No20 by The Baffler

No. 20

MARK S. FISHER

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No. 20

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 1

Number 20 EDITOR IN CHIEF

John Summers 9 FOUNDING EDITOR

Thomas Frank

SENIOR EDITOR

Chris Lehmann 9

LITER ARY EDITOR

Anna Summers

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

George Scialabba Eugenia Williamson

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Lindsey Gilbert

CONTR IBUTING EDITORS

Albert Mobilio Aaron Swartz 9

DESIGN AND ART DIR ECTION

The Flynstitute 9

GENER AL M ANAGER

Jeanne Mansfield 9

FOUNDERS

Thomas Frank Keith White PAST PUBLISHER

Greg Lane, 1993-2007 9 Published by The MIT Press No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

The Baffler (no. 20) is due to the advice and

support of Daniela Cammack, Rachel Cass, Ellen Faran, Melissa Flashman, David Grewal, Frank LeClair (aka “Mr. Baffler”), Nick Lindsay, Jeff Mayersohn, Daniel Moses, Jorian Polis Schutz, Harvey Silverglate, and Catherine Tumber, not to mention those of you who chipped in over the Internet. You can find your name, and our gratitude, emblazoned on page 172. For allowing us to print the first-ever excerpt from Christopher Lasch’s unpublished novel, we thank Professor Robert Westbrook and the Special Collections Department of the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library. Thanks, too, to John Trumpbour for reciting some stirring verse by “The Homeless Economist” at Shays Pub one evening in May. The verse appears on page 168. The identity of “The Homeless Economist” shall remain a mystery beneath the hangman’s hoodie.

Cover art is by Mark S. Fisher

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA | thebaff ler.com © 2012, The Baffler Foundation. No part of this magazine may be republished in print or electronically without the written permission of The Baffler Foundation.

2 1 The Baffler [no.20]

BRAD HOLLAND

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 3

Contents 1 The Head Office

This Cradle Won’t Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Salvos

Dead End on Shakin’ Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thomas Fr ank

Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jed Perl

The Joke’s on You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sit-Cons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Oh, the Pathos! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Accountants for Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

153

Presenting . . . The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Steve Almond Class on TV Heather Havrilesky

Presenting . . . This American Life Eugenia Williamson The Pew Charitable Trusts David D’Arcy

The Dollar Debauch

Dilemmas of the Rentier Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris Lehmann

Into the Infinite

The Threshold of Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kim Phillips-Fein

116

Notes & Quotes

The Head Office . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kurt Tucholsky

Daniel’s Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Daniel A aron

Tod Mesirow

A Bad Day in Brooklyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Emma Gar man

Studies in Total Depravity

Party of None . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barack Obama’s annoying journey to the center of belonging Chris Br ay

4 1 The Baffler [no.20]

17(+)

Maze of Doom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

M A R K DA N C E Y

Jim Newell

The high, the low, the vibrant Billionaire Ball . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epitaph for the student-athlete Matt Hinton

Stories

Lancelot Gomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Manohar Shetty

Mr. Secondhand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Manohar Shetty

Bhutas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Saskya Jain

106 130

140

144

Memoir

Delusional Parasitosis and Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Will Boisvert

Poems

Faulty Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alan Gilbert

Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kingdom 2 (a poetics) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

R ae Ar mantrout

The Back Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Geoffrey Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien

Tranche I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tranche II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Joshua Clover

Projecting Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Forrest Gander

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Susan Stewart

One Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Matthea Harvey

The Blackest Black Forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Yau

Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers . . . . . . . . . .

The Homeless Economist

Remainders

Simone de Beauvoirâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Les Belles Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Seth Colter Walls

Ancestors

64 24

28 29

78 79

105

114

129

160

168 124

Life and Times of a Libertine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

161

Bafflers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

170

Christopher Lasch

M A R K DA N C E Y

The

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> T h e H e a d O f f ic e

This Cradle Won’t Rock 3 John Summers

ne hundred years ago, 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, walked out of the mills. Unskilled, unorganized, crowded into tenements, they’d been lured from their homes in Turkey, Poland, Russia, and Italy by promises of prosperity in the world’s largest textile factories. All they really wanted in that 1912 strike was a reduction in their fifty-six-hour workweek without a drop in their subsistence-level wages. Yet as the textile barons first ignored, then refused their economic demand, the workers began pressing a corollary—the right to pursue culture of their own choosing in the margins of their lives. This turn in the strikers’ grievances alarmed the mill owners and their retainers in the press, the police, and local government, but earned this refrain in James Oppenheim’s valedictory poem honoring the ten-week stoppage:

the demand for “art and love and beauty” allowances in the wage economy flowered in the radicalism of the thirties and forties. But the Bread and Roses strike and its class-inflected cultural aspirations have disappeared from public memory; virtually no newspaper, magazine, or broadcaster has seen fit to commemorate its centennial this year. You don’t remember the strike for the same reason you don’t remember that it was foreign-born workers who won you your weekends—back when you had a job, that is.

ig business has not forgotten, however. It has kept up its side of the fight with amazing persistence. Last year, for exSmall art and love and beauty their drudging ample, Maine Governor Paul LePage demanded the removal of a labor his spirits knew. tory mural hanging in the state’s DeYes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, partment of Labor. Governor LePage too! is a Republican and a loyal lieutenant in the Grand Army of the Market. But Over in Cambridge, meanwhile, the comgovernment by both parties, at every level, has bined forces of money and culture responded been divesting itself of cultural sponsorship. by rushing to the defense of upperclass preToday’s business-worshipping leaders abhor rogative. The president of Harvard, A. Lawall forms of art that can’t be packaged for prirence Lowell, offered students a gentleman’s vate consumer markets. C in any course they left in order to join the And so a century of debate over the social and aesthetic value of culture has been militia in Lawrence, a city founded by his hollowed out. Not many observers of our grandfather. Roughly a hundred of these commodity-based system of production prescholar-soldiers threw on their uniforms, tend to care any longer about the dilemmas mounted their horses, and took up rifles of art in a democratic society. There seems against the immigrant women and girls on no point in questioning whether a painting, the picket line. book, or film is good or bad. A society that The strikers won a temporary wage victory has lost hope of seeing itself reflected in its over the owners and the Harvard cavalry, and 6 1 The Baffler [no.20]

Government has divested itself of sponsoring culture. Our business leaders abhor all forms of art that can’t be packaged for private consumer markets.

9 culture naturally loses interest in it. The erasure of the Lawrence strike’s legacy bespeaks a definite migration of cultural power from the redoubts of society and government to unaccountable, unrepresentative, and inaccessible agencies of resource allocation—velvet-gloved foundations and debtproducing colleges and universities, mainly. The results have been boring and unreal, a culture for nobody’s sake, at once arbitrary and overdetermined. In the foundations and universities, as in the corporate marketing departments from which they borrow their strange notions, a class-specific fetish for creativity coincides with an invincible belief in meritocracy, while cartel-like techniques of managed competition muffle the contradiction. America’s stagnation proceeds directly from the assumption that cultural activity requires only enough funding to generate ratings, credentials, prizes, and tourist dollars. The managers ensure that nothing too interesting, idiosyncratic, or passionate reaches the public.

affler 20 brings you a roll call of the inert, sterile, and depraved cultural leavings of our plutocratic age. Welcome to an America that offers up neither bread nor roses, but a thin philanthropic gruel that advertises the baronial status of business, and a luxury-grade higher education that emits a boosterish fog. You will read here of decomposing cities that glitter with “vibrancy,” TV moguls who stage fables of competitive individualism, and Very Serious novelists chasing Very Important literary prizes. You will follow esteemed journalists and professors as they chronicle the endless education of the President. You will learn about the imperial Pew Charitable Trusts and its pet broadcasters on public radio, and take in the postideological pantomiming of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on cable television. Admiring the performance art of Harvard fraud Adam Wheeler, you will observe the Ivy mothership’s efforts to smite the pretender down. Harvard, you will see, no longer dispatches its students to bully strikers, since it now sends its best and brightest to Wall Street to plunder pensions. Back on campus, it defends the honor of its brand—and prays that no one lingers too long over the exploits of its endowment. So let the new culture lords and minions cleave to their prizes and credentials, their investment portfolios, their advertising metrics, and their tedious marketing schemes. The rest of us still need bread . . . and roses, too.t The

Baffler [no.20] ! 7

h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

The Head Office 3 Kurt Tucholsky

he Head Office knows everything better. The Head Office has the overview, the belief in overview, and a filing system. In the Head Office men are busy with never-ending disputes but they slap you on the back and say: “Dear Friend, you can’t judge from your individual position! We at the Head Office . . .” The Head Office, for the time being, has one main concern: to remain the Head Office. God help the subordinate office that ventures to do something independently! Whether or not it was reasonable, whether or not it was necessary, whether or not something was on fire, first the Head Office has to be consulted. Why else would it be the Head Office? It is because it is—take note of that. All those out there will just have to come to terms with that! It’s not the clever ones who sit in the Head Office but rather the crafty ones. Whoever does his little job may very well be clever but he certainly isn’t crafty. If he were, then he would manage to dodge it, and for this there is only one solution: the reform proposal. The reform proposal leads to the creation of a new department, which—of course— is incorporated into and controlled by the Head Office. One person chops wood and thirty-three stand around—this is the Head Office. The Head Office is set up with the purpose of thwarting the energy and initiative of its subordinates. The Head Office has no ideas and expects others to implement them. The Head Office is a little bit less fallible than the Pope but nowhere near as good-looking. The practical man doesn’t have it easy. He fervently rails against the Head Office, tears all of their directives to small pieces and uses them to wipe his eyes. That done, he marries the boss’s daughter, gets promoted, and ends up in the Head Office, because it is an advancement, after all, to make it to the records room. Having made it this far, he clears his throat, straightens his tie, pulls his shirt cuffs down, and begins to govern, as a part of the god-ordained Head Office, full of deep disdain for the simple, practical man, deep in never-ending dispute with Head Office colleagues. So he sits there, like a spider in a web that others constructed, prevents efficient work, makes irrational demands, and knows everything better. t

Translated from the German by Kate McQueen. First published in Die Weltbühne, 1925.

8 1 The Baffler [no.20]

S P E N C E R WA LTS

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[ S a lvos ]

Dead End on Shakin’ Street 3 Thomas Fr ank

y hometown is vibrant. Its status as such is certified, official, stamped on both sides. There was a time, though, when it wasn’t, when my friends and I would laugh at Kansas City’s blandness: its harmless theater productions, its pretentious suburbs, its private country clubs, its eternal taste for classic rock. We called it “Cupcake Land,” after a favorite Richard Rhodes essay from the eighties. The city knew nothing of the bold ideas of our robust generation, we thought: it had virtually no music subculture; it was deaf to irony; hell, it actually tried to drive out of business the last surviving club from its jazz-age glory days. Maybe that was the sort of criticism everybody made of their Midwestern hometowns back then. Well, those hometowns have certainly turned the tables on us today. Our enthusiasm for music is a dead thing now in these post-alternative decades, a mere record collection that we occasionally cue up after one Scotch too many to help remember the time when art seemed to matter. But Kansas City doesn’t need any reminders. The place fairly quivers with vitality now. It is swarming with artists; its traffic islands are bedecked with the colorful products of their studios. It boasts a spectacular new performing arts center designed by one of those spectacular new celebrity architects. It even has an indie-rock festival to call its own. And while much of the city’s flowering has been organic and spontaneous, other parts of its renaissance were engineered by the very class of civic leaders we used to deride for their impotence and cluelessness. At that Kansas City indie-rock festival, for example, the mayor himself made a presentation this year, as did numerous local professionals and business leaders. Besides, as everyone knows, cupcakes are cool nowadays, like yoga or something—the consummate expression of the baker’s artisanal vibrancy. 10 1 The Baffler [no.20]

our hometown is probably vibrant, too. Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in. This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation’s city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration’s economic recovery strategy for the nation. In the fall of 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts launched “ArtPlace,” a joint project with the nation’s largest banks and foundations, and ArtPlace immediately began generating a cloud of glowing euphemisms around the central, hallowed cliché: ArtPlace is investing in art and culture at the heart of a portfolio of integrated strategies that can drive vibrancy and diversity so powerful that it transforms communities.

Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous. ArtPlace says its goal is not merely to promote the arts but to “transform economic development in America,” a project that is straightforward and obvious if you accept the organization’s slogan: “Art creates vibrancy and increases economic opportunity.”

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 11

] And that, presumably, is why everyone is so damn vibrant these days. Consider Akron, Ohio, which was recently the subject of a conference bearing the thrilling name “Greater Akron: This Is What Vibrant Looks Like.” Or Boise, Idaho, whose citizens, according to the city’s Department of Arts and History, are “fortunate to live in a vibrant community in which creativity flourishes in every season.” Or Cincinnati, which is the home of a nonprofit called “Go Vibrant” as well as the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, which hands out “Cultural Vibrancy” grants, guided by the knowledge that “Cultural Vibrancy is vital to a thriving community.” Is Rockford, Illinois, vibrant? Oh my god yes: according to a local news outlet, the city’s “Mayor’s Arts Award nominees make Rockford vibrant.” The Quad Cities? Check: As their tourism website explains, the four hamlets are “a vibrant community of cities sharing the Mississippi River in both Iowa and Illinois.” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Need you even ask? Pittsburgh is a sort of Athens of the vibrant; a city where dance parties and rock concerts enjoy the vigorous boosting of an outfit called “Vibrant Pittsburgh”; a place that draws young people from across the nation to frolic in its “numerous hip and vibrant neighborhoods,” according to a blog maintained by a consortium of Pittsburgh business organizations. The vibrations are just as stimulating in the component parts of this exciting new civilization. The people of creative-land use vibrant apps to check their bank accounts, chew on vegetarian “vibrancy bars,” talk to one another on vibrant cellphones, and drive around in cars painted “vibrant white.” Then there are the unfortunate places from which the big V is said to have receded, like the “once-vibrant” Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, where remediation efforts are thankfully under way. Detroit has for years provided the nation’s thoughtful class with sobering lessons on what happens when the vibrant evaporates, and the fear that such a fate might befall other scenes and other communities still occasionally makes headlines. A looming “shortage of vibrancy” re12 1 The Baffler [no.20]

portedly gave the Connecticut business community quite a scare in 2007, while the city fathers of Cleveland took a peep at all that was vibrating in Seattle back in 2002 and suspected that they were losing the race: “Without that vibrancy, Cleveland may decline.” The real Sahara of the vibrant, though, is that part of America where lonely Midwestern farmers live among “crumbling reminders of more vibrant days.” This is a land from which vibrancy has withdrawn its blessings; the disastrous depopulation that has followed is, if we follow the guideposts of vibrancy theory, the unavoidable consequence. In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers’ markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.

s with other clichés, describing a city as “vibrant” was once a fairly innovative thing to do. Before 1950, the adjective was used mainly to describe colors and sound—the latter of which, after all, is transmitted through the air with vibrations. People’s voices were often said to be “vibrant.” As were, say, notes played on an oboe. To apply the adjective to a “community” or a “scene,” on the other hand, was extremely unusual back then. In fact, the word “vibrant” does not seem to appear at all in the 1961 urban classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, even though that book is often remembered as the very manifesto of vibrancy theory. How the expression made the leap from novelty to gold-plated bureaucratic buzzword is anyone’s guess. It is a cliché that I personally associate with NPR—not merely because announcers on that network tend to hymn the vibrant with complete indifference to the word’s exhaustion, but because they always seem to believe they are saying something really fresh and profound about a place or a “scene” when they tag it thus. But the real force behind our mania for the vibrant is the nation’s charitable foundations. For organized philanthropy, “vibrant” seems to have become the one-stop solution

[ We aren’t sure what vibrancy is or whether or not it works, but part of the project is nevertheless “informing” people that it does.

9 for all that ails the American polis. A decade ago there were other obsessions: multiculturalism, or public-private synergy, or leadership programs. But now, it’s Get southern Illinois some vibrancy, and its troubles are over. “A vibrant arts community strengthens our region,” declares the website of the Seattle Foundation, describing art as a way of attracting and retaining awesome corporate employers. The New England Foundation for the Arts spends its substance “to nurture a vibrant ecology for dance.” The Kresge Foundation “seek[s] to build strong, vibrant communities—enlivened by the presence of healthy cultural organizations and well-resourced artists.” The S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation says it’s “dedicated to advancing a productive, vibrant, and sustainable California.” The Greater Tacoma Community Foundation hands out “Vibrant Community” grants to local nonprofits, while the “Vibrant Communities” program of Montreal’s J. W. McConnell Family Foundation seems to be a sort of anti-poverty initiative. But while everyone agrees that “vibrancy” is the ultimate desideratum of urban life, no one seems to be exactly sure what vibrancy is. In fact, the Municipal Art Society of New York recently held a panel discussion—excuse me, a “convening”—of foundation people to talk about “Measuring Vibrancy” (it seems “the impact of arts and cultural investments on neighborhoods . . . is hard to quantify”). In retrospect, it would have been far better to convene such a gathering before all those foundation people persuaded the cities of the nation to blow millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs. Even ArtPlace, the big vibrancy project of the NEA, the banks, and the foundations,

is not entirely sure that vibrancy can be observed or quantified. That’s why the group is developing what it calls “Vibrancy Indicators”: “While we are not able to measure vibrancy directly,” the group’s website admits, “we believe that the measures we are assembling, taken together, will provide useful insights into the nature and location of especially vibrant places within cities.” What are those measures? Unfortunately, at press time, they had not yet been announced. But a presentation of preliminary work on the “Vibrancy Indicators” did include this helpful directive: “Inform leaders of the connection between vibrancy and prosperity.” Got that? We aren’t sure what vibrancy is or whether or not it works, but part of the project is nevertheless “informing” people that it does. The meaninglessness of the phrase, like the absence of proof, does not deter the committed friend of the vibrant: if you know it’s the great good thing, you simply push ahead, moving all before you with your millions. This is not the place to try to gauge the enormous, unaccountable power that foundations wield over American life—their agendasetting clout in urban planning debates, for example, or the influence they hold over cashstrapped universities, or their symbiosis with public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Nor is this the forum to salute them for their many positive contributions to society. My target here is not their power, but their vacuity. Our leadership class looks out over the trashed and looted landscape of the American city, and they solemnly declare that salvation lies in an almost meaningless buzzword— that if we chant that buzzword loud enough and often enough, our troubles are over. The Baffler has mocked, analyzed, and derided money’s cultivation of hipness since our earliest days in print. Just think of all the permutations of urban hipness that have flickered by since we undertook that mission: Rollerblading near water. “Potemkin bohemias” like Chicago’s Wicker Park. Richard Florida’s “creative class.” And while each in turn drew the cheers of the bystanders, utilities were privatized to disastrous effect, the New Economy The

Baffler [no.20] ! 13

] came and went, the real estate bubble grew and burst, the banks got ever bigger, state governments declared war on public workers, and the economy went off a cliff. It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this. They have nothing to suggest, really, to Cairo, Illinois, or St. Joseph, Missouri. They have no comment to make, really, about the depopulation of the countryside or the deindustrialization of the Midwest. They have nothing to offer, really, but the same suggestions as before, gussied up with a new set of clichés. They have no idea what to do for places or people that aren’t already successful or that have no prospects of ever becoming cool. And so the dull bureaucrat lusts passionately for the lifestyle of the creative artist, but beneath it all is the harsh fact that foundations have been selling the vibrant, under one label or another, for decades; all they’ve done this time is repackage it as a sort of prosperity gospel for Ivy League art students. As the name of a suburban St. Louis street festival puts it, without the smallest detectable trace of irony, “Let them eat art.” In the face of this deafening silence, let us propose a working hypothesis of what makes

up the vibrant. Putting aside such outliers as the foundation that thinks vibrancy equals poverty-remediation and the car rental company that believes it means having lots of parks, it’s easy to figure out what the foundations believe the vibrant to be. Vibrant is a quality you find in cities or neighborhoods where there is an arts or music “scene,” lots of restaurants and food markets of a certain highbrow type, trophy architecture to memorialize the scene’s otherwise transient life, and an audience of prosperous people who are interested in all these things. Indeed, art production is supposed to be linked, through the black box of “vibrancy,” to prosperity itself. This is something so simple that one proponent has illustrated it with a flowchart;* it is something so obvious that just about everyone concerned agrees on it. “Corporations see a vibrant cultural landscape as a magnet for talent,” goes the thinking behind Kansas City’s vibrancy, according to one report; it’s “almost as vital for drawing good workers as more-traditional benefits like retirement plans and health insurance.” * Step one: “Artists move in”; step five: “Neighborhood develops ‘cool’ reputation”; step six: “Property values go up.”

P. S . M U E L L ER

14 1 The Baffler [no.20]

[ Art is literally a substitute for compensating people properly. “Let them eat art,” indeed.

9 (Did you catch that, reader? Art is literally a substitute for compensating people properly. “Let them eat art,” indeed.) And so when the Cincinnati foundation known as ArtsWave* informs the world that “the arts create vibrant neighborhoods and contribute to a thriving economy,” they are voicing a sentiment so commonplace in foundation-land that it is almost not worth remarking on. How does art do these amazing things? you might ask. Reasoning backwards from the ultimate object of all civic planning—attracting and retaining top talent, of course—the ArtPlace website pronounces thusly: The ability to attract and retain talent depends, in part, on quality of place. And the best proxy for quality of place is vibrancy.

Others have spelled out the formula in more detail. We build prosperity by mobilizing artpeople as vibrancy shock troops and counting on them to . . . well . . . gentrify formerly bedraggled parts of town. Once that mission is accomplished, then other vibrancy multipliers kick in. The presence of hipsters is said to be inspirational to businesses; their doings make cities interesting and attractive to the class of professionals that everyone wants; their colorful japes help companies to hire quality employees, and so on. All a city really needs to prosper is group of art-school grads, some lofts for them to live in, and a couple of thrift stores to supply them with the ironic clothes they crave. Then we just step back and watch them work their magic.

his, then, is how far it’s gone. The vibrant is the public art of today. It is Official. Our leaders think it will solve the prob-

lems of the cities large and small. Our leaders believe it will help to pull us out of our persistent economic slump. In this respect, we are counting on our artists for considerably more than we did during the country’s last experience with economic breakdown, but also—in other respects—considerably less. In the thirties, the federal government launched a number of programs directly subsidizing artists. Painters got jobs making murals for the walls of post offices and public buildings; theater troupes staged plays; writers collected folklore; photographers combed the South documenting the lives of sharecroppers. But no one expected those artists to pull us out of the Depression by some occult process of entrepreneurship-kindling. Instead, government supported them mainly because they were unemployed. In other words, government then did precisely the opposite of what government does today: in the thirties, we protected artists from the market while today we expose them to it, imagining them as the stokers on the hurtling job-creation locomotive. Both then and now we heard much about “scenes.” The public art of the thirties was, famously, concerned with “the American scene,” via the style known as “regionalism.” Thomas Hart Benton painted Missouri scenes, John Steuart Curry painted Kansas scenes, and unemployed authors assembled tour guides to every state in the union. In today’s more vibrant version, though, the artist himself is the spectacle, the subject of the tour guide. His primary job is not really to produce art but to participate in a “scene”—in an act that is put on for well-heeled spectators. Indeed, this act is essential to the vibrant: in order to bring the economic effects that “the arts” are

* This organization used to be some dreadful highbrow outfit called the Fine Arts Fund, until the day in 2010 that it turned on and got hip and figured out that its mission should be “to advance the vitality and vibrancy of Greater Cincinnati by mobilizing the creative energy of the entire community.” Behold: ArtsWave was born. The

Baffler [no.20] ! 15

] being counted upon to bring—attracting and retaining top talent for a city’s corporations, remember—the artist himself must be highly visible. He must run a gallery, patronize cool coffee shops and restaurants, or rehab rundown buildings. In short, where the WPA helped bankroll the work of William Gropper and Orson Welles, today’s vibrancy elite has let a thousand artisanal “third spaces” bloom. The federal programs of the thirties produced “art for the millions” and aimed to improve both cities and rural settlements, to make them more livable for everyone. Today, however, we have a different audience in mind. Vibrancy is a sort of performance that artists or musicians are expected to put on, either directly or indirectly, for the corporate class. These are the ones we aim to reassure of our city’s vibrancy, so that they never choose to move their millions (of dollars) to some more vibrant burg. An artist who keeps to herself, who works in her room all day, who wears unremarkable clothes and goes without tattoos— by definition she brings almost nothing to this project, adds little to the economic prospects of a given area. She inspires no one. She offers no lessons in creativity. She is not vibrant, not remunerative, not investment-grade. Vibrancy theory reveres the artist, but it also insults those who would take artistic production seriously. Think of the purblind art that this philosophy would guarantee us, were we to take it to heart and follow its directions to the letter. The public art of the thirties was often heavy-handed, close to propaganda even, but it was also critical of capitalist institutions and intensely concerned with the lives of ordinary people. The vibrant, on the other hand, would separate the artist from such boring souls. The creative ones are to be ghettoized in a “scene” which it is their job to make “vibrant,” thereby pumping up real estate prices and inspiring creative-class onlookers. But what of the people no one is interested in attracting and retaining? Millions of Americans go through their lives in places that aren’t vibrant, in areas that don’t have a “scene,” in jobs that aren’t rewarding, in industries that aren’t creative; and their experiences are, almost by 16 1 The Baffler [no.20]

definition, off limits for artistic contemplation. Instead of all that, the aesthetic of the vibrant proposes a kind of tail-chasing reverence for creativity itself, the awesome creativity that is supposed to inspire the businessmanspectator and lead him or her to conjure up bold and outside-the-box thoughts. Consider the trophy buildings that are, inevitably, the greatest expression of vibrancy theory—the assorted Frank Gehry and pseudo-Gehry buildings that every city council seems to believe it must build as a sort of welcome mat to the creative class. Regardless of the particular shape that each structure’s fluttering and swooping exterior takes, the point of the buildings is, in a general sense, to flaunt their eccentricity, to conspicuously defy the straight lines and cheap construction materials of the conventional buildings that surround them. And this would not be The Baffler if we didn’t take this opportunity to swing the sledgehammer at the obvious contradiction here. On the one hand, vibrancy theory treats the artist as a sort of glorified social worker, whose role is to please children and stimulate businessmen and somehow support the community. But the means by which the community is to be supported is always some species of vanguardism or conspicuous creativity. The whole point of the vibrant is to build prosperous communities; and yet prosperous communities, with their Babbitt-like complacency and their straight lines and their conventional building materials, are precisely what we expect artists to flout and defy. A second problem: the monuments to creativity that we are constructing all across America these days are supposed to be a reaction against the top-down city planning that once caused soulless public housing towers to be built all across the land. How different is it, though, to tear down entire city blocks in order to build, say, a vast performing arts center whose lines aren’t strictly rectilinear? For that matter, why is it any better to pander to the “creative class” than it is to pander to the traditional business class? Yes, one strategy uses “incentives” and tax cuts to get companies to move from one state to another,

[ while the other advises us to emphasize music festivals and art galleries when we make our appeal to that exalted cohort. But neither approach imagines a future arising from something other than government abasing itself before the wealthy.

et’s say that the foundations successfully persuade Akron to enter into a vibrancy arms race with Indianapolis. Let’s say both cities blow millions on building cool neighborhoods and encouraging private art galleries. But let’s say Akron wins. Somehow its planned vibrancy catches on and, thanks to a particularly piquant theater group, it is able to steal away Indianapolis’s businesses. Akron “attracts and retains”; it becomes a creativeclass Paris. It leaves Indianapolis an empty hulk on the prairie. What then? Is the nation better served now that those businesses are located in Akron rather than in Indianapolis? Or would it have been more productive to spend those millions on bridges, railroads, highways—hell, on lobbyists to demand better oversight for banks? History is more than a conflict between bogue millionaires and cool millionaires, however, and once you grasp this, you realize that it doesn’t take a whole lot of “creativity” to come up with real answers to the big problems. You just need to change the questions slightly. How about, instead of serving some targeted fraction of the master class, we chose to give an entirely different group of Americans what they wanted? Even if those Americans weren’t cool? What would that look like? A while ago I was talking about rural depopulation with an officer of a Kansas farmers’ organization; as it happened, he had thought about the problem a great deal. Using arts festivals to make small towns appear “vibrant” was not one of his suggestions, however. Instead, he proposed universal health coverage, since independent farmers find it difficult to get insurance nowadays and are often driven to seek corporate employment by this brute fact of rural life. Other solutions to the problem of rural depopulation are just as easy to come up with.

Outlaw corporate agriculture, which would encourage not only small farms but food diversity as well. Use zoning rules to restrict big-box stores, thereby saving small town merchants. Make college excellent and affordable, so that graduates aren’t forced by the weight of student debt to seek corporate employment. Rewrite NAFTA and take other steps to stop the decline of manufacturing. For any of this to happen, though, the vibrancy Ponzi scheme first has to bottom out. The bombed-out heartland must learn to resist the urgings of the foundation grandees and fix its gaze instead on the far less beguiling reverie of durable, productive enterprise. Some places, however, have gone so far down the vibrant brick road that there appears to be nothing to do but patiently await the final Götterdämmerung of the creative class. So hop to it, Akron: convert your very last rubber factory to an artist’s loft, bring on the indie-rock festivals and have Santiago Calatrava design you a sweeping new titanium City Hall. Go vibrant—and go for broke.t

bed • A piece of furniture to recline or

sleep on. Symbolically, a little tomb, a fine and private place to make love on or to die in, a sanctuary, a hideout, a launch pad into the nether regions. On cold nights, blessed beds are warmed by endearing blankets, on hot nights cooled by whispering sheets. A frame for flowers. —Daniel Aaron

V I C TO R K ER LOW

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 17

[ S a lvos ]

Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics 3 Jed Perl

or years now the art world has been unpredictable, fragmented, disorienting, like a hair-raising rollercoaster ride. The economic situation in the galleries and the auction houses reaches dizzying heights followed by equally bewildering depths. And new artists and art markets emerge even before last season’s artists and exhibitions can be absorbed. All of this has a fascination, no question about it. Drop into the galleries for an afternoon and you may find yourself amused. I do. But when I go back to the galleries week after week and month after month, I find that my impressions grow unstable. I feel uneasy. And I know that I am not alone. Although gallerygoers are stirred by contemporary art and museumgoers are having extraordinary experiences, there is a widespread feeling that nothing really adds up—either for the artists or for the audiences. No matter how eye-filling the encounters that people are having with works of art, these experiences, stripped of context and implication, can end up somehow unsatisfactory. For inveterate gallerygoers the art world has come to resemble a puzzle to which nobody really has any solution. And why is there no solution? There is no solution because too many of the pieces are missing. The shared assumptions about the nature of art that ought to bind together our variegated experiences are nowhere to be found. Look behind the art world’s glittering collage of a facade and you find a pervasive uncertainty, a culture adrift in sour disenchantment. There is so much disappointment and confusion around the very idea of art that even when the art does not disappoint, people find themselves backing away from the experiences they have. It is not easy for anybody to write about art in this strange, disconcerting time. I cannot say that I find it easy. The days I spend looking at art have their hours of high exhilaration. There is also an underlying anxi18 1 The Baffler [no.20]

ety, because the wonders are isolated, and it is difficult to see how things fit together. I keep looking for a key, a theme, a pattern. Week after week, month after month, I go to the museums and the galleries in many cities, but mostly in New York. And in New York, although I visit museums and galleries uptown and downtown and outside of Manhattan, most of the action, at least when it comes to contemporary art, is to be found along the streets of Chelsea, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, north of Fourteenth Street and south of Thirtieth Street. Walking those blocks, waiting for elevators, sometimes finding that the views of the Hudson River outside high windows trump anything on the gallery walls, my thoughts, more impressions than thoughts, are unsettled. Some days, I see so much and have so few strong experiences that by the time I get in a cab to go home my mind is pretty much a blank. Other times, things begin to fall into place, at least for the moment. Getting excited about new work can be a clarifying experience; that was certainly how I felt when I began to see the DVDs of Jeremy Blake, with their luxuriant, nostalgia-soaked hedonism. At other times, something indifferent or annoying or truly terrible has its own kind of clarifying effect. As I go from gallery to gallery I find myself trying to formulate an idea or develop a little theory, something that helps me make sense of it all. Not long after coming out of a Tony Oursler show—he makes elaborate installations with surreal bits of video projected on sculptural objects—I found myself thinking, “Okay, the art world is now a variety show.” At some point after returning from Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the most widely discussed of the fairs where more and more of the business of art is going on, the words “laissez-faire aesthetics” came together in my head. And then there was the afternoon when I wandered across an empty plaza at the Los

[

BRAD HOLLAND

“Okay, the art world is now a variety show.”

9 Angeles County Museum of Art, wondering what on earth I could say about the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and came to the conclusion that under the circumstances all I could do was send postcards from nowhere. Writing, no matter how difficult, is just about the only way I have of making sense of the disconnect between the enthusiasm I feel

for some of the work that I’m seeing and my more general distress at an art world that’s drunk on money and publicity. Although some have argued that tougher economic times can lead to a more disciplined—or at least a somewhat chastened—art world, my feeling is that money and publicity remain paramount even when the money is drying up. The

Baffler [no.20] ! 19

] In any event, long before the art market’s most recent slide—actually, there is a boom-andbust cycle in every decade—I had realized that value judgments, in and of themselves, would no longer do. There had been a time when I imagined that my responsibilities as a critic were fulfilled when I described my reactions to the work of a particular artist or the work in a particular exhibition. Finding the words to convey those experiences helped crystallize the experiences for me—and, hopefully, for my readers. But description, no matter how convincing or compelling, is no longer enough. Increasingly, what I believe is essential is figuring out how the parts of the puzzle that is the art world fit together—or at least trying to figure it out. I want to look for causes, for the larger patterns that shape the way art is presented and the way the public perceives it. I’m pretty sure about the kinds of experiences that mean the most to me. But how do they fit together? And why are they constantly elbowed to the side by other kinds of experiences? This is not easy to explain, although it surely has something to do with the rapacity of our new Gilded Age, and with the nihilism of an art market eager to dress each and every new trend in a few moth-eaten costumes from the trunk labeled Dadaism. Am I too negative? That is surely a criticism leveled against many critics. The response, at least my response, is that criticism, even the most negative criticism, can be fueled by enthusiasm, by avidity. I believe mine is. I criticize because I care. Still, when I’m with art world friends and we are happily, exuberantly complaining about any number of aspects of the current scene, there frequently comes a moment when we hear our own words all too clearly, and a terrible gloom settles over the group. In the silence everybody is wondering: Is it really this bad? When that question is raised, I like to invoke the example of Charles Baudelaire, who, in his Salons, was as devastating about the art world of mid-nineteenthcentury Paris as anybody could possibly be about early twenty-first-century New York. And yet, I remind my friends, Baudelaire was writing even as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Au20 1 The Baffler [no.20]

As for discussions about quality, about why some things are better and some things are worse, these are frequently dismissed as intellectually dishonest, as grounded in insupportable assumptions about the nature of artistic experience and the nature of art.

9 guste-Dominique Ingres, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Gustave Courbet were painting, and he certainly knew there were giants in his midst, even if he had doubts about Ingres’s work. Baudelaire, of course, lived in one of the great ages of criticism, and ours is a time when many question the value of criticism, and newspaper and magazine editors more and more seem to feel that they can do without critical writing. The role that art critics and art magazines play in our culture is greatly diminished. It is the dealers and the collectors and perhaps a few curators who are the arbiters. Even Artforum, a magazine once both revered and despised for its strong critical voice, is now mostly known for the advertisements in the print edition and for a website that has become a key source of gossip about art world goings-on. Of course, when the poet Randall Jarrell, half a century ago, published an essay titled “The Age of Criticism,” he was not happy about what he saw, either. His complaint, focused on literary matters, was that there was too much discussion of the arts that fed on other discussions of the arts, and too little emphasis on direct experience and on criticism as a record of that experience. Of the better literary journals of his day, such as Partisan Review, he commented that “each of these contains several poems and a piece of fiction—some-

[ times two pieces; the rest is criticism.” Jarrell was not against criticism. How could he have been, considering that he was as devoted to his own criticism as to his own poetry? What he wanted to emphasize was an essential distinction between the visceral experience of art and the analytical experience of criticism. And he was opposed to any form of critical writing so absorbed in its own analytical operations that it drew attention away from the immediate experience of art. There is surely still too much self-aggrandizing criticism. But in the art world the sad fact is that hardly anybody is any longer willing to criticize anything.

mong artists and committed gallerygoers there are now so many things that nobody is willing to argue about that it is difficult to know where to begin. Nobody any longer wants to make a case for or against representational painting or sculpture, or for or against abstract painting or sculpture. The old debates about the relative importance of form and content are seldom heard nowadays. And anybody who begins to speak about the importance of high culture in a democratic society, or who wants to make some critical distinctions between high culture and popular culture, is likely to be met by skeptical looks, as if there were something unacceptable about even the possibility of such a discussion. As for discussions about quality, about why some things are better and some things are worse, these are frequently dismissed as intellectually dishonest, as grounded in insupportable assumptions about the nature of artistic experience and the nature of art. Now it is of course true that many of the old arguments—about representation and abstraction, form and content, high and low, good and bad—were academic or meretricious or both. The essential experience of art is a matter of emotions that can be powerful or elusive or any number of other things, and to the extent that those old arguments drew attention away from the fundamentals, they were symptomatic of the crisis that Jarrell described in “The Age of Criticism.” The debaters, as Jarrell might have pointed out, were often blind to all subtleties

and nuances, or willfully ignored subtleties and nuances they knew existed. The old arguments, however, no matter how maddening they could become, had a way of sharpening the mind, if only because the weaknesses in the arguments meant that new arguments had to be devised. What is to be deeply regretted today is the eclipse of the spirit that fueled the intellectual debates of yore. The arguments that used to erupt on street corners and at gallery openings and at dinner parties and everywhere that artists and art lovers met, no matter how painful and even pointless they could at times appear, were in essence idealistic, an effort to understand better, to see with greater clarity: to penetrate to the essence of art. When nobody wants to argue about anything anymore—and that is where we are today—the likelihood is that nobody believes in much of anything. Or at least nobody is willing to admit in public that they are in fact a believer in some particular idea about art. Welcome to the age of laissez-faire aesthetics. Anything goes, and the old modern rebellion against standards and distinctions has been replaced by a newfangled conviction that anything can go with anything else. Take, as an example, the words that Sabine Folie, then a curator at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, wrote for Dear Painter, Paint me . . . , an exhibition that toured Europe a few years ago. “Trash,” Folie explains, “has become a transcendental necessity.” In her essay, entitled “Meta-Trash,” Folie observes that “there can no longer be any painting without trash.” This statement is not meant to open a conversation. Folie is not asking if trash can in fact be transcendent (whatever that might mean). She is simply presenting an outrageous juxtaposition as a statement of fact. What holds the art world’s attention is the commingling of heretofore irreconcilable standards and distinctions, not high versus low but the shotgun marriage of high and low. “Trash,” Folie remarks, “hangs over our heads like a sword of Damocles.” The truth is far worse. The sword has fallen. “Meta-trash” is triumphant. The mayhem is almost indescribable. And if next season trash and transcendence get divorced and each marry something The

Baffler [no.20] ! 21

] else, so much the better. The other day, in the catalogue of an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s late work, I read an essay in which Warhol turns out to be a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It took me awhile to get the drift of laissez-faire aesthetics. I was held back by my assumption that even the kookiest art world ideologues must believe in some sort of logic, or at least some connection between cause and effect. I am not sure I would even now understand what makes the laissez-faire aesthetes tick, had I not been struggling to come to grips with the skyrocketing reputations of a number of younger artists, especially Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin. I could not see why Yuskavage’s soft-porn figure paintings, with their smarmy renderings of babes with big breasts and big hair, were praised, simultaneously, for evoking Giovanni Bellini’s altarpieces and Walt Disney cartoons. How, I wondered, could anybody mistake Yuskavage’s glib highlights and shadows, like something from a mid-century magazine illustration, for Venetian chiaroscuro? I was equally confounded by the press I read about the painter John Currin, whose slick, sleazy studies of suburban housewives were said to be channeling both the mythological narratives of the sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Lucas Cranach the Elder and the raunchy cartoons in MAD magazine. What I eventually realized was that I was looking for emotional or intellectual coherence when in fact those were values that the artists and their supporters had either rejected or perhaps simply lost track of; it is difficult to say which. Classicism and kitsch are now nothing more than differently spiced sugary treats, to be picked out of the candy dish—and then sampled, consumed, or tossed in the garbage. Yuskavage and Currin can channel high and low with impunity, with no obligation to reconcile them, or indeed any idea that there might be a conflict. The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now—think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes—believe that any experience that anyone has with a work of art is equal to any 22 1 The Baffler [no.20]

The people who are buying and selling the most highly priced contemporary art right now—think of them as the laissez-faire aesthetes—believe that any experience that anyone has with a work of art is equal to any other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously.

9 other. They imagine that the most desirable work of art is the one that inspires a range of absolutely divergent meanings and impressions almost simultaneously. The collectors who make sure that John Currin’s shows are sold out even before they open believe that it is their privilege to respond to anything at any time in any way they choose. A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be. When collectors hang a Currin on the wall, they are given permission—more than that, they are given the right—to appreciate this oilcloth horror as a painterly painting as exquisite as a Velázquez, or to enjoy it as an incompetent high-kitsch send-up of classical painting, or to assess its value as social commentary, or to laugh at it as a piece of Dadaist stupidity for stupidity’s sake. Or they may enjoy their Currin as a financial trophy pure and simple, proof of their buying power. Or they may regard it as an object of delectation, in much the way that they have been instructed by some art-historian-turned-art-consultant to enjoy a painting by Bonnard. They can have it every way. They experience no conflict. The painting is whatever the collector wants it to be. And Currin

[

BRAD HOLLAND

gives them enough cunningly mixed signals that the possibilities seem endless. I recognize that the taste for Currin, and for Yuskavage and a number of other artists, is in part a continuation of developments that are now a generation or two old. The whatthe-hell attitude with which the new high-end consumers of art confront the whole question of meaning will strike some as reminiscent of the mindset of a number of collectors in the early sixties. Back then, there was a group of big spenders who were turning their attention from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art

and boasting about how much fun they were having now that they had sloughed off the serious themes of the mid-century abstractionists. The in-your-face kitsch of Currin and Yuskavage is certainly related to that earlier rejection of modernist ideas about seriousness and quality. And laissez-faire aesthetics also owes something to the ironic fascination with downright incompetence that gave birth to the movement known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Badâ&#x20AC;? Painting, kicked off in 1978 with a show of that name at the New Museum, organized by Marcia Tucker. By the time Tucker mounted The

Baffler [no.20] ! 23

Faulty Logic 3 Alan Gilbert I’m from the rare generation that didn’t go to war,

but it’s still the inheritance.

Air raid sirens wail throughout the mall. I think about you less on sunny days,

though I’m just as full of the clichés

we start with instead of an empty page.

But if this shelter collapses,

we’ll move on to another one

with free coffee and donuts for the meetings,

wondering how does it feel to wake up

in the house in which you’ll die?

I’m driven by a machine called protein. I’m driven by a machine called hope,

even if at times it’s like I’m talking to somebody

who isn’t really there.

The dog might seem aggressive,

but it mostly wants to play.

So go ahead and rock that boat

lodged firmly on the shore.

You can call it peace if you want to. I’ll stay here and build it broken

with the saying instead of the said.

24 1 The Baffler [no.20]

[ her exhibition, there certainly existed what many regarded as a critical groundwork for the new counter-connoisseurship, in essays such as Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on Camp” and Pauline Kael’s 1969 “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” There are, however, essential differences between garbage then and garbage now. They are distinctions that would have been perfectly clear to Sontag and Kael, who had always taken for granted the significance of traditional artistic values, and who both, late in life, pointed out that they had never meant for camp or trash to trump old-fashioned quality. Pop Art and “Bad” Painting, in any event, were self-consciously ironic; they depended on the existence of a standard that was being mocked or from which one was registering a dissent. Irony, even in the whatever-themarket-will-bear forms that it often assumed in the eighties and nineties, was generally accompanied by at least the afterglow of a moral viewpoint. The artists were mocking something. They had a target. This is what has now changed. Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing. Even irony is too much of an idea. The artists treat everything equally. David Zwirner, the dealer who has played a major role in pushing Lisa Yuskavage’s reputation into the stratosphere, has observed in an open letter to the artist that “frankly, I am not sure what your work is about.” He makes this declaration without any apparent embarrassment. And while Zwirner does hasten to add that the paintings are “utterly sincere,” I am left with the gathering suspicion that the meaning of the work is designed to be unresolved, that the work is meant to register as noncommittal, at least from the audience’s point of view. This laissez-faire attitude is just right for a new breed of high-end shopaholics. John Currin has become the voice of laissezfaire aesthetics. The man and his art and his reputation reflect the cracked values of an art world where most of the people in charge no longer know what gives a work of art life. The unease or confusion that greets Currin’s portraits of suburban matrons and young cuties and gay couples, larded with allusions to Old Master paintings and pop culture, is said to

mark the emergence of a freshly off-kilter sensibility. His lounge-lizard gambits are hailed for giving classical values a modern twist. In the catalogue of a recent retrospective of Currin’s work, the art historian Robert Rosenblum announced that “Currin knows his Old Masters inside out,” an assessment that Rosenblum based on his experience going through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection with the artist. Currin has even curated a selection of masterworks at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, thereby proving that he likes Velázquez as much as the next guy. He certainly knows how to spritz ideas. He has a line on everything, from photographs of models in Cosmopolitan to Cranach’s Venuses and Eves. He dabbles with misogyny, but slyly, so that it registers as nouveau masculinity. And of course this pleases the guys in Tribeca, with their fashion-model girlfriends and steak dinners and cigars, among whom there might be somebody with the half a million bucks that you need to buy one of Currin’s paintings. This relative newcomer—Currin was born in 1962—is the art world’s equivalent of the fast-talking politician. He will overwhelm you with glittery ideas even as each sentence that comes out of his mouth leaves you more convinced that he believes in nothing.

he laissez-faire art world is a treacherous place. Even the most hard-fought vision or vantage point can look implausible in this slippery universe. And any artist who manages not only to maintain a personal vision but also to build a solid critical reputation becomes a paradoxical figure—an anomaly, if not a freak. Consider Bill Jensen, who is now in his sixties. He began, some thirty years ago, painting dark-toned, febrile abstractions, dream visions haunted by memories of the art of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Arthur Dove. In recent years his work has become more open, more expansive, more casually lyrical. Working with paint that has sometimes been thinned to the consistency of Japanese ink, Jensen unfurls jagged, looping calligraphic strokes over surfaces that have the luxuriant patinas of faded gold leaf and weatherworn The

Baffler [no.20] ! 25

] bronze and centuries-old vellum. If there is something sleek and easy on the eyes about these paintings, that is just their Gilded Age come-on. In most of the compositions, broad strokes of paint create a floating foreground suspended before an equally ambiguous background. The weight of the colors and the differences in surface treatments give these juxtapositions a specificity, a focus. Jensen’s paintings have a fascinating double life, grabbing a gallerygoer on first glance while also working slowly, almost covertly. He lets us know what kinds of things he is thinking about. An interest in Japanese ink painting is evident. So is his fascination with an old idea of the artist as a craftsman. And one can see many allusions to Willem de Kooning and to Abstract Expressionism in general. Among artists Jensen has an ardent following. He is a figure in the Brooklyn bohemia that nowadays centers around life along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, where the twentysomethings and thirtysomethings browse in one of New York’s few independent bookstores, Spoonbill & Sugartown. He has exhibited with blue-chip galleries, first Mary Boone, and now Cheim & Read. And yet from the vantage point of the international art machine, Bill Jensen hardly exists. The trouble for the laissez-faire art world must be that Jensen’s work rejects consensus, that it’s so particularly, so insistently what it is. There’s no irony about Jensen’s relationship to de Kooning or Japanese brush painting. And when his color becomes extravagantly giddy, with eye-popping oranges and purples and greens, the point is not to be campily carnivalesque but to be heartfelt, exuberant, exultant. What Jensen cares about is his own inward-turning feelings, sometimes to the point of obscurity. So the process by which this work finds its audience is naturally slow, incremental, irregular, unpredictable. Why should it be otherwise? The health of painting does not depend on huge audiences; a couple of dozen people can sustain an artist’s career. I am not thinking here only of modern art or of the avant-garde. Jean Fouquet’s illuminated pages and Nicolas Poussin’s allegories were 26 1 The Baffler [no.20]

meant to speak to minuscule audiences. Jensen has his imitators in the art world, no question about it. But he is not a consensus artist. His effects are not reproducible. His best paintings are singular statements, irrevocably solitary. And so they violate the very principle of laissez-faire aesthetics, which has everything to do with an emotional promiscuity, with an ability to be all things to all people. In this sense, laissez-faire aesthetics mimics the reach of popular culture, although without the democratic idealism that gives the best of pop culture its essential power. It is the very essence of popular culture that the intense feelings a song or a movie kicks off in one person are also experienced by many other people, almost simultaneously. When somebody refers to “the summer we fell in love and everybody was playing our song,” they are describing one of the essential pop experiences—the sense that the individual is connected with the group. Among laissez-faire artists there is an assumption, sometimes openly voiced, often silently implied, that if an art experience cannot spread like wildfire it is not really significant—and that it is somehow undemocratic. I reject both claims. It is true that the greatest popular artists produce at least the illusion that they are living where the audience is living. But painters set out to do something entirely different. We interact with a painter’s work in a radically different way. We develop a one-on-one relationship with a painting, a relationship that is intimate, maybe even secretive. When people find something lacking in even the best contemporary painting and sculpture, they may actually be saddling this work with an unwarranted assumption, widespread today, that all major works of art are going to have the pervasive effect that we know from some of our great experiences with popular art—with movies and rock music. The result is a flattening of all artistic experience.

he biggest danger now confronting people who love painting and sculpture is a unitary view of culture, which in practice amounts to a view that all culture is, or

[ The biggest danger now confronting people who love painting and sculpture is a unitary view of culture, which in practice amounts to a view that all culture is, or should be, popular culture.

