marketing director who hired me, squirmed under this new authority for a month and then quit.

PARK AMERICAN DREAM At the park of unexploded ordnance and by-products of enriching uranium: The everglades do all they can, do your best to recall your ticket and what brought you out of your home. Was it the child or a local celeb? The big pin on his shirt & Bonzo? A miniature greenback with Lus face where George was, a crescent cup? Moons bright as perpetual renewals in that trough? I ask: they're mine. Accident dropped my basket in this beaten wood under boon of fifty stars, so my names scratched on the pavement throughout the worlds shot events. This park solicits my unit of account (its dollars) like a coin to make its horsies go, sells our few half-baked ideas: thanks lord for the successes of my faith with the ball, despite losing, this fun, rides, my enemy.

-LAndrea 'Brady

Same As the Old Boss

The marketing VP replaced Kerry with a fork-tongued consultant who quickly earned the nickname "Satan." Beneath Satan's yogaand-Chai veneer was a duplicitous, hornrimmed, Fifties-style middle manager with the survival instincts of a starving leech. She held fast to her corporate host through a proven regimen of upper management ass-kissing, covering her own ass, and whipping the asses of those beneath her. She used her position to advance her species, siphoning off the marketing budget to consultant friends who didn't know the first thing about the company or the industry except how to apply their mouthparts to the money hole and suck. The last thing Satan wanted was to reveal her absolute ignorance. Drawing from her bag of consultants tricks, she hid behind a new set of "performance metrics" designed to put her smack in the middle of the department's selfmanaged workflow. These "reforms" were supposed to make the freewheeling marketing staff "accountable" to corporate goals, but they were really Satan's way to meddle in various projects whenever she needed to deflect upper management's attention from her blood feasting. She took no responsibility for the "deliverabIes" to which she made us pledge our souls. Work ground to a halt. We spent so much time filling out forms, creating reports, and attending meetings to explain what we were doing and to learn how we should be filling out forms and formatting our reports, that it took twice as much effort to accomplish anything. Satisfying though it may be, it would be wrong to lay all the blame at Satan's feet. She took advantage of a situation. EducatedGuess was experiencing an identity crisis familiar to many New Economy companies. It didn't know what it wanted to be. Rather, it didn't know what Wall Street wanted it to be: Internet services provider? Web hosting firm? Custom integration shop? End-to-end solutions provider? What was the magic combination that would drive up the stock price? Above all, EducatedGuess hoped to transcend its stodgy reputation as a practical engineer of Internet technologies that it helped pi-

oneer in the Eighties when it was part of the New York State Education Research Network. It wanted to be seen as a sleek, fast-moving Internet company. And things moved fast at EducatedGuess.1t used proceeds from its IPO to buy prime Times Square office space, extend its network through an acquisition spree, and add staff to make it all work. Had Ross investigated a company like EducatedGuess, he would've found the no-collar workplace in transition. It was the ideal New Economy corporate organization-the kind that (as Ross put it) "was assembled with minimal starch, and maximum flex, to turn on a dime, and thereby reinvent itself ftom quarter to quarter." But as the "fluidity" of its "unstable" no-collar workplace dried up, EducatedGuess morphed into a traditional organization, the kind that Ross identifies as being "governed by formal work rules and rituals." Garmins product cycles were predictable, its markets stable, and the company was responsible only to its small cadre of private shareholders. By contrast, anyone of EducatedGuess's services could be applied to thousands of customers in scores of potential markets. No single PR message could possibly address such an unwieldy audience. And EducatedGuess was a public company. The most important audience of all was the stock market, which scrutinized company news every day for a whiff of future profits. I required a direct line of communication to senior managers to not only get the latest news, but also to fine-tune and distribute it for maximum Wall Street satisfaction. It was a fluid process that couldn't be filtered through layers of middle management, and therefore it was a direct threat to Satan's control of the marketing department. "The absence of chains of command between employees and managers" (Ross again) was the last no-collar perk available to me at EducatedGuess. Otherwise I would've walked. Unlike the rest of the marketing staff, my job put me into almost daily contact with senior management. The more Satan tried to worm her way into my established network, the more I flaunted my connections and protected access

THE BAFFLER

to them. If traditional power structures favored Satan-she was my boss, after all-I could at least sprinkle salt to stop the slime trail at my office door. One afternoon Dave, the CFO, stopped by my office. For an Internet company executive there was nothing slick about him. He was tall and gangly, and he spoke with a slight stutter. He was from the working-class, industtial wasteland on Syracuse's west side (EducatedGuess's network operations were centered in Syracuse). To mask his lack of refined social skills he'd adopted the crude swagger of a frat boy. "Hey Featherbrain;' he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "How come you can't get the stock above $30?" "Isn't that your job?" "Fuck you! Where'd you learn to write, anyway? That last press release was-it sucked. New VP of sales?" He moved his hand up and down in a jerk-off gesture. "Who gives a shit?" "I'm only as good as my material." My office shared a wall with Satan's office. I got up and closed the door. "What's up with the California deal?" "Due diligence." "Like ... what? A week? Two weeks?" "Forget it. We need some new business releases. What about New Era?" "Waiting on their approval." "Waiting on their approval. Great." Dave was growing agitated. He jabbed his index finger in the air. "We need to have a press release every-one every week. What else do-is there anything else we can release?" I didn't know what else to say and I didn't want to make any excuses. Satan had me working on a stupid project having to do with EducatedGuess's sponsorship of the Boston Marathon. It was stupid because it was, at best, a regional story. Stupid because it had zero news or business value. Stupid because it was 100 percent promotional, the kind of PR that pisses off journalists. I had to direct the efforts of Satan's consultant friend in Boston to whom we shelled out ten grand for local media outreach. The whole thing was Satan's first real project. She didn't want to do any of the work, but she

wanted her hoof marks on it in a big way. After Dave left my office Satan appeared outside my door, her bony fingers wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. She had a deliberate manner of speech common to unlicensed therapists. A conversation with her came with a lot of slow nodding and "uh-huh, uh-huh's" to suggest she was listening with utmost care and attention. Cultural appreciation-or appropriation, take your pick-dictated her mode of dress. Today she was wearing some kind of half smock, half sari thing with a bold floral print. "So ... Steve ... tell me ...." She blew into her mug of tea to cool it. "Where are we with the Boston Marathon?" "The release?"

"Uh-huh." "Haven't even started it." Satan raised her eyebrows and smiled as if I'd admitted some embarrassing psychological problem. "I think ... we need to really move on this.. .. Get some momentum going, you know?" "It's not a priority." The race was six weeks away, I explained. Announcing our sponsorship now didn't make sense. In fact, it would hurt any chances we had with the media. As I spoke Satan tightened her grip on her mug. Her knuckles turned white. "Uh-huh ... Uh-huh ... Well, it's a priority for this department, Steve." "Yeah. I understand that. It's just not a priority for me right this second." I waited until

Same As the Old Boss

"First thing tomorrow." Satan took a deep, cleansing breath before I hit "Wow, okay." her with my trump card. "Dave told me that he "Let's do-we need two releases this week. wants new business releases. He wants the stock to break $30 by the end of the quarter. It's Combination punch. What else do we got?" "Boston Marathon is slated fOr Thursday." kinda important." Dave made a sour face. "I don't want that She exhaled through her teeth and reminded thing going out right after the acquisition. It's me that I had agreed on particular goals in our last meeting, and that I needed to be more ac- bush league. Bump it." "New Era is set for next week." countable to the "contract" the marketing de"If that's all we've got for new business. Run partment had made with the marketing VP to get the most out of the Boston Marathon spon- it Thursday." Dave thumped his desk. "Thirty sorship. It was all bullshit, of course, punish- dollars by Friday, Featherbrain." I spent the last hour of the workday factment for going over her head to Dave. "And from now on ... " she said. "I want to checking the California release. At five o'clock see all press releases ... before they go out. I sharp Satan appeared at my door wearing a want to see ... a project matrix ... of the re- cape of some sort and a wool cap with a South leases you're working on. And I want it up- American pattern woven into it. "Brian's done with the Boston Marathon dated every week." It was clear where this was headed. Satan site," she said. "I think ... the press release ... was maneuvering to wrest control of the press should go out tomorrow. It'll be more ... effecrelease process. I fought it for a few weeks until tive." "Can't. The California deal popped. It's I realized I'd be better off slipping my head from the noose. For me, self-management was going out first thing tomorrow." Satan shifted her bag to her other shoulder. the best thing about the no-collar workplace. But with Satan's constant undermining I was She wasn't pleased about being left out of the getting worn down. Satan didn't want to make loop. Worse, she might have to miss her yoga important decisions; or, if she did, she wanted class. "When did this happen?" a scapegoat at the ready. That's what she meant I told her that I'd just found out an hour ago by these ridiculous contracts and accountability measures. That's why she had us put every- and was trying to confirm all the numbers before everyone left for the day. She should talk to thing in writing like signed confessions. If she wanted control of PR, she was going Dave, I suggested, about the Boston Marathon to get it all, including "new kinds of mental release. He had his own ideas about it. I didn't and emotional shackles" [Ross1that came from get into the details. Satan nodded and made such close proximity to "Wall Street's upsides chewing motions, as if she were trying to unand downsides." All I had to do was transfer hinge her jaw. "Vh-huh... Vh-huh ... You need to be the load from my shoulders to hers and watch her stumble. Either way I\:l win. She'd back off more ... responsive, Steve. I'll have a chat with Dave. In the meantime ... let's ... stick with the or I'd quit a job that had become unbearable. The time came soon enough. Dave called original plan." The California release didn't make much of a me into his office late one Monday afternoon to tell me that the California deal, an acquisi- dent. The stock went up a few cents in morning tion of a network company based in San Fran- trading then settled back to where it started by cisco, had wrapped. EducatedGuess could day's end. I had expected to hear from Dave but claim a coast-to-coast network. It was a na- he was busy fielding questions from analysts. Nor did Satan have her "chat" with him by tional player now. It was big news-real news. Wednesday afternoon because, as far as I knew, ''I'm ready to pull the trigger." I said. "Just we were still going with the original plan. It was say the word."

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a train wreck in the making. Against Dave's wishes, I loaded the Boston Marathon release for distribution and got out of the way. There were two messages from Dave on my voicemail when I arrived at work Thursday morning. First: "Where's the fucking New Era release?" Then: "Call me as soon as you get in." For once I had followed corporate protocol to the letter. I let my supervisor make the decision and did as I was told. Dave was going to rip Satan a new one, but I was going to take the initial hit. I punched Dave's extension. He put me on speakerphone. "Hi ... Steve." It was Satan. My heart froze. How long had she been in Dave's office? I was a dead man. "We have an ... issue ... that needs to be ... addressed." "I got Dave's message a minute ago," I said. ''I'm confused. I assumed Dave agreed with the Boston Marathon release going out today." "Uh-huh .... Well, that's not what ... we ... agreed on ... Steve." "We?" I didn't know what else to say. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't just call Satan a liar. Dave cut in. He was tripping over words more than usual. "Work it out later. Right now we needCan we get-Steve, where's the New Era release?" "It's-"

"I proofed Steve's version last night and adjusted the ... messaging. It's ready to go out any time." Two more lies. But who was counting? "Yeah, its ready to go," I said. "I want it out before noon." Dave hung up. I had to hand it to Satan; she was crafty. Old school, Politburo crafty. What made me think I could beat her at her own game? Personal connections were all fine and good, but I couldn't rely on them. EducatedGuess wasn't that kind of company anymore. Dave's loyalty ran one way: to the shareholders. A monkey could write the press releases for all he cared. And that was as it should be. He'd just have to find another monkey.

