No21 by The Baffler

No. 21

STEPHEN KRONINGER

IS S. F

HER

TH E Cure~All F OR I NTERNET ADDICTION 3

Since 1988 #

thebaff ler.com

No. 21

The

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The journal that blunts the cutting edge

Number 21 EDITOR IN CHIEF

John Summers

FOUNDING EDITOR

Thomas Frank

SENIOR EDITOR

Chris Lehmann

DESIGN AND ART DIR ECTION

The Flynstitute

LITER ARY EDITOR

Anna Summers

POETRY EDITOR

Thomas Sayers Ellis

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Lindsey Gilbert

CONTR IBUTING EDITORS

George Scialabba Aaron Swartz Eugenia Williamson

CONTR IBUTING ARTISTS

Steve Brodner Mark Fisher Brad Holland Ralph Steadman

GENER AL M ANAGER

Jeanne Mansfield

For helping us complete The Baffler’s (no. 21) journey to the end of the election, we thank Jerry Cohen, Dave Denison, Hannah Epstein, Melissa Flashman, William Giraldi, David Grewal, Eliza LaJoie, Nick Lindsay, Jeff Mayersohn, Daniel Noah Moses, Nik Mills, Carolyn Oliver, David Rose, Rhian Sasseen, Jorian Polis Schutz, and one well-appointed young man in Cambridge who prefers not to embarrass his family by permitting his name to be listed here. Meanwhile, Thomas Sayers Ellis, our new poetry editor, we are free to trumpet. Welcome!

FOUNDERS

Thomas Frank Keith White PAST PUBLISHER

Greg Lane, 1993-2007

Published by The MIT Press No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Front cover art is by Stephen Kroninger. Back cover art is by Sam Lubicz.

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA | thebaffler.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.21]

q Art: BR A D HOL L A N D

BRAD HOLLAND

The

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Contents 1 Tower of Baffler

Only a Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Salvos

To the Precinct Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Long Con . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How theory met practice . . . and drove it absolutely crazy Thomas Fr ank Mail-order conservatism Rick Perlstein

Can’t Stop Believing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Magic and politics David Gr aeber

34, 70

Come On, Feel the Buzz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

High Church Hustle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex Pareene

CNBC’s televangelists Jason Linkins

The Dollar Debauch

Oh, the Irony! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris Lehmann

Into the Infinite

The Missionary Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barbar a Ehrenreich

Other People’s Problems

The Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dubr avk a Ugrešić

124 132

78, 95, 110, 120

Cities of Night. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Belén Fer nández

Anything for the Libor Boys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

100

Call of the Wild. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

114

Christian Lorentzen

Detroit on screen Will Boisvert

The Rod of Correction

Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter? . . . . . . . . .

4 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Josh MacPhee

138

Your money and your life Notes & Quotes

The Lying Game. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Face Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Three Odd Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jim Newell

Ana Marie Cox

Manohar Shetty

Story

Invasion of Grenada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

George Singleton

146

Poems

Or Why the Assembly Disbanded as Before. . . . . . . . . . . . .

from California Tanka Diary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summit Meeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Equations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Roberto Tejada

Harryette Mullen Tony Hoagland Kwame Dawes

Song of Whiteout and Blackache. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

108

Jeweler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

112

The Free World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

118

Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

159

Trifling Bureaucracies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

162 163

Ailish Hopper

Dante Micheaux

Camille R ankine

Fady Joudah

Car men Giménez Smith

Obituary

The Alternative Press in Retrospect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eugenia Williamson

Ancestors

If I Were President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

154

Baff lers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

166

C. Wright Mills

The

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> Tow e r o f B a f f l e r

Only a Dream 3 John Summers

he general elections were looming by the time we packed up these salvos, stories, poems, and graphics and laid our bindle on the doorstep of our printer in Pennsylvania. Yes, we went to print with an issue on politics, one eye blind to the outcome of the great contest. Still, we sighted the cultural apparatus of American politics, the focus of the issue, spinning long past the pixie-dust trails and superfascinating polls of the campaign season. November 6, one way or another, will have introduced fresh pickings into the same breed of high and mighty in Washington, where they will have already begun reproducing copies of images of their reflected mandates. And, in the core industries that produce the spiritcrushing consensus known as our national politics, only the bylines will have changed. The political media will be trolling the inside story of the struggle to control the story, just as the permanent government of nitwits and lobbyists will be feeling imperial as ever amid the new styles in favoritism and obstruction rolled out by the donor class. Baffler 21, the third and last issue of our revival year, will have arrived in your mailbox several weeks after the spoils have been divided and then reconciled in the aftermath. Yet it’s sure to remain your most reliable debriefing book during the first hundred days of the next administration—or for as long as market populism remains the default position within the leading business schools, academic seminars, and editorial pages that hassle every new administration and corps of lawmakers.

he all-digital, all-the-time brand of political journalism at work today turns out to offer less cognitive resistance to this process of consensus formation than one might hope. From the direct-mail kingpins, alt-press agonists, and cult-stud professors, to the assorted media moguls, bloggers, and 6 1 The Baffler [no.21]

pundits described in these pages, the cultural apparatus standing between the public and its problems pursues a politics of brainshare; the game is won by click and by “like,” measures that mimic the market indexes. The hyperreality on our screens turns out to be useful, in this respect, for promoting lullabies, fads, and just-in-time demonologies. Knowledge may or may not be power. But knowingness drives the coverage on Politico, scripts the patter on MSNBC, and fuels the cauldron of excitations on CNBC’s Squawk Box. It’s tempting to blame the conservative barons and their vested interests for all the dysfunctions of our political debate. It’s more interesting, though, to observe the cultural metamorphosis driving our collective lurch beyond the categories of true and false. Once upon a time, let us say, reason guided our efforts to sort out the claims and counterclaims raining down from on high. Today’s political managers and messaging professionals are hyperconscious of unconsciousness, in tune with the irrational. Channeling videogame designers, admen, PR flunkies, celebrity editors, social media programmers, casino promoters, and cultural theorists, post-crash politics have moved out of the hand and into the head of inward-looking politicos. It’s not cultural critics, after all, but academic psychologists, brain scientists, and their popularizers who travel the gilded highways of the corporate speakers’ circuit, where they lay down common sense for the socially unconscious business class.

gainst our age’s dreampolitik, we present our own act of imagination—a printed journal, no less, of unrepresented thoughts. We do so remembering our ancestors, who concluded that acting as if the world we wanted were true is a prime precondition of making it so. And so we assembled this issue as if it were perfectly normal to

The cultural apparatus standing between the public and its problems pursues a politics of brainshare; the game is won by click and by “like,” measures that mimic the market indexes.

9 of engagement and launch our salvos against the apparatus of dead language and dreamy selfdelusion across the political spectrum. The activist Left—the subject of our first salvo—is fired up by the dream of transformation, yet oddly reluctant to make demands that might expose it to acrimony and division. You might say the R E N E M AG R I T T E , The Castle of the Pyrenees, 1959. The Israel Museum | Bridgeman Art Library spirit of this magazine observes expect a political system without privileges, the same minor paradox in reverse. Every sala culture without commodification, and a vo and story, poem and illustration, sails under cooperative economy in which maximum reits own gusts, untethered to liberalism’s desire turn on investment is not the sole criterion to reincarnate itself as a ruling creed or the of value. Left’s hustling after a social movement to re The as-if attitude is certainly no more deem mass suffering. Imagination is the name foolish, and a lot more fun, than the stylized of our desire. There’s no higher mission than despair of the American literati, or the cyniart and criticism updated for the age of investcism peddled by our public intellectuals. If as ment capital and high-tech chicanery. if is to produce its expected effects, however, Next year portends even greater awakena certain respect for reality is required. A caings for cheerfully independent muckrakpacity for discerning the difference between ing—our twenty-fifth anniversary hearkens. hope and fantasy is also useful. And it’s on So read on, citizen, and ye shall be saved from the latter distinction that we draw our terms those who say ye shall be saved.t The

Baffler [no.21] ! 7

6 t h e B r i d ge

r. Cowperwood hung up his telephone receiver with a click, and Mr. Sluss sensibly and visibly stiffened and paled. Mrs. Brandon! At the thought of Mrs. Sluss—her hard, cold, blue eyes—Mr. Sluss arose, tall and distrait, and ran his hand through his hair. He walked to the window, snapping his thumb and middle finger and looking eagerly at the floor. He went back to his chair, but he could not sit in it. He went for his coat, took it down, hung it up again, took it down, announced over the phone that he could not see any one for several hours, and went out by a private door. Wearily he walked along North Clark Street, looking at the hurly-burly of traffic, looking at the dirty, crowded river, looking at the sky and smoke and gray buildings, and wondering what he should do. The world was so hard at times; it was so cruel. His wife, his family, his political career. He could not conscientiously sign any ordinances for Mr. Cowperwood— that would be immoral, dishonest, a scandal to the city. Mr. Cowperwood was a notorious traitor to the public welfare. At the same time he could not very well refuse, for here was Mrs. Brandon, the charming and unscrupulous creature, playing into the hands of Mr. Cowperwood. If he could only meet her, beg of her, plead; but where was she? He had not seen her for months and months. Oh, Lord! O, Lord! He wondered and thought, and sighed and pondered—all without avail. Pity the poor earthling caught in the toils of the moral law. At four o’clock, after Mr. Sluss had wandered for hours in the snow and cold, belaboring himself for a fool and a knave, and while Cowperwood was sitting at his desk signing papers, contemplating a glowing fire, and wondering whether the mayor would deem it advisable to put in an appearance, his office door opened and one of the trim stenographers announced Mr. Chaffee Thayer Sluss. Enter Mayor Sluss, sad, heavy, subdued, shrunken, a very different gentleman from the one who had talked so cavalierly over the wires some five and a half hours before. Gray weather, severe cold, and much contemplation of seemingly irreconcilable facts had reduced his spirits greatly. Cowperwood had seen him more than once on various political platforms, but he had never met him. When the troubled mayor entered he arose courteously and waved him to a chair. Mayor Sluss put down the high sugar-loaf hat he wore and said, grandiosely, as was his manner even in direst extremity: “Well, you see, I am here, Mr. Cowperwood. What is it you wish me to do, exactly?” from Theodore Dreiser, The Titan (1914)

8 1 The Baffler [no.21]

The

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[ S a lvos ]

To the Precinct Station

How theory met practice . . . and drove it absolutely crazy 3 Thomas Fr ank

here is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, D.C., reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years after the Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the bankers’ friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough. Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show, carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximizing shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to be a winner—the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the situation: Once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would have to conceal what they did. Your service to the 1 percent would no longer be something you could boast about without feeling the contempt of your fellow Metro passengers. A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panelist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that

they were part of a group. Another one of the panelists was moved to utter this riposte: What I would note, is that people can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards. . . . I would agree, an individualism that our society has definitely had inscribed upon it and continues to inscribe upon itself, “I can only speak for myself,” the “only” is operative there, and of course these spaces are being opened up . . .*

My heart dropped like a broken elevator. As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed.

is a danger,” the Slovenian philoso“T here pher Slavoj Žižek warned the Occupy

Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park last year, and he wasn’t referring to the New York Police Department. “Don’t fall in love with yourselves.” We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?

Žižek’s remarks appear in n+1 magazine’s Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, the first book, and one of the most eclectic, to appear on the subject of last year’s protests. That volume was eventually followed by numerous others ranging from speeches delivered to the encampments (Noam Chomsky’s Occupy) to historical considerations of the protest (Todd Gitlin’s Occupy Nation) to collective memoirs

* The speaker was Natasha Lennard, who was covering OWS for the New York Times but who was also clearly a sympathizer with the movement.

10 1 The Baffler [no.21]

[

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

The

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] by participants (Occupying Wall Street). Before considering them, I have to ask that the usual disclaimers be applied with prejudice: Todd Gitlin is a friend of mine whose work I admire; Joe Sacco, who drew the cartoons that accompany the Chris Hedges entry, is another acquaintance and a onetime Baffler contributor; Will Bunch, whom I have never met, reviewed my last book (he was ambivalent about it); I know several of the contributors to the n+1 anthology; other friends of mine contributed to the quasi-official Occupy memoir; and still other friends appear in these books’ pages, making statements, being quoted, that sort of thing. Left-wing actions are like family reunions, I guess. Nearly all of these books wander more or less directly into the “danger” Žižek warned against. They are deeply, hopelessly in love with this protest. Each one takes for granted that the Occupy campaign was world-shaking and awe-inspiring—indeed, this attitude is often asserted in the books’ very titles: This Changes Everything; The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America. The authors heap up the superlatives without restraint or caution. “The 99% has awakened,” writes the editor of an anthology of Occupy documents. “The American political landscape will never again be the same.” What happened in Zuccotti Park was “unprecedented,” declares Noam Chomsky. “There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.” But that is nothing when compared to the enthusiasm of former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges. In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt he compares Occupy to the 1989 revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The protesters in New York, he writes, were disorganized at first, unsure of what to do, not even convinced they had achieved anything worthwhile, but they had unwittingly triggered a global movement of resistance that would reverberate across the country and in the capitals of Europe. The uneasy status quo, effectively imposed for decades by the elites, was shattered. Another narrative of power took shape. The revolution began.

12 1 The Baffler [no.21]

B o ok s D is cus sed Will Bunch, October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge (Kindle Singles, $1.99) Noam Chomsky, Occupy (Zuccotti Park Press, $9.95) Lenny Flank, editor, Voices From the 99 Percent: An Oral History of the Occupy Wall Street Movement (Red and Black, $15.99) Sarah van Gelder and YES! Magazine, editors, This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (Berrett-Koehler, $9.95) Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (HarperCollins, $12.99) Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, $28) n+1 magazine, editor, Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, $14.95) Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (Haymarket, $15)

Or had it begun twelve years previously? In 1999, you might recall, lefties nationwide swooned to hear about the WTO protests in Seattle; surely the tide was beginning to turn. Then, in 2008, liberal commentators swooned again for Senator Barack Obama: he was the leader we had been waiting for all these years. Then, in 2012, they swooned in precisely the same way for Occupy: it was totally unprecedented, it was the revolution, et cetera. I don’t object to any of these causes, as it happens—I supported Occupy; I voted for Obama; I was excited about the 1999 protests—but I can’t stand the swooning. These books were written by educated people, certain of them experts on

[ We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?

9 social movements. Why must they plunge so ecstatically into uncritical groupthink? “Groupthink”? Yes. With a few exceptions here and there,* these books are amazingly, soporifically the same. They tell the same anecdotes. They quote the same “communiqués.” They dwell on the same details. They even adopt, one after another, the same historical interpretations. And for the most part, what Žižek called our “normal lives” are not really part of the story. Nor are the “changes” that Occupy failed to secure. Even to bring them up, the reader senses, would be the act of a dullard. What matters, as author after author agrees, is the carnival—all the democratic and nonhierarchical things that went on in Zuccotti Park. The details of that carnival are the subject matter of nearly all the books reviewed here— details that are described with loving, granular singularity. Should the reader be interested, she can now learn as much about what happened in Zuccotti Park in New York City during those magical sixty days of OWS as she can from other books about the inner workings of the Obama Administration, or the decision-making of Congress. Indeed, measured by words published per square foot of setting, Zuccotti Park may well be the most intensely scrutinized landscape in recent journalistic history. We know just about everything that went on there, and the tales are repeated from

book to book: how the drummers kept everyone awake, what happened on the Brooklyn Bridge, how the “people’s mic” worked, where the idea for General Assemblies came from, how everyone pitched in and cleaned the park one frantic night to keep from being evicted the next day. Measured in terms of words published per political results, on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement’s significance, its unprecedented and earthshattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering. And what do we have to show for it today in our “normal lives”? Not much. President Obama may talk about the “top 1 percent” now, but he is apparently as committed as ever to austerity, to striking a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item.** With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purg-

* The n+1 anthology and Todd Gitlin’s book, Occupy Nation, deserve praise for occasionally taking a critical stance. The others are pretty much indistinguishable in their enthusiasm.

** Demands were a sort of joke at the beginning of the campaign, with the Zuccotti Park encampment issuing a tongue-in-cheek list of non-demands very early on. A more serious list of grievances was agreed upon a little while later, followed by a single political demand in December 2011. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 13

] ing Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate.

he question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But it’s exactly the wrong question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks’ overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupy’s cause as an approval of the movement’s mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a “community” in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special empha14 1 The Baffler [no.21]

sis. Noam Chomsky’s thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that “one of the main achievements” of the movement “has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange,” et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans “tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.” How building such “communities” helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky’s implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up. And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as

[ Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. Occupy did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists. It didn’t lead to a strike, or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office.

the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world.

hether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake.* On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by “the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media.” Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its

friends, the banks.** Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue.*** And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting— by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers’ own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralismleading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips back in the days of September

* Again, the only exceptions are found in n+1’s essay collection, Occupy! ** “Simply put,” writes Judith Butler in the second issue of Tidal, a journal of “occupy theory,” “the appeal or demand that sought to be satisfied by the existing state, global monetary institutions, or corporations, national or transnational, would be giving more power to the very sources of inequality, and in that way aiding and abetting the reproduction of inequality itself. As a result, another set of strategies are required, and what we are now seeing in the Occupy Movement is precisely the development of a set of strategies that call attention to, and oppose, the reproduction of inequality.”