9 should be, popular culture. No one personifies this new attitude more completely than Matthew Barney, the good-looking man who is often the subject of his own videos and photographs, and who has become an expert in inflating experimentalist gambits to grandopera proportions, never more so than with Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, mounted at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2003. Barney’s sleek self-consciousness enabled him, in his younger years, to make some money as a male model for J. Crew and Macy’s advertising campaigns. He offers modernist obscurantism wrapped in a metrosexual package, and the result is another version of laissez-faire aesthetics. He was a downtown sensation with his first show at Barbara Gladstone in 1991, for which he videotaped himself, naked except for some mountain climbing equipment, scaling the walls of the gallery. Since then, he has become an international pop-bohemian phenomenon. Visitors to the Guggenheim show were probably a bit vague as to why Barney, looking as buff as can be in a pink kilt, had filmed himself climbing up the rotunda of the Guggenheim and then projected the results on video monitors suspended from the ceiling of the museum. My impression, however, was that people were glad to go along with the arcana of the Cremaster cycle, a series of five phonybaloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination. Barney stars in a sprawling but static pageant of athletic prowess, cross-dressing, and gender-bending, with

settings ranging from an Art Deco skyscraper to a rugged coastal landscape. The audience at the Guggenheim may not know what is going to come next, but they immediately take everything in stride. They feel oh-so-up-to-date when Barney poses in a gynecological examination chair. It doesn’t matter what any of this means. You’re simply expected to accept the illogic. (The cremaster, for those who have not yet heard, is the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles; it is described in a twenty-page glossary in the Barney catalogue that has entries ranging from “anus island” to “zombie.”) With Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, the Guggenheim Museum became an artsy-fartsy version of the multiplex. And that is right in line with laissez-faire aesthetics. What laissez-faire aesthetics has left us with—in the museums, the galleries, the art schools, and the art magazines—is a weakening of conviction, an unwillingness to ever take a stand, a refusal to champion, or even surrender to, any first principle. More than anything else, what laissez-faire aesthetics threatens, with its insistence that anything goes, is the disciplined imagination without which an artist is rudderless, a wanderer in the wilderness. Some will say that what has finally been eclipsed is the modernist adventure, with its celebration of a well-defined set of artistic principles and values: purity, progress, formalism, abstraction. This is not necessarily to be regretted. The way art is understood will of necessity change over time. But what is now in doubt is much bigger than modernity. It is nothing less than the freestanding power of artistic experience, which we discover in works of every time and place, from the Tanagra figurines and the Romanesque manuscripts to the paintings of Rembrandt, Poussin, Corot, and Mondrian. There is nothing laissez-faire about any of these masterworks. When we contemplate them in all of their particularity—in the insistent singularity of their poetry and in the almost delusional extremism of their endlessly various visions—we see that they are anything but easygoing, that they are, each in its own way, relentlessly, triumphantly intolerant. An artist’s vision is always a solitary kingdom.t The

Baffler [no.20] ! 27

Kingdom 3 Rae Armantrout In the kingdom, the open mouths of flowers aren’t asking. * When you say she’s “gone,” you mean she’s home. She’s sheets Cold cirrus fingers. Or she’s expected soon at the big air-space gala. * In other words, she speaks and ruffled yellow throats trumpet your arrival at the Courtyard Marriott tomorrow

28 1 The Baffler [no.20]

Kingdom 2 ( a poetics) “Sharon is Karen.” I never said that. I just said, “Get into the picture.”

* Phoneme clusters? These things happen.

* “Flock together,” we say, when we don’t say, “Opposites attract.”

J OS E P H B LO U G H

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 29

[ S a lvos ]

The Joke’s On You

Presenting . . . The Daily Show and The Colbert Report 3 Steve Almond

mong the hacks who staff our factories of conventional wisdom, evidence abounds that we are living in a golden age of political comedy. The New York Times nominates Jon Stewart, beloved host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as the “most trusted man in America.” His protégé, Stephen Colbert, enjoys the sort of slavish media coverage reserved for philanthropic rock stars. Bill Maher does double duty as HBO’s resident provocateur and a regular on the cable news circuit. The Onion, once a satirical broadsheet published by starving college students, is now a mini-empire with its own news channel. Stewart and Colbert, in particular, have assumed the role of secular saints whose nightly shtick restores sanity to a world gone mad. But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously. Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage. 30 1 The Baffler [no.20]

ans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times offered a summation of the majority opinion in a 2008 profile of Stewart that doubled as his highbrow coronation. “Mr. Stewart describes his job as ‘throwing spitballs’ from the back of the room,” she wrote. “Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day . . . in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.” Putting aside the obvious objection that poking fun at the powerful isn’t the same as bluntly confronting them, it’s important to give Stewart and Colbert their due. They are both superlative comedians with brilliant writing staffs. They represent a quantum improvement over the aphoristic pabulum of the thirties satirist Will Rogers or the musical schmaltz of Beltway balladeer Mark Russell. Stewart and Colbert have, on occasion, aimed their barbs squarely at the seats of power. The most famous example is Colbert’s turn as the featured speaker at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Paying tribute to President George W. Bush, seated just a few feet away, Colbert vowed, “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he

[

S TE P H E N K RO N I N G E R

Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive.

9 stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always reboundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.â&#x20AC;? He went on to praise,

in punishing detail, the media who had served as cheerleaders for the presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s factually spurious rush to war in Iraq, and his embrace of domestic surveillance and torture. The crowd, composed of A-list cheerleaders, sat in stunned silence. The

Baffler [no.20] ! 31

] Stewart has generated a few similar moments of frisson, most notably when he eviscerated Jim Cramer, the frothing former hedge fund manager who hosts the CNBC show Mad Money, and Betsy McCaughey, an unctuous lobbyist paid by insurance companies to flog the myth of government-run “death panels” during the debate over health care reform. Stewart also played a vital role in shaming Senate Republicans into supporting a bill to provide medical care for 9/11 first responders. What’s notable about these episodes, though, is how uncharacteristic they are. What Stewart and Colbert do most nights is convert civic villainy into disposable laughs. They prefer Horatian satire to Juvenalian, and thus treat the ills of modern media and politics as matters of folly, not concerted evil. Rather than targeting the obscene cruelties borne of greed and fostered by apathy, they harp on a rogues’ gallery of hypocrites familiar to anyone with a TiVo or a functioning memory. Wit, exaggeration, and gentle mockery trump ridicule and invective. The goal is to mollify people, not incite them. In Kakutani’s adoring New York Times profile, Stewart spoke of his comedic mission as though it were an upscale antidepressant: “It’s a wonderful feeling to have this toxin in your body in the morning, that little cup of sadness, and feel by 7 or 7:30 that night, you’ve released it in sweat equity and can move on to the next day.” What’s missing from this formulation is the idea that comedy might, you know, change something other than your mood.

ack in October of 2004, Stewart made a now-famous appearance on the CNN debate show Crossfire, hosted by the liberal pundit Paul Begala and his conservative counterpart Tucker Carlson. Stewart framed his visit as an act of honor. He had been mocking the contrived combat of Crossfire on his program and wanted to face his targets. The segment quickly devolved into a lecture. “Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” he told Carlson. “See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians 32 1 The Baffler [no.20]

and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns.” The exchange went viral. Stewart was hailed as a hero: here, at last, was a man brave enough to condemn the tyranny of a middling cable shoutfest. But who, exactly, did Stewart mean by “we”? He’s not just some poor schnook who works the assembly line at a factory then goes home to mow his lawn. He’s a media celebrity who works for Viacom, one of the largest entertainment corporations in the world. Stewart can score easy points by playing the humble populist. But he’s as comfortable on the corporate plantation as any of the buffoons he delights in humiliating. The queasy irony here is that Stewart and Colbert are parasites of the dysfunction they mock. Without blowhards such as Carlson and shameless politicians, Stewart would be out of a job that pays him a reported $14 million per annum. Without the bigoted bluster of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, The Colbert Report would not exist. They aren’t just invested in the status quo, but dependent on it. Consider, in this context, Stewart’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His initial segment highlighted the hypocrisy of those who portrayed the protestors in Zuccotti Park as lawless and menacing while praising Tea Party rallies as quintessentially patriotic. But Stewart was careful to include a caveat: “I mean, look, if this thing turns into throwing trash cans into Starbucks windows, nobody’s gonna be down with that,” he said, alluding to vandalism by activists during a 1999 World Trade Organization summit. Stewart then leaned toward the camera and said, in his best guilty-liberal stage whisper, “We all love Starbucks.” The audience laughed approvingly. Protests for economic justice are worthy of our praise, just so long as they don’t take aim at our luxuries. The show later sent two correspondents down to Zuccotti Park. One highlighted the various “weirdos” on display. The other played up the alleged class divisions within those occupying the park. Both segments trivialized the movement by playing to right-wing stereotypes of protestors as selfindulgent neo-hippies.

[

S TE P H E N K RO N I N G E R

Stewart can score easy points by playing the humble populist. But he’s as comfortable on the corporate plantation as any of the buffoons he delights in humiliating.

Stewart sees himself as a common-sense critic, above the vulgar fray of partisan politics. But in unguarded moments—comparing Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison, say, or crowing over the assassination of Osama bin Laden— he betrays an allegiance to good old American militarism and the free market. In his first show after the attacks of September 11, he delivered a soliloquy that channeled the histrionic patriotism of the moment. “The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center,” he said shakily, “and now it’s gone, and they atThe

Baffler [no.20] ! 33

] tacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity, and strength, and labor, and imagination, and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the South of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.” It does not take a particularly supple intellect to discern the subtext here. The twin towers may have symbolized “ingenuity” and “imagination” to Americans such as Stewart and his brother, Larry, the chief operating officer of the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company. But to most people in the world, the WTC embodied the global reach of U.S.backed corporate cartels. It’s not the sort of monument that would showcase a pledge to shelter the world’s “huddled masses.” In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of that. To imply a kinship between the towers and the Statue of Liberty—our nation’s most potent symbol of immigrant striving—is to promote a reality crafted by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Stewart added this disclaimer: “Tonight’s show is not obviously a regular show. We looked through the vault and we found some clips that we thought might make you smile, which is really what’s necessary, I think, uh, right about now.” You got that? In times of national crisis, the proper role of the comedian is not to challenge the prevailing jingoistic hysteria, but to induce smiles.

he Daily Show and The Colbert Report are not just parodies of news shows. They also include interview segments. And it is here that Stewart, at least occasionally, sheds his greasepaint and red rubber nose. With the help of his research department, he is even capable of exposing lightweight frauds such as Jim Cramer. More often, though, his interviews are cozy affairs, promotional vehicles for whatever commodity his guest happens to be pimping. He’s not interested in visitors who might interrogate the hegemonic dogmas of corporate capitalism. On the contrary, his green room is often stocked with Fox News regulars. Neocon apologist Bill Kristol has appeared on the

34 1 The Baffler [no.20]

show a record eleven times since 2003. Mike Huckabee has visited seven times, Newt Gingrich, Chris Wallace, and Ed Gillespie five times, and so on and so forth on down the dismal demagogic food chain: Lou Dobbs, Ron Paul, Michael Steele, Juan Williams, Ralph Reed, Dick Armey. Stewart, who is nothing if not courteous, allows each of these con men to speak his piece. He pokes fun at the more obvious lines of bullshit. The audience chortles. Now for a message from our sponsors. When Stewart hosts a figure of genuine political power, the discussion usually winds up anodyne. A 2010 visit with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was especially painful to witness. Stewart, a prominent critic of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, seemed starstruck. “What does the burden feel like,” he asked Rice, “on a day to day basis, agree or disagree with the policy?” It was a textbook illustration of the golden parachute of politics. Having left office, Rice’s sins were, if not forgotten, then at least deferred for promotional purposes. His guest had a new memoir to sell, after all. “I’m telling you, you gotta pick up [Rice’s book] about a patriotic American who is, if I may, doing the best that . . .” Stewart paused awkwardly, as if suddenly recognizing what a shill he’d become. “We’ll have the other conversation a different time.” When Rice returned a year later to promote a book about her years in the Bush White House, what emerged was Stewart’s obeisance to figures of authority. “I hate to harp on this,” he said at one point, attempting to redirect Rice back to her use of bogus intelligence. He asked her no explicit questions about, for instance, a report by the House Committee on Government Reform citing twenty-nine false or misleading public statements she had made about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. While Stewart played the milquetoast, Rice commandeered the conversation, suggesting that without the Iraq war the Arab Spring would never have happened and (by the way) Iraq and Iran would be locked in a nuclear arms race. Once a charming propagandist, always a charming propagandist!

[ Colbert’s flag-fellating routine often bends toward unintended sincerity. His visit to Iraq in June 2009 amounted to a weeklong infomercial for the U.S. military.

9 In a sense, Rice owed Stewart an even larger debt. His criticism of the Iraq war— a series of reports under the banner Mess O’Potamia—might have done more to diffuse the antiwar movement than the phone surveillance clauses embedded in the Patriot Act. Why take to the streets when Stewart and Colbert are on the case? It’s a lot easier, and more fun, to experience the war as a passive form of entertainment than as a source of moral distress requiring citizen activism. Colbert’s interviews are even more trivializing. While he occasionally welcomes figures from outside the corporate zoo, his brash persona demands that he interrupt and confound them. If they try to match wits with him, they get schooled. If they play it straight, they get steamrolled. The underlying dynamic of Colbert’s show, after all, is that he never loses an argument. The only acceptable forms of outrage reside in his smug denial of any narrative that questions American supremacy. In this sense, Colbert the pundit can been seen as a postmodern incarnation of the country’s first comic archetype, the “Yankee” (a designation that was then a national, rather than regional, term). As described by Constance Rourke in her 1931 survey, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, the Yankee is a gangly figure, sly and uneducated, who specializes in tall tales and practical jokes. Unlike Stewart, whose humor clearly arises from the Jewish tradition of outsider social commentary, Colbert plays the consummate insider, a cartoon patriot suitable for export. But Colbert’s mock punditry reinforces a dismissive view of actual corporate demagogues. Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly and his ilk come off as laughable curmudgeons, best mocked rather than rebutted, even as they steer our common discourse away from sensible policy and toward toxic forms of grievance.

And Colbert’s own flag-fellating routine often bends toward unintended sincerity. His visit to Iraq in June 2009 amounted to a weeklong infomercial for the U.S. military. It kicked off with a segment in which black ops abduct Colbert from his makeup room and transport him to a TV stage set in Baghdad, which turns out to be one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. Colbert is a brilliant improvisational comedian, adept at puncturing the vanities of his persona in the same way Bob Hope once did. (Colbert even brandished a golf club for his opening monologue in Baghdad, an homage to Hope, a frequent USO entertainer.) Still, there’s something unsettling about seeing America’s recent legacy of extraordinary rendition mined for laughs. Colbert’s first guest, General Ray Odierno, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, was treated to questions such as, “What’s happening here that’s not being reported that you think people back home should know about?” The hulking general then gave the host a buzz cut, as a crowd of several hundred uniformed soldiers roared. Colbert himself acknowledged his reverence for the troops in interviews leading up to his visit. (“Sometimes my character and I agree.”) So it wasn’t exactly shocking that the shows themselves were full of reflexive sanctification of the military. Soldiers, by Colbert’s reckoning, aren’t moral actors who choose to brandish weapons, but paragons of manly virtue whose sole function is to carry out their orders—in this case “bringing democracy” to a hellish Arab backwater. This is an utterly authoritarian mindset. Stewart, at least, has displayed the temerity to question American military might on occasion. A few months before Colbert’s Iraq adventure, in the midst of a heated debate over torture with yet another neocon guest, Cliff The

Baffler [no.20] ! 35

] May, Stewart dared to opine that President Harry S. Truman was a war criminal for ordering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. His statement was shocking in its candor: “I think if you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore and you said, ‘The next one’s coming and hitting you,’ then I would think it’s okay. To drop one on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people. Yeah. I think that’s criminal.” Two days later, Stewart issued an on-air apology: “The atomic bomb—a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk [my statement] back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say. Which, by the way, as it was coming out of your mouth, you ever do that, where you’re saying something and as it’s coming out you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, ‘No, no, he wasn’t, and you should really say that out loud on the show.’ So I am, right now, and, man, ew. Sorry.” This mea culpa was not spurred by a media uproar or a corporate directive (as far as we know) or any apparent reexamination of Truman’s decision, which (for the record) led to the deaths of an estimated 250,000 Japanese, most of them civilians. It was, more revealingly, the result of Stewart’s inbred aversion to conflict, to making any statement that might depart too dramatically from the cultural consensus and land him at the center of a controversy. An even more dramatic example came during his 2010 interview with Rachel Maddow, during which Stewart trotted out one of his favorite canards, that “both sides have their way of shutting down debate.” Maddow asked, “What’s the lefty way of shutting down debate?” “You’ve said Bush is a war criminal,” Stewart replied. “Now that may be technically true. In my world, a war criminal is Pol Pot or the Nuremberg trials. . . . But I think that’s such an incendiary charge that when you put it into conversation as, well, technically he is, that may be right, but it feels like a conversation stopper, not a conversation starter.” This 36 1 The Baffler [no.20]

is the Stewart credo distilled: civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity.

y contrast, consider the late Bill Hicks, a stand-up comedian of the same approximate vintage as Stewart and Colbert. “You never see my attitude in the press,” Hicks once observed. “For instance, gays in the military. . . . Gays who want to be in the military. Here’s how I feel about it, alright? Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of fucking story. That should be the only requirement. I don’t care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet, go wait in that foxhole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody. . . . I watched these fucking congressional hearings and all these military guys and the pundits, ‘Seriously, aww, the esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a moral’—excuse me! Aren’t y’all fucking hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs and when we need you to go blow the fuck out of a nation of little brown people, we’ll let you know. . . . I don’t want any gay people hanging around me while I’m killing kids!” Fellow comics considered Hicks a genius, and he did well in clubs. But he never broke into national television, because he violated the cardinal rule of televised comedy—one passed down from Johnny Carson through the ages—which is to flatter and reassure the viewer. David Letterman invited Hicks to perform on his show but cut his routine just before the broadcast. Several years after Hick’s death, an apologetic Letterman ran a clip of the spot Hicks had recorded. It was obvious why Letterman—or the network higherups—had axed it. The routine openly mocked everyone from pro-lifers to homosexuals. To hear Hicks rant about the evils of latemodel capitalism (“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself”), or militant Christians, or consumerism, is to encounter the wonder of a voice free of what Marshall McLuhan called the “corporate mask.” Hicks understood that comedy’s highest calling is to confront the moral complacency of your audience—and the sponsors.

[ So long as Stewart and Colbert keep earning ratings (and ad dollars), they can do what they like. This is how the modern comedy plantation functions. It’s essentially self-policing. You find yourself out of a job only when your candor costs the bean counters more than it makes them.

9 This willingness to traffic in radical ideas is what makes comic work endure, from Aristophanes’s indictments of Athenian war profiteers to Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” that Irish parents sell their children as food to rich gourmands, from Lenny Bruce’s anguished, anarchic riffs to George Carlin’s rants. “There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever, be fixed,” Carlin once said, though not on The Daily Show. “The owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.” In a 1906 address at Carnegie Hall entitled “Taxes and Morals,” Mark Twain lambasted plutocrats who advertised their piety while lying about their incomes. “I know all those people,” Twain noted. “I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.” He said that word—criminal—knowing that many of these folks were seated in the gallery before him. Twain had this to say about the patriotism of his day: “The Patriot did not know just how or when or where he got his opinions, neither did he care, so long as he was with what seemed the majority—which was the main thing, the safe thing, the comfortable thing.” It’s this quality of avoiding danger, of seeking the safety of consensus, that characterizes the aesthetic of Stewart and Colbert. They’re adept at savaging the safe targets—vacuous talking heads and craven senators. But you will never hear them referring to our soldiers as “uni-

formed assassins,” as Twain did in describing an American attack on a tribal group in the Philippines.

t’s worth noting that Twain’s scathing indictment of the military initially was redacted from his autobiography by an editor concerned that such comments would tarnish the author’s reputation. And it’s equally worth pondering the constraints that define Stewart and Colbert’s acceptable zone of satire. After all, their shows air on Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom, the fifth largest media conglomerate in the world. Apart from bleeped out profanity, there appears to be no censorship, ideological or otherwise, enforced by the suits at Viacom. So long as Stewart and Colbert keep earning ratings (and ad dollars), they can do what they like. This is how the modern comedy plantation functions. It’s essentially self-policing. You find yourself out of a job only when your candor costs the bean counters more than it makes them. Bill Maher learned this in 2001, when, as the host of ABC’s Politically Incorrect, he offered a rebuttal to President Bush’s assertion that the 9/11 hijackers were cowards. “We have been the cowards,” Maher observed. “Lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.” What followed was a textbook case of economic censorship. The right-wing media launched into the expected paroxysms, and the mainstream media fanned the fury. Maher insisted he was making a linguistic argument, not endorsing the terrorists. But it was too The

Baffler [no.20] ! 37

] late. FedEx and Sears Roebuck pulled their ads, and ABC cancelled Politically Incorrect in early 2002. Soon after, the Los Angeles Press Club awarded Maher an award for “championing free speech,” and he took his act to HBO, where he didn’t have to worry about offending sponsors. For Viacom chief Sumner Redstone, airing shows with offensive content isn’t a problem. Redstone grew up in the entertainment business. After earning a law degree and acquainting himself with the intricacies of tax law, he joined his father’s movie theater chain. Redstone’s crucial insight was to recognize that, while new means of distribution might evolve, content was the vital commodity. He built his father’s business accordingly, eventually acquiring Viacom in a hostile takeover. The corporation now owns 170 media networks and thousands of programs, including Jersey Shore, which celebrates binge drinking, brawling, and the vigorous pursuit of venereal disease and melanoma. In the corporate mindset, the specifics of “content” are irrelevant. Either you generate the necessary margin, or you cease to exist. “Content is king,” as Redstone is famously fond of pointing out. And profit is God. If there’s one program on Comedy Central that affirms this maxim, it’s not The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, but the cartoon satire South Park. Over the course of sixteen seasons, the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have pursued taboo topics with abandon. An episode entitled “Trapped in the Closet” not only played off rumors that Tom Cruise is gay but also condemned Scientology as “a big fat global scam” and exposed its various loony secrets. Other South Park episodes have used epithets and profanity as a way of confronting our collective neuroses about race, religion, and sexual orientation. The only publicized instances of Comedy Central censoring South Park have been in response to episodes in which Parker and Stone used images of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked threats of violence. South Park indulges in a good deal of bathroom humor—perhaps inevitably, given that 38 1 The Baffler [no.20]

its protagonists are ten-year-olds. But the show is far more radical than its polished stablemates for the simple reason that it is willing to confront its viewers. Parker and Stone savage both the defensive bigotry of conservatives and the self-righteous entitlement of the left. They accomplish this not by riffing on the corruption of our media and political cultures, but by creating original dramas that expose the lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications of the viewing audience.

urveying the defects of American governance more than eight decades ago, H. L. Mencken issued the following decree: “The only way that democracy can be made bearable is by developing and cherishing a class of men sufficiently honest and disinterested to challenge the prevailing quacks. No such class has ever appeared in strength in the United States. Thus the business of harassing the quacks devolves upon the newspapers. When they fail in their duty, which is usually, we are at the quacks’ mercy.” To their millions of fans, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert represent the vanguard of just such a class. And hope for their leadership was never more keenly felt than in the weeks leading up to their vaunted Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The gathering, a hastily conceived send-up of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally, took place three days before the 2010 midterm elections, with a stated purpose of calling for civility. But the event itself accomplished nothing beyond revealing the bathos of Stewart and Colbert. It boiled down to a goofy variety show, capped by one of Stewart’s mawkish soliloquies. His central point was that Americans are a decent people, capable of making “reasonable compromises.” By way of proof he showed a video of cars merging in the Holland Tunnel. “These millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long, thirty-foot-wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river,” Stewart said. “And they do it. Concession by concession. ‘You go. Then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. . . . Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car,

[ is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay. You go and then I’ll go.’ Sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare and he is scorned, and not hired as an analyst.” It’s hard to know where to begin with a metaphor this misguided. But it might be instructive to contemplate the rise of right-wing radio, an industry borne of commuter rage, which now dominates not just the Republican Party, but our national discourse. Stewart would have us believe that selfish jerks never get hired as analysts. But as his sidekick Colbert clearly demonstrates, that’s exactly who gets hired at the networks—folks who can excite our primal states of negative feeling: wrath, envy, fear. In Stewart’s daffy formulation, pundits and politicians are the ones who prey on an otherwise noble citizenry. But it’s us citizens who watch those pundits and elect those politicians. We’ve chosen to degrade our discourse. Stewart and Colbert make their nut by catering to those citizens who choose to laugh at the results rather than work to change them. Having convinced more than 200,000 such folks to get off their butts and crowd the National Mall—not to mention the two and a half million who watched the proceedings on television or online—Stewart’s call to action amounted to: “If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.” Such is the apotheosis of the Stewart-Colbert doctrine: the civic “rally” as televised corporate spectacle, with special merit badges awarded for attendance. Bill Maher was one of the few prominent voices to call his comrades out. “If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something,” he said. He went on to point out the towering naïveté of their nonpartisan approach, with its bogus attempt to equate the insanity of left and right: “Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capital and he didn’t say, ‘Remem-

ber folks, those Southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too!’ No. He said, ‘I have a dream. They have a nightmare!’ . . . Liberals like the ones on that field must stand up and be counted and not pretend that we’re as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit as they are, and if that’s too polarizing for you and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.” Maher’s dissent, all but lost amid the orgy of liberal self-congratulation, echoed Mencken’s exhortation: one must challenge the quacks to get rid of them. The reason our discourse has grown vicious, and has drifted away from matters of actual policy and their moral consequence, isn’t because of some misunderstanding between cultural factions. It is the desired result of a sustained campaign waged by corporations, lobbyists, politicians, and demagogues who have placed private gain over the common good. In a sense, these quacks have no more reliable allies than Stewart and Colbert. For the ultimate ethos of their television programs is this: the customer is always right. We need not give in to sorrow, or feel disgust, or take action, because our brave clown princes have the tonic for what ails the national spirit. Their clever brand of pseudo-subversion guarantees a jolt of righteous mirth to the viewer, a feeling that evaporates the moment their shows end. At which point we return to our given role as citizens: consuming whatever the quacks serve up next.t

chaosticist • A believer in and

promulgator of the doctrine of ultimate disorder. Chaosticists are fatalists. For them history is an unbroken tale of fuck-ups and catastrophes. They relish what they deplore. Chaosticists are doomsters. Henry Adams was a Chaosticist Supreme. —Daniel Aaron

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 39

[ S a lvos ]

Sit-Cons Class on TV

3 Heather Havrilesky

n television, money imbues characters with honor or shame, dignity or recklessness, charity or malevolence. While the black hat vs. white hat moral absolutism that once dominated the small screen has slowly dissolved into an ethically ambiguous world of pure-intentioned, pill-popping nurses and idealistic, philandering ad men and humble, meth-slinging chemistry teachers, these nuances are less often applied to matters of class. The very rich are either breathtakingly noble or downright nefarious, while the very poor are as self-destructive and helpless as injured baby animals. It’s odd, then, that the one show that dares to burden its privileged heroines with both aggressively entitled and infantile urges of the urban elite would come under fire for focusing on rich white women. Forget the whitewashed, class-bound portrayals of every maledominated TV show of the past half-century; HBO’s Girls, a comedy about the demeaning post-college years of coddled white girls, should shift its premise, its focus, and its tone in order singlehandedly to carry the banner of multiculturalism and class unity. Yet it’s hard to think of a single TV show that approaches upper-crust decadence with as much transparency (and, at times, outright scorn) as Girls does. From the very first scene, Hannah (Lena Dunham) takes the shape of a self-satisfied, overgrown infant, slurping up pasta on her parent’s dime, while they steel themselves to inform her that they’re cutting her off financially. Her response? She pouts like a spoiled brat, protesting that all of her boho artist friends are fully funded by their parents and hinting that her entire life will fall to pieces without their support. Hannah’s friends, meanwhile, are exposed as overindulged and deluded. Hannah’s wealthy, egocentric friend Jessa ( Jemima Kirke) deliv-

40 1 The Baffler [no.20]

ers a rousing speech to her fellow nannies at a city playground about demanding fair pay and benefits—as her own two charges wander off unattended. Meanwhile, Hannah’s pretty roommate Marnie (Allison Williams) is disparaged for floating in an insulated bubble

[

J . D. K I N G

Downton Abbey’s parade of poor, dumb proles is so relentless that it’s hard not to picture its Yank fans savoring the show’s ugly class implications as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

9 The

Baffler [no.20] ! 41

] created by her good looks and her money. Her art gallery job smacks of parental connections, she’s treated with kid gloves by her adoring boyfriend, and her parents still pay her BlackBerry bill. Hannah herself is often set straight by more sensible denizens of the regular working world: when she shows two coworkers at her office the photo her sort-of boyfriend sent her of his penis, the two women tell her she’s devaluing herself and should dump him immediately. This clash of post-elite-college idealism and working-world reality, playing out in the slightly shameful realm of condescending, training-wheels internships, lies at the heart of the show’s mission. It’s the reason it’s called Girls: drifting through the trustfund-enabled, fun-seeking romper room of Manhattan and Brooklyn, these clueless children couldn’t be more out of touch with the rigors of the real world. Somehow, though, while Girls generates controversy, Downton Abbey’s exaggerated portrait of upper-crust heroism smoothly sidesteps critical scrutiny. The British export, which has won PBS more viewers than might tune in for an average episode of Mad Men, takes dramatic moments of anger, love, and passion and replaces them with awkward silences, polite stuttering, and the same shots of vintage cars pulling up to the estate over and over again. But while Mary (Michelle Dockery) thinks better of telling Matthew (Dan Stevens) her true feelings and Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) decides against letting his wife Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) know that her continued neglect has caused his eye to wander, their underlings engage in a steady stream of reckless and unsavory activities. Ethel (Amy Nuttall) the maid gets impregnated by a soldier, Daisy (Sophie McShera) the scullery maid marries a man she doesn’t love, and Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) is found guilty (wrongly, we assume) of killing his wife. And then there are the ill-considered antics of Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), the footman who purposefully gets his hand shot off so he’ll be sent home from battle during WWI, then begins an underground business 42 1 The Baffler [no.20]

selling flour and sugar to Downton Abbey only to get tricked out of his money by a shady supplier. He’s reduced to hiding Lord Grantham’s cherished dog, Isis, in the hopes of playing the hero when he returns the dog to her master. While this Edwardian soap opera’s overheated class melodramas appear to provide little more than voyeuristic period fare for American viewers—Brideshead Revisited minus the wit and self-awareness—the parade of poor, dumb proles is so relentless that it’s hard not to picture its Yank fans savoring the show’s ugly class implications as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. True, American TV comedies have offered up buffoonish working-class characters, from Ralph Kramden to Homer Simpson, who dream up harebrained get-rich-quick schemes only to wake up and fall on their faces. But Downton Abbey is the show for our moment, unique in offering the old-world rich as the remedy for the miseries and woes of the lower orders—something that U.S.-produced television longs to propose from its own culturally aloof sanctums in Hollywood, but can never pull off.

his shift in sensibility represents a new, decadent phase in the always demented logic of TV production. Even during the darkest, upward-redistributing days of the Reagan and first Bush eras, television could still deliver a firm slap in the face of class prerogative, be it the lurid inhumanity depicted in owning-class soap operas such as Dynasty and Dallas, or the quasi-heroic sitcom misadventures of Roseanne Barr and the Bundy clan. Yes, that cohort of working-class protagonists was still condemned to economic doom and cultural irrelevance, but the rich were tobogganing headlong into the void at a much faster and more stylish clip themselves. If they accomplished nothing else, the TV offerings of the eighties and nineties made viewers from any social class feel equally bad about themselves. In the cloistered and punitive Old World of Downton Abbey, though, underlings who display any fire in their bellies are treated as petulant and uncomprehending children. When Tom Branson (Allen Leech),

h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

Maze of Doom 3 Tod Mesirow

Creating an L.A.-based television

show is a strange enterprise. In certain ways, it’s like every other creative endeavor that begins with an idea in someone’s head. If the head belongs to a writer, there is the blank screen, the medium for realizing the idea in words. For a composer, there are the notes, for a painter, the brush strokes, and so on. But for the TV producer, the immediate next step after the idea is taking the pitch to network officials. Major industry players aren’t the only ones who have to pitch network officials. Anyone working on any show at any time has to come up with ideas and pitch them to the people running the shows. One show about reuniting lost friends and lovers, called Lost & Found, was pitched to the FX network in its very early days. The show’s staff met to go over potential stories. “What about former models, maybe they were pals in Paris and haven’t seen each other in awhile?” “Perfect,” said the show runner. “There’s bound to be emotion, and drama, and divergent paths.” “How about reuniting a marine biologist and a dolphin?” A few laughs from the group. A derisive guffaw or two. “If you can find them, you can do that story.” Sometimes it’s the unusual or the unexpected that succeeds. Sometimes it’s the clear, the simple, the of course idea that succeeds. Rupert Murdoch came to America and bought half ownership in Twentieth Century Fox, a film studio. Murdoch then recruited Barry Diller, newly arrived

J . D. K I N G

from Paramount, to start the Fox Television Network. Diller had very specific ideas about pitching. All he wanted to hear was the promo—the condensed version of whatever show was being pitched. Diller gave you ten seconds. If you were not able to distill the idea to ten compelling seconds, then the idea wasn’t well formed enough, nor was the idea worth continuing to think about. Everything Mr. Diller did, he did in a concise fashion. Interviewing job candidates, he asked three questions: What do you watch on television? What magazines do you read? And what radio stations do you listen to?

Early in the life of Diller’s new net-

work, a documentary made by a local Fox station scored well in the ratings. Fox broadcast it nationally. Suddenly there was an idea for a series of similar documentaries. Both Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller were listening in on the pitch, in a conference room with Stephen Chao, the VP of development for reality programming, and me—my title was director of development. “What about the dark side of Horatio Alger—Larry Flynt.” “Why Larry Flynt?” Mr. Murdoch wanted to know.

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 43

h “What’s the promo?” asked Mr. Diller. “Rags to riches First Amendment crusader, considered pornographer by some, shot and maimed, turns to drugs and outrageous media stunts while battling the Supreme Court.” Close to ten seconds, but a bit long, and not super concise, actually. “Sounds good.” “Let’s develop that one.” It was never made. The people who were supposed to make it came up with an even better pitch. “We put a bunch of cameramen inside police cars for a week and edit the best stories into one show each week”— which became the Fox series Cops.

hat is the dumbest idea you can think of? Maybe that’s what’s required for success. There are plenty of shows on television that make no sense. How did they get made? How were they sold? Someone had the dumbest idea ever and sold it. And now it’s on television, making money. Is there any idea too dumb for television? The MTV offices are in Santa Monica, a short distance from the ocean. In the lobby we passed by a perfect early sixties Airstream trailer, parked on artificial turf. There was a sign saying “keep off,” and, in the wall, fifteen televisions running the various channels that make up the MTV Networks. We were escorted by a young person to a conference room with a glass wall facing the waiting area on one long side and overlooking the tree-lined street below on the other long side, and a television on one short wall, and a blank wall on the other. The executive arrived, bringing with her bottled waters. “So what do you have?” “It’s a competition show, with a fun twist.” 44 1 The Baffler [no.20]

“That’s good.” “Two teams are given a list of items to procure.” “Okay.” “They can’t buy them. They can’t steal them. They have to be given to the teams willingly.” “Got it. What are they?” “Panties.” “Panties?” “Panties. The name of the show is Panty Raid.” “Love the title.” “Here’s how it works. Each team has three people. Usually in a group there are one or two super chatty types, and at least one quiet one. That one gets the camera.” “They film themselves?” “There’s one camera person—a real one—that follows each team. Two camera people total. But for the other angle— the team member films everything.” “I like that. User-generated.” “Exactly.” “Will people really give them their underwear?” “Depends on how they’re asked. And remember—there’s a real camera there too—most people love the idea of being on television.” “But do most people love the idea of giving a stranger their underwear on camera?” “Absolutely.” “How does it start and end?” “We’re thinking very simply—designed for an affordable budget. The two teams are in a parking lot of a shopping center. A cool car drives up—a ’69 Camaro, for instance—the host gets out, says hello, hands each team their target list and a camera, and tells them they have twenty-four hours. The team with the most panties—wins.” “Who’s on the target list?” “It’s different each week. Crossing Continued on page 46.

[ a put-upon chauffeur, aims to upend a soup of cow pies and spoilt milk over the head of a visiting military officer in order to demonstrate his distaste for capitalists and their wars, his social betters behave as if his ideals are merely rationalizations for attention-seeking stunts. Likewise, the maid Ethel’s desire to light up her dreary life with a little romance is greeted as the self-destructive behavior of a harlot. And so on, throughout the awkward and stilted social deference that makes up the true dramatic tension in this curious franchise, which has still more curiously caught on like wildfire among PBS’s liberal viewership.

ou’d think a dose of class retribution could come in handy—something like Revenge, ABC’s fantastical new drama about Emily (Emily VanCamp), a feisty middle-class woman who’s intent on bringing down the corrupt rich people who condemned her father, David Clarke ( James Tupper), to a disgraceful and untimely death. There were quite a few of them, too, from Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe), the wealthy matriarch who had an affair with Emily’s dad and then turned on him, to Victoria’s head of security, who had David collared for a terrorist crime he didn’t commit, to the author who was paid off by Victoria to write a book about how David was guilty. The guiding principle here is that the very prosperous, if they so choose, can crush mere mortals under their feet. “The people I bring into my inner circle will always be protected,” Victoria tells the bribed author. “You will remain in that circle as long as you hold up your agreement. If you choose not to, I guarantee that those memoirs you’re so proud of will end in a very dark chapter.” Revenge presents an even starker version of the cartoonish nastiness and depravity of eighties soaps Dallas and Dynasty. Instead of setting forth a morally unstable world inhabited by flawed but fragile characters—think of those scenes at the Ewing ranch or the Carrington mansion where every single character gathered in a Scooby-Doo semicircle and accused each other of double-dealing—Revenge focuses on one tenacious antiheroine who’s hell-bent

on destroying a uniformly malevolent family. But neither Emily nor her one ally, Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann), a dotcom billionaire, is presented as a pure-hearted crusader, fighting the good fight for justice. Nolan is more than a little creepy and slightly sadistic, and Emily, although she’s been horribly wronged, shows so little hesitation in embracing a campaign of deception and vengeance that the whole crusade takes on a slightly surrealist flavor. The only thing saving Emily from damnation is the comparative malice of her enemies. Because, while only J. R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington were consistent in their villainy, the rich characters on Revenge have the heart and soul of Cruella de Vil. Aside from the occasional glimmer of self-doubt that flickers across Victoria’s face, these characters seem to have more in common with Dr. Evil or Mr. Burns than with real human beings. Revenge has money instantly rendering human beings rotten to the core. “You really are a son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny), Victoria’s evil husband, says to Tyler (Ashton Holmes), a young man who’s trying to blackmail him. “Yes, it does appear that you despicable people are starting to rub off on me,” Tyler replies. Like Dynasty and Dallas (and Downton Abbey, for that matter), Revenge has no subtext. What you see is what you get. And it’s no surprise to find that the working-class characters on Revenge are prone to the same self-sabotaging behaviors that you find on Downton Abbey. Emily’s friends from the past are scrappy, hardworking types whose down-to-earth warmth never quite makes up for their impulsiveness and bad taste. Emily’s true love is Jack Porter (Nick Wechsler), a burly guy who can usually be found in a plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, pouring brews at the local pub he owns, where some facsimile of John Cougar Mellencamp’s greatest hits plays on an endless loop. His girlfriend Amanda (Margarita Levieva) is a former stripper whose distinguishing characteristic is that she’s not smart. When Amanda isn’t speaking to Jack in simple sentences, she’s climbing onto the bar in her Daisy Duke short-shorts and pouring alcohol directly into the mouths of scragThe

Baffler [no.20] ! 45

h guard, nun, bus driver, librarian, policeman, waitress—the whole gamut.” “How does it end?” “The teams return to the parking lot. The host has a clothesline strung up, and counts the panties as the teams hang them up.” “Huh. I’m not sure I would give up my underwear. Would you?” “Depends on who is asking, and how they ask. We’ll cast for pure appeal.” “I get it. I’ll take it to the group, and see what they think.” “Great. Thanks. We think it’s one of those great, simple ideas.”

children’s-focused TV network was adding live-action nonfiction to its cartoon lineup. I was there to pitch the network executive, whom I’d never met, in a meeting set up by my agent. “You know I’m a really big fan of everything you do,” he said. “We have to do something together.” “Okay,” I said, “Great. Then I have something perfect for you. The title is Monkey Behind the Wheel.” “Gotta stop you right there. We did a pilot with a chimpanzee last quarter, and it was a disaster. No monkeys.” I’d seen this scene in the movies, and on television, where the person pitching an idea (in this case me) has to improvise. But I had never been so completely shot down so immediately after starting. “Do you have anything else?” “One thing,” I said. “No monkeys, but there’s still a car. It’s based on a remote-controlled car. But full-size.” The executive sat forward in his chair. “Can you really do that?” “Absolutely,” I said, full of actual confidence, and not faux bravado. In fact, my very first episode of Monster Garage entailed building a full-size remote-controlled car in five days. And it worked. “Great! What happens with the car?” 46 1 The Baffler [no.20]

I love how this is going so far. “Well, there’s two kids—it has to be a competition, right?” “Exactly.” “So one of the kids builds the car . . . while the other kid BUILDS A MAZE.” I’m really happy—I like this idea, thought up right on the spot. In fact, I like it a whole lot more than Monkey Behind the Wheel. I imagine the entire scenario of massive television success unfolding right before my eyes. I’ve only had one near-death experience, and some of my life did flash before my eyes—but not as completely as this Iconquer-television fantasy. “That’s awesome. What kind of maze?” “The sort of maze that’s difficult to drive through. It’s a competition, right? So the remote-controlled car builder has to get through the maze, and the maze builder has to build the maze to prevent the car from getting through.” “I love that! What’s it called?” And I come up with what I still think is a perfect title: Maze of Doom. “Fantastic. When can you send me something on it?” Because clearly I don’t have a DVD, a PDF, or even a piece of paper—which isn’t necessarily odd, but usually you walk in to pitch a show with a few audiovisual aids. “Few days. I’m still refining the idea a bit.” “Great. Let’s get this going. I really want to make this series with you.” Big handshakes, man-hugs, and I leave his office astonished and amazed. Luckily I still remember that feeling, because after that, it was, as is so often the case, all downhill. We had three more meetings, several phone calls, exchanges of email offers and counteroffers, and nothing ever came of it. No monkeys. No remotecontrolled cars. And no maze.t

[ Television has lately tried to address the plight of the poor directly—albeit in a sitcom, the only format in which industry executives can seem to tolerate the idea of poor people.

9 gly local ne’er-do-wells. Jack scoffs at her slutty antics, but like any working-class opportunist, he changes his tune when it’s time to count up those wads of cash she’s just won in exchange for her dignity. Jack tells Amanda he’d like to use that money to take her out to a nice dinner, but Amanda wants to hit Atlantic City instead. That’s what foolish poor people do with their extra money, after all: they lose it all at a blackjack table while John Cougar Mellencamp plays in the background. The moral? If these people would stop sucking on a chili dog behind the Tastee Freez, they might have some hope of trading in that little pink house for a 10,000-square-foot mansion on the beach.

elevision has lately tried to address the plight of the poor directly—albeit in a sitcom, the only format in which industry executives can seem to tolerate the idea of poor people. You might have hoped that on the basis of the title alone, CBS’s Two Broke Girls would show the trials, tribulations, and self-knowing wit shared among real Americans after the 2008 meltdown. After all, past sitcom generations have dealt with such material head-on, and sometimes even insightfully—from All in the Family to Good Times to Roseanne. But where those earlier shows were able to make the blue-collar world of the Midwest or the outer boroughs of New York seem like places where people lived, Two Broke Girls feels more like a sloppy diorama in a natural history museum. In the scrappy diner of Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King’s creation, absurd stereotypes come to non-life. Max (Kat Dennings) is the prototypical no-nonsense underclass woman, prone to making the sorts of bad choices that make her brand new friend and fellow waitress, Caroline (Beth Behrs), roll her eyes. You see, Caroline was rich and spoiled until her fa-

ther was arrested for perpetrating a Madoffstyle Ponzi scheme, so she’s ambitious and hardworking (huh?). When savvy Caroline discovers that hapless Max makes great cupcakes, she pushes Max to start a business. Caroline enrolls Max in a cupcake decorating class, then sets up their website, finds customers, gets gigs, and makes sure they get paid. She even gets Max to throw a benefit at the diner in order to pay off her student loans. Without Caroline to keep her on the straight and narrow path to glory, presumably Max would blow all of her profits on OxyContin, boxed wine, and Ho Hos. And even though Caroline has a criminal for a father, Max is the one whose family life is painted as dysfunctional. Max grew up poor, you see, so her parents must be careless, trashy, or absent. “No one taught me how to bake, no one taught me how to use tampons, no one taught me anything,” she tells Caroline. She laments her mother’s flakiness and says she finds the idea of a loving family “unbelievable.” And when Caroline feels bad, Max tells her, “Giving in to feelings is for rich people. Regular people just have to get up, get drunk, and go fulfill their babysitting duties.” Still, Max makes it clear that being poor is a temporary state of affairs for both of them. “Listen, everybody’s broke in their twenties, and everybody hides from stuff,” she says. “You run into freezers; I practice ignorance and black-out drinking.” The diner is where the most clownish racial stereotypes play out. Earl (Garrett Morris), the cashier, appears to have been cobbled together from old Sanford and Son sound bites. “My mother used to make the best chocolate pie,” Earl tells the others in one episode. “I remember one time she got so mad at this white lady she worked for, she took the chocolate pie to the bathroom . . . No, hold on, that was The

Baffler [no.20] ! 47

] from The Help.” Han Lee (Matthew Moy), the diner’s owner, is an industrious Korean man who barks orders in a heavy accent, punctuated occasionally by childlike lines like, “I want so bad to be heep.” Oleg ( Jonathan Kite), the Russian cook, never utters a word that doesn’t involve sexual innuendo. From here, more stereotypes wander into the diner, interacting with the stereotypes therein, forming a breathtaking three-ring circus of flat characters derived entirely from age-old prejudices and fleeting conversations overheard at the local deli. Two Broke Girls is the kind of comedy that pretends to focus on the concerns of the common man even as the story itself undermines those concerns. “So when you were laying around on your trust fund doing nothing every day, having other people scrub your toilet, you could hold your head up high?” Max asks when Caroline hides instead of facing a wealthy ex-boyfriend who comes into the diner, unaware that she works there. “But now that you support yourself by earning your own money, that’s somehow shameful?” This sort of speech might be a little more convincing if the world of Two Broke Girls weren’t consistently painted as shameful, from harrowing encounters with snobby exes to catering jobs where supermodels boss the two girls around to some degrading scenes involving coupon clipping. But then, this is the central premise of Two Broke Girls: those hard-earned sav-

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ings don’t add up very quickly, and until they do, you’d better prepare to be humiliated by those with more money (and therefore more dignity).

fter a few hours enduring the classbound clichés of Two Broke Girls and Revenge, it’s hard not to long for the classbound clichés of Gossip Girl, if only because Gossip Girl, like its rich thugs vs. poor thugs predecessor, The O.C., plays more as farce than melodrama. In fact, most of the fun of Gossip Girl lies in rubbernecking the perks of wealthy Manhattan—which are so much perkier than the perks of wealthy Manhattan Beach: sipping cocktails at the New York Palace Hotel, browsing at Bergdorf’s and Missoni, lounging at the Russian Tea Room. And the pretty young things therein are as well cast as the locations; you couldn’t find a closer physical embodiment of prep school grandiosity than Ed Westwick (who plays Chuck Bass) if you plucked a Salinger-scripted phony out of The Catcher in the Rye and threw him onto the small screen. And what woman in the world personifies the breezy entitlement of Upper West Side femininity better than Blake Lively? Recreating a fantasy of the beautiful life is only half the battle, of course. The other half lies in toying with the dysfunctional tics of the propertied class, from teenagers living alone in luxury hotels while their indifferent parents foot the bill to the constant abuse of handservants like Blair Waldorf’s (Leighton Meester) underling/faux-Mommy Dorota (Zuzanna Szadkowski). But the worst nightmare of all for these poor little rich kids is the feeling that any achievement they manage to carry off will be the result of someone pulling strings for them behind the scenes. “My grandfather just admitted to me that the only reason I have this job is because he bought the Spectator,” says Nate (Chace Crawford) in a recent episode. “Here I was, thinking I was doing great work and so proud of it, now I just feel like a total fraud.” Creator Josh Schwartz and the other writers of Gossip Girl seem to recognize that making rich characters evil

[ almost feels like overkill. There’s plenty of injustice already built into the picture, even when the characters’ intentions are pure. What’s atypical about Gossip Girl is that the middle-class kids on the show aren’t depicted as occupying higher moral ground than their loaded (in all senses of the word) peers; they, too, suffer from self-obsession, narcissism, and ego-driven despair. Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) in particular—like Hannah of Girls—serves as a cautionary tale for those just privileged enough to indulge themselves in a creative-class career. Dan labors over a novel about his classmates, then balks when his friend Vanessa ( Jessica Szohr) secretly gives his manuscript to a publisher. From there, Dan is embittered by every success. First he doesn’t want his book to be published. Then his book is published, yes—but his book signings aren’t popular enough. (“My book is a failure, Dad. I’m a failure.”) Next, his book is optioned, but the producer wants to change his character from an innocent outsider to a skilled manipulator. (“We’re gonna Zuckerberg him!” the producer tells Serena.) Finally, the movie gets killed. Dan should be basking in the satisfaction of having accomplished something using his talents. Instead, he’s whining to anyone who’ll listen that his writing career is making him miserable.

trangely, it’s the ability of the rich on Gossip Girl to casually admit their un fair advantages that separates the show from its less tolerable TV cousins. Whether Chuck is offering to pay off Blair’s dowry and release her from her bad marriage or Blair is sending Dorota on some awful errand to serve her own selfish needs, the enormous benefits of wealth aren’t reduced to either blackmail or bestowing favors. Instead of pretending that money makes them morally superior (Downton Abbey) or morally inferior (Revenge), the wealthy of Gossip Girl encounter their wealth exactly the way real wealthy people do: with matter-of-fact pleasure. Take Chuck, explaining why he became a male slut in the wake of his breakup with his one true love, Blair. He was heartbroken at first, he says, “But then I

realized I’m a seventeen-year-old billionaire. With tremendous stamina.” Even the delusions of the wealthy aren’t offensive on Gossip Girl, maybe because they’re treated as just that. When Vanessa asks Blair, “What makes you better than me?” Blair is thrilled to respond, “Everything. Generations of breeding and wealth had to come together to produce me. I have more in common with Marie Antoinette than with you.” Yes, Blair: you certainly do. Exposing the presumptions of the prosperous while never giving in to the notion that wealth bestows any kind of ethical advantage (or disadvantage, for that matter): this is what both Gossip Girl and Girls do so well. But instead of showering the rich and less rich with equal-opportunity angst and scorn, how about making television shows about regular people, struggling to survive without appearing either hapless or insane, working hard to make ends meet without shooting themselves in the foot? If network execs and TV writers need a little help imagining stories about regular people with regular concerns, they need to stop and look around for minute. Because, well, we’re everywhere—everywhere but on TV.t

cloud chamber • “Apparatus used to study the tracks of ionizing radiations.” Figuratively, transcendental cloud chambers are employed to trace the processing of soul stuff. 1) The spirits of the dead pass through a vast tunnel into the cloud chamber. 2) Once enclosed, the soul stuff is purified by a supramundane process, i.e., Zionization, the strains of evil and sin leaving telltale trails. 3) Once cleansed, and having passed angelic inspections, the soul-rays reform in rainbow irradiations and ascend heavenwards while the detritus deliquesces into “tiny droplets of water” and slowly descends to earth. —Daniel Aaron The

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[ S a lvos ]

Oh, the Pathos!