DeepBridge was so new my paychecks still had the name of the old company on them. The cramped four-room office was at the end of the hall in a building on lower Broadway, a block from Wall Street and Trinity Church. The VP of marketing, Sydney, made me a generous offer in a closet-sized utility room as she ran off a copy of one of my short stories. We shook hands, me standing on one side of the copy machine, and Sydney on the other. I thought DeepBridge was going to be different. It was a small back-end integration firm with real clients and real expertise, not a flyby-night dot-com. It didn't make absurd "eeverything" promises; its specialty was something I could sink my teeth into. The cofounders, Jim and Tony, were engineers and therefore, I assumed, rational and logical in their decision-making. And in a market that had begun to falter, DeepBridge was backed by $50 million in venture capital, one of the largest single placements in the industry. People a lot smarter than me had confidence in DeepBridge and its senior management. It was too much, perhaps, for me to expect that my last real job in Manhattan would last any longer than a year. None of my other jobs had lasted more than nine months. In what was now a predictable pattern, my supervisor and mentor, Sydney, left the firm within six months.

Same As the Old Boss

Her no-collar management style, honed in the snapped a picture. I boarded the Staten Island Ferry and stood competitive custom software shops of Silicon Valley, was tailor made fOr start-ups like Deep- on the back deck facing lower Manhattan. It Bridge. But DeepBridge had trouble starting was a beautiful spring day. The sun flashed and up. The market was tanking. The planned IPO skittered along the sleek glass fac;:ades fronting was put on hold. Meanwhile, the company ac- the financial district. The World Trade Center quired a Web design firm based in Washington, towers looked like two giant solar panels mirnc. to capture some of the front-end business roring the blue sky. I was tired of the corporate hopscotch game IQ been playing and dreaded it was outsourcing. The second sign of the Apocalypse came the prospect of looking for another job. when DeepBridge hired a consultant, named For the next few months I kicked around Mark, who also happened to be an old college Manhattan, spending my severance pay and buddy of Mark, the owner of the recently ac- doing things I never got a chance to do. It was quired Web design firm and now the market- hard to enjoy myself I felt defeated somehow. ing department's reluctant new boss. Mark the Thousands of laid-off Silicon Alley workers consultant was based in an old farmhouse out- wandered the streets, wondering what had side of Rome, Italy, where, among other rele- happened to them. We stood next to each vant business activities, he pressed, bottled, and other in quiet reflection at museums, waited in sold private-label olive oil. Mark from nc. line for discount matinee tickets to Broadway didn't want to deal with marketing. There was shows. The question wasn't whether we'd find a lot of pressure on him to generate new busi- another job. There were still plenty of opportuness in the pharmaceutical market. That's why nities. The question was whether the "workhe brought on Mark from Rome. At Mark place idyll" we had tasted was just "a pricey infrom Rome's request, I updated the corporate dulgence" or "a reasonable expectation." Ross answers with a quote from his favorite boilerplate to reflect our new "sales office" in Rome. According to him, it was important to "superbohemian" Razorfish employee: project our "international reach." It's like saying we can only have good things, like womens rights or human rights, if you are affluent, "I give us six months," I whispered, leaning and then you put a price on these things, or you on the waist-high partition that separated my see them as toys that get handed out only when cubicle from Piyali's. She was digging into a there's enough to go around. pasta salad over which she had shaken half a On the surface, it's a pithy sentiment worthy container of red pepper flakes. "You think so?" This was Piyali's first no-col- of enshrining in a worker's Bill of Rights. What lar workplace experience and she was still some- the Razorfish employee was really saying, Ross what bewildered by what was expected of her. interprets, was that a good job "should be a She had left a stable and prestigious, if boring, matter of justice, and not a fringe benefit of the job as an analyst with Goldman-Sachs and put right kind of education, or a reward for a lucky her Hr-B work visa at risk by coming to Deep- throw of the Nasdaq dice." Bridge. "Aw, Steve-o! I don't know what I'd do." It echoes a theme that runs throughout Six months later, almost to the day, the mar- Ross's book: The heroic no-collar worker and keting team was laid off. Jim, the CEO, took us the visionary companies they work for are vicinto a conference room and gave us the news. It tims of "stockholders. .. clamoring for blood." came as no surprise to anyone. The company Their knees buckle in the soil of an "unstable was struggling. Still, a few tears were shed. I geology" littered with needles from junkie intook the rest of the afternoon off and walked vestors looking for their next "Nasdaq fix." If down to Battery Park. At Bowling Green I the "incoming high tide" doesn't drown them, passed a Japanese man who stood unsmiling "binge capitalism" and "hungry wolves" are next to the big brass bull statue as his wife waiting to gobble them up.

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Same As the Old Boss

It's hard not to share the sentiment-the knee-jerk reaction against what Ross calls "the financialization of the economy (and the workplace) [that takes] a heavy toll on jobs." But the simple fact is, the Razorfish ideal was paid for with lots and lots of money, both public and private. The problems started when Old Economy companies that were spending billions on IT projects cut back their budgets. It wasn't as easy anymore for Razorfish project managers to bully chief technology officers into paying kids $200 an hour to build a Web site. The idea that a standard of living earned by an inexperienced middle-class workforce at the peak of a speculative bubble is somehow equivalent to "human rights"-that a cushy job at an exceptional company is in any way related to "justice"-originates in a sense of privilege so exalted that no system, capitalist or otherwise, could live up to it. It's the stuff of Utopian fiction, of dorm-room philosophy, which is exactly how Ross ends No-Collar, in a reductio ad absurdum glimpse of a future that looks suspiciously like a multicultural version of The

Matrix. In Ross's "satisfyingly bad movie" the future is ruled by-surprise!-a monolithic organization called the "Global Trade Authority" that has enslaved the world's population in a seamless virtual reality called "Softer Time." Work is performed by human drones programmed by the sinister "Brain Dome." Fear not, because in a dark corner of the Brain Dome, "our nascent rebel, Roxanne, is hacking her way through the last layer of advertising on the Softer Time firewall," where she will hook up with "Miguel, one of the human prototypes who worked for a first-wave Internet company in the twentieth century." The beneficiary of a fantastic severance package, Miguel lives "debt free" in a quasi-communal society with the unfortunate name, "Bono Zone." He and Roxanne team up to "shred the firewall" and expose the "false utopia of Softer Time" to the rest of us fools trying to payoff our credit cards. This is the legacy of the New Economy workplace? An elite class of hacker kids tap-

ping on keyboards? To whom is this fantasy even relevant? If this is the future, I will have less chance of getting a decent job than I do now. With my skill set, I'd be relegated to painting Miguel's mansion-for freel-in the Bono Zone. I'd be better off sending my resume to the Brain Dome in hopes of landing a gig hyping the wonders of Softer Time.

On the morning of September II, 2001, I'd planned to stop by the DeepBridge office to say goodbye to Jim and Tony. I was leaving New York for good and moving upstate. It was only a two-stop subway ride from Jersey City to the World Trade Center, and a short walk from there to DeepBridge. Of course, I never got there. I watched the day's events unfold from across the Hudson River. Two weeks later I used my DeepBridge business card to get through the security zone that extended all the way to Canal Street. I worked my way downtown, arriving at 60 Broadway only to find the building empty. The entire financial district was a ghost town covered in three inches of gray dust. The guard at the lobby desk gave me fifteen minutes to take the elevator upstairs and retrieve whatever it was I needed. I didn't need anything, of course, but I went anyway. The eighth floor hallway smelled like smoke. I stared at DeepBridge's locked door for fifteen minutes then turned around and got back on the elevator. On the way uptown I stopped to watch the recovery effort. This was before the NYPD had erected plywood walls to keep onlookers from been clogging up the sidewalks near the site. out of work for four months, but standing there, watching firemen carry plastic buckets up mountains of smoking rubble, it felt like four years. My short career in the New Economy had been, to quote Ross, "converted ... into instant nostalgia." And nostalgia is the appropriate term since it describes a desire for something lost that never really existed. _

UPCOMINC EVENTS McCormick Tribune Center 1870 Campus Drive Northwestern University Evanston Campus

Louis Menand Date to be announced

Richard Florida and Terry Clark Thursday, May 15th /If 12:00pm

Richard Florida is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of The Rise of ~he Crea~ive Class (Basic, 2002). Terry Clark is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. They will debate "The Politics of the Creative Class."

Louis Menand is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His last book, The M~physical Club (FSG, 2001), was a New York Times best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for History. His current book is American Studies, also from FSG. Thomas Frank Dllte to be announced

Back by popular demand!

PAST EVENTS Thomas Frank

Lawrence Lessig

Founding Editor of The BaJJIer, and author of The Conque~ of Cool, and One Marke~ Under God.

Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and Director of the Creative Commons initiative.

LowelillerJman Formerly of 60 Minuus, now a

Please visit our website (www.cliosociety.com) where you can find information about past and upcoming events. And be sure to leave us your e-mail address, so we can keep you informed as we develop our summer program.

producer for PBS FronUine, and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

~><-

Clio is a nonprofit organization based

in Evanston, Illinois. Our mission is to help connect students of all ages with some of today's leading thinkers and writers. Our focus is the arts and humanities. Clio organizes speakers, presentations, and debates on a range of timely subjects. Our events seek to provide manageable introductions to some of today's more complex topics. Our events are held on Northwestern University's Evanston campus.

All of Clio's events are open to the public and entirely free of charge. Clio

Conor O'Neil, Secretary Tel: 847 570-9715 Fax: 847 570-9716 E-mail: secretary@cliosociety.com www.cliosociety.com Post Office Box 5333 Evanston, Illinois 60204-5333

FLEXIBILITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Paul Maliszewski

orking how and where you want is one of few fairy tales that survive from the glorious age just passed. The New Economy is so much rubble, but the dream of flexibilityof weaving together work and life ever more inextricably-lives on, like a cockroach that has emerged unscathed from a sci-fi apocalypse. A recent ad campaign fur Intel's Centrino chipwhich promises to grant people the freedom to do their computing anywhere-shows just how charming the fairy tale can be. A man pounds away on a keyboard as he sits at the tee of a driving range. A woman is so engrossed in her spreadsheet that she doesn't notice she's being carted around on a furklift. Like fairy tales from childhood, the Intel ads are playful and exaggerated. The woman on the furklift is as imperturbable as the princess whose sleep was upset by a single pea is delicate. But however whimsical the details, the ads' underlying assumption, as in fairy tales, remains serious and implied: People want their flexibility. Internet companies are supposed to have rewritten the rules of the workplace by making a big, public show of saying they had no rules. During the New Economy's heyday, promises of flexible workplaces flourished extravagantly, in part because companies were competing to hire a limited number of capable workers. The ultimate perk was the telecommute. Want to work from home? Great. Want to work from the beach, sitting before the ocean, or at the coffeeshop, or on a park bench? No problem. Want to work odd hours, pulling the occasional all-nighter? That's cool. Really, just do whatever's best for you and your "workstyle," to borrow a term from Richard Florida, a booster for flexible lives for a new age. For Florida, telecom-

muting is not a matter of mere convenience, its a way for the employee to foster his "own creative rhythms," a way to advance "a broader process of self-actualization" and "to use work as a platform for pushing forward an overall creative identity." Of course, there is another side to flexibility. Being able to work from home when the need arises translates, in short order, into a tacit corporate expectation that all employees will do some work outside the office, while at home and on the road, in airports and hotel rooms. If your co-worker sends you e-mails time-stamped at 2 A.M., you take notice of such initiative and uncommon industry and stop slacking off at midnight to watch a little television. If your boss gives you to understand that he reads a few reports every night before bed, you better believe that you do, too. In White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration

o/Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America

(Norton, 2002), Jill Andresky Fraser surveys the flagging morale of the professional class in the face of such expectations. She interviews hundreds of people in professions ranging from banking and finance to publishing and telecommunications, for whom flexibility once seemed attractive but became a trap. Frasers respondents represent every career stage, from recent graduates to veterans, and they all speak grimly and with gallows humor, like battlescarred soldiers. Some post their laments anonymously to Web sites such as fuckedcompany.com and disgruntled. com, then laugh bitterly at their misfortune. Others organize toward some legal end. Some of the people whose tribulations Fraser describes are turbo-yuppies. Gemma, for example, works in marketing in