*** I agree that there is a brilliance to demandlessness, but not the brilliance that Hedges and company insist upon. By putting off

the need for demands, Occupy was able to harness public outrage without being immediately captured by shrill ultra-leftists (people like, say, Chris Hedges), the one bunch the public probably hates even more than investment bankers. If this was the real design behind the campaign’s orderlessness, however, it is not mentioned in any of these books. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 15

] 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about. None of the books discussed here can really bring themselves to this buzz-killing admission, however. More pleasant by far to go with the default interpretation instead: that Zuccotti itself was the lesson. That the process was indeed the message. That the correct way to tackle the power of the financial industry is—duh—to set up a temporary village in a nearby park and start teaching the world what “community” is.

he Occupy artifact that really blew me away in the early days was the Tumblr feed in which people posted handwritten accounts of their economic hardship. (Significantly, it is discussed at length in only one of the books considered here—the n+1 collection, again.) What made it such powerful testimony, I thought, was the way it embodied the 99 percent slogan; one heard unmistakably here the voices of average people from every walk of life, each one of them done in by the same bank-industry urge to screw the world, one customer at a time. You couldn’t ask for a better expression of Depression-style majoritarianism. The rhetoric in Zuccotti Park was also, of 16 1 The Baffler [no.21]

course, loudly majoritarian. But in practice, to judge by these books, OWS tasted overwhelmingly of one monotonous flavor: academia, with a subtle bouquet of career activism. Protestors are not always identified by occupation in these books, but when they are, they usually turn out to be college students, or recent graduates, or graduate students, or professors. Episodes like the Student Day of Action in November 2011 loom large in the story. Slogans and protest signs gravitate toward such timeless adolescent causes as selfexpression and finding yourself (“Seek your own truth,” reads a typical protest sign reproduced in one of these books). Occupiers are always said to be “creating a space” for things, a cliché of academia and the foundation world that I grew sick of hearing back in the nineties but that has lost none of its power as a simulation of profundity. And the episode as a whole has become an irresistible magnet for radical academics of the cultural-theory sort; indeed, for them it seems to have been a sort of holy episode, the moment they were waiting for, the putting into practice of their most treasured beliefs. There’s nothing wrong with college students and grad students taking to the streets, of course. Society needs to hear from them. When tuition prices hit stratospheric levels, when recent grads routinely carry a hundred grand in debt, and when people studying for a PhD are exploited shamelessly, they damn well ought to be protesting. They should be shutting the system down. They should be screaming for price controls. Just look at what happened earlier this year in Quebec, where a huge part of the population came out in support of student groups demanding affordable higher education: the protesters actually won. They got what they wanted. Social protest secured academic opportunity. What I object to is the opposite: high-powered academic disputation as a model for social protest. Why does the subject of Occupy so often inspire its admirers to reach for their most elevated jargonese? Why would certain Occupiers break from the action to participate in panel discussions? Why did others

[ choose to share their protest recollections in the pages of American Ethnologist and their protest sympathies in the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies? Why would the author of an (admittedly very interesting) article about drum circles feel the need to suggest that he is contributing to “scholarly literature”? Why would a pamphlet clearly intended as a sort of Common Sense for the age of Occupy be filled with declarations such as this: Our point of attack here is the dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the current social and political crisis. We engage four primary subjective figures—the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented—all of which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or mystified. Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us the means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which these subjective figures suffer but also to invert these subjectivities in figures of power.*

And dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory? A journal that then proceeded to fill its pages with impenetrable essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility of theory-speak? Is this how you build a mass movement? By persistently choosing the opposite of plain speech? Yes, I know the answer: For a protest to become a broader social movement it must analyze and strategize and theorize. Well, this one did enough theorizing for all the protests of the last forty years, and yet it somehow never managed to make the grade. Occupy did lots of things right: It had a great slogan and a perfect enemy and it captured the public imagination. It built a democratic movement culture. It reached out to organized labor, a crucial step in the right direction. It talked a lot about solidarity, the basic virtue of the Left. But in practice, aca* Declaration, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

demic requirements often seemed to come first. OWS was taken as a proving ground for theory. Its ranks weren’t just filled with professionals and professionals-to-be; far too often the campaign itself appeared to be an arena for professional credentialing. Actually, that’s an optimistic way of putting it. The pessimistic way is to open Michael Kazin’s recent book, American Dreamers, and take sober note of the fact that, with the partial exception of the anti-apartheid campaign of the eighties, no movement of the Left has caught on with the broad American public since the Civil Rights / Vietnam War era. Oh, there have been plenty of leftists during this period, of course—especially in academia. Studying “resistance” is a well-worn career path, if not the very definition of certain subdisciplines. But for all its intellectual attainments, the Left keeps losing. It simply cannot make common cause with ordinary American people anymore. Maybe this has happened because the Left has come to be dominated by a single profession whose mode of operating is deliberately abstruse, ultrahierarchical, argumentative, and judgmental—handing down As and Fs is its daily chore—and is thus the exact opposite of majoritarian. Maybe it has happened because the Left really is a place of Puritanical contempt for average people, almost all of whom can be shown to have sinned in some imperialist way or other. Maybe it is because the collapse of large-scale manufacturing makes social movements obsolete. We do not know. And none of the accounts under review here get us any closer to an answer.

ccupy people don’t like Tea Party people; this is another point of unanimous agreement. Indeed, in the mind of Occupy, Tea Party people apparently aren’t really people at all; different biological principles apply to them. Consider a recent essay in Occupy’s theory journal by Judith Butler, a professor at Columbia University, who writes with revulsion about a Tea Party gathering where people reportedly cheered for the coming deaths of sick persons who weren’t The

Baffler [no.21] ! 17

] insured. “Under what economic and political conditions do such joyous forms of cruelty emerge?” she asks. It’s a good question. Two paragraphs later, however, the subject has inevitably changed to Occupy and its glamorous refusal to make demands, and Butler has theorized herself into a very different understanding of protestersin-crowds: they are inherently liberationist. “[W]hen bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands,” she writes. “They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom; they are calling for a livable life.” This is automatically what indignant people do, just by showing up and enacting their existence with their bodies—except, apparently, when they are the people described two paragraphs before. When the indignant ones are Tea Partiers, I guess, their bodies carry a negative charge or something so that when they gather, what they demand is that the lives of others be stripped from them. Which is a pretty huge difference, considering that the two movements are superficially so similar. For example, both are almost obsessively concerned with the bailouts of 2008, correctly understanding them as the departure point in public attitudes toward business and government. Participants in both describe the bailouts as “crony capitalism.” Both make their displeasure known by occupying public spaces, and both forms of protest cherish stories about the lengths to which their cadres have gone to keep those public spaces clean. Both Tea and Occupy gave Ron Paul followers prominent roles, and you could hear calls to “End the Fed” in Zuccotti Park as well as at the big Glenn Beck rallies. Then there were those Guy Fawkes masks, popular with both groups (Grover Norquist displays his prominently on his desk), which commemorate not the 99 percent or some red-state urAmerican, but a comic-book loner who wages a righteous, one-man war against a tyrannical government. The movement cultures are similar, too. 18 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Tea Partiers as well as Occupiers deliberately kept their demands vague, the better to rope in a wide cross section of the discontented. And both groups fetishized their persecution. For the Occupiers it’s the cops, pepper-spraying the defenseless and rounding up the righteous in scenes that each of these books dwells on at length. Will Bunch’s October 1, 2011 is a forty-five-page account of how a single Occupy march ended in a mass arrest, while Chomsky’s book is dedicated to the “6,705 people who have been arrested supporting Occupy to date.” For the Tea Party, on the other hand, it’s the liberal media calling them “racist,” a bit of cruelty that right-wing authors reiterate as obsessively as the Occupiers do the cruelty of the NYPD. See, for example, Michael Graham’s 2010 book, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, TalkRadio Americans, which is concerned almost exclusively with cataloguing liberal insults directed at Tea people. Leaderlessness is another virtue claimed by indignados on the right as well as left. In fact, there’s even a chapter in the 2010 “Tea Party manifesto” written by Dick Armey that is entitled, “We are a Movement of Ideas, Not Leaders”—which is ironic, since Armey is commonly referred to as “Leader Armey,” in recognition of the days when he was majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. The reasoning, though, is the same here as it is with Occupy. As Armey puts it, “If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or her. They could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party.” Occupiers, of course, say pretty much the same thing: if you have leaders, they can be co-opted. Surely, though, the distinctive Occupy idea that protesting is an end in itself—that “the process is the message”—surely that is unique, right? After all, Occupiers and their chroniclers have spent so much brainpower theorizing and explicating and defending the idea that horizontalism is a model and a demand and a philosophy rolled into one that it can’t possibly be shared by their political opposite. But of course it is—with the theory slightly modified. “We call this complex and diverse

Or Why the Assembly Disbanded as Before 3 Roberto Tejada Hosanna in the borderline cinderblock warehouse, as much applause as possible to collapse inside an ambulance now that conveys The intravenous bags and bottle holder, twenty-seven stones from here to the Idyllwild to the gun fields Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a place you find automaton nurses who labor in green-grey subterfuge, in all-over stripes A round of punches to the lower jaw for my part in the main so I get it now Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m the chosen one for reassignment Face so altered as to beguile. This is enemy-convenient a purview suitable to very new cosmetic methods. Question is the admin diazepam and other hypodermics were they counteractive or now consistent With enough cases as to compel canvassers to anticipate first signs of panic, sleepwalker antecedents Tray tables in upright position, crushed ice out of open mouth, air-conditioned ward redolent of superstores And tattoo shops, or was it morphine sulfate in protocols applied to disable the congenital twins? Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the world news: to junk-science prizes wax-candy lips intone a flawless if always accented sentence The kind of talking from another world where my mother was Marlo Thomas and there were rival techniques Contributed to the celebrity of my seven-sided disappearance or was that all my enuresis when I doubled in size As from her pocketbook, adorable but already diminishing? The

Baffler [no.21] ! 19

] The conservative era will be brought to a close only through some kind of mass social movement on the left. But what kind of movement might succeed?

9 movement ‘beautiful chaos,’” writes Leader Armey in his Tea Party manifesto. “By this we reference what is now the dominant understanding in organizational management theory: decentralization of personal knowledge is the best way to maximize the contributions of people.” While the glorious decentralization of OWS was supposed to enact some academic theory of space-creating, the glorious decentralization of the Tea Party enacts the principles of the market; it enacts the latest in management theory; it enacts democracy itself. Big-government liberals, on the other hand, are in Armey’s account drawn to hierarchy as surely as are the big-media dumbshits scorned by Occupy’s chroniclers: “They can’t imagine an undirected social order,” Armey declares. “Someone needs to be in charge.” Armey’s coauthor, Matt Kibbe, then grabs this idea and gallops downfield. “This is not a political party,” he insists; “it is a social gathering.” Tea Party events don’t have drum circles, as far as I know, but Kibbe nevertheless says he is “reminded of the sense of community you used to experience in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert: peaceful, connected, smiling, gathered in common purpose.” It is “a revolt from the bottom up,” he declares. It is “a community in the fullest sense of the word.” If you look closely enough at Tea Party culture, you can even find traces of the Occupiers’ refusal to make explicit demands. Consider movement inamorata Ayn Rand (a philosopher every bit as prolix as Judith Butler) and her 1957 magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, where “demands” are something that government makes on behalf of its lazy and unproductive constituents. Businessmen, by contrast, deal in contracts; they act only via the supposedly consensual relations of the market. As John Galt, the leader of the book’s capital strike, explains in a lengthy speech to the American 20 1 The Baffler [no.21]

people Rand clearly loathed: “We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” A strike with no demands? Wha-a-a-a? Why not? Because demands would imply the legitimacy of their enemy, the state. Rand’s fake-sophisticated term for this is “the sanction of the victim.” In the course of actualizing himself, the business tycoon—the “victim,” in Rand’s distorted worldview—is supposed to learn to withhold his blessing from the society that exploits him via taxes and regulations. Once enlightened, this billionaire is to have nothing to do with the looters and moochers of the liberal world; it is to be adversarial proceedings only. So how do Rand’s downtrodden 1 percent plan to prevail? By building a model community in the shell of the old, exactly as Occupy intended to do. Instead of holding assemblies in the park, however, her persecuted billionaires retreat to an uncharted valley in Colorado where they practice perfect noncoercive capitalism, complete with a homemade gold standard. A high-altitude Singapore, I guess. Then, when America collapses—an eventuality Rand describes in hundreds of pages of quasi-pornographic detail—the tycoons simply step forward to take over. One last similarity. The distinctive ideological move of the Tea Party was, of course, to redirect the public’s fury away from Wall Street and toward government. And Occupy did it too, in a more abstract and theoretical way. Consider, for example, the words anthropologist Jeffrey Juris chooses when telling us why occupying parks was the thing to do: “the occupations contested the sovereign power of the state to regulate and control the distribution of bodies in space [five citations are given here], in part, by appropriating and

[ resignifying particular urban spaces such as public parks and squares as arenas for public assembly and democratic expression [three more citations].”* This kind of rhetoric is entirely typical of both Occupy and the academic Left—always fighting “the state” and its infernal power to “regulate and control”—but it doesn’t take a very close reading of the text to notice that this language, with a little tweaking, could also pass as a libertarian protest against zoning. Since none of the books described here take seriously the many obvious parallels between the two protests, none of them offers a theory for why the two were so strikingly similar. Allow me, then, to advance my own. The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest these days, all the way from Disney Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens vandalizing a Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that they are rising up against “the state.” It’s in the cultural DNA of our times, it seems; our rock ‘n’ roll rebels, our Hollywood heroes, even our FBI agents. They all hate the state—protesters in Zuccotti Park as well as the Zegna-wearing traders those protesters think they’re frightening. But here’s the rub: only the Right manages to profit from it.

is, for free-market believers, the purest expression of the General Will available. And perhaps that was the plan of the movement’s masters all along. The vagueness and the leaderlessness were merely for show, it seems— gimmicks designed to give the product the widest possible appeal in the early days. Occupy Wall Street never made that turn. It took its horizontality seriously. It grew explosively in the early days, as just about everyone with a beef rallied to its nonspecific standard. But after the crackdown came, there was almost nothing to show for it. It is as clear to me today as it was last year, however, that the conservative era will be brought to a close only through some kind of mass social movement on the left. But what kind of movement might succeed? Well, for one thing, a movement whose core values arise not from an abstract hostility to the state or from the need for protesters to find their voice but rather from the everyday lives of working people. It would help if the movement wasn’t centered in New York City. And it is utterly essential that it not be called into existence out of a desire to reenact an activist’s fantasy about Paris ’68. Try Mississippi in the fifties instead. Reenact Flint, Michigan, circa 1937 and you could get somewhere. Look to Omaha, 1892, and things could work out differently.t

s things developed, the Tea Party didn’t really mean any of its horizontalist talk; that was just there to make the movement attractive to potential joiners. The Tea Party had no poststructuralist thinkers contributing to theory magazines, but it did have money, organization, and a TV network at its back. It quickly developed leaders, and demands, and an alignment with a political party. Its main organizations eventually mutated into Super PACs, their antihierarchical populism apotheosized into money—which * Jeffrey Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social

Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation,” American Ethnologist, vol. 39, no. 2.

P. S . M U E L L E R

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 21

[ S a lvos ]

The Long Con

Mail-order conservatism 3 Rick Perlstein

itt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasonedbut-overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity. Some Romney lies posit absences where there are obviously presences: his claim, for instance, that “President Obama doesn’t have a plan” to create jobs. Other Romney fabrications assert presences where there are absences. A clever bit of video editing can make it seem like Romney was enthusiastically received before the NAACP, when, in fact, he had been booed. There are lies, damned lies, statistics—like his assertion that his tax cut proposal won’t have any effect on the federal budget, which the Tax Policy Center called “not mathematically possible.” That frank dismissal vaulted the candidate into another category of lie, an attempt to bend time itself: Romney responded by calling that group “biased”; last year, he called them “objective.” There are outsourced lies, like this one from deep in my files: in 2007, Ann Romney told the right-wing site Newsmax.com that her husband had “always personally been prolife,” though Mitt had said in his 1994 Senate race, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.” And then Ann admitted a few sentence later, “They say he flip22 1 The Baffler [no.21]

flopped on abortion. Well, you know what? He did change his mind.” And then there’s the most delicious kind of lie of them all, the kind that hoists the teller on his own petard as soon as a faintly curious auditor consults the record for occasions on which he’s said the opposite. Here the dossier of Mittdacity overfloweth. In 2012, for example, he said he took no more federal money for the Salt Lake City Olympic Games than previous games had taken; a decade earlier, however, he called the $410 million in federal money he bagged “a huge increase over anything ever done before.” There are more examples, so many more, but as I started to log and taxonomize them, their sheer volume threatened to crash my computer. (OK, I’m lying; I just stopped cataloging them, out of sheer fatigue.) You can check in at MSNBC’s Maddowblog for Steve Benen’s series “Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity” for the current tally. He was at Volume XXXIX as of this writing, though I’m confident several more arrived while this magazine was at the printers. Volume XXVIII, posted early in August, listed twenty-eight separate lies. Then came the Republican convention, when his designated fibbing-mate Paul Ryan packed so many lies into his charismatic introduction to the nation that a Washington Post blogger assigned by his editor to write a piece on “the true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech” could find only one entrant for the “true” section; and his editor then had to concede that “even the definition of ‘true’ that we’re using is loose.” Pundits—that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too—have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character.

[ Both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?

M A R K DA N C E Y

And more power to them. But that’s not really my bag. I write long history books that are published with photos of presidents and presidential aspirants on the covers. The photos are to please the marketers: presidents sell. But my subject is not really powerful people; biography doesn’t much interest me. In my view, powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics. The leaders are easy to study; they stand still. We can amass reams on their pasts, catalog great quantities of data on what they say in the present. Grasping the shape of a mass public, though, is a more fugitive process. Publics are amorphous, protean, fuzzy; they don’t leave behind neat documentary trails. Studying the leaders they choose helps us see them more sharply. Political theorist James MacGregor Burns’s classic book Leadership explains that “leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain mo-

tives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers . . . in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.” Watching charismatic people try to seize their attention and win their allegiance becomes the intellectual whetstone. As political psychologist Harold Lasswell once put it, a successful aspirant to leadership is one whose “private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest.” Watching those private motives at work, the public they seek to convince comes into focus. All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them? An Oilfield in the Placenta In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to The

Baffler [no.21] ! 23

] readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value. Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers. Who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs? That’s why, for instance, the other day I (and probably you) got an advertisement by way of liberal magazine The American Prospect seeking donations to Mercy Corps, a charity that helps starving children in the Third World. But back when I was getting emails every day from Newsmax and Townhall, the come-ons were a little bit different. Dear Reader, I’m going to tell you something, but you must promise to keep it quiet. You have to understand that the “elite” would not be at all happy with me if they knew what I was about to tell you. That’s why we have to tread carefully. You see, while most people are paying attention to the stock market, the banks, brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else . . . [in] what I call the hidden money mountain . . . All you have to know is the insider’s code (which I’ll tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month.