Presenting . . . This American Life 3 Eugenia Williamson

his spring, professional storyteller Mike Daisey was revealed to have fabricated key events in a segment for the public radio show This American Life. The broadcast, an adaptation of his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, recounted his journey to the Foxconn manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, China. In record time, the monologist’s name became shorthand for self-aggrandizing deception—though curiously little attention has been paid, then or since, to the manner in which Daisey’s story scrupulously adhered to the narrative conventions of This American Life. The episode in question, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” was an inventory of high Victorian exploitation straight out of the Industrial Revolution. During his tour of China, Daisey explained, he encountered sad but noble workers, among them a man with a hand ruined in a factory explosion who was spellbound by the iPad Daisey brought with him. “It’s a kind of magic,” the worker said, or rather didn’t. Volumes of predictably earnest media criticism were expended on Daisey and his transgressions. One man’s fabrications sent the pundits into rounds of frantic handwringing, causing them to question the nature of narrative, reportage, and truth itself. Most critics agreed that This American Life host Ira Glass displayed heroic grace in the wake of the damaging revelations. When Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz suspected Daisey had lied, Glass promptly looked into the matter, confirmed Schmitz’s suspicions, and issued a press release confessing that he hadn’t fact-checked the story as thoroughly as he should have. Glass then devoted an entire episode of This American Life to explaining Daisey’s falsehoods. “Retraction” culminated in a fraught interview with Daisey himself, during which Glass expressed both anger and 50 1 The Baffler [no.20]

empathy. “I simultaneously feel terrible, for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also I stuck my neck out for you. You know, I feel like, I feel like, like I vouched for you. With our audience,” Glass said. “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” was hardly This American Life’s first foray into investigative journalism. Each week, the program presents three stories on a theme. More often than not, these are quirky personal anecdotes about The Way We Live Now, though in recent years the show has tackled issues of broader importance: kidnappings in Colombia, Geoffrey Canada’s radical approach to educating the poor, the root causes of the new depression. Daisey’s story, among the show’s most ambitious attempts at social criticism, was the most popular episode in the history of This American Life. And in an hour, the pundits moaned, Daisey dashed the trust it had taken Glass twenty years to build. Amid all the coverage was a stinging remark from Bloomberg reporter Adam Minter. Speaking to Marketplace, he suggested that the audience of This American Life was part of the problem: “People like a very simple narrative. . . . Foxconn bad. iPhone bad. Sign a petition. Now you’re good. That’s a great, simple message and it’s going to resonate with a public radio listener. It’s going to resonate with the New York Times reader. And I think that’s one of the reasons [Daisey] had so much traction.” While Minter’s comment was the most accurate explanation of what had happened, it still missed the mark. It’s obvious that Mike Daisey wasn’t some marauding blackguard hell-bent on tricking the noble, irrepressibly nice host of a public radio institution and his legion of right-minded fans. But the truth is far more uncomfortable: Daisey stepped forward to deliver to This American Life listeners exactly what Glass has conditioned them to

[

P E TE R A R K L E

Daisey’s story, suggestive of the show’s push into social criticism, was the most popular episode in the history of This American Life. And in an hour, the pundits moaned, Daisey dashed the trust it had taken Glass twenty years to build.

9 expect—a dramatic nonfiction narrative in the form of a personal journey. A self-aware, middle-aged, middle-class everyman who travels to an exotic locale and meets a bunch of people who aren’t too different from This American Life’s listeners is the show’s perfect story. That’s why Glass had to

send Daisey to the gallows for minor falsehoods that in no way obscured the greater truth about Apple Inc. Daisey exposed the fact that the aesthetics and conventions of the kind of narrative journey Glass has patented—one born of nineties boom-time decadence—were never designed to accommodate The

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] harsh economic truths, much less to promote any kind of critical art or intelligence. Glass’s reaction to Daisey’s lies, more than the lies themselves, exposed the limitations of This American Life’s twee, transporting narratives, the show’s habit of massaging painful realities into puddles of personal experience, its preference for pathos over tragedy. From the beginning, This American Life has carefully blunted the class implications of its stories. Daisey’s story was one it couldn’t contain. The lesson couldn’t be clearer: it’s time for This American Life to grow up.

n seventeen years on the air, This American Life has become a runaway commercial success and the gold standard for first-person radio journalism. Its format of three stories loosely tethered to a theme, its devotion to the small, strange details of everyday existence, and Ira Glass’s distinct enunciation and large plastic spectacles have become synonymous with arch knowingness, worthy entertainment, and a certain kind of whimsy. More than a million people tune in to This American Life every week, making it one of Public Radio International’s most successful programs. Its stylistic influence can be heard in many newer public radio programs—in the confessional storytelling of The Moth; in TAL-produced Planet Money’s personal, narrative approach to economics; in the way the wacky hosts of the science show Radiolab enthusiastically talk over one another—and in the chirpy, low-budget feel of shows like the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters. But This American Life has become more than just an influential radio show. Today, it’s a megawatt, multi-platform empire. It is the most popular podcast in that medium’s short history. And it exerts no small influence on the publishing industry: an author’s appearance on the show all but guarantees a sales boost, if not best-seller status, and Glass canonized a number of journalists in The New Kings of Nonfiction, his 2007 anthology. This American Life has been a television program, now on hiatus, airing on Showtime and Current TV. A This American Life segment spawned the children’s movie Unaccompanied Minors— 52 1 The Baffler [no.20]

an adaptation of a 2001 segment about child travelers stranded in airports over the holiday season. In April, Variety reported that HBO would adapt a 2010 This American Life story about a drug runner turned suburban dad turned missing persons investigator into a dramatic series starring Owen Wilson. In the past year, Glass co-wrote and co-produced a feature-length adaptation of monologist and This American Life contributor Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, as well as an adaptation of a This American Life sketch about cryogenics directed by Errol Morris and starring the hunky Paul Rudd. Before Ira Glass became a brand, he was a Chicago-based reporter for NPR’s All Things Considered. In 1990, he started a documentary radio show called The Wild Room for Chicago public radio affiliate WBEZ with a partner, Gary Covino. It was a fertile moment in indie culture—a self-conscious hyper-literacy overtook American popular art. The celebrated fiction of the time was all wordy and complex. The New York Times championed slacker musical acts like Pavement and Beck, who used three-dollar words, and low-budget independent cinema made a mark with films like Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which focused on the quirky lives of super-articulate, if unattractive, regular people. Meanwhile, the first generation of venture capitalists were settling into Silicon Valley to launch a long march of IPOs. By the mid-nineties, the time was right for a shaggy yet literate radio show hosted by a quirky public-radio geek with a nasal voice and a penchant for inserting “uhms” amid his rapid-fire narrations. In 1995, the MacArthur Foundation offered WBEZ a $150,000 grant to produce a program that spotlighted work by Chicago artists. Station manager Torey Malatia approached Glass, who jumped at the chance to go national. The 1995 debut of This American Life tracked the balmy ascendancy of the Clintonite middle class and the first wave of Internet-age capitalism just as surely as did indie culture. Back then, Glass had a ponytail. Glass’s new franchise made its name by deploying what would prove to be a defining

[ The show makes its listeners feel proud of their station, their values, their endless sympathy for the infinite, and infinitely fascinating, varieties of middle-class families, and even, sometimes, for the poor, who, in the end, are just like everyone else.

9 public radio device: the first-person vignette. In short order, squeaky-voiced humorist David Sedaris and squeaky-voiced music commentator Sarah Vowell established themselves as personalities. Like Glass, these early breakout stars hailed from middle-class backgrounds but delivered piquant life stories virtually ordered up from hipster Central Casting: Sedaris recounted his hilariously lustful reveries about a male coworker as he toiled as a Macy’s Christmas elf, and Vowell’s dad really liked guns. For a staid public radio audience, the squeakers must have seemed transgressive, but they also broke through to the mainstream: their books made the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and each appeared on David Letterman. Together, they would usher in a new era of quirky—and occasionally ethically challenged—personal narrative. For a 2007 article for The New Republic, Alex Heard took it upon himself to fact-check Sedaris’s essays, many of which Sedaris had read on This American Life. Heard found a great number of embellishments and outright fabrications—and Sedaris admitted as much when Heard confronted him. Heard concluded that Sedaris’s understanding of the difference between fiction and nonfiction was not at issue. What was important, Heard wrote, was that the “editors and radio producers who packaged Sedaris’s earlier work certainly understood the difference. They knew that, in our time, nonfiction is bankable in ways that fiction is not.

What bugs me is that they milked the term for all its value, while laughing off any of the ethical requirements it entails.” After the Daisey scandal, The Awl’s Choire Sicha compiled a list of journalists who’d noted Sedaris’s slippery relationship with the truth, titling it “In Fabrication Uproars, At Least Everyone Agrees David Sedaris Is a Liar.” Sedaris’s embroideries have been allowed on the grounds of satirical license, but his experience as a Glass-minted celebrity offers an early version of the moral of the Mike Daisey saga: to narrate all is to forgive all—so long as you stay away from politics.

lthough the narratives presented on This American Life don’t always reflect reality, they do succeed as efficient conduits for upper-middle-class self-satisfaction. (An Onion headline from 2007: “This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence.”) The show makes its listeners feel proud of their station, their values, their endless sympathy for the infinite, and infinitely fascinating, varieties of middle-class families, and even, sometimes, for the poor, who, in the end, are just like everyone else. Most of the time, in fact, the stories on This American Life fall under Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch: “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.” Consider the forensic care that the Glass team has expended on making the seamy side of working-class life palatable. Back in the nineties, Glass introduced This American Life’s very own slacker correspondent, Dishwasher Pete, née Jordan, a pleasant, wellspoken young man who traveled from restaurant to restaurant washing dishes as a kind of vision quest. For public radio listeners—the majority of whom are college-educated and who, on average, earn tens of thousands of dollars more than the median American income—Jordan was the perfect guide to the unpleasant world of dirty, low-wage work. He The

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] maintained his sense of humor and enough ironic distance to safeguard listeners from anything resembling despair over the fate of America’s wage-earning class. After all, Jordan could give up his itinerant tour in the service economy and do something more appropriate for an articulate white person. Surely everyone else condemned to dead-end occupations could exercise the same option. When Jordan published the musings from his zine, Dishwasher, in a 2007 book of the same name, the Times admired its insights into the dishwashing “subculture.” And in a back-cover blurb, the writer and editor Sean Wilsey praised it to the heavens: It’s easy to think of the 1990s as a fat and insignificant decade, but in the handwritten, photocopied pages of a zine called Dishwasher was a world every bit as vivid and passionate and strange as that of ’50s beats or ’70s punks— the world of nomadic pearl diving (aka suds busting) as described by the heroic Pete Jordan. This is a story of youth (desperate to avoid experience), of work, and of the mad vastness of America, as compelling to my mind as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Never mind that Jordan was a writer slumming it to get material. Never mind that only a child of privilege can afford to think of a menial job as an heroic enterprise, or to make up stupid, pseudo-poetic phrases to describe it, like “pearl diving” and “suds busting.” Never mind, either, that dishwashers are unskilled laborers, not members of a subculture, and that most of them who aren’t Dishwasher Pete would rather be doing something else. To This American Life fans, everyone is measured by middle-class terms—even people left scraping dirty plates for minimum wage in a hot kitchen. Although Dishwasher Pete’s contributions have largely been relegated to TAL’s archives, his legacy of studied incuriosity about the limitations of wage slavery lives on. Take the last segment of the popular 1997 episode “Conventions,” in which Glass interviewed the Grateful Dead lyricist and cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow. Twenty years ago, while attending an Apple convention at the behest 54 1 The Baffler [no.20]

of his pal Steve Jobs, Barlow fell instantly in love with a comely young psychiatrist attending a rival convention in the same hotel. On a weekend one year into their charmed courtship, the pair flew from their Manhattan home to California to see a Pink Floyd concert with Barlow’s friend Timothy Leary. On that Golden State junket, they agreed to wed, but, in a tragic turn of events, both contracted a virulent flu and decided to return home early. “She took an afternoon flight, and I took her down to the airport,” Barlow relates to Glass over a mournful electric guitar soundtrack. “[We] gave each other a great big kiss, and she said, ‘Nothing can keep us apart, baby. We were made for each other.’ And she just walked onto the plane, and went to sleep, took a nap, and it turned out that the virus that we both had . . . had attacked her heart.” The Garciaesque solo guitar soundtrack that the show’s producers used to punctuate the segment comes to an ominous stop. “As she was sleeping, she started to fibrillate and just died. She was two days short of her thirtieth birthday.” “Oh my God,” Glass says, though he must have known what was coming. Oh my God, indeed. The poor psychiatrist did everything right: she had an advanced degree and a white-collar job that would pay for health insurance, found true love with a rebel in an Armani blazer, and death came for her, too. Is nobody safe? “Prior to this I didn’t believe in the soul,” Barlow says. The noodling guitar resumes. “We were the same soul. Having seen that, that changes everything.” “Now that you’ve had this experience with her, do you find that you have this experience all the time in a smaller form, where you meet a group of strangers and there’ll be one whose eyes strike you and you think, okay, I can see a part of this thing?” Glass asks. “Absolutely,” Barber answers. “I feel an ability to attach on a moment-to-moment basis that is completely unlike anything that I’ve felt prior to that.” Does Glass pause to note that Barlow is a free-market ideologue? That a list of his friends reads like a who’s who of Boomer hip-

[ pie capitalists? That he has the disposable income to fly out to attend a terrible rock concert on a whim? No, stupid—it’s all about the soul. John Perry Barlow’s role on This American Life was identical to the one carved out for Dishwasher Pete: to smooth over and soften up social reality, to serve as a lifestyle docent to a privileged class of listeners brought faceto-face with the void. But where Dishwasher Pete was engaged in harmless slumming, Barlow was exploring a brand of yuppie theodicy: bestowing transcendent social meaning on the otherwise senseless death of a thirty-yearold woman. Sure, Barlow’s betrothed is gone, but he’s learned something, and that’s what really counts. On the surface, Barlow’s testimonial couldn’t be more different from the saga of Nellie Thomas, a black guy living in a poor neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. In a TAL segment called “Everything Must Go,” a Columbia University sociologist named Sudhir Venkatesh talks about how Thomas made thousands of dollars by illegally selling ammunition, but had no idea what to do with all that money. Instead of enjoying it, he’s afraid he’ll be robbed, and so he hides bricks of cash in his furniture and backyard while keeping a sleepless shotgun vigil. Thomas finally gives up and asks Venkatesh for advice. “What do your people do when they have all this stuff that they can’t use?” Thomas asks. “I’m Indian, but I assumed he meant middle-class folks,” Venkatesh narrates. The sociologist then advises the hustler to have a garage sale. Thomas, overjoyed, thanks Venkatesh profusely, then begins “running around like a child building a tree house,” stuffing thousands of dollars in his couch cushions and vacuum cleaner. Thomas’s story follows the same basic narrative arc as Barlow’s, giving listeners a heady rush of tension and resolution, only to impart the clichéd lesson that crime doesn’t pay. Any feelings of danger or anxiety over hearing about an actual poor person are filtered through a guide with a PhD. Venkatesh glosses over the likelihood that, by selling illicit ammunition, Thomas had directly fed

the increase of violence (and perhaps death) in his community. Instead, Venkatesh takes pains to tell us that Thomas is just a nice, kind of quirky guy who wants to live a quiet life. He doesn’t spend his money on flashy cars or drugs or women—he’s practically middle class. Carry on, listeners—poor people aren’t crushed and dehumanized as you might have suspected. Sometimes they even find money in vacuum cleaners! However, when poor Americans who aren’t self-healing spiritual beings wander into This American Life broadcasts, they tend to become strangely invisible. When TAL devoted an episode to budget cuts that forced towns to slash city services, producer Sarah Koenig visited Trenton, New Jersey, to interview residents coping with cutbacks in community policing in a municipality regularly ranked among the country’s worst outposts of violent crime. “There’s been muggings. There’s been shootings. There’s been break-ins,” says Trenton city councilwoman Marge Caldwell-Wilson. “We had a rash of burglaries during the day while people were home. They were stealing copper downspouts and running down the street as the neighbors were yelling at them. So that’s how brazen things are happening.” “I keep asking if she’s talking about her neighborhood, because her neighborhood is beautiful,” Koenig says, incredulously. “Historic Victorian townhouses, lovely clean streets— I saw a Volvo station wagon parked across from

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The Back Country 3 Geoffrey Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien Who stole the lake? The frightful bandits with their hats full of feathers, they stole the lake. When did they steal it? When the sun was covered with a cloud full of needles, it was then they stole it. Who shall retrieve it? The hatless harrier creeping through the brambles, he shall retrieve it.

56 1 The Baffler [no.20]

[ Marge’s house, two car seats in back, a New Yorker magazine in the passenger seat.” Like many rust-belt cities on the East Coast, Trenton is a notoriously violent place with a declining industrial base. Its unofficial slogan, spelled out on a trestle bridge leading into the city, is “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.” Though Koenig talks to some people from the lower orders and duly notes their own fear over the spread of violent crime, she takes pains to situate Trenton’s perennial crime epidemic in the cloistered retreats of New Yorker-subscribing sedan owners whose copper tubing is at risk. Look out, public radio listeners—they’re coming for you, too!

n April, in advance of a live performance of This American Life to be simulcast at five hundred movie theaters in the United States and Canada, I interviewed Glass for the Boston Phoenix, where I’m a staff writer. Though interviewed in this context is an overstatement; it was one of those conference calls set up for celebrities who are too busy or important to speak with reporters individually. I was allowed one question: “Were David Sedaris’s stories exaggerated, and does that matter?” After a fair amount of throat-clearing about going back over the Sedaris oeuvre, Glass conceded that “yes, there are exaggerations in his stories, and he’s the first to admit it. As he says, when asked if the stories are true, he says they’re true enough for you. That said, in the wake of Mike Daisey, one of the things we’ve talked about at our show is should we only have on stories that we factcheck? Like, should we only have stories that are 100 percent true?” Since such ironclad guarantees, Glass said, are unlikely in a case like Sedaris’s, the show has two options with comic monologues going forward: “We either fact-check them and let the audience know they’re true, or at least figure out some way to clue in the audience to, like, this is not to be taken the same way as the journalism.” “Though, truthfully,” Glass continued, “it’s a funny thing. I would like to believe that the

audience is sophisticated enough that they can tell the difference and that we don’t have to cue them.” That’s a bold wish, given the kind of audience Glass has cultivated. All too eager for soft landings in times of moral confusion and social trouble, they’ve made “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” among the most popular broadcasts in TAL history, second only to the show in which Glass retracted it. Apple, of course, has emerged from the scandal in better financial shape than ever. By the end of the week in which Daisey’s confabulations were reported, Apple stock climbed to a stunning price of $599, prompting the company to announce an unprecedented $45 billion dividend payment to its investors. By the end of the conference call, another journalist offered this of the broadcast that walked back many of Daisey’s factual claims: “That show was just as riveting as the original Mike Daisey.” The befuddled Glass thanked her, and laughed.t

daymare • Nightmares are conventionally attended by witches and devils and occur in darkness. Not so daymares, which take place in the light and can even be morning events. (“After his orange juice, he had a daymare.” Or, “The daymare pranced gaily through the sunlit window and soared over him.”) Yet these playful associations belie the daymare’s chilling terror. Daymares are more blatant and invasive than nightmares, their gaiety at once shameless and gruesome. —Daniel Aaron

V I C TO R K ER LOW

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h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

A Bad Day in Brooklyn 3 Emma Garman

f the financial industry operates in our society like a ruthless drug dealer, then the book publishing industry is like a superannuated old biddy, once grand and imperious, now losing her faculties and prone to ill-advised dispensations of large sums of money. She sort of means well, though, so it’s best to kiss up to her and pretend not to notice her decrepitude, bless her heart. Hence the uproar this spring. When the arbiters of publishing-industry taste were inexplicably denied that ne plus ultra of ass-kissing opportunities, the annual awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, they all rose up in comically jowly dudgeon as though someone had slapped granny. Publishers and booksellers—an ultra-civilized cadre not given to extreme displays of temper—were, as the New York Times reported, “incensed.” Never mind that it’s not so uncommon for the Pulitzer board to beg off from awarding the fiction prize. Such abstentions have occurred ten times in the prize’s ninety-four-year history; the last time was in 1977, to remarkably few sententious hues and cries from the literary overclass. And anyway, it was far from the case this year that the literary scene was subject to complete, loutish neglect. The Pulitzer fiction jury shortlisted three novels—Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson—for prospective acclaim, but, for reasons unspecified by the prize administrator, none wound up with the $10,000 prize and attendant career boost. This unexpected turn of events, to judge by the incoherent emotions issuing from the literati, signaled nothing less than a plunge straight back into pre-Enlightenment darkness. For it wasn’t merely disappointing that neither Karen Russell, nor Denis Johnson, nor the late David Foster Wallace was honored. It was, averred Pulitzer juror Maureen Corrigan, “terrible news.” (To which the only sensible response is: how enviable a life in which the absence of a book plaudit qualifies as terrible news!) “We were invited to serve on the jury because we’re recognized as being, in some way, literary experts,” Corrigan wrote in the Washington Post. “Why, then, turn the final decision over to a board primarily composed of non-literary folk?” The no-Pulitzer uproar was absolutely the rage of the literary experts. Corrigan—a book critic for NPR and a lecturer at Georgetown University—shared judging honors with Susan Larson, the former books editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and Michael Cunningham, who’d brought home a Pulitzer of his own for his 1999 opus The Hours. In defending the experts, the New Yorker ran an excruciatingly condescending blog post depicting the Pulitzer board as vacant idiots who’d rather watch cat videos, read The Hunger Games, and throw Mad Men parties than consider the oh-so-worthy fiction shortlist. In the New York Times, meanwhile, Ann Patchett—novelist, bookstore 58 1 The Baffler [no.20]

M E LI N DA B EC K

This unexpected turn of events, to judge by the incoherent emotions issuing from the literati, signaled nothing less than a plunge straight back into pre-Enlightenment darkness.

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h owner, and “author of an eligible book”—lamented the publicity, and therefore book sales, stolen by the Pulitzer board’s abstention. Patchett and her fellow experts just wished for the Pulitzer fiction prize to go to someone, anyone, even against a backdrop of dissent or disagreement. If you take literary prizes at face value, her plea looks curious: rather than reward merit, however subjectively that quantity must be perceived, the prize should have been awarded to any eligible nominee, just because—why, just because it’s apparently an indispensible means of getting readers “excited” about books. But what’s at stake is the notion that “non-literary folk” like and appreciate the literary establishment’s own novels, a notion upheld so long as someone wins. Not giving the prize to anyone—well, that ruins the whole pretense. The simultaneous expression of insecurity and entitlement underlying Patchett’s non-argument (which, to be fair, reads as if written in the heat of the moment) brings to mind an Ivy League undergraduate who cannot begin to comprehend why her mere presence in a classroom hasn’t automatically led to an A. Or perhaps more fittingly, given the scale of market influence sought by the prize cartel, Patchett’s pique is redolent of the bankers’ expectation of bonuses regardless of performance—and bankers are a class of philistine to which most literary taste-arbiters would be horrified to find themselves compared.

Writers of serious fiction must pledge their existence to the overadministered hinterland of MFA programs.

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f course, rewarding merit and defending literary standards are laudable endeavors. But the trouble today is that judgments of literary value are decidedly arbitrary, none more so than the awarding of the Pulitzer. It’s a peculiarity of the Pulitzer that the board imposes no restrictions on the field of books that can be nominated; you can even nominate your own book, so long as you’re American and can fork over the $50 entry fee. Laura Miller, Salon’s book critic and former Pulitzer fiction juror, remembers the “hundreds and hundreds” of nominees, “including many self-published novels with titles like ‘The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,’ most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.” So presumably Maureen Corrigan and her co-jurors sifted through and discarded books they hadn’t heard of, paying closest attention to those already given the seal of approval by their peers. Other literary awards have more restrictive criteria: the National Book Award, one of the most prestigious and insidery prizes, accepts only books nominated by publishers, and while any number of titles can be submitted, an imprint might see fit to nominate only one or two authors—especially if a contractual agreement to do so was negotiated during a book’s sale. A novel like the surprise 2010 NBA winner, Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon, qualified for consideration only because it was published by the tiny McPherson press. If Gordon’s agent had placed it with a higher-profile fiction house, such as FSG or Riverhead or Norton, bigger, splashier titles that were calculated to be more award-friendly would have shunted it aside. Only occasionally does an interesting and fresh work happen to slip through, a notorious British

g example being Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which all the major publishers rejected before the Scottish house Canongate picked it up. Once published, Martel’s novel won the prestigious Man Booker Prize and became an international sensation. “If Martel had been published by one of the big houses,” said veteran London editor Dan Franklin at the time, “I guarantee the book would never have been entered.” With no clear standards and a declining product to push, the publishing world’s gatekeepers have been woefully incompetent when it comes to the most basic component of their industry’s mission: identifying novels that will win either popularity or critical acclaim or, even rarer, both. The storied market-building power of the prize cartel, in other words, fails quite flatly on its own terms. Today’s literary landscape is littered with striking illustrations, far too many to enumerate, but several recent Hollywood films—The Help, Water for Elephants, and We Need to Talk About Kevin—were adapted from runaway best sellers that drew repeated rejections from people who even now remain at large, making random, arbitrary, hit-or-miss decisions on their employers’ behalf. Some have probably won bonuses and promotions— again, in the ignoble tradition of the money-grubbing lords of Wall Street whom the literary world professes to scorn. And needless to say, once a novel becomes a critical or commercial hit, publishers will clamor to acquire the rights for it, as well as for anything vaguely similar. (How many editors, right this second, are resolutely wading through stacks of inept S&M stories thanks to the

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h wild success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book none of them would have dreamed of publishing?) The much-admired novelist Tom McCarthy, whose debut, Remainder, was first published by a small art press in Paris, supplied a singularly apt response when enthusiastic critics and readers made the novel a success and the publishers who’d initially rejected it came back with offers: “Well fuck off: it’s the same book as it was two years ago.” Clauses in literary contracts are not the only form of hedging against the arbitrariness of the prize dispensation. Today, writers of serious fiction who hope to publish via mainstream channels must write in the prestige-fiction genre and pledge their personal existence to the overadministered hinterland of MFA programs, grants and fellowships, lit journals, and the special section of purgatory that is a writers’ colony—an interconnected and manifestly anti-meritocratic system that bars outsiders from playing the game by denying that it is a game. All three Pulitzer fiction finalists attended MFA programs: David Foster Wallace graduated from Arizona, Denis Johnson from Iowa, and Karen Russell from Columbia. Russell was taught by writing division chair Ben Marcus, who has professed himself “mystified” by the negated Pulitzer. (Funnily enough, “mystified” is how “non-literary folk” often feel about Marcus’s novels, which are published by Knopf.) The prestige-fiction genre perpetuates itself by chronically floating an inflated valuation on the credentials market. In other words, it depends on the same cartel logic of leveraged competition that enabled companies like Countrywide to prosper on the exclusively, well, fictional returns of mortgage-backed securities. One NYU MFA candidate named Anelise Chen neatly summed up the self-regarding isolation of the prestige-fiction genre in an essay published at The Rumpus, where she compared the distribution of MFAs between the top five hardback novels on the New York Times’ best-seller list and the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, which functions as an industry tip sheet for advance-worthy young writers. Not surprisingly, the fiction best-seller list included no one with an MFA, while the “20 Under 40” roster included virtually no one without an MFA.

The prestigefiction genre perpetuates itself by floating an inflated valuation on the credentials market.

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o maybe a prime marketing opportunity for a single author was lost when nobody received this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But on closer scrutiny, Ann Patchett’s complaint that the absence of a Pulitzer fiction prize is bad for books has it backward. If the journalists and academics on the board couldn’t agree on the merits of the contenders in spite of such concerted pressure to hymn the genius of someone, anyone, then there’s no reason to imagine the public could, either. And it’s more harmful to long-term sales of serious fiction if “non-literary folk” buy the officially declared best novel of the year, only to discover that their expectations diverge sharply from the book officially endorsed by literary experts. A similarly counterproductive process occurs with the cronyist tradition of the jacket blurb: a bookstore browser might alight upon a novel that’s hyped, in the dashed-off phrasing of a current literary wunderkind, as the novelistic equivalent

g of a three-hour orgasm. Once our innocent customer has assessed her readerly pleasure as being more akin to an averagely satisfying sneeze, she won’t attribute the discrepancy to the blurber and the author sharing an agent—she’ll simply think twice about buying highly touted literary novels in the future. What, then, is an ailing industry to do? Although I’d never be so crass as to suggest that book world dramas should be manufactured for publicity, U.S. literary awards might as well take inspiration from the U.K. prizes and enlist celebrities as judges. (This year’s Booker panel is graced by the floppy-haired gravitas of Lord Matthew Crawley from Downton Abbey!) Celebrifying the awards would kill two birds with one stone: the media would cover the proceedings with less duty and more enthusiasm, and there would be horrified chatter about the apocalyptic inappropriateness of it all. Who knows, maybe George Clooney or Angelina Jolie could be persuaded to take a break from ending thirdworld poverty to glance through a year’s worth of “coruscating,” “fearless,” and “necessary” novels. Or, as an alternative to that headlong embrace of the literary award scene for the superficial enterprise it is, publishers could broaden the terms by which books and authors are evaluated, perhaps (and I know this is radical) by elevating the words on the page over the credentials on the résumé. In that brave new world, prizes would no longer be a means of conferring legitimacy—and publishing types would have to look elsewhere to document their sense of cultural neglect and grievance. Then, at last, we might see some real creative writing.t

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[ M e moi r]

Delusional Parasitosis and Me 3 Will Boisvert

irst, let’s get something straight: our apartment does not have bedbugs. Which is strange, since it’s hosted every other kind of vermin. Cockroaches, of course. One of the string of transient roommates who troop through our living room once left a pot of cooked vegetables sitting out for a week, and fruit flies swarmed. For a while there were mice in the shin-deep trash piled up on the kitchen floor, dumped there by Max, the thirtysomething Ukrainian philosophy grad student who holds the lease. Until I pressed the issue, Max barred me from cleaning up the mess on the grounds that there were important documents buried in it that he would need months to extricate. Meanwhile, the drifts of three-yearold magazines, students’ blue books, soiled paper towels, and mangled tennis shoes made ideal nesting habitat for rodents. But we did not have bedbugs. No one in the apartment was ever bitten. There were no live bugs or nymphs on the bed or in the crevices of furniture and walls, no cast-off exoskeletal husks, no blood smears on the sheets to mark the path from host to hiding place, no black ink-spot fecal stains between mattress and box spring, no cloying odor of strawberries and coriander. When our landlord announced a building-wide inspection by a bedbug-sniffing canine, I felt confident. Ramon (the super), a short, balding man with a ponytail leading a small beagle on a leash, arrived with the rest of the bedbug team. I watched the dog nose around my bedroom. “What does he do if he finds bedbugs?” I asked Ramon. “Ah,” he smiled. “He sits.” After five minutes of no sitting, I relaxed. Then the handler picked him up, put him on top of the bed, and started making vigorous arm gestures, as if he were calling the dog out 64 1 The Baffler [no.20]

at home plate. Still, the dog did not sit. He yelped. “There are bedbugs in here,” breathed the handler. The same procedure marked Max’s bedroom as infested, too. “But no one’s ever been bitten,” I spluttered. “I’ve never seen any bedbugs.” “That doesn’t matter,” said Ramon. “They could be hiding anywhere. Some people don’t react to the bites. And they don’t bite everyone. You could have a wife getting bitten and her husband beside her won’t notice anything.” What the hell? I seethed, composing the rant that would take over my internal monologue in the coming days. So, a man who knows goddamned well he’s not getting bitten by any goddamned bedbugs, a man who doesn’t have a wife in bed with him (thank you very much), a man who’s never seen any bugs, which would have to be leaving his bed every night and crawling to some other apartment to bite somebody else and then returning to his bed to digest the blood they sucked—that man’s carefully marshaled evidence, experience, and informed opinion should be ignored just because some fucking dog that ought to have its snout kicked in barked? And with that I crossed into the world of New York’s bedbug epidemic, where the verdict of a transparently coached dog cannot be appealed. Kafkaesque is an apt, but too mild, word to describe it. In his celebrated giant-bug tale, “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka imagined that a family of middle-class urban strivers would react to a son’s transformation into a cockroach by attempting a reasonable coexistence before moving on to eradication. In twenty-first-century New York, bedbugs don’t need to bite, or even make a cameo appearance, to provoke scorched-earth militance in the city’s class struggle.

[

even years of Daily News headlines— from 2004’s bedbugs blitz city to 2010’s bloody bedbug nightmare to last year’s brooklyn bedbug hell—attest to New York’s panic over the species Cimex lectularius. A once ubiquitous cohabitant of human dwellings that was largely eradicated in

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rich countries by DDT after World War II, the bloodsucking parasite has staged a comeback in the last decade thanks to pesticide resistance and global travel. The size of an apple seed, the bug presents a truly fearsome prospect only when blown up on a tabloid’s front page: blunt-nosed and beady-eyed, The

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] spindly legs bunched up toward the head, dragging behind an enormous rust-brown belly that swells to obscene pearly redness when engorged with blood. Its bite is harmless—unlike mosquitoes, bedbugs transmit no diseases and are not likely to cause anything worse than itchy bumps. But bedbugs are annoying, and they are distinctly creepy to contemplate when lying awake at night. (A Toronto crack addict is reported to have suffered anemia from nightly blood loss to the thousands of bedbugs swarming his home.) The resurgence was real enough to provoke government concern—the Environmental Protection Agency convened national bedbug summits in 2009 and 2011—and lurid enough to spark a firestorm of Internet rumormongering, now institutionalized at the Bedbug Registry, an online compendium of unvetted, anonymous bedbug alerts and fright fests. (My building was listed there along with an apocryphal story about a bugridden homeless man squatting in an apartment.) Bedbug frenzy has been one of the decade’s great scare stories, winning the insects the number one spot in Time magazine’s 2011 Top Ten Evil Animals list. New York was the plague’s epicenter. Bedbug violations issued by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development rose from 82 in 2004 to 4,481 in 2011, and exterminators tell of exponential growth in bedbug jobs. According to the press reports, the bugs are everywhere—driving people from their apartments, crawling through theaters, restaurants, and subway stations, braving the Brooklyn DA’s office, and infiltrating the chic headquarters of the Saatchi & Saatchi ad agency. The summer of 2010 was a watershed, with humiliating infestations of high-end stores like Niketown and Victoria’s Secret, and a sighting at the Waldorf-Astoria that resulted in a lawsuit by a bitten Michigan woman. Sensing a threat to tourism and retailing, the Bloomberg administration mobilized against the menace by setting up a Bedbug Advisory Board and issuing stern new regulations. Hair-trigger overreaction became the order of the day: Kings County Hospital closed and fumigated its 66 1 The Baffler [no.20]

emergency room after a single bug was discovered in an ambulance parked outside. But while there’s clearly a bedbug problem, there’s also a major dose of hysteria inflating it. Bedbug numbers are notoriously squishy; they are based either on municipal hotline calls that swell after each wave of media hype or on surveys of pest control companies that have a financial interest in trumpeting the plague (and finding bugs where they may not exist). In a 2009 community health survey, nearly 7 percent of adult New Yorkers answered “yes” to the question, “During the past twelve months, have you had a problem with bedbugs in your home that required an exterminator?”; but that’s a question I would have to answer “yes” to now, even though my apartment doesn’t have bedbugs. In reality, there are no objective estimates of bedbug prevalence, says Richard Pollack, a Harvard public health entomologist who runs a pest consulting service. Of the insect samples sent to him for confirmation as bedbugs, 90 percent turn out not to be—many of them from homeowners who have already paid thousands of dollars for bedbug eradications. Sightings reliably follow sensational publicity, he observes; “after one of those [bedbug] stories appears in the news the red light on my phone starts blinking enough to give someone a neurological disorder.” Bedbug paranoia is a major cause of a psychological disorder—“delusional parasitosis,” a morbidly exaggerated fear of parasites—that is markedly more dangerous than the insects themselves. One North Carolina woman who couldn’t shake the feeling that bedbugs were crawling all over her swabbed her skin with Hot Shot Bedbug and Flea Killer, and then “soaked her hair in pesticide and put a plastic bag over it,” the New York Times reported. A few days later, she died of respiratory failure. From amid the paranoia over bedbugs it’s possible to detect a corollary anxiety over biting. If the biting-and-sucking fetish carrying today’s vampire movies suggests a cannibalistic consumer culture in the grip of regressive psychology, then bedbug mania does much the same. Still, it is the invisibility of

[ The size of an apple seed, the bug presents a truly fearsome prospect only when blown up on a tabloid’s front page: blunt-nosed and beady-eyed, spindly legs bunched up toward the head, dragging behind an enormous rust-brown belly that swells to obscene pearly redness when engorged with blood.

9 bedbugs—“secretive” and “cryptic” are the le Carréan entomological descriptors—that worries us most. Their flat bodies can squirm into the tiniest crevices and knotholes, hide in bed frames and wall sockets, be everywhere while seeming to be nowhere. Exterminators warn homeowners that they can have a major infestation without knowing it, and even professional inspectors often miss them. The solution to this conundrum couldn’t have been simpler or cuter: domesticated dogs (that is, dogs that don’t bite) whose superhuman noses are trained to identify the bug’s telltale odor with phenomenal keenness. Studies seemed to prove their effectiveness; one widely cited paper by University of Florida entomologists put the accuracy of canine bedbug detection at 98 percent under controlled conditions. Dog teams proliferated and became the detection method of choice, able to conduct in just a few minutes an inspection that would take a human with flashlight and magnifying glass hours. New York Times profiles toasted dogs as the loyal, nontoxic mascots of the anti-bedbug crusade, nature’s friendliest creature guarding us against one of her nastiest. It was too good to be true. Gradually, reports surfaced of embarrassing canine detection gaffes, false positives as well as false negatives. The University of Nebraska spent $400,000 treating 197 dorm rooms in which dogs alerted to odors, but physical bedbug traces were confirmed in just eighteen cases. Field studies of working dogs indicate that mistakes are the rule, not the exception. A Rutgers entomologist invited seven commercial dog teams to inspect New Jersey apartments that had been rigorously vetted for

bedbugs. The results were nothing to wag tails about—false positives ranged up to 38 percent. “We’ve never seen a dog that does not give false alerts,” the entomologist, Changlu Wang, told me. Lots of things can throw them off: food odors, residues from pets, or just a bad day. One dog with a perfect record the first day dropped to less than 50 percent accuracy the next. Even more disconcerting, correct detection rates—dogs alerting in an apartment that definitely had bugs—averaged only 43 percent. Three heavy infestations were missed by all the dogs. Those results aren’t controversial. Philip Koehler, a coauthor of the University of Florida study, told me that training standards for commercial dog teams are uneven and that a visual inspection that finds physical evidence should be mandatory after a dog alert. (My dog handler did no visual inspection.) He’s heard that some dog companies deliberately manipulate their dogs into alerting in order to drum up business. (My handler was employed by the company that does the exterminating, an obvious conflict of interest.) Then again, sometimes it’s the dog that manipulates the handler. The training regimen is all too simple: the dogs are made to hunt for hidden vials of live bedbugs and are fed only when they correctly alert to them. Sounds foolproof, but out on a job a savvy, hungry dog might reason as follows: if I don’t alert at this bed, I won’t get fed; if I do, I might get fed. That logic holds up even if the dog smells nothing in particular, especially if the handler doesn’t visually verify; in that case, Koehler warns, “the dog eventually outsmarts the handler to get a reward.” Mind games can dominate an inspection. Here’s how one The

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] While the bugs clash with the Bloombergian vision of a pristine, upscale metropolis, they also offer a fine pretext, potent precisely because it is invisible and ineradicable, to regiment, marginalize, and evict the stubborn remnants of a downscale, impoverished New York.

9 handler posting on Bedbugger.com described his moody relationship with his partner: I attribute [false positives] to elevated stress levels (mine) that induced self-rewarding behaviors (hers). Something like I was allowing her to use her brains (watching me, tension on the leash, etc.) during the inspection not her nose. . . . False negatives I attribute to me, again under stress I would tend to change my pace (typically going too fast and not allowing her to go where she needs to go).

Far from a straightforward litmus test for bug emanations, a dog inspection is a tangle of subtle mutual influences—stress, pacing, leash tension, eye contact—biased by powerful psychological forces: the handler’s greed, perhaps; the dog’s hunger, for certain. Strict training is supposed to counteract those distortions, but the demands are onerous. To keep the dog sharp—and honest—the handler is supposed to make it sing for its supper by finding hidden live bugs before every meal. (Purists feed their bedbug training colonies from their own veins.) “No matter what else is going on, Holiday dinners, Superbowl parties, Vacations, we train every day twice a day,” wrote Bedbugger’s handler, lamenting the “lifestyle change” required by his trade. The temptation to slack off, to use dead bugs instead of live, to give the pooch (and oneself ) a break with an unearned bowl of chow, to let considerations beyond the dispassionate parsing of scent sway an inspection, must be enormous. Combine a tired dog at the end of a long day, a handler eager to make quota, and a crummy hovel that fits everyone’s idea of a bedbug haven, and a false positive is almost a foregone conclusion. 68 1 The Baffler [no.20]

e received the treatment plan a week after our inspection, and it was a bombshell. Even before spraying could begin, we had to undertake a draconian “preparation” protocol that would turn the apartment into a cross between an isolation ward and a labor camp. All closets, shelves, nightstands, bookcases, drawers, armoires, and entertainment centers were to be emptied of their contents. Clothes, bedding, towels, and miscellaneous fabrics were to be washed and dried at high heat, then sealed in plastic bags. All books—hundreds of books, in an apartment with a grad student and a professional book reviewer—were to be individually inspected for bugs and eggs, then wrapped in plastic. Furniture, picture frames, paintings, and mirrors were to be vacuumed and piled up in the middle of the room, leaving a sixteen-inch open corridor around the walls. This regimen was to persist for weeks through several treatments, during which our belongings were to stay sealed in plastic. Meanwhile we were to vacuum every surface and crack in the apartment every day, being careful after each vacuuming to wrap the vacuum bag in plastic and throw it in an outdoor trash can. This rigmarole promised almost as much upheaval for me as it did for any bedbug. But as fearsome as it sounds, this show of force masks the weakness of the anti-bedbug arsenal. With pesticides either banned due to toxicity concerns or waning in effectiveness because of resistance, dustings and fumigation seldom resolve the problem and often exacerbate it when the bugs simply decamp for neighboring rooms. Temperature extremes kill bugs—there are portable bedbug ovens for heating small items, steam cleaners for mat-

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tresses, and equipment that heats an entire room to the requisite 120 degrees Fahrenheit— but in well-insulated nooks they may survive. The holdouts can last months in a hiding place without feeding and then creep out to reestablish an infestation. Exterminators therefore prefer to talk about establishing relationships rather than eradication. The website at BedBug Central, a high-profile pest control outfit, envisions “an ongoing effort that may require numerous visits,” but reassures readers that “the number of bugs and bites experienced by the homeowner should be minimal.” The bugs’ tenacity has shifted the focus of bedbug programs from management of the pest to management of the host. The bedbug community is obsessed with the problem of “clutter,” which essentially means any trace of human presence. Clothes, furniture, stuffed animals, electronic appliances—they can all shelter bugs and eggs and pose an obstacle to extermination. Clutter can be heated, frozen,

fumigated, and sealed in plastic, but it’s best if it is simply not there; the New York City health department’s bedbug website recommends “putting nonessential belongings into storage until the bedbugs are gone,” which could well mean forever. But while clutter control, which extends to the wholesale discarding of furniture (several times over if infestation recurs) is the primary cause of resistance to bedbug treatment protocols, it can also function as a form of therapy. Bedbug literature harps on the theme that the pests can plague even the tidiest homes, but the stigma of having them is still deeply humiliating; the maniacal cleaning and purification rituals demanded by treatment protocols help homeowners reestablish their claims to middleclass cleanliness and respectability.

n my apartment, the issue of clutter turned the bedbug treatments from an annoyance into an existential threat. My bedroom was just orderly enough to make the prep routine conceivable. Max’s clutter occupied a different quantum state entirely—allencompassing, unwrappable, immovable. He had never cleaned or thrown away anything in his life, and his hoard of junk filled up his bedroom, all four hallway closets, the kitchen, and the vestibule with books, old clothes, broken computer parts, wooden African totems, headless mannequins, and bubble wrap. The treatment plan recommended a prep-cleaning company, but at $135 an hour we couldn’t afford one—and even if we could, there was no way Max would allow anyone to excavate his midden, stuffed as it was with memorabilia and hidden information and obscure speculative use-value that only he could discern. The

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] My irate phone call to the pest control company led swiftly to a confrontation with the building manager, a beefy man with the commanding air of a cop. Brushing aside my bleated request for a visual inspection—that would cost $700—he edged his way inside. The vestibule was shrouded, cut off from the light of the windows by the reef of clutter that formed a makeshift partition enclosing the living room. The place felt claustrophobic and derelict and insane, and I could see why the manager would consider Max, who was always months behind on the rent, more of an infestation than a tenant. He peered at the chaos, then turned to me. “We’re not playing around here. You’re not on the lease, and we will have you evicted if you cause trouble. This apartment has to be prepared when the exterminators come. Will it be prepared?” “Well . . .” I stammered. “WILL THE APARTMENT BE PREPARED?” I shrugged helplessly. It was perfectly obvious that, with two days to go, the apartment would not be prepared. “Everything has to be cleaned,” he said on his way out. “We have cameras in the laundry room, so we’ll know whether you washed your clothes. If you don’t, we’ll take you to court.” Such clashes over bedbugs are growing more common in New York, where everything eventually boils down to trench warfare between landlords and tenants. The conflict sharpened in 2011 when the Bloomberg administration imposed stringent new regulations. Landlords are required to respond immediately to bedbug complaints on pain of a Class B housing violation. When a bug is found, they must elaborate a building-wide action plan, inspect contiguous apartments, and inform current and prospective tenants. Housing activists have hailed the new measures, and fight-the-power stories about bugridden tenants winning rent reductions from outraged judges have sprouted in the press. There’s no question that these regulations are necessary to prod do-nothing landlords into dealing with genuine infestations. But 70 1 The Baffler [no.20]

in a climate of alarmism, misinformation, and rampant pest control scams, they also lend themselves to abuse. They have an authoritarian side—the city’s Bedbug Advisory Board report recommended “evaluat[ing] current housing court procedures . . . to compel compliance and access to ensure effective bedbug management”—that stokes landlords’ most fascistic impulses, licensing them to surveil and dictate tenants’ personal lives to an unprecedented degree, right down to their housekeeping and laundry practices. And since you can’t prove you don’t have bedbugs any more than you could have quashed a witchcraft charge in Salem, the bugs furnish an excuse for open-ended harassment of any tenants that landlords would like to be rid of. On a larger scale, while the bugs clash with the Bloombergian vision of a pristine, upscale metropolis, they also offer a fine pretext, potent precisely because it is invisible and ineradicable, to regiment, marginalize, and evict the stubborn remnants of a downscale, impoverished New York. Because bedbugs—or at least bedbug treatments—have always been seen as a problem of the poor. In centuries past, bedbugs preferred the rich, who slept in warm rooms on beds with plenty of cracks to hide in, to the poor, who slept in frigid rooms on straw that was periodically burned. “In the King’s bed, too, there are yet more bedbugs waiting for their share of blood, for His Majesty’s blood tastes no better or worse than that of the other inhabitants of the city, whether blue or otherwise,” José Saramago reminds us in Baltasar and Blimunda. But servants, a population of semi-homeless poor people circulating among wealthy houses, have always been an indispensable vector. “If you have occasion to change Servants, let their Boxes, Trunks, &c. be well examin’d before carried into your Rooms,” warned the 1730 edition of John Southall’s A Treatise of Buggs, “lest their coming from infected Houses should prove dangerous to yours.” The preoccupation with the poor continues today. The bedbug establishment tiptoes around this truth, carefully emphasizing that the bug bites rich and poor

[ alike. And it’s true: luxurious co-ops and fourstar hotels have infestations, while the crummiest, filthiest apartment—my apartment— does not. But when health officials and social workers gather at bedbug conferences, their presentations don’t focus on the Ritz-Carlton or Abercrombie & Fitch, but on the Boston housing project, the Toronto homeless shelter, and the Manhattan SRO. It’s the poor, they’re sure they know, who have the bad habits and dysfunctions that bedbugs thrive on, who pass through squalid communal housing, who buy infested secondhand mattresses and refuse to throw them out, who lack the funds to hire companies to prep their clutter, and who have no choice but to sublet rooms from psychotic hoarders. It’s the poor who have to be gently nudged, or firmly coerced, into compliance. And it’s the poor who end up dispossessed and out on the streets when a ginned-up bedbug panic gets rolling.

y treatment day I’ve been up for two days straight, laundering and packing and sealing and fretting. Max has roused himself and is busy shifting clutter from one spot to another and aimlessly scrubbing bared patches of floor, but this makes the totality even worse. A showdown with the exterminators and the building manager seems inevitable. With an hour to spare before they are scheduled to arrive, I log on to Craigslist to scan the roommate ads to see where I might land if they proceed to eviction. The last time I moved, when I was thrown out of my apartment because I couldn’t come up with $560,000 to buy it with, finding a new place was a nightmare—Max was my last option. It’s worse now, sky-high rents for tiny cells inhabited by suspicious, demanding people, with me somewhere near the bottom of the great chain of parasitism that is the New York housing market. After paying first month’s rent and a security deposit, I’ll be flat broke with no money to hire movers. If I’m forced out, I’ll be able to take along only the bare essentials: no trunks, and only the boxes I can carry. The bulk of my clutter—a few sticks of furniture, my books—I will have to leave behind.