THE BAFFLER

New York City and returns her phone calls on the subway by cellular phone, then checks for new messages several times once she arrives home, where her husband, an investment banker, is revising reports on the computer, a task that regularly occupies him until late in the night. Their clients have their home phone number and aren't shy about using it. Then there are the sad-sack cases, like Manny, a technical writer for Intel. After putting in a regular day, he comes home to his daughters, prepares dinner, and has the girls in bed by around eight, giving him time-and flexibility-to return to work until at least 1 A.M. When the stress becomes too much for him-and it does frequently, Manny says-he crashes, staring vacantly into his computer, not moving and not hearing a thing. One day a supervisor finds him like this, fried, and issues a stern warning. Manny, like a character in a Samuel Beckett play, goes on because he must go on, unable to imagine an alternative to the way things are and afraid to do otherwise than get back to work. In 1996, Andrew Grove, then CEO of Intel and the boss of Manny's bosses, wrote a book on managing called Only the Paranoid Survive. The book provides context about the company now aiming to make us even more flexible. Most of Grove's opus is hackneyed stuff, a stew of management-lit leftovers-some moldy social Darwinism here, some scrapings from The Art ojWar there. But Grove eventually comes to the dark heart of the matter: The most important role of managers is ro create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, /ear of bankruptcy; /ear of being wrong, and /ear of losing can all be powerful motivators. How do we cultivate /ear oflosing in our employees? We can only do that if we feel it ourselves.

Grove's book is very 1996, you might say. No paeans to flexibility, no cooing about creative rhythms. The era of corporate cool had only begun to dawn, and dread of the axe still dominated the managerial mind. What is exceptional about the book-even salutary-is Grove's bluntness: Managers must instill fear. Profit depends on it.

White-collar workers got the message. Fraser hears again and again from respondents who describe a cynical and unspoken code whereby employees dare not take advantage of certain perks and benefits. Companies offering "flextime" scheduling, the ability to work from home and telecommute, or generous, familyfriendly leave policies really make more of an empty promise of flexibility than a firm guarantee. Workers who take the policies at their word and apply for leaves do so at the risk of their careers. Meanwhile, those who don't take leaves must work harder and stay later, just to pick up the slack when their department is short one monkey. A study of managers at a financial services firm finds that men and women who took short leaves were promoted less frequently than those who stayed in their seats. The leave-takers also received lower performance ratings and, of course, smaller raises. Sybil, a vice president at Merrill Lynch, describes her view of the flexible workplace: The corporation is in this incredible drive to be politically correct. So they'll send you these communications telling you its okay to stay home to take care of your sick parents or your kids. Its incredible cynicism on peoples parts. For management ro tell you that its okay is BS. Its not okay. It doesn't work. For the people who don't avail themselves, theres just more work .... This cynicism leads to incredible anger at the office. I /elt it.

Yet the frustrations and preoccupations Fraser records are but trifles to the heroic new men and women exalted by Richard Florida in his bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And

How It's Transforming WOrk, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Lifo (Basic Books, 2002). "We

trade job security for autonomy," Florida declares, on behalf of this bold new social formation. "Creatives" don't worry about getting laid off. They quit jobs that can't satisfy their enormous appetites for self-actualization. They launch personally rewarding entrepreneurial ventures. They become consultants. They "strive to create [their1own identities." Then they "re-create" them allover again.

Flexibility and Its Discontents

Who are these demigods, the lucky few? They're computer programmers and webmasters, graphic designers and college professors, and of course artists, writers, poets, and musicians. That's the "Super-Creative Core" of the new class, anyway. Also admitted are highflying professionals in finance, advertising, law, and health care, whom Florida judges to be creative enough. "These people engage in creative problem solving," Florida explains (so far describing nearly everyone) "drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems." By the time Florida finishes counting, the creative class numbers 38 million people, or roughly 30 percent of the workforce. Not surprisingly, "the members of the Creative Class do not see themselves as a class," Florida acknowledges. More troubling for his demographic land-grab, however, is the simple fact that many members of the class (the doctors, say, or the Wall Street analysts) share little in common with others (such as the freelance writers). Nevertheless, Florida believes the creatives, even if they haven't achieved class-consciousness, stand in the vanguard of society and are the architects of ,'deep and profound shifts in the ways we work, in our values and desires, and in the very fabric of our everyday lives:' The creatives are making their power felt

most forcefully at work, where they favor flexibility over structure. Creatives shun regular schedules and rules, bristle at dress codes, and are most at ease-and most fulfilled, validated, and self-actualized-when flitting mayfly-like from project to project and job to job. Job security? Who needs it? That sounds like indentured servitude to them. Pensions are for old men in ill-fitting clothes. Stock portfolios are much cooler, because you, like, control them yourself Creatives like to work from their homes, or while on the go. They carry computers, phones, pagers, and Palm Pilots, all manner of digital goodies to keep them forever connected to their offices. They're the people who treat the local Starbucks as if it's their personal office. On airplanes, creatives yak away on their cell phones until the flight attendant asks them to please turn them off. Then they use their tray tables as desks. As soon as the plane touches down they check their messages. The creatives are well educated and usually well off. And because they're so busy actualizing themselves, they demand to be well taken care oE That task falls to those Florida calls the service class. This subaltern group is larger than the creative one, with 55 million people, or 43 percent of the workforce, but it lacks power. Its average salary is less than half of the creative

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class's (which clocks in at $48,752). The service class includes waiters, retail clerks, and janitors, as well as Florida's housekeeper, his gardener, and the guy who cleans his swimming pool. Some members of the service class are, Florida allows, capable of moments of creativity and thus "prime candidates for reclassification." (Florida says his housekeeper is "a gem" and that he "trust[s] her not only to clean but to ... suggest ideas fOr redecorating," projects she "takes on ... in an entrepreneurial manner.") Still, the class as a whole "exists mainly as a supporting infrastructure for the creative class and the creative economy." Or, to translate, they serve the creatives, cleaning up their messes.

company or the creative employee. "The ultimate control issue," he writes, "the one we have to stay focused on, individually and collectively-is how to keep stoking and tapping the creative furnace inside each human being." Florida apparently learned this life lesson from his daddy. In a speech televised on C-SPAN, he quoted his father, who worked all his life in an eyeglass factory in New Jersey and who, one Saturday years ago, took young Richard to see where he worked. At that time, his father said: Richard, its not the machines, its not the technology, its not this wonderful factory building. The key to understanding this factory is the knowledge and the intelligence and creativity of the men who work in this factory.

It's a shame Florida's father didn't become a professor of management. He seems to have had the language down.

.. MOSS-ANIMALS."

And what of the creative class:" relationship to its superiors, the capitalists? Surely, as other students of economics have suggested, there is some imbalance in the way power is divided between workers and management. Not important, says Florida. Acknowledging that "Karl Marx had it partly right," he contends that "more workers than ever control the means of production because it is inside their heads; they are the means of production." Florida doesn't concern himself with the question of who ends up owning the stuff his heroes work on-the

The key to understanding all those employees and their creative urges, for Florida, is to avoid probing too deeply the terms of their employment. "The most notable feature of the new labor market, as just about everyone agrees, is that people don't stay tied to companies anymore." Right, and the second most notable feature is that few people can stay tied to a company, even if they want to. Job insecurity, however, which just about everyone recognizes, doesn't register as insecurity in Florida's world, bur rather as an intelligent, creative choice. Florida sees contentment where all but Dr. Pangloss would observe garden-variety fear. To read Fraser and Florida side-by-side is to realize that it's possible fOr two authors to write about the same group of professionals without betraying a single instance of agreement. Do their differences come down to a matter of he said/she said? No, they do not. Fraser quotes more people, relying on interviews she conducted herself, in a single chapter than Florida musters in his entire book. When Florida wants to support one of his postulates, he typically turns to postings he read on a FaJl Company bulletin board, second-hand forwarded e-mails,

Flexibility and Its Discontents

or responses to his Information ~ek column. A friend of his attends a party and overhears "one conservatively dressed professional saying to another, 'I would never give up my office to work like that!'" Florida then offers this as standalone evidence establishing that "some people consider the new workspace an affront to their values and a threat to their status." In lieu of more substantial reportage and primary research, Florida provides tables and graphs and column upon column of numbers. He studied Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, combed the US. census, and finessed the results of an Information ~ek readers survey, ever watchful for any blips or pings indicating that the creative class is out there, somewhere. But in a surprising revelation at the end of his book, Florida confesses: In retrospect, I probably could have wrinen this book using no statistics at all. The main story that I've tried to convey here is an intensdy human one that transcends numbers .... Many of my arguments could have been made as convincingly just by telling stories ftom my field notes and lening my human subjects and observations speak for themselves.

There is, it's true, an intensely human story to be told, but Florida didn't tell it. Nor did he try. Renata Adler has written of the laziness of journalists for whom phoning around qualifies as legwork. Florida does his best to advance the lazy writer's art by taking gross liberties with newspaper articles he has condensed in the course of his "research" and then supplying them with specious interpretive significance. For example, Judy Davis, a temp worker in Cincinnati, might be surprised to find out that Florida holds her up as "the best indicator of how thoroughly we have come to terms with the new labor market." Davis was laid off in March 200I by the Kelly Scientific unit of Kelly Services, which had assigned her to EthiconEndo Surgery, a division of Johnson & Johnson that manufactures surgical instruments. This misfortune earned Davis a starring role in a story by Louis Uchitelle in the New York Times. Davis tested Ethicon-Endo's instruments, for which the temp agency paid her $17.50 an hour. Uchitelle interviewed her extensively enough to know how many daughters Davis

has (two), that she's divorced, and that, at the time of the article's publication, she was volunteering. Uchitelle asked how she tested the instruments ("sometimes on pigs and goats") and learned how she sought help from a church group organized to help people who lost their jobs, among much else. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Davis appears unnamed and is referred to as "a woman who lost her job in Cincinnati." Florida allows her one line only: "If you talked to me a couple of months ago you might have heard some outrage, but now it's a matter of biting the bullet and going forward." Florida wants Davis, like other creatives (somehow, by his calculus, even some temps are creatives), to accept uncertainty as a way of life. His mind is already made up. "I have come across few who hanker for a return to the old one-company-for-life arrangement," he declares, forgetting or perhaps choosing to ignore that in between a volatile, uncertain job market and one-company-for-life there exist plenty of other arrangements to hanker after. "Like this woman," Florida writes, moving from