Soon after reading that, I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta. “Dear NewsMax Reader,” this appeal began, leaving no doubt that whatever trust that publication had built with its followers was being rented out wholesale. “Please find below a special message from our sponsor, James Davidson, Editor of Outside the Box. He has some 24 1 The Baffler [no.21]

important information to share with you.” Here’s the information in question: “If you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cells to treat disease because of moral concern over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue, pay close attention. You can now invest with a clear conscience. An Israeli entrepreneur, Zami Aberman, has discovered ‘an oilfield in the placenta.’ His little company, Pluristem Life Systems (OTCBB: PLRS) has made a discovery which is potentially more valuable than Prudhoe Bay.” Davidson concluded by proposing the lucky investor purchase a position of 83,000 shares of PLRS for the low, low price of twelve cents each. If you act now, Davidson explained, your $10,000 outlay “could bring you a profit of more than a quarter of a million dollars.” Not long after I let the magic of the placenta-based oilfield sink in, I got another pitch, this one courtesy of the webmasters handling the Human Events mailing list and headed “The Trouble with Get-Rich-Quick Schemes.” Perhaps I’m a little gullible myself; for a couple of seconds, I believed the esteemed Reagan-era policy handbook might be sending out a useful consumer advisory to its readers, an investigative guide to the phony get-rich-quick schemes caroming around the right-leaning opinion-sphere. But that hasty assumption proved sadly mistaken, presuming as it did that the proprietors of outfits like Human Events respect their readers. Instead, this was a come-on for something called “INSTANT INTERNET INCOME”—the chance at last to “put an end to your financial worries . . . permanently erase your debts . . . pay cash for the things you want . . . create a secure, enjoyable retirement for yourself . . . give your family the abundant lifestyle they so richly deserve.” Back in our great-grandparents’ day, the peddlers of such miracle cures and get-richquick schemes were known as snake-oil salesmen. You don’t see stuff like this much in mainstream culture any more; it hardly seems possible such déclassé effronteries could get anywhere in a society with a high school completion rate of 90 percent. But tenders of

[ The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

9 a 23-Cent Heart Miracle seem to work just fine on the readers of the magazine where Ann Coulter began her journalistic ascent in the late nineties by pimping the notion that liberals are all gullible rubes. In an alternate universe where Coulter would be capable of rational self-reflection, it would be fascinating to ask her what she thinks about, say, the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined “Ideas Will Drive Conservatives’ Revival.” Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed “Health News” included the headlines “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” and “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.” It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying that’s now sutured into the modern conservative movement’s DNA—and to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers. The history of that movement echoes with the sonorous names of long-dead Austrian economists, of indefatigable door-knocking cadres, of soaring perorations on a nation finally poised to realize its rendezvous with destiny. Search high and low, however, and there’s no mention of oilfields in the placenta. Nor anything about, say, the massive intersection between the culture of “network” or “multilevel” marketing—where ordinary folks try to get rich via pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bag—and the institutions of both evangelical Christianity and Mitt Romney’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And yet this stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological

struggles that make up its official history—if not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began. Those tactics gelled in the seventies— though they were rooted, like all things right-wing and infrastructural, in the movement that led to Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination in 1964. In 1961 Richard Viguerie, a kid from Houston whose heroes, he once told me, were “the two Macs”—Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur—took a job as executive director for the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The organization was itself something of a con, a front for the ideological ambitions of the grownups running National Review. And fittingly enough, the middle-aged man who ran the operation, Marvin Liebman, was something of a P. T. Barnum figure, famous on the right for selling the claim that he had amassed no less than a million signatures on petitions opposing the People’s Republic of China’s entry into the United Nations. (He said they were in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever saw the warehouse.) The first thing Liebman told Viguerie was that YAF had two thousand paid members but that in public, he should always claim there were twentyfive thousand. (Viguerie told me this personally. I found no evidence he saw anything to be ashamed of.) And the first thing that Liebman showed Viguerie was the automated “Robotype” machine he used to send out automated fundraising pitches. Viguerie’s eyes widened; he had found his life’s calling. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 25

] Following the Goldwater defeat, Viguerie went into business for himself. He famously visited the Clerk of the House of Representatives, where the identities of those who donated fifty dollars or more to a presidential campaign then by law reposed. First alone, and then with a small army of “Kelly Girls” (as he put it to me in 1996), he started copying down the names and addresses in longhand until some nervous bureaucrat told him to cease and desist. By then, though, it was too late: Viguerie had captured some 12,500 addresses of the most ardent right-wingers in the nation. “And that list,” he wrote in his 2004 book, America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Over America, “was my treasure trove, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, as I started The Viguerie Company and began raising money for conservative clients.” Fort Knox: an interesting image. Isn’t that what proverbial con men are always claiming to sell? The lists got bigger, the technology better (“Where are my names?” he nervously asked, studying the surface of the first computer tape containing his trove): twenty-five million names by 1980, destination for some one hundred million mail pieces a year, dispatched by some three hundred employees in boiler rooms running twenty-four hours a day. The Viguerie Company’s marketing genius was that as it continued metastasizing, it remained, in financial terms, a hermetic positive feedback loop. It brought the message of the New Right to the masses, but it kept nearly all the revenue streams locked down in Viguerie’s proprietary control. Here was a key to the hustle: typically, only 10 to 15 percent of the haul went to the intended beneficiaries. The rest went back to Viguerie’s company. In one too-perfect example, Viguerie raised $802,028 for a client seeking to distribute Bibles in Asia—who paid $889,255 for the service. Others joined the bonanza. Lee Edwards, a YAF founder who today works a nifty grift as “Distinguished Fellow in Conservative 26 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Thought” at the Heritage Foundation writing credulous hagiographies of conservative movement figures and institutions (including, funnily enough, the Heritage Foundation), cofounded something called “Friends of the FBI.” This operation’s chief come-on was a mass mailing of letters signed by the star of TV’s The FBI, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., purportedly to aid the families of fallen officers. The group raised $400,000 in four months—until Zimbalist abruptly withdrew his support. The TV star said he’d looked at the organization’s books and seen how much was going to the fundraisers—and claimed he’d been the victim of “fraud and misrepresentation.” In 1977, Democratic Congressman Charles H. Wilson of California proposed timid regulations to inform donors exactly how much of their money was going to the cause they thought they were supporting. The Heritage Foundation raced forth with an “issues bulletin” announcing that any such rule changes would subject “church leaders” to “vicious” attacks, and would “increase the paperwork on every Christian organization . . . inevitably lessening the funds each charity can use for its stated purpose.” (Christianity itself being the obvious target of this Democratic subterfuge of “reform.”) And just to give the cause the imprimatur of elected office, a favorite congressman of the Christian Right, John Conlan of Arizona (“He’s never been honest,” Barry Goldwater once said about him), was drafted to explain that the high overhead of direct-mail campaigns was a boon to the charity-customers: it represented start-up— “prospecting”—costs that would permit organizations to raise yet more money down the line. (“Defends charities against Big Government,” read the caption beneath a picture of Conlan in Conservative Digest—the magazine Richard Viguerie published.) Here’s the thing, though: as is the case with most garden-variety pyramid schemes, the supposed start-up costs never seemed to stop. And conservative groups that finally decoupled their causes from Viguerie’s firm found their fundraising costs falling to less

[ “How anyone of any sensitivity can stand to read those letters scrawled by little old women on Social Security who are giving up a dollar they cannot afford to part with . . . without feeling bad is unbelievable.”

M A R K DA N C E Y

than fifty cents on the dollar. Viguerie would point out his clients didn’t feel ripped off. At that, maybe some were in on the con, too—for instance, his client Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-smut group, took in an estimated $2.3 million over a two-year period, with more than 80 percent going to Viguerie’s company; the group’s principal was future S&L fraudster Charles Keating. It all became too much for Marvin Liebman, the Dr. Frankenstein who had placed the business model in Viguerie’s palpitating hands. Liebman told conservative apostate Alan Crawford, author of the valuable 1980 exposé Thunder on the Right, that Viguerie and company “rape the public.” Another source familiar with the conservative direct-mail industry wondered to Crawford, “How anyone of any sensitivity can bear to read those letters scrawled by little old women on Social Security who are giving up a dollar they cannot afford to part with . . . without feeling bad is unbelievable.” Such qualms clearly did not carry the day— and now the practice is apparently too true to the heart of conservatism to die. In 2007, the

Washington Post reported on the lucrative fundraising sideline worked up by syndicated columnist Linda Chavez. George W. Bush had nominated Chavez to be his first secretary of labor, but then backpedaled after reports that she had lied about an undocumented worker living in her house. Among the prime redmeat entries on her résumé is a book called Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. And while Chavez probably wouldn’t have brought much reliable wisdom to the task of regulating organized labor, it’s quite clear from the Post report that she had mastered the art of the shakedown. In her direct-mail career, she had “used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. Their solicitations promise direct action in the ‘fight to save unborn lives,’ a vigorous struggle against ‘big labor bosses’ and a crippling of ‘liberal politics in the country.’” But true to the Viguerie model, less than 1 percent of the money that Chavez’s groups raised went to actual political activity. The rest went either back into further fundraising pitches or into salaries and perks for Chavez and her relatives. “I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez told the Post. I guess you could. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 27

] Waging Culture War for Fun and Profit But the New Right’s business model was dishonest in more than its revenue structure. Its very message—the alarmist vision of White Protestant Civilization Besieged that propelled fundraising pitch after fundraising pitch—was confabulatory too. The typical ploy ran a little something like this, from Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation: Dear Friend: Do you believe that children should have the right to sue their parents for being “forced” to attend church? Should children be eligible for minimum wage if they are being asked to do household chores? Do you believe that children should have the right to choose their own family? As incredible as they might sound, these are just a few of the new “children’s rights laws” that could become a reality under a new United Nations program if fully implemented by the Carter administration. If radical anti-family forces have their way, this UN sponsored program is likely to become an all-out assault on our traditional family structure.

Following the standard scare-mongering playbook of the fundraising Right, Weyrich launched his appeal with some horrifying eventuality that sounded both entirely specific and hair-raisingly imminent (“all-out assault on our traditional family structure”— or, in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms, taxpayer-supported “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior”; or, to take one from not too long ago, the white-slavery style claim that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood”). Closer inspection reveals the looming horror to be built on a non-falsifiable foundation (“could become”; “is likely to become”). This conditional prospect, which might prove discouraging to a skeptical28 1 The Baffler [no.21]

ly minded mark, is all the more useful to reach those inclined to divide the moral universe in two—between the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe, and sane. Weyrich’s letter concludes by proposing an entirely specific, real-world remedy: slaying the wicked can easily be hastened for the low, low price of a $5, $10, or $25 contribution from you, the humble citizen-warrior. These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep. Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will— and the monster shall be banished for good. Scaling Up This method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obama’s Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeal—a snake-oil-selling one—works as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the hero’s intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabal—a cabal that, wouldn’t you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly

[ Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this.

9 resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals. In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains. Dear Fellow Conservative, Do you know which special interest has given more money to the Obama and Clinton campaigns than any other? If you guessed “trial lawyers”—well, okay, that’s too easy. But can you guess which special interest came in second? Labor unions? Nope. The Green Lobby? Nope. AARP? Wrong, again. NEA? Nyet. Give up? Okay, here’s the answer: Wall Street. That’s right. According to CNNMoney. com, Wall Street securities and investment firms have given over $35 million to Democratic candidates this election cycle. . . . If you’ve been wondering why the financial industry has been in meltdown—and taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with it—now you know. Let’s face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics about as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through. . . . Trusting them with your money is like trusting Bill Clinton to babysit your underage niece.

But I know someone you can trust to manage your investments. . . . His name is Dr. Mark Skousen—that’s “Dr.” as in “Ph.D. in Economics and Monetary History,” something you don’t get by playing Beer Pong with your frat buddies. For the past 28 years, subscribers to his investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, have profited enormously from his uncanny ability to predict major market trends before they happen. . . . For instance: In the early ’80s, Dr. Skousen predicted that “Reaganomics will work” and said “a long decade of profits is coming.” . . . The “bottom line,” as they say? Don’t let the Democrats run the country. And don’t let Wall Street frat boys manage your investments. Do it yourself, with the genuinely expert guidance of freedom-loving economist Mark Skousen in Forecasts & Strategies. Click here to learn more.

That letter is signed by Ann Coulter—and, truth be told, it reads like she wrote it. It is a perfect portrait of the nether region of the right-wing con, figure (politics) trading places with ground (commerce) a dizzying dozen times over in the space of just these several paragraphs. There is the bizarre linguistic operation that turns “liberal” (or, in Coulterese, “pinko”) into a merely opportunistic synonym for “stuff you don’t like.” There’s the sloganeering alchemy that conflates political and economic magical thinking (“freedom”!). There’s shorthand invocation of Reagan hagiography. And then, presto: The suggestible readers on the receiving end of Coulter’s come-on are meant to realize that they are holding the abracadabra solution to every human dilemma (vote out the Democrats—oh, and also, subscribe to Mark Skousen’s newsletter for investors, while you’re at it). There’s a kind of mystic wingnut great-circle-of-life aura to this stuff. Mark Skousen, a Mormon, is the nephew of W. Cleon Skousen, author of the legendarily bizarre Birchite tract The Naked Communist, which claimed to have exposed the secret forty-five-point plan by which the Soviet Union hoped to take over the United States government. (Among the sinister aims laid out in the document: The

Baffler [no.21] ! 29

] gain control of all student newspapers; “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”) Upon its publication in 1958 (it was republished in 2007 as an ebook), the president of the Church of Latter-day Saints, David O. McKay, recommended that all members read it. Mark Skousen is also author of a book called Investing in One Lesson, which cribs its title from the libertarian tract Economics in One Lesson, distributed free by conservative organizations in the millions in the fifties, sixties, and seventies (Reagan was a fan). He founded an annual Las Vegas convention called “FreedomFest”—2012 keynoters: Steve Forbes, Grover Norquist, Charles Murray, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey— which advertises itself as “the world’s largest gathering of right-wing minds.” This event points to another signal facet of the conservative movement’s long con: convincing its acolytes that they are the true intellectuals, that anyone to their left is the merest cognitive pretender. (“Will this 3 Minute Video Change Your Life?” you can read on FreedomFest’s website. Because three-minute videos are how intellectuals roll. Click here to learn more.) The oilfield in the placenta is another perfect mélange of right-wing ideology and a right-wing money con. It begins with a signal ideological lie: that stem-cell research represents an outrage against the right to life (but the cultivation of embryos for in vitro fertilization does not). It then pulls the mark along with the right-wing fantasy that energy independence is only one miraculous technological breakthrough away (but the development of already existing alternative energy sources doesn’t count as one of those breakthroughs). It all makes its own sort of internally coherent sense when you consider the salesman: James Dale Davidson is a founder of the National Taxpayers Union, a Richard Mellon Scaife– funded enterprise that gave Grover Norquist his start as a professional conservative. Davidson himself is a producer of Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster. “There is overwhelming evidence that Foster was murdered,” he 30 1 The Baffler [no.21]

told the Washington Post. “They obviously have reasons they don’t want this to come out . . . obviously there’s something big they’re trying to protect.” Of course, the childlike appeals won’t work their full magic without the invocation of the conservative movement’s childlike heroes. The Gipper appears in another splendid specimen received by Human Events readers— which is appropriate, because Human Events is where Reagan himself got a lot of the madeup stuff he spouted across his entire political career. “When President Ronald Reagan got cancer during his presidency,” this one begins, “the great German doctor Hans Nieper, M.D., treated him. It would have been frontpage news if it hadn’t been hushed up at the time.” (“German doctors ‘cook’ cancer out of your body while you nap!”) “Many American cancer patients lose their hair and their vitality. But Reagan kept his famous pompadour hairstyle. He also kept his warm smile and vigorous style.” (“CLICK HERE to request German Cancer Breathrough: A Guide to Top German Alternative Clinics.”) “Reagan lived for another 19 years. He died at age 93, and not from cancer.” (“Fortunately, as a journalist I’m protected by the First Amendment. I can tell you the truth without having to risk persecution from the authorities.”) Miracle cures, get-rich-quick schemes, murderous liberals, the mystic magic mirage of a world without taxes, those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere in the Syrian desert—only connect. Untruth and Consequences And what of Willard M. Romney’s part in the game? There’s a lot going on with Romney’s lying, not all of it related to his conservative identity; he was making things up as a habit, after all, back when he was a Massachusetts moderate. To a certain extent, Romney’s lies are explicable in just the way a lot of pundits are explaining them. When you’ve been all over the map ideologically, and you’re selling yourself to a party now built on extremist ideological purity, it takes a lot of tale-telling to

[ Miracle cures, get-richquick schemes, the mystic mirage of a world without taxes, those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden in the desert—only connect.