When the exterminators come, they pay no attention to the clutter and go about their main task of punching holes in the wall and spraying in insecticide. Exiled for the day, I take the subway to Midtown and sit in a park, exhausted and raddled, watching numbly as dogs, the universal enemies of mankind, frolic everywhere. A film crew from a cable show called Paranormal Paparazzi picks me out of the crowd for an impromptu interview, probing me for my opinions on the supernatural piffle of the moment. The interviewer instantly realizes her mistake when she hears my hoarse, bitter mutterings. She’s looking for genial credulity; I’m giving her Mel Gibson on a bender. I’m in no condition to summon up any fear of unseen things—neither ghosts, nor voodoo curses, nor the Mayan apocalypse, nor the mysterious booming noises that have been heard in the state of Wisconsin. What I fear is the landlord’s men, pounding on the door.t

fossick • A mining term probably of

Australian origin. To fossick means to search for gold in abandoned workings, or to dig out a crevice, or (more loosely) to rummage through or ferret out, or to look around for salvageable materials. Hence trash collectors and junk peddlers are fossickers. And so are scholars who sift letters and notebooks and journals in libraries and chophouses in search of buried cultural treasures. Columnists and investigative reporters can be fossickers, too. —Daniel Aaron

V I C TO R K ER LOW

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 71

v Th e D o l l a r D e b a u c h

Dilemmas of the Rentier Class 3 Chris Lehmann

mid the run-up to the general election, one of those awkward facts that don’t have any relevance to either of the major party’s stratagems nonetheless has come to light. As President Obama has begun aggressively touting the “Buffett Rule” to introduce marginal increases in capital gains taxes, and as advisers such as economic policy czar Gene Sperling have launched yet another decorative bid to step up investment in the manufacturing economy, data from the IRS shows that the Obama years have achieved almost nothing to remedy the yawning inequalities in the economy. The top 1 percent of income earners have taken in fully 93 percent of economic gains since the Great Recession, the numbers show. That share outpaces Bush-era figures by a mile; as the economy emerged from the 2001–02 recession, the top 1 percent claimed a lousy 65 percent of the gains that followed. It’s never been a better time to be rich in America. As the administration’s defenders will tell you, there are structural reasons that the post-2008 feints toward recovery have proven so strikingly top-heavy. In the Bush-era recession much of the damage was confined to the investor class, while in 2008 the housing economy was devastated, and along with it, a great deal of the demand that stoked growth in the labor market. A slower recovery in the real economy meant that returns were greater for the 1 percent. But such explanations are something close to question-begging. If the Obama administration had wanted to spread recovery measures broadly among the earning public, it could have crafted policies accordingly—in much the same fashion that Franklin Roosevelt responded to the last major economic meltdown by using Keynesian stimulus programs, by scrapping the gold standard, and by curbing Wall Street. The chair of Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisers through 72 1 The Baffler [no.20]

2010, Christina Romer, repeatedly sought to place job growth at the center of the administration’s economic agenda, but Obama ensured that financial policy remained right where it’s been over the past generation or so of anemic economic gains for working Americans—in the hands of Wall Street– approved caretakers of the paper economy such as Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, and Lawrence Summers. In an already upward-skewing pattern of income distribution, in a heavily worker-averse economy, this administration is reaping what it has sown. Except, you know, for the reaping part. This dry and dismal litany of economic fact has come nowhere close to dislodging the rote messaging of the campaign season, whereby the market-appeasing incumbent is feverishly ginning up the impression that he’s a populist, deep down, since he has had the good political fortune to draw from the GOP deck a complacent former private equity kingpin as his major-party opponent. Hence his cost-free embrace of the Buffett Rule—a cosmetic simulacrum of serious tax reform (tellingly named for a billionaire) with zero chance of passing Congress. Amid the campaign-friendly, ritual invocation of the Buffett Rule, scarcely anyone noted the president’s craven, and far more consequential, signing of the House Republicans’ JOBS Act. Since so few GOP lawmakers have firsthand acquaintance with actual jobs, they have mistaken the word for an acronym, as in “Jumpstart Our Business Startups.” The JOBS Act suspends independent accounting requirements and due-diligence reporting protocols for businesses floating new stock offerings—which means, in the mobbed-up climate of today’s Wall Street, that it’s essentially a license to commit fraud. And like the Clinton administration’s spectacularly dumb endorsement of the GOP Congress’s repeal of New Deal regulations enacted in the 1933

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

Glass-Steagall law, the JOBS Act effectively wipes out the recent lessons of financial history, rolling back the enhanced accounting standards signed into law after the catastrophic market failures known as Enron and WorldCom. Such staggeringly cynical displays are the sort of campaign messaging that matters in the orderly conduct of elections under a plutocracy. The JOBS Act serves as an un-

mistakable reminder to skittish Wall Street donors that all the loose populist talk is just so much telegenic blather for the impressionable 99 percenters, just as the donor class suspected. When it comes to policy, indeed, Obama’s message is: don’t pay any attention to Warren Buffett’s public shows of tax contrition; rather, heed the way that the Berkshire Hathaway baron amassed his fortune—and go and do likewise. The

Baffler [no.20] ! 73

on’t doubt, either, that there’s a deeper distemper lurking behind the White House’s content-challenged posturing on national economic policy. The steadfast refusal of the administration to advance anything like a serious industrial policy or an agenda to spur (small-j) jobs growth reflects the same rear-window outlook that has thwarted administrations back to the Carter years. It reflects, in other words, the backwards vision of American business enterprise that prevails in Washington, a city that has no industrial base to speak of but that collects rentier-style wealth under the rule of a permanent lobbying class. Washington is the only major housing market in America to prosper in the wake of the ’08 calamity. This was supposedly so because the center of our national government is “recession proof”; the thinking goes that economic crises spark increased growth in the federal bureaucracy. But the real dosh has been flowing to the exurbs of Metro D.C., where the lords of highend contract commerce reign, and where your standard GS-4 analyst can’t swing a mortgage loan. Loudon County, the horsey Virginia suburban demesne that’s home to many a power lobbyist, corporate-cum-political consultant, and defense contractor, is the nation’s richest county; nearby Fairfax County is the second richest; and Howard County, Maryland, just across the Potomac, is third. The chronic distortion of actual productive activity on display in the exurbs has bred an official D.C. discourse almost completely at odds with economic reality. This isn’t the case only among the lobbyist-led chorus of lawmakers on Capitol Hill; a singularly surreal vision of economic relations is also, tellingly, the patois of the D.C. media—the reporters, editors, and all-around wise men who are wont to gaze longingly at the real estate listings in Loudon as they lay out in brave, self-regardingly pragmatic detail just what’s best for the long-suffering American worker or the out-of-luck single mother. Consider a remarkable run of coverage assembled this past winter by the Washington Post—the leading organ of meritocratic

74 1 The Baffler [no.20]

self-congratulation in a city filled with smug overachievers. As last year’s Occupy protests against economic privilege abated with the onset of colder weather, the Post’s arbiters of content programmed a series of essays to get to the bottom of the suddenly hot topics of inequality and public perceptions of the social value of wealth. The results were textbook studies in near-hysterical journalistic repression. Over at the reliably right-wing Sunday Outlook section, the late social scientist James Q. Wilson—who had been tirelessly denying the larger impact of class inequality in tracts such as The Marriage Problem and The Moral Sense, together with his now-legendary airing of the since-discredited “broken windows” theory of community policing in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly—took a look at the uproar over inequality in these United States and serenely pronounced it a non-problem. Wilson’s waspish dispatch—titled, of course, “Angry About Inequality? Don’t Blame the Rich”—argued that it is a grave and reckless category error to assume rich Americans represent “a monolithic, unchanging class.” No, sir! Why, just factor in social mobility, for starters! A Federal Reserve study found that “less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.” Never mind that the individual composition of a plutocratic class has never been the point of the agitation against it; rather, what’s at issue is the scope of its influence. Never mind, as well, that there’s a great deal of difference between a 1 percenter sliding down to the 1.5 percent cohort and heading all the way down to the bottom quintile. For Wilson, it’s enough to adduce the idea of mobility at the top, and presto: Algerism! “A business school student,” according to Wilson, “may have little money and high debts, but nine years later he or she could be earning a big Wall Street salary and bonus.” Admittedly, “there are people such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates who are ensconced in the top tier, but far more common”—more common than two deliberately isolated examples, that is—“are people who are rich for short periods.”

v The chronic distortion of actual productive activity on display in the exurbs has bred an official D.C. discourse almost completely at odds with economic reality.

9 Phew! This is a surefire argument stopper—so long as you ignore the voluminous evidence showing that upward mobility in these United States lags behind the rates logged in such high-tax welfare states as Canada, Britain, and (shudder) Denmark. Professor Wilson delivered some admiring asides on the sturdy meritocratic connection between higher learning and the spread of big-money jobs, and argued, nonsensically, that leveling inequality could well entail banishing women from the workforce. But soon enough, he zeroed in on his real quarry: the shiftless poor. You see, the less fortunate among us have little to complain of, since they’re afforded all manner of cheap consumer goods. “The country has become more prosperous, as measured not by income but by consumption,” Wilson reasoned. “Income as measured by the federal government is not a reliable indicator of well-being, but consumption is”—and consumption is ever on the rise. “Though poverty is a problem,” Wilson allowed in one of his more unguarded moments, “it has become less of one.” (This, by the way, was an affront: the poverty rate had increased from 14.3 to 15.1 percent between 2009 and 2010, while the median U.S. income had dropped 2.3 percent over the same period.) But that is no reason not to target the behavior of the poor as the real culprit behind America’s economic woes. To redress the social ills besetting the poor, Wilson wrote, was a simple matter of “finding and implementing ways to encourage parental marriage, teach the poor marketable skills and induce them to join the legitimate workforce.” This last missionary plea is especially ripe, as though

Americans enduring the worst recession and contraction of the labor market in living memory were but perversely playing hard to get with a corps of would-be employers, and would be fully disciplined productive members of society if only there were some—any— way to “induce” them to do so. Of course, in the stunted moral universe of Wilson and his cohort of policy intellectuals, the chief project is never anything so unwieldy and fraught as the achievement of economic equity; rather, the only surefire remedy for poverty—and the only path forward that doesn’t involve the wholesale decimation of public resources and the certain demoralization of liberal social engineering—is the moral rehabilitation of the poor, even though no amount of moral improvement will ever revive the perverse natures of the “underclass” to the satisfaction of their scolding social betters in the right-wing policy world. What’s remarkable about Wilson’s non-explanation of why wealth inequality is a virtue isn’t so much its raw ideological self-delusion—that’s the stock in trade of the conservative policy world. No, what’s striking about these class-baiting excurses in culture-preaching is that they are now the lingua franca of Washington’s own hothouse class of political achievers, regardless of their notional party affiliations or ideological leanings. That’s why, a week or so prior to the Wilson manifesto urging readers to focus their anxieties about wealth inequality on the misbehaving poor, the editors of the paper’s daily op-ed section ran a piece by Democratic political consultant Bill Knapp advancing the identical argument. The Knapp outing bore the chipper sobriquet, “Middle Class Is Moving Forward, Not Backward”—and sure enough, Knapp, like Wilson, marveled at the income gains kicked up by the new knowledge economy and the explosion of the female workforce. Women have migrated into the labor economy at a 350 percent spike since 1960—evidence, in Knapp’s curious formulation, that the United States is “creating more jobs than people.” Yes, there’s poverty, Knapp concedes. But The

Baffler [no.20] ! 75

v like Wilson, he takes brave contrarian aim at the social mores of the poor over and against any assessment of life chances parceled out by the labor or investment markets. “Politically incorrect as it sounds,” Knapp insists, “poverty is driven by a lack of education and by single-parent households.” As for all the voguish talk of the 1 percent and the 99 percent also-rans, Knapp darkly warns that “an entire intellectual and political infrastructure is used to exaggerate and distort income disparity”—a flatly absurd and undocumented claim, but enough to reinforce the impression that this hack campaign consultant is the heroic Randian victim of a massive culture conspiracy, another decadent rhetorical tic of the policy right that has made its way across the partisan aisle. (Then again, one of Knapp’s signature campaign clients is New York’s billionaire GOP mogulcum-mayor Michael Bloomberg, so, like all dispassionate apparatchiks in the D.C. orbit, he can lay claim to the precious credential of Third-Way bipartisanship.) And like comrade Wilson, who argued that cheap consumer durables take the real sting out of poverty, Knapp seeks to seal the case for the eternally upward-tending U.S. middle class by taking sober inventory of all the cool stuff its members can now buy. After all, “83 percent of American adults owned a cellphone last May, up from 66 percent in January 2005.” An allied spike in teen cell ownership over the same period augured especially well, our social prophet reports: “When more teenagers own luxury electronics, it means there are more families with disposable income. . . . The struggling middle class is getting their teenager cellphones, video-game systems and computers.” Let them eat Nokia! The structural identity of the Knapp and Wilson dispatches is striking, but the real payoff for D.C. policy thinkers here is the air of glib fatalism both writers share. You could, I suppose, try to do something about inequality, but such gruesome state interventions are bound to backfire, as the chaos in Greece now makes clear; Wilson fatuously 76 1 The Baffler [no.20]

noted that, yes, “Greece seems to be reducing income inequality—but with little to buy, riots in the streets, and economic opportunity largely limited to those partaking in corruption, the nation is hardly a model for anyone’s economy.” (Fatalists of the Wilson stripe of course can’t be expected to note that however corrupt Greek officialdom may be, the policies of the neoliberal eurozone economy escalated the country’s economic plight to crisis proportions: when market failures happen, state intervention has to be the cause.) Or you could, in theory, redistribute income to shift jobs and material benefits to the 12.7 million and counting Americans who are out of work, and the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure. But such measures might well upset the smoothest system of mass cellphone delivery in the history of human civilization—and besides, until less privileged Americans learn to breed and educate themselves properly, there’s just no point.

eanwhile, over at the other end of the economic spectrum, the Post’s editors sensed a different sort of political crisis brewing. The GOP primaries had drawn attention to Mitt Romney’s fortune— the accrual of which stood pretty much as the former Massachusetts governor’s sole remaining calling card for Republican voters. But Newt Gingrich derided the former Bain Capital pasha as an idle luftmensch, thriving on “Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work.” So the Post dispatched political writer Marc Fisher to sort out the troubling finding that “Wealth Can Be a Political Burden” for rich candidates seeking to take their ordained place in the Oval Office. Fisher offered a catalog of other candidates who’d been ensnared of late by the perception that economic privilege had left them out of touch with the sensibilities of the striving middle class—such as the 2004 Bush-Cheney ad showing John Kerry in full windsurfing regalia, and the televised image of Bush père’s moment of awed befuddlement before a hightech supermarket price scanner. And after

v It is outlandish to pretend that a business model so deeply reliant on built-in conflicts, and so overt in its courtship of corporate interests, doesn’t translate into a mindset of deference to wealth and power.

9 revisiting the ample store of similar moments from Romney’s primary campaign—from the $10,000 debate-stage wager with Rick Perry to the candidate’s casual characterization of $370,000 in income from speaking fees as “not very much”—Fisher heroically unearthed a detail from Romney confreres and campaign hands to demonstrate that the candidate’s nine-figure fortune had not insulated him from the struggles of real Americans after all. “Just last week,” Fisher noted, “Romney and his wife, Ann, sent an aide to pick up their breakfast at McDonald’s rather than shell out for an expensive hotel meal”—a flourish showing that the big-money candidate retains “a keen sense of the value of a dollar.” It seemed not to occur to Fisher that most McDonald’s patrons are unable to dispatch an aide to fetch their Happy Meals; but who knows, perhaps that’s the next iteration of luxe entitlement awaiting the middle class once the novelty of the cellphone wears off. Moving beyond these recondite readings from the Romney common-touch barometer, Fisher supplied a studiously noncommittal account of the careers of America’s moneyed political leaders, with one academic source noting wanly that Romney’s wealth is an “ambiguous” moral quantity in our public life, and another announcing blandly that “what matters most is the context of wealth.” But Fisher gave the last word to the overleveraged billionaire and preposterous person Donald Trump, who reassured a FOX News interviewer who seemed skittish about this new populist clamoring against the natural politi-

cal order that “ultimately, people want to be rich. And that’s part of the American way.” Still, the Post’s excursions into the ambiguities of wealth had not yet exhausted the fatuousness of its position. What if some alert reader, not totally convinced by Fisher’s Trump-style ventriloquism, still thought there might be something revolting about the methods of capital accumulation that our model citizens employ on the way to getting rich? And so editorial writer Charles Lane scurried to examine the forensics of wealth acquisition and determined, improbably, that the underlying issue is rentiership. As Lane laid out the question, questionable gains are those that come from rent—i.e., “any kind of income that people get by controlling existing resources—or exercising officially conferred privileges—as opposed to creating new wealth through labor or investment.” See, any such rentier class would be out of step with the officially approved method of accumulation via innovation. The passive enterprise of rent-seeking rubs Americans the wrong way. Many of the 1 percent are indeed members of the privileged rentier class, Lane went on—lavishly credentialed high earners such as lawyers and (at the more productive end of the scale) doctors. Naturally, the beneficiaries of rent-seeking collectively implore the machinery of government to preserve their privilege: “Much political activity consists of trying to create, or keep, opportunities to collect economic rent. That’s what lobbyists for various licenses, tariffs, tax breaks and subsidies—from the sugar industry to Solyndra—have in common.” In advancing these observations, Lane backed himself into something close to a heresy, certainly in the American sphere of respectable opinion, and definitely within the polite consensus governing economic coverage at the Washington Post. There are, in fact, some sorts of wealth that are unearned, and the arrangements netting them are inherently unfair. This simple insight, available to any ordinary person, shatters the simple equation of wealth and virtue that ensures the privilege of the 1 percent. So just imagine The

Baffler [no.20] ! 77

Tranche I 3 Joshua Clover I have lived through the end of syntax I have lived though the imperial grammars I have lived through the bursting of a bubble visible from space I have lived through the suicide of money to preserve the life of value I have lived through the fatal sacrifice of philosophy to avoid the jaws of the dialectic I have watched the spiral of Vico become the spiral of Sismondi and then watched that become le vrai viral livre I have stood atop a small hill with Mallarmé in one hand and in the other a cognitive balm and of what virtue were our pretty phrases against a thousand beautiful men standing in rank near the sunlit shore

the furor if Lane had gone on to mention that the model of rentiership applies to people just like him, to the other wise men massaging copy into acceptable channels at the Post, and, indeed, to the rest of the name-brand Washington journalists who enjoy lucrative pay-to-play arrangements with the private sector, who collect five-figure speaking fees from trade groups, investment houses, and issue-advocacy shops, “controlling existing resources” and “exercising officially conferred privileges” while they manufacture and disseminate what passes for legitimate economic opinion in this time of national calamity.

ike most major newspapers, the Washington Post has spent the past decade saddled with a punishingly obsolete business model—in the first quarter of this year, profits at the Washington Post Company fell by 7 percent from the first quarter of 2011, thanks in part to a buyback stock campaign. (Anemic as this showing was, it was an improvement over the previous quarter’s losses of 22 percent.) The Kaplan network of educational testing now accounts for 60 percent of revenues for the Washington Post Company. And as Bloomberg News notes, Kaplan “has come under government scrutiny along with the rest of the for-profit education industry.” It seems that managers at the Post 78 1 The Baffler [no.20]

depend on a gruesome and extortionate form of rent-seeking activity for their livelihoods. Nor is this awkward state of affairs without consequence for the newspaper’s reputation. For-profit education institutions spent $11.9 million on lobbying in 2011, and for their money won the rollback of a proposed rule change at the Department of Education that would have greatly diminished the industry’s $30 billion profit model. Post Company CEO Donald Graham personally intervened with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; the Kaplan group’s own lobbying assault was captained by former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. And to ensure maximum legislative compliance, a lead investor at the for-profit network collared Iowa senator Tom Harkin in a Capitol corridor during the height of the industry’s blitz and told the lawmaker—who’d chaired several key congressional investigations into the industry— that he was determined to “make life rough” for him if the senator didn’t dial down his attacks on the industry. “I took it as a threat,” Harkin told the New York Times. “It was one of the most blatant comments ever made to me in my years in the Senate.” If these tactics sound, well, Nixonian, then you haven’t heard the least of it. The Post-Kaplan connection is just one among

Tranche II We have given our hearts away we have given away all our dollar-denominated assets including our hearts we like regular anarchy we like rational derangement we we we so excited we say contradiction is the fluid in which we are suspended we turn and return and turning is the form contradiction takes when we are drifting we turn round and round in the night we are citizens of the turn we are tropolitan and in the city of the turn in the moving contradiction we haven’t really eaten or slept in a couple days and the men are beautiful and the women are beautiful and we remember that we meant to come here and never leave we meant this over and over but it meant something else

countless symptoms of institutional corruption in the power centers of D.C. media companies, which routinely sponsor forums and other private get-togethers granting lobbyists and industry advocates access to reporters. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth notoriously was forced to cancel one pay-to-play venture, hosted salon-style at her own home at the height of the 2009 health care debate. Promotional come-ons for the gathering promised cozy confabs matching up the Post’s “health-care reporting and editorial staff members” with “your organization’s CEO.” The event was billed as nothing less than an “underwriting opportunity” for participants—i.e., a chance to ensure that Post reporters and editors shill for the lobbyist’s policy agenda by placing said employees in the home of the woman who signs their paychecks. Participating companies would have shelled out $25,000 ($250,000 for the full Weymouth dinner series), and naturally would have expected more than an amusing pinot noir for the outlay. None of this is meant to suggest that Post employees receive daily marching orders from the for-profit commissariat atop the company’s publishing masthead. (Indeed, let the record show that I was a happy, and for the most part, a happily un-fucked-with, editorial hand at the Post from 2000 to 2004.) How-

ever, it is outlandish to pretend that a business model so deeply reliant on built-in conflicts, and so overt in its courtship of corporate interests, doesn’t translate into a mindset of deference to wealth and power. Just think of how the Post of old would have reported on a government agency that hosted private gatherings with six-figure entry fees for the industry leaders it oversaw. Think of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke open the Watergate story by heeding the simple dictum to “follow the money,” might have reacted back in the day upon receiving word that the Republican National Committee had expended heroic amounts of cash to influence how congressional leaders came down on a key regulatory decision—and then presumed not only to assume a guise of utter impartiality but also to advise the public on the optimally prudent and mature positions to take on questions of regulation, wealth, and lobbying influence in the first place. Then again, that’s probably why the opinion-makers holed up in today’s Washington Post ensure that it continues to be the primary source of sound advice on the socially ruinous moral trespasses of the poor: any honest reporter’s investigation of the stubborn infrastructures distorting the debate over wealth inequality would lead to the Post’s own boardroom.t The

Baffler [no.20] ! 79

[ S t u di e s i n To ta l Depr av it y]

Party of None

Barack Obama’s annoying journey to the center of belonging 3 Chris Br ay

In real life, the balls were rushed and exhausting for the Obamas to attend. They danced ten times to the same song, “At Last” by Etta James, hearing the same lyrics over and over. But the version shown on television was stunning, one of those rare moments when presidential symbolism, personal history, and the nation’s emotions met and fused. —Jodi Kantor, The Obamas

arack Obama’s personal journey begins, and it is instantly made meaningless. Sometime in the first half of 1966, Obama’s stepfather was mysteriously forced to return to Indonesia from grad school in Hawaii. Lolo Soetoro went home to a long episode of political violence, the outlines of which are not substantially in dispute. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, had tried to create political stability by balancing three competing political forces in the life of a new country: the army, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), and Islam. On the night of September 30, 1965, PKI members and leftist military officers attempted a clumsy sort of coup d’état that resulted in the murder of six right-wing generals and, accidentally, a lieutenant. The plot was a shambles: publicly incoherent, loosely planned, and easily suppressed. Suharto, the most powerful right-wing general to survive the attempt, used the plot as a pretext to seize power and purge communists from Indonesia’s political life. Within weeks, soldiers and militias were killing hundreds of thousands of people and removing thousands more to detention camps. In Jakarta, U.S. embassy officials informed their Indonesian counterparts that they were “generally sympathetic with and admiring of” the army’s chosen course. American military planes rushed to supply radios to Suharto’s headquarters to help his army coordinate the purge. So Lolo Soetoro goes home, soon to be followed by his young wife, Ann, and her son, the future U.S. president. According to for80 1 The Baffler [no.20]

mer New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (Riverhead, $26.95), nobody really knows even today what was happening at the time. “The details of the September 30, 1965 coup and counter-coup remain in dispute, as do the particulars of the slaughter that followed,” Scott avers. Still, she concedes that a few things aren’t shrouded in fog, such as the fact that “it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors.” As a result of this nationwide outbreak of neighborhood violence, Scott concludes on the same page, “The army became the dominant institution in the country.” Neighbors spontaneously turned on neighbors, driven by unclear motives to perform unclear acts; the PKI was destroyed; the army ended up in power. Mysterious events, clear outcome. The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, $29.95), by New Yorker editor David Remnick, gives the story a touch of detail, explaining that Lolo Soetoro found himself in grad school “at a time when his country was enduring a horrific civil war.” Seven dead on one side, hundreds of thousands on the other: civil war. Why were they fighting? “Suharto claimed that the violence had been initiated by leftists,” Remnick reports, though he pronounces no judgment as to the veracity of the claim. The whole thing may have had something to do with the left and the right. Let’s move on. Placed by the authors in a murky setting, the narrative version of Obama’s stepfather is

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assigned a murky role. “Lolo was in the army,” according to Janny Scott’s book, which shows him in uniform. Remnick, on the other hand, says Lolo “had taken a job as an army geologist,” language that neatly elides the question of his personal agency.* Either he chose to become a geologist after a civil war, or he was forced to serve in an army that had recently engaged in mass murder and was still engaged in the indefinite military detention of political enemies. Apparently, these are small distinctions. He took a job in Suharto’s army, sometime in 1966. Whatever Lolo was up to, Ann and Barack were devastated and delighted to join him. Janny Scott has them living in a place where people are “unable to eat the fish because of

decaying corpses in the water.” On the next page, “Jakarta had a magical charm,” and on the next “the city felt friendly and safe.” Jumping into this milieu of orientalist exoticism, Ann eventually got a job as an English teacher, where snacks were available in the teacher’s lounge. There were, Janny Scott reports, many kinds of Indonesian snacks: “They include seafood chips, peanut chips, fried chips from the mlinjo tree, chips made from ground rawhide mixed with garlic, sweet-potato snacks, mashed cassava snacks, sweet flour dumplings made with sesame seeds, sticky rice flavored with pandanus leaves, sticky black rice sprinkled with grated coconut, and rice cakes wrapped in coconut leaves or banana leaves, to name a few.” This is more detail than Scott has

* Another, smaller problem: Lolo Soetoro was a geographer, not a geologist. The

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] managed for the political events of 1965, in a story about a family that went home during a political purge so stepdad could join the army prosecuting it.* Ann Dunham’s occupational history is equally hidden behind this thicket of meaningless narrative. The English school, it turns out, was her second job in Indonesia. Here’s Scott, again: “By January 1968, she had gone to work as an assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-Amerika, a binational organization funded by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development” (USAID). The offices of the USAID were located at the U.S. embassy, by the way, where officials had communicated American approval of mass executions and arranged for the shipment of communications supplies. Hints of the story Remnick and Scott are trying not to tell begin to slip out. Lolo Soetoro had served in Suharto’s army, and Ann Soetoro was an employee of a thinly veiled Cold War federal agency, reporting to the American director of an organization with an office at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. The naïf with a desk at the embassy had eyes, though, and she noticed some things. Ann “sensed the hauntedness of Jakarta,” David Remnick writes, especially after she “came across a field of unmarked graves.” And so the doe-eyed USAID employee ventured an innocent question to her husband: “She tentatively asked Lolo what had happened with the coup and counter-coup, the scouring of the countryside for suspected Communists and the innumerable killings, the mass arrests, but most Indonesians, Lolo included, were extremely reluctant to talk about the horrors of the mid-sixties.” Remnick’s phrasing presents all of its own answers as a preface to our discovery that Ann’s question wasn’t answered. Janny Scott’s version of the story is a little less helpless. In this

B o ok s Ba sh ed Hendrik Hertzberg, ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era (Penguin, $25.95) Jodi Kantor, The Obamas (Little, Brown, $29.99) James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press, $24.95) James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (Viking, $26.95) David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, $29.95) Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (Simon & Schuster, $28) Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (Riverhead, $26.95) Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, $29.99)

account, Obama’s mother eventually “pieced together some of what had happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip.” Somehow, a federal employee at the U.S. embassy managed to figure out some little bits about what had happened with that whole political mass murder by the army thing in the country where

* “Ann loved Indonesian snacks,” Scott continues, offering some careful analysis of the reasons why she did. Surely she enjoyed the

flavors of the snacks, but perhaps her delight was “compounded later by admiration for the enterprising people who made them.” Then comes, and I am not making this up, another list of local snack foods, this one focusing on sweet snacks rather than on the generally savory snacks of the previous list. “The snacks in Ann’s department were the envy of other departments,” we learn. There is a quote from an Indonesian acquaintance, describing how popular Ann’s snacks were. There is a story about a bad snack that Ann did not like. Lolo was in the army. It is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. In a story about Indonesia in the late 1960s, you can learn a lot about the cookies and chips.

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[ Political journalism in America operates as a kind of narrative cotton gin, cleanly stripping meaning from events. It creates the kind of magical world where no one is quite sure what happened in Indonesia in 1965, but the food was delicious and everyone walked away with a desire to benefit society through selfless public service.

9 her husband was a soldier and her employer delivered military supplies. And the lesson? Indonesia was where “Ann was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters— liberal, humanist values,” Remnick concludes. It’s where she taught him the values of “honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others,” where she lectured him about “a sense of obligation to give something back,” Scott adds. It’s where she “worked to instill ideas about public service in her son.” Because Indonesia in the late sixties was the perfect place and time to learn about liberal humanist values and public service. More recently, David Maraniss walked into this dark room and turned on the lights. His Barack Obama: The Story (Simon & Schuster, $32.50), which tells the story of Lolo Soetoro and his family, sees the creepy significance of the political setting. Suddenly we have a version of Lolo who, sitting in Hawaii, knew that “the political situation in Indonesia made him especially vulnerable.” Whole layers of meaning open up, as Maraniss shows Obama’s stepfather amid dangerous events with precise language: “On top of all this, the Indonesian army, the military to which Soetoro still had civilian obligations, was involved in a bloody skirmish in Malaysia against the British.”* If he were to return to Indonesia, Lolo suspects he’d be “placed on the front lines doing reconnaissance work.” Throughout Maraniss’s account, a clock is ticking: “Soetoro knew that his time was running out.” Indonesian offi-

cials showed up at his university in Hawaii and sharply questioned him about his politics and his affiliations back home. He fought a losing battle to keep his student visa and was finally forced home by the loss of that visa in June of 1966. When Ann arrived with her son to join her husband, Maraniss writes, “the extent of the political bloodshed in Indonesia during the purge and the brute power and force of the emerging Suharto regime certainly must have stunned and demoralized her.” We’ve taken a sharp turn away from the world of delightful native snack foods. But then Maraniss walks away from the politics that he sees so clearly. Serving the narrative conventions of American journalism about powerful figures, he works his way out of the detailed and careful story he’s told, and instead tells the one he’s expected to tell. Despite “all of the political bloodshed that Indonesia had just endured, violence triggered by raw power, fear, and political and ethnic hatred,” young Barry Obama’s classroom in Indonesia was somehow “a place removed.” His teacher “spoke idealistically of the notion of tolerance.” Floating above his setting, “Barry in Indonesia was not just an early comingof-age story, but also the start of his coming to grips with race.” Amazingly, in the most banal conclusion drawn by any of these books, life in Indonesia brought the future president symbolically “closer to his father in spirit than he ever would [be] again,” a critical step in the formation of his personal identity. “He was

* Compare this to Janny Scott’s statement that Lolo Soetoro was later “in the army,” or to Remnick’s claim that Soetoro “had taken

a job” with the army. We learn two critical facts in one tight sentence: Soetoro would become a civilian in a military position, and he didn’t have a choice about it. The

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] also closer physically, only the breadth of one ocean away.” Oh, daddy, I am near you. Something has dragged a sharp and engaged reporter away from the landscape he has carefully surveyed, back into the banality of a dismal publishing formula in which people must necessarily get to know themselves and feel better about their fathers. The established narrative conventions cannot be escaped. Their Very Names Were Music Political journalism in America operates as a kind of narrative cotton gin, cleanly stripping meaning from events. It creates the kind of magical world where no one is quite sure what happened in Indonesia in 1965, but the food was delicious and everyone walked away with a desire to benefit society through selfless public service. The overarching narrative premise, the bit of mechanism that strips out the politics, is that actions and conflicts are essentially personal. A protagonist—a future president of the United States, say—is on a life journey or vision quest, struggling with the legacy of his mother, or of a historical father figure, or of an actual father, or some combination thereof. Villains appear, necessarily. They stand athwart the personal quest, for personal reasons involving bad personal character. Policy negotiations are spiritual and psychological tests: Will Barack grow into his destiny through bold action, or shrink from history with narrow vision? Is either eventuality due to the way he feels about race, his roots, his papa? What Barack Obama “proposed as the core of his candidacy was a self,” David Remnick offers on the first page of his book, framing the nearly six hundred pages of portentous celebrity profiling that follows. Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (Harper, $29.99) describes its subject as “this brilliant construct,” sounding like an overawed Ivy Leaguer writing a seminar paper, and wonders whether this walking, talking narrative object can possibly “handle the waterfall of inchoate yearnings crashing down on him.” In a closing chapter 84 1 The Baffler [no.20]

titled “Finding and Being Found,” David Maraniss has Obama “on the way to his family’s unimaginable destination, his own el dorado.” In the Lifetime biopic, the role of Barack Obama will be played by Debra Messing. Outside of the thing that passes for news on cable television, few journalists perform this dismal removal of meaning from politics more winsomely, with greater pretensions to wry knowingness and stylistic elegance, than Hendrik Hertzberg. In the introduction to his ¡Obámanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era (Penguin, $25.95), a collection of his New Yorker essays, Hertzberg parrots Remnick, his boss, with a description of Obama’s “long apprenticeship as a student of himself.” But Hertzberg makes sure to rub plenty of his own important self against Obama’s student self, until you surely understand that they’ve met, they totally know each other, and, oh my goodness, they are mutual fans: “I told him how much I admired his 1995 book Dreams from My Father, still the only one he had published.” And then? “He told me that he and Michelle were big fans of the New Yorker.” There are three shameless paragraphs about this encounter. (Hertzberg’s wife and Obama’s wife also dig each other, by the way.) Later, Hertzberg received an invitation to meet with the president during a conference for liberal bloggers, and he’s happy to tell you about that, too. Follow an experienced journalist into a close discussion on important topics with a leading political figure, and learn from the hard-earned knowledge he brings to his analysis: “The discussion was off the record, but it violates no confidence to say that, as I suppose we all expected, he made a favorable impression on us.” By not revealing the things that I suppose we all expected, journalism helps us to understand our world. Every word in Hertzberg’s book bridges the selves of the serfs with the selves of the political class. They complete us; they run for office so that we can feel, so that we can be personally redeemed and sanctified at our emotional core. Obama, in this, is like Mario Cuomo: “Both made Democrats, haunted for decades by a phantom of themselves as losers who are weak and glum, suddenly feel like winners who

[ Every word in Hertzberg’s book bridges the selves of the serfs with the selves of the political class. They complete us; they run for office so that we can feel, so that we can be personally redeemed and sanctified at our emotional core.

9 are strong and joyful. Cuomo was grand opera and Obama was the rebirth of the cool, a jazz formalist, but both were virtuosi. Their very names were music.” Yes! Take a moment to say “Barack Obama” and “Mario Cuomo” out loud, so you can hear the operatic jazz mellifluence. In his speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, “Obama comes riding through the smoke and scoops up his audience like a hero sweeping a stranded damsel onto his horse.” Hertzberg goes on, but I can’t. Little Faith in Government On facing pages in Ron Suskind’s Con Men, advertised as the inside story of how the Obama administration managed its way through the worst recession in seventy-odd years, Suskind introduces a guy named Billy Tauzin. On the second of those two pages, Tauzin is described as a steadfast advocate of the “unfettered marketplace,” a description that closely follows Suskind’s assurance on the previous page that Tauzin has “little faith in government acting as an arbiter” on health care matters. So who is this limited government, pro– free market fanatic? When Suskind first shows Tauzin in action, he’s one of two people sitting near Larry Summers at a White House–sponsored meeting on health care reform: “A long-serving Louisiana representative who switched from Democrat to Republican in the 1990s, Tauzin had pushed through one of the most expensive pieces of legislation in American history: the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. Costing $500 billion over ten years, it is considered by many to be a massive handout to the pharma industry, which in return hired Tauzin as their lead Washington representative.”

So the “unfettered marketplace” is where the central government nakedly gives away hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts to private corporations, and people who don’t believe that government should act as an arbiter in health care matters are the sponsors of some of the most expensive health care legislation in history, and free market purists work as corporate lobbyists in the District of Columbia, probing for the spigot. It’s free markets and laissez-faire economics, a halftrillion public dollars at a time. Thank god Billy Tauzin doesn’t believe in government intrusion in the health care marketplace, because just imagine what that would look like. But Ron Suskind isn’t an ordinary writer using words in order to describe meaning, any more than Billy Tauzin is an ordinary speaker using words to communicate a set of beliefs; no, Suskind is using words to police a story into established narrative forms, putting the competing players into their categories. Marketplace, free markets, regulation, deregulation, isolationist, pacifist, anti-government, left, right, center, centrist, extremist, mainstream: these are Facebook words, telling readers about connections, positions, and identities rather than ideologies and actions. In political journalism, someone who believes in the “unfettered marketplace” is a Republican. That person need not believe in the unfettered marketplace, whatever that is, or act in its service. The phrase is not intended for that purpose. Big books about national politics follow the same rules that Janny Scott and David Remnick bring to their stories about the Soetoro family’s sojourn in Indonesia and how Young Barack was endlessly becoming. Suskind’s book gives us, as the subtitle indicates, a story about The

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] Fortunately, Obama has been able to cover the awkwardness caused by his genius with the social deftness that comes from his “unusual self-restraint and self-awareness,” and his “vaunted poise,” and his—okay, let’s stop here.

9 “the education of a president,” setting Obama’s challenge against the test that George Bush failed: “He needed to grow, and he didn’t.” The nation is personified, too, and goes on its own personal journey, but it’s sort of riding shotgun. As Obama rises to the presidency, Suskind says, “The ground was trembling from the streets of Chicago to the fertile fields of Kansas.” Linked by trembling streets, the Chosen One is almost pornographically attached to the Body of the People: “It is a rare bond that allows a president and a nation to move as one. . . . Policies suddenly become not just what the president does at some adviser’s behest, to score a political point, but who he—or, someday, she—is. It is then that president and public enter their shared moment.” There are many such moments in Confidence Men, including an extraordinary analogy involving a school bus. It’s on page twenty-four, if you haven’t eaten lunch and want to read it for yourself. Sometimes the narrative lens is a little wider than a single person, but politics still sinks beneath an aggregated personal journey in which a whole status group grows into its moment of destiny together. The model was laid down long ago by professional acolyte and melodramatic hagiographer of power Arthur Schlesinger Jr., with his sweeping narrative volumes on the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations. Contemporary books like James Mann’s The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (Viking, $26.95) take readers through the voyage of a class of Democratic foreign policy operators, the president among them, tracking them from the wilderness of the Bush years to the moment they could put on their cleats, take the field, and show the crowd how they could move the ball just like Republicans. While 86 1 The Baffler [no.20]

streets trembled on the fertile fields of Kansas, or something. They are all becoming. Of course, mapping all these personal journeys can be an exhaustingly circular task, as when Mann describes tedious think tanker John Podesta’s tedious emanations about a tedious think tank called the Center for a New American Security: “In an interview in early 2010, Podesta confessed that he was a little disappointed with CNAS. It had started out in the political center, maybe slightly left of center, he said. But he felt it had drifted to the right after [Kurt] Campbell and [Michèle] Flournoy departed and had gradually become just another mainstream Washington defense institution.” Understand? It started out in the political center, but it gradually drifted—a little to the left! a little to the right!—into the mainstream. But the nonsensical language isn’t meant simply to identify actors or clarify allegiances. Purporting to describe and explain, it ranks, excludes, and orders. Here’s Mann telling the foreign policy version of Ron Suskind’s Obama-finds-his-economic-bearings subplot. Experts are descending on Colorado for the annual meeting of the Aspen Strategy Group, and all the soup is just hot enough: “The group spanned the spectrum of mainstream thinking about American foreign policy. They were, above all, respectable. Aspen participants were not too far to the left or the right; there was no radical critic of the United States such as, say, the late Chalmers Johnson, inveighing against American empire, and there was no isolationist like, say, Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, urging that all U.S. troops simply be brought home. No, the visitors to Aspen share similar assumptions; they are senior practitioners, practical people who dwell within the realm of the possible.”

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They spanned the spectrum of people who share similar assumptions, representing the entire range of thought that you get when you keep critics out of the room. Everyone gets a voice but the actual left, the authentic right, people who say the word empire, and people who, being “isolationist,” think the American military presence shouldn’t span the face of the earth. All voices are welcome around the table, as long as they say more or less the same thing. It is, you see, a centrist forum, focused only on “the realm of the possible.” If

you think the “realm of the possible” shrinks when everyone allowed in the room to discuss the possibilities already shares the same assumptions, you’ve just shown why you’re outside the locked door. Wear a jacket out there, hippie, ’cause the wilderness is cold. They Are Married to Us, Too Events and human beings outside the narrative frame of the personal journey toward the responsible center are incidental, sometimes mentioned but never fully perceived. The

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] Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99), for example, is about the personal journey the Obamas are taking as a couple. The book scrupulously examines dilemmas like the one that opens chapter three: “The approach of the forty-third Super Bowl, with the Pittsburgh Steelers playing the Arizona Cardinals, raised a question in the White House: where would the fortyfourth president watch the game?” Here, too, we ride shotgun, as Kantor asks us to wonder not only about “the impact of the presidency on the Obamas’ relationship,” but also about “how the Obamas’ personal dynamic had consequences for the rest of us.” After all, she concludes, with the very last words that frame the introduction of her book, “they are married to us, too.” We’re like a whole national family of sister-wives, joined in mass matrimony. Just imagine how many in-laws we’ll have to visit. Pakistanis, on the other hand, take their places as the furniture our family casually rearranges in its living room. Some of the president’s supporters thought he would scale back American drone strikes, but it was not to be. “The supporters,” it turns out, “were wrong.” Obama’s personal journey as an emerging leader went elsewhere. Here’s how Kantor’s paragraph, describing the new president’s first drone strike, ends: “Three of the other dead were children.” Here’s how the next paragraph begins: “The new first lady, meanwhile, was figuring out how Malia and Sasha could have playdates with their new school friends.” One set of dead children backs up against a pair of live ones. It’s jarring only if you’re able to notice. Meanwhile, faked problems are placed in the narrative to displace the real problems, like dead Pakistani children, that politicians and their journalist courtiers are not able to perceive. In a stunning passage that Ron Suskind surely didn’t regard as stunning, we learn that an Obama campaign speech on foreign policy fell flat. As a result, Obama rushed to meet with a team of economic advisers, since “attention-grabbing domestic policies looked like the only way his campaign was going to 88 1 The Baffler [no.20]

generate forward motion.” The campaign “had booked the room,” Suskind explains, “for the next two hours.” The advisers tossed around ideas, suggesting (for example) that high levels of unemployment among “low- to moderately-skilled male workers” could be addressed with a program to train them for work in the growing field of health care. Obama “shook his head”: “‘Look, these are guys,’ he said,” and they wouldn’t want to take jobs as nurse’s aides. Then, finally, an economist sitting at the table pulled something out of the air: “‘Infrastructure,’ he blurted out. ‘Rebuilding infrastructure.’ Obama nodded and smiled, seeing it instantly.” This is how policy is made: people make shit up around a table to patch over a bad speech, and then go to Congress for a trillion dollars, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. A few hours later, a bridge collapses—one bridge, in a nation of close to four million square miles—and the policy is vindicated. Here’s Suskind again (observe the seamlessness of the collisions in these sentences, the way premises arise and are simultaneously refuted and sustained without ever interrupting the smoothness of the narrative): “It was government’s responsibility to ensure that the physical foundations of the country, on which its economy and way of life rested, were sound. The bridges and dams, the electrical grid, the highways—the condition and upkeep of these things could not be left to the private sector and profit motive alone. They never had been. If government did not step up soon, disaster would surely ensue.” So infrastructure had never been left to the private sector, because it had always been the government’s responsibility, but the government needed to step up and start doing the things it had always done, instead of doing what it had never done and leaving roads and bridges to be maintained by the profit motive, which it had to stop doing despite never having begun to do it. Look again at the sentences on both sides of “They never had been,” and see how all the claims fit together: absolute incoherence, total nonsense, and an established journalistic narrative.

[ “Why is it that Democratic presidential candidates hold out the prospect of a new American foreign policy,” Mann asks, “and yet often wind up with ones that are not fundamentally different from the Republicans?” Yes, why is that?