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particular to general so abruptly his readers will be lucky if they suffer only whiplash, "we simply accept it as the way things are and go about our busy lives. We acknowledge that there is no corporation or large institution that will take care of us-that we are truly on our own:' The way Florida sees it, "people ... perceive advantages from this new system. To a large degree, it is what we 'want.' " The scare quotes are his, and their purpose remains ambiguous. Is Florida uncomfortable saying that this is something we really "want"? Is he quoting something we collectively said or whispered while dreaming? Or, deep down, do we really want this new system and just not yet know it, in much the same way the creative class isn't aware of its own existence? It is worth noting here-because Florida does not-that Davis had been laid off for three months by the time Uchitelle contacted her. Davis said she burst into tears when she was let go. She also said, "I loved the work, and I was devastated." She expressed uncertainty about where she would or could direct her anger, implying that she was-sorry, Florida-angry. She accurately assessed her former employer's unfair employment practices, describing two distinct classes of employees, saying, "Ethicon is a wonderful company with wonderful benefits, including severance, but none for me." And while she admitted that if she were a business owner not making a profit, she too would be forced to lay people off, this woman never gave an unqualified impression of someone who has "come to terms with the new labor market." This woman did not want what befell her. Yet Florida needs her to want it. He needs her, and everyone really, not to be angry about layoffs. He needs everyone, moreover, to be comfortable with uncertainty, even to relish it, because he believes-and wants us to believethat a lack of structure is often best for nurturing the creatives and their lifestyle. "I find it fortunate that people are no longer required to be loyal to large corporations," Florida writes, looking to turn that little frown upside down. "Now people are free to direct their loyalties to more meaningful aspects of life: their own personal development, their families and friends, their

communities and the things that truly interest and matter to them." To the vast numbers oflaid-off workers who get by with skimpy or no company severance packages and shrinking welfare payments and who, in a recent decision by the Bush Administration, are now no longer even counted by the Department of Labor, the news of this silver lining surely must come as something of a revelation. So its no surprise when Florida describes the mass layoffs of the late 1990S and remarks that the news did not generate "outrage and horror" as earlier rounds of layoffs did. '~nd what was the reaction?" Florida asks. "Not much," he answers. And what is Floridas evidence? Besides Judy Davis, not much. Indeed, it's pointless to expect Florida to look at any issue except through the prism of his fatuous ideas about creativity. He recounts an economic development meeting convened years ago by Tom Ridge, then governor of Pennsylvania, to map the future of the state. Florida listened as Ridges secretary of labor and industry complained that the "workforce [was] out of balance," that the vocational schools were "turning out too many hairdressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory workers." Florida went back to Carnegie Mellon and posed this conundrum to his first-year public policy students. He did not ask them to think about why such a trend existed; he invited them to join him in a game of pretend. "If you had just two career choices open to you," he asked,

Flexibility and Its Discontents "where would you work-in a machine shop, with high pay and a job for life, or in a hair salon, with less pay and where you were subject to the whims of the economy?" Florida reports that his students as well as "audiences across the country" chose the hair salon in overwhelming numbers. What, if anything, does this prove? That when people who, by virtue of their education and birth, will never in their lives have to cut hair or weld, weigh their romanticized ideas of working in a hair salon against their notions of factory labor, decide that they prefer the former over the latter? No, Florida is more fearless. He concludes, first, that almost all people feel a hair salon is "the more creative, exciting, and satisfying place to work." Then he goes on to extrapolate a universal lesson: "In almost every case, the content of the job and the nature of the work environment mattered much more than compensation." What's more, tireless polling of his high-toned audiences leads him to "suspect that similar motives drive many of the people who choose the hair salon in real life." From these sources, Florida suspects he understands real life.

The replacement of industrial work by metiers such as hairdressing has been the fate of many cities in recent decades. So where better than Pittsburgh, home of derelict steel mills not to mention Carnegie Mellon and Richard Florida, to find out how industrial workers feel about recent trends in the economy and workplace? Florida isn't all busted up over the collapse of the country's steel industry, and he acknowledges the lot of Pittsburgh's former steelworkerS-II2,500 of whom lost jobs at the mills or in related industries between 1979 and 1985only in passing and as statistics. However, when regional development agencies tear down "the historic Homestead Steel Works ... making way for a giant waterfront mall that features islands of big-box retail stores amid yawning acres of parking lots," Florida mourns the loss of buildings and, perhaps, their potential for great, gritty loft apartments for the creatives. What Florida regards as a real tragedy, and

what moved him to write The Rise ofthe Creative Class, was that Lycos, a start-up Internet portal cum search engine affiliated early on with Carnegie Mellon, decamped fOr Boston in exchange for a pile of venture-capital money. The news so flabbergasted and disturbed Florida that he resolved to understand why Lycos jilted its hometown and to figure out how places like Pittsburgh, a city he clearly loves, might in the future avoid losing such vital avatars of creativity. The answer to these questions has a lot to do with the pop star Christina Aguilera. This shimmering daughter of Pittsburgh, who got her start singing the national anthem at Steelers games, left town to seek riches and glory in better-known centers of culture. So, too, I learned, did Dieselboy, "one of the foremost drum and bass DJs in the world," who hit the exit close on the heels of DJ Sine and Producer 1. 8.7. Alas, Florida grieves, it was bound to happen, since Philadelphia has a "more dynamic dance-music scene." NIghtlife just hasn't been the same since in the neobohemian neighborhood of Shadyside. If you're wondering what all this has to do with Lycos, ask yourself this: Do you honestly expect hipster high-tech workers to stay for long in a city without a decent drum and bass DJ?

Florida fusses and worries so much over the exit of one pop star, two DJs, and a record producer because he firmly believes that such cultural highlights and attractions are crucial to the economic revitalization of cities. "Music... plays a central role in the creation of identity and the formation of real communities," Florida counsels, going on to praise the exemplary scenes in Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and Austin. But if a city wants to improve its local economy, it must provide much more than good tunes performed nightly by poorly compensated musicians. It must serve up a combination of avant-garde art

THE BAFFLER

galleries and improvisational theater companies, funky restaurants, cool bars, hot nightspots, and ''organic and indigenous street-level culture." Florida helpfully distinguishes street-level culture (good) from "art imported from another century fur audiences imported from the suburbs" (bad). Official culture, including ballets, operas, chamber music, and the like, is staged and scheduled to occur at a certain time, which really cramps the style of the creative class, testing their patience and fundness for infinite flexibility. What the creatives crave is lots of indigenous street-level culture. Street-level culture is "social and interactive" as well as "native and of-the-moment." It "grows organically . '. "#-..' .'" '"~f e. â&#x20AC;˘ from its surroundings," with the art's creators ~ ," and patrons living like neighbors, possibly even ,. F â&#x20AC;˘ , I hanging out and, who knows, interacting at the same indigenous coffee shop. Florida himself learns "a great deal from talking with people in pendent, the free weekly newspaper of Raleigh, coffeeshops." He asks these people to share Durham, and Chapel Hill, ran a cover story "their ideas about work, leisure, and commu- about Florida's book under the headline, "Why nity." Places that possess these uncommon, Artists, Geeks, and Rock Bands Are the Key to highly sought-after ingredients-Florida names Economic Recovery." The article included phoSan Francisco, Austin, Seattle, the usual sus- tographs of a local belly dancer and a saxopects-attract the creative class and, to his phonist to illustrate where else one might reamind, earn comparisons to Florence during the sonably expect economic recovery to originate. Renaissance and Vienna in the late 1800s. A sidebar headline boasted, "We're No.6." So is Pittsburgh beyond hope? Does Sacra- Meanwhile, Baton Rouge's Advocate reported, mento possess more indigenous street-level cul- '''Creative Class' Called Key to Growth; Baton ture than Cleveland? Does Cincinnati employ Rouge Lags." The Champaign-Urbana Cityview more people in creative class professions than weighed in with, "What Champaign-Urbana Providence? Is Tucson or Phoenix more amen- Can Learn from Madison, Austin, and Even able to the workstyle of the creative class? Is Iowa City." The Sydney Morning Herald admitRochester a cool place to live? Florida's book ted, "Fostering the New Creative Class: It's pretends to answer all these questions without High Time Australia Got the Idea," apparently qualification, using statistics and supplying a undeterred by Florida discussing and ranking ranked list of cities. And therein lies the book's only US. cities. The Plain Dealer smartly played meteoric popularity. Nothing, it seems, can the book for two local angles, running both quite guarantee a book national media atten- "Columbus Get [sic] Hints for Keeping OSU tion, reviews in local newspapers, and a shot at Grads" and "The Creative Class Loves Clevebecoming a bestseller than a list like this, de- land." The Buffalo News gave the city the busiclaring authoritatively that some stuff is better ness, declaring, "Buffalo Needs Creative Class than other stuff, but only one is the best of all. to Thrive," while the Albany Times Union conThe Rise ofthe Creative Class is also a book gratulated its readers-"Albany Emerging as with hundreds of built-in local angles, there for Hub of Creativity." Other newspapers were not any reporter in need of an easy story. The Jnde- so certain, however. The Detroit Free Press asked,

'...

.. _hUst

Flexibility and Its Discontents

"Can These People Save Detroit?" (yes, but only if your belly dancers are very, very good.) And so it went in more than a hundred newspapers. Traditionally, cities vie with one another to convince corporations to choose them as the location of the new headquarters, shipping warehouse, or factory. Cities advertise in glossy, fullcolor economic development trade periodicals like Plants, Sites & Parks, Expansion Management, and Area Development. If they're trying to attract telemarketing firms they may boast that their workforce speaks English without an accent. They compete for the corporations by trying to offer the most enticing package of longterm tax breaks, real estate subsidies, and other incentives to bring the business to a city or, if they're already there, to keep them close. (The same basic shakedown goes on at regional and state levels, too, except the baskets of goodies are even better.) Cities retain economic development officials and their staffs on the payroll for the express purpose of sweet-talking any CEO with a mind to relocate the firm, and one way to regard Florida's book is as a pitch for his personal consulting businesses, Catalytix and the Richard Florida Creativity Group. In any case, thanks to his book, the economic development game just got a lot harder. Pittsburgh and other US. cities would do well, Florida writes, to follow the example of Dublin, which attracted high-tech companies such as Gateway, Intel, IBM, and Microsoft through a combination of low corporate taxes, generous assistance from the European Union, and a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed workforce willing to work more cheaply than similarly trained people in, say, Seattle, New York, and London. This is not so much a miracle, Irish or otherwise, as old-school economic development. Dublin did not rest there, however. It capitalized on its historic authenticity, preserving it and "painstakingly revitalizing the same pubs where James Joyce, Bram Stoker, and Samuel Beckett might have once had a pint." The planners exercised the utmost taste, eager to avoid anything too obviously faux or too much like EuroDisney. Dublin also offered tax breaks to ''cultural creative people," thus preserving not

just its architecture but also "its growing legion of native celebrities, such as U2, Van Morrison and Liam Neeson." In fact, so great was the attraction of Dublin (or so lucrative its tax breaks) that Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to make one of his homes there. So, too, did Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, whom Florida was thrilled to spot quaffing in the prim and proper Shelbourne Hotel. The presence of this leatherclad grandee Florida chalks up to Dublin's ''clever and forward-looking strategy of leveraging authentic cultural assets to attract people and spur economic revitalization." He exclaims, "Today the district is hipper and more energetic than ever before." Florida's fairy tale about Dublin needs a little updating. According to a February 2003 article in the New York Times, 10,000 Irish have lost their jobs in the last year, and two of the country's major technology companies shut down their operations, with one moving its business to China and the other transferring everything to Poland and Wales. Why? Has Gdansk been secretly nurturing a great music scene? Is China home to the best new DJs? Or did those companies choose their new locations because of simple economics? In Florida's world, of course, decisions are never a matter of economics. And in his desperation to deny the most basic facts of the world we live in, he has mistaken the side effects of a booming economy-restaurants serving nouveau cuisine, quirky coffeeshops, art galleries, a vibrant music scene, a movie theater showing old foreign films, Dieselboy-for the causes of growth. His advice to cities is, in effect, to build Potemkin bohemias, complete with authentic edginess, leveraged cultural assets, and streetlevel culture, all prepared for those esteemed dignitaries, the members of the creative class, to arrive. It all sounds rather nice-who wouldn't want cool stuff like a coffeeshop or Ron Wood in their town, especially real estate developers? But as a prescription for a revived economy, this plan is so wrong-headed and backwards that it reads like satire. Artists and indie rockers are not the engines of economic recovery. They can't be, because they flourish-or at least

THE BAFFLER

manage to eke out a living-in places that can support artists and indie rockers. In Pittsburgh many bars and restaurants closed when the steel industry collapsed. They had no choice; the regulars couldn't any longer afford to patronize them. Opening the bars and restaurants again would not miraculously rejuvenate the steel industry. Nor would opening them bring some more creative industry to town. Bar- and restaurant-owners cannot in the absence of customers keep their businesses open, however much they want to generate a little authentic culture and do their part for economic development. They'd spend their time better awaiting the arrival of the Russian empress.