9 M A R K DA N C E Y

cover your back. But that doesn’t explain one overlooked proviso: these lies are as transparent to his Republican colleagues as they are to any other sentient being. Nor does it account for a still more curious fact—for all the objections that conservatives have aired over Romney’s suspect purity in these last months, not one prominent conservative has made Romney’s dishonesty part of the brief against him. It’s time, in other words, to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound. In part the New York Times had it right, for as much as it’s worth: Romney’s prevarications are evidence of simple political hucksterism—“short, utterly false sound bites,” repeated “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” But the Times misses the bigger picture. Each constituent lie is an instance pointing to a larger, elaborately constructed “truth,” the one central to the right-wing appeal for generations: that liberalism is a species of madness—an esoteric

cult of out-of-touch, Europe-besotted ivory tower elites—and conservatism is the creed of regular Americans and vouchsafes the eternal prosperity, security, and moral excellence of God’s chosen nation, which was doing just fine before Bolsheviks started gumming up the works. A Romney lie in this vein is a pure Ronald Reagan imitation—as in this utterance from 2007: “In France,” Romney announced on the campaign trail, “I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up.” And just as Reagan was found to be reciting film dialogue and jump-cutting anecdotes from his on-screen career into his pseudobiographical reminiscences on the stump, so it turns out that Romney picked up the marriage canard from the Homecoming Saga, a science fiction series written by Mormon author Orson Scott Card. (Another reason for students of Romney’s intellectual development to queasily recall that he told interviewers during that same 2008 presidential run that his favorite work of fiction was Battlefield Earth, the sci-fi opus by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a consummate shakedown artist in his own right.) Either deliberately or through some Reaganesque slip of the unconscious, Romney’s stump confabulations worked the same way that those legendary Viguerie direct-mail The

Baffler [no.21] ! 31

] appeals did: since reality is never Manichean enough, fables have to do the requisite ideological heavy lifting—to frighten the target audience to do the fabulists’ will. That’s the logic of the pitch for the quivering conservative masses. Once, I gave a speech to a marquee assemblage of true members of the conservative elite, from William Bennett to Midge Decter to Alf Regnery, at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a conservative think tank that rich donors convinced Princeton University to house under its auspices. (Karl Rove made a cameo appearance, during which he bragged about making a Republican congressman cry.) In my remarks, I laid out what I took to be a disturbing moral pattern, what I naively thought would stir these folks into something like shame. Why was it, I asked, that whenever Richard Nixon needed someone to brazen out some patently immoral, illegal, or dishonest act, he frequently and explicitly sought out a veteran of the conservative movement— the same conservatives whose ideology in policy contexts he usually derided? Because, I said, “Nixon knew that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered the description he made of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy: ‘good, healthy, right-wing exuberants.’” I gave half a dozen examples of latter-day conservative exuberance, in my own admitted exuberance to rain down the shame: the phony “middle of the road caucus” formed to secretly take over a National Student Association meeting from the right; the fliers the RNC put out during the 2004 election announcing that a President John Kerry would institute a plan to ban the Bible; the time Jerry Falwell lied that he’d never argued for the elimination of the public school system—“lying for the Lord,” as Mormons call it. Then, as the question-and-answer period approached, I trembled, anticipating the conservative elite’s chastened response. Yes, reader: I was once just that naive. M. Stanton Evans, a legendary movement godfather, stood up. He said my invocation 32 1 The Baffler [no.21]

“I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”—at which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them.

9 of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Richard Nixon had never been a conservative. He proceeded, though, to make a striking admission: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”—at which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them. And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romney’s apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.t

from California Tanka Diary 3 Harryette Mullen Meandering through hill-top neighborhood of splendid old mansions, I loiter at wrought-iron gates picketing the senator’s home. * “Where does California’s produce go?” shoppers ask in supermarkets stocked with Mexican avocados and Chinese garlic. * Parking in front of the apartment block, the produce truck driver whose horn announces his arrival with “La Cucaracha.” * Visiting with us in Los Angeles, our friend went out for a sunny walk; returned with wrists bound, misapprehended by cops. * At night our tidy clean green park is locked to keep out rough sleepers who bed down on sidewalks next to shopping carts full of rubbish. * Standing his ground in a pair of elegant leather shoes, offering each passer-by a chance to buy the homeless newspaper. * Within territorial boundaries of contested city blocks, yellow fire hydrants are marked with graffiti signatures. * A homeless woman spends her days collecting odd scraps of paper, then sits in front of the all-night drugstore, poring over them. * Confronting the suspect, police use lethal force against a disorderly mountain lion trespassing in a private yard. * When you see me walking in the neighborhood, stopping to admire your garden, I might be composing a tanka in my head. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 33

[ S a lvos ]

Can’t Stop Believing Magic and politics [ pa r t 1] 3 David Gr aeber

oliticians are by definition dishonest. All politicians lie. But many observers of American politics agree that over the last few years, there has been something of a qualitative change in the magnitude of political dishonesty. In certain party precincts, at least, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to change the rules to allow for a level of flagrant, over-the-top lying about political opponents that we rarely see in other countries. Sarah Palin and her “death panels” pioneered the new style, but Michele Bachmann quickly took things to even more spectacular heights with her wild claims of government plots to impose sharia law on the United States or secret plans to abandon the dollar and replace it with the Chinese yuan. Mitt Romney didn’t top either Palin or Bachmann in the grandeur and magnificence of his lies, but he did try to make up for it in volume, having based his entire presidential campaign on an endless string of fabrications. Many of the lies coming out of the Republican side are, in fact, so brazen that it’s hard to see them as anything but conscious provocations. It’s as if their candidates have begun daring the media and the Democrats to openly call them liars. What are we to make of this? First of all, it can hardly be a coincidence that all three of the above-mentioned politicians are deeply religious. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are evangelicals; Romney has been a Mormon bishop. In these religious circles, belief and lies are matters referred inward to one’s internal state. That is why the religious supporters of such politicians remain untroubled when the media reveals their statements to be untrue. If anything, their supporters are likely to react indignantly toward any journalist who suggests lying is the result of conscious dishonesty. Charismatics and evangelicals embrace a form of Christianity in which faith 34 1 The Baffler [no.21]

is almost all there is to it. If you are speaking about people of faith, the ones who have opened themselves to the divine spirit, then there can be no questioning the purity of their intentions. And then some secular liberal elitist media type is calling them liars? What the Republican Right is performing is a theological version of an essentially magical style of political performance: they are whisking a universe into being through acts of conscious faith. The limit is that—as long as the other side isn’t stupid enough to echo Bob Dole’s famous “stop lying about my record!”— the magic works only on those who already see them as morally superior. For liberals, of course, all this means that Republicans live in a dream world of their own devising. They see themselves as the “realitybased community,” the folks that doggedly insist on gathering facts and figures and examining the world the way it really is. The origin of that phrase is telling in itself. It comes from a New York Times Magazine essay by onetime Wall Street Journal correspondent Ron Suskind. Called “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” the essay is, for the most part, an elaboration on the same point I just made, namely that for Bush’s fans, the purity of his inner convictions was what really mattered. But the passage that made Suskind famous was one in which he reports a conversation with an unnamed “senior adviser to Bush” that, he says, “gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency”: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way

[

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the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

For liberals, this passage confirmed everything they’d always wanted to believe. Buttons and T-shirts announcing “proud member of the reality-based community” soon appeared. The phrase became a shibboleth. But there

is reason to believe that even here, things are not exactly what they seem. There have since been other journalists pointing out that Suskind’s work often combines a suspiciously too-good-to-be-true quality with quotations whose sources, when they are identified, vehemently deny having said what he claims they said. Neither has anyone else ever claimed to have heard a Bush aide say anything remotely like this. It’s possible that Suskind himself just made the whole story up. Is the very idea of a “reality-based community” itself an extraordinary pretense? In fact, what is really striking about political debate The

Baffler [no.21] ! 35

] in America today is that both the mainstream (read: extreme) Right and mainstream (read: moderate) Left have gone so far in creating their own realities that meaningful conversation has become impossible. There once was a time, for instance, when liberals and conservatives could argue about the root causes of poverty. Now they argue about whether poverty exists. Once they debated how to overcome racism. Now it’s common to hear conservatives insist that, just as the only liars are those who accuse them of lying, the only racists are those who accuse others of racism. But the other side does the same thing. If a Christian conservative wants to discuss the dominance of mainstream U.S. culture by a secular-minded “liberal elite,” or a Rand Paul supporter wishes to talk about the relation of the Federal Reserve and U.S. militarism, they will be met by a similar wall of incredulity. It seems awfully strange for the mainstream Left to identify itself with the tradition of Enlightenment empiricism when its greatest avatars have spent the last generation trashing the very idea of objective reality. The liberal class does have its own equivalent to the church, after all, and it is the university. The university has its equivalent of theologians, who interpret the works of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida with as much reverence as radical thinkers reserve for Karl Marx. And what do such authors do except trash the entire Enlightenment project? Both the mainstream Democratic Left and the Republican Right, in other words, have long been working in the tradition of American humbug, hype, and hucksterism; but they have justified it in different ways. The Right has relied on a logic of faith and inner conviction; the Left once preferred a rhetoric of science, and now prefers some kind of poststructural anti-science—but both really come down to more or less the same thing. Both are appropriate to the social base of their respective parties—the 1 percent that provides its funding, culture, and sensibilities. The Republicans are, notoriously, the party of business. It’s hardly surprising that they idolize the inner confidence of the determined 36 1 The Baffler [no.21]

CEO and are willing to say whatever it takes to close the deal, and then to do whatever needs to be done to run the company. The Democrats are the party of what Barbara Ehrenreich long ago dubbed the “professional-managerial class”—a party of teachers, hospital administrators, lawyers, social workers, and psychotherapists. Hardly surprising, then, that the highest expression of their weltanschauung would be the works of Michel Foucault, for at least twenty years a god of contemporary U.S. academia, and a man who argued that professional discourses are forms of power that create the very realities they claim to administer. Or that during the nineties and aughts, decades when the U.S. economy became more and more explicitly a financialized bubble economy, and Hollywood and especially Wall Street money poured into the Democratic party, the embrace of such ideas in intellectual circles became more and more extravagant. I’m not suggesting any simple, one-to-one connection here. It’s not as if left-leaning American academics were directly influenced by Wall Street funding. But the beauty of the system is that they didn’t have to be. They lived just as much in a bubble-world as anyone else, and their existing theoretical dispositions, born of the everyday common sense of a professional world in which impression management is everything, reflected the logic of a bubble economy.

well remember attending conferences and seminars just before the crash in 2008 where I listened to complex, jargon-filled presentations by students of cultural theory or science studies, or even radical political scientists. They claimed that the emergent logic of “preemption,” “securitization,” and “financialization” betokened not only the birth of unprecedented new forms of social power, but also a transformation of the very nature of reality itself. “We on the Left need to learn a thing or two from the neoliberals,” I remember hearing one fresh-faced cultural studies grad student remark (cultural studies grad students often consider themselves the cutting edge of the global Left, even if they

[ It seems awfully strange for the mainstream Left to identify itself with the tradition of Enlightenment empiricism when its greatest avatars have spent the last generation trashing the very idea of objective reality. The liberal class does have its own equivalent to the church, after all, and it is the university.

9 engage in no political activity), “because to be honest, in most ways, they’re way ahead of us. I mean, these guys have figured out ways to create value out of nothing!” At the time, I remember answering, “You know, Wall Street insiders have a term for that sort of thing. They refer to them as ‘scams.’” But I don’t think anyone was really listening. Most academic radicals had boxed themselves into a theoretical language according to which the very idea of a scam was almost meaningless. By flipping from science to anti-science, from Enlightenment empiricism to its opposite, the academic Left has left itself with the notion that performance really is everything. The intellectual trends ran from the emergence of “performance theory” itself in the late eighties, to the nineties rise of actornetwork theory, with its insistence that even the objects of scientific inquiry are created by political processes of negotiation, persuasion, alliance-building between scientists, institutions, objects, animals, and microbes. But the essence of the matter is: during the period when the American (and by extension North Atlantic) economy became increasingly based on the production of financial bubbles of one sort or another, its intellectuals simultaneously seem to have decided that absolutely everything is simply the product of political performance. The bubble economy was a kind of apotheosis of political magic.

ut as any genuine magician (or successful politician) can tell you, it’s not really that simple. True, we all accept that a president is above all someone who knows how to act like a president; we endlessly criticize candidates for any perceived inability to perform

the part. But if a candidate openly stated that performing was her only qualification to be president, her chances of election would stand at nil. In the real world, all the games of double- and triple-think remain with us. All we have done is come up with different reasons to resist having to think about them. At least Ron Suskind’s (possibly imaginary) Bush adviser was aware that faith is not enough when it comes to creating new realities: you need military force too. The ultimate difference between the magician and the politician is exactly that: the knowledge that he can, if it ever really becomes necessary, call on men with weapons—whether armies or police. This is his ace up the sleeve. Political realities are always a murky combination of fear, desire, and double- and triplethink. You have to ask whether your average citizen believes the given political order is just, or whether she believes that everyone else believes it to be just. You have to ask whether she believes there’s any way she can realize her dearest ambitions other than within a world she already believes to be a scam; you also have to ask whether she believes that trying to change things, or even loudly pointing out that the whole thing is a scam, might get her seriously hurt. (As the recent fate of Occupy Wall Street revealed, even when middle-class white people go out on the streets to speak unpleasant truths in today’s America, violence is a genuine possibility.) And then you have to ask whether everyone else believes violence will happen if they themselves try to change things—or just whether everyone thinks everyone else believes that’s what will happen to them. The hall of mirrors is endless.t Continued on page 70. The

Baffler [no.21] ! 37

[ S a lvos ]

Come On, Feel the Buzz 3 Alex Pareene

ast June, Joe Williams, a reporter for the political newspaper and web news site Politico, said on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC talk show that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared comfortable only around white people. Conservative websites trawled through Williams’s Twitter feed and found other comments betraying a lack of respect for former Governor Romney, and Williams was quickly and rather publicly fired. Here’s how Politico’s founding editors Jim VandeHei and John Harris explained Williams’s cashiering in a company memo: Politico journalists have a clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias. This expectation extends to all of the public platforms in which we and our reporting and analysis appears, including cable TV and social media platforms like Twitter. Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams’s public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility. His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way. Joe has acknowledged that his appearance reflected a poor choice of words. This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them.

Unless, that is, Politico managers themselves disregard them. In August, Politico reporter David Catanese defended GOP Rep. Todd Akin’s bizarre lecture on where babies come from. Akin, running for U.S. Senate from Missouri, revealed that he believed a common conservative myth: that in the event of “legitimate rape,” the female body somehow prevents pregnancy from taking place, thus negating the need for a rape exemption from a prospective abortion ban. 38 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Catanese tweeted that the negative response to Akin’s comments was overblown, because “we all know what he was trying to say.” He continued digging, suggesting that Akin might have a point about this legitimate rape thing. After all, Catanese wrote, some unknown number of “reported” rapes are surely fake (though it’s not “PC” to admit as much), and it is certainly possible (not that he had checked out “the science”) that actual rapes are unlikely to lead to pregnancy. “The left is often 1st to shut down debate as ‘off limits’ when it deems so,” he finally tweeted. “Aren’t these moments supposed to open up a larger debate?” Catanese was reprimanded and taken off the Akin beat, but he kept his job. The difference between these two episodes speaks volumes about D.C.-based access journalism and the highly toxic, incestuous variant of it that Politico has perfected. Or to put things a bit more baldly: in all likelihood, David Catanese and Joe Williams suffered divergent professional fates because the leaders of Politico are more concerned about losing access to the Romney campaign than they are about losing access to victims of rape. How deep does this craving for access run? Well, the same month that Politico fired Williams, the daily published—in the news, not the opinion section—an article cobylined by founder Jim VandeHei and the paper’s star reporter and mascot, Mike Allen, arguing that the mainstream media were unfairly subjecting candidate Romney to greater scrutiny than they had trained on candidate Barack Obama in 2008. The evidence for this claim largely hinged on the authors’ forensic study of story placement. For instance, they noted that the New York Times had put a story about Ann Romney’s fancy dancing-horse hobby on A1 and a piece about David Maraniss’s new Obama biography on A15. This was, VandeHei and Allen wrote, obvious proof that conservative complaints of liberal media bias

[

R A N DA L L E N OS

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 39

] have merit: “It’s certainly hard to argue that the Romneys’ horse-riding habits today are worse than the Maraniss revelations, which have gotten little mainstream coverage.” Maybe so. But it’s also hard to argue that the Maraniss “revelations” were meaningful disclosures of anything in particular. They concerned Obama’s youthful experiments with marijuana use—something that Obama himself had chronicled in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. But Politico’s gimlet-eyed media critics adduced a second piece of evidence to support their case for an anti-Romney bias in the political press: a lengthy Washington Post profile of the young Mitt Romney, which included scenes of him holding down an effeminateseeming schoolmate in order to forcibly cut his hair. This appeared on the Post’s front page, while the paper’s “Obama smoked drugs” piece was on A6. (One might conclude, in the rigidly sequential method adopted by VandeHei and Allen, that here was objective proof that the Times is more liberally biased than the Post, by nine pages. Then again, it might be proof that David Maraniss is an editor at the Washington Post, which could have an institutional interest in playing up Maraniss’s book and its pseudo-revelations.) To sum up their brief against runaway liberal bias in the mainstream press, Allen and VandeHei went to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer: “These stories are not unusual, except they were never done about then-Senator Obama in 2008.” Fleischer’s complaint was a common refrain among conservatives convinced that Obama hoodwinked his way into office with an assist from a press corps too blinded by liberal notions of social justice to properly convey the upstart’s clear constitutional radicalism and troubling history of extremist associations. But among the sort of people who remember the long 2008 summer of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and the New York Times story that desperately sought to find a single person who remembered doing a single line of cocaine with the future president in his school days, it’s hard to figure just how much 40 1 The Baffler [no.21]

additional vetting would satisfy this crowd. But vetting the would-be vetters wasn’t really the point. No, the chin-stroking chastisements proffered under Allen and VandeHei’s byline served an infinitely more petty purpose than calling out the alleged pro-Obama bias of the press corps. Politico wanted only a pretext to tweak the Washington Post, which had, in Politico’s argot, just “won” the entire week with Jason Horowitz’s well-reported, deeply sourced profile of Romney. Politico doesn’t do anything close to long-form investigative journalism, and it was no doubt galling to split-second purveyors of microscoops Allen and VandeHei that the Post had somehow managed to dominate the conversation around the presidential campaign with a fivethousand-word character study that was not reducible to a Twitter punch line. Allen and VandeHei’s piece, anyway, bore a none-too-subtle subtext, aimed squarely at the messaging professionals atop the Romney campaign: Hey, look over here! VandeHei and Allen all but shouted to Team Romney. We’re happy to carry your water for you! To call this craven performance a study in access journalism is an insult to the storied sycophantic practitioners of that low craft. Sure, echt-insiders like legendary New York Times columnist James Reston might lease out their bylines to war criminals like Henry Kissinger—but such ceremonial deference at least took place under some vague aura of a quid pro quo. Politico, by contrast, was in this instance publicly whoring itself out for no purpose beyond its all-too-palpable craving for a slightly more incremental monopoly on meaningless bits of information that even paid campaign flacks are apt to forget the day after they race through the overstimulated nervous system of the D.C. media. Let’s Get Small The word politico originated in the seventeenth century as a term of moral derision, and furnished the title of Matthew Josephson’s 1938 study of the graft-riddled Congresses of the Gilded Age. For VandeHei and his cofounding editor John Harris, however, the moni-

[ The word politico originated as a seventeenth-century term of moral derision; among other things, it furnished the title of Matthew Josephson’s epic study of the graft-riddled Congresses of the Gilded Age.