To recap: once, a group of Obama’s campaign advisers, sitting around a table in a room that was booked for two hours, hit upon a new and sudden need to have the government start maintaining public infrastructure; and before the sun went up the next day, journalists were earnestly explaining that highways and dams could no longer be left to the private sector, pause, “They never had been,” pause, government needs to step up. All of these invented themes take perfect form in Noam Scheiber’s exhaustingly banal The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (Simon & Schuster, $28), one of the finest pieces of raw stenography you could hope ever to read. The universe has given us Noam Scheiber for the same reason it’s given us Hendrik Hertzberg: as an exemplar of a particular character type, in this case the earnest scrivener of conventional wisdom. Scheiber’s résumé nails every point right on the head, from The New Republic and a fellowship at the New America Foundation to Oxford for a Rhodes scholarship. His personal journey worked according to design, training a young journalist to a state of impenetrable establishment credulousness. Scheiber types up a new Obama plan to spend fifty billion dollars on “crumbling roads and bridges” as part of a package of “reasonable, centrist policies” that pushed against the “extreme demands” of Republicans, who, presumably, desire immediate American bridgelessness in which no one can drive anywhere because all the roads have returned to dust and the

broken dams have flooded everything. There is oration, and it gets the requisite adjective: “Obama delivered . . . a speech as muscular as the American Jobs Act Sperling had crafted,” Scheiber writes without laughing. If speeches are “muscular,” does the phrase “bold action” appear? Reader, you know it does. That Power to End Debate But let’s give them their due. Journalists like Ron Suskind, James Mann, and Noam Scheiber manage to notice policy and the significance of policy choices more than the career academic who has covered the similar “education of a president” narrative. In Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University Press, $24.95), Harvard historian James Kloppenberg writes what might as well be a biography of Kim Jong-il on sale at Pyongyang airport. Every word is bold struggle and brilliant formation. Young Barack encounters many challenges, but he is shaped by the strengthening fire; in one environment after another, “his exceptional intelligence enabled him to master difficult concepts that left many of his classmates floundering.” That latter example specifically describes the future president’s experience at, yes, Harvard Law School, where diminished cognition is apparently the norm and smart people really stand out. Fortunately, Obama has been able to cover the awkwardness caused by his genius with the social deftness that comes from his “unusual selfrestraint and self-awareness,” and his “vaunted poise,” and his—okay, let’s stop here. Kloppenberg coughs out a book celebrating Barack Obama’s glorious philosophical pragmatism, his commitment to civic republicanism, his openness in thought and discussion. In this version of the heroic centrist melodrama, the Great Leader believes in a philosophy that demands “open-ended experimentation,” citizen! He stands for “open-mindedness and ongoing debate.” He is unique among politicians in that he insists upon “respect for one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise with them.”* Declaring the importance of all this open discussion The

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] and respectful exchange, Kloppenberg also writes back-to-back sentences like this: “So incoherent is American public debate that Obama’s critics simultaneously blame him for an economic situation he did nothing to cause and oppose larger infusions of money into the economy through much greater government spending, the only option that might address the problem. The impasse in which the nation finds itself stems directly from the American people’s limited access to power— and their equally limited access to responsible sources of information about how the American economy works.” Does the professor who types sentences celebrating open-ended experimentation and open-mindedness notice that he also declares the presence of the only option for American economic policy? Does he notice that he pronounces dissenting sources to be irresponsible? Reader, he does not. Oh, impassioned critic of our president who opposes the only allowable policy option, where is your openness, your pragmatic commitment to open-ended experimentation, your free-flowing debate, your modesty? Here, in any event, is Kloppenberg’s: “Have the first three years of the Obama presidency made necessary a reconsideration of the arguments presented in Reading Obama? The short answer is no.” This question-and-answer, from the book’s new preface, drags its author into the realm of naked self-parody. “Since the book appeared,” Kloppenberg writes with unembarrassable smugness that goes down like brandy in Cambridge, “I have heard from many people who have known Barack Obama at different stages of his life, and in very different circumstances. All of them have told me they think I have him right.” What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is Professor James Kloppenberg of Harvard University saying he

must be right because he’s heard from “good friends” of the president’s at Harvard Law School, not to mention from “a former head of a European government” too. Well, there you go. Sounds like the only person who hasn’t confirmed his portrait of the president’s “mature, penetrating mind” is the man himself; no doubt, the professor lies awake at night dreaming of the call. Reading Obama echoes another classic of the form, a ten-thousand-word Vanity Fair lament from September 2010 in which professional thumb-sucker Todd Purdum declared a similar concern over the kind of people who oppose whatever their betters declare to be the only option for public policy. “It used to be,” Purdum wrote, starting with words that invariably signal idiocy ahead, “that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day’s events. The pace of events has picked up, sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite, and subject to little responsible control.” Later in the same article, Purdum quotes presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, who does not appear ever to listen to herself speak, and who similarly laments the decline of the old days of responsible discussion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says. Yes, Purdum nods along, a thousand times yes: “Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate.” What a shame. Both Wall Street’s Man and Obama’s Here I must pause to confess that I admire Ron Suskind’s book, although I had to squint to feel it. At least I admire it more than do its critics, like Jacob Weisberg and Ezra Klein, who know that Suskind must have been factu-

* Here’s the open-minded president on ABC News in early May, compromising and respecting his opponents all over the place:

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that—for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that—I think same-sex couples should be able to get married. Now—I have to tell you that part of my hesitation on this has also been I didn’t want to nationalize the issue. There’s a tendency when I weigh in to think suddenly it becomes political and it becomes polarized. And what you’re seeing is, I think, states working through this issue—in fits and starts, all across the country. Different communities are arriving at different conclusions, at different times. And I think that’s a healthy process and a healthy debate. And I continue to believe that this is an issue that is gonna be worked out at the local level, because historically, this has not been a federal issue, what’s recognized as a marriage.” It’s so centrist and responsible that it manages not to promise, offer, or suggest anything but the cool diffusion of process. If you’re gay, we commit to talking about you some more.

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[ ally wrong because his book about politics is full of pettiness, backbiting, and accounts of internal chaos and disloyalty in policymaking. This is the lament of the faithful, who know that politics is serious business and a public service. In any case, the critics are right that the book is a mess. For nearly five hundred pages, Suskind wages conceptual war on his own evidence, piling up proof about a set of premises while insisting on a whole other set of contradictory conclusions. But the evidence, bless its little heart, speaks through the author’s fog, describing a set of policy arguments and their outcomes. Reporter Suskind overcomes Writer Suskind. Here, at least, is a book about politics that has politics in it. We learn that Christina Romer—Obama’s first chair of the Council of Economic Advisers—argued (along with several other key aides) that insolvent banks, including even the biggest of them like Citigroup, should be seized and wound up, their failures resolved through disciplined regulatory intervention. She lost to (in particular) Tim Geithner, who opted to “keep matters moving forward with as little disruption as possible,” preventing a crisis of confidence in the financial system by endlessly throwing free money at it. Peter Orszag, meanwhile, argued for data-driven health care reform that would first aim to control costs, then use the savings to expand coverage. Instead, the bill that survived Congress “would be more accurately defined as ‘insurance’ reform than ‘health care’ reform,” as Suskind observes, “since the centerpiece was mainly an expansion of the private insurance industry.” In a book written by someone who bothers to notice policy, regulation is a disputed thing of unclear boundaries and purpose: What is it? How will it work? What should it do? Whom should it serve? Look at the outcome of both of the major domestic policy disputes in the first years of the Obama administration. In health care, a policy initiative intended to reduce health care spending instead ended with a requirement that more people send money to private insurance corporations, while private health care corporations escaped any

significant cost controls at all. (Somebody tell this to David Remnick, who crows about “the tens of millions of Americans who would now have health care,” as though there’s no distinction between an insurance mandate and the delivery of medical services.) In financial regulation, banks ran the table, and Suskind can write sentences like this one: “The government had handed $125 billion to nine banks, without conditions.” While we have a national debate framed by a false choice between deregulation and reckless greed or more regulation and greater fairness, here are two instances in which more regulation produced more corporate income. The facts don’t fit the debate; more remarkably, the debate won’t fit the facts. Neither will Suskind’s book, which describes the “unfettered free markets” of the “deregulated post-Reagan era,” and an “army of men” in government who held “an unshakeable belief in the miracle of the markets, the freer the better,” and “traditionally antiregulatory Republicans,” and the “general agreement” about the “lack of regulation” in finance. Describing efforts to legislate financial regulation after 2008, Suskind references the “sweeping” Depression-era regulation that it would be measured against: “There hadn’t really been any since then, so the bar was low.” Right alongside all of that language, a reader gets Suskind’s description of Alan Greenspan’s “greatest historical influence,” which was that he “helped to ensure that, in each crisis, the rollover of debts . . . would be supported,” creating “a flood of liquidity that altered the ancient, commonsense physics between price and value, confidence and pessimism.” Two pages later, Suskind describes “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, guaranteeing roughly 80 percent of all mortgages, and for years encouraging the extension of debt to unsteady borrowers as part of [a] national bipartisan push to spread the ‘virtues’ of homeownership.” A few more pages, and we learn that those two organizations, “and by association the U.S. government . . . were the guarantors of Wall Street’s business model and its vast profits,” a business model assured by “government’s The

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] role as backstop—final recipient of the risk being passed to and fro between investors in debt.” Next, it’s on to the bankruptcy reform legislation of 2005, which exempted repos and swaps, “like those soon-to-be-fatal credit default swaps,” from the “automatic stay” on corporate liabilities on bankruptcy. After that, we hear about the “migration” of middleclass money from savings accounts to Wall Street, caused by “the government’s 1970s creation of tax-exempt 401(k)s and IRAs.” From there, Suskind turns to the Federal Reserve Bank’s “cheap-money policies”; and then to banks “making money from the free money offered by the Fed, and sitting on the profits”; and then to AIG and “the government’s total contribution to the firm” rising to “a stunning $170 billion”; and then to the stark declaration that “Washington was becoming Wall Street.” See all the deregulation? It’s almost like we didn’t have any government at all. Put it this way: in a book about the attempt to overcome the legacies of deregulation through the stabilizing and reasonable influence of the regulatory state, the pharmaceutical industry lobbyist Billy Tauzin is sitting next to Larry Summers in the White House, where everyone is somehow on a journey to the center. Describing the latest iterations of this regulatory-corporate fiesta, Suskind delivers the verdict of the asset manager Larry Fink, with an ellipsis from the original: “The president is much more of a centrist . . . in some

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ways he might even be called right of what used to be called center.” I think that’s supposed to be a compliment, delivered by a critic who was then “impressed,” as Suskind notes, by an up-close encounter with the president to discuss the country’s economic plight. It’s clear from all these accounts of the sensibly pragmatic exercise of power in Washington that the “center” is where corporations go to pick up their free cash. But at least there are no extremists at that center. You can just change the foreign policy names in James Mann’s The Obamians to domestic policy names, and you will have exactly the same narrative on offer in Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men. “Why is it that Democratic presidential candidates hold out the prospect of a new American foreign policy,” Mann asks, “and yet often wind up with ones that are not fundamentally different from the Republicans?” Yes, why is that? The Policy Executive as a Social Type In October 2010, Kloppenberg described his work on Barack Obama’s political formation to an audience at the U.S. Intellectual History Conference in New York. In his remarks Kloppenberg probed the sophistication of Obama’s extraordinary mind, the depth of his philosophy, the seriousness of his engagement with the long roots of American political thought. In a story on Kloppenberg’s talk, New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen wrote that the audience “responded with prolonged applause.” A history professor in the crowd helpfully interpreted the enthusiastic response of Kloppenberg’s peer group: “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours.” The president is, like us, extraordinary. He went to college a lot. Many critics have described the emergence of such insulated status groups among American elites, “the product of the cultural fragmentation that seems to characterize industrial and postindustrial societies,” in Christopher Lasch’s words. No fool for power, Lasch noted the separation of an emerging intellec-

[ “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours.” The president is, like us, extraordinary. He went to college a lot.

9 tual class from the society that produced it. As academic and political elites have evolved since then into status groups sealed off from reality and insulated from economic pain, they have substantially merged into a new kind of managerial elite. A Harvard history professor celebrates the ascendance of a Harvard Law grad and University of Chicago law professor to the presidency; and as the new president rises from one to another of these “strategic loci of social control” (in Lasch’s words, again), he brings along other members of his social class. Professor Elena Kagan moves from the dean’s office to the Supreme Court with only a brief detour to polish her curriculum vitae for government work; Professor Cass Sunstein takes his desk in the new administration—as “regulatory czar”— not far from Professor Samantha Power over in the State Department, who also happens to be his wife. Professor Christina Romer and Professor Larry Summers wait outside the Oval Office for a meeting, the air thick with tension, in the same seats once occupied by Professor John Yoo and Professor Condoleezza Rice, while Professor Steven Chu wraps up his discussion on energy policy. Wonderfully, Suskind describes “Summers’s pride in leading the most academically accomplished, big-brained team since Kennedy’s ‘best and brightest.’” It worked so well the first time, didn’t it? As Kloppenberg casts a horrified look at all the irresponsible sources that burden the educated managerial class with incoherent debate, he sees himself. (And he likes what he sees.) As the professoriate continues, amazingly, to swoon over a Barack Obama who has been gratefully pronounced by the financial industry to be “much more of a centrist” than they had expected, they aren’t seeing the object of their projected adulation. The highly educated

class, the new kind of managerial elite, is protecting itself from self-knowledge. It’s hiding. Surveying the body of self-congratulatory, pragmatically centrist literature celebrating this self-congratulatory, pragmatically centrist administration, it’s at last possible to understand the true character and scale of our plight: the nation is locked in an elitemade crisis—caused by regulatory capture, not by mythical deregulation—that has been extended and deepened by elite intervention constructed around further regulatory capture. The solution to that problem has been to batter at the chimera of deregulation. A failed elite class that finds itself unable to put its knowledge into effective operation instead speaks of that knowledge in a louder voice. It tells us, of course, that Barack Obama is a rare and magnificent genius, that he is a pragmatic centrist who correctly performs the only inevitable policy options, that he is one of us. The Qing Dynasty died under the hapless guidance of men like these, men who had trained hard in Confucian principle and passed a brutally difficult series of exams to ascend to the highest ranks of a dying regime that they couldn’t hope to save. We know so wonderfully much, and none of it works. In this context, the center is a place of belonging, not a place of belief. It’s therefore striking to note that, in a book that describes a battle between regulation and deregulation, left and right, Suskind describes one brief hopeful moment in Congress, a momentary coalescence among senators who favored tough limits on the size and leverage to be allowed to financial corporations. Congressional leaders opposed the measure, “But senators started signing on, as the most liberal members, such as Sherrod Brown and The

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] Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, were joined by none other than Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, and his party’s leading voice in the chamber on banking issues; Nevada’s John Ensign; and Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, arguably the Senate’s most conservative member.” You can appreciate how distressing this specter would have been to the White House, and to its dutiful class of mandarin apologists: Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn were now in agreement on a key question of financial policy, burdening public debate with incoherence. But then the centrists intervened, and left us instead with the mostly unfinished gesture of the Dodd-Frank Act, which solves the problem of too-big-to-fail banks by leaving them just as large as they are now. Fortunately, though, since it wasn’t deregulation, Dodd-Frank could only have been a major victory for the regulation of the financial industry. To dispute that point is to be an extremist. A country that can’t manage or mitigate the crisis of its failing institutions has at least found a way to avoid talking about it, five hundred pages at a time. Disciplined, Satisfying, and Secretive And yet the politics accidentally leak through. The narrative construct named Barack Obama is everywhere encountering boundaries, slamming into hard limits that prevent him from taking bold action to help us on our own journey at his side, even though

our emotions have fused with his and we are married to him and his wife. In books that depoliticize political events, politics becomes an obstacle to Obama’s performance of process rather than the process in which he is engaged. And that real process, the one he wishes to perform, is formidable indeed. “He had to clean up the financial crisis first,” Jodi Kantor explains, “but then he would be able to move on to his real agenda, which included dealing with a rapidly warming earth and fixing a health care system so expensive it might eventually bankrupt the country.” Oh, and he told his staff to get started on “an advanced smart grid to transport new forms of power across long distances,” and he called leaders in the Middle East “to tell them he was committed to achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace in his first term.” And let’s also multiply some loaves and fishes, and can we reupholster the couch in the Oval Office? But then the only reason Obama doesn’t repair the global economy and reengineer medicine and change the temperature of the earth and toss up a new national power grid to harvest the wind and institute an immediate and lasting peace between Israel and Arabs is that people shamefully said no to him. His staff tells him that he can’t just grab up land across the length and breadth of the nation to run his advanced power lines, but would have to negotiate for it with such intrusive things as “every tiny municipality along the way,” pissants that

grubin • To grubin is to procrastinate in a gloomy and lugubrious manner, not meanly or whiningly but powerfully and portentously. Grubinists are Weltschmerzian fatalists. They believe in, and accept, the law of perdurable disorder. They espouse chaoticism (q.v.). Grubin was the surname of an accident-prone sad sack, always ill or tired, always late, always pleading for extra time, yet at moments dry and sardonic. —Daniel Aaron V I C TO R K ER LOW

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[ they are. Here are the next two paragraphs in their entirety: I’m the president. Can’t I get this done? he asked his advisers. Actually, no, they told him. The smart grid idea was scrapped.

Dunder Mifflined in his own office by uncooperative employees, Obama is similarly thwarted all over the imperial city by an inexplicable explosion of personal intransigence and meanness. Mitch McConnell, “a Kentuckian with large, calm eyes,” is “conjured up” to twirl his waxed mustache and tie Penelope to the train tracks. “Where Obama was subtle and intellectual, McConnell was a tough, canny tactician who believed in brute repetition of anxietyinducing messages about the mounting federal deficit, bailouts, and terrorist attacks,” Kantor explains. The description of Obama as a subtle intellectual comes precisely one page after the one where he tells his staff to make an advanced smart grid appear, then gives up when they tell him there are laws. But anyway, it’s all just narratives: elsewhere in the book, Kantor writes that “the federal deficit was a stunning $1.4 trillion, the most red ink that post–World War II Washington had ever seen.” Why does Mitch McConnell keep talking about the size of the federal deficit? Merely because he’s a tough, canny tactician. The thing is simultaneously real and impossible to discuss as real, a dangerous reality and a narrative ploy that Republicans are playing as a game. Crushed by Mitch McConnell’s shrewd decision to pretend there’s a federal deficit, Obama retreats to the rationality of state violence. “In comparison to the raucous noise of domestic politics,” Kantor writes, “there was something disciplined and satisfying about secretive national-security work. There was no messy Congress to deal with, no stroking and horse trading with legislators, and certainly no Tea Party resistance.” In short, Obama was “more at ease with the exercise of power than the exercise of politics.” Here it is, all of it: a world of personal will, without critics, without opposition, without irresponsible debate that tragically can’t be

closed anymore by a single paternal figure. Political events without political content or meaning, without politics. It is disciplined, satisfying, and secretive. Killing people overseas allows a leader to move past politics and achieve the satisfaction of exercising power. American journalists see the politics of their own place and moment as clearly as they see the political substance of Ann Soetoro’s Indonesia, where young Barack Obama spent some time becoming. Swing Sets To my eye, nothing tells the story of our historical moment like the story about the swing set. It appears in Jodi Kantor’s book, as the Obamas “stepped into new lives that seemed in many ways to belong to nineteenth-century regents, with a circle of staff whose size and degree of specialization seemed to rival that of a royal court.” Remember that Kantor dwells on the limits Obama has encountered as his political opponents make slyly framed claims about federal spending and excessive debt. The president is confined in a political trap, bound by the inherent parsimoniousness and procedural paralysis of a government managed by political process. He also has “at least two valets to dress, groom, and pack for him, a navy steward to serve him meals, a maître d’ and six butlers for the residence, and two personal aides for everything else.” And then it’s time to buy some White House swings for Sasha and Malia, and the staff leaps into action. “The staff performed their work with total seriousness: when it was time to order a swing set for the Obama girls, Rear Admiral Stephen Rochon, the chief usher, traveled to the factory in South Dakota where it was being made to inspect it.” Trapped by its limits, unable to take bold action, pinching pennies, and frozen by political obstructions, the White House dispatches an admiral across the country to buy playground equipment for its children. The Obamas are helpless, living like nineteenth-century regents. The absurdity of our own historical moment is written clear as day by people who can’t begin to perceive what they’ve written.t The

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[ S t u di e s i n To ta l Depr av it y]

Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard 3 Jim Newell

n December 23, 2011, the dons of Harvard University finally got to see Adam Wheeler sentenced to a year in prison. Wheeler, a twenty-five-year-old whom they admitted in 2007 on the strength of an academic record he’d fabricated out of thin air, had been caught again—and this was not something a young gentleman does to America’s most highly self-regarded institution of advanced credentialing. A few months earlier, Wheeler had submitted a résumé to U.S. Green Data Inc., on which he said he had attended Harvard. Technically, this was true; he’d been one year short of graduating when someone at the school belatedly noticed he had falsified the credentials that won him admission, and that he had plagiarized the papers that won him scholarships and prestigious awards. But the ten-year probationary punishment that the Middlesex County Superior Court had meted out upon the discovery of his fabulism forbade him ever from claiming he had attended the school, and the new offending résumé landed on the desk of a Harvard alum, who forwarded it to a dean, who turned it over to the district attorney’s office. And Adam Wheeler, who attended Harvard and who had been forced by the Court to lie about his having attended Harvard, was packed off to jail for lying about his having attending Harvard. The school of George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger (the war criminal who was feted on campus this spring as a conquering hero) took all appropriate measures to ensure that its name would never be sullied by associating with an immoral, egomaniacal charlatan, at least one who never held high office. And all the useful knowledge that Wheeler picked up in more than two years of classes was no longer something from which he could draw on to contribute to society. 96 1 The Baffler [no.20]

College credential fraud may seem like a nitpicking offense for throwing a nonviolent offender into the overcrowded prison system for a tour of the seasons. But Wheeler embarrassed Harvard; his puncture of arbitrary power was so trifling that, paradoxically, it couldn’t be ignored. Harvard officials had little choice but to make an example of him through an aggressive, custom-tailored prosecution whose real aim was to restore the correct order of things. Adam Wheeler, after all, is merely a mediocre public school graduate from Delaware. But Harvard—well, everyone knows that Harvard shines across the fair land as a beacon of meritocratic upward mobility universally accessible to a nationwide corps of upper-middle-class teenagers of arbitrary intellectual ability. Take a look at the victim impact statement Harvard presented to the Court in 2010, and notice how the country’s mightiest and richest institution of enlightened learning asks for the maximum punishment to be inflicted upon a lying schoolboy. The victim wanted to send a message to the entire world that fraud on campus will not be tolerated, no ifs, ands, or buts about it: Wheeler’s acts of deception and fraud not only harmed Harvard University directly, but also undermined the public perception of integrity in higher education nationally and around the world. We require honesty as well as excellence from our students, which is why, when we discovered Mr. Wheeler’s fraudulent conduct, we brought it to the attention of the district attorney’s office. In terms of sentencing, we believe restitution is appropriate, so that the financial aid and other funds that Mr. Wheeler stole from Harvard can be put to use to support deserving Harvard students. We also feel strongly that Mr. Wheeler should be

[

DAV I D G OTH A R D

The

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] prohibited from profiting from his fraudulent schemes for as long a period as the court has the power to impose. Were he permitted to profit from the notoriety he already has gained as a result of his flagrant dishonesty, all of higher education would continue to be negatively impacted.

t’s not as though Harvard lacks for alums whom the institution should be ashamed to be associated with, or who have befouled “the public perception of integrity in higher education.” Wheeler’s final prosecution came just three years after a cabal of alumni known as the financial services sector destroyed the economy by playing computer games with the planet’s accumulated wealth. There was former Harvard President, Treasury Secretary, and deregulator extraordinaire Larry Summers; there was Summers’s predecessor at Treasury and mentor in the intricate art of fucking up global economies of weaker nations for no good reason, Robert Rubin (AB ’60 and member of the Corporation, Harvard’s governing body); there was the CEO of America’s most ruthless megabank (“the smart ones,” in financial expert circles), Lloyd Blankfein (AB ’75, JD ’78); and then there were approximately 100 percent of the other key figures who engineered this wholly preventable near-reversion to the state of nature—all Crimson men with at least one tour of duty. The university offers no protest as these apocalypse machinists drop John Harvard’s name in their pursuit of sinecures atop whatever remaining elite institutions and systems they have yet to destroy; instead, it covers them with laurels and showers them with money. Take the case of Andrei Shleifer, a prominent Harvard economics professor and former head of the disgraced Russia Project at the Harvard Institute for International Development. In the nineties, Shleifer won a contract from the U.S. government to administer “shock therapy” to the Russian economy, to theorize and implement its transformation from failed socialism to a market economy dominated by private capital and guided by 98 1 The Baffler [no.20]

legal norms. The key to establishing a favorable investment climate was teaching the Russians respect for the rule of law—because every academic economist knows that underlying market economies lies a rational consensus, an agreement to play by the rules duly articulated and enforced. And out of this orthodoxy came not only a failed mission and a reaction inside Russian power circles that set a baleful course, but a tale of personal and institutional corruption as awesome as you are likely to find anywhere in scandal-plagued higher education, with sordid details of fabricated expense accounts, no-show jobs, and leisured junkets that make Adam Wheeler seem like a piker. The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office investigations of Shleifer’s activities turned up large quantities of credible evidence of money laundering, embezzlement, tax evasion, and fraud, evidence that directly implicated his wife, a hedge fund manager. In 2004, a Boston judge in the federal district court ruled Harvard liable for breach of contract in the Shleifer debauch and found the celebrated economist liable for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Adam Wheeler’s tangle of lies cost Harvard $45,000 and change, a pittance next to the $26.5 million they paid in the Shleifer settlement, the largest in the university’s history. The Russia Project, launched with all the overweening arrogance due the gilded dogmas of business, showed up the shock troops of the market’s ideological vanguard as a pack of self-dealing crooks and swindlers who help themselves to giant heapings of public wealth when no one is looking. Yes, you already knew that. But how do you think Harvard responded as the evidence piled up and the investigation closed in on one of their own? Right again: Andrei Shleifer was promoted, given the coveted Whipple V.N. Jones chair in the Department of Economics after his pal and mentor Larry Summers intervened with the dean of the faculty. In other words, a closely conjoined pair of global market fraudsters successfully headed off accountability for their crimes by exploiting the elaborate masquerade that keeps Harvard’s worship of power and money

[ With the great meritocratic ruse at last exposed in the light of day, young strivers might well give it a go themselves. Even better, forget going to Harvard—why not simply throw “BA, Harvard” on the ol’ résumé right now and start making tons of money playing financial computer games tomorrow?

9 spinning. The undergraduate imposter is in jail. The economist, who has never presented the defense he said all along was forthcoming, is today what he has always been: a member in good—and indeed, ascendant—standing of the Harvard economics department, one of those superstar professors who travel abroad to give expert advice to backward peoples and then come back to campus to instruct drooling students in how the world works. Nobody at Harvard, none of the admissions officials, deans, or professors who were too lazy or incompetent to notice Adam Wheeler’s lies, appears to have been punished. At this most elite of elite institutions, it’s standard operating procedure to shift the blame downward, so that Harvard can continue collecting donations from financial wizards and garlanding them with the occasional honorary degree. The journalism world, a collection pool for the few Harvard College graduates who rebelliously reject law or consulting careers but hardly have to make it the hard way (the New York Times, notably, reserves a junior reporter job or two each year for graduating staffers of the Harvard Crimson), has been thorough in its anti-journalistic investigations of the perps behind the ’08 crash—low-income mortgage holders, minorities, recipients of unemployment benefits, Congressman Barney Frank, and unionized public school teachers, to name only a few major players in this shadowy network—while the ever upward-falling meritocracy of high finance has been deemed too petulant to fail. So there was a certain grim fitness to the high Victorian melodrama of Middlesex Assistant District Attorney John C. Verner seeking maximum punishment for the lying

schoolboy. It’s one thing to despoil retirement funds, lay waste to the mortgage sector, plunge countries to the brink of bankruptcy, and reduce the life expectancy of a whole people, but the American republic plainly will not stand for the trespass of writing “Harvard” on a job application—even if the young applicant in question needed that job in order to pay off some of the $45,000 and change in fines arising from the previous year’s prosecution. “Despite everything that has happened to Mr. Wheeler prior to being put on probation, he still continues to do what he has been doing: falsifying résumés, lying, and stealing,” Verner pontificated, the winds of profound moral certitude puffing his every word. “Mr. Wheeler is not going to stop doing what he’s doing”—saying he went to Harvard—“unless he’s sentenced. He has to be punished.” Superior Court Justice Diane M. Kottmyer obliged. Wheeler was not mentally ill, she allowed, but “simply has a character flaw that makes him dishonest.” Sending him to a mental facility would only feed “his sense of himself as a person who can do these things and get away with them without repercussions.” And so Adam Wheeler was sentenced to one year in prison, for saying, truthfully, that he went to Harvard.

heeler came to Harvard to study English and left as a bit player in a twisted Dreiserian tragedy, exaggerated to hammy effect by a humiliated university covering its ass. He bought into Harvard’s great enabling social myth at face value: the notion that twenty-first-century meritocratic advancement is available to all through the procurement of a college diploma. Like any The

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] rational economic actor, he sought to procure a diploma from the finest college, with maximum efficiency. Wheeler’s crime, in the institution’s eyes, was that he saw Harvard degrees for what they are—items for purchase that cloak the owner with a manufactured prestige that, in our pretend meritocracy, automatically raises one’s market value upon the deal’s closing. The only thing propping up that value is the admissions office’s carefully maintained scarcity of supply—a luxury good ostensibly awarded to society’s most able. So Wheeler once more called the bluff of the Harvard admissions crew: he gave them whatever song-and-dance they were looking for, and, shockingly, came close to completing the purchase. It’s quite apparent that Harvard administrators couldn’t merely expel Wheeler and demand he return the money when they finally noticed the obvious lies on his academic résumé. There was an urgent example to be set here, after all: enterprising young minds watching the news coverage might have reasoned that the people who run Harvard are utter morons who caught Wheeler only after a final fabrication so flamboyant that he must have wanted to get caught. With the great meritocratic ruse at last exposed in the light

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of day, young strivers might well give it a go themselves. Even better, forget going to Harvard—why not simply throw “BA, Harvard” on the ol’ résumé right now and start making tons of money playing financial computer games tomorrow? All Wheeler did, anyway, was spot major systemic inefficiencies and disingenuously exploit them for personal financial reward. And if Harvard is a place that would expel such a Capitalist of the Year, then it’s everyone else’s moral duty as Americans to pick up where he left off, and continue looting the place until it reaches a competitive market-clearing equilibrium: when looting a Harvard degree would no longer be worth the trouble—when Harvard, horror of horrors, becomes but one college of many!

o say that Harvard caught Wheeler in 2009 gives the school far too much credit. He’d almost certainly be selling crappy derivatives to some vain aristocrats in Eastern Europe right now if he’d just glided quietly through his senior year. Instead, he applied for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, for which he had to submit a résumé, a Harvard transcript, several letters of recommendation, and a project statement (on “cultural mobility”), all of which he must have known would be thoroughly vetted. Since these documents were nothing more than collections of absurd lies, anyone reviewing Wheeler’s scholarship applications for a minute or two would certainly catch something. Plagiarists famously continue raising the stakes of their fabulations in the need to be caught, and to win some perverse admiration for their crooked genius. This seems to have been the case with Wheeler, who at this juncture in his fake career had come as close to turning himself in as possible without saying the words, “I’m guilty, you can take me away now.” The moment of unraveling came when English Professor James Simpson noticed that Wheeler had plagiarized the work of fellow Professor Stephen Greenblatt. That relatively recondite discovery led Harvard investigators to all of the much more obvious falsifications, ones that shouldn’t

[ “I was, to put it poorly, suckled upon the teat of disdain,” Wheeler wrote, offering his new chums a spot of his “fluency” in Old English. “I was inspired therby [sic] to apply to Harvard, where the humanities, in short, are not, simpliciter, a source of opprobrium.”

9 have required the efforts of a professor reviewing Rhodes scholar applications with a finetooth comb to detect. As a junior, Wheeler had submitted a (plagiarized) research paper with the unassuming title “The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne: Space, Place, and Text from More to Marvell.” The paper was nominated for Harvard’s prestigious Thomas T. Hoopes prize—and it won. By the time he was a senior, Wheeler was peddling an even rosier view of his years at fairest Harvard. On his Rhodes application, he claimed to have a 4.0 average. He did not. His résumé said he had coauthored four books with a Harvard English professor. The professor he listed did not coauthor books with undergraduates, and college students, even at Harvard, typically do not have four advanced books in their oeuvre by senior year. Wheeler also wrote that he was fluent in Old Persian, Classical Armenian, and “Old English.” Down here on Planet Earth, the only reason you would select such a trifecta is to signal to your readers that you are fucking with them, and are not really fluent in any foreign languages. At Harvard, they loved it. An investigation into Wheeler’s initial application to Harvard proved, even more gobsmackingly, that the High Lords of America’s most prestigious university couldn’t smell bullshit if they were walking in a pasture half an hour past feeding time and felt a squish under their boots. Wheeler billed himself as a graduate of the Phillips Andover Academy who had scored a perfect 1,600 on his SATs. In reality, he had been an above-average student at Caesar Rodney High School in rural Delaware, where his parents, Richard (a former shop teacher) and his wife, Lee, now own

an interior design firm. He scored a 1,160 and a 1,220 in his two stabs at the SATs. Wheeler applied to Harvard as a transfer student, but—as you should be able to guess by now—he did not attend the school from which he told Harvard he was transferring. He alleged he was an MIT student who’d completed his first undergraduate year with straight A’s— MIT doesn’t grade first-years on the alphanumeric scale—and he submitted four fabricated letters of recommendations from actual professors. The real school Wheeler was transferring from was Bowdoin—a fine school, but one from which Wheeler had already been suspended for a semester during his sophomore year following accusations of, yes, plagiarism. The Harvard alumnus who interviewed the pretend MIT student during the transfer process should have been a wee bit concerned when he went to interview Wheeler on Bowdoin’s campus. Wheeler, however, fed him some lie about enrolling in a course that was available only on Bowdoin’s campus that semester. Acting out the role of MIT transfer student delighted Wheeler well past his 2007 admission to Harvard. After the scandal broke, the Crimson published excerpts from emails he’d sent to fellow incoming transfer students. They’re written in the cartoonish voice you’d expect of, say, a young con man clutching a pocket thesaurus as he impersonates a pretentious, overachieving MITto-Harvard student. “My own, brief, assessment of my character,” he wrote, “is that I am sententious, crypto-tendentious, slightly pedantic with a streak of contrarianism, a fascination with any pedagogical approach to Shakespeare, and a decent sense of humor.” Sports, of course, the striver dismissed as “a The

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] They will blame you for taking out loans that you couldn’t afford, even though they were the ones who approved them and pushed them on you.

9 neighborhood faux-pas of epic proportions.” And let’s not even talk about his days and nights of isolation wandering through the deserts of MIT. “I was, to put it poorly, suckled upon the teat of disdain,” Wheeler wrote, offering his new chums a spot of his “fluency” in Old English. “I was inspired therby [sic] to apply to Harvard, where the humanities, in short, are not, simpliciter, a source of opprobrium.” By the time Harvard set a date for Wheeler’s disciplinary hearing in the fall of 2009, Wheeler had left campus, returned to Delaware, and asked the school to let him know whenever its disciplinarians reached the expulsion verdict that he knew was coming. He returned to Massachusetts in the spring of 2010 to spend some time in the clink following his indictment on twenty counts of larceny, identity fraud, falsifying an endorsement or approval, and the dazzlingly dystopian charge of “pretending to hold a degree”—all interchangeable criminal-ish terms emitted like a thick fog to conceal the one true bedrock offense, telling Harvard people a bunch of obvious lies that they pretended to believe because they were too lazy or vain to fact-check them for half a second, which made Harvard look incompetent. Later that year, when the initial judge in the case convicted Wheeler and handed down his ten-year probation sentence, the terms of the punishment included a bonus kick on the way out: Wheeler was not able to profit from his crimes for these ten years, far past the likely expiration of his fifteen minutes of notoriety. Tough state-mandated love for a cocky youngster who’d gone too far? Spin it that way if you must. More important, though, was the noprofit rider’s efficiency in sparing the Harvard brand from the more explosive humiliations, presented in all their naked detail, that could 102 1 The Baffler [no.20]

surface in the would-be tell-all, My Story: How I Played Those Harvard Suckers Good And You Can Too, by Adam Wheeler. Further examples of Wheeler’s fraud, fakery, and amateurish self-parody abound, but the simplest way to put the episode in perspective is to imagine that someone was running across Harvard Yard in an unmissable neon suit screaming “I’M A FRAUD WHO HAS LIED ABOUT EVERYTHING,” around the clock, for two years, until one professor finally suspected that something was most decidedly off about this young man whose Rhodes scholarship application he’d been reviewing and intending to accept.

o be fair, every incoming Ivy League class since the dawn of time has had its share of opportunistic tools who arrive at campus embracing the well-known snob stereotypes that recruiters had sworn were the stuff of mythology. When I arrived for my freshman year at Penn—yes, reader, I, too, once was an ambitious young know-it-all from a mid-Atlantic suburb who’d heeded the siren song of a lesser Ivy to launch me into the stratosphere of the great American meritocracy—there was a first-year student in the Wharton School of Business who lived down my hall. And he’d Scotch-taped above his computer monitor a dollar bill, on which was written “FOCUS.” He would improve. But it’s hard to ignore the chilling way in which Wheeler’s shtick—all of it—reflects on Harvard’s administration, admissions office, faculty, students, and others who’d interacted with him for years, sucking up one fakery after another. Did they really believe such a person could exist? Yes, they did; not only did they, but they showered this such person with awards and honors and cash, rewarding the young man for making them feel great about

[ themselves for attracting and forging such a person. They adored him. Grandiosity, even of the bizarre strain that Wheeler had taught himself to practice, sustains itself, multiplies, and warps minds only when no one bothers to roll down a window. Many of the media analyses that followed Wheeler’s unraveling took the same path to nowhere, and missed the point all over again: From what diagnosable mental affliction must this young man suffer? Psychopathy? Sociopathy? (Is that different from psychopathy?) Depression? Manic depression? Schizophrenic hyper lunatic madness disorder thing? In the usual journalistic procedure, self-appointed experts were contacted, and duly quoted, to offer commonsense observations branded with the seal of science. Narcissistic Personality Disorder was the closest they came to a consensus. This sounded about right to many online commenters. Narcissist, yes. That is the one. But like many forms of overeager armchair

diagnosis, the pathologized version of the Wheeler saga reveals at least as much about the diagnosticians as it does about the patient. While the complexity, thoroughness, and attention to detail evident in Wheeler’s schemes put him in a rare class that may well merit psychiatric forensics, the cultural game that essentially licenses everyone and their mother to pin him with the proper chilling medical acronym comes close to violating the no-profit clause of Wheeler’s probation agreement. It conveniently allows us to ignore the broader, uncomfortable class issues that might arise through the application of critical thought. If we can say that that guy over there did what he did because of Severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then, phew—he’s just out of his mind, unlike you and me. Only afterward, in an article such as the Christian Science Monitor’s “Harvard Hoax: Adam Wheeler Case Points to Rise of Student Fraud,” do we begin to broach the issue of the prevailing trends that could induce

P. S . M U E L L ER

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] normal folk—people like you and me!—to masquerade as overachieving Ivy Leaguers. The Monitor story quotes Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers and this piece’s dial-an-expert of choice, finally saying the obvious goddamn thing: “As the economic value of higher education has taken center stage in people’s minds, we are seeing more often people trying to get ahead by whatever means necessary.” Amid the smoldering ruin of the post-meltdown American scene, the popular mind now sees one last means of ascending the ladder of social mobility: obtaining a four-year college degree. As more and more rush to climb it, scarcity sets in, and tuition spirals. You, the graduate, soon recognize that there aren’t many jobs out there paying enough to allow you to service your six-figure debt load. College may be worth it now only if you can get accepted into what we call top-tier schools. But they’ve got no space for you—the children born into upper-middle-class families have taken those spots, and they’ve kicked down the ladder behind them. They will hoover up your money, present and future, and, eventually, they will lose it all playing financial computer games. The crimes of larceny, fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, and bad taste will not apply to them. They will blame you for taking out loans that you couldn’t afford, even though they were the ones who approved them and pushed them on you. So, what else is there to do if you’re a student from a rural Delaware public high school hoping to realize your God-given right to American social mobility as the byproduct of hard work? Student fraud, baby. It’s the last hurrah. You went to Andover, you aced your SATs, you’re transferring from MIT, you speak Old Persian and Old English and you’ve coauthored four books. You’ll go to jail if they catch you, so don’t get caught. For all the rival diagnoses of Wheeler’s psychiatric maladies now caroming around the courts and the media, maybe his real problem was bad timing. Maybe he saw what he needed, far in the distance, and jumped 104 1 The Baffler [no.20]

too soon. Maybe in another generation or two, Harvard admissions officials will have caught up with the vanguard trends and grace a future Adam Wheeler with a full scholarship for the ingenious fabrications he will lay at their feet, instead of dispatching him to the correctional facility. And by then, future Adam Wheelers will be bedding down in dorms named after Larry Summers, that greatest hustler among the great Harvard meritocrats, who rose to the top of the American elite from a hardscrabble childhood in nowheresville, with nowhere to go, no hope for a better life, only two prominent economists as parents and two of the greatest economists of the twentieth century as uncles. But he dared to dream against all odds. You, meanwhile, will have to figure something else out.t

hellbox • A receptacle in printing establishments to hold broken or discarded type. Metaphorically a container for disgusting, shameful, and inexpugnable recollections.

V I C TO R K ER LOW

Ignoriah • A minor prophet in the time

of Jeremiah. His prophecies always turned out to be the opposite of what he predicted or warned against, yet undeterred he continued to pronounce his Ignoriads. Hence Ignoriah is the namesake of all bumbling vaticinators. —Daniel Aaron

Projecting Love 3 Forrest Gander For Eiko & Komo dragging her fingernails across the air as she comes stage left, he steps from darkness into his flesh under the minatory glare of X the flexed tendons of his fingers, her eyes and lips flare when he stumbles she is aware without looking almost they embrace the vessels and nerves of their cheeks under thin strata of fascia when her mouth breaks black open when stage right he exits cupping the wound when she cries out (in Japanese) â&#x20AC;&#x153;I see the world upside downâ&#x20AC;?

The

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[ S t u di e s i n To ta l Depr av it y]

Billionaire Ball

Epitaph for the student-athlete 3 Matt Hinton

ustin, Texas, where I live, brands itself as “The Live Music Capital of the World.” And at times, you can look on the heavy concentration of local musicians and the buzz of the lines streaming out of downtown clubs and believe that the city’s economy is based on a disheveled army of twangy, Waylon-and-Willie-worshipping troubadours. Each spring, after all, the native gestalt is amplified and put on display for the rest of the world during the city’s annual celebration of the hipster zeitgeist, South by Southwest. Meanwhile, the start-up companies hiding in discreet campuses around the city tell a different story of what makes Austin hum, and, if you ask the boosters at the chamber of commerce, they will point you to the city’s quiet concentration of high-tech heavies—your Dells, Apples, IBMs, Samsungs, and so forth. But the most readily visible, upwardly mobile, relentlessly promoted, frequently visited, and universally beloved business in Austin doesn’t technically qualify as a business. That would be the tax-exempt University of Texas Athletic Department, an unstoppable, ever-expanding machine that obliterates all race- and class-based lines in a ritual quest for money and glory. As anyone who spent any time on or near campus during the most recent overhaul of the 100,119-seat Darrell K. Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium can attest, this is one local business that has weathered the recession quite nicely. When DeLoss Dodds took over as Longhorn athletic director in 1981, annual revenue hovered around $4.5 million. Dodds’s department took in more than $150 million in 2010–11 (nearly $20 million more than its nearest competitor, Ohio State), with profits in excess of $16.6 million after record-breaking expenditures. Mack Brown, the head football coach, makes $5.1 million a year before incentives; 106 1 The Baffler [no.20]

men’s basketball coach Rick Barnes brings in $2.4 million. (Brown and Barnes are the highest-paid public employees in the state by a wide margin despite their official status as nonprofit executives.) The department has its own bureaucracy, its own sponsors, and its own licensing and fundraising arms. Last year, it launched its own (theoretically) national television network devoted exclusively to Texas sports. For broadcasting rights, ESPN agreed to shell out $300 million over twenty years. For all intents and purposes, University of Texas Athletics is a self-sustaining corporate entity using the university as a tax shelter. And it’s not alone: amid cutbacks, furloughs, layoffs, and tuition hikes at virtually every public university in America, more than a dozen athletic departments reported at least $90 million in revenue apiece in 2010–11 as a result of fat television contracts and fat-cat donors, an unthinkable total for any college sports program as recently as a decade ago. Football, and to a lesser extent men’s basketball, is an automatic moneymaker almost everywhere— leaving the storied traditions that form the basis of long-term fandom a marketing fig leaf at best, and a vanishing dead letter at worst. And nowhere is the tension at the divided heart of collegiate sports more evident than in the “scholar-athlete,” the disenfranchised worker at the center. Here’s a century-old enabling fiction that’s become an aggrieved, orphaned ideal-type in today’s money-steeped, scandalplagued higher education. Build It and They Will Yum As state legislatures have slashed humanities budgets and research grants, big-time college sports has pointed the way from the moldering ivory tower to the lush green fields of the market—or, to borrow an all-too-appropriate phrasing courtesy of University of Louisville

[

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

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] basketball, from Freedom Hall to the KFC Yum! Center. Students flock in record numbers to business schools, while math, science, and engineering departments race to transform themselves into entrepreneurial profit centers. All of these newly baptized market apostles on campus are moving into territory their athletic departments began staking out years ago. As larger and larger (but still taxexempt) sums pour into and out of athletic departments, the question is not whether the richest sports programs will grow too large, independent, and professional to remain under the university umbrella; the question is, when they do grow too large, will college sports survive in any recognizable form? Not that anyone has ever mistaken college sports for a pure embodiment of the broader mission of higher education. To trace the yoking of athletics to higher learning, you have to go all the way back to the handful of university presidents and coaches who met at President Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in October 1905 to rescue the popular and controversial game of football from progressives who criticized its brutality and its reliance on the “tramp athlete”—the well-paid ringer who took the field under an assortment of aliases for any school that would have him. Roosevelt was a fan of the game, as was his successor, Woodrow Wilson, who, as president of Princeton, pronounced team sports a natural, healthy component of the university’s mission to enrich mind, body, and spirit. It would not have occurred to either Roosevelt or Wilson that a student from a credible institution could be lured from campus by professional sports. Apart from baseball, such operations in the early twentieth century were upstart, ramshackle endeavors akin to regional professional wrestling, a kind of traveling sideshow unsuited to anyone who had ever had the good fortune to set foot in a college classroom. By today’s standards, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States— launched by Progressive-era reformers to regulate college sports in 1906—was designed for glorified intramurals. Yet from that seed sprouted, four years later, the National Colle108 1 The Baffler [no.20]

giate Athletic Association (NCAA), an oversight group manned largely by officials from member schools to enforce standardized rules and academic eligibility requirements and thereby to shore up athletics as a core component of higher education. Following the example of the recently revived Olympic games, the architects of the NCAA installed the turn-ofthe-century concept of “amateurism” at the conceptual center of the enterprise. Virtually no feature of the founding era’s approach to college sports makes sense today. There is no equivalent of the “athletic department” in post-secondary education abroad; to foreigners accustomed to club teams training athletes from early ages, the concept of tying athletics to academics is an American obsession—a perversion, really, and a bizarre one at that. Nowhere else in the world is an aspiring footballer required to maintain a certain grade-point average in criminal justice to remain with his team, just as no English major is expected to learn how to hit a turnaround jumper between close textual studies of James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald. For a while, at least, a few schools with strong football programs made a token effort to mind the gap. Notre Dame, a national gridiron power once denied entry to the Big Ten on the grounds that coach Knute Rockne knowingly fielded ineligible players, refused to participate in the tawdry spectacle of postseason bowl games for forty-five years because the school’s administrators feared the institution would acquire the unsavory reputation of a football factory. Not to be outdone, the University of Chicago, a founding member of the conference that would become the Big Ten, dropped its football program in 1939, just after halfback Jay Berwanger won the first Heisman Trophy. (University president Robert M. Hutchins once described the sport as “an infernal nuisance” that distracted the university from becoming “the kind of institution it aspired to be.”) In 1954, during an era when Cornell, Harvard, and Yale routinely finished in the year-end football polls and Princeton halfback Dick Kazmaier won the Heisman by the widest margin in history, the eight

[ Nowhere else in the world is an aspiring footballer required to maintain a certain gradepoint average in criminal justice to remain with his team, just as no English major is expected to learn how to hit a turnaround jumper between close textual studies of James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

9 university presidents of what would become the Ivy League signed an “Ivy Group Agreement,” reaffirming their commitment to deny athletic scholarships and keep athletics firmly under the foot of the universities’ “academic authorities.” Those schools still play football, but have long since withdrawn from the arms race required to compete nationally. The Dollar Bowl The gradual secession of the Ivies meant that few of the schools left in the college football fray could offer prospective recruits a pedigree of illustrious alumni or induction into the social and political elite upon graduation. But they could still offer enterprising scholarathletes the enduring communal bond that comes with singing, cheering, and having their hearts broken alongside thousands of likeminded, frequently drunken countrymen. With such obviously exploitable emotional ties sitting right there in the open, it’s a wonder college sports remained as undervalued as they did for as long as they did, especially by television. That’s due in some part to the reluctance of the NCAA to put games on TV in the first place. For years, the organization offered networks only a single “Game of the Week” in various regions because it viewed the tube not as a potential tool for spreading the game’s popularity, but as a competitor

threatening to undermine ticket sales. That assumption began to change in the late seventies, when dissatisfied schools banded together independently of the NCAA to negotiate with networks under the banner of the College Football Association, and changed for good in 1984, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA-controlled television plan violated the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts. With the Court’s decision, the NCAA—always an anemic operation with few formal mechanisms of enforcement—was cut out of the action. Individual conferences could now negotiate and profit from their own media contracts, including the cartel-like postseason arrangement we know as the Bowl Championship Series in the top tier of Division I football. Meanwhile, the NCAA was left with the less lucrative privilege of organizing postseason tournaments in all other sports, only one of which—Division I men’s basketball—contributes significantly to the organization’s bottom line. The onslaught of money following the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision has laid such utter waste to the feeble facade of athletics as an educational enterprise that even the most pieeyed apologist for the institutional-athletic complex has a hard time conjuring it with a straight face. Renegotiated television contracts for rights to broadcast regular season football and basketball games have poured hundreds of millions into conference coffers, doubling and in some cases tripling the cut for schools at the top of the food chain. The newly expanded Pac-12 conference scored a deal with ESPN and FOX last year that’s projected to net five times the annual payout under its current agreement, which expires this year, completely independent of future revenues from the proposed Pac-12 Network. Last year, too, the NCAA distributed a record $180.5 million in TV money to Division I conferences from its major cash cow, the men’s basketball tournament; and the Bowl Championship Series, in which the NCAA has no stake, paid out $174 million, a number that’s risen every year of the series’ fourteen-year existence. The checks have grown large enough, fast The

Baffler [no.20] ! 109

] enough to keep every Division I conference in a competitive scramble over the money. When the Atlantic Coast Conference’s newly renegotiated, $3.6 billion television deal with ESPN this spring failed to match the record sums promised to the other major leagues, the chairman of the Florida State University Board of Trustees responded by publicly threatening to move the Seminoles to the greener pastures of the Big 12. And the Big 12 itself was nearly torn asunder in 2010 before then-commissioner Dan Beebe promised a lucrative enough TV deal to keep his heaviest hitters, Texas and Oklahoma, from fleeing to the Pac-12. (He delivered, with a reported thirteen-year, $1.17 billion agreement with FOX for second-tier rights—that is, second choice of games after the first-tier rights holder, in this case ESPN, has taken its pick. But even the inducements of that deal weren’t enough to keep less essential members Missouri and Texas A&M from bolting to the Southeastern Conference; Beebe was subsequently forced to resign.) When the music stops in the next year or two, at least one league, the fifty-yearold Western Athletic Conference, is likely to be out of business. But the rest will be substantially richer. The Swoosh Ascendant To conjure the largesse now required to compete at the Division I level, the schools need wealthy boosters. These figures have always been essential to large-scale sports operations, but their influence has, you might say, gone on steroids. The biggest names in the new class of college sports donors, Nike founder Phil Knight and business magnate T. Boone Pickens, have poured so many tens of millions of tax-deductible dollars into the coffers of their alma maters, Oregon and Oklahoma State, that they function as de facto owners of the athletic departments. At Oregon and Oklahoma games, the two billionaires hover over their respective sidelines, mix in their locker rooms, and preside over newly constructed luxury boxes at the stadiums they helped to renovate. (Oklahoma State’s stadium in Stillwater is named 110 1 The Baffler [no.20]

for Pickens, as are several other buildings on campus. Oregon’s campus in Eugene boasts the Knight Library, Knight Law Center, and the recently completed Matthew Knight Arena, named for Phil Knight’s late son.) Both megaboosters hold unofficial veto power over major hires and decisions. In Knight’s case, there is speculation that he helped push out former head football coach Mike Bellotti in 2009 in favor of assistant Chip Kelly, whose instant success as offensive coordinator had sent him shooting to the top of other schools’ wish lists. Rumors also persist that Knight’s box in Autzen Stadium is equipped with a headset that allows him to listen in on the Ducks’ coaches during games, a claim he’s declined to confirm or deny. Now and then the unseemly influence of the donors shows openly. T. Boone Pickens, who made his fortune as a wildcatter in Texas oil fields and later enhanced it as a corporate raider and hedge-fund manager, convinced the Oklahoma State athletic department in 2007 to purchase life insurance policies for two dozen of its largest donors, all over the age of sixty-five, and to list the department as the sole beneficiary. Two years later, with every donor enlisted in the “Gift of a Lifetime” program still alive and OSU saddled with $33 million in premiums, the university dropped the program and filed suit against the insurer to recover costs. Not surprisingly, meanwhile, the Oregon program has run afoul of Phil Knight’s wellknown devotion to manufacturing sneakers and sports apparel with the cheapest sweated labor that the global economy has on offer. Thanks largely to student protests in April 2000 and the adverse publicity they generated, a watchdog group called the Worker Rights Consortium was able to induce Oregon’s then-president, Dave Frohnmayer, to enter into a one-year pledge to honor basic workers-rights guarantees for attire bearing the school’s logos and university licenses. At that point, Knight embarked on a none-toosubtle campaign of capital flight, pulling out a $30 million stake in the planned renovation of the university’s Autzen Stadium and hint-

[ It’s become steadily harder to use “amateurism” and “college athletics” in the same sentence without calling forth a chorus of bitter guffaws.