Last August, Florida met with some of the members of the creative class at "The Four-Day MBK conference sponsored by the Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Watching his presentation on videotape (it was carried on C-SPAN), I was struck by how ingratiating he was with his audience and hosts. "In the book I document the rise of a new class," he said, pausing briefly to look around the room. Then he added, "We are all members of this new class." He left it to the audience to infer that, therefore, each one of them was also creative. What a nice feeling.

So solicitous has Florida been to his new class that he checked with them before he decided what moniker he was going to tag them with. He tried out many names while working on the book, he writes. "I noticed that the ... people I was interviewing, particularly the younger ones, did not like to be called Bobos"-the term David Brooks coins for the bourgeois bohemians, in Bobos in Paradise, another poll-driven, pseudo-sociological study of the creative crew. Florida further noted that his focus group "bridled at the suggestion that they were in any way bohemian." So Florida, obedient, tried out other words. Like any marketing pro, he was eager to fine-tune his approach in order to move more product. He needed "something more with it," he confesses, "something that belonged to their generation." He tried out "alternative." They hated alternative. He floated still other terms. They hated those, too. Finally, he settled on "creative." The new name was an instant hit. "What they liked ... was the notion that in whatever they did, they could be thought to be creative." And who wouldn't, really? Addressing the audience of entrepreneurs on C-SPAN, he said, ''What you're doing is leading a broad social movement." Many of them may be excused for more modestly thinking when they woke up that morning that they were, in fact, running companies. But it was time, Florida said, to "begin to think about what kind of economy and society we want to build in the future." He called for a "New Deal for the creative age," a revolution that "harnesses our energy, our insights, our entrepreneurial zeal to transform ... political structures and governmental institutions." Florida's political platform was not without its idealistic planks: And what we need to do in the future is to invest as individuals, as company leaders, as public citizens, in ensuring the creativity of all, not jusr the venture capitalist, not just the successful entrepreneur, the artist, the chef, the entertainer, but more than that-that the little kid, growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood, doing his hip-hop poetry has an outlet fur that creativity.

Under a different New Deal, we once thought that society's challenge was to improve the lives

Flexibility and Its Discontents

of everyone in that disadvantaged neighborhood, not to seek out one individual and tap him with an entrepreneurial wand, making him briefly and unimaginably rich. The former is a democracy. The latter is not. It is, at best, a meritocracy, which is democracy lite or, as Christopher Lasch describes it, "a parody of democracy." In The Revolt of the Elites, a sharply critical book that anticipates Florida's by seven years and rebuts it on every point, Lasch distinguishes between meritocracy's opportunities for individual advancement and democracy's wider opening up of the means of civilization. Lasch writes: The new managerial and professional elites ... have a heavy investment in the notion of social mobility-the only kind of equality they understand. They would like to believe that Americans have always equated opportunity with upward mobility .... But a careful look at the historical record shows that the ptomise of American life came to be identified with social mobility only when more hopeful interpretations of opportunity had begun to fade, that the concept of social mobility embodies a fairly recent and sadly impoverished understanding of the ':.\merican Dream," and that its ascendancy, in our own time, measures the recession of the dream and not its fulfillment.

In due course, Florida concluded his speech, accepted the audience's applause, and then stepped down from the stage to field questions. A member of the creative class from New Orleans wanted to know why New Orleans ranked so low on Florida's creativity scale. Given its rich music scene, shouldn't it have been higher? And, as a follow-up, how would Florida recommend fixing New Orleans? Another creative class member asked Florida for tips on how to motivate the natural creativity in his staff, because right now he seemed to be doing all the creative work around there himself. A third creative confessed that as his company grew he was having trouble "treating people as individuals, because you can't, I mean, it's just an absolute nightmare." The distance between Lasch\; democratic vision and Florida's plan to lift up the hip-hop poet was great, but there existed a gap as large between Florida's dream and the creatives' how-

to pragmatism. The creatives, it turned out, didn't give a damn about Florida and his disadvantaged poet. Their grievances were phantoms, the feverish inventions of idle minds and comfortable bodies. Two decades of steady deregulation, generous tax cuts, and quietly rolled-back labor reforms wasn't enough, they wanted more. Their only interest was self-interest. A man from Philadelphia said, "My perception is that the unions in our big, old industrial city have really limited our growth and stymied us, and I just wanted to see what your thoughts were on what the future of unions holds." Unions are no longer relevant, Florida answered, catching on to the wave of resentment spreading across the room. He voiced his hope that everyone would "get beyond all these bureaucratic, large-scale, industrial institutions," but expressed his fear that in this recession there might be "a reaction backward." The questions kept coming, and they drifted farther from Florida's ideals. "Some of us were at the White House yesterday, and it seems that the administration's definition of a real person is the working class," another creative offered, apparently delusional. "As you state, the numbers are really with the creative class, and I think the luxury tax is a great example of stupid legislation. Do you see any type of real movement or push towards, you know.... " The question just trailed of there, nonsensically, and the audience member waited for Florida's wisdom. "I think we're the new silent majority," Florida declared. As he continued to speak, Nixon\; phrase hung in the air, and I wasn't sure if I'd actually heard it. I rewound the tape and listened again. "I think we're the new silent majority," Florida said, ignoring the fact that the creative class is neither a majority nor all that silent, assuming Florida\; packed speaking schedule is any indication. As Florida took another swipe at unions and then charged at special interests, both shadowy powers with "a stranglehold on our politics," he seemed less tied to his vision of taking care of the chefs and the poets and more like any member of his class. _

THE BAFFLER

DECEMBER

2,2002

As it happens every night beloveds, while we turned in the night sleeping uneasily the world went on without us. While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine. While we turned sleeping uneasily a warehouse of food aid was destroyed, stocks on upbeat sales soared, Australia threatened first strikes, there was heavy gunfire in the city of Man, the Belarus ambassador to Japan went missing, a cruise ship caught fire and in yet another, the third, cruise sick many on it got sick, and the Pope made a statement against xenophobia. While we turned sleeping uneasily Liam Gallagher brawled and irate fans complained that "Popstars: The Rivals" was fixed. While we turned sleeping uneasily the supreme court agreed to hear the case of whether university admissions may favor racial minorities. While we turned sleeping uneasily poachers caught sturgeon in the reed-fringed Caspian which shelters boar and wolves and some of the residents on the space shuttle planned a return flight to the US. Beloveds, our world is small and isolated. We live our lives in an apartment that is 600 square feet about a quarter mile from the shore on land that is 700 square miles and and 5,000 miles from the nearest land mass. Despite our isolation, there is no escape from the news of how many days are left in the Iraq inspections. The news poll for today was should we invade Iraq now or should we wait until the inspections are complete and we tried to laugh together at this question but our laughter was uneasy and we just decided to turn off the television that arrives to us from those other time zones. Beloveds, we do not know how to live our lives with any agency outside of our beds. It makes me angry that how we live in our beds-full of connected loving and full of isolated sleep and dreaming also--has no relevance to the rest of the world. How can the power of our combination of intimacy and isolation have so little power outside of the space of our bed? Beloveds, the shuttle is set to return home and out the window of the shuttle one can see the earth. "How massive the Earth is; how minute the atmosphere" one of the travelers notes. Beloveds, what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this minute atmosphere?

December 3, 2002

DECEMBER

3,2002

Beloveds, today the UN commission searched all of the square feet of Hussein:" office in a show of power. When I speak of feet I speak of attacks conceived in Afghanistan, planned in Germany, funded through Dubai, executed in America, using Saudis. I speak of the frozen assets of Osama bin Laden and the demand from Turkey for a second UN resolution before the US moves in on Iraq. I speak of Ahmed Zakayev being set free and Malaysia warning Australia that any pre-emptive strike against them even in the name of preventing terrorism would be an act of war. Beloveds, I keep trying to speak of loving but all I speak about is acts of war and acts of war and acts of war. I mean to speak of beds and bowers and all I speak of is Barghouti's call for a change of leadership and the strike in Venezuela against Chavez and the 66 ships on the fleet of shame. I speak of the morning possibility of peace for the 16 million people from Mali and Burkina Faso who are in the Ivory Coast that disappears by evening. I speak of the 80 evacuated from Touba. I speak of the 95 year old Palestianian woman who was shot by Israeli troops while driving her car. I speak of the 600 year old Spanish Haggada now in Sarajevo. I speak of Burundi and the Forces for Defense of Democracy. I speak of the US wanting to ban the antidote to nerve gas on the Oil-Food plan with Iraq. I speak of the release of Saaduddin Ibrahim and his 27 employees. I do not say more than movement when I speak. Beloveds, we say we do not want to move any more. We want to see ourselves as located and bound even if not local, located and bound to someone else:" land and there by chance even as we do not see ourselves as part of the land. This is all we want today. Yet the world swirls around us. The ocean levels rise and the beach gets smaller. We say our bed is part of everyone else's bed even as our bed is denied to others by an elaborate system of fences and passport checking booths. We wake up in the night with just each other and admit that even while we believe that we want to believe that we all live in one bed of the earth's atmosphere, our bed is just our bed and no one else's and we can't figure out how to stop that from being that way.

-Juliana Spahr

"the music industry mafia is pimping girl power sniping off sharpshooter singles from their styrofoam towers." - a.d.