9 ker was a conceptual upgrade: they originally planned to launch their Capitol Hill tip sheet under the plain-vanilla name “Capitol Leader” but evidently settled on the epithet as a better summation of their journalistic ambition. In terms of strict diction, you can’t fault their decision. In debuting a minute-by-minute chronicle of the permanent campaign by, for, and about terminal Hill insiders, VandeHei and Harris went all in on the enabling fiction that the seamiest features of human nature— which would find full expression in Politico’s quest to discredit rivals, to distort simple political aims and ideas with drive-by caricatures, and to float personality-based digital memes across the gossip-driven agoras of social media—were themselves somehow news, and therefore newsworthy. In the bald effort to define (and, of course, to win) a whole new race to a whole new journalistic bottom, the faux-statesmanlike overtones that came with a name like “Capitol Leader” simply weren’t going to cut it. The name Politico also fits the VandeHeiHarris empire in an institutional sense, since the entire operation is a rich person’s attempt to buy influence. This is, of course, true of many (perhaps most) successful media outlets. A rich person’s vanity is much less likely to disappear overnight than, say, your classified advertising pages—as the Allbritton family, which owns and operates the tip sheet, knows all too well. Joseph Allbritton, a Texas banking millionaire, purchased Washington, D.C.’s former second paper, the Star, in 1975. The afternoon newspaper was rapidly dying,

and he was forced to sell the publication to Time Inc. just three years later. Time couldn’t make it work either. The Star closed up shop in 1981. But Allbritton Communications was born, and by the time Joseph Allbritton’s son Robert decided to get back into the newspaper world in 2006, his company owned a string of local television stations, mainly in the Washington, D.C., area. And when he stormed back into the world of written journalism (if not the print variety, strictly speaking), Allbritton spent enough to lure some big names to his new venture. VandeHei and Harris came aboard from the Post, where they were well-known political brands. And even though both editors were veterans of Old Media newspaper writing, they embraced the meaningless jargon-laced vacuity of New Media hype projects. “Obviously, you have to have synergy,” VandeHei crisply told the New York Observer shortly after his defection to the new paper was announced. From Time came respected White House correspondent Mike Allen, who’d quickly become the paper’s spiritual core. But its biggest star was blogger / reporter Ben Smith, a New York–based writer on national politics for the Observer (see: synergy!) who consistently rebuffed management’s efforts to get him to move from Brooklyn to Washington, and whose work was frankly the better for it. In short order, Politico’s assemblage of quickly acquired talent set about to reconfigure the already gnat-straining business of Washington newsgathering in a whole new, unnervingly banal, fashion. Actually, Politico’s ethos first began to emerge a year before the publication’s official launch, with the release of The Way to Win, a much-feted and then quickly forgotten 2006 book that Harris cowrote with Mark Halperin, then ABC’s chief political correspondent. (Halperin has, shockingly, not yet gone to work for Politico, though he was for a time in talks to host Politico’s Sunday morning show, a synergistic dream that has not yet come to fruition.) The book presented the ultimate Beltway media insider’s interpretation of the events of the last four presidential elections and used these The

Baffler [no.21] ! 41

] putative insights to create “lessons” for 2008’s would-be candidates. The thesis was that campaigns and the personalities of those who run them matter above all else (it would take another few years before the notion that, say, “the economy” might also affect electoral results could gain any serious traction in the campaign press corps). Harris and Halperin contended that, in this fatuous system of impression management, post-Clinton Democrats had been regularly outclassed by brilliant Republican operatives like Karl Rove—the man who, curiously enough, was then ideally suited to keep both Harris and Halperin richly fed with meaningless campaign-cycle scoops. The book marveled at conservatives’ deft manipulations in persuading the press to chase after bullshit stories and publicize misleading right-wing propaganda. In addition to showcasing their embarrassingly naked adulation for Rove, Halperin and Harris also hymned the unrivaled genius of the hack online propagandist Matt Drudge—again, largely on the basis of Drudge’s ability to manipulate people like Harris and Halperin into doing his bidding. “How Matt Drudge Rules Our World” was one chapter heading, and here was the justification the authors offered for their devotion: “No one has facilitated more political hijackings than he has. No one has a better grasp of the economic, ideological, and psychological incentives that power the Freak Show.* Few journalists would count Drudge as a colleague. But in the past decade, he has contributed to the change in how American politics has been covered, and his impact will be a major factor in the 2008 presidential race.” And true to the terms of their own personality-driven political “analysis,” Harris and Halperin professed to find evidence of Drudge’s outsize influence in his character— a particularly laughable claim in view of the

shameless distortions and truth-averse copy that drives traffic on the Drudge Report. Nonetheless, these prim arbiters of the political rulebook confidently announced that “Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper. In this sense, he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.” Not once does the reader get any advance notice that the brilliant Bush-Rove machine was about to suffer a humiliating midterm defeat in 2006, nor that a Democrat not named Clinton—or Edwards or Warner—would then secure the Democratic nomination and go on to win the presidency entirely without the slightest bit of help from Mr. Drudge. Come to think of it, the reader also doesn’t hear much about Iraq, Abu Ghraib, or even the 2000 Florida recount battle, which did far more to elevate George W. Bush to power than either Matt Drudge or Karl Rove. Praise the Lord and Pass the Fedora Matt Drudge may no longer rule the political world, but the fedora-sporting right-wing recluse is still John Harris’s dreamboat. Even a cursory examination of Politico’s daily output shows a tour through the news cycle curated largely to win Drudge’s favor. (And the love is largely reciprocated. One study has determined that, by 2009, Politico was Matt Drudge’s sixteenth all-time most linked-to source—not too shabby for a site that had launched only two years earlier.) One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss’s biography of Barack Obama. (The liberal media vetting blackout continued apace, in other words.) Politico’s Dylan Byers took the excerpt

* “The Freak Show” is Harris and Halperin’s irritatingly vague and lazy effort to come across as jaded insiders, channeling the

incredulity with which their imagined readership greets the decadent mores of the Beltway. In reality, of course, this shorthand invocation is much more an exercise in self-flattery than high Menckenian outrage: by posing as the knowing interlocutors of official Washington, Harris and Halperin affect a cynicism they haven’t earned. Calling D.C. a freak show (as opposed to, say, an open-air graft bazaar or a spiritual abattoir) is a glib, frat-boy putdown, too blurry in scope to defend or bother documenting—and just as important, it costs the high priests of objectivity at ABC News and the Washington Post precisely nothing in terms of their institutional prestige or hard-won political access.

42 1 The Baffler [no.21]

[ Even a cursory examination of Politico’s daily output shows a tour through the news cycle curated largely to win Drudge’s favor.

9 and turned it into a little micro-news story: Obama admitted to Maraniss that certain figures in his first memoir were “compressions”— i.e., composite characters. Byers completely missed that Obama explicitly said at the outset of his own book that some characters were composites, but Drudge didn’t care. “Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in Memoir,” went his headline, with a link to Politico instead of Vanity Fair—and another false rightwing meme got its wings. Journalistically speaking, this was a rare double-gainer. Confronted with a misleading claim in the source material he was repurposing, Byers merely reiterated the untruth rather than even minimally reporting the claim. He then proceeded to make the untruth cruder still by shrinking it into a Politico-friendly byte size—and was, naturally enough, rewarded with millions of Drudge-directed page views for his trouble. It’s bracing to consider how many successful Web-baiting careers at Politico might be cut short if reporters there ever bothered to read Dreams from My Father. Fortunately, though, there’s little chance that such a reckoning with the truth will ever occur, thanks to the paper’s endlessly excitable business model, which conflates the work of journalism with an amnesiac’s bad acid trip. Much of Politico’s published output seems deliberately engineered to exasperate high-minded liberals who consider journalism an act of public service. In its short half-dozen-year lifespan, the Politico brand has become a byword for a style of political reporting that gleefully defies almost every liberal shibboleth about the civic values of newsgathering: gossipy, blithely unconcerned with policy or the real-world ef-

fects of the actions of political actors, fixated on artificial “narratives,” designed to flatter the powerful. When I said, on Twitter, that I liked a number of Politico reporters (Ken Vogel, their campaign finance reporter, is one of the best in the country on that beat), many of my liberal followers reacted with disbelief. It’s also important to remember that for all the talk about how Politico has “revolutionized” the business of political journalism, most of the reported substance of the paper is quite unexceptional. Especially when Congress is in session, Politico is typically full of the sort of stories that also fill more sober and established Capitol Hill news outlets such as Roll Call and National Journal: it reports on Washington, for Washington, as a trade publication would. (It’s true that there is one slight variation: Roll Call and National Journal have long hived away their premium content behind a very expensive paywall, meant more for elite than public consumption. But here, too, Politico has proven less paradigm smashing than casual observers might suppose—the site launched its own high-priced policy subbrand, Politico Pro, in 2011.) And like other Capitol Hill newspapers, Politico fills its opinion section with banal opeds from (the staffs of ) unremarkable members of Congress. And for all of the paper’s buzz, it’s unclear whether it makes any money. Allbritton is privately held. Huffington Post media reporter Michael Calderone (formerly Politico’s media reporter, and before that the media reporter at the Observer, where he got that VandeHei quote about synergy), tried and failed to figure out whether Politico was profitable in a piece on the paper that ran in the inaugural issue of the Huffington Post’s tablet magazine arm. “Politico’s editors maintain that their company is profitable and isn’t borrowing money to fund its expansion,” he wrote, but “there have long been doubts about whether Politico actually has earnings putting the company in the black.” If Politico is profitable, then it’s become so largely by a process of reverse synergy. That is to say, the company’s freely distributed print product—little known outside of D.C.—would The

Baffler [no.21] ! 43

] likely be subsidizing its online operations. Advertisers will pay more for print than for online ads, and they’ll pay much more for a niche audience of very wealthy or very powerful readers. So Politico’s audience is not you and me, but the same people who have always kept Hill publications afloat: lobbyists, members of Congress, and their staffs. In this likeliest of profit-earning scenarios, the company’s product is not political journalism but the eyeballs of people with the power to craft legislation and regulations. Allen’s widely read email newsletter, Playbook, reveals as much each day in the unsightly sponsor messages that punctuate his aphasiac’s tour of the campaign news cycle: ** A message from Goldman Sachs: When Titan International set out to become the No. 1 manufacturer of specialty tires in the world, it turned to Goldman Sachs to help find the funding it needed. See how Goldman Sachs helped Titan International create manufacturing jobs and grow their company: http://tinyurl. com/83x4tgz. **

Other Playbook sponsors this summer have included the American Petroleum Institute, Hyundai, GE, and something called the “Investment Company Institute.” While John Harris proved an exceedingly inept oracle of how to win a presidential campaign, Politico has thrived in the same time-tested way that small-p politicos have always prospered, by gaming the acquisition of insider knowledge to yield maximal returns in petty graft. The key to persuading advertisers that you are, in fact, an influential, thought-leading brand is to remorselessly promote yourself in public—and this is one new-media mandate at which Politico undeniably excels. In this sense, the Politico brand is largely a dumbed-down directive to beat down its small army of competitive Beltway trivia sniffers in harder and faster fashion than any previous media dispensation has ever seen. This mandate was infamously summed up in a memo on the company’s business model leaked to The New Republic, which explained, in brusque authoritarian fashion, that the unironic prime objective for Politico 44 1 The Baffler [no.21]

scribes is to “own the morning”—i.e., to dominate the D.C. media microclimate until that golden moment when its seasoned inhabitants repair to their desperately needed three-cocktail lunches. All the professional lore surrounding the Politico shop is merely a variation on the mantra to “win the morning” (as the phrase has been reconstituted, with even less irony, in the Politico newsroom)—the notion that their editors are driving their young reporters to work twice as hard and fast (and wake up twice as early!) as everyone else; the myth of Mike Allen never sleeping; the ingratiating, right-leaning “counter-takes” on conventional wisdom that fuel much of the operation’s daily coverage and nearly all of its Internet coverage. In marketing terms, the “own the morning” image is simply the anchor of a very skillful PR campaign. That is to say, Politico mainly prevails over its rivals working on either “traditional” or “new” media platforms by getting people to talk and write about Politico—and by getting people to hate Politico in a way that used to be reserved for the lumbering Old Media brands that dominated the national politics beats, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Boys in the Brand Nevertheless, there is a specific Politico ethos, a worldview, and a style of writing and reporting that sets the Harris-VandeHei collaboration apart from the institutions the paper grew out of. It’s a product of the worst of Washington in a particularly awful era for Washington. In this abject little tip sheet, a moment of profound elite self-regard and complete disconnect from the rest of the nation has found its outlet. The problem doesn’t stem from Politico’s roster of reporters and bloggers (apart from a few notable, and lamentable, exceptions). Instead, the Politico malaise originates chiefly in the organization’s founders and leaders. VandeHei, Harris, Allbritton, and Allen are the paper’s guiding lights and the men responsible for its most flagrant journalistic sins. Just consider that infamous management

[ “This is a Darwinian business,” the memo barked, in drillsergeant cadences. “People are not looking for MORE to read. They need to NEED and WANT each individual story in POLITICO. If they don’t, we will not capture the eyeballs and mindshare that we must have to thrive in this brutal environment.”

9 memo. A particularly psychotic exemplar of the genre, it weighed in at 2,500 words—more than a thousand words longer than a previous memo had insisted that all Politico stories be. (The ideal Politico reader, you see, doesn’t “read” so much as skim Playbook’s paragraphlong blurbs on his BlackBerry.) “This is a Darwinian business,” the memo barked, in drillsergeant cadences. “People are not looking for MORE to read. They need to NEED and WANT each individual story in POLITICO. If they don’t, we will not capture the eyeballs and mindshare that we must have to thrive in this brutal environment.” The memo then inventoried the fundamental questions each reporter is expected to ask before posting his or her scooplet. Among them are: “Might an investor buy or sell a stock based on this story?” and “Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?” (Sometimes, of course, you get a blogger to post on your story by publishing an awful story.) There is also some helpful advice for overhyping a wholly unimportant bit of information: “If you are not certain that several of these are ‘yes,’ you can reframe your reporting or analysis so people will say, ‘POLITICO is reporting . . . ’ or ‘The way POLITICO put it is . . . ’” In the same self-aggrandizing but newsminiaturizing vein, Allbritton has openly mocked the concept of public service journalism. “I think we have to acknowledge that the money is spent for reputational benefits and a public service play,” he told The New Republic’s Gabe Sherman, when asked about expensive investigative reporting projects. In case his contempt wasn’t clear enough, he added: “Why does someone have to go off and write their thesis paper while they do it?”

Politico, in other words, manages to maintain—or enshrine—the worst features of the post-war “objective” American press: horserace-style campaign coverage and the ritual fetishization of a phantom centrist vision of how national politics should work. These empty postures work out, in practical terms, to a pervasive cynicism about the entire process of politics that ends up rewarding the worst actors on the national political scene for their shamelessness and skill at being horrible. At the same time, Politico’s managers have deliberately excised long-form reporting and investigative journalism: one of the few things the dying urban dailies and magazines did better than any other variety of news media had done before or since. No awards-grubbing for Politico, thank you. Matt Drudge doesn’t link to multipart exposés on the private prison industry; he links to stories about how the president loves teleprompters. Quite often, Politico’s campaign coverage is so singularly useless and fact-free that one almost hopes whatever defense contractor or industry front group that has stepped forward to sponsor Mike Allen for that day received a refund. In one standard-yet-egregious example, a July interview that ran on Politico Live (Politico’s “Online Morning Show”) with clownish former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich led to three separate news articles, each based around a one-minute video featuring a separate meaningless bit of pseudo-news: that Gingrich thought Sarah Palin should speak at the 2012 RNC convention in Tampa (something with no chance of happening), that Condoleezza Rice would make a good running mate for Mitt Romney (something with no chance of happening), and a The

Baffler [no.21] ! 45

] suggestion that Romney “loosen up” (something with no chance of happening). And the brand fearlessly pursues the same hurricane-force inanity in its offline endeavors, which are certainly in no danger of winning any journalism awards. At the Republican National Convention this August, I watched Mike Allen interview Newt Gingrich in the flesh at the “Politico Hub,” a workspace and bar on the ninth floor of a downtown Tampa office building. The Q&A was largely an opportunity for Gingrich to plug his multitude of profitable ventures: Allen wanted to know about Gingrich’s wife’s new picture book, and whether “you guys have a competition to see who is more prolific.” Later that day, Romney gave his convention address. “If the ball had bounced a little differently,” Allen said to Gingrich, “that would be you.” Actually, no: the ball would have had to have somehow bounced into an entirely different political universe for the unelectable former House Speaker to have become the presidential standard-bearer of the Republican Party in 2012. But Gingrich, who has a string of counterfactual historical fantasy novels to his credit, happily indulged the inviting reverie. In the event of an Obama loss, Gingrich said, small businesses would begin hiring “on election night.” This seemed like a claim worth pursuing—would entrepreneurs start digging through the stack of résumés the minute NBC called Ohio?—but Allen, naturally, did not ask Gingrich to clarify or defend the assertion. Nor did Allen ask Gingrich to elaborate on his stated support for Representative Akin— Newt said, and both men seemed to agree, that a brand-new poll showing Akin’s race as a dead heat suggested that the candidate’s legitimate-rape “gaffe” was over and done with as a matter worth discussing. Allen then proceeded to tee Gingrich up for a funny story about switching from a BlackBerry to an iPhone and a cute-kid yarn about Gingrich taking a grandchild to a submarine for a birthday. That latter set piece made Allen positively giddy: “That’s what happens when you have 46 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Grampa Newt! You get to go to a Trident submarine!” That’s right! Just like when you defer fatuously to failed-candidate Newt, you haul down an enormous six-figure salary! BuzzFeed is neither feed nor buzz. Discuss. At the end of 2011, BuzzFeed, a New York– based website aggregating funny (and unfunny) web culture detritus that for some reason had attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, announced that it had hired Politico’s second-biggest star, Ben Smith, to be the site’s editor and oversee its brand-new politics section. BuzzFeed, the brainchild of Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti, was an attempt to quantify and game the secret of “viral” content—i.e., dumb shit that people look at while they’re bored at work—and in its first years it became a well-trafficked compendium of lists of funny pictures, many stolen in part or wholesale from viral content incubators such as the social media website Reddit. When Ken Lerer, another Huffington Post cofounder, wrote BuzzFeed a $15.5 million check to branch out into “reporting,” it was clear that the site’s new ambition was to take on Arianna’s behemoth. And Ben Smith, the acknowledged master of viral political reporting, would head up the charge. The New Republic’s Marc Tracy credits Smith with pioneering the “IMterview,” a dubiously valuable but undeniably viral format in which he simply printed transcripts of his online chats with political operatives. This practice, Tracy noted, effectively gave political flacks “a platform to spew pure, unedited talking points.” Smith’s popularity with a wide variety of such operatives on most sides of most major political divides is based in part on the understanding that he will fairly represent their positions and views. It’s also based on the belief that he will pass along spin more or less without criticism or comment. BuzzFeed Politics has a sensibility but carefully avoids a point of view. (That the resolutely “fair” and nonpartisan Smith was hired by Peretti and Lerer, both outspoken liberals,