9 ing that he might as well retire as a University of Oregon donor. (Knight, together with most other shoe and apparel moguls, endorsed a far more lenient set of manufacturing and labor standards promulgated by the Fair Labor Association, an industry group.) Lo and behold, it took President Frohnmayer only a few months to divine an obscure legal rationale for annulling the school’s agreement with the Worker Rights Consortium. After due consultation with the school’s in-house counsel, he announced that the university was barred by state law from remitting membership dues to non-incorporated groups like the consortium, which didn’t possess federal tax-exempt status. (Why the school couldn’t simply withhold membership dues from the consortium to comply with the state law was a mystery he left unexplained.) And as a measure seemingly designed to steady Phil Knight’s check-writing hand, the university went on to enact a full ban on business partnerships between the university and any outfit not deemed “politically neutral”—and sure enough, Knight reinstated his $30 million donation to the stadium plan, kicking in a $20 million bonus for good measure. By the end of the ensuing decade, the football team’s endless, ever-evolving ensemble of flashy Nike uniforms had made the Ducks walking billboards for the company every time they took the field. Not coincidentally, both Oregon and Oklahoma State are in the midst of the most successful on-field runs in their respective histories; both football programs have risen from decades of mediocrity to assert themselves as national powers in less than ten years. Though Oregon’s expenditures ballooned by 71 percent between 2006 and 2011, the athletic department still came out in the black after watching annual revenues soar 107 percent in a single year, from $59 million in 2009–10 to

$122.4 million on the heels of its 2010 run to the BCS Championship Game. Not a bad return on investment. There’s every reason to believe the Knight and Pickens model of mogul sponsorship represents the future. But that hasn’t stopped lesser schools and deficit-ridden athletic departments from spending as much as they can get away with to remain competitive. And money-mad administrators have proven none too fussy in recouping the shortfall from already heavily indebted undergrads. Student fees earmarked for athletics have increased by 31 percent since 2005. To take one example of how this breaks down, more than 40 percent of Rutgers’s athletic department budget in 2009–10—the same year the recessionwracked university froze professors’ salaries, shrunk academic programs, and jacked up tuition, housing, and other fees—came from a combination of student fees and the university’s general fund. The following year, the subsidy rose to 47 percent. Meanwhile, the athletic department nuked six “non-revenue” sports programs altogether. The Bucks, the Buckeyes, and the Incredible Shrinking Scholar-Athlete And so it’s become steadily harder to use “amateurism” and “college athletics” in the same sentence without calling forth a chorus of bitter guffaws. This poor (or in a few notable cases, not-so-poor) “student-athlete” is vastly more coveted by coaches, boosters, agents, marketers, licensers, and assorted hangers-on than anyone in 1905 could have dreamed—and more obliged to transform himself into a rippling, precisely honed freak. Still, he remains bound to an antiquated vision of character-building recreation unsullied by profit, as college athletics is the only The

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] arena of American life that systematically denies adult citizens the opportunity to exploit their full market value. Even if you concede that athletic scholarships are a form of payment, the amateur model in practice is nearly impossible to defend amid a larger economic culture in unwavering thrall to the free market. After Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor and a handful of teammates were hit with multi-game suspensions in December 2010 for allegedly selling jerseys, championship rings, and other memorabilia in exchange for cash and free tattoos, familiar condemnations of the players’ selfishness sparked an equally formidable backlash against NCAA rules restricting their pursuit of happiness with their own property. After all, while the scandal expanded to claim head coach Jim Tressel’s job and the remainder of Pryor’s college career, Ohio State continued to sell replica versions of the suspended players’ jerseys on its official website and elsewhere with no repercussions. Pryor, now a backup with the Oakland Raiders, told Sports Illustrated earlier this year that he had receipts proving his ill-gotten gains in college had all gone to helping his mother in Pennsylvania pay household bills. That was a somewhat dubious claim from a scholar-athlete who’d repeatedly been pulled over in expensive SUVs on loan from local dealerships—but it nevertheless sharply and smartly underlined just how far removed players from disadvantaged backgrounds feel from the money they see going into palatial facilities and their coaches’ salaries. When virtually every other line in athletic budgets is growing at a record pace, and virtually every available inch of athletic department property is emblazoned with a corporate logo, the hypocrisy of building a firewall around the athletes themselves is particularly pungent. Echoing many a sports columnist, the mother of one of the suspended Ohio State players, wide receiver DeVier Posey, blasted the NCAA in the Columbus Dispatch for enforcing rules that “ensure that the young men that have poured their hearts and souls and energy and intellect into their craft are continually kept at a disadvantage when 112 1 The Baffler [no.20]

everybody else around them is running to the bank.” One challenge to the status quo is coming via an ongoing federal lawsuit, led by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, that seeks to overturn the NCAA’s ban on allowing athletes to profit from their status as college athletes after their eligibility has expired. O’Bannon launched the suit after he came across a pixelated version of himself—readily identifiable by jersey number and appearance, if not by name—in an EA Sports video game that recreated UCLA’s 1995 national championship squad as a “classic” option. Meanwhile, the internal dissensions over revenue sharing within the game point up the oldest story in college sports: an existential debate over how much longer ostensibly big-time programs like Rutgers can continue struggling to pull their own weight opposite the likes of Texas and Ohio State before one side or the other decides to draw a new, more accurate line demarcating the Haves and Have Nots. The same process has played out twice in the last half-century, first in the reclassification of schools into Divisions I, II, and III in 1973, and later in the creation of the BCS in 1998. Both moves were efforts to bring the formal structure of college sports into line with financial and competitive realities, each time resulting in fewer schools at the top. The next time such a shakeout occurs, the heavyweight class likely will be culled to the few dozen schools that can realistically afford to be there, thereby creating a landscape in which largely self-supporting programs are organized similarly to a pro sports league. Whether such an alignment could or would exist under the auspices of the NCAA is an open question; as likely as not, it will require a mass secession. Either way, given the recent legal and cultural momentum toward cutting “student-athletes” in on the profits, there is a very good chance that the Haves in this scenario will find a way to pay players something resembling market value—or otherwise ease the barriers to outside money from agents, licensing, media appearances, and selling autographs and memorabilia. At that point, the

[ last vestiges of “amateurism” in big-time college sports will be erased forever. That’s the theory, anyway. The vision of a more professionalized future for Division 1 college sports does have the virtues of honesty, practicality, and at least a bit more transparency than the longstanding contradiction between ballooning revenues and disenfranchised student-athletes. Yet, in a very fundamental way, that contradiction is central to the success that’s made college sports possible, and may be central to its future success—if not its survival. The divide between money and virtue is part of its DNA, deeply informing its past. And if college sports has anything unique to sell that their competitors in the sporting market do not, it’s a connection to the past. Merchandising the Tribe Football was born on campus, and set down deep roots there decades before television facilitated the emergence of the National Football League as a global corporate juggernaut. Though the concept of amateurism has prob-

ably always been more romance than reality, at one point in the not-too-distant past, fans could still plausibly pretend that they were rooting on essentially normal people—boys who grew up in the next town over and sat in the next row in class, who seemed to emerge from the student body in the name of school pride and physical fitness and maybe a date with the homecoming queen. Eventually, the accumulated moments of agony and ecstasy made football Saturdays the beating heart of many schools, venerable coaches their most visible ambassadors, star players their most notable alumni, and towering Depression-era stadiums their most recognizable landmarks. Each new batch of recruits and their classmates in the stands renewed the ritual the way a body renews its cells. College sports forge a social contract, which gives life to distinct, thriving cultures that are, frankly, tribal. This is the reason college sports fans (and so many ham-fisted marketers who take aim at college sports fans) are so obsessed with tradition as the lifeblood of the enterprise: ritual is the way college sports forge the sense

P. S . M U E L L ER

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The City Mouse and the Country Mouse 3 Susan Stewart A rough and ready cousin lived on barley and water, and barley water, too, and slept on a board, while the women of the city dressed themselves as flowers. From every ear a bauble spun, from every fez a tassel. Not me—I was barefoot until I was ten and the boys wore soft white dresses like nightgowns. If you were in town for just a week in summer, you’d find yourself yearning for big-ticket items. What you cannot pronounce you’d pay too much for; all the grit would be glitter, and/or vice versa. The dogs and cats are sprawling on the Turkey carpets; a racket rattles the door. The ortolan is steaming up the view beneath the napkin. The portions are small, and there won’t be any more. I do not like that music at my dinner! I do not like the growl of politesse! Better beans and bacon, better some peace, than cakes and ale and guns and fear and butter.

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[ of community and continuity that draws people in, and separates them from the crass, bottom-line vulgarity of the professionals. It’s telling that of the “Big Four” team sports that dominate the athletic landscape in the United States, college baseball and hockey have never come close to capturing the devotion (or dollars) associated with college basketball and football. The reason for this is quite obvious: baseball and hockey didn’t grow up on campus. In those sports, professional leagues took hold first and built their own infrastructure for nurturing young talent. Top hockey and baseball prospects are still more likely to opt for a paycheck in a developmental league than for a spot on college teams, which largely remain an afterthought in the broader sporting landscape. “March Madness” notwithstanding, college basketball has begun to suffer much the same fate due to the mass exodus of talent to the NBA over the last decade and a half, despite a new NBA rule requiring top high school prospects to take at least a oneyear detour through school. There’s little risk of a similar trend in college football, where courts have upheld an NFL rule requiring players to wait at least three years between high school graduation and joining the league. Very few high school football players are physically capable of such a leap, anyway. But college fans do have an aversion to professionalization and all that it entails: recognizable personalities that are sanded away by practiced banality, fight songs that are drowned out by commercials on the Jumbotron, ancient idiosyncrasies that quietly disappear, fans (especially students) who get priced out. Increasingly valuable players are increasingly aloof from fellow students, and may at some point formally sever the distinction by being allowed to profit beyond their scholarships. The game begins to feel watered-down, homogenized, and predictable—that is, it starts to sound a lot like the NFL, only without the NFL’s level of skill on the field. What former tribe member turned anonymous customer is going to keep paying for yet another minor league? The seeming inevitability of this transition

is the pivot point at which the alienation of the tribal sports fan intersects with the complaints of the universities and humanities divisions that have historically regarded college sports as a nuisance. Both constituencies fear the influence of big money, and the institutionalized grasping for more and more of it is slowly eating away at the edges of what makes their passions worth being passionate about. Both share a sense that the game has been irrevocably altered by market interests, that the Starbucks in the library and the fast-food logo on the football stadium are permanent features, that there is little hope of turning back. And on the fringes of both groups, there is legitimate concern about long-term survival. The employable liberal arts grad is nearly as endangered a species as the “scholar-athlete.” And the adaptations required by a more specialized, more cutthroat environment do not always look like progress.t

kakistocracy • “Government by

the worst,” a handy angry-sounding word that defines the state of affairs in many countries. The world has long suffered from anfractuous (full of twists and turns) kakistocracies, and no less so today. Even United States officials, in the opinion of some cynical and disenchanted people, appear to be little more than a horridge (nest of bad characters).

kutubuth • Presumably of Arabic ori-

gin, kutubuth has been defined as “a form of melancholia which was said to affect people chiefly in the month of February. It was characterized by great restlessness, the patients wandering to and fro continuously, quite unconscious wither they were going.” An acute manifestation of this affliction—sometimes reaching epidemic proportions—may be observed annually in educational institutions. —Daniel Aaron

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s Into

the Infinite

The Threshold of Joy 3 Kim Phillips-Fein

argaret Fuller was thirty-three and suffering from migraines when she wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” a manifesto on behalf of sexual equality, and saw it published in The Dial, the journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson whose editorship she had recently resigned. The article, expanded into a book and published in 1845 under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century, made its stirring claim to equal rights in the rhetoric of transcendentalism, according to which the self was limitless and unbounded, with each human being containing the possibility of divine perfection. Fuller, far from limiting her vision to political or legal equality, saw sexual inequality in terms of its corrosive power to destroy not only love, marriage, and family relationships, but also the inner or existential lives of women. Sexual hierarchy robbed women of “the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means, to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge.” In the book-length version, she wrote of little girls encouraged to play with feminine toys; of society’s unfair denigration of single women (or “old maids”), whom she argued could play an important social role; and of the necessity of widening the range of occupations open to women. Most of all, she wrote of how the psychological and economic dependence of women trapped them as permanent children, a condition that stunted their spirits and therefore held back the whole development of humanity. For male and female souls were entwined; masculine and feminine “energies” spilled into each other. Men and women were thought to occupy two separate spheres, two entirely different ways of being in the world, “but, in fact,” Fuller wrote, “they are perpetually passing into one 116 1 The Baffler

another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” After writing “The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller broke out of her New England world, leaving behind the Cambridge of her childhood. She moved to New York to write for the New York Tribune. She then departed for Europe, where she lived in Rome and reported on the Italian Revolution of 1848–49. Her thought widened and expanded beyond the transcendentalists’ focus on the self, and turned toward revolutionary socialism. Fuller’s transformations were not only political and intellectual: while living in Italy, she became pregnant and bore a child. It is not clear that she ever married her son’s father, but if she did, it was only after the conception of the baby. Margaret Fuller then died dramatically and unexpectedly, in 1850, in a shipwreck only 220 yards off the shore of Fire Island. Most of the wreck’s victims who tried to swim to land survived. But Fuller—and her child and his father, whom she was bringing back to America—stayed aboard the sinking ship for hours, waiting for help that never arrived. Her death fascinated and horrified her contemporaries, many of whom could not help but interpret it as an appropriate, if terrible, end to a life that had strayed so far from social conventions. She was depicted in sketch-art aboard the storm-tossed ship, her clasped hands at her bosom and her eyes cast toward heaven. Ralph Waldo Emerson and a few of Fuller’s other famous associates collected some of her writing, along with their own memorial essays, and published a volume of her Memoirs, which enjoyed a brief period of surprising commercial success. But shortly after, the public’s interest in Fuller— as in the transcendentalist movement—disappeared. In the late twenties, literary critic V. L. Parrington described her work as “the completest embodiment of the inchoate

Fuller, far from limiting her vision to political or legal equality, saw sexual inequality in terms of its corrosive power to destroy not only love, marriage, and family relationships, but also the inner or existential lives of women.

DAV I D J O H N S O N

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s Fuller received an education that became the most important fact of her life. But it was bound up with a strong sense of her limitations and failures—her inability to fit in seamlessly with the classical tradition that her father had pressed into her.

9 rebellions and grandiose aspirations of the age of transcendental ferment.” John Matteson’s The Lives of Margaret Fuller (Norton, $32.95) offers to reintroduce her to a popular audience, though the biographer himself seems not quite sure what to make of his subject. Like others who’ve written about her recently, Matteson is drawn to Fuller mostly because her life was so vividly exceptional for her time, more than for the relevance of her ideas. He claims the transcendentalist motif of self-development and discovery as a structuring principle of his biography, saying that he wants to chart Fuller’s life as a “succession of lives,” that her “essence was life, not writing,” and that her “greatest creation was her life.” Despite its anti-intellectual bent, which has the effect of domesticating her story in its own time and place, the biography does help us see Fuller in new ways that set it apart from what’s come before. Recently, for example, scholars have traced Fuller’s relationship with transcendentalism—even though she’s long been associated with the movement, her own ideas were never fully contained within it. Matteson illuminates the depth of Fuller’s personal ambivalence toward the very transcendentalist friends she was closest to and suggests the likely influence of this ambivalence on her career as a writer and thinker. She was a woman in a male circle, and her prominence depended on her connection to Emerson. But although the transcendentalists accepted her—even making her the editor of their magazine, The Dial—her relationships with them remained unsatisfying in ways that may have prompted her turn toward writing about the problems of women. 118 1 The Baffler

Fuller’s relationships with her infant child and with his father, on the other hand, emerge in this biography as complicated but joyful. Fuller’s death aboard the sinking ship has haunted generations of critics, in part because it is so easy to see it as a kind of indirect suicide—she was returning to a hostile land, with no certain economic future, no real possibilities, and she was burdened by a relationship with a man who lacked a clear path forward himself. She was mother to a child that she did not want to care for, her soul’s freedom and her sense of control over her own work having been thwarted by biological reality. Matteson gives us a portrait of the challenges motherhood posed for Fuller, but he also provides evidence that motherhood offered her an emotional respite. Such an interpretation opens up the possibility that Fuller stayed aboard that sinking ship because she did not want to risk the possibility of her own survival if it meant losing the human connections to her family—especially to her child—that she had only just begun to form. This makes her loss all the more tragic. She died on the cusp of realizing a new potential.

argaret Fuller was born in Cambridge in 1810 to an ambitious, Harvard-educated, politically active father who ran a legal practice, and a gentle, quiet mother who apparently loved nothing more than tending her flowerbeds. The idea that men and women were destined for different spheres could have been no more fully realized than it was in Fuller’s own family. The world of the intellect was that of her father. Learning to think meant becoming part of a world in which she was tutored, prodded, crammed full of every classic text and every

s literary allusion. Under his instruction, she was reading complete books before the age of five. By six, he was tutoring her in Latin (Greek came shortly thereafter). By nine, she was immersed in histories, biographies, and the Latin canon. The education cost her plenty. She read all day, waiting for her father to come home and hear her lessons late at night. “The consequence,” she later wrote, “was a premature development of the brain, that made me a ‘youthful prodigy’ by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism.” When she lay down at night to try to sleep, she saw gigantic faces advancing toward her, their features distorted by proximity. She was haunted by images of being trampled by horses, or of trees dripping with blood, or of a pool of blood rising until it threatened to engulf her. One might have thought that the “best-read woman in America,” as Matteson puts it, would have been proud of her early intellectual development. But in later life, Fuller blamed her education for her frequent headaches and for her lasting physical weakness and frailty. She wrote that her education made it difficult for her to be an independent thinker: “The force of feeling which, under other circumstances, might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts of others.” She claimed that she wished she had “read no books at all” until she had been older—she wished that she had “lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them.” She received an education that became the most important fact of her life. But it was bound up with a strong sense of her limitations and failures—her inability to fit in seamlessly with the classical tradition that her father had pressed into her. When Fuller went to school, she could not make friends with the other girls, whose progress she conspicuously outpaced. Matteson, following many biographers (beginning with Emerson) catalogues her physical flaws: she was chubby, and prone to acne and bad

posture. Her family did not provide emotional respite from her social isolation; when she transcribed her father’s letters, for example, he complained of the “slovenliness” of her handwriting. Her formal education stopped when she was almost fifteen, but she continued to read and study on her own, consuming the works of Racine, Milton, Dante, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goethe—the list goes on. In 1833, Fuller’s father, upon retiring from politics, moved the family from Cambridge to a country estate in Groton. Two years later, he died of cholera. His daughter closed the eyes of his corpse. Her first teacher was lost, and she was forced, at age twenty-five, to feel her own way intellectually in the world.

uller was also forced to earn her own living for the first time. She worked on a biography of Goethe, but this would not pay the bills. It was her interest in Goethe, all the same, that led her to Ralph Waldo Emerson; a mutual friend gave him a copy of a story that she’d translated. Emerson invited Fuller to spend two weeks visiting with him and his second wife, Lidian, in the summer of 1835. Fuller was in awe of Emerson when they met—she once described him as “my only minister”—but although he enjoyed, appreciated, even loved her, their friendship seems never to have been one of equals. Their mutual frustrations lie at the heart of Matteson’s biography, which gains its frisson from describing afternoons that Fuller spent with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, from depicting a world in which these literary icons were simply friends. The book is packed with stories of Thoreau standing under Fuller’s window to invite her out for an early morning boat ride, or Emerson and Fuller sending each other notes carried by Emerson’s beloved son Waldo. Undeniably, she felt close to these male intellectuals. Yet the friendships, like Fuller’s initial education, came at a cost. Fuller was nervous, thrilled, brimming with stories and ideas when she met Emerson, seven years her senior. He was bowled over by her stories, her anecdotes, the habit she had The Baffler ! 119

s of describing others with a scornful air, her intellectual aggression, and her sense of humor. She stayed for three weeks instead of the invited two. She was desperate to know what he thought of her, constantly complaining, “I know not what you think of me.” He withheld his opinions—which were often contradictory anyway—writing to his brother that she was “extraordinary” but also noting with condescension: “How rarely can a female mind be impersonal.” Their friendship deepened while Fuller developed as an intellectual. She tried teaching at elite girls’ schools—which she found deeply frustrating—but then began to earn money through “conversations,” in which a speaker charged an entrance fee for a talk that, unlike a formal lecture, was delivered without notes. Fuller spoke (most of the time) to women-only audiences, and sought to focus their attention on pressing questions about the nature of their existence: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” The “conversations,” which recalled the seventeenth-century gatherings convened by New England’s first woman spiritual dissenter, Anne Hutchinson, were immensely popular, and Fuller developed a loyal following as a brilliant speaker. But as her renown grew, she had more difficulty writing. She was constantly plagued by physical maladies: “My body is a burden, not an instrument.” She often despaired of her abilities, decorating her work with so many quotations and allusions that it is hard not to see these displays of her erudition as a way of hiding her own ideas. She was constantly frustrated with herself, berating herself cruelly for her insufficiencies. “I feel within myself an immense power, but I cannot bring it out,” she wrote in her journal. “I stand a barren vine stalk from which no grape will swell, though the richest vine is slumbering in its root. . . . Often, too often do I wish to die.” In this context, her relationship with Emerson was all the more troubling. In 1839, he came to her to ask a favor: Would she edit his new quarterly journal? The name—The Dial—was to be taken from an essay by Bron120 1 The Baffler

son Alcott, in which (as Matteson explains) he suggested that “just as a sundial marked the movements of the sun . . . the individual soul was an instrument that registered the greater movements of the universal spirit.” Fuller said yes. It was an extraordinary opportunity, and one that she could not have imagined arising elsewhere in antebellum America. But it was a collaboration that failed to give her intellectual recognition and support. Even as Fuller took up the charge, she marked her distance from Emerson and her friends. “My position as a woman, and the many private duties which have filled my life, have prevented my thinking deeply on several of the great subjects which these friends have at heart,” she wrote not long after taking up the editorship. She did not enjoy the detailed work of copyediting. And as she worked on the journal, she began to feel that she could not trust Emerson. She observed to herself that whenever she left him she felt “despairing and forlorn.” He openly told her that he didn’t really understand her, and he bragged to her about his other female friends, with whom he felt more intimate. Hurt feelings might have been ameliorated had he paid her for her work on The Dial; instead, she quit in frustration after a year. How exceptionally difficult and confusing this relationship must have been for Fuller— probably making her furious on some level even as she depended on it, even as it afforded her opportunities she could not have found anywhere else—comes out in a story that Matteson tells about her sojourn with the Emersons in the summer of 1842, after she left the magazine. Emerson’s adored fiveyear-old son Waldo had died of scarlet fever earlier in the year, and his wife, Lidian (she had changed her name from Lydia because Emerson was irritated by the way it sounded when people pronounced it with a New England accent), was distraught. Despite this, Fuller came to stay with the Emersons that summer. She took long walks with the Emersons in the afternoons and evenings, watching the moon on the Concord River, dallying

N E W YO R K M E T RO P O LITA N M U S EU M O F A RT

Margaret Fuller, 1850.

in the hemlocks on a “golden afternoon.” Emerson told her that “the soul knows nothing of marriage” and dilated on how the emotional demands of a wife could not help but limit a man from achieving his greatness. Lidian was extremely jealous, not so much because she imagined an affair, but because Emerson’s intellectual intimacy with Fuller excluded her. She confronted Fuller, who was defensive and angry, saying that other women had so much that she did not have that it was impossible to imagine them being envious of her. Still, the entire episode must have seemed to Fuller an example of a relationship whose existence depended upon denying the emotional needs of the woman—pretending that they were not even real. Were such examples of marriage why she wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century that she “urged on woman independence of man . . . because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other”?

Fuller’s relationships with others in the transcendentalist circle were even more strained. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, were friendly to her face. Matteson tells of Hawthorne and Fuller reading and talking on the grass together one bright Sunday morning, their conversation of childhood memories and mountains interrupted by Emerson returning from a Sabbath stroll through the woods. They went boating together. Fuller wrote that Hawthorne seemed more like a brother to her than any other man. Yet in later years, Hawthorne described her as having a “strong and coarse nature,” made fun of her aspirations (calling them “such an awful joke”), and, when she died, wrote: “She was a great humbug . . . tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband, and their child, on board that fated ship.” With friends like these, it’s not surprising that Fuller wrote about how women needed to work on their own terms for their freedom, and how they would have to do so in spaces free of men, whose minds were “so encumbered by tradition” that they could not be deeply involved in the struggle: “At present, women are the best helpers of one another.” Her “conversations” must have seemed an attractive alternative to the strange emotional space provided by Emerson and Hawthorne. But who were the women friends who could be her intellectual allies in the same way? The suffragettes recognized her importance (Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that her book had “more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time”); she had extremely close (and, Matteson suggests, erotically inflected) relationships with a few female friends; she became familiar with many of the famous women intellectuals of her time: Harriet Martineau, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet none of these women provided the intellectual space that the transcendentalist avant-garde could offer her. In a real way, she was alone. The Baffler ! 121

argaret Fuller left New England in 1844, going first to New York (where she finished her book, adding, among other things, passages based on conversations with women serving time at Sing Sing for prostitution), then to Europe, then to a revolution. There she fell in love with an Italian man, eleven years her junior, whom she met by chance in a Roman church. It might seem that the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli was not the best match for Fuller. As she wrote to William Henry Channing, one of her transcendentalist friends, “If earthly union be meant for the beginning of one permanent and full, we ought not to be united.” Ossoli was not an intellectual, although he was (as was she) deeply committed to the Roman Revolution (he fought in the revolutionary Civic Guard). She had no intention of getting pregnant, and she was devastated and terrified when she did. In her newspaper columns filed from Europe for the New York Tribune, she hinted at suicide. Yet she gave birth in a remote Italian village, with Ossoli leaving the day after Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli arrived. (They were keeping their relationship secret from his family as well.) Two months later, Fuller left little Nino (as he was known) in the village and returned to Rome to report on the revolution. Even after she became aware that Nino was not safe— the family she left him with was barely feeding him; he became ill; the village and even the family he was staying with was torn by violence—she did not act quickly to remove him from danger. All of this might seem to provide ample evidence for her ambivalence about becoming a mother at all, her life irrevocably linked to that of a man with whom she might otherwise have had a passing affair and to a helpless and dependent child. And yet, as Matteson’s biography makes clear, that’s only part of the story. Perhaps her relationship with Ossoli—whom she always described as adoring—felt like a reprieve from the intellectualism of her other connections. It was part of the revolutionary upheaval, forming a new kind of political community. 122 1 The Baffler

And Nino gave her tremendous pleasure from the moment he was born. Everyone said he was beautiful. When she came back from Rome to see him at Christmastime, she was amazed by how he leaned his head into her chest, as though to reproach her for leaving. She sat and watched him sleep. When he was a toddler, back in her care, she wrote loving descriptions of him: “He laughs, he crows, he dances in the nurse’s arms . . . he blows like the bellows . . . and then having shown off all his accomplishments, calls for his playthings.” She wrote of his “fearful rapture” and “pure delight” at new toys: “You would laugh to know how much remorse I feel that I never gave children more toys in the course of my life.” She was filled with joy when she came back from a walk and saw how happy he was to see her—it seemed, at times, the happiness that he brought her was “the first unalloyed quiet joy” of her life. She was not sure that he was brilliant or gifted or talented. “My little one seems nothing remarkable,” she wrote. For Fuller, though, for whom intellectual gifts had been so fraught, this admission may have seemed a blessing. “I feel the tie between him and me so real, so deep-rooted, even death shall not part us. I shall not be alone in other worlds, whenever Eternity may call me.” At the same time, over her last months in Italy, even as she watched the revolution collapse—as she wrote, she saw “every hope for which we struggled, blighted”—her ambivalence over writing seemed to have lessened. No longer did she dally about, waiting for inspiration while reproaching herself for failing to be a genius. Instead, she worked on her book about the Roman Revolution that was to have been her magnum opus, and although she was far from done with it when she left, she carefully packed her draft in the hopes that she would soon find a publisher. When Fuller decided to go home, many of her friends told her she shouldn’t make the trip. Emerson suggested that her book about the revolution would be more successful if it came from an expatriate. Gossip ran rife about her new family. But she insisted on

s For many years afterward, Margaret Fuller’s sudden death seemed to her contemporaries like a punishment for her trampling of social convention. One wrote, “her life was romantic and exceptional, so let her death be.”

9 returning, in spite of her premonitions that something terrible might happen. When the boat (piloted by an inexperienced sea captain and caught in an unexpected storm) hit a submerged sandbar near Fire Island and broke open, at first it seemed that the possibilities for survival were good. They were in sight of the shore; people appeared to be gathered there; surely they would send help soon. None arrived. Fuller and her new family were alive on the wreck for more than ten hours, hoping that someone would rescue them. Until the very last minutes, they refused to swim. The boat began to break apart. The other passengers and the crew abandoned the drowning vessel; most of them survived. Why didn’t Fuller swim? Did her lifelong fear of drowning make it impossible for her to act? Was it some kind of latent depression or ambivalence about returning to America? Was it simply that the situation was so uncertain that she could not think clearly, her escape demanding a physical strength she lacked? Why did she stay while the water rose around her, as in her childhood nightmares? Matteson suggests Fuller was not paralyzed by her fear of America, nor by an inner passivity that broke through from her youth, but by the terror that if she tried to make it to the shore, then she might live, but her child might not. She had written, only months earlier, that she could not imagine surviving the loss of Nino. Earlier in her life,

she had written that she believed she would always be alone. Now she was not alone, but was that gift to be taken from her? In the end, it should be noted, she did try—she let the ship’s steward take Nino to make the desperate swim. But it was too late, and all were overwhelmed by the water. The last words she was heard to say were: “I see nothing but death before me—I shall never reach the shore.”

or many years afterward, Margaret Fuller’s sudden death seemed to her contemporaries like a punishment for her trampling of social convention. As one of her friends wrote, “her life was romantic and exceptional, so let her death be.” Even Emerson consoled himself that her death was “in happy hour,” for “her health was much exhausted. Her marriage would have taken her away from us all, & there was a subsistence yet to be secured, & diminished powers & old age.” In publishing Fuller’s Memoirs, Emerson was able to claim her memory for his transcendentalism. This is ironic, for had Fuller lived, her life might have carried her still further away from Emerson and his world. The intellectual community she had once thought would nurture her ambitions—one in which she could be an exceptional woman among a group of men—might have been replaced by a different relationship to writing. She might have become more confident in her powers, less agonized, less determined to prove herself in a community emotionally alien to her. Perhaps her child and her relationship to Ossoli (as mysterious as her friends found it) would have provided a different kind of ballast. Maybe she would have made common cause with Anthony and Stanton and the first women’s movement. As Matteson indicates, the truth might be that (as another of her friends put it) her “life spilled at the very threshold of her joy.” “What concerns me now,” Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life in its kind. Had I but one more moment to live I must wish the same.”t The Baffler ! 123

2 Re m a i n d e r s

Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images 3 Seth Colter Walls Is the noxious event setting up a broader insight or critique? Or is this just part of the period verisimilitude of the show, akin to its unfailing attention to the right cabinet cozy or comb lubricant that was all the rage among the privileged class of 1963?

n ad-agency savant is known for composing inspired campaigns on the fly. After work hours, bouts of heavy drinking alternate with bedding extramarital partners who are left begging for more. Then this world-by-the-gonads member of the creative class heads home and puts the children to bed—before enjoying some banal but topical spousal conversation about a fast-changing, latesixties milieu. No, this isn’t a recap of a Mad Men episode, but a rough précis of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images, a 1966 novel about a professionally sure-footed yet spiritually unfulfilled ad-woman named Laurence. The novel’s sole English translation is out of print—perhaps because de Beauvoir’s existentialist attention to the empty form of betterment aligned with the late-sixties “good life” is far less market-friendly than the soft-focus anomie of the AMC franchise. Mad Men–branded suits—an “exclusive” creation of the show’s costume designer, Janie Bryant—will always look handsome enough in a Banana Republic display window, quite aside from the show’s content. I learned about Les Belles Images by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s collection of essays and criticism, Making Waves (newly reissued in paperback). Responding to literary fashions circa 1967, which held that de Beauvoir was a tapped-out, old fogey writer of fiction, Vargas Llosa threw down like so: “Quite wrong . . . although faithful in its contents to the existential postulates of ‘commitment,’ . . . [it] is similar, in its writing and structure, to an experimental novel.” Eventually, I found a used out-of-print copy of Les Belles Images at New York’s Strand Bookstore. And I’ve spent the last few years of Mad Men mania trying to get coworkers and acquaintances to read it. It’s not been the most welcome suggestion, despite the novel’s superficial similarities to television’s unofficial show of the moment. Strobing flashes of professional inspiration can rudely intrude upon Laurence’s domestic life, just as they do in Don Draper’s world. “The children made their way into a hollow tree and there they found themselves in an enchanting room all paneled in natural wood,” Laurence’s interior mind rhapsodizes, in the service of a client, as she looks upon her own daughters. “Follow up this idea. . . . I am not selling wooden panels; I am selling security, success, and a touch of poetry into the bargain.”

n other ways, though, de Beauvoir’s Laurence is quite remote from the world of Mad Men—a place where most characters mark time in the grip of various professional grudges while steadily getting richer. Most usefully, for our purposes, the novel’s protagonist allows 124 1 The Baffler [no.20]

J O N ATH O N ROS E N

The

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2 If the fire thrown by de Beauvoir in Les Belles Images is too hot for modern tastes, let’s at least allow the novel’s absent presence to say a little something about the limitations of would-be smart television.

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herself to adopt a consistently critical stance in relation to her work and its too easy manipulations. “It was wearisome; indeed, it was depressing,” is how de Beauvoir sums up Laurence’s response to a psychological survey commissioned by her agency. “Smoothness, brilliance, shine; the dream of gliding, of icy perfection; erotic values and infantile values (innocence); speed, domination, warmth, security. Was it possible that all tastes could be explained by such primitive phantasms? . . . To astonish and at the same time to reassure; behold the magic product that will completely change our lives without putting us out in the very least.” The contemporary viewer of Mad Men—who might be a bit smugly proud of understanding the subtle, sidelong glance the show can cast on the various ignorances and hidebound social forms of yesteryear—may well be taken aback by how quickly de Beauvoir picked up on such themes in real time. According, variously, to Laurence’s husband and stepfather, who take turns sounding very much like a mid-century Thomas Friedman, all that’s left is for “the world to become one country” as “the gap between the capitalist and socialist countries will soon be done away with.” But Laurence has memories of the very recent past, recollections of the Holocaust and the Resistance that lead her to question why the late-sixties march toward progress admits of no sadness over Algeria or why the images of civil rights protesters in America seem to be forgotten just as soon as they flash across the world’s TV screens. The many shades of femininity in Mad Men are parceled out among its (admirably) large cast of woman characters—but de Beauvoir’s focused portrait of a woman, and her rigorous attention to Laurence’s subjective perception of the world, makes for a tougher, more worldly account of gender inequities. On Mad Men, one never knows quite how deeply the depiction of a clueless, not-yet-retrograde man—a boorishly ignorant doctor or a harassing superior—is meant to resonate thematically. Is the noxious event setting up a broader insight or critique? Or is this just part of the period verisimilitude of the show, akin to its unfailing attention to the right cabinet cozy or comb lubricant that was all the rage among the privileged class of 1963? Laurence is more established in her career than Mad Men’s bestknown striving career woman, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss). Still, like every other woman struggling to make a name for herself in a 1960s workplace, Laurence is regularly subjected to the windy bromides of her superiors in the patriarchy. “Personally, I believe the future belongs to women,” one blowhard dude eminence says at a party. “Maybe. But only on condition that they don’t ape the men,” answers another. “Feminism: at present everybody was talking about it all the time,” Laurence thinks to herself, with droll detachment. Laurence also gives expression to the claustral, trapped-at-home anxieties represented by Draper’s ex-wife, Betty—a veritable poster wife for the “problem that has no name” as diagnosed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. However, the resemblance here truly is passing: Laurence has thought more provocatively about those issues than the lady of the Draper house, played by January Jones with either studied

@ blandness or just blandness of the plain-vanilla variety. In the same paragraph where Laurence realizes she obsesses over work at home and dreams of domesticity in the office, de Beauvoir writes, “behold the lacerated state of the woman who goes out to work,” before adding a contradictory jab, nested in a parenthetical aside: “She used to feel far more lacerated when she did not have a job.” By endowing a single character with all these modes of thinking, de Beauvoir makes sure that the philosophical question of alienation that plagues her protagonist—namely, “Why am I not like everyone else?”—remains consistent throughout the story in precisely the way it hasn’t during Mad Men. Name brands get checked, too, in Laurence’s milieu. Yet there’s never the feeling that an itemization of finery is there to make us impressed with the realness of the story universe. Laurence, a character to rival any in existentialism’s fictional canon, takes care of that all by herself; she contains such a multitude of disaffected moderns within her own skin that almost all of Mad Men’s women somehow seem descended from her—as, for that matter, does the series’ male protagonist, Don Draper. During the show’s first two seasons, the character played by Jon Hamm did seem possessed by a desire to determine what kind of man he really was, as well as the total range of answers his countrymen might be willing to accept. But in more recent episodes he’s seemed alienated in no fundamentally distinct way from all the other unhappy comfort-seekers on Mad Men. Though he may flip through a volume of Frank O’Hara poems every now and again, his attention to the process of examining himself is hardly what you’d call sustained. Laurence is wise enough to suspect that her own answers may not exist even in the crisscrossing fashions of the literary world. “What books? Proust can’t help me. Nor Fitzgerald,” she thinks. And then comes a move, or more precisely an inability to move, straight out of Beckett: “Yesterday I stood there in front of the windows of a big bookshop. . . . Which to start with? I did not go in.” Despite the stasis implied in that scene, Laurence does forge a path forward for herself in plot-juicing ways. (Vargas Llosa’s essay is particularly good at describing the way in which Les Belles Images represented de Beauvoir’s riposte to the flattened affect of the nouveau roman tradition, then much in vogue.) Without spoiling the ending, it’s fair to say Laurence figures out what to do with the lover, the husband, and the children in her life. That a novel about existentialist quandaries manages more narrative payoff than the first several dozen episodes of a serious television entertainment is no small thing. And it’s an achievement that comes from what Vargas Llosa identified as de Beauvoir’s main statement in her novel: that progress “must be at once material, intellectual and moral, or it will simply not be progress at all.”

o what happened to de Beauvoir’s book? Did anything unique conspire to render it an underground, word-of-mouth work—aside, that is, from the usual suspects in publishing’s lineup of economic vagaries? The cover of a seventies British mass-market edition of Les The

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2 Belles Images gives at least part of the game away. Seen, from behind, upright on a bed—naked (as will happen) aside from panties and a floppy sunhat—sits a lithe, vacationing Laurence, regarding her own visage in a small, cute mirror. It means to look pretty sultry, as though the novel were a steamy beach read. Here’s a slice of how Laurence really experiences luxury travel in the novel: “Clever advertising had made them believe that here they would be thrilled beyond all expression; and back home no one would dare to confess that he had been quite unmoved. They would urge their friends to go and see Athens and the sequence of lies would go on and on—in spite of all the disillusionments, the pretty pictures would remain intact.” Anyone drawn in by the novel’s cover in the seventies would have probably felt deceived by that particular advertisement after only a few pages. This wasn’t a good enough lie to get passed on from one consumer to the next, and so the novel made its inevitable way to the remainder table. Still, if the fire thrown by de Beauvoir in Les Belles Images is too hot for modern tastes, let’s at least allow the novel’s absent presence to say a little something about the limitations of would-be smart television. A great deal of our critical consensus now gathers in front of the small screen—and over the past decade or so, the arbiters of cultural debate have raised the stakes by likening the thirteen-episode installments of cable-drama storytelling to the stuff of literature. Simone de Beauvoir’s book can remind us how a moving-image medium may have a limited capacity to undermine the upper class’s very same church of les belles images. Any viewer succumbing to a case of acute image-fatigue during the beautifully composed fifth season of Mad Men would do well to consult Laurence’s testimony, in which the character tells us glumly that she has learned “too much about how a set was put together—it fell to pieces under her eyes.”t

P. S . M U E L L ER

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One Way 3 Matthea Harvey Where the first one came from, we’ll never know, but once it landed, it did what arrows do—it pointed. The headlines read New Shape Discovered: Arrow Invents the Straight and Narrow. Children who had been content to trail snails around the patio suddenly made a gesture we’d never seen before— holding one arm out in front of their chests then curling in all but the longest finger. They wanted to go to the playground and slide down the slide with determined smiles. They pointed at the girl with a blotch of tomato soup on her shirt, the ape with alopecia, and laughed with an unfriendly new note in their laughter. Arrows led to purchases. Arrows led to adieus. A simple shape had turned us all from cars into ambulances, keening with intent. The weatherman no longer ambled aimlessly around our T.V. screen. When he pointed at Chicago then Boston, the people sitting on sofas in those cities suddenly felt how very different from one another they were. Dogs pulled at their leashes, sparrows vectored through trees, knitters turned to welding. Though there was no denying that the “this way up” signs on parcels meant that more vases arrived at their destinations intact, the new words that mushroomed into being were problematic—initiative, tomorrow, your fault, mine. Couples sat in restaurants launching them back and forth over the bread basket. Soon we’d invent bows, cannons, guns.

The

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T O R I E S

Lancelot Gomes 3 Manohar Shetty

t was Filomena Rodrigues who broke the news at the Panjim fish market. She ran into her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, who was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky bosom. “Did you know,” Filomena said in a breathless undertone, stuffing silver-black mackerels into a plastic bag, “Lancelot Gomes has married again?” Maravilha almost dropped the mullet, and gasped, “What? Again?” “You just won’t believe,” hissed Filomena, eyes coruscating like a cat’s. “It’s his own secretary this time and she’s only twenty-two. And he must be at least fifty plus! And just you guess what, and this will shock you, ooo, she’s a ’indu!” Maravilha pressed her crucifix into her chest involuntarily. “Oh Lord,” she exclaimed. “A twenty-two-year-old ’indu girl? What is the world coming to? And to that senile old rake?” After some more haggling by Maravilha, the two parted company, promising to “put their heads together” over the “scandalous business” later at home in Merces. Maravilha posted a chain-letter and crossed herself at a wayside shrine as she trudged towards the bus-stand.

“What is the world coming to?” she repeated to her husband Mussolini da Gama that same afternoon. “This must be his third or fourth marriage and the girl is only twenty-one! And he must be at least fifty-five, the scoundrel!” Mussolini, a tall, mongoose-faced schoolteacher, said, “It’s shameful. Shameful! We must do something. Morals have gone down the drain these days. This is bad for the children.” “But what can we do?” said Maravilha, dropping a block of dried pig’s blood into the 130 1 The Baffler [no.20]

sorpotel simmering in a clay pot. “Everyone is so loose nowadays. Too many dances and carnivals! And see what shameful things they are showing on the TV these days. It is corrupting our youth!” Montgomery, the youngest of her eight children, heard the entire conversation.

That evening, he met his friend Auduth Camotim at the “Tulxidas” taverna. After three stiff pegs, he said, “You know something, Camot—the old fellow who lives in the old bungalow near the church? He got married again, to a twenty-year-old dame, a Hindu chick.” “Lucky bugger, that Lancelot Gomes. His first conquest was a Muslim broad, Ghulam Xec’s daughter, I think, from Vasco.” “Yah, man,” Montgomery said expansively. “Whadda heck—variety is the spice of life. But why you not geddin’ married, man? Already you’re geddin’ grey hair.” “What to do, Monty. Apply, apply, but no reply,” said Camotim, mournfully sipping his fourth Old Monk.

The following day Camotim met his bank office colleague Naguesh Vencatexa Naique at a football match between Pele’s XI and Eusebio’s XI at a shorn paddy field in Caranzalem. At the half-time break, in between gulps of canned beer, Camotim said, “Arre Naguesh, you know that old bugger Lancy Gomes?” “The one who lives in the new bungalow near the post-office?” “Correct, correct. He has tied the wedding knot yet again. For the third time. A Hindu dame this time, only nineteen years old, I have heard. The ceremony was top secret.” “Third time? What stamina, man. More than even Eusebio’s center forward.”

M A R K S . FI S H ER

“More than even Maradona. He must be sixty years old, a real budda.”

“What stamina he must be having,” Naguesh told his girlfriend Teresa, at a secret tryst with her at a hill-top cross in Dona Paula. “Must be like a marathon runner.” Teresa, plump and giggly, said, “I saw his first wife once. Very fair she was. A Parsee, I think, from Bombay. I think he is doing some real estate business.” “No, no. Not real estate. He is a printer, I think, printing visiting and greeting cards. I think his first wife was a Muslim from Vasco. Some Muslims are very fair. But what stamina!” “Definitely not Muslim. Her name was Nilofer, I think. But I’ll ask my friend Belvinda tomorrow. She used to work for this Gomes. Made advances to her also, I think.” “Three dames—bloody hat-trick.” “You’re jealous or what! Don’t try any

hattrick-fattrick with me!”

The following afternoon Teresa went with Belvinda to see a Hindi movie at the El Dorado theatre. After the movie, her eyes still puffed from the tear-jerker, Teresa said, “Nice movie, no. Life also is like a movie only. Do you remember your former boss, Lancelot Gomes? You know, you know, he got married again!” “O gosh!” said Belvinda, “The creep! He must be at least sixty-two years old.” “And you know, you know the girl is only eighteen and that too a Hindu!” “What a scandal! His first wife was an Anglo, I think. Nellie something. From Bangalore.” “You knew her, no?” “Lid’lbit. But just last week I saw this girl in his car. She was wearing a red salwar khameez and I was wondering and wondering who she was. I thought she was his daughter.” The

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w “She is good looking?” “OK. Fair she is. Fast she must be to marry a zantto. I’ll phone up Maria tomorrow. She’s working in his office only.” “But he’s filthy rich, no?” “Pots and pots he has, men.” The next day, during a long and leisurely lunch break, Belvinda called up Maria. “Hello, Maria,” she said. “You must be knowing why I’m phoning.” “Oh, so you have heard the news? So fast it is spreading,” said Maria, interrupted from her pork chops. “You can talk?” “Yah men. Only Joe is here.” “Joe?” “Joe men. The peon.” “Oh. What about Lancy’s latest catch? Give us the juicy news. You know her?” “Lid’lbit only. She worked in the other office mostly, in Margao. Quiet she is, like a mouse.” “Mouse? Must be a big gold-digger. She is only eighteen?” “Can’t say, Bel. Must be more.” “Twenty?” “Must be twenty-two, twenty-three. Rogue he is.” “Yah. Just yesterday I saw her in his car. She was wearing a blue salwar khameez and I was wondering and wondering who she was. I thought she was his daughter.” “Looks like.” “She is Hindu, no? His PA?” “I tinksomen. But sometimes she is wearing jeans and T-shirt.” “Modern she is. So what. These days many Hindus are wearing hotpants. What’s her name?” “Tahira Zahira something. Nice name.” “Muslim name, no?” “Yes men. But she’s Hindu. Dessai something.” “This is third or fourth?” “Fourth, I think.” “Fourth! Horse he must be, no Maria?” “Rabbit he is. Five six kids he must be having.” “Must be more. Hockey team I think. 132 1 The Baffler [no.20]

What you eating for lunch?” “Pork chop.” “You’ll get fat like me, men. I’m having small rice curry.” “Coming to ‘Rock Round the Clock’?” “Yah. With Subodh.” “Why men? You know how people will gossip. Mad you are, Bel.” “He’s ’indu, but nice. Good business also he has. So many people are marrying like that. Lancy also. She’s his PA?” “Never. Who told to you? She’s doing some computers.” “Where they are living now? Same bungalow where a lot of foreign people are staying? I can hear them talking every time.” “No foreign people are there, Bel. You mus’ be hearing BCC TNT TV or something.” “You can hear somebody breathing, Maria?” “Somebody is breathing. Crossconnection I think.” “Someone is coming. I’m putting the phone down, OK?” “OK. I’m putting the phone down.” “OK.” “OK.”