~\~~(O 13 mt+ll!m Ia

Brought to you by Ani DiFranco. Putting substance before style and art before profit, Ani injects her new album Evolve with genuine poetry and innovative sounds. It's the definitive musical statement from the Little Folksinger and her 5-piece band. IN STORES NOW RIGHTEOUS BABE RECORDS WWW.RIGHTEOUSBABE.COM

CHILDISH THINGS by 7Jan Kr,lly

childhood wish fulfilled on Christmas Day-and this within mere months of my thirty-fifth birthday. My big sister gave me the Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Man:, a plastic objet d'art I've desired since I first saw it in a comic book ad years ago. The Prisoner is a plastic model kit, an example of a once-honored craft barely hanging on in contemporary American male pubescence. Following a medieval dungeon motif, the Prisoner is simply a skeleton in shredded clothing chained to a wall. Mouth agape and body slack in a postmortem slouch, when fully constructed the figure serves no earthly purpose, save to amuse young boys and make grown men realize they need to get out and/or laid more often. Brief decades after its apogee, model kit building was unceremoniously tossed on the lost childhood pile along with slingshots, soapbox racers, and string-wound tops. Where once young boys huddled in suburban basements and rec rooms to assemble Chevys, P-51 Mustangs, and Panzer tanks while dabbling in remedial mind expansion through model glue, today they memorize control-button combinations to remove their opponents spine in Mortal Kombat V. But models had their day, from the late Forties to the late Seventies, with an Alpine peak of popularity near the end. The variety was staggering. Military vehicles, cars, TV characters, dinosaurs, and historical figuresit's unlikely any human endeavor escaped memorialization in ABS plastic. The most successful kit manufacturer was likely the Prisoner's creator, the Aurora Company, which fostered a loyalty among its young customers bordering on the cuhish. Aurora sold kits with modest success for years when, HAD A

in 1959, Marketing Director Bill Silverstein led the company into the plastic simulacrum avantgarde. Silverstein hit upon the idea of putting a contest form (read: marketing survey) in every kit, asking young builders to suggest what they would like to see enshrined in plastic. In the eternal voice of boyhood, the lads demanded the grotesque. Out of three thousand submissions, Aurora selected a fifteen-year-old who proposed the old Universal Films monsters. After much cajoling, Aurora's skeptical and skittish honchos allowed Silverstein to release a Frankenstein kit in 1961. It rapidly sold out. "It seemed like every kid in America wanted his own monster," Silverstein told the author of The Aurora Hiffory and Price Guide. Emboldened, Aurora produced other molds and gave their plants the okay to churn out monsters. Frankenstein's monster was followed by Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Bride of Frankenstein, and others. One by one, classic horror icons populated America's bookshelves and nightstands. The Prisoner was an interesting exception among the traditional fiends. Released in 1966, the kit was developed and trademarked by Famous Monflers ofFilmland, a periodical shrine to horror fandom and embryonic geek culture. Aurora was a faithful FMF advertiser, and the magazine backscratchingly promoted Aurora by running contests that challenged their readers to submit customized versions of the monster kits. Knowing their readers' morbid tastes, the publishers put their skulls together and came up with the Forgotten Prisoner of CastelMare. Upon reflection, it's a repulsive concept, really. While Aurora's other models recreated cinematic chimerae, the Prisoner was essen-

THE BAFFLER

tially a representation of violated human remains. (Not just left to starve, the poor devil was also snacked upon by the model's ornamental rats, spider, and snake.) In a way, the Prisoner betokened a relaxation of America's sheltering of its young 'uns. Like Siddhartha in his palace, young boomers seemed purposefully hoodwinked about life's ickiness. Death occurred everywhere in Greil Marcus' ''old, weird America," but in the postwar period dead and decaying things were quickly swept away. Imagine, then, how the typical Sixties mom and pop reacted upon entering Sonny Boy's room and finding him assembling make-believe corpses. Yet Aurora continued to push propriety's limits. Kids soon could build torture chambers equipped with red-hot pokers, guillotines, and gibbets. New character kits included mad scientist Dr. Deadly, too-sexy-for-junior-high Vampirella, and, inevitably, a terrified girl. Hotpantsed and halter-topped, the latter kit left much flesh area exposed for the model builder to lovingly paint with Testors' #2001 (Skin Tone). Lacking not only clothes but also a name, she was called only "The Victim." Soon, organizations like Parents for Responsibility in the Toy Industry protested the pernicious influences the models allegedly exercised over the kidlings. Moreover, the National Organization for Women somehow failed to appreciate the Victim and joined the outrage choir. Familyloving Nabisco Company, which bought Aurora out in 1971, moved to soothe protesters by having Aurora produce less shocking models. Perhaps feeling betrayed, Aurora's fans stayed away, and in 1978, the company tanked. Thus, parental action saved the day, and children were nevermore corrupted by plastic boogymen.

How is it then that on Christmas morning 2002, I could unwrap the distinctive "long box" of the Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Mare kit, admire its art by James Bama (a pulp illus-

trator famous fur his stirringly homoerotic Doc Savage book covers), and huff the scent of fresh styrene? Thank Thomas E. Lowe for that. Son of kitty litter inventor Edward Lowe, Thomas made his own pile of dough selling household doohickeys throughout the Eighties. Longing for the toys of his youth-and perspicaciously recognizing the growing trend in post-boomer nostalgia-Lowe founded Playing Mantis, a company dedicated to reconstructing toy memories. Starting with Johnny Lightning-brand die-cast car reissues, Lowe moved on to the old Aurora monster models, selling them under the Polar Lights label. It was Lowe's reissue, not the original Prisoner, that turned up under my Christmas tree. Original Aurora kits, mint in box [audible gasp], now command upward of three grand, which tells you how badly some people want their childhood back-or how badly they want something denied them the first time around. The Aurora monster models aren't the only reissues out there either. Those obsessed, mostly adult males, with collecting childhood talis-

Childish Things mans, now support thousands of sellers of inconsequential crap. Thanks to the Internet god, pre-adolescent relics can now be bought and sold at auction, and for objects chased into obscurity by the action groups, cheap facsimiles are easy to find. So, what's my excuse? Put me in the camp of the denied. Discovering the Prisoner's reissue during a Web search, I felt the prickles of memory of wanting-wanting-wanting but never getting the Prisoner in my kidhood. I added the Prisoner to my Web site wish-list (itself an interesting Internet phenomenon that permits adults to unashamedly maintain a year-round letter to Santa while letting marketers, as with Amazon.coms wish-list feature, pinpoint a consumer's past, present, and future desires). Seeing the Prisoner on my list, my big sister undoubtedly sought to redress this cruel omission of my youth. While I was tickled to finally have the Prisoner in my mitts, when it came time to construct it, my mind went, to quote Brett McNeil, "exquisitely blank." I'd forgotten the specifics, the "art" of model building. I needed paint. I needed brushes. I needed fixer, exacto blades, and that marvelous glue. A visit to Toys 'R' Us provided an expected shock. Besides a few Snap-tite kits (idiot-proof models requiring neither paint nor glue), model kits were no longer for sale. No planes, trains, or automobiles; no tanks, no dinosaurs, and certainly no Forgotten Prisoners. Apparently, Toys 'R' Us once carried the Polar Lights reissues, but now nary a wolfman hair was to be fuund. A later trip to a hobby shop increased my suspicions that bona fide adolescents no longer thrilled to model kits. I perused the racks in earshot of several kids and their older male companions. It was these fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who baritone-squealed in joyful surprise to discover that "they still make" suchand-such, breathlessly recounting for their young charges how they built this or that model, which they eventually immolated, blew up, or picked off with a pellet gun. The process of assembling a model is a meditative act. My Prisoner arrived in thirty pieces,

each numbered and attached to stiff styrene trellises that became superfluous once the fruit was plucked off. The numbers and assembly instructions, accompanied by an exploded view, were a joke. Even the most mentally challenged child, I thought, could recognize the front and back of a skull, and know not to attach a forearm to the knee joint. While not up to the standards of Gray's Anatomy, the Prisoner is a fairly accurate portrayal of a skeleton. Its educational aspect is still questionable, however, as the poor creature's tattered clothes conceal 70 percent of the bones. Valuable information regarding the pelvis, vertebrae, femur, and humerus bones is lost. The Prisoner is a Level One model, one that can be constructed within a half-hour's time. My adult schedule, persnickety attention to detail, and fumblethumbed approach to construction stretched that out to about three hours, not including paint drying time. The instructions recommended that I use black for the Prisoner's clothes and red for his waist band. I vetoed those colors. With his buccaneer clothing and rakish sash, I thought my Prisoner would look like a waiter from a Spanish restaurant. I outgeeked myself by creating a visual media pun. Painting his coat black with white piping and his trousers a buttercrunch tan, my prisoner became The Prisoner, protagonist of Patrick MacGoohans Kafkaesque television series. I giggled over my little joke. My wife declared me a dork. Overall, my model-building experience was tranquil, my mind no more riddled with images of rape and bloodshed than usual. Happily, I was not transported back to my youth. I was no younger when I finished the Prisoner than when I began-in fact I was noticeably older. Here and there, memories wafted up like glue fumes. I recalled the last time my hands were caked with acrylic paint and rubber cement, back in '79 when I built C-3Po. Never particularly adept, I could never make my results look like the boxes' elaborate illustrations of, for instance, soaring Grumman F4F Wildcats strafing Japanese Betty bombers. My efforts on the Prisoner were not helped by

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my now much larger fingers either. Still, I did have, as they say, "fun," even if the glue has lost its kick.

Model kit popularity has faded, but parental invigilators remain: some noble, most simplistic and reactionary. Groups like the Lion and Lamb Project, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and the quite potent National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) continue to push for softer-edged toys. Their mission statements sound helpful and uncontroversial. The NIMF supports the First Amendment, to be sure, but seeks to "maximize the benefits and minimize the harm of media on children and families through research, education, and advocacy." The Lion and Lamb Project "is an initiative by parents for parents, providing information about the effects of violent entertainment, toys and games on children's behavior." The horribly irresponsible media certainly love them. The Lion and Lamb Project provides tasty holiday newsbites with its yearly "Dirty Dozen Toy List," in which playtime nonos have moved beyond guns, knives, and bombs. Consider a recent target, Take Two Interactive's game Grand Theft Auto: V1ce City. This video game encourages players "to hijack police cars, gun down pedestrians, kill policemen, pick up prostitutes in order to get 'health points' ... and then kill the prostitutes in order to get their money back." Yikes! Yet Lion and Lamb also analyzes the heck out of the most harmless-seeming toys. For example, it pillories Nerf-Blastin' Zurg, a "brightly colored action figure" from the Toy Story franchise. Zurg is a bad boy, Lion and Lamb declares, because he can "shoot darts from a triple-barreled toy gun. 'Prepare to meet your DOOM!' reads a strip on the back of the box ... 'ARRGGH!!' screams Zurg as a dart bounces back and hits him in the chest." The toy "takes cartoon violence off the screen and puts it into children's playrooms." Lion and Lamb makes the predictable mistake of suggesting alternative, peaceable, and inarguably lame toys, such as Phlat Ball. ("Is it a

disc!? Is it a ball!?" inquires the copy. In an uncaring universe, does it matter?) These groups frown heavily on macho, and so tilt most of their attention toward boys' toys. Yet skimming through their Web sites, it's notable that while they all decry violent toys, little direct protest is made about war or violence itself--other than to say that they are very bad, and we must keep our children far removed from them. (The Mennonite-based Christian Peacemaker'leams are an exception: They send packs of Anabaptists to military hot spots as well as to Toys 'R' Us parking lots to advocate nonviolence.) NIMF has a vocal proponent in Senator Joseph Lieberman, too, who stated about V1ce City-type games, "This relatively small but highly popular minority is not just pushing the envelope-they are shooting, torturing and napalming it beyond all recognition, and beyond all decency." So stated the senator who later voted to give Our President permission to use real guns and bombs on real human beings.

In contrast to their counterparts in the buttondown Sixties world, today's parental action groups have lost a valuable weapon: their target's sense of shame. Many of the worst offenders, like Grand Theft Auto, are obviously aimed at adults. Consequently, a new refrain is: "What if a child were to get his or her hands on a copy?" So gonzo, over-the-top violent is Grand Theft Auto and its kin, it just doesn't seem right to let the little urchins near them. Damage must be done, right? If a toys "psychological damage" involved the mopping up of juvenile gray matter, the shelves would bow and creak with only the fluffY and furry. Thus, the desensitization argument continues to be pushed, with numerous psychological studies cited (but rarely named) "proving" such damage. NIMF, for instance, presents factoids like: "Studies have shown, and experts agree, that a reduction of violence in the media will not only reduce violence on our streets, it will reduce the cost of health care by as much

Childish Things as 25 percent." So will lobotomies, and with greater certainty. In every sense, psychological damage is difficult to assess, but since the toys look so damned awful, that's proof enough for parents. Note the rush to judgement in media firestorms like the Columbine aftermath, where antisocial behavior was immediately traced to toy (Doom) and/or media (The Matrix) "damage." Never you mind that Eric Harris was on Luvox and Kip Kinkel heard voices long before exploding.