[ suggests either business considerations or the notoriously self-defeating instincts showcased by successful liberals.) It focuses on the trivial, the briefly amusing, and the silly. In July, Smith and BuzzFeed Politics reporter Rebecca Elliott posted “A Political User’s Guide to the Trolls of Twitter” that revealed an interesting definition of “troll.” The term, which dates back to the earliest days of the Internet, has a specific and useful definition: one who makes provocative claims one doesn’t necessarily believe and attempts to goad sincere people into endless, aggravating argument. The trolls on BuzzFeed’s list, though, were almost entirely people with sincere and passionate political beliefs who were rude to self-declared nonpartisan reporters. They were divided into “Obots,” “Romneybots,” “Paulites,” “Breitbartians,” and, most tellingly, “Media Matters.” These people aren’t trolls. They’re media critics and regular people with strong political beliefs. They tend to believe the nonpartisan press is trolling them. What the Drudge Report is to Politico—the ne plus ultra of online notoriety—Facebook is to BuzzFeed. The political material featured on BuzzFeed is designed not to be picked up by one conservative eccentric, but by tens of thousands of lazy individuals. To that end, most posts and articles feature one easy-todigest piece of information presented as directly as possible, along with a compelling illustration, followed by some words that most consumers are not expected to read. In this model of viral renown, context isn’t just superfluous, it’s often counterproductive. Context would sink some news-ish product before it even had the chance to make the obsessively self-referencing rounds of the social-media world. Take, for example, the tale of President Barack Obama’s oral sex joke. “Did President Obama Just Make a Blowjob Joke?” went the headline, back in June. Experienced news consumers know to mentally add a “no” to the end of all headlines posed as yes-or-no questions, but this one was immune to any sort of reading as a traditional news article. It was based on a pool report, a source of ephemeral political yuks for years. But those

yuks were rarely presented in such an ironyfree manner. Here’s the White House transcript of Obama’s remarks at an LGBT fundraiser in Los Angeles: I want to thank my wonderful friend who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups—(laughter)—but I think she claims Michelle didn’t go all the way down. (Laughter.) That’s what I heard. I just want to set the record straight—Michelle outdoes me in pushups as well. (Laughter.) So she shouldn’t feel bad. She’s an extraordinary talent and she’s just a dear, dear friend—Ellen DeGeneres. Give Ellen a big round of applause.

Did you get it? The “go all the way down” bit is the supposed blowjob joke. The BuzzFeed report (unbylined—and posted at a time when all of Smith’s BuzzFeed material was unbylined as a result of his exit agreement with Politico) was comprised entirely of that quote, a paraphrase of that quote from the pool report, two

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] snickering tweets from reporters, and the line “White House officials didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about whether the line was correctly interpreted.” At no point did “BuzzFeed staff” note that the president was referring to a push-up contest between Michelle Obama and comedian Ellen DeGeneres that had happened on her show a few months earlier, which Michelle won despite not demonstrating proper form. The joke was a single entendre. Smith’s initial defense of the piece—that Obama certainly could have intended the “go all the way down” line to serve as a double entendre—gave way to the more honest admission that the adolescent tittering of the crowd when the president uttered the phrase was itself the story. But any claim to newsworthiness here was utterly beside the point. The point was simply to garner Facebook “likes” and “shares,” not to inform or even particularly amuse the reader. (Even by that measure, the item was a middling success, since it had logged a mere 850 registered “likes” as of September. That’s a decent enough performance for political content, but a pittance compared to the thousands racked up by BuzzFeed classics like “Can You Make It Through This Post Without Crying?” or “23 Easy Ways To Instantly Make Your Day Better.”) Matt Stopera, the BuzzFeed senior editor responsible for many of the site’s all-time biggest hits, tried his own take on a political scoop in September with a post about a hip-hop superstar’s unlikely political endorsement. The headline: “Nicki Minaj is a Republican, Is Voting For Mitt Romney.” The subhead was “I am not joking,” but Minaj almost certainly was. The supporting evidence (helpfully plastered in bold text on a very Facebook sharefriendly image of Minaj) was one line Minaj delivered during a guest appearance on a new song by her frequent collaborator Lil Wayne: “I’m a Republican voting for Mitt Romney, you lazy bitches is fucking up the economy.” The line was a pretty obvious satirical commentary on the relationship between net worth and partisan affiliation. (And rappers are occasionally known to engage in flights of fancy. In other 48 1 The Baffler [no.21]

guest verses, Minaj has endorsed “eat[ing] your brains” and claimed that she is known to “kill bitches [and] leave your body in a bayou.”) But here again, any whiff of the quoted remark’s actual context would have rendered the literalminded post pointless. The misleading version, making a headline out of one idle joke in an obscure freestyle verse, swept through the political and entertainment news worlds on an otherwise slow holiday weekend. In the grand scheme of things, it matters much less that people are being lied to about the political leanings of talented MCs than that they’re being misled about the actual policy beliefs of both of America’s political parties. Still, a willingness to be credulous or intentionally obtuse about one indicates a willingness to uncritically pass along bullshit about the other. The theme of this year’s Republican National Convention was “we built it,” based on a blatant misreading (and selective editing) of a harmless quote from President Barack Obama about the role that government-funded infrastructure plays in private-sector success. Most of the convention’s major speakers shamelessly distorted the argument and beliefs of the president and the Democratic Party. The most flagrant such flights of fancy came courtesy of vicepresidential nominee Paul Ryan, who opened his acceptance speech by nonsensically blaming the president for a plant closing that happened before he took office and went on to blast Obama for failing to support a “centrist” deficit-reduction proposal that Ryan himself had personally torpedoed in the House of Representatives. The Romney campaign is based, to a degree that is surprising even by modern standards, on a series of deceptions, including the racially tinged accusation that the president supports the elimination of the onerous work requirements added to the federal welfare program under President Clinton. Immediately after the RNC concluded, Smith, in a sort of commentary-slash-signed editorial, took the opportunity to blast . . . factcheckers. Citing “an unusually honest election on both sides,” Smith absurdly characterized the 2012 race as “a rare campaign being con-

[ ducted in the daylight on the highest stakes in American government, the giant domestic programs most Americans wind up using and the taxes that pay for them.” This is his commentary on a campaign in which the central argument from the author of a plan to eliminate Medicare is that the Democrats “raided” it in order to fund health care for undesirable poor people. When most political reporters claim that campaign operatives and professional liars are in fact engaged in a high-minded exchange of ideas, it seems transparently like “sourcegreasing,” to borrow a phrase Smith uses in his standard-issue paragraph of pro forma disclaimers (what other journalistic hacks call their “to be sure” paragraph). But what’s truly terrifying about the great BuzzFeed politics experiment is that Smith, I think, believes this presidential cycle has set a new benchmark in public truth-telling. This, it seems, is one key collateral side effect of context-free click-chasing: once you dispense with the idea of the truth as an element of your journalistic

business model, you’re no longer able to discern what is and is not truthful in larger policy and electoral settings, when the idea of the truth, you know, matters. This, in a nutshell, is what you get when Politico, if not Matt Drudge, rules your world. The future of Internet-enabled political journalism now seems to be little more than Hobson’s choice between wide-eyed elation at Newt Gingrich’s excellent submarine ride or a sober appraisal of the essential honesty of Mitt Romney’s campaign manager. And so there is one undeniable truth to be gleaned from the many meaningless legacies that Politico shall undoubtedly bequeath to the generation of political scribes it is now schooling: the major forces of Washington’s political establishment have little to fear from the mighty democratic specter of an Internet-empowered citizenry. Their many ornate depravities are in less danger than ever of getting revealed to the public at large—unless, that is, they let slip a remark that can be tortured into a seventhgrade-level double entendre.t

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h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

The Lying Game 3 Jim Newell

n September 9, 2009, Congressman Joe Wilson, who had represented South Carolina’s Second District since 2001, shouted “YOU LIE!” at President Barack Obama while he was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress to boost support for his thenfoundering health care reform plan. You remember this, yes? Obama said, “The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” and then someone in the back of the chamber interrupted him and shouted, “YOU LIE!” The fury that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi bore on her face as she shot her head leftwards, toward the interruption, may have been the most natural, visceral expression of disdain we’ve ever seen from a United States lawmaker. All right, maybe the fainting reactions from the Washington pundit class did descend into self-parodic hyperbole—as though this single moment of disrespect to the president portended the five hundred years of unrelenting biblical apocalypse that, say, going to war with Iraq for no reason apparently didn’t—but you didn’t have to be a monarchist to see that Wilson’s outburst was objectively inappropriate. Hollerin’ nonsense at presidents during their addresses to joint sessions of Congress is downright boorish. So the question at the time seemed to be, would Congressman Joe Wilson resign immediately, decline to run for reelection, or lose his reelection bid? The answer turned out to be . . . Joe Wilson raised tons of money, and so did his opponent, and nothing changed. Only three days after the outburst, Ben Smith of Politico reported that disposable income had begun to fill up the coffers of candidates in South Carolina’s Second District: A source on Rep. Joe Wilson’s campaign says his fundraising has broken $1 million—and surpassed that of his Democratic rival, Rob Miller—since his outburst of “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to Congress Wednesday. The source said Wilson’s current tally is $1,005,021 from 18,859 donations amid a high-profile campaign on the Drudge Report and elsewhere telling conservatives that Wilson is “under attack” for his willingness to take on Obama.

By September 25—five days before the Q3 fundraising deadline—the National Republican Congressional Committee was asking Wilson to send a mass fundraising email on behalf of the party titled “The health care bill Pelosi doesn’t want you to read.” Wilson’s appeals to partisans turned him into a GOP cash cow. It’s not news that stupidity can advance an American political career. This is, after all, the country that elevated both Warren Harding and Richard Nixon to its highest office. But the case of Congressman Wilson showcases something new, both within our body politic and in 50 1 The Baffler [no.21]

A L A I N P I LO N

The magical Internet is now manufacturing national political brands, and the fundraising clout that goes with them, for confirmed morons. The

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h our brave new digital culture: the magical Internet, once touted as history’s greatest boon to democratic accountability, is now manufacturing national political brands, and the fundraising clout that goes with them, for confirmed morons. There Goes Everybody Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. We were assured by digital savants that the advent of the wired public life would enthrone transparency and reason. The greedy, decadent gatekeepers would be tossed asunder, with an authentic Digital Will replacing them as the primary means of pressuring authority. “We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us,” the tireless cyberutopian Jeff Jarvis explained in his book What Would Google Do? “We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.” Clay Shirky has ingeniously hymned the web as an inexhaustible mine of creative political resistance, even as he (like Jarvis) has turned this exuberant liberation theology into a lucrative career as a glorified corporate motivational speaker. It’s apparently never occurred to such cyber-boosters that the curation of political ideas on the web cuts both ways—that existing authority figures can pick and choose the crappy ideas and attitudes that suit them best from the same online “marketplace of ideas,” use existing apparatuses to push them through, and get away with it without even a rap on the knuckles from the ineffectual, or nonexistent, counter-authorities empowered by web connectivity. Indeed, not only is our new breed of web-enabled lummox-leader able to mint loutishment into mass-merchandised victimology overnight, but the same tools that are supposed to fearlessly empower the U.S. citizenry now permit these goombahs to have the last word—and to launch a whole new raft of fundraising appeals. Nearly two years after the You Lie Moment, on August 25, 2011, Congressman Wilson was still milking it, having sent a fundraiser appeal titled “I Was Right,” in which, as McClatchy reported, “Wilson portrays himself as a victim of political enemies who have punished him for telling the truth.” Wilson, you see, was upset that $8.5 million worth of federal grants in the new health care law would, as McClatchy put it, “be used to establish 25 medical clinics targeting migrant and seasonal farm workers, some of whom have historically been undocumented workers.” Wilson’s appeal claimed that Obama “misled all of us.” In an actual, functioning political system, the congressman would have written a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services inquiring about enforcement mechanisms for provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 before asking his supporters for money. By this time, though, Wilson knew how to play the new game. He’d rebounded from his “You Lie” notoriety and won reelection over his Democratic opponent, Rob Miller, by 10 percentage points. That’s right, he won his reelection race by approximately the same margin that he would have won by had he sat on his hands and shouted nothing that night. The only difference was that, by shouting, he separated cer52 1 The Baffler [no.21]

g tain excitable members of the American public from millions of their dollars during the worst economy in eighty years. Consider all of the dollars that would have been more effectively discarded had they been lit on fire and their ashes dumped into the port of Charleston. As McClatchy reported on October 18, 2009: Over the next 21 days, through the Sept. 30 end of this year’s third quarter, Wilson and Miller combined to raise $4.34 million—more than Democratic Rep. John Spratt and GOP challenger Ralph Norman collected over two years for their 2000 election in what had been the state’s richest U.S. House race ever.

When political consultants first came to understand the power of online fundraising—this was in the wake of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, recall—the idea was that this would bring about a new epoch of decentralized democratic power wherein politicians bent toward the concerns of the masses, who’d suddenly become their largest funding bloc. As Dean’s campaign manager Joe Trippi wrote in his memoir, the Internet’s “decentralized, scattered architecture make[s] it difficult for big, establishment candidates, companies, and media to gain control of it.” Now it appears online campaign fundraising entrenches the status quo by fueling an exponentially expanding arms race, littered with bad incentives to bring out politicians’ worst traits.

Consider all of the dollars that would have been more effectively discarded had they been lit on fire and their ashes dumped into the port of Charleston.

Where Isn’t the Outrage? As one of those depraved journalists whose job is to follow every minute-by-minute development in American politics, I can best describe my job like this: I look to see how much money politicians earn for saying or doing stupid things. It’s become one of those sad jokes among the Twitter chattering classes. That freshman congressman said he loves Hitler! What’ll it be, $3 million overnight? Ha ha . . . Oh, how we hate our lives. For me, it started with Wilson, but even as I type these words, that immortal moment of political derangement is poised to be eclipsed. Missouri Representative Todd Akin, who’s running for the state’s U.S. Senate seat, has said something spectacularly offensive on a local television news show. Speaking about pregnancies resulting from rape, Akin said, “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.” According to the CDC, the average number of pregnancies resulting from rape is 32,000 per year, but hey, one man’s “32,000 cases” is another man’s “rare.” Akin then hazarded his explanation for this non-phenomenon with one of the more infamous sentences of the year: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The problem with this bit of anecdotal soft-science is that it’s wrong to the point of insanity and something approaching cruelty. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and pretty much every other national Republican worth his salt swiftly demanded that Akin drop out of the race—not necessarily because they thought his comment itself was disqualifying, but because they never wanted The

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h Akin—who has a reputation for staying stupid things—to be the candidate facing Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. The incumbent Democrat was supposed to be vulnerable to a Republican challenge this cycle, and a pickup in Missouri could well put the GOP within striking distance of a Senate majority. But all these organizational imperatives of the old political order didn’t matter. Todd Akin might be a fool, but he could easily see how his epic moment of public lunacy could be mined for more coverage in the press, and how more fundraising dosh could be cynically reaped by depicting himself as a victim of the press. In short, reader, he didn’t give in. The day after the scandal broke, he took to Twitter, writing, “I am in this race to win. We need a conservative Senate. Help me defeat Claire by donating.” Contextual ads surfaced across the vast spaces of Google and Facebook, reading, “Akin Isn’t Dropping Out: Chip-in $3 as a sign of support for Todd Akin’s campaign.” When Akin appeared on the radio the next day to announce his final decision to stay in the race, he noted that he’d received a “tremendous outpouring of support” from donors who didn’t like to see everyone gang up on someone who simply thought that women’s vaginas have magical anti-rape powers. We look forward to hearing what the final haul will be. Five million? One or two at least in the next week? One million would make a fine benchmark, since that’s the figure Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann set when she stepped deep in it this summer. She, along with a handful of other Republican cosigners in the House, sent and publicly posted a letter to the Department of Homeland Security suggesting that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s longtime top aide, Huma Abedin, may have been working to help the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the United States government. Bachmann didn’t provide evidence for this preposterous claim, other than noting that Abedin’s father knew someone affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood several decades ago. For a congresswoman with a long and well-blogged history of making inane comments based on nothing, this was her worst and most malicious moment yet. And sure enough, Bachmann announced that her fundraising figures spiked to $1 million during her random persecution of a respected government official of Arab descent. No doubt, the avalanche of cynical, self-victimizing emails her campaign sent over the month demanding small donations to defend her against those who would roll over in the face of the Muslim Threat did just the trick. The self-victimizing, viral fundraising pitch is now a permanent feature of American political life. One sure sign is how quickly the major party fundraising committees have wielded the blunt Joe Wilson cudgel. The minute that a petty outrage swarms in the vacuous political news cycle, you can count on senior party flacks taking to their overworked email servers to exaggerate the outburst and dispatch a new round of indignant fundraising appeals. The unequivocal worst offender here is not some rogue conservative demagogue: it is, rather, 54 1 The Baffler [no.21]

g Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Aaaaaand there’s the email from Debbie! is another of those jaded asides that appear like clockwork on the Twitter feeds of Washington-based political journalists thirty seconds after any Republican has said anything to any media outlet in the globe, let’s say. (One just rolled in as I was writing that last sentence, subject line “UNREAL,” demanding a donation of “$3 or more” to help defeat Todd Akin.) We won’t deny that Republican politicians’ media spots have a frighteningly high chance of producing attackable content. But because of that very volume of material, one’s credibility as an indignant commentator would seem to suffer by feigning outrage over every. single. thing. This spring, Wasserman Schultz’s counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, was asked in a television interview to respond to Democratic accusations of a Republican-led “War on Women.” This was, by itself, a rather pointless exercise: asking a rival political leader to endorse the opposition’s talking points about his party is a bit like asking Genghis Khan if he might possibly harbor some hostility toward non-Mongol populations. By contrast, asking directly about the various Republican-sponsored state and federal bills and laws since 2011 that have sought to restrict access to women’s health and family planning programs would be a more productive way of dealing with a major-party mouthpiece. Nevertheless, the sad journalistic set piece ran its course, and here is how Priebus’s response began:

The selfvictimizing, viral fundraising pitch is now a permanent feature of American political life.