In Anjuna, Bismarck Monteiro, who had overhead the entire conversation, put down the receiver. He turned to his wife, Angela, and said, “I overheard a funny conversation.” “Why do you listen to other people’s chatter?” said Angela. “As it is you’re already a little deaf.” “I could not help it. It was a cross-connection. But just listen to what I heard. You remember Lancy Goes? The hotel owner?” “Yes, yes. He made lots of money in Kuwait.” “He got married again. For the fourth time.” “What? I don’t believe you!” “Believe you me, I heard it almost from the horse’s mouth. And this time he’s married a Hindu, only eighteen years old.” “Only eighteen? But he must be sixtyfive! He was in the Lyceum with my brother.

What the menfolk are up to these days! It is all because of TV!” “His first wife was Anjali Vaz, from Canada, I think.” “No, no, not Canada—Australia. What happened to their daughter Monica?” “She went to Bahrain. I heard she got divorced and lives with a married man in Bombay.” “Shee. What people do these days! Broken families mean only disasters. All morals have been lost! Do you remember Father Hubert of Cansaulim? He left the priesthood and married a barmaid in Portugal. A sixty-yearold baldy marrying someone fit to be his grand-daughter! Shee. All morals have been lost!” Maybe morals, Bismarck thought, but not Lancy’s libido. What a horny bugger he must be. He looked at his thin, angular wife who had reluctantly borne two children, sighed, and put on the TV to watch The Bold and the Beautiful, his favorite addiction.

The next morning, alone at home, Angela wrote a letter to her best friend, Fatima Vaz in Loutulim: Dear Fatima, Thank you for the sausages you sent with Brother Theo. Fat and juicy they were, I always tell Bismarck that you make the best sausages in Goa. I have said a hundred times, why you don’t start your own small side-business? Make also some balchao and misquit and you can start Fatima Foods. All rubbish they sell in the cold storage. Look how Oslinda Botelho from Aldona has prospered. Her stuff, pickles and everything is selling like hot cakes. God has been kind to us—we do not need small business. But you have to think of your children and their needs are always growing and growing. What will you do after Alfred retires? He is a good human, but good people don’t prosper. What promotion they have given him in that deluxe hotel even after so many years of honest service? You only tell me. As I have said before, nothing ventured,

nothing gained. There’s corruption and corruption everywhere. All the ministers and leaders are making money. Lakhs and lakhs they are making from bribes from big builders and the mining people who have already destroyed Goa and destroying it even more while the government is turning a blind eye. Why? Because even the government, including the chief minister, is in their pockets. My son Patrick has started a real-estate business. He’s doing very well now and knows all the tricks of the trade. What to say, money makes the world go round. But look at the spiritual corruption. Morals have gone to the dogs. Just yesterday Bismarck was telling me of Lancelot Goes, the multirich departmental shop-owner. You may not know him, but the scoundrel has married for the fourth time! All hush, hush, and to boot a young Hindu girl! A chit of a girl and some are even whispering she’s a minor. A sixtyeight-year-old baldy marrying a minor—but you know how people in Goa gossip. Nothing to do, so they gossip and gossip. Bismarck was sounding envious when he was telling me. Men are like that—marrying four wives, like Mohammedans. How is your Alfredo? And the little ones Zelia and Zelima—what pretty pretty names! I hope you will all come for my birthday next month (September 10). Even if it rains, you all must come. Lots of people are coming from Cansaulim. I will write to you if I need some nice patties and samosas from Margao. I will send a message with Brother Theo, what a humble gem of a man. Bismarck sends his love. Yours lovingly Angela Monteiro. P.S. You left your red umbrella in my house. It is safe and sound with me.

Fatima was a pious woman, the mother of eight children. The church bell sounded the angelus as she read through Angela Monteiro’s letter. Her eyebrows shot up in lopsided tweezered parentheses as she thought: “Who she think she is, criticizing my AlThe

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w fredo? Just because she is rich, she thinks she can say anything! Does she know what people in Cansaulim are saying about that corrupt sarpanch Bismarck? But the Lord will show him no Mercy.” After Mass the next morning, she wrote in an aerogramme to her sister Matilda in Safat, Kuwait: Dear Matilda, I hope you are in the pink of health. We are as well as can be. My youngest, Mathew, had fever few days ago. Now he is better. Dr. Lotlikar was very nice, though he is Hindu. Mark and John are doing well in college. Mark is serious and not chasing the village girls, and wasting money on dances. Luke is in Bombay to do paper work to come to Kuwait. God bless you and Wilfredo for taking him there. He is sincere and honest like his father. My back is hurting from all the housework, which is even more now as both Martha and Mary are working in the office in Margao. Few days back our neighbor Hector organized the village dance. (So noisy it was, whole night I could not sleep a wink.) But he suffered a big loss because Clemox Mendes, the big pop singer, charged Rs 80,000 for one hour of his nonsense din. He is singing holier-than-thou rubbish about drugs and corruption, but making pots and pots of money on TV and other shows. Even for close friends like Hector he is not giving any discount. He’s so Holier-thanThou that now they’re calling him the “Pope” star! Part of the funds was for the orphanage also. Still this cheap monkey did not cut his price! What to say, this is how the world goes round. And do you know that big Bombay man Max Camoes who is writing all goody goody things about Goa in the papers and all? Alfredo confided in me that he owns twenty—20!— taxis in the super deluxe hotel in false names. I have warned Mary and Martha there are wolves and wolves in sheep’s clothing. Royal hypocrites people are. Angela wrote to me yesterday. Foolish she is, with a wagging tongue, even insulting my poor Alfredo. She thinks I have all the time in the world to start a business of pickle and

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prawn balchao! Can you imagine? But you know how she is throwing her weight since she moved into the new big house built on the foundation of cheated villagers. You know what I am talking about. She wrote also of Lancy Goes who I think owns a fishing trawler. You may not be knowing of him, but he has married again for the umpteenth time to a Hindu girl! Some are saying she is a minor and police may take action! What a scandal! All morals have gone to the pits in Goa. Do you remember your college classmate Monica? She was in Bahrain and now she is living in sin with a married man in Bombay. I heard her first marriage is not yet annulled. Even the priests are affected. It was so sad to hear about Fr Ignatius who was defrocked. I only blame that evil woman Gracinda, who led him away from his rightful path. What to say, even the Church is falling prey to scandal. That is one good priest less in Goa. How is your Wilfredo? And the little one, Ralvin—what a nice name! I hope Milagrinha is looking after him—servants are so costly even here now. Now they make demands for Christmas presents even. We had a small birthday party for Mathew. Martha put an advertisement in the paper, “U R 2 Today” with his photograph. So cute it was. So chubby chubby he is. Convey my love to Willy and smacking kisses to Ralvin. Your loving sister, Fatima P.S. Do you remember Gwendolina, Dr. Azavedo’s youngest? She got married in the village church to that nice man from Mazagaon, Seby Pinto. They put a cute ad in the paper—“U 2 R 1. ” Sweet, no?

Matilda Costa, tired, overworked, and irritable after extricating herself from the usual passes made at her by her Arab boss, saw Fatima’s letter and sighed. “Another gloom and doom message from Goa,” she thought. She had a bath and put on the video player to watch a Hindi movie. After a microwave supper with her husband and son, just before retiring to bed, she read Fatima’s letter.

The next afternoon, a Friday, she wrote in her schoolgirlish handwriting a letter to her friend in Bombay: Hi Bharati! How are you? I am well and happy here. It’s so hot here but we have AC, even in the car. I saw Madhuri yesterday—so groovy she is in Hum Apke Hai Kaun! And fantastic songs! Have you seen it on the big screen in Bombay? We get all the latest videos here. Fatima wrote to me, as usual full of gloom and doom. Do you remember our classmate Monica Carvalho? Guess what, she’s living with a married man in Bombay. And her divorce is not even finished! Real chalu she has become. Who would have predicted in college—such a bookworm she was! And do you remember that short dark fellow Lancy Goes who was always ogling the girls like a wolf, on the beach? Guess what—he has married for the fourth or fifth time! A young innocent girl, it seems, and a Hindu, your own jaatwallah! Such scandals are happening in Goa! It seems even the police are suspicious because she’s underage, only seventeen, I think. Lancy must be thinking “the more the merrier”! How is your hubby? And the kids Ashok and Rita? Ralvin is fine, quite a handful he is. Plump and cute he is. Willy is fine and is slogging his heart out day in and day out. I will meet you before Christmas this year. Give me more news about Bad Bombay and Bollywood. Have you seen Bombay? Monisha is really cute, but the songs sound really constipated! Lots of love, Yours, Matilda. P.S. We are building a new house in Colva named WILMARAL—for WILfred, MAtilda and RALvin. You remember that politician Eddie Mascarenhas? He also has a new house close to us—EDANFRESH—for EDdie, ANgela, and their kids Frank and Esther. It’s a nice big house, but smaller than our house.

Bharati received Matilda’s letter on her thirtieth birthday. Amidst the noisy celebrations, she read the letter hastily. Balloons popped as the phone rang in her flat in Santacruz. It was her brother Dutta calling from New Jersey, U.S.A. The clamor of cooking and shrieking children almost drowned out his voice. “Hello, Bharati, happy birthday! So, how are things cooking out there?” he said. Radiant, Bharati gushed, “Lots of cooking still to be done—everyone’s here! Thanks awfully so much for calling, Dutta. It must be prime time there?” Dutta laughed. “What’s prime time when I’m calling my little sis on her thirtieth birthday? How’s mum, is she there?” “No, she’s fine but couldn’t stay. She’s gone back to Mapusa.” “Oh, what a pity. So what other news back home?” “Nothing much . . . Oh yes, just today I got a letter from Matilda in Kuwait. You remember her?” “Remember her? Of course? She was my first date. Bloody nervous I was!” Bharati laughed. “Yeah, you could never dance! You remember Lancy Goes, the creepy ogler?” The din around Bharati rose. “Who?” said Dutta. “Lancy Goes . . . It’s really noisy here!” “Oh yah, ‘Pansy’ Goel. I remember him well. Who doesn’t remember him? Settled down in Goa, didn’t he?” Distracted by the mounting noise around her, Bharati said, “Yeah, well, it seems he’s married again! For the fourth time! To a minor. It seems the police are after him.” “Jeezuz! What the heck’s going on in good old Goa! I remember the first and second but you don’t know them, Amrita—‘Ambrosia Amrita’ we used to call her—and of course, that Portuguese mix-breed, Carmelina. But who’s the latest?” The noise rose to a deafening level. The phone crackled, and at that moment Bharati’s five-year-old daughter began to tug at her saree, crying and complaining about her brother, Ashok. The

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w “Rita!” Bharati shouted in exasperation. “Just wait a moment, will you?” “Rita?” said Dutta. “The same one from Merces? Dr. D’Silva’s daughter?” Bharati, pacifying her daughter, said, “There’s so much noise here, Dutta! I can hardly hear you.” “Anyway, let’s not spend dollars on idle gossip. All the best to you and mom and the rest of the gang. ’Bye and keep in touch.” Dutta rang off.

In his twenty-first floor apartment Dutta Virgincar, MD, tall, cadaverous and greyeyed, son of a pig-iron tycoon, pondered over the news about “Pansy” Goel. “Sonofabitch,” he thought. “Always scoring with the chicks! And a bloody outsider too—all the way from Rourkela or some such one-horse town. The bugger even learned Portuguese.” The same night, back from the hospital where he worked, Virgincar wrote to his friend Remington Quadros in Mississauga, Canada: Hi there Remy! How’s life treating you there, pal? Freezing, I reckon, like me. But I’m putting in solid work and sweating it out for my moolah. And these days I’ve got someone to keep me warm, a nurse, a true-blue Yank from Philadelphia. Cold from the outside but like fire underneath! Not for marriage, of course. These Yanks, if they find someone more loaded, they drop you like a hot brick. Somebody else we both know, though, has entered into “holy” matrimony again. You remember “Pansy” Goel in college? I got the news straight from my sis in Bombay—the gringo’s married again! For the fourth goddamn time! And guess who the prized catch is this time? You just won’t swallow this—remember “Lovely Rita Meter Maid”—of course you do, you were crazy about her. That’s the one he’s caught in his net (bed!) this time. She’s definitely not a minor—that’s what Bharati thinks. Must be around 26, right! We last saw her six years ago, remember, at Viren’s birthday bash in Calangute. Great looker. I hope you’re not broken-hearted pal. (Anyone keeping your

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bed warm out there?) You’ll always be the Born Bachelor. By the way, I may not be a Bachelor Boy much longer. Mom’s lining up a few girls— all Brahmins of course, though you know I don’t believe in all that caste stuff—for me to check out next year. May be it’s time I settled down in Goa—before one catches AIDS! You should see the Negro patients I have to treat. I’m not a racist, of course, but these guys from the shanties are bloody ungrateful for everything that’s done for them. You should see the gunshot and knife wounds. You’ll flip. You’re lucky, man, with that cosy job in the postoffice. Anyway, “Pansy” Goel has thrown egg at our faces. We should have called him “Randy” Goel! But maybe the “pansy” tag got to him and he set out to prove us all wrong? And talk of secularism! And, by the way, wasn’t there something fishy about his divorce from that mestico, Carmelina? Anyway, bye for now and why don’t you try your luck in the US of A? Think about it. All the best— Dutta PS. Why don’t you write something about it in SOS. These damned outsiders are taking over both our land and now our gals!

Remington Quadros, editor of the newsletter SOS (Sons of the Soil), cold and lonely in his bleak two-room tenement in Mississauga, fumed as he read Dutta’s letter. “Fucker thinks I’m lucky!” he raged. “That Bamon Richie Rich, always calling me to the States, but doesn’t lift a finger to help. That son of a Portuguese bootlicker! And wasn’t he crazy about Carmelina—only, his pop intervened and shunted him off to the States. And that fucker Nitin ‘Pansy’ Goel—he hadn’t even divorced his second wife, a minor. And he’s gone on to his fourth! Bastard bigamist! Bloody Indian bigamy laws—with so many problems, what do they care about bigamy? And poor, sweet Rita . . .” His fierce eyes clouded over when he thought about her. Later that week, he editorialized in the

new edition of SOS: GOA—Going, Going, Gone . . . It is well-known that the degeneration of Goa has steadily gone downhill—now it is accelerating at breakneck speed, like a tourist Sumo taxi on Anmod Ghat. A jungle of five-star hotels, financed by selfserving Capitalist Outsiders, have mangled Mother Goa’s coastline, making an utter mockery of environmental laws. Politicians from the Left, Right and Center have been bribed left, right and center, leaving the common man high and dry, adrift in the (few remaining) sands of time. Truly the Mammonhungry builders have left their footprints on the Sands of Time! The lot of the common man has gone from bad to worse to desperate since the “Liberation” of Goa in 1961. Despite the loudspeaker-type announcements (a la our tiatrist tempos) of liberalization of the economy from the Corridors of Power, rampant unemployment is the order of the day. Even though the powerful builders and hotel industry lobby promises jobs to our youth, it is well-known that only lowly menial jobs such as waiters and bell-boys are given to our youth on a meagre pittance. All the topmost posts are reserved (a la Indian Reservation Policy) for Outsiders. The Powers-that-Be promise the earth to our people and it is the earth that they deliver, viz. dirt, mud, muck and potholes. (And, to boot, Grand Canyon–type ravines in the exploitedto-death mining belts of Bicholim and Pale—which rugged majesty no tourist gets to behold.) But all is not lost, SOS pledges its support to its namesake, namely Sons of the Soil of Goa. We will continue to strive courageously to preserve the Goenkar’s unique Cultural Identity. Victory to our Sons of the Soil! Salt of the Earth! While drugs are there to stay to corrupt our Youth forever, a new dastardly menace has invaded our pristine shores. It is an unspeakable crime—but speak up we must, or forever bear the burden of guilt. Yes, it is Child Prostitution, catering to the sick minds of the Wild White West. Along with AIDS, drugs, massage-prostitution, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, this is our latest “Import.” The rot has truly sunk into Goa’s Golden Sands! The authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the physical, and now moral, decay of Goa, the “Rome of the East.” Before the next century heralds in a new age, Goa is

doomed to become the “Tomb of the East”! And now yet another evil, nay, heinous crime against society looms large in “The Paradise That Was Goa”! Reliable sources continue to provide information to SOS on the degeneracy of Goa. It is not just Kashmiri terrorists and smugglers who have found a safe haven in Goa. Now a new species have crept into our beloved land—the Immoral Bigamist!! The law enforcers appear to be least concerned over these tragic crimes. The incompetent police, too busy with taking bribes from foreign tourists for petty traffic offenses, are ignorant of the extent of Bigamy prevalent in Goa! The tip of the iceberg was detected by an intrepid scribe who reported to SOS that a well-known, unscrupulous businessman, an Outsider who has sucked the blood dry of our Golden Goa for over ten years, has recently lured into his clutches a young innocent RC from Merces. Although he has not freed himself from the bonds of matrimony in his previous marriage to a minor, he has, disregarding all norms of society, shamelessly hitched himself for the fourth time to another “holy” wedlock. Can SOS remain silent over this Unholy Alliance?! While no one questions this Rabid Romeo’s virility one must question his Rabbit Immorality. SOS is bound hand and foot by the laws of this our adopted land, but yet not to speak out would be the act of a coward! It is the paramount duty of SOS to our brothers and sisters in Golden Goa to expose the Dark Deeds of the Dastardly Bigamist—the Outsider culprit “NPG” and the poor, innocent victim, “RD” of Merces!! May Justice Prevail! “Truth Will OUT!” be Ever Our Motto! God bless our Beautiful Land! Goa for Goans!! Dev Borem Korum. Your ever Vigilant Editor and Keeper of Goa’s Moral Fiber, REMINGTON BENHUR QUADROS

Quadros published a hundred-odd copies of the four-page newsletter every six months or so (Balance Sheet permitting). Besides the fulminating editorials (under the heading “Bird’s Eye View”), the pages contained news about weddings, births, dances, intervillage football tournaments staged by Goans in the U.K. and Canada, a matrimonial column titled “CinderThe

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w ella’s Golden Sandal,” and an obituary column. This column, called “R.I.P” with “A Tearful Adieu” in brackets, was the most avidly read. Some copies were sent off as complimentaries to people in Goa, Uganda, the U.S., and the U.K. by Quadros. This particular issue, denouncing the “Dastardly Bigamist,” reached the house of Vincent Braganza in Sutton, Surrey. Braganza, a retired railway official, had settled in the U.K. in the sixties. After a breakfast of kippers and marmite, he told his English wife, Elizabeth, “This man, Quadros, he seems to be going over the edge. Here, just read this.” Elizabeth read the editorial and laughed, “It’ll probably cause a storm in Goa!” “No, I don’t think so. Nobody takes this junk seriously. Jolly bad show though. But I wonder who this NPG with his four wives is?” “Why don’t you ask Oscar Menezes? He’s from Merces, isn’t he?” “Good idea.”

The following Sunday Braganza met Menezes at a GAA (Goa Abroad Association) meeting. The meeting, as usual, had deteriorated into a wordy war between members. They could not decide on the referees for a football match between Anjuna XI and Benaulim Boys. Finally, the members opted for an English referee as he would be “fair and neutral.” The menu for the St. Xavier’s Feast day also provoked much acrimony with one group of women championing sorpotel with pig’s blood and the other believing it tasted just as good and was more “refined” without it. A fiery debate also followed on whether to use “deseeded green chillies” or the “original red hot Salcete variety” for the chicken cafreal. The meeting was adjourned with the decision on the ingredients of the sorpotel and chicken cafreal deferred till the next “Get together on the gala occasion of the ExPresident of GAA Caetano Pimenta and his Ever Loving wife Anastasia’s Golden Jubilee Wedding Anniversary Celebration.” On their way out, Braganza, who had steered clear of the controversy, asked Oscar 138 1 The Baffler [no.20]

Menezes about the initials NPG and RD. Menezes thought for a while and said, “Could it be Naresh ‘Pixie’ Ghorpade?” Braganza said, “That’s impossible. He died six years ago.” Menezes shrugged, “Can’t think of anyone else. Some playboy he must be! Haven’t been to Goa for a few years now. The divorce rate there will soon match Britain’s. And RD? Could it be Rosy Dourado? Anyway, I have a cousin in Merces. I’ll post this to her. She’s a first-class gossip. She would know for sure.”

Two weeks later the newsletter arrived at Filomena Rodrigues’s old bungalow in Merces. She shivered with pleasure when she read the editorial and the initials of the “culprit” and the “victim.” It was she, later that evening, who broke the news to her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, at the Panjim fish market. Maravilha was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky bosom. “Did you know,” Filomena said in a breathless undertone, stuffing silver-black mackerels into a plastic bag, “Nikhil ‘Pinky’ Gole has married again?” Maravilha almost dropped the mullet and gasped, “What? Again?” “You just won’t believe,” hissed Filomena, eyes coruscating like a cat’s. “It’s his own secretary this time and she’s over forty plus! And he must be only twenty-six! And just you guess what, and this will shock you, ooo, she’s a Catholic!” Maravilha pressed her crucifix into her chest involuntarily. “Oh, Lord,” she exclaimed. “A forty-plus Catholic woman? What is the world coming to? And to that young rake!” After some more haggling by Maravilha, the two parted company, promising to “put their heads together” over the “scandalous business” later at home in Merces. Maravilha posted a chain-letter and crossed herself at a wayside shrine as she trudged towards the bus-stand.t

BRAD HOLLAND

The

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T O R I E S

Mr. Secondhand 3 Manohar Shetty

hen Cajetan Xavier sold his tenyear-old Vespa to buy a ten-yearold Maruti 800 it came as no surprise to the other residents of St. Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula. The wiry frame of Cajetan putt-putting on his aging scooter up the steep slope before the National Institute of Oceanography and in the hash-mark streets of Panjim was a familiar sight. In the colony itself he was a well-known figure as he tinkered with the old scooter, injecting it with a few more months of sustenance in his crowded makeshift garage, or as he rode up the slope to his house, the chassis, backseat, and handlebars loaded with bags of his weekly provisions. Other residents passing by in their swanky cars would often gesture if he needed any help with his load, but Caji was an independent sort and he would simply wave them on. They were now pleased and relieved to see him in the comparative safety of his car. A secondhand car, undoubtedly, but still safer than that old, rundown Vespa. Cajetan was quite content to live all alone at St. Jerome’s with a few daguerreotypes of his ancestors in tailcoats, hoary moustaches, and hats hanging from the walls of his dining room. He hired no maids and did his own frugal cooking, swept and swabbed his own floors, and kept his garbage out in the green and black dustbins provided by the Panjim municipal corporation. He attended Sunday Mass regularly in the village chapel nearby in his grey suit, off-white shirt, striped tie, and slightly scuffed shoes—his apparel never changing in all the years he had attended Mass at the chapel. The other residents of St. Jerome’s, who were not in the least bit surprised when he bought the secondhand car, wondered if he possessed another suit or formal shirt and tie. Behind his back they often passed catty comments. On his latest acquisition one

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said: “Maybe the government in Lisbon has doubled his pension.” “At last I think he has dipped into his savings . . . Such a skinflint,” said another. “Why can’t he buy something new for a change? Even on installments . . .” said his immediate neighbor, Hector Gonsalves. That last comment, even given its waspish tone, was most pertinent. Ever since Cajetan had settled in the colony all those years ago, none of the residents could recall him buying anything new. His purchase of the secondhand car after the sale of his secondhand scooter had followed a set pattern. His fellow residents knew that all the furniture in his house had been bought secondhand, some of it from the previous owner of the house and other pieces from households who had migrated to the Middle East or to Canada. The fans, the refrigerator, the cooking gas stove, and the mixer-juicer had all been bought from previous owners. There were rumors in the colony that even his clothes, including the Sunday suit and shoes, had been bought secondhand from Chor Bazaar in Bombay. No one knew for sure the antecedents of his crockery and cutlery. Some of the residents were even convinced that they had all been bequeathed to him by some kind families in Beira. To be fair to the Jeromites (as they called themselves), they were not off the mark on the used origins of Caji’s belongings, and on his cognomen “Mr. Secondhand.” Cajetan, indeed, harbored a compulsive fondness for used goods. But it was not a proclivity born out of stinginess or financial necessity. Caji simply liked old things and could not bear to discard used goods. He had a knack with discarded stuff, especially old machinery. With a deft touch of his hands and a reservoir of patience, he could inject new life into a discarded fan or air conditioner or carburetor. Cajetan hated throwing out old things and his makeshift garage and

M A R K S . FI S H ER

backyard were filled with rusted parts of all kinds of machineryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;domestic and vehicular. In fact, in Mozambique he had gained a reputation as something of a miracle worker with obsolete trucks and cars, farm machinery, water pumps, and such other mechanical goods. In the school he had taught in he was well known for fixing old laboratory equipment and machines and the cycles of his many students. It was this particular talent for creating born-again machinery that had forced him to flee the country. In the many internecine conflicts that had plagued Mozambique, Cajiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s services had often been called upon to repair jammed and rusted weaponry and quasi-military vehicles. Caji was a peaceable

man, neutral as Bern in his political views, and his services and talent had often been compelled into use by opposing forces. It was this double-edged situation he found himself in that had finally compelled him to leave Mozambique. He had tried to be impartial in his forced services, but in times of conflict this had proved to be a most inequitable position to be in. Thus he had reluctantly left the country and his chosen vocation. But in return for his many years of service, the Portuguese government still sent him his monthly pension. And he came away to Goa with his knack of repairing old machinery and other goods still intact. When any of the residents of St. Jerome approached him with a faulty mixer-cum-grinder or table fan, Caji The

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w was willing to extend a helping hand. And as he never charged for his services, there was an uncharitable element to his nickname “Mr. Secondhand.” Caji now enjoyed the comfort of his old car. With his adroit and versatile hands he had streamlined the engine, fixed the headlights with workable bulbs, set right the brake linings, and stitched a tear in the backseat. He had loved his trusted Vespa, but had been forced to get rid of it not because it had turned unreliable and obsolete, but because of a newfound status he had recently acquired—or was about to acquire. The clothes he wore, though old and worn, were now always freshly washed and ironed. And his shoes of late had acquired a shiny new look. Not that Caji was sloppy or untidily dressed in the past; it was only that now he took extra care with his demeanor and general appearance. Even the Maruti 800 had acquired a fresh coat of bright yellow paint, cadged no doubt from leftovers from friendly garages and Maruti repair facilities, but still in his capable hands made to extend to the length and breadth of his car. Only a few, like the nosey and sharp as a pine-leaf Isobel Cotta, noticed the change in Caji’s outlook and general behavior. “There is something afoot with Caji,” she said in a voice as tangy and astringent as cashew fruit. “He actually smiled and wished me good morning.” “Maybe he has received a Christmas bonus in his pension. That’s why he could buy that car,” said her friend Lavina, a retired clerk from the Cooperative Bank of Mapusa. “He seems just the same to me,” said Winston Dourado, who sold life insurance policies. “He still pays his premiums on the dot.” “Something is definitely afoot,” repeated Isobel, pursing her lips. Two weeks later, the “something afoot” took a clear and startling direction. The entire colony was agog with a shudder of excitement when each of the residents found an invitation card in their mailboxes. The card, embossed with silver bells at its four corners, simply read: 142 1 The Baffler [no.20]

John and Joanna Pacheco Graciously Invite You to the Nuptials of Their Daughter Christobel with Cajetan Xavier Son of (Late) Martin and (Late) Belinda Xavier (Chinchinnim) On January 25 At the Church of Mary Immaculate Conception, Municipal Square, Panjim At 5.30 pm Followed by Cocktails and Dinner at the Taj Holiday Village, Candolim At 8.30 pm No Presents Please

Though impressed by the Taj location and the polished tone of the invitation, the very first questions that the stunned residents of St. Jerome’s asked were, of course: “Who is Christobel Pacheco?” and “How old is she?” They wondered if she was the daughter of the Pachecos of Betalbatim village who owned “Pacheco Wines and Spirits” in the tinto. Or was she from the Pachecos of Rivona who had recently migrated to Portugal? Even with all their networking and crosschecking and church connections, the Jeromites could not figure out the provenance of the bride. Till one evening, Isobel and Lavina, armed with flowers and a bottle of wine, knocked on Cajetan’s door. He welcomed them warmly and invited them to sit on his carved, refurbished love seat—or that is what Isobel imagined it to be. After a few congratulatory offerings and some graceless hints, Caji opened up a little. He told them that the Pachecos were old friends and colleagues from Mozambique. And Christobel had been a primary school teacher in the very school he had taught in for many years in Beira. The two ladies told Caji how thrilled they were at this late union of two loving souls, with Lavina interjecting with the rather impolite remark: “Better late than never.” In his open happiness, the remark seemed to have no effect on Cajetan, who even divulged what they most wanted to hear: “She is fifty-four, six years my junior . . .” After the pair left with this precious bit of news, Isobel

remarked: “Fifty-four? Mr. Secondhand ties the knot with Miss Secondhand!” This rather predictable joke spread like a summer landclearing fire among the Jeromites, which was supplemented by: “Better late than never.” Another said, “Old wine tastes better.” Another wondered rather crudely if “Caji could rise to the occasion.” But knowing Caji’s frugal disposition, they were all agreed that this would be far from a lavish wedding. In this they were all mistaken. At the ceremony itself, among the older men, the polite good wishes turned to envy when they saw Christobel. Tall and stately, with dark, luminous hair, she smiled shyly as she accompanied Caji, attired in a brand new double-breasted suit, waistcoat and tie, and spanking new shoes, walking down the aisle of the church of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception in Panjim. And the reception that followed in the five-star hotel was truly grand with a six-minute-long fireworks display and a sumptuous dinner. And a most energetic and convivial wedding march, with the bride’s father giving a touching and humorous toast with remarks on “fine, mellow old spirit” and “the wisdom that comes with age.” The bride herself was most gracious, mingling diffidently with the other guests, speaking to those who knew the language in a Portuguese as refined and eloquent as any spoken by them. A few, of course, sat in a corner with their overweight and jaded husbands, remarking on her fair complexion and wondering if she had any Portuguese blood. That this allegation was wholly untrue did not prevent Isobel from making an acid comment on “oversexed” Portuguese officers stationed in Maputo and Beira. Such unpleasant remarks and the envy of over-the-hill spouses had no effect on the newly married couple. As soon as they had settled into Caji’s bungalow, Christobel set to work. She deweeded the garden, got the interiors of the house repainted, bought some (spanking new) kitchen equipment, imposed some sort of order into the garage-cumdumpyard, and quite easily convinced her

husband to make a down payment on a new Maruti car—with a substantial advance from her parents. And though Christobel, without her bridal makeup, looked closer to her age, there was an unbridled energy about her. She chatted with her neighbors and remained on cordial terms with her fellow Jeromites. There were rumors that she had been married before and that her previous husband had disappeared in the numerous civil wars that had besieged Mozambique, reinforcing the joke of Mr. Secondhand acquiring a secondhand bride. But Caji knew better. The Portuguese, despite all their failings, were masters at keeping records. Records of births, deaths, and marital status. And Caji still maintained contacts with the church and old friends at the registry in Beira . . . But in their newfound and profound happiness, the newly married couple didn’t give a fig—or a fig leaf—for unfounded gossip or past history. They were like nervous but giggly teenagers in their exploration of unknown territory. Their untried concupiscence reached their most tender depths. And Caji being Caji, he often ate the leftovers from Christobel’s plate and loved the taste of melted ice cream on her tongue.t

short story • Henry James’s “silvershod, sober-paced, short-stepping, but oh so hugely nosing, so tenderly and yearningly and ruefully sniffing, grey mule of the ‘few thousand words.’” shroff • In India, a banker or money

changer; in China, a detector of base coin. Shroffs possess a psychological night vision or sin-sight that makes them sharp probers of corporate chicanery and of diverse kinds of intellectual fraudulence. Successful prosecuting attorneys are often shroff-like in style and behavior. —Daniel Aaron

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T O R I E S

Bhutas 3 Saskya Jain

ant Ram did not have a drinking problem when he started working at the museum. That was a year ago. It was L.M. Pant, the museum’s director, who gave Sant Ram the job as a watchman. Sant Ram arrived in Delhi from the hills to stay with a cousin’s uncle, who was the museum’s head sweeper. The uncle went to the office to put in a good word for Sant Ram with the chief peon, who would pass it on to the personal secretary, who promised to mention it to the director. A few hours later—the sun had not quite reached its apex—the uncle went to the communal tap for a handful of water when he stopped short, body stiff, eyes wide. He collapsed to the floor, and was pronounced dead of a heart attack within the hour. Later that day, Sant Ram, the only blood relative present in the city, found himself accepting Pant Sahab’s condolences when the secretary whispered something in the director’s ear. Sant Ram was taken on immediately, going from jobless in the morning, to homeless at lunch, to gainfully employed by sunset. “I know you always suspected this,” Sant Ram wrote to his wife, Hansi, in a letter that night, “but now you can be absolutely sure that you are married to a blessed man. Thanks to God’s grace and Diwan Chacha’s death—may his soul be at peace—your husband has already found a job.” He thought of Billu, the village postman, reading his letter out to Hansi and added “A job in that glorious city of cities, Delhi.” It was the same Billu who had always taunted him at school because Sant Ram was afraid of birds, especially chickens. Sant Ram grinned to himself. He set the pen to the paper again. “Not just any small-time job like delivering things to other people,” he wrote, “but a real job, with one of the most powerful institutions in the world, the Government of India.” Before signing off, Sant Ram informed his wife that she was to pack up her belongings and take the next

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train to the city along with their young son. He promised that he would be assigned official housing “more or less at the time of your arrival.” Six months later, they were still sharing a room divided by an old bedsheet with another young family. “Big-shot promises, short-range results,” the other wife would say to Hansi as they leaned over their kerosene stoves on either side of the sheet, cooking dinner. “My husband is the same.” “Speak for yourself,” Hansi would reply as she pumped the little handle furiously to reignite the flame. A breeze was blowing through the door, which they left open during the day to disperse the fumes. “My husband—” “Works for the Government of India. The most powerful institution in the world, I know. Then why are you still living in a place in which one wall doubles as a handkerchief for the children?” “Speak for yourself,” Hansi said again, mumbling this time. Sant Ram began to leave for the museum earlier. “The heat,” he said to his wife. “You would know if you had to cycle across the city every day.” “All right, but don’t forget to ask Pant Sahab about housing,” Hansi whispered to him on his way out so the other wife wouldn’t hear. “You remind me every day, how could I forget?” he said as he mounted his bicycle. “Did you say something?” she called after him. He shook his head and waved. A few hours later, he was sitting on his rattan stool in the textile gallery. If only it were socially acceptable to marry pieces of furniture, he thought. His stool had served him loyally throughout these months, never questioning or reminding him of anything. He yawned and stretched his body, flexing his dangling feet

M A R K S . FI S H ER

to touch the floor with the tip of his shoes. Absently, he pulled a strand of rattan from the base of his stool and began to chew on it. The door of the gallery opened. Sant Ram turned. A young woman in a tie-dye salwarkameez stood in the entrance. Never mind furniture, Sant Ram thought. I just married the wrong woman. With a hearty puff the visitor blew a strand of thick, black hair out of her face and made a beeline for the brocades, clutching a sketchbook and box of colored pencils to her chest. She looked around. Sant Ram jumped up from his stool and brought it over to where she stood. “Thank you, bhaiyya,” she said with a smile and sat down.

A shiver ran through Sant Ram’s body. He glanced at the young lady’s behind lodged comfortably in the seat that had held his own sorry cheeks only moments before. He hovered around, watching the floral patterns behind the glass pane take shape on her sheet of paper. “Are you a famous painter, Madam?” “No.” “A famous actress with a flair for painting?” “Daddy says actresses are all body, no brains.” “You should tell your Daddy that his own daughter is all actress plus brains.” She giggled and turned to face Sant Ram. The Baffler ( No. 20) ! 145

w The back of her hand was still covering her mouth, and he could see her smooth, pink palm. “Why, Daddy didn’t tell me you’re such a joker.” “Daddy, Madam?” The young woman dug the tip of her elbow into her knee and rested her chin on her hand. “I’m Parul Pant, and I’m studying to be a world-famous designer.” From that day onwards, Parul came to the gallery several times a week. She told Sant Ram that she was on her summer break from college. Sometimes she brought friends; then she would greet him with a wave and a smile. Alone, she would often stand and chat, and he would carry his stool to wherever she had decided to sketch or study. At home, his wife had stopped whispering. “How much longer are we going to be holed up here like mice? I have half a mind to go speak to Pant Sahab myself!” Sant Ram got on his bicycle. He waved to his son and pushed down hard on the pedal. “You know what I think?” Hansi called after him. “I think Pant Sahab doesn’t even exist!” When Pant Sahab called Sant Ram into his office that day after he had helped Parul sketch by pointing out a flaw in the weave that he felt should be rendered accurately in her drawing, he was sure that his luck was about to change. He pictured himself coming home that evening, not speaking a word until he had finished most of his dinner, and then casually saying, “By the way, that Pant Sahab who doesn’t exist, he assigned me housing today.” The air-conditioned room was empty when Sant Ram entered. The chai-boy informed him that the director was in the new gallery. This was an annex to the main building, a separate room with its own entrance. Sant Ram found it and entered, but stopped short. The gallery was small. It had no windows, and its walls, floor, and ceiling were painted pitch black. Along the walls, one next to the other, stood towering figures of dark wood, each face illuminated by a spotlight. Most of the sculptures were taller than Sant 146 1 The Baffler [no.20]

Ram. The female ones had large breasts. Their hair was styled into intricate buns that looked like melons hanging behind each ear. They also had snarling, canine teeth. The male figures had horns and tongues protruding from their upturned heads. The tallest sculptures were human in form, but their heads came from all the animals Sant Ram thought he could imagine: boar, snake, cow, lion, dog, horse, and, yes, chicken. Some had multiple heads. Pant stood at the far end of the gallery next to a wooden figure. It was of a cow’s head and, to Sant Ram’s relief, a cow’s body. It was roughly the right size, too. Its eyes were raised to meet the director’s, and its tongue stretched out from between its smiling mouth as if to lick his hand. Pant had not noticed Sant Ram, who remained frozen by the door. “People don’t understand what it means to give your life to something, Samira,” Pant was saying to the cow. “I know you’d rather be back home than put on show here, but what kind of a life is that—rotting away in some shed, your beautiful wood eaten by white ants? Isn’t this much better?” Pant reached out to stroke the cow’s snout. Sant Ram cupped his hand to his right temple to eclipse the partial view of the chicken-headed figure. He scuffed his shoes against the floor. Pant looked up. “Ah, there you are.” He walked to where Sant Ram stood. “Welcome to your new office! I’m promoting you to this gallery. If you do this job well, you’ll have your housing.” Sant Ram felt a tickle as the hairs on his back stood along his spine. He gazed again at the tall figures, their eyes wide and bulging with malice, waiting to be provoked. He wondered whether Pant was testing him, or whether he truly believed him more capable than the other watchmen. “I envy you,” Pant said, and he clearly meant it. “I wish I could sit watching these gorgeous sculptures instead of signing files and attending meetings all day long.” He closed his eyes as if to listen to the soft rhythm coming from the speakers in each of the corners. Sant Ram could make out

drums, tambourines, and faint chants. He closed his eyes and thought of Parul. Perhaps he could persuade her to come here and sketch these monsters, or to design clothes to cover their hideous bodies, especially their faces. Seeing that the director was still lost in thought, Sant Ram carefully repositioned the watchman’s stool so that the chicken-headed figure was concealed by the boar-woman. “It’s an endless tape,” Pant said and opened his eyes. “So visitors can get a sense of the atmosphere of these nocturnal rituals. I want the room to feel like perpetual night. I recorded these songs myself. Twenty-five years ago, as a student. The Bhuta cult—” “Bhuta, Sir?” Sant Ram swallowed. Bhuta meant ghost. “Yes, Sant Ram. Ancestor worship. Cult of the dead. Fascinating. They’ve pretty much died out today, but—” Pant looked at Sant Ram. “Are you all right?” Sant Ram removed his fingers from his ears. “Yes, Sir.” “Good. So watch them carefully. Each piece is worth a fortune.” Pant rapped his knuckle on the potbelly of a man with a lion’s head and left. The door closed behind him, and Sant Ram was alone. Was Pant punishing him? Perhaps Parul had said something? He dismissed the thought: she had been as friendly as ever. Yet Pant had made himself clear. If he did his job well, he would have housing. Sant Ram stood still and didn’t breathe. The music playing in the background seemed to be getting louder. He could not tell whether it was light or dark outside through the tinted glass of the door. He felt his heart pounding against his ribs and wondered whether he was already possessed. Don’t make eye contact, he told himself before sinking onto his stool. As he turned towards the door to see if by some chance Parul was walking past, he thought he saw the boarwoman’s pupils move.

hree weeks later, it was lunchtime. The gallery was empty. Sant Ram stroked the wooden tongue of the cow with his fingers. He had renamed it Bhola Ram, partly

after himself and partly after their buffalo back in the village. “What can I say, Bhola Ram?” Sant Ram tickled its ears. “I know you think I’ve been neglecting my family, but the wife simply won’t leave me in peace until I get housing. Frankly, the more she pesters me, the less I want Pant Sahab to offer it to me. I’ll send her back to the village! But then, as soon as I get it, I can ask to be transferred back to Textiles.” He poked his finger into a flaring nostril. “No offense, but this room is not for me.” He felt beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He lowered his voice to a whisper and stealthily pointed at the other figures in the room. “The only reason they haven’t harmed me yet is because they’re scared Pant Sahab will send them back to the white-ants.” He spoke normally again. “Anyway, you have to admit that Raju would be better off in the village. He’s three now. He won’t start school for another two years at least. Let him breathe the pure village air again, don’t you think?” “You’re talking to a piece of wood.” Sant Ram spun around. “Hansi!” He had not heard her come in. “What are you doing here?” He added, “And it’s not just a piece of wood. Pant Sahab said—” “Pant Sahab is as nutty as an almond thandai. The librarian told me she saw him climb the banyan tree in the museum courtyard yesterday to hang up a set of terracotta birds. He could have gotten anyone to do it for him, but she said he was so content, sitting up there in the branches.” “The librarian? How long have you been here?” “Since morning.” “How did you get here? You’ve never even—Don’t touch that!” Hansi was probing the edge of the wooden sword in the hand of the lion-man. Sant Ram grabbed his wife’s arm and pulled her away, mumbling an apology to the figure. Hansi gave him a sly look. “It’s never a good sign when a man is more frightened of a log than of his wife.” She smiled at him. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” She sat down on his stool. “Someone will see you here, Hansi, and The

Baffler [no.20] ! 147

w then we’ll never get housing.” “They’re already watching us,” she said and nodded at the sculptures. Sant Ram shivered. He wiped his forehead. Hansi pulled him closer by the sleeve. “What’s this?” She smiled at him for the first time in months. “All work and no masti?”

t ten minutes after five during Sant Ram’s fourth week at the new gallery, he locked the door and made his way to the director’s office. In the days he had spent in what he came to see as his jail cell, with the sculptures as his wardens and fellow prisoners, he had developed strategies to safeguard himself. (1) A short prayer to appease their wrath as soon as he unlocked the gallery in the morning; (2) no hateful or mocking thoughts directed against them, though feelings of dread were permitted; and (3) though he was certain that they looked at and possibly moved towards him whenever he turned his back, he had decided that he would light them on fire should they do so in front of him. For this purpose, he now always carried a box of matches in his pocket, which he would occasionally take out and twirl between his fingers as a subtle but unambiguous warning. Still, he felt as if he was working two jobs. He was museum watchman and shaman, and he was convinced that it was only a matter of time before the sculptures figured out that he was a fraud with no real powers against them. Thus he had survived four weeks in the Bhuta gallery, but the previous night he had stayed up coming to the conclusion that he wanted housing for his family, but not at the cost of his life. He requested a meeting with Pant Sahab that morning, hoping to negotiate a return to the textile gallery without compromising his chances for housing. He knocked on Pant Sahab’s door. “Come in!” Pant was sitting behind his desk, his reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose. “What can I do for you, Sant Ram?” “Sir, I don’t know how to say this to you.” He looked at his feet. “Don’t say anything. I think I know what you’re here for.” 148 1 The Baffler [no.20]

“You do?” At that moment, the door swung open, and Parul walked in. “Hi, Daddy. Namaste, Sant Ramji.” She gave her father a kiss on the shiny dome of his head and plopped down in a chair. “Why did you send Sant Ram into exile to that horrid place, Daddy? Now I have to sit on the floor whenever I go to Textiles.” Tears filled Sant Ram’s eyes. “Your daughter is so intelligent, Sir. People will sing songs of praise in her name one day.” “Unlikely,” Pant said. He turned to his frowning daughter. “I will arrange for a stool to be kept for you in Textiles.” Pant returned to his files. Sant Ram looked at Parul, who smiled at him and shrugged. “Sir?” “Yes?” Pant looked up. He seemed confused to see the watchman standing before him. “You said you knew what I wanted to speak to you about?” “Ah, yes. Of course. You want your position at the Bhuta gallery to be made permanent.” He pointed his pen at Sant Ram and grinned at his daughter. “I knew I had the right fellow as soon as I hired him. He’s got the real stuff, as they say. It’s true dedication, I tell you.” “Daddy never gives praise like that!” Both father and daughter beamed at him, nodding their heads in approval. “Actually, Sir—” “Oh, and before I forget. Your order for housing has come through.” Pant dug through his papers and pulled out a sheet. “I had them put it all in one order—your house and your position with the Bhutas. Saves some paper. All this bureaucracy can be so wasteful. Anyway, sign here and you’ve killed two birds with one stone: seventeen Bhutas a day keeps homelessness away. I thought of that earlier.” “You’re a real hero, Sant Ram,” Parul said. “I’ll come visit you sometime.”

fter his meeting with Pant and the move into the government quarter, Sant Ram added the fourth and single most

effective strategy to his list: rum. He allowed himself a few swigs before he began duty and a few more once the stream of visitors thinned at about noon. He soon discovered that the thought of being imprisoned in the room with these creatures became more bearable once his vision blurred slightly. The door opened. When Sant Ram turned he saw that it was his wife. “Why aren’t you at home?” he asked. “Our new place is so close to the museum that I just thought I’d say hello.” “You came to check on me. You got your housing. Now leave me in peace.” Sant Ram sat up a bit too quickly. He heard the rum splash about inside the glass bottle strapped to his naked chest underneath his shirt. “What’s that sound?” “My stomach. I just drank some water.” “I think I smell alcohol.” “It’s your imagination. The Bhutas are getting to you. I think it’s time for you to leave.” “Fine, I’ll leave. But you better not be up to something or I’ll personally get in touch with each of these fellows to find a way to punish you.” Sant Ram curled his lips into a pout and turned his head away from his wife, but when he heard the door close behind her he clasped his hands together to keep them from shaking. This room would be his chamber of death! A group of schoolchildren on a field trip would come in one day in the not-sodistant future and find his cold body curled up in the corner. He felt anger gathering in his stomach. As if he didn’t have enough trouble keeping the Bhutas under control! What kind of a wife would threaten her hardworking husband with instigating his own wardens against him? One more word and he would send her back to the village. He raised his eyes and scanned the room. The Bhutas stared back at him, their eyes filled with scorn. He got up. The room was like a tiffin box, all smells were stuck inside. He opened the door and swung it back and forth several times. “Hey, there! What are you doing?” It was Parul.