A pet expert is retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and researcher of what he calls killology-the study of why people kill-which is explained at killology.com. Grossman proposes that violent video games and toys condition our children for mayhem, much in the same way that, ahem, the U.S. armed forces prepare soldiers for combat. (Is the message then, "Wait until you're eighteen, kid"?) Grossman claims a "pseudosociopathy" is induced in training soldiers through simulation of combat conditions. Gradually abandoning his fear of death and taking life, the soldier can jettison the rationalism of the cerebrum for the self-preservation instincts of the reptile brain. Fair enough. We've all seen Full Metal Jacket. Still, Grossman is prone to statements like, "After nuclear holocaust, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media." Poppycock. The pervasive, unspoken fear is that this alleged relaxation of morals, taste, and restraint is not so much inspiring good kids to antisocial acts as leading them to believe it's all right to roam savage and free. The more horrible yet rarely spoken thought is not the idea that Nerf-Hurtling Zurg, Marilyn Manson, and even actual firearms turn kids into mon-

sters, but that the little bastards are monsters already. Consider children as insane adults. Rippling with hormones and rife with selfpossession, kids are indeed nigh-psychopathic and stroboscopically twitching in the throes of a time period most adults considered nightmarishly uncertain. Amusingly, parent groups and marketers both seek to extend this sense of childhood, this "innocence" for as long as possible. Spilling over into the twenties, thirties, even forties, childhood now leaves a larger and longer path. Most little boys, however, are already terrifying. Whether flicking flies into spiders' webs, squashing anthills, or hitching M-8os to frogs' backs, their sadism is astonishing-and this in the days before Playstation 2. Boys no more need to be inspired to horror by model kits, television, or video games than simply bored by the universal law that most of the time nothing is happening. School shootings predate our electronic scapegoats-remember Brenda Spencer's 1979 "I don't like Mondays" rampage? Columbine turned fearing for our children into fearing our children; music, media, and games were to be held accountable for Klebold and Harris' rage; and the cycle spun on. But remembering a golden age is always a mug's game. Quantitatively, even qualitatively, violence may have increased in the past several decades, but equating its rise with the number of units of Toy X sold is dubious at best. Toy protests are an attempt to identify a tangible source of an intangible problem, a physical thing that we can destroy, thus preventing evil from getting' em while they're young. Despite this, and as toy history has proven, no matter how many Forgotten Prisoners of Castel-Mare or copies of Tekken 3 you round up and burn, violence isn't going anywhere. As bizarre as it may sound, the Prisoner is starkly honest. It is a nonironic representation of human remains-a genuine memento mori rather than a simulated horror. Yet I can't help but chuckle at the Prisoner's utter fakeness. Mandible drooping, he chortles at the absurdity of his past status as a death fetish for boys

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and the parents who feared them. Some toy designers do indeed create a steady supply of funtime gore, but only to meet a demand-perhaps spurred by the stern maternal "no!" of the parent groups. For every parental action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The current producers of the Prisoner, Grand Theft Auto, and likewise, I would guess, are male, in their thirties, and possessed of senses of humor black as the Ace of Spades. Protesting mothers-goaded by their procreative arroganceare not. While my own parents never denied me the right to play Dungeons and Dragons, absorb Saturday afternoon monster movies, and read brain-rotting comics until my eyes glowed like red embers, many of my friends' parents did, citing the old arguments of protecting them from Satan, smack, and sodomy. The reaction and results were not what either expected. If denied in youth, you can now fulfill your every childish wish. Now you can own those psychologically scarring monster

models. Couldn't own the Victim in her day? With vector graphics, game designers grown up and intoxicated on Woo and Tarantinoand perhaps seething at past wrist-slappingsallow you to virtually experience the warmth of a whore's blood on your bare knuckles and the intoxicating thrill of barreling down on pedestrians and randomly popping cops and passerby in the head with an automatic. Up yours, Mommy! To repeat an earlier point, from what are we protecting our children? The drive is to soften the instinct to kill, and to shelter children from that which is horrible. In educating children to not be murderers, however, it's rarely considered that shielding them so carefully might give them an exaggerated sense of the world's goodness and a diminished idea of their own vulnerability. In short, we risk producing victims, and worse yet, benumbed proles oblivious to the fact that, in many ways, this can be a miserable world. â&#x20AC;˘

GO WEST, EVERYONE ... by Krpin Mattson

OMEWHERE IN SOUTHEASTERN UTAH: I am tion of the open road-the tough and macho looking down about two thousand feet into culture of the frontier-Thoreau was somea canyon that appears candy-colored-pink thing of a Victorian. His appreciation of the swirls splashed against a white sandstone back- outdoors combined the animalistic with the inground. There is just the slightest evidence of a tellectual and spiritual: "You must walk like a crooked creek outlined by green tamarisks. In camel, which is said to be the only beast which the distance stand snow-capped mountains. ruminates when walking." It was the "great Stunned by the beauty of this place, my wife awakening light" that he experienced out in the and I discuss our descent while getting our two- wild-the spiritual world of nature celebrated year-old snug in his pack. We will spend eight by his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson-that drew days walking down the canyon, hoping the creek Henry back to the woods. Rumination, reflecbed will provide water to drink. With just enough tion, solitude, and thought-such were the food on our backs, plus some rope and other ideals inspired by the natural world. essentials, we have stripped ourselves down to I appreciate the great transcendentalist more the basics, as we always do on such trips. Soon than usual as I trudge through this Southwestafter descending, we will see ancient Indian ruins ern backcountry and ruminate myself I need (entire communities that left behind only their my Thoreau since I'm finding it harder to make houses for us to peer at), bizarre rock drawings on these trips nowadays. It's not the pain in my canyon walls that make little sense to us, cabins knees. It's not the dehydration we face on the built by early Mormon settlers (abandoned out third day, desperately searching for water in a of hard luck), natural arches and bridges carved bone-dry stretch of the canyon. It's not seeing a into canyon walls, and lots of red rocks. Most cougar's tracks and wondering if he's out there importantly, we will experience the sort of sur- somewhere, greedily licking his lips in preparareal solitude that few people get nowadays. This tion for feast. Its none of this. It's whats happenis the only place I can hear the wind blowing ing to the land out here in our new Wild West; its what we're doing to those few stretches of and nothing else. This is why we are here. As usual, I brought a book of Henry David wilderness we haven't turned into condo housThoreau's writings with me. At night, we pitch ing units for the rich-to those places where we camp, and I crack the book open, struck by can actually experience solitude, escape, the Thoreaus ponderings about the natural world. I gelling of our sanity away from the crowds. The first sign of bad things hits us on our wipe the sand from the pages and listen to Henry discuss the "art of walking," explaining fifth day when we run into evidence of automowhy he took off on long sojourns through the biles. Jeep tracks have cut across the stream bed woods on a regular basis, something his friends at one point, leaving behind smashed plants never understood. The wild country reener- and spilt oil. The tracks come from local county gized Thoreau. He loved the "roughness of commissioners who have gotten it into their character" of those who had direct contact with heads that this federal land is theirs. After all, it's nature. While anticipating Whitman's celebra- in their backyard, as they never cease to point

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out. There was once a "road" that went down this canyon-a road open only to owners of high-clearance vehicles capable of making it through four-foot-deep water and over boulders and two-foot ledges. At the end of the "road" (really just the floor of two canyons) stands a majestic arch that tourists love. The National Park system thought about shutting this road down after too many people got stuck in the stream bed. They held public meetings to solicit input. The park system presented its case: 4x4's were ripping up the desert ecosystem, which, unlike wetter environments, is more delicate, more susceptible to damage. Why not give the stream a break from tires and oil, park administrators and some locals argued. After all, there were other roads in the general vicinity. But the commissioners could not fathom this: Why should their land be locked up by the elitist federal government? They pressed their case in courts; they cried for "access" for everyone: Tourists mount the barricades! Only jeeps could move people into the backcountry, they argued. They sued, won, and now drive to the arch when they desire. The logic of the commissioners strikes me as odd when traveling the land by foot. Call me a Luddite and a crank, as most would, but I really cannot fathom how going to see something via foot is more elitist than tanking up a sport utility vehicle and driving there. I've done the requisite cost analysis: My backpack, boots, and food cost around $200. The cost of an SUV capable of making it here costs around $30,000. I'm stumbling on the logic. Of course, in the end, roads in this area are often cut for the pure sake of fighting wilderness designation. Declare wilderness in southeastern Utah, and anyone will tell you that there will be a bulldozer and road cutters out there in seconds. There doesn't even need to be a promise of oil or minerals; its the damn principle of the thing. The concept of public lands and the idea that preservation should be weighed in any decision concerning them-these thoughts are anathema to local elites stoked by the voices of the "Wise Use movement." While before, the locals might have appeared as renegade yahoos,

now they have a cause and higher purpose. It's harder and harder nowadays to know which arguments against environmentalists represent homegrown resentment against the feds (and easterners more generally) and which are nurtured by the new Astroturf movements of the national lobbying organizations. The Wise Use movement has been hard at work since the 1980s. Its leaders come from institutions that barely cloak their libertarian predilections-the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE)-or prideful regionalismPeople for the West. Back in 1984, Ron Arnold, one of the most vocal Wise Users, rode the original Reagan backlash, seeing environmentalism as a thinly veiled form of communism. He explained to a pro-pesticide group: "Environmentalism is an already existing vehicle by which the Soviet Union can encourage the Free World to voluntarily cripple its own economy." Socialism collapsed, as we all know, but that did not prevent Arnold from arguing in the mid-1990s that "the National Park Service is an empire designed to eliminate all private property in the United States." People for the West uses these arguments to wage war against the enemies of mining companies. Most of their budget comes from mining companies, as it happens, but they like to think they're just a citizens' group fighting the good fight. It's no longer the people versus the special interests; it's the people defending the special interests against elitists in the federal government. It matters not that many Americans consider themselves sympathetic to environmentalism; this is all about whipping up the backlash. As the journalist David Helvarg discovered and wrote about in The war Againfl the Greens, the Wise Users offer all sorts of assistance to those waging battles against environmentalism, mosrly by proffering public relations campaigns. In the process, the Wise Users have discovered a cash cow. As Alan Gottlieb, the head of CDFE (which works both on antienvironmental backlash and against gun regulation), explained to Helvarg: "I've never seen anything payout as quickly as this Wise Use thing has done. What's really good about it is it touches the same kind

W'e~

Everyone ...

of anger as the gun stuff, and not only generates a higher rate of return but also a higher average dollar donation. My gun stuff runs about $18. The Wise Use stuff breaks $40." That might just be because, well, theres big money behind the desire to open up public lands to oil drilling and mining. As Gottlieb makes clear, Wise Use taps the pocketbooks not of small-gun owners but of the corporate elite hungry fOr public land. The Wise Users and their industrial allies are not the only ones who want to get their hands on the West. The culture industry wants in too. Of course, since the 1930S, Hollywood has loved the backdrop of red rocks, and today it seems every car commercial must be filmed in the new Wild West. But none of this compares to the origins of Eco-Challenge, an event that had its kick-off just a few miles from where my wife and I are hiking. Eco-Challenge added hipness to the backlash-something it desperately needs to draw in the Gen X crowd who know little about the dreams of mining companies but do want their adrenalin pumped. The event is the brainchild of Mark Burnett, a British-born veteran of the Falklands War. After Burnett expatriated to Los Angeles back in the 1980s, he sought a way to turn his military talents to entrepreneurial advantage. He hit upon the idea of a race in which competing teams would dash across 370 miles of Utah's canyons-hiking, biking, horseback riding, rafting, and climbing. When he pitched the idea to MTV in 19% the execs loved it. The future president of MTV gushed in a story about