Well, for one thing, if the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars.

In other words, Priebus was calling out the opportunistic “War on Women” slogan as an opportunistic slogan, and adding that it’s one he disagrees with, as a Republican National Chairman is wont to say in response to such limp questioning. The email from the Obama campaign flack, titled “Republicans Compare Women to Caterpillars”—really?—came soon enough. Aaaaaand then there was the email from Debbie! “To have the head of the GOP say these attacks on women are as fictional as a ‘war on caterpillars’ is callous and dismissive of what matters to women and completely out of touch,” Wasserman Schultz wrote. The DNC then took to Twitter to play around with hashtags: “GOP chair dismisses his party’s attacks on women’s rights, comparing it to a ‘war on caterpillars.’ #WomenArentInsects.” Women: not insects. Got it. So, yes: Armed with the greatest means of communication designed to level all the old hierarchies that formerly sundered our leaders from the great vox populi, senior political operatives are hounding innocuous metaphors into the ground, determined to separate that last three dollars from that last gullibly alarmed supporter. Say what you will about caterpillars, but they at least have the good sense not to take interactivity at face value.t The

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[ S a lvos ]

High Church Hustle CNBC’s televangelists 3 Jason Linkins

risis is the stock-in-trade of the newsgathering business. Even in its present conglomerated state, American journalism lives or dies for scoops. In this competitive climate, you should be able to count on any news organization to report a world-shaking calamity in its broadest contours. So it’s impossible to imagine a TV news outlet reporting in late November 1963 that President John Kennedy’s visit to Dallas had drawn some suspicious activity in the area surrounding the Texas School Book Depository but that, on the whole, the event had marked a significant first step along the path toward reelection for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. Yet that imaginary report would be roughly equivalent to the work of the market savants who direct programming at the cable business network CNBC. In 2008, the world they cover turned upside down. Toxic debt overwhelmed the paper prosperity of the early aughts. Several major investment banks went belly-up, and scores more took on the telltale pallor of the financial walking dead. National economies teetered on the brink of ruin. And there was CNBC’s best-known face of market prognostication, Mad Money host Jim Cramer, who reported the initial rumblings of the crisis in March 2008 as if he hadn’t noticed a thing amiss: “Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there?! NO, NO, NO! Bear Stearns is fine.” Six days later, Bear Stearns was dead, its balance sheets a flood of red ink, its spare parts consigned to the grim-faced government accountants who were to oversee the bailout of Wall Street for months to come. Bear’s early flameout was an unmistakable, and by this time entirely foreseeable, sign that more gruesome reckonings were in the offing. Since then, Cramer’s bellowed moment

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of bullishness on Bear Stearns has become a symbol of the failings of the business press to register even the smallest hint of trouble in the markets ahead of the mortgage crisis. The Cramer follies have been broadcast, over and over, as a specimen of how the bubble-manias spiraled doggedly upward, until thudding ingloriously to Earth. In many ways, though, the Cramer clip’s half-life is unfair: Cramer himself was just a cheerleader in the madness that caught most responsible observers of the financial system completely flatfooted. And more important, the focus on Cramer’s errant moment of stockpicking misses the bigger, truly bizarre tale of CNBC’s post-crash career. In the nearly half a decade since the Bear debacle, the leading cable source of business news has done its business in an alternate universe, behaving as though Wall Street were just another wronged party in the crisis, and not its principal author. In CNBC’s through-the-looking-glass version of events, socialist regulators are about to seize control of the American economy. And the heroic defenders of prosperity are the bankers and brokers of the stock market, who must now be saved from the expropriating regulators. The only sane path forward is to unleash the mighty, market-hewing hands of the Wall Street titans of commerce from the bonds of public-sector restraint. Or to once again adopt the imagery of disasters past: to right the foundering ship of prosperity, it must be steered headlong into an iceberg. Sinners Before an Angry Market The perversity that garlands CNBC’s news operation has deep roots. The cable news network that CNBC would eventually become has its origins in an ancient cable channel called the Satellite Program Network (SPN), which operated throughout the United States in the

[

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1980s. For most of its heady run, the programming on SPN was gleefully schizophrenic—a mix of odd game shows, niche programming, and hoary, low-budget movies. (Fun fact: one of the network’s offerings was a show called Moscow Meridian, hosted by French-born Soviet mouthpiece Vladimir Pozner.) The channel ended up in the hands of NBC, which relaunched it as the Consumer News and Business Channel in April 1989. Two years later, CNBC cornered the stocks-and-shares cable audience when it absorbed its much larger rival, the Financial News Network. The first thing a casual CNBC viewer notes today is neither the network’s ideological distortions nor its blown market prognostications. Rather, it’s the network’s trademark

riot of visual stimuli—the frenetic sort of data presentation that might make sense in an aphasic’s ward. Crawling tickers and swooshing graphics depicting real-time market analysis frame an array of hosts who provide an unnervingly overcaffeinated profusion of jabber. It’s quite hard to describe to someone who’s never taken it in—I reckon that it’s the aural-visual equivalent of receiving a frenzy of information live from the jock strap of one of the light-cyclists from the “Tron” movies while tweaking on Adderall. Also, for good measure, you are a werewolf. This stimulus overload makes CNBC more visually arresting than the drier incantations of its chief competitor, Bloomberg Television. And when you go beyond the viThe

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] sual packaging into the daily content, you realize that the network faces no serious threat from its latest upstart competitor, Fox Business Network. It’s just too hard to get to the right of CNBC. It would be limiting, however, to describe CNBC as primarily, or even reliably, rightleaning—at least in the flat and binary scheme of political choreography that places the Obama White House on the “left” end of the political spectrum. At key moments, when the Obama administration acted in ways that pleased the market, CNBC swung foursquare behind the White House’s efforts. In March 2009, for instance, Obama’s economic team released details of its bank bailout plan—which offered the financial crisis’s Wall Street no-accounts a sweetheart stake in a “public-private partnership” that was set up to buy up toxic assets with the promise that taxpayers would be on the hook if anything got too hairy. After this market-stabilizing arrangement, CNBC’s Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer made their way to the set of the Today show to enthuse. Cramer declared Obama to be, finally, “proshareholder.” Burnett, meanwhile, beseeched everyone to give the administration’s stimulus plan—which had by that time launched a thousand Tea Party rallies—more time to work! Such provisional embraces of Obamanomics point to an important wrinkle in CNBC’s broad animus toward the administration: the members of CNBC’s commentariat weren’t very worked up over Obama’s party affiliation. They were, rather, pitching fits over what amounted to perceived violations of market etiquette—those policy proposals and rhetorical asides suggesting that the Obama White House didn’t honor the stock market’s guiding mores. “CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect ‘the Market,’” noted Time’s TV critic James Poniewozik. “The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us.” Naturally, the only way to appease such an angry God is to ensure that its needs are perpetually met, at whatever cost such outlays may 58 1 The Baffler [no.21]

visit upon productive enterprise—or however much they may accelerate the many moneyed corruptions of our political system. CNBC’s Church of the Market has a set of easily identifiable tenets. It’s taken as a self-evident article of faith, for instance, that the private sector is right-minded and honorable in all of its dealings. Government regulation of the private sector is always something to mistrust—regulation, at best, threatens to distort the Market’s performance. And at worst, it’s tyranny. It therefore stands to reason that advocates of government intervention are candidates for a witch-dunking. “Regulatory capture” is a concept promoted by heretics; in CNBC’s perfect world, the Wise Men of Wall Street work hand in hand with regulators as partners in self-policing. That a revolving door spins inexorably between the two is not seen as a vice. And here’s the truly deranged part of the CNBC saga: the network’s market devotions have only accelerated in the wake of the 2008 calamity—the interval, in other words, when the idolatry of the Market has proven not only false, but toxic. Institutionally speaking, CNBC refuses to acknowledge many of the basic, underlying causes of the economic collapse. The network’s talking heads oppose any regulatory intervention into Wall Street’s business and insist that Wall Street can trim its own sails, even though precisely nothing about the post-meltdown conduct of the big banks indicates that they want to correct any feature of their past conduct. If the Lords of Finance fail in their appointed rounds of self-regulation, that contretemps is but a temporary setback born of some technical glitch, and definitely not a sign of some galactic moral degeneracy. Of course, the central problem for CNBC’s Apostles of the Market is that the Market, in fact, failed—and did so on such a stupendously disastrous scale that to insist on its unsullied virtue is a study in journalistic malpractice. Going into the collapse, the Market was humming along with as much laissez-faire as it had ever been accorded. And yet somehow, it melted down. The verdict, rendered by the maestro himself, Alan Greenspan: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or

[ In CNBC’s through-the-looking-glass version of events, socialist regulators are about to seize control of the American economy.

9 permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.” CNBC has evinced neither any recognition of any such flaw nor any distress over Greenspan’s belated discovery. Instead, the network has surveyed the blighted landscape of America’s post-crash economy and decided that the culprit behind it all is the unproductive poor— together with the feckless, corrupt government that taxes and spends indefatigably in the misguided belief that it’s actually helping these no-account class warriors in their mission to drag the nation’s heroic financial elite down to their sordid level of being. Osculating the Overclass The obvious solution, in this cruelest of alternate realities, is to shore up the selfimage of the country’s investor class. Even as the financial crisis and its miseries slowly prodded ordinary Americans into a growing awareness of the inequalities that govern their lives, CNBC kept stolidly scripting its programming to the same Randian playbook. Any time over the past five years, you could dial up the network at random and hear the same pundit’s lament: the lenders weren’t the culprits here—no, that dishonor clearly fell to the debt-ravaged borrowing class. The saps, miraculously, were made out to be predators—the near-death experience of American capitalism was the handiwork of the American mortgage-holders who had traded substantial amounts of their own public and personal equity in a $4.8 trillion bailout of Wall Street’s most desperate failures, without any accountability or foreseeable payback in return. And to make this dumbfoundingly counter-empirical case, the network had recruited an impressive roster of shock troops to represent the 1 percent. Prior to the 2008 cataclysm, the two most visible personalities at CNBC were Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett, both creatures

of Wall Street. Bartiromo had fielded flak for getting chummy with her banker sources; in 2007, she faced embarrassing conflict-of-interest reports that she had accepted a flight on a Citigroup executive’s corporate jet. Burnett, meanwhile, started out as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and later did time as a vice president of Citigroup’s media division. Both of these “Money Honeys” (as they were dubbed by the ever gender-enlightened financial press) spent much of their respective tours at CNBC being staggeringly misinformed on camera. Bartiromo, arguing against one of those terrible Great Society programs that had helped to end poverty among seniors, was widely mocked for demanding that then– New York Representative Anthony Weiner should sign up for Medicare himself, if he was such an ardent supporter of the program. It fell to Weiner to explain to Bartiromo that he was, in fact, forty-four years old. As for Burnett, she went on Meet the Press to declare that the public concern over bank executives using bailout money as bonusplunder wasn’t a “real issue,” adding, “The taxpayer money isn’t being taken and paid out in the form of bonuses.” There was no way for her—or for anyone else, in the oversight-challenged TARP regime—to know that. (Burnett has since slid downward in the Dunce Parade to a perch at CNN, where she insisted to a Zuccotti Park protestor that the government had made money from TARP—a development that should obviously put a brisk end to public outrage at Wall Street. At the time she made this argument, taxpayers were $95 billion in the red from TARP.) But the chief architect of CNBC’s highbaroque regime of crisis denial was, of course, Squawk Box correspondent Rick Santelli, who on a fateful February afternoon in 2009, took it upon himself to decry the Obama administration’s efforts to rescue underwater homeowners from the clutches of certain The

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] destitution. Standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he declared that the recipients of this particular bailout were the real malefactors in the economic collapse. Rallying the traders who were collected on the floor as if they were the True Sons of Soil and Toil, he declaimed that there should be a “Chicago Tea Party” in response. From that solitary outburst—which in a more just world would be little more than an outtake in the extended DVD of Elia Kazan’s prophetic media satire A Face in the Crowd—a million bedevilments were spawned. With that great moment in financial-cumpolitical delusion firmly occupying the top spot in the network’s clip reel, CNBC has thrown over its Money Honeys in favor of an army of mini-Santellis, most of whom captain the network’s market-osculating dayside operations. There is the network’s chief international correspondent Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, author of the fittingly overconfidently titled book You Know I’m Right: More Prosperity, Less Government and full-throated devotee of Chicago School shock-doctrine purist Milton Friedman. (Her take on Iraq’s first post-invasion elections in 2005 was: “What I learned is when people say the Middle East isn’t ready for democracy, you should not believe it.”) CNBC has also provided a regular perch for access-journalist extraordinaire Andrew Ross Sorkin, who edits the market prostrations featured in the New York Times’ financial supplement, DealBook. Sorkin is best known as the author of the bestselling Too Big To Fail, a narrative account of the 2008 financial meltdown that depicts Wall Street’s celebrity bankers in the precise way CNBC prefers—as hallowed titans who endured an unimaginable tragedy at the hands of wicked fortune. Sorkin’s account casts nary a critical glance at the men involved in the fiasco. And Sorkin’s protagonists—including Jamie Dimon and John Mack—showed their appreciation by turning out in force for his Graydon Carter–hosted book party at Monkey Bar in Manhattan. Sorkin has garnered more recent attention for his role in a CNBC interview with Paul Krugman that was supposed to be an oppor60 1 The Baffler [no.21]

tunity to learn more about Krugman’s latest book, End This Depression Now! Instead, Krugman was subjected to a session of glib belittlement (Sorkin asked if earning the Squawk Box Blue Chip Book Award was as good as winning a Nobel Prize; cohost Joe Kernen referred to Krugman as a unicorn) that steadily devolved into what Krugman termed a parade of “zombie ideas.” Writing in his New York Times blog afterward, Krugman offered this tart summary of the value added by CNBC broadcasts: “Among other things, people getting their news from sources like that are probably getting terrible advice about any kind of investment that depends on macroeconomics.” Krugman should have known that no one on CNBC was interested in a probing examination of his ideas. He was, to CNBC, nothing but a useful ideological foil. Sorkin is about as likely to take Krugman’s ideas seriously as the Pope is to crack the spine of The Da Vinci Code. The network’s most practiced and versatile market apologist is doubtless Larry Kudlow, who, prior to coming to CNBC, had done time in both political parties, the New York Federal Reserve, Bear Stearns, A. B. Laffer and Associates, and Empower America, a conservative economics crank-tank that eventually became FreedomWorks. Here is one entirely representative Kudlowist pronouncement on the prospects for global prosperity, circa 2006, culled from the terminally sanguine and Bush-besotted pages of the National Review (from a piece about, of all things, Middle East conflict): The U.S. stock market and world equity bourses are important measures of fear, hope, security, and the health of the world’s economy. And while you might not know it from today’s magnified headlines about war, terrorism, higher oil prices, and rising interest rates, the stock market message is one of reasonable hope, confidence, and optimism about the state of the world.