“Nothing,” he said and held the door open for her. “Just supplying the Bhutas with some fresh air.” They both stepped into the gallery. “What a terrible hole,” Parul said as she looked around. “But Daddy is so proud of you!” “All I want is to make your father happy.” He smiled and dusted off the seat of his stool. After a quick, imploring glance at the figures, he invited Parul to sit. She fanned herself with her purse. “What smells funny in here?” “Just the heat.” Sant Ram took the purse from her hand and started fanning her at twice the speed. The door opened. “What’s going on here?” Hansi was standing in front of them, arms akimbo. The purse dropped into Parul’s lap. “Hansi, this is Pant Sahab’s daughter. Parulji, this is my wife.”

nother week passed. Sant Ram was asleep on his stool, his body slumped against the wall and the buttons of his shirt undone down to his chest. A bottle was tucked into his shirt, and with every inhalation, the rise of his stomach pushed it into sight for a few seconds. He awoke with a start. The bottle tumbled from his shirt onto the floor with a clang. It was empty. He sat up and looked around,

P. S . M U E L L ER

The

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w rubbing his eyes. He had dreamed that he was a fox walking along the hilly paths of his native Garhwal on his hind legs, dressed in a tie-dye salwar-kameez. He wiped the sweat from his face and closed his eyes again for a moment, listening to the familiar music playing from the speakers. What if someone had seen him? He looked around. The gallery was deserted. He hoped that nobody had watched him sleep and complained. It must be lunchtime. He would air out the gallery and talk to some of the guards outside to be sure he wasn’t in trouble. What luck! Maybe he was blessed after all. He relaxed against the wall for a few seconds, stretching his body and burping at length. Enough! he told himself. These figures were turning him into a beast. He buttoned up his shirt and straightened his hair. As he hid the bottle underneath his stool, he promised himself that he would throw it out that evening and never buy another. A giggle rose in his stomach. A bottle of rum every day keeps seventeen Bhutas at bay, he thought. “What do you think of that, Pant Sahab?” he said out aloud, hiccuping. He got up and walked to the door. The ground seemed to move slightly under his feet. He reached for the handle and pushed it. The door jammed. He pushed again, harder this time. Still, it did not open. He kicked it and shoved it with his body; he hammered the glass with his fist. Then he stopped to investigate the handle. The door was locked. From the outside. Maybe I’m still drunk and this is a dream, Sant Ram thought. He checked his arm for reddish-grey fur. There was none. Nor were his ears pointy. He shook the door handle again, and suddenly he had the strong sensation of nearby presences. He was convinced that if he turned around, the figures would be standing in a close semicircle around him. As he strained to look through the tinted glass of the door, he saw a note taped to it from the outside. It read: “We know you’re drunk! If you can’t guard the figures during the day, at least learn to do so at night.” It was signed “Parul Pant.” Next to it he made out a purplish thumb imprint that 150 1 The Baffler [no.20]

he could only assume belonged to his wife. Had the women gone mad? He would show his wife to make friends with the high and mighty of this world! That was his job! Then it struck him: Night! It was night, and he was locked in a room full of spirits who had been given command of solid bodies twice his size. What would they do to him? What would they not do to him? He spun around and pushed his back against the door. The figures flew back to their spots as he turned. Had the child with the horse’s head always been to the right of the boar-woman, or had they traded places? They were going to drive him mad before tearing out his limbs one by one like scrawny weeds. He walked to his stool, keeping the gallery in his view. As long as he kept his eyes on them, they would not move; he had learned that much in the weeks he had guarded them. It was only when he looked to the side or closed his eyes for a moment that they took liberties with him. He would switch off the music, he thought. That would dampen their spirits! The tape recorder was kept on a small, raised shelf; he would have to climb on his stool to switch it off. It would be impossible to do so without turning his back. He checked the bottle of liquor to be sure it was empty. He unscrewed it and licked the rim and as much of the neck as he could reach with his tongue. Then he sat down on his stool and cried. When he raised his head again, he saw that it was too late. They had started moving. The boar-woman, the horse-child, the lion-man, even his always faithfully inanimate cow—they had set their limbs in motion and were slowly coming closer. At their head was the chickenfigure. The room began to swim as more tears ran from his eyes. He remembered the box of matches in his pocket, but he could not move. It was as if they had poured glue on his stool. The only thing he noticed was that the boar-woman’s breasts were glistening and, in a moment of lucidity, he realized that it came from the greasy hands of visitors who must have rubbed them whenever he had turned his head. Sant Ram screamed. He felt the glue on his seat loosen. He jumped up and charged.

He had intended to lift himself up to the chicken-monster’s face and poke out its eyes, which had come alive with its body, but when he grabbed the extended arm for support, it came off at the joint and he landed on the floor. Turning on his belly, he jumped up, the piece of log raised above his head like a baton, and charged once again, this time in the opposite direction. Before the other guards realized what had happened, Sant Ram had broken down the door and was running through the compound. He ran to the front gate, grabbed his bicycle from the stand, pushed it past the sleeping guard, and sped down the main road. He had been cycling at top speed for several minutes before he realized he was not heading homewards. He also noticed the piece of wood clutched under his arm, and felt a sharp pain in his right hand. He turned around. Nobody was following him. The roads were deserted and, except for the circles of light around the street lamps, pitch dark. He stopped and lifted his bicycle onto the pavement to sit down in the grassy patch behind it. Dark droplets had formed on his knuckles. He felt a shard of glass stuck in his skin and pulled it out. Then he picked up the piece of wood. The surface was smooth, and he could make out the wrist and hand attached to it. He clutched the dowel that had held the forearm in place at a right angle to the upper arm and realized what he had done.

hen Sant Ram awoke, it was morning. He scrambled to find the piece of wood before he saw that he had slept on it. He asked a passerby for the time. It was a quarter past nine. Pant Sahab would already have heard, but he would still be at home. He lived just a few minutes away in a government house. During the night, Sant Ram had cycled towards it. He tucked the arm into the sprung clasp of his back-carrier before mounting his bicycle. When he reached the Pant residence, there was a small crowd assembled in front of it. Pant’s driver, the guards from the neighboring galleries and from the front gate stood

in a semicircle around the director. Behind him was Parul; next to her stood Hansi. The guards must have decided to inform the director about the night’s events collectively to reduce their individual blame. When they saw Sant Ram approaching, the group fell silent. “Here comes our hero,” he heard one of the guards say. “He’s got the missing piece,” another one added. Sant Ram carried the wooden arm like a bouquet of flowers and handed it to Pant. “Thank God,” Pant said, and gave it to Parul, who passed it to the driver, who carried it to the car parked in the driveway. “Now would you care to explain what in heaven’s name you were thinking? Getting drunk on my premises and then breaking down a door using not, mind you, the stool—” Pant’s voice rose as he spoke, “or any other fucking object you could have found in that gallery, but an arm, an arm from one of my sculptures!” Sant Ram kept his eyes on his boss’s sandals. “Your drunkenness is enough to suspend you. I’ll never know how much embarrassment you caused me in front of my visitors. I had no idea! If Parul hadn’t found you—” Sant Ram looked at Parul. Their eyes met briefly before she turned away. “Mind you, it wasn’t my idea to lock you into that room, but that’s how you repay me? For all that I have done for you? I mean, what didn’t I do for you? I picked you up from the streets and gave you this job, I promoted you, and you can’t even spend a few extra hours in my gallery? And with such gorgeous, priceless pieces nonetheless! Instead you break down doors? Answer me!” “I’m sorry, Sir.” “You’re sorry? That’s it?” Sant Ram hung his head. “I get it. You think you’re too good for this job. You’d rather be sitting in an air-conditioned room and ride around in the back of a car. Well, let me tell you something. You have to work to achieve that. I am where I am today because I never thought I was too good for anything. Here, let me show you how it’s The

Baffler [no.20] ! 151

w done.” He handed his briefcase to Parul and strode down the driveway. The other men exchanged glances. Sant Ram jogged after him. The driver ran ahead and opened the door of the white Ambassador, but Pant marched past him towards Sant Ram’s bicycle parked behind the car. Pant undid the stand, swung himself onto the seat, and began to pedal. The men sprung into action. The driver slammed the door and reversed the car to follow his boss down the road. The other men ran towards their own bicycles. Sant Ram raced to catch up with his boss. “Sir, what are you doing, Sir?” He ran alongside the director. “I’m showing you how it’s done.” “I know how to ride a bicycle, Sir.” “Don’t be smart. I gave you a chance and you ruined it.” “Sir, I’m really sorry, Sir. Just one more chance, Sir.” A bicycle bell sounded from behind. “Slow down, Daddy!” When Sant Ram looked to his left, he saw Parul on her red Hero Lady. He could see Hansi’s hands grabbing Parul’s waist as she sat perched on the back of the bicycle. They turned on to the main road. Pant looked at his daughter in surprise, then, returning his stern gaze to the road, slowed down so that they were cycling at one level. Sant Ram jogged between the two vehicles. “It was the Bhutas that made me do it, Sir. I swear on my mother’s good health. They

came at me and they were going to eat me alive if I didn’t get out of there. So I panicked. I grabbed the closest arm and it came off, just like that, and that’s when I had realized I could escape.” Pant was still looking straight ahead. “You know it’s true, Sir! We both speak their language.” “Definitely true,” Hansi yelled to the director. “I saw him talk to the cow, and I swear on my son’s grades it nodded its head in response. Please don’t suspend my husband, Sahabji!” “It’s really my fault, Daddy. I should have just come to you instead of listening to her!” “With all due respect, Parul Madam, he’s my husband, and I won’t watch him turn into a drunkard! I mean, I won’t watch him go crazy.” Sant Ram noticed that the director’s brow relaxed. He had found his rhythm and was no longer out of breath. When he looked around, he saw that a fleet of bicycles had gathered around them, forming a cocoon. Most sweepers, tea-boys, and guards took the main road to the museum, and word of the director’s new ride had spread fast. They cycled in front, behind, and on either side of Pant and his daughter to protect them from the traffic; they made a shield between them and the Ambassador rolling along at a slow speed. As the cavalcade of bicycles took the final turn down the road leading to the museum, Pant turned to Sant Ram. “Hop on,” he said.t

smoucher • Walt Whitman’s word for one who “deceives, cheats, or pilfers.” Smouchers aren’t confined to any particular class or occupation or physical type (although they are often fancied as heavy men with jowls) and in general look pretty much like the rest of us. However they are morally tettered (scaled or patched) and spiritually akin to roorbacks (spreaders of political lies) and to makebates (instigators of discord and strife). Smouchers are thoroughly corrupt at birth and leak poison. —Daniel Aaron 152 1 The Baffler [no.20]

V I C TO R K ER LOW

[ S a lvos ]

Accountants for Taste The Pew Charitable Trusts 3 David D’Arcy

n the fall of 2006, Philadelphia faced what looked like a cultural crisis. The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins’s dramatic 1875 painting of Philadelphia surgeon Samuel Gross operating on a man’s thigh before an audience of colleagues and students, went up for sale; local medical school Thomas Jefferson University owned the iconic canvas. And the would-be buyers, offering $68 million, were a pair of out-of-town museums that had joined forces—the National Gallery of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum, a shrine (then under construction) to the Walmart fortune in Bentonville, Arkansas. Philadelphians who heard the news feared that the picture—considered the greatest ever painted in the Quaker city—would leave. But the medical school feared losing a big payday. It had acquired the painting for $200, and was then in the middle of a $500 million expansion; it took no great feat of university accounting to work out that it was time to sell. Walmart heiress Alice L. Walton, Crystal Bridges’s founder and board chair, certainly had the cash. In what looked like a pro forma gesture to civic duty, Thomas Jefferson gave the city forty-five days to match her offer. Philadelphia had already suffered its share of embarrassments, beyond chronic abuses by politicians, policemen, and priests. But now a crown jewel of the city representing the triumph of medical science as a secular sacrament, which depicted the surgeon as a Moses figure, was on the verge of falling into the hands of Arkansas’s nouveaux billionaires. Into action leapt the Pew Charitable Trusts, the $5 billion, Philadelphia-based fund that had reconstituted itself over several decades from a private family foundation into a philanthropic powerhouse. The modern Pew had long been an outsize presence in the struggling City of Brotherly Love, hand-

PHIL ADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART | PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS

ing out fantastic sums of money and lobbying public officials for its pet projects. With boosterish rhetoric and arm-twisting of local patrons, Pew leveraged its influence with politicians who had the loudest voices, such as then Governor Ed Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, who admitted that he had never seen The Gross Clinic. The Pew offensive soon succeeded, matching Alice Walton’s offer with donations from all over the city that conferred joint, local custody of the picture on the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. And so Walmart’s advance was halted at the Liberty Bell. Or was it? In stopping the Walmart acquisition, Pew revealed a side of its high-toned operation that dismayed many in the interconnected worlds of art and philanthropy. In order to acquire The Gross Clinic, the two Philadelphia institutions that were its new custodians had to unload other works by The

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] Art is only as good as the traveling public’s willingness to pay for it—a functionalist standard that defers to the market as the de facto arbiter of cultural value.

9 Eakins, paintings that Philadelphians would now have little chance of seeing again. Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson University, smelling even more money, was emboldened to sell a different Eakins painting to the same dreaded Walmart heirs. But Pew was Big Charity, the Walmart of its own field, not to be outdone in a battle of family fortunes. Once it identified its interests, it did not lose. Like Walmart, Pew made over the market that it conquered in its own image. The Eakins rescue showcased Pew’s operational force in Philadelphia, its capacity for leveraging its influence in the mad scramble for scarce cultural funds. Yet the implications of its sheer weight in cultural policy don’t stop at that city’s limits. Every arts group in the country wants Pew’s money, which comes with a price. Lesser institutions are told how to use art to generate tourism and cash, to mobilize McCultural blandness to attract cultural consumers. To organizations whose missions are not favored in the commercial marketplace, Pew’s generosity looks more like indifference. Art is only as good as the traveling public’s willingness to pay for it—a functionalist standard that defers to the market as the de facto arbiter of cultural value. As Pew put it in a set of talking points formulated to rally support for buying The Gross Clinic: “Eakins created a painting about Philadelphia, to represent to millions of visitors the ‘world-class’ excellence and modernity of his city.” The pitch sounded more like a Chamber of Commerce slogan than a charity’s mission statement; it seemed more suited to Las Vegas than to the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia museums retained a masterpiece. The local powerbrokers got a fetish object, and the tabloids scored a win for the Pew-led home team. Meanwhile, walk beyond Philadelphia’s new Museum Mile and 154 1 The Baffler [no.20]

you’ll find forty thousand abandoned properties, many of them row houses in a distinctive architectural vernacular—even the brick home where Rocky Balboa grew up in Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 hymn to the city. At the ground level, the city’s culture, like its schools, is decomposing. The labor to address that challenge is enormous and uncertain, and likely thankless, even for an imperious charity accustomed to stroking from the media. But instead of taking on the task, Pew has seized on shiny trophies like The Gross Clinic, which is less a painting than a monument—like the Rocky Statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, although the Main Line Pews wouldn’t have given Sylvester Stallone the time of day.

ehind Pew’s pursuit of The Gross Clinic lay a belief in centralized, foundationbased planning that assumes culture is a commodity to be monetized, requiring farsighted investment portfolios. The lords of Pew codified this approach into a strategy of cultural manifest destiny, announced in a 1999 paper called “Optimizing America’s Cultural Policies”—later changed to “Optimizing America’s Cultural Resources” to avoid the Orwellian ring of a cultural policy in a country that never declared one. Pew decided to make grants “to build the research, data, and information base for cultural policy analysis and decision making,” as noted in a study prepared by an MIT professor working in a Pew-funded program at the University of Chicago. The goal of “optimization,” Pew executives said, was to get as many people as possible talking about the many ways in which culture was involved in their daily lives, and to rally broad public support for cultural activities. But as the New York Times noted at the time of the project’s launch, a key aim, despite the

[

Scots Presbyterian, was a farmer in western Pennsylvania, forty miles from where oil was first struck in Titusville. He went on to make a fortune selling and shipping oil and gas, and, in 1886, founded the Sun Company (later, Sun Oil, and, later still, Sunoco). Connections to Philadelphia were always part of the enterprise. After the 1901 Spindletop strike in Texas, Pew’s firm sent crude to the city to be refined. And after the patriarch died in K ATH E R I N E S TR E E TE R 1912, the family made money shifting nomenclature, was to shape governfrom a Philadelphia shipyard they built durment policy in cultural affairs: to show “that a ing World War I. Timing worked in the Pews’ case for more government money for the arts favor. Since the clan’s holdings were in land can be made with data the Pew will collect.” and industry in the twenties, rather than in That ambition faltered, however, and as the stock market, the Pews grew even richer government at all levels has divested from arts during the Great Depression. They jumped funding, Pew has assumed a larger role in its on distressed properties in the United States own design. “Optimizing America’s Cultural and Europe then, and got out of their EuroResources” pointed the way forward for Pew pean investments before World War II. to research and fund a national cultural infra Charity for the Pews was discreet and local structure for which Pew alone would be the whenever it went beyond the family’s strict matrix. Forget for a moment the old talk of Presbyterianism and Republican zealotry. a big arrogant charity built on an oil fortune Joseph Newton Pew Jr., a son of the foundand operated like Exxon. That’s all here, of er, spent millions to block Wendell Willkie course. But in centralizing an information from the Republican ticket in 1940, but when matrix about the consumption habits of its it came time to release a Pennsylvania delegaclient base, massaging demand in advance, tion pledged to its governor in order to stop and promoting a bottom-line dependency Willkie from prevailing at the party’s conthat few nonprofits can refuse, Pew looks a lot vention, Pew’s butler wouldn’t disturb him in more like a marketing conglomerate. his bath. When Joe Jr.’s older brother, the ur Which is to say that it’s a long time since conservative J. Howard Pew, died in 1971, he the days when oil first made the Pew family’s left an estate valued at some $100 million to fortune. The Pews had been rich for decades the Pew Freedom Trust, whose mandate was before Pew philanthropies were formed in to make grants to causes opposing “Social1948. The clan first glided into long-term ism, welfare-state-ism, Marxism, Fascism, prosperity in the mid-nineteenth century. Joand any other like forms of government inseph Newton Pew, an abstemious abolitionist tervention.” Just a year earlier, J. Howard had The

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] The use of the word “culture,” instead of art—together with the proto-scientific “data”—suggests a sunny populist openness to the American arts scene, while casually annexing a more extensive territory of funding activity.

9 decided that Princeton University—formerly the intellectual center of fundamentalist theology—“had too many communists,” and so Pew Freedom Trust bought a Carmelite seminary outside Boston to establish the GordonConwell Theological Seminary. Its theology, like the founder’s politics, veered toward the extreme right. The Sun Oil Company prospered as the culture of the automobile overtook Cold War America. Pew heirs set up seven trusts, according to Waldemar Nielsen’s The Golden Donors, which chronicles the 1948 founding and subsequent evolution of the Pew Charitable Trusts. By the early seventies, when the funds totaled more than $600 million, some in the younger generations were leaning liberal, and Pew dollars went to hospitals of all faiths as well as to Presbyterian and evangelical groups. Pew had so much money that Glenmede Trust Company, a private bank that the family had established in 1956 to run their charities and manage the family’s money, was under pressure to find new places to hand it out to. In the eighties another generation of Pews and Sunoco executives overhauled the charities and replaced a company executive with a tall, handsome figurehead, Thomas Langfitt, a Pew adviser on health and a neurosurgeon on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Langfitt specialized in head trauma, which he studied in the university’s lab by subjecting baboons to the crushing impact of skull injuries. Langfitt was a respected physician and researcher, but he came into the Pew family’s employ after a scandal. His Penn lab, suspected by animal rights activists of abuses, was infiltrated, and the activists released edited videos made by researchers of experiments in which baboons’ skulls were smashed. The 156 1 The Baffler [no.20]

tapes showed lab personnel laughing blithely at the carnage. The publicity surrounding the brutal tests triggered an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Langfitt and his team told the feds that the apes were anesthetized—a claim that the evidence flatly contradicted. At the end of the whole episode, the university reprimanded Langfitt and a colleague, and the USDA fined Penn $4,000 for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. In 1987, Langfitt decamped to head the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Glenmede Trust Company. Langfitt fired most of the Pew’s philanthropic management, enriched himself—he led his peers among foundation chiefs with a $560,000 salary—and hastened the foundation’s rapidly changing priorities. Under Langfitt’s stewardship, Pew’s portfolio of charitable awards—often given anonymously—retreated from long-standing grantees that cared for the blind and the mentally disabled and moved toward culturally secular causes that Langfitt favored, such as advanced medical training and health care reform. By 1994, when Langfitt was pushed aside at Glenmede in favor of a seasoned money manager, Pew was a rich place, and it was getting richer. Unlike the J. Paul Getty Trust, which had set a parallel course to operate as a fullscale culture-backing powerhouse of philanthropy in the eighties, Pew didn’t wear down its endowment with costly architectural projects or erode its credibility defending its employees in lawsuits involving the purchase of looted art. And unlike older and more baldly corporate-branded funders such as the Philip Morris Companies, which courted cultural influence via lavish arts sponsorships, Pew faced no broader reckoning in the court of public

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the media, a high priority for the once-reclusive Pew—at least so long as the scribblers in question are focused on praise rather than critical scrutiny. And there’s plenty of praise. The Pew’s national arts “optimization” initiative, the Cultural Data Project, collects information on who makes and consumes culture all over the United States. The use of the word “culK ATH E R I N E S TR E E TE R ture,” instead of art—together opinion, which prompted Philip Morris to rewith the proto-scientific “data”—suggests a brand itself and take its arts support overseas. sunny populist openness to the American arts Still, Langfitt’s most enduring legacy scene, while casually annexing a more extensive territory of funding activity. The stated proved to be his protégée Rebecca Rimel, an goal is to help arts organizations operate more emergency room nurse and one-time instrucefficiently, and to promise a similarly optitor at the University of Virginia. Rimel met mized return on investment for groups that Langfitt as a student of head trauma in 1979, give money away. Part of that process involves joined Pew in 1983, and took the reins in 1994; a standardized grant application that can be now sixty-two, she is still Pew’s president and sent to multiple institutions, reminiscent of chief executive officer. Rimel presided over the baroque set of applications and financial its signature 1999 initiative, “Optimizing aid forms dispatched to college aid adminisAmerica’s Cultural Policies,” which launched trators. Pew’s claim is that it is merely providits quest to become America’s de facto arbiter ing an infrastructure for a field that lacks one: of efficiency in resource allocation.

ulture management is one of Pew’s many causes. The charity also funds research in medicine, education, the environment (especially oceanography and overfishing), media (a favorite is National Public Radio, nicknamed National Pew Radio by some NPR staffers), voter participation, and lots of Philadelphia-based initiatives. But its culture management will have the largest impact, because the $5 billion charity gives away many millions annually. The sheer scale of the operation wins plenty of attention from

(CDP) is a powerful, online management system designed to strengthen the arts and cultural sector. The CDP is an emerging national standard that gathers reliable, longitudinal data on arts and cultural organizations. The project enables participating arts organizations to track trends and benchmark their progress through sophisticated reporting features, empowers researchers and advocates with information to make the case for arts and culture, and equips funders with data to plan and evaluate grant-making activities more effectively. The

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] Leave aside the uninspiring language describing a project supposedly dedicated to cultural excellence, and the mission to convene state arts organizations in what, in the name of efficiency, seems to duplicate the bureaucratic functions of the much-maligned National Endowment for the Arts. Pew proposes to manage information-gathering and grant evaluation for nonprofit groups on a state-bystate basis. Some states have already signed on, as they seek to bring recession-battered budgets under tighter control. But what do they gain, besides a softer bottom line? Will they earn good faith from Pew, which might eventually “invest,” as Pew puts it, in local programs? Arts groups and their state councils are eager to participate, and they tailor their pitches to what Pew seems to like. We always knew that there was no accounting for taste. What’s troubling is that there is simply no accountability; Pew doesn’t need to show results for a funding base or a state-financed arts public. And when it decides that this or that project doesn’t meet the optimal criteria of funding efficiency, there’s nothing to stop the charity from pulling the plug. There’s a paradox here, rooted in a misunderstanding. The Cultural Data Project “empowers researchers and advocates with information to make the case for arts and culture.” What about the case for projects that don’t have an obvious market, or, God forbid, don’t

voice of bloods • Swedenborg explains this phrase in his Dictionary of Correspondence: “for whosoever bears hatred towards his brother, kills him in his heart.” The voice of bloods is the unspoken seething utterances, the violent conversation inwardly conducted, the ravenous fancy of the soiled self, the criminal thought entertained in the dreams of day and night. For further explication, see Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Fancy Show Box” and the entry “hellbox” in Daniel’s Dictionary. —Daniel Aaron 158 1 The Baffler [no.20]

have a flair for marketing themselves? What about arts groups and nonprofits that just need money? Pew’s quantitative metrics come from the box office: access, measurable impact, and volume of consumer interest that an arts initiative can generate. Eager to show broad support for an already broadly defined notion of culture, the foundation typically bankrolls projects that drive popular taste further down-market. Pew’s favored exercises in market populism, hatched to please politicians and duly optimized publics, end up, in practical terms, flattering tourists and local heritage rackets. There’s a regional center celebrating the steelmaking culture of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio; there’s the restoration of Philadelphia’s Independence Mall (and Pew’s building of a $20 million visitors’ center); there’s a mural-painting project in Philadelphia that foregrounds the work of graffiti artist Stephen Powers, who once used the walls of his neighborhood there as an illegal canvas. And there’s support (declared every half-hour) for arts programming on National Public Radio, which is bound to produce admiring dispatches on these undertakings, or others just like it, at some future airdate. All these boosterish endeavors bear eloquent testimony to Pew’s de facto mission: marketing Philadelphia while marketing itself. “If tourists come,” Rimel has told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “they will bring with them money and jobs and word of mouth, which will make more come. And they’re not only going to go down to Independence Historical Park. They’re probably going to stay over, if we’re successful, and they may then decide to visit the Art Museum—and oh, by the way, they may decide to get a musical performance while they’re here.” The implications for potential grantees are chilling. “Arts organizations are going to have to thrive and survive on their merits,” Rimel said to the Inquirer in 1996. “They cannot depend on support from the corporate community or in some cases foundations or individuals. Those that are passing the market test are those who are going to be standing tall.” The

[ plore what they see as Pew’s ecoliberal agenda, with Rimel as its commissar. And there have been academics who’ve observed the evolving philanthropic behemoth with alarm. Marie Malaro, a lawyer and an expert on nonprofit governance, wrote in 2006 that “Rimel wants to make Philadelphia a Mecca for museum-goers and has already given examples of how she expects to accomplish this goal. In these examples trust assets are used to interfere in the management of other nonprofit organizations in order to divert their assets to her Mecca goal. Certainly this type of activity does not further the diversity benefit expected of the nonprofit K ATH E R I N E S TR E E TE R sector. Tis a wise saying that goes manifesto reminds you of the rich man who as follows: ‘Our third sector is not working if tells a poor man begging on the street to show there are no nonprofits one does not like.’ more initiative. This saying reminds us that one of the reasons Rimel’s nineties-era cheerleading for a we have a nonprofit sector is to give a voice market makeover of Philadelphia’s heritage to things that may not be popular at the mohasn’t borne much material fruit; the city now ment. Thus, steps taken to silence or alter the receives a declining chunk of Pew’s largesse. mission of a legitimate nonprofit undermine But the Rimelian conception of culture as a one of the very reasons our society supports a revenue-transfer agent is now omnipresent. nonprofit sector.” Witness, for example, the recent testimony of But what stands out in Pew’s ever-rising Governor Ed Rendell, who’s nothing if not a profile is the absence of scrutiny, an entitlepolitician with his ear to the ground. Of the ment for an organization that now runs more new $150 million building on the Benjamin than half its operations out of the former home Franklin Parkway for the Barnes Foundation, of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a another pet project of Pew’s, he told the InWashington, D.C., building that Pew acquired quirer this spring that “every high-end couple in 2009 for $155 million. For a charity with its in the United States that’s interested in art sights on trophies and symbols, the building’s and culture is going to have to visit, and spend association with Washington/Wall Street is a three days and two nights in Philadelphia.” camera-ready outpost for its blend of extreme From beneficence to box office. wealth, philanthropy, and vanity sponsorship—and its lack of accountability. Just as the he Pew Charitable Trusts have strayed SEC has yet to bring a successful full prosecuinto some unwelcome controversy— tion out of the 2008 market debacle, so is Pew but most of it has been confined to outbursts banking on deflecting any relevant constituenfrom little-to-lose bloggers, one of whom cies who might be moved to question its own asked, “Who died and made Rebecca Rimel market-making power in the ruined bastions Pope?” Online critics on the right chiefly deof the culture wars.t

The

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The Blackest Black Forest 3 John Yau Just nada y nada, which means drop dead in your cleanest socks, o grand and fearless pumpkin. Whether brave or bedraggled or both, the fact that you can put anything (or anyone) into my poem doesn’t mean that you should submit an innocent biped to the vagaries of an adventure, escapade, or journey, any exploit that might be considered a quest, search, mission, or hunt. Haven’t you been listening? Don’t you press your ears to the airwaves? Undertakings in which there is something momentous, earth shattering, or life changing waiting at an undisclosed location (the end) have not (repeat) been acceptable, or even advisable, for decades (insert longer time frame). It is nostalgia personified ever since (ever since) the price of gasoline began rising, the increased industrial capacity of our treacherous neighbors to the east became an economic factor, and the calamitous aftermath of the fall of grandiose empires to the north and south. Officially speaking, there are to be no further missions, pursuits, or expeditions, either within the domain of this poem or outside its porous borders, in the no-man’s land of ruined kingdoms, broken oil derricks and growing silt deposits. Any such chase could, would, and should end in disaster, an upsetting of the lately achieved balance, a crisis that is to be avoided now that villagers across the land have erected new traffic signals outside their municipal swimming pools. Listen to what they are saying—Please be careful when approaching the crosswalk; and be advised that the starlings, nuthatches, and finches must be collectively recognized for their contributions to the recent paper drive. This is the poem in which you are most happy, the one that most closely resembles you in all your minor notes of glory.

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A n c e s t or s

Life and Times of a Libertine 3 Christopher Lasch

P H OTO G R A P H CO U RT E SY C H R I S TO P H E R L A S C H E S TAT E

y subject lies before me like a patient awaiting the knife— my fair country, ravaged bride of the wilderness, struggling to bring forth a new civilization. This is no normal birth: the mother is still no more than a girl: her hips are too narrow; surgery is indicated. The intercom crackles up and down the corridors of the vast metropolitan hospital: “Calling Dr. Fox! Dr. Fox to the delivery room!” I hurry to the operating table, the master-surgeon, calm in the midst of confusion. One of the nurses weeps in a corner. The young intern confides, in an undertone everyone can hear, that the case is hopeless. The bride moans rhythmically; she looks up at the surgeon, her eyes full of hope and fear. Dr. Fox issues crisp instructions; the others take heart from his quiet command of the situation. The patient’s heart-beat stabilizes. Other life signs return. The surgeon’s eyes over his mask betray no hint of emotion. He Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) wrote this satirical novel in the summer of 1973 in a cottage in back of his family’s Vermont vacation home. As Lasch later told an interviewer, he considered his novel while he was writing it “a devastating, witty send-up of American politics,” but his publisher didn’t agree, and soon enough he abandoned the project to the drawer. This excerpt from chapter one—the first time any part of the manuscript has been published—introduces the protagonist, Harold Fox. The rest of the novel chronicles Fox’s rise to prominence in Cold War America and his fall from grace as a member of the “Richard Trixie” administration during the “Watershed” scandal. All Lasch manuscripts © Nell Lasch and courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library. —Jeff Ludwig The

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Democracy was on its deathbed; the alarms went out; Uncle Sam hurried to the scene like a country doctor summoned in the middle of the night, his saddlebags flapping, his horse’s hoofs clattering on the road.

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delivers a bouncing baby boy with the face of a mature adult, whom they all recognize as the new man the world has been waiting for. The mother relaxes, sleeps. The master-surgeon strides from the room, having come, seen, conquered. I see myself, then—I hope without illusions, with neither false modesty nor false pride—as a skilled surgeon presiding at the birth of a new American culture, a culture more advanced, more mature, stronger and healthier than the old culture, which was stunted by puritanical repression and the harsh work of taming a virgin continent. From the time of its founding, it has been widely assumed that America would be the womb of a new race of men; but it is only in our time that the new man is finally beginning to emerge—all the rest has been a long and difficult preparation, a four-hundred-year pregnancy. If it has been my privilege to assist at the delivery, it is a peculiar conjunction of circumstances, much more than my native abilities, that has made this possible. I happened, Harold Fox, to be in the right place at the right time. The part I played could have been played by hundreds of others; fortune alone assigned it to me. My many-sided public career has spanned five decades, from World War II to the Watershed. I am confident, therefore, that an account of my life, which intersects at so many points with the great events of the time, will also constitute a record of my country’s history during the most decisive years of its existence. As a Rhodes scholar in the late 1930s, I witnessed at first hand the moral collapse of England and other Western democracies, epitomized by their appeasement of Hitler, and came to understand that the United States would soon be called from its historic isolation to play a dominant role in world affairs. Democracy was on its deathbed; the alarms went out; Uncle Sam hurried to the scene like a country doctor summoned in the middle of the night, his saddlebags flapping, his horse’s hoofs clattering on the road. The assumption of global responsibilities had a sobering, maturing effect on our people, especially the people in government, who were most directly charged with these awesome responsibilities. As an officer in the OSS and later in the newly formed CIA, I saw the emergence of a new type of public servant—tough, pragmatic, realistic, without illusions about “making the world safe for democracy” or about bringing into being, through politics, some other grandiose design, but determined all the same to leave the world a better place than he had found it. I was privileged to play a minor but by no means insignificant part in the shaping of American foreign policy during the years after World War II, when the United States rallied the free world, turned back the menace of totalitarianism, and guided the European left in its struggle to establish progressive democracy as an alternative to communism. Driven out of government service by the reckless demagoguery of the late Senator McCartney, I returned to America after seventeen years abroad and assumed the editorship of Gastronome, a new monthly devoted to the art of good living. Later, as everyone knows, I founded

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Man of the World—“the most influential magazine of our time,” according to the noted critic Leslie A. Fielding. I saw my career in journalism as an extension of my work in government, both having as their object the promotion of a new cosmopolitanism. I sought to help my countrymen overcome their parochialism, assume the responsibilities of world power, and cultivate a mature outlook—a new sophistication—that would be commensurate with these responsibilities. I realized, moreover, that the new society that was emerging—the post-puritan society, I liked to call it—would be above all a society of leisure; accordingly I tried to prepare the American people for the demands of leisure by showing them how to enjoy life discriminately and without guilt. After fifteen highly successful years as an editor and leader of opinion, I returned to politics in the late sixties, when it appeared that everything the country had achieved since World War II was in danger of being overwhelmed by a misguided radicalism obsessed with destruction for its own sake. The public already knows something of the part I played in the Trixie administration and in the Watershed scandals, but the full story remains to be told. In my account of the Watershed affair, I intend to spare no one and to bring out the inside story for the first time. The symbolism of that name, incidentally, has not escaped me: the Watershed was truly a turning-point in our history, and I trust The

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that my account will make clear why it should be regarded as such. This will by no means be a record of public events alone. Nothing that contributed to my development will be ignored. Friendships, love affairs, personal triumphs, and occasional failures have all played their part in my growth. I shall record them with as much discretion as is consistent with the demands of complete frankness. I sought to help my countrymen overcome their parochialism, assume the responsibilities of world power, and cultivate a mature outlook—a new sophistication— that would be commensurate with these responsibilities.

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orn in 1916 in the little prairie town of Inverness, Illinois, now a suburb of Chicago, I was raised in moderate circumstances until my father’s business was wiped out by the repeal of Prohibition, after which the family lived in genteel poverty. My father found it difficult to settle down to a vulgar life of trade. He opened a dog-racing track, but the whippets were decimated in the hard winter of ’34. For a time he sold patent medicines. Later he found a job selling life insurance, but the work was alien to his temperament. Minimizing risks, prudently laying by for the future, were activities for which my father had little enthusiasm. He lived for the moment. I see now that he was ahead of his time, a hedonist living in a world still dominated by the Protestant ethic. My mother came from New England stock. A woman of refined tastes, she suffered daily humiliations in the narrow village to which my father had brought her. She encouraged my bookish tastes, providing me, on my thirteenth birthday, with a leather-bound set of The Messages and Papers of the Presidents. My encounter with the liberating rationalism of Thomas Jefferson had the unexpected consequence that I became an atheist, to the chagrin of my mother and of Reverend Carstairs, the Congregationalist minister. “I attribute this development,” I overheard the reverend say, “not so much to Jefferson as to evil influences closer to home. I’m afraid, Ellen, the boy takes after his father.” “Lower your voice, John,” said my mother. “I don’t want Harold to overhear you. It is important that he should respect his father.” “Let us respect them that are worthy of it.” The residents of Inverness despised my precocity. I turned inward, and wrote bitter satires in the style of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Every winter the town was seized with the frenzy of basketball. As editor of the Iconoclast, the school paper, I wrote bitter satires on the decline of sport—from a diversion of gentlemen to the vulgar amusement of the herd. I also designed the uniforms of the cheerleaders—a credible early version of the miniskirt. The “jocks,” as we would call them now, naturally regarded me as a “queer,” but I took my private revenge. Blessed with good looks, sensitive, intellectual, and unburdened by conventional scruples, I was remarkably attractive to women. My success in this line fairly maddened my loutish classmates, and I was more than once singled out for physical abuse. Never mind; the daughters of Eve found me irresistible. When I was a freshman in high school I had the great good fortune to be apprehended in compromising circumstances with Patsy Murphy,

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a senior, the homecoming queen and the toast of Inverness High. The Latin club, of which I was already president, had unanimously voted to build a float for the homecoming parade—a lifelike representation of the cave in which Dido and Aeneas sought shelter from the storm. Finding ourselves providentially alone in her family’s barn, at a critical stage in the construction of the float, Patsy and I sought shelter from the deprivations of village life on the Middle Border. Her father made an ugly scene, as a result of which Patsy was forbidden to attend her own coronation—a further deprivation for which I later consoled her with all the powers of sympathy at my command. My own reputation, however, was made. No female was judged safe from my nocturnal depredations. Reports of my exploits spread through both the school and the town; nor did I do anything to correct the exaggerations that accumulated around my growing legend. After graduation, I became the first alumnus of Inverness ever to attend Harvard College. As a scholarship student and outlander to boot, I had to endure the snubs of the Cabots, Lowells, and Lodges. Traditional barriers of class and caste were still very much in evidence at Harvard in the thirties, and the spirit of snobbery prevailed. To have attended a public high school meant that you were permanently ostracized from polite society. It was an open secret, of course, that polite society had become a terrible bore, but many young men of The

Baffler [no.20] ! 165

The only aristocracy to which I have ever aspired is the aristocracy of talents, and as long as my equals recognized my abilities, I did not trouble myself over the opinion of my “superiors.”

plebian birth still pined over their exclusion from it, and a few were led to commit acts of desperation. Poor John Loeb, a Jewish teacher’s son from Camden, New Jersey—an absolutely hopeless case, in other words—assiduously cultivated the men in Lionel, Strauss, and Wigglesworth, tagging along at their heels, intruding himself into their games, inventing distinguished ancestors by the dozen, and dressing in a manner that threatened to exhaust the family savings by the end of the first term. His imitation of the proper Bostonian was letterperfect, but it bore the fatal stigma of having been acquired rather than inherited. The Wigglesworth crowd led him on, giving John to believe that he had been elected into one of the most exclusive clubs in Cambridge. On the night of his “initiation,” a public ceremony was held in the middle of the Yard, at which John was invested with the title, “Social Climber of the Year,” and made to ride around the Yard on an ass, bearing what he was told were the traditional emblems of the office—a shiny metal Christmas “tree” signifying false claims of ancestry, a gigantic calling card pinned to his back, and the tongue of an ox hung around his neck, with which to lick the boots of his betters. Two weeks after this event, poor John threw himself from the Boylston Street Bridge into oblivion. Such scenes, together with the general economic and diplomatic crisis of the thirties, made me something of a socialist. As editor of the Crimson, I carried on a tireless crusade against the pretensions of wealth, the insularity of the New England elite, and the criminal indifference of Harvard men to poverty and injustice at home and to the rise of fascism abroad. While the prep school types disported themselves in their meaningless frivolities, I carried off the scholastic prizes; nor did I neglect the physical side of my development, excelling at tennis, squash, and soccer. The only aristocracy to which I have ever aspired is the aristocracy of talents, and as long as my equals recognized my abilities, I did not trouble myself over the opinion of my “superiors.” The most useful lesson that I learned at Harvard was that great men are human too and that nothing is gained by treating them with exaggerated and worshipful admiration. Contemptuous of my social betters, I nevertheless stood in considerable awe of my teachers until, gaining their intimacy, I came to understand that even intellectual giants have their blind spots, the famous have their flaws, and the mighty their pettiness. To hear a couple of distinguished professors hotly disputing the batting averages of the Brooklyn Dodgers is an

Zuzims • Zuzims, Swedenborg explains, are “a race similar

to Naphilims,” namely “those who, through a persuasion of their own height and preeminence set at naught whatever is holy and true.” Vintage Zuzims speak in the tongues of the super-rich televangelists, salespeople, public entertainers, pundits, and doctrinaires. —Daniel Aaron

166 1 The Baffler [no.20]

education in itself; to be able to correct them both, the equivalent of an advanced degree. One incident in particular stands out in my memory. After winning an essay contest in history, I was summoned to a state dinner at which the prize was to be conferred with suitable ceremony. All the great lights had assembled for the occasion—Morison, Merk, Miller, Parsons, Sorokin, even men from esoteric fields like philosophy and religion. As we gathered for cocktails, my hand shook so badly that I could hardly hold my glass of sherry—the first glass of sherry, incidentally, that I had ever had. The distinguished historian Arthur Schillinger, Sr.,* who had once taught at the University of Illinois—his period of exile and probation, as his colleagues jokingly referred to it—was delighted to learn that I came from the “Northwest Territory” too. “How are things out in the old territory?” he asked in a voice that was sure to be overheard by several of his colleagues. “Fine,” I stammered, conscious of the fact that this remark fell somewhat short of the brilliance demanded by the occasion. As we sat down for dinner, Professor Schillinger, evidently forgetting our earlier conversation, asked once again about conditions in the “territory.” His question came during a momentary lull in the conversation; I was conscious of heads turning all up and down the table. I assured him again that things were fine. A palpable disappointment greeted this weak and deferential reply. Burning, I stared at my plate. After dinner we adjourned to the common room for coffee. Professor Schillinger, greeting me by this time as an old friend, announced in a voice that instantly commanded the attention of the entire room, “Mr. Fox, you know, hails from the prairie. Once lectured at Illinois myself—period of exile and probation. Tell me, Fox, how are things out in the territory?” Without thinking I blurted out: “I have news for you—it’s become a State.” The room “broke up.” The next day my remark was already legendary. I have never again deferred to eminence out of a misplaced sense of my own unimportance.

ust before my graduation—magna cum laude—I was elected a Rhodes scholar. On a balmy day in September 1937, I sailed for Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth, an innocent going abroad, a pilgrim to the shrine of culture. Little did I dream that I would not return for almost twenty years, having long since left my innocence behind, somewhere on my many travels.t * An allusion to Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who taught at Harvard from 1924–1954 following stints at

Ohio State University and the University of Iowa. Much of this scene appears to have been borrowed from Lasch’s own Harvard experience. As a history major during his student days, 1950–1954, Lasch won the department’s William Scott Ferguson Prize for best essay; the award was presented at a similar ceremony, which Schlesinger Sr. attended. The

Baffler [no.20] ! 167

Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers 3 The Homeless Economist In the middle of the night I woke in a big fright Saw mobs marching down the street To a fierce iconic beat They sang a dirge of disgust

Green gallows for the Wall Street Bankers Lying thieving money wankers

Rotten SOBs with no moral anchor Hang them, Invisible Hand, with righteous anger

At the evil money lust

Where were you, federal regulators?

That has our economy made bust

When Wall Street went to war

The scumbags of the financial

Screwing employees, shareholders,

Upper Crust

ever more

The White House and Congress Green gallows for the Wall Street Bankers

Suckin’ up to bankers behind

Lying thieving money wankers

Hang them, Invisible Hand, with

Goldman’s Rubin told Clinton what

Rotten SOBs with no moral anchor

closed doors

righteous anger

to do

The CEOs and big financiers

All is well, big money’s swell

Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup

How much you think Wall Street

Stealing money as they flee the

Paid them when they left?

Greenspan of the Federal Reserve said

chicken coop

Madoff with his Ponzi scheme What a horrible insane dream Collateralized swaps, derivative drops Toxic assets, financial plops Liars’ loans sold as triple-A

Green gallows for the Wall Street Bankers Lying thieving money wankers

Rotten SOBs with no moral anchor Hang them, Invisible Hand, with righteous anger

Gekko Bankers gotta get their fees

Give them what they truly deserve

Spreading chaos and disease

Heads swinging from the Federal Reserve

168 1 The Baffler [no.20]

q L O L R AT S

S TE V E B RO D N E R

The

Baffler [no.20] ! 169

Bafflers No. 20

Daniel Aaron, who turns one hundred on August 4, was founding president of the Library of America and remains Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. He’s the author of The Americanist and Writers on the Left and the editor of The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession. In 2010, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal “for his contributions to American literature and culture.” Steve Almond is the author of the short story collection God Bless America. Rae Armantrout’s most recent books are Versed, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Money Shot. She teaches poetry and poetics at UC San Diego. Chris Bray lives in West Hollywood, California, with his wife and daughter. Please direct threats, abuse, and offers of low-wage academic employment to him via his editors. Will Boisvert is a critic and journalist in New York. Joshua Clover is finishing his third poetry book, Tranche/Syntagma. His previous books include The Totality for Kids and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. David D’Arcy is a journalist and critic who writes about culture. He is heard regularly on BBC Radio. His film blog is Outtakes. Thomas Frank is our founding editor and a columnist at Harper’s Magazine. The paperback edition of his latest book, Pity the Billionaire, will be published this fall. Forrest Gander’s most recent books are Core Samples from the World and two books of translation: Watchword by Pura López Colomé and (with Kyoko Yoshida) Spectacle & Pigsty: Selected Poems of Kiwao Nomura. Emma Garman is a writer and critic living in Berlin. Alan Gilbert is the author of a poetry book, Late in the Antenna Fields, and a collection of essays and articles, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight. A second book of poems, The

170 1 The Baffler [no.20]

Treatment of Monuments, will be published this fall. Matthea Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. Her third book of poems, Modern Life, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Heather Havrilesky is the author of Disaster Preparedness and a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles. Matt Hinton is former editor of Yahoo! Sports’ college football blog, Dr. Saturday, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BCS. He blogs about college football for CBSSports.com and writes two weekly in-season columns for FootballOutsiders.com. Saskya Jain was born and raised in India, then educated at Berlin’s Free University, Columbia University, and Boston University. This fall she will be a resident at Ledig House in Omi, New York. Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) was one of the leading American social critics of the last halfcentury. His books included The New Radicalism in America, The Culture of Narcissism, and The True and Only Heaven. Chris Lehmann is our senior editor and Dollar Debauch columnist and the author of Rich People Things. Tod Mesirow, a creator and producer of many television series, participated in the creation of the Fox network and ran such long-running shows as Monster Garage and MythBusters. Jim Newell has covered politics as a staff writer at Gawker, an editor at Wonkette, and a contributor to the Guardian and Salon. Geoffrey O’Brien’s most recent books are Early Autumn and The Fall of the House of Walworth. He’s executive editor of the Library of America. Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and the author of Eyewitness, New Art City, and Antoine’s Alphabet. “Cash-and-Carry Aesthetics” is the introduction to his new essay collection, Magicians and Charlatans, to be published this fall.

Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. She teaches history at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Manohar Shetty’s four books of poems include Domestic Creatures. He’s also the editor of Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa and lives in Dona Paula, Goa, with his wife and two daughters. Susan Stewart is the author of a book of poems, Red Rover, and a prose meditation, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making. Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) was a GermanJewish journalist, satirist, and cultural critic. Seth Colter Walls contributes arts criticism and reporting to the Village Voice, Slate, XXL, and the “online spaces” belonging to The New Yorker and New York magazines. Eugenia Williamson, our associate editor, is a staff writer at the Boston Phoenix. John Yau is the author of Egyptian Sonnets and Further Adventures in Monochrome. He teaches in the visual arts department, Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers University.

Translator Kate McQueen

Graphic Artists

Peter Arkle, Melinda Beck, Steve Brodner, Mark Dancey, Randall Enos, Henrik Drescher, Michael Duffy, Mark S. Fisher, Patrick JB Flynn, David Gothard, Brad Holland, David Johnson, Victor Kerlow, J.D. King, Lewis Koch, Stephen Kroninger, David McLimans, P.S. Mueller, Jonathan Rosen, Katherine Streeter, Spencer Walts

The typeface employed throughout the pages of The Baffler is Hoefler Text, designed in 1991 by Jonathan Hoefler, available through the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry, New York, NY.

M A R K S . FI S H ER

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Baffler [no.20] ! 171

Thank You

Benja min Alsup A non ymous Greg Arens Sa mantha E. Ar nold Nicholas Bacuez John Baughman Phineas Bax andall Brian Bennett Erik Ber nhardsson Walter Biggins Chris Bohner Jean-Guy Bourgeois M ark Brenner M andy Brown Dan Bryk Donna Castelli Michael Clark Caleb J. Cobur n Greg Cohn Gretchen Colavito Sean Conner Jason Davis Stephen Demuth Steven G. de Polo Jesse DeWitt Tom Dowe A mber Drea C. E. Emmer Carl Ericson Henry Farrell Jack Fifield Stumptown Geek Mike Gintz Chris Goosman Gavin J. Gr ant Carlos Halston Christian Hanson Sealy Hayes J. Br adford Hipps Jonathan Hope A ndy Hunter Wm. Noel Ivey Teresa Gowan & David K aiser Dick Ginnold & Julie K aspar Ken K atkin Julie Kertzman Inna Kushnaryova Victoria A. Large K atie Lederer The Rev. Dr. Gawain F. de Leeuw Kevin Lehnert Ruth Lopez Ja mes MacNevin Rory M acPhail

M atthew Jackson M arta Albert Marten A. McEnery Patrick McLeod Paul Mergler M atthew Miller Luke Mitchell Ken Moir Sean Moon Daniel Moses Casey Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell Henry H. Owings Paul Palink as M att & Kristina Parish Elliott Pearl Ryan A nthon y Petersen Ed and Dorothy Puhl Benja min R awn Pollyanna Rhee Brian Riley Brendan Roach Justin Rood Lyle Jeremy Rubin Julie Shapiro John Sharp Christina M. Simpson Jonathan Simpson Aoshima Skeels Mike Skoglund Ja mes Aron Smithington Alex Snell M att Sosnow Sa muel Spencer John Sta mper Paul Scott Stanfield Stephen Steim A ndy Sturdevant Peter Sola Sumire Nick Sweeney Charles Everett Taylor I Clive Thompson Dylan Tisdall Chris Toensing Mike Tr avers Scott Trudeau Mike Vargas Jason Vest A ndres Viglucci Sa m Weinreich Jonathan W. Wilson Derek Wollenstein Fr ank Work man Arlington York Sandy Zipp

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