Eco-Challenge fOr Los Angeles Magazine: "This is MTY. It's pro-social. It's hip. It's fun. It's like we invented it." They were off to the races. So what if environmentalists opposed the plan? So what if there would be damage to the area as participants chased horses and were chased themselves by camera trucks? MTV wanted it, and better yet, Eco-Challenge fit the spirit of the New Economy. This was the time when "team players" displaced the lone man in the gray flannel suit. And what could be more about team playing than having to go at it hard against the rugged wilderness in small groups? As Burnett himself hyped it up to one reporter: '1\n adventure race is continuous problem solving-just like in business." MTV nodded its head, followed by the Discovery Channel and now its new host, the USA Network. It's not hard to imagine what Thoreau would have thought of Eco-Challenge. This was outdoors exploration, certainly, but by orchestration and planning, the sort that outlawed rumination. Theres no time for such hoiry-toiry stuff. The wild country is now a space for competing. It is not a place for pondering existence but for disciplining ourselves against the terrible laxness that might sneak up and destroy our economic potency. The wild country is no friend or ally or inspiration but our enemy. Beat it, EcoChallenge tells us, and you can not only win the prize and learn new skills of team playing but also get on television. Scale the sucker, Burnett suggests to his enthusiasts, but don't stop and think about the beaury of that stupid sand heap. Eco-Challenge helped spawn today's "extreme sports" craze-the cultural pay-off for our New Economy's elite. Today's business leaders are donning not sack suits from Brooks Brothers but the fleece of Patagonia. Our robber barons no longer explore European towns, desperately buying the culture they could not find in America, but instead are whitewater rafting in Third World countries or mountain-biking in Moab, Utah. Big money now buys big adventure. The underbelly of this craze became national news when four people died ascending Mount Everest in May 1996. The more details about that adventure came out, the worse it sounded.

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There were the stories of climbers tossing aside empty bottles of oxygen while walking over people who died on previous expeditions. There were the exorbitant sums people paid to make the trip (close to $IOO,OOO). Then there was the truly outrageous story told by Jon Krakauer about Sandy Pittman, the New York socialite who had already tried to ascend back in 1993 and came back in 1996. During her 1993 trip, Pittman brought not only a "duffel bag full of gourmet food" but also a "portable television and video player." Pittman did not truck these things up the mountain herself; she let a Sherpa do it for her. When she ascended during the fateful 1996 trip, she had the Sherpa carry not only her junk but also her, latched on by harness. She had, after all, paid good money for this, and her friends really wanted her to make it to the top. If you read middlebrow cultural critics-a key source for the recent blather concerning extreme sports-you'd think this 'Adventure Craze" was all about the 'American character," the inherent yahooness of people who moved to the frontier at the drop of a hat. In an article written for American Heritage, Anthony Brandt discussed his own ascent of Mount Rainier and then let his thoughts run wide about extreme sports. Of course, he admitted that much of the recent craze is due to "prosperity." But sooner or later, the middlebrow refrain trumps any economic explanation. 'Adventure," Brandt explained, is "deeply embedded in the culture" of America. Or as Thomas Ricks put it in a story about Moab for the Atlantic Monthly, adventure is a part of the "wild new west" that goes back to all that frontier cowboy sort of stuff. The 'American character"-the mythical invention of Fifties historians-has now been updated for the Gen X crowd. The middlebrows miss something. After all, MTV initiated a marketing strategy fur Generation X when it picked up Eco-Challenge. In 1997, Brandweek, that installment bible for todays image whores, pronounced the dawn of "The Extreme Generation." The author, Myra Stark, a "director of knowledge management" at Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising, explained to

her readers that extreme sports is also known as "alternative sports" and that one of its "fulk heroes," Missy Giove, "sports a Mohawk topknot with shaved hair on the sides, sometimes silver, sometimes purple, along with tattoos and body piercing." Stark then warned advertisers of extreme sports, a bit absurdly, not to succumb to "advertising cliche." Market the hell out of this stuff, she suggests, just be cool about it. Of course, the outdoors clothing corporations don't have much to worry about; no one seems to have caught onto the excessive hype. After all, everyone's buying the stuff. Columbia Sportswear's earnings, for instance, were up 70 percent in 2000, its stock soaring. So how about that rugged American character? Sure seems resistant and self-driven, doesn't it? In the end, most of us know the area my wife and I are hiking through from America's most famous pop culture icon-the car commercial, especially the more recent sort where a sport utility vehicle zips through red rock country, alternative music blaring as it bumps up and down, dirt flying everywhere. Thoreau once suggested walking west in solitude; today we are practically reprimanded if we don't come here in our 4X4's, ready to rip up some new roads, to celebrate the well-being provided by the New Economy but also to make clear that we have not become flabby in the process. This is why I'm finding it harder to come out hereit's more difficult to cut through the bullshit, to ignore the utterly insipid messages that cloud the beauty and solitude of this place we're hiking. The old Wild West might have been a place for yahoos to burn down their farms as they moved along-devastating the land and slaughtering the Indians in the process. Today, the violence comes when one of the Wise Users loses it and sticks a pipe bomb in an environmentalists car (it has happened). The damage is done when a team of mountain biking executives, reenergizing their management skills, comes barreling through, looking for new terrain to tear up. The land weighs heavy under this stress. The postmodern Wild West might have changed the imagery, but it has not changed the appetite fur destruction. _

LONG LIVE SOCIALIST REALISM! by <JJubravka Ugresic

DON'T KNOW WHY, but the rules of marketoriented literary culture remind me of good old socialist realism. I admit that my heads a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe, but thats what I think. I also admit that I travel too much-here, there, back again-so I see things all mixed up. And maybe it's just nostalgia. But isn't that understandable? My entire country has been destroyed by murderers and criminals, my libraries have been burned by thugs. Surely I have a right to nostalgia, at least. Today there is hardly anyone who knows what socialist realism is. East European artists have an allergic reaction to it. For the last fifty years East European artists have developed elaborate strategies of subversion, and have given socialist realism such a hammering that they have killed it stone dead. They were so bloodthirsty that they erased all trace of it. That's why no one can explain what the socialist realist scourge was anymore. For Westerners, and more surprisingly also for Easterners, the idea of socialist realism has been sealed in its monumental icon: Mukhina's WOrker and Collective Farm Girl (Rabochy i kolhoznitsa) monument, which also appears as the logo for movies produced by Mosfilm. And, of course, in the figure of the hypothetical father of the term itself, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. A brief recap. Socialist realism demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. That truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism. Socialist realist literature must be accessible to the broad mass

of readers. This fundamental didactic demand produces a novel structured around the struggle of positive and negative heroes (Superman vs. Lex Luthor!), and various types of novels: the "production novel," the "pedagogical novel," and so on. If we ignore its victims for a moment, then we can say that the art of socialist realism was a happy art, even when it dealt with darker themes. My personal favorite is the ''disability'' theme, introduced by Nikolai Ostrovsky in his novel How the Steel lVtts Tempered, which is considered to be an official cornerstone of socialist realist literature. Ostrovsky's novel is a story about a war invalid, a blind man, a positive hero who in the end overcomes everything. The Yugoslav film Jull People also used this theme. The main characters are a man and a woman: an engineer with a missing leg (a former partisan, a war invalid) and a young, blind doctor. They fall in love. They spend days working hard, he to build the society of the future, she in her hospital. They often go skiing together: The engineer skis on one leg, the doctor by memory. The doctor subjects herself to a risky operation, after which her sight is restored. I shall never erase from my heart the magnificent happy ending, when the limping engineer and the formerly blind woman meet on a mighty socialist dam. Their kiss, accompanied by the mighty roar of the water and the ecstatic applause of the workers, will remain in my cultural memory forever. The art of socialist realism was not only happy, but also sexy. Nowhere have so many muscular and healthy bodies been put on display, so many entwined haymakers and tractor drivers, workers and peasants, strong men and

THE BAFFLER

women. Nowhere, to put it in contemporary terms, were so many Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Roseanne Barrs, and Sylvester Stallones joined into one, powerful body. Socialist realism was an optimistic and joyful art. Nowhere else was there so much faith in a bright future and the definitive victory of good over evil. Nowhere except in market-oriented culture. Most of today's literary production bases its success on the simple socialist-realist idea of progress. Bookstore counters are heaped with books that contain one single idea: how to overcome personal disability, how to improve ones own situation. Books about blind people regaining their sight, fat people becoming thin, sick people recovering, poor people becoming rich, mutes speaking, alcoholics sobering up, unbelievers discovering faith, the unfortunate becoming lucky. All these books infect the reading public with the virus of belief in a bright personal future. And a bright personal future is at the same time a bright collective future, as Oprah Winfrey unambiguously suggests to her impressive world audience. To be successful, market literature must be

didactic. Hence the enormous number of books with the word "How" in their titles. How to this and How to that-How the Steel Was Tempered. The American best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back has roughly the same healing effect on the American Black oppressed female proletariat as Maxim Gorkys novel Mother once had on its readership. Contemporary market literature is realistic, optimistic, joyful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic, and intended for the broad reading masses. As such, it ideologically remolds and educates the working people in the spirit of personal victory, the victory of some good over some evil. It is socialist realist. Some seventy years have passed since the birth of socialist realism. East European writers are the ones who lost out in this story-they're the ones I am sorry for-because they lacked the self-confidence to stand up for their own art, and threw the old, hard-working socialist realist writers in the trash without learning from them the skills they need in the literary marketplace. They battered their child to death. And so, socialist realism is dead. Long live socialist realism! _

''You spent our whole credit card bill at Dusty Groove again? Pm 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 fmd 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!

dustvuroove.com _

73afJlomathy LAndrea 'Brady teaches at Brunel University in Uxbridge, England. "Park American Dream" is from her collection Vacation of a Lifetime (Salt).

JVpin Mattson teaches American history at Ohio University and is the author of InteUectualr in Action and a co-editor of Steal This University.

Faber & Faber in October.

A member of the second generation New York School, 'Bemadette Mayers many books include Story, Moving, Memory, Studying Hunger and The Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions).

LAna Marie Cox's resume is littered with failed hipster-paradise dot-coms such as Feed and Suck. She has not learned her lesson and continues publishing at theanticmuse.com.

Juliana Spahr is the author of Puck You-AlohaI Love lOu (Wesleyan), Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (University of Alabama), and Reponse (Sun &

Nifk Cohen writes for the Guardian. His new book, Pretty Straight Guys, will be published by

f02neth Nel Cukier, a writer based in Boston and Paris, is working on a book about the Internet and international relations.

Steve 'FeatherHone is a writer and photographer. He lives in upstate New York. LAda

1?i!na (jrybauskas is a Chicago artist and

graduate of The School of the An Institute of Chicago. Her current work investigates ideologies of celebration, patriotism, and empire.

Jamie IVJlven is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family's World After Violence and an advisor to the resident council of the Stateway Gardens public housing development in Chicago.

Moon).

7Yubravka Ugresic is writer who writes in Croatian (and sometimes in English) and lives in Amsterdam. Her most recent book is Thank lOu for Not Reading (Dalkey Archive Press). .(gurie 'Weeks lives in New York City and was a contributor to the screenplay for Boys Done Cry. She is currently finishing her first novel, Zipper Mouth, from which THE BAFFLER'S excerpt is taken; as well as a book of short stories, Deb-

bie's Barium Swallow or, I Know I Am A Flower.