“Leaving aside the wisdom of the economic analysis,” wrote Columbia Journalism Review’s Gal Beckerman, “the claim that stock market

[

J OS E P H B LO U G H

investments are some kind of marker of how people feel about Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah is beyond weird.” Kudlow has since stepped out as an apologist for the sixteen banks that are currently under investigation for their role in rigging the London interbank offered rate (Libor), maintaining that this staggering conspiracy was a victimless crime and that “homeowners” along with “state and local governments benefited” from the systematic concealment of hundreds of billions in market losses. But the Libor rate, as any one even vaguely acquainted with global investing well knows, is a benchmark to which virtually all financial transactions are tied, and even microscopic manipulations can result in massive distor-

tions of wealth or harrowing losses. If Kudlow doesn’t understand this (or if he does but is pretending otherwise), that, too, is “beyond weird.” But once again, Kudlow makes clear his allegiances—the rate fixers must be motivated by some greater wisdom. Leaching the Victims CNBC’s market-worship manifests itself in an abiding adoration of the Lords and Ladies (but, let’s face it, mostly Lords) of the Financial District. Their exertions, which help to perpetuate the harmonious gyroscopy of the financial world, are celebrated. It’s taken as an article of faith that their talents are vast, their decisions sage—and their compensation eternally just. As CNBC craves unfettered, friendly acThe

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] cess to the Lords of the Street, it’s understandable that its mouthpieces would decide to protect, on pain of death, the tradition of ostentatious executive compensation, wholeheartedly selling the line that outsized stockand-bonus packages are absolutely critical because they attract and maintain talent, despite all the compelling evidence that suggests that the talent the financial sector has attracted and maintained is severely wanting. CNBC’s position on the matter was exactingly detailed by the late Squawk on the Street anchor Mark Haines in an argument with California Democratic Representative Brad Sherman, who supported placing limits on the salaries and bonuses of AIG executives. It happened that Haines had, the day before, made his thoughts on Wall Street executive salaries quite clear: “You can’t really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don’t make more than $250,000.” Haines sought to drive the same point home with Sherman by lowering his hypothetical ceiling for Wall Street compensation yet still further below any existing proposal, apparently just for the sake of highlighting the rampaging Bolshevism of it all. “You and people who share your opinions seem to feel, you know, let’s hold salaries on Wall Street to $100,000. Do you have any idea what Wall Street would look like if you did that?” Sherman sensibly complained that he’d never said he’d set the compensatory limit that low, and that his position was still very generous—like President Obama, he thought “$500,000 plus unlimited restricted stock” was more than acceptable. Sherman really stepped in it when he dared to suggest that the American taxpayer could benefit from putting the failed financial institutions in receivership and instituting caps on salaries and bonuses. Haines insisted that “most people agree” that any such course of action “would have caused some systemic problems.” Sherman responded that while “most people on Wall Street agree” on that, “most people on Main Street do not.” “What do the people on Main Street know about running a financial system?” blurted 62 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Haines. Sherman provided the obvious response: “What do AIG executives know about running a financial system?” For CNBC, extremism in the defense of ungodly CEO compensation packages clearly is no vice. But the magnanimity that CNBC extends to those atop the financial food chain does not extend in any way to those at the bottom. Network correspondents have consistently cast those who got ground up in the gears of the subprime mortgage Tilt-A-Whirl as the real moochers, distorting the financial system’s majestic yet delicate machinery. Thus, the inhouse editorial position is that predatory lending is a holocaust that never happened. On March 2, 2010, Larry Kudlow and Melissa Francis anchored a segment that for all intents and purposes was set up to pooh-pooh the Obama administration’s efforts to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On hand to opine were Santelli; former FDIC chair Bill Isaac; and Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance. Tavakoli asserted that consumer protection was desirable, but a “big bloated regulatory body that won’t get the job done” was not a solution she favored. She might have gotten through the segment free of ridicule had it not been for her insistence that predatory lending was a thing that actually happened. “I have to tell you, here in Illinois, people were preyed upon—” She was immediately interrupted by Kudlow: “Oh wait a second, we’re all victims?” Francis followed hard upon, saying, “The phrase ‘predatory lending’ always kills me because how do you trick someone into—how do you force someone to borrow money? Don’t borrow it if you can’t afford it!” A few moments of excited disparagement ensued. Still, Tavakoli rallied, insisting that borrowers were defrauded and citing a number of examples in which predators were prosecuted. Santelli wasn’t having it: “It takes two to tango. You can’t cheat an honest man.” Tavakoli called his response “pablum.” It was, of course, much worse than pablum—it was a denial of objective reality. My Huffington Post colleague Arthur Delaney, who’s reported on numerous instances of

[ CNBC’s market-worship manifests itself in an abiding adoration of the Lords and Ladies (but let’s face it, mostly Lords) of the Financial District.

9 preyed-upon borrowers, immediately pointed me in the direction of the ne plus ultra example—a woman named Virginia Naill, from Mineral, Virginia, who had “unwittingly gotten herself into an adjustable-rate mortgage with a two-year teaser rate.” What she ended up with was a loan, deemed by Virginia Legal Aid Justice Center lawyer Tom Domonoske to be an “example of what went wrong in America.” As Delaney explained, Naill, 50, thought she’d refinanced into a fixedrate mortgage. Back in 2006, that’s what she’d told the broker she wanted. But she signed the documents that were put in front of her, and what she got was a case study in irresponsible lending—a debt trap that even the broker has admitted was based on a fraudulent application. Naill works at a Wal-Mart distribution center. Her husband, Donald Naill, is a roofing contractor. “They knowed me and my husband were illiterate, that we had a hard time reading and understanding what we read,” Naill told the Huffington Post. “We told ’em straight up they’d have to read it to us, and they said that they would.” In a September deposition for a lawsuit filed on behalf of Donald Naill, the Naills’ broker said she knew the loan application contained bogus information—an inflated income statement that qualified them for a loan virtually guaranteed to blow up in Virginia Naill’s face when the interest rate adjusted.

Naill is just one of thousands who’d been taken for a ride in this fashion. But Santelli would no doubt have the same answer for Naill as he had for Tavakoli: “We cannot look at our citizens as stupid. And if they are stupid and they sign things that they don’t understand, that’s an issue that should be dealt with. But to carte blanche make these rules and bureaucratize the entire system because of the shortcomings

of those that are financially illiterate. Deal with the issue: financial literacy.” Obviously, to Santelli’s mind, those who exploit the illiteracy of others for their own illgotten boodle don’t suffer from any shortcomings, moral or otherwise. They are simply true acolytes of the Market, acting as God intended. Ready, Aim, About-Face Given the stolid uniformity of the network’s market-worshiping mindset, it’s most instructive to note the few passing occasions when CNBC has tried to reckon with reality. In May 2009, for example, CNBC performed a ritual incantation live on the air in an effort to acknowledge, in a generic sort of way, that the Market had somehow faltered. The network dedicated one hour of its primetime broadcast schedule to a special symposium on the “Future of Capitalism.” In keeping with the show’s portentous title, CNBC took care to assure viewers that it would be a true “meeting of the minds,” and the network indicated its overall importance by running a countdown clock on the chyron-infested screen throughout the day. And what a “meeting of the minds” it was! Gathered together on the dark, spartan stage were such luminaries as AQR Capital Management cofounder Clifford Asness, PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and—perhaps most astoundingly, given that this was supposed to be a panel discussing the “future of capitalism”—former General Electric CEO and CNBC house mascot Jack Welch. As it turns out, with the noteworthy exception of Fink, the panelists’ vision for the “future” of capitalism mainly involved relentlessly reinvoking their past assertions. Asness—who famously referred to President Obama’s tax policies as a pogrom—stuck The

Baffler [no.21] ! 63

] to his admonitions against the governmentsponsored entities that had lately come asunder in the mortgage crisis, demanding that “someone in government” make a “mea culpa” about Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in order to restore “trust.” Pandit, meanwhile, was rather insistent that the “future of capitalism” required everyone to just take a chill pill and recognize that he and his fellow financial barons had suffered enough. “There’s been a lot of pain,” Pandit said, “and people have paid for it, and they are paying for it.” He assured everyone, “In a significant way, we have reset the world . . . and what we really have to look to right now, is not the retribution, but what can we do to drive growth going forward.” Welch added his own ominous hallelujah, “We’re not done. We’ve been through this before. We will come back.” You know—like zombies. Fink, to his credit, was willing to admit that descrying the “future of capitalism” sort of required advancing something like a coherent critique of capitalism’s recent past. “Capitalism went way too far, and there was no one governing the excesses of capitalism. And I’m blaming the investors, too . . . everybody here was guilty.” In short order, the other copanelists banded together as one to limply object to these heresies. As well they should! After all, this session was, if nothing else, a public declaration that the Lords of Finance had rebuilt their temple and had made their bodies ready to once again accept the Holy Spirit of the Market. This was no time for blame-taking or apostate reasoning. The pièce de résistance, though, came this July, when CNBC aired an extraordinary interview with Sandy Weill, who up until 2006 had served as the chief executive of Citigroup. Weill sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Becky Quick, and uttered these amazing words: “I think what we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking. Have banks be deposit-takers. Have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans. Have banks do something that’s not go64 1 The Baffler [no.21]

ing to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail. If they want to hedge what they’re doing in their investments, let them do it in a way where it can be mark-tomarket, so that they’re never going to be hit.” Quick’s initial reaction to Weill’s suggestion was to say, “That’s a pretty radical idea, though.” But it didn’t used to be. Weill was essentially endorsing what was, until 1999, the law of the land—the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and, more importantly, built a firewall between commercial and investment banking. Glass-Steagall stood until the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did away with the firewall, on the grounds that it was hampering financial sector “innovation.” President Bill Clinton, who signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill into law, did so with the proclamation that Glass-Steagall was “no longer relevant”— the colloquial name for the legislation was the “Financial Services Modernization Act,” after all. Famously inveighing against all this modernization was North Dakota’s Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan, who warned that the lawmakers bringing it to pass would “in ten years’ time look back and say we should not have done that.” His prescience was off by just a year, as it turned out. What made Sandy Weill’s suggestion all the more extraordinary is that no one had worked harder to ensure the repeal of GlassSteagall than Sandy Weill had—for the simple reason that nobody stood to benefit more fabulously from the passage of Gramm-LeachBliley. Weill, who often bragged that the bill should have been named “Weill-GrammLeach-Bliley,” is known to have had a plaque on the wall of his office that proclaimed him the “shatterer of Glass-Steagall.” “You’re almost referring to bringing back Glass-Steagall,” noted the ever-astute Sorkin. On that apparently radical notion, Weill strategically demurred, suggesting that “the only part of Glass-Steagall that we really cared about was insurance underwriting, and that’s what went away with Glass-Steagall.” That is not, strictly speaking, true: the supermarket

[ era of banking that Weill famously ushered in could not have happened had Glass-Steagall’s firewall remained upright. Nevertheless, Weill was of the opinion that the world had changed, “and the world that we live in now is different than the world that we lived in ten years ago.” (A fairly cheap and easy insight, it should be noted, for someone who had gotten out while the getting was good.) Had Weill been facing two journalists who were at all interested in pursuing the obvious hypocrisy of his remarks, some very obvious questions would have been asked. For starters, they might have asked him why he spent a small fortune to lobby against a law that had long served as the means by which investment and commercial banking were separated. They might have also queried him as to why that sort of financial sector regulation had suddenly, to his estimation, become unimpeachable—and indeed, necessary. They might have pointed to the obvious fact that the cost of Citi’s myriad failures had been passed on to American taxpayers, by means of a piece of legislation that he had, for years, trumpeted his involvement in enacting. Naturally, that’s not how CNBC played it. Instead, Weill’s remarks were accepted as an entirely new suggestion from just another member of CNBC’s lost tribe of Wall Street apostles, all equally victimized by the capricious twist of fate that the Market had thrown at them. There needn’t be any further examination of the role Weill played, or the law he enabled—both of which objectively militated against CNBC’s fatalist party line on the financial crisis. So while Weill’s comments got played throughout the day as a “shocking about-face,” no one at the network gave any apparent consideration to what made the about-face so shocking. Instead, Weill’s comments were deployed as a useful tool in the furtherance of undermining the Obama administration’s limp attempts at financial sector regulation— the Dodd-Frank bill and the watered-down bid to reinstate parts of Glass-Steagall via the “Volcker Rule.” This stratagem was both cynical and brilliant: CNBC had to know that

the Obama administration would not want to embrace Weill’s suggestion after expending so much effort to get Dodd-Frank signed into law. So the next day, Sorkin was back on set, asking Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, straight up, “Is Sandy Weill wrong then?” Wolin’s reply? “I think what we should be doing is putting in place the kinds of size and scope restrictions that Dodd-Frank contains.” And that was the life cycle of Sandy Weill’s extraordinary self-negating proposition, as far as CNBC was concerned. Its value as a prospective reform was confined entirely to its pedigree—’twas the pronouncement of a Lord of Finance, to be puzzled over briefly, perhaps, and then decorously tucked away. In any other setting, where rational humans exist, Sandy Weill’s unexpected proclamation would have served as a shock to the system, an event that begged for further circumspection. But at CNBC, it was just another test of faith that needed to be overcome. And by that point—having steadfastly held the line against the diminishment of their liege lords’ compensation, having denied agency to the true victims of the financial calamity, having presented themselves as devoted servants of the old Gilded Age now ready to mark its renewal—the people of CNBC were veteran true believers. Surely, one day soon the Market shall bless them for their chaste intellectual devotions.t

P. S . M U E L L E R

The

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h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

Face Value 3 Ana Marie Cox

able news ratings peak during an election season, and networks add as much political content as possible to capitalize on the nation’s always fleeting interest in the process. The demand for pundits increases along with that interest. I know because I’m one of them. In the post-blogging era, the distinction between journalist and commentator, citizen and pundit, has dissolved. There are more opinions than there are people. (Science will have to come up with a new anatomical metaphor for the possession of so many.) It’s a buyer’s market for news organizations, and I am fully aware that being an entertaining interlocutor with a face that doesn’t break the camera is a factor whenever I get work. Those are the two valuable assets I bring to the table, and when a print publication hires me—at least as I see it, looking back on the last eight years—cable news’ demand for me is part of the decision. Going on TV makes my print employers happy. It makes me happy, too: it’s a relatively cost-free way of saying to a larger public what I write for my readers. To be completely honest, it’s fun. And the vast majority of the talking heads you see on cable news are doing it for the same reasons I am: it makes their employers happy, and it’s mildly exhilarating, like the rollercoasters you don’t have to be tall to ride. They are not doing it for the money, believe it or not. Only a fraction of the pundits appearing on any given show are paid “analysts.” Most of them are remunerated in more existential terms. This is the process behind a cable news hit (they are called “hits,” for no good reason as far as I can tell, though I like to think of myself as a journalistic gun for hire). First, a booker calls you the day before in a panic. Bookers are always panicked. I understand that panic. If going on live TV is walking a high-wire without a net, programming live TV is stringing the wire without a net, under a deadline. The show needs you IMMEDIATELY, or, in fact, in about twenty-four hours, but they need a commitment IMMEDIATELY. “We’re doing a segment on CAMPAIGN THING THAT JUST HAPPENED. Can you come on to talk about it?” Once availability is established, then you move on to what you’re going to say. “Okay, HOST wants to see if THING THAT JUST HAPPENED is going to CHANGE THE NATURE OF THE RACE. What do you think?” You can try to offer a nuanced view. A booker in a non-panicked state (maybe they’ve already booked the first person they need for the segment and therefore aren’t haunted by the specter of dead air) may be responsive to a nuanced view. Whatever you say will eventually show up as an extremely condensed sound bite when the host asks you about it, but there’s some payoff to trying for complexity—it could mean that

66 1 The Baffler [no.21]

If going on live TV is walking a high-wire without a net, programming live TV is stringing the wire without a net, under a deadline.

P H I LI P B U R K E

you will get an open-ended interrogatory sound bite from the host. However, there is also a chance that the booker will tell you, “I need to talk to my producer about this.” That usually means that what you plan to say doesn’t fit into the outline they’ve established for the segment. They ask you about foreign policy, but you want to say that foreign policy doesn’t matter. They want someone to explain why the White House did XYZ, but you think they did XZY. “I need to talk to my producer” isn’t a lie, but given the utter panic of most booking situations, if there’s any chance what you have to say will fit into the segment they envision, then they will start with the car confirmation and date-making immediately. Yes, the car. I have a love-hate relationship with the car service The

Baffler [no.21] ! 67

h that comes with doing a cable news hit. Sending a limo to pick you up seems like a big expense for what amounts to five minutes of airtime, but almost everything weird about cable news makes sense if you remember the sugar-high adrenaline rush of making sure nothing goes wrong, no one is ever late, and there are no surprises. They want you to be on time, and so, a car. The car makes me feel conspicuous, especially in the neighborhoods where I’ve lived the past few years. On the other hand, being driven around by someone can generate a sense of pleasant alienation, a numbness on par with heading to a gangland sit-down: I am different, I am not in control, I am being driven to an appointment that I may not emerge from alive. (TV IS LIFE AND DEATH, remember. Panic.) At the TV studio, you get makeup. Early on, I thought of objecting under the pretense of false modesty. But next time you watch cable news, think about how distracting it would be if everyone on the screen was airbrushed and sparkly except for that one person with the bad skin and greasy hair. I suppose it’s also the case that to give some people makeup and not others could affect how viewers felt about what they were saying. I mean, maybe. (Ancillary weirdness about the spray-on makeup most network makeup artists use: it is almost impossible to clean off without a Silkwood shower. This leads to the very Washington spectacle of two badly dressed men sitting down for drinks wearing eyeliner.) So resisting that tiny compressed-air foundation gun is futile, and after a while you get used to it. Also, the women (yup, usually women) who do your hair and makeup are probably the nicest people you’ll meet in the course of going on cable news, and they’re the ones most likely to listen if you talk to them.

he primary goal of those running a cable news network is to create interesting programming, though that is often in conflict with the primary goal of those booking the segment, which is to avoid surprises. Worst-case scenario is probably when two guests reach an unexpected agreement. Usually, it’s a balancing act: planned disagreement. When I first started being a regular guest on cable, engendering conflict was the rule. Bookers would make sure that my opinion on an issue was opposed to that of the other guest. Sometimes opinions don’t have a clear opposite, of course, in which case, sketching out a stance in shades of gray—the war in Iraq is a catastrophe and we shouldn’t necessarily pull out, sex education for children is a great idea and parents should have a say in it—is a great way to keep the show humming along and to keep your dinner plans intact. But my opinions aren’t that complicated most of the time. So I’d give the booker my take (often based on having asked people who knew more than me), and usually the booker would tell me the name of the other guest (again, no surprises), and what his (come on, it’s a he) opinion was. I’d then tell the booker my witty rejoinders, which allowed the host to play knowledgeable intermediary. “Guest A, you have a problem with the kinds of solutions posed by Guest B. In fact,

68 1 The Baffler [no.21]

g you’ve said [THING I SAID]. Is that right?” This pattern kept the conversation from becoming an exchange of ideas. If a good debate is two people tossing ideas back and forth, then a cable news debate circa 2004 was two people tossing ideas to a third person, who held onto them and kept them from being in play. It was like trying to bounce balls off a marshmallow wall. But that was years ago. Sometime in the last four years—I think it may have been during the 2008 election—the cable networks I appear on stopped trying to book guests on “both sides” of an issue (because, come on, every issue has exactly two sides, amiright?). Instead, segments now tend to take one side of an issue as the starting point; the role of guests is to work with the host to either build up or tear down that point of view. To the extent there’s balance . . . well, only one of the networks pretends to be interested in “balance,” and it seems to have decided that balance means putting a big, fat finger on the scale. The other networks aim for the spectacle of polite outrage at what’s happening outside the studio walls: eye rolling as analysis. Though, to be honest, there’s a lot about political campaigns to roll your eyes at. Outrage is, actually, an improvement—at least no one has to be an on-air punching bag. Selfishly, it’s meant that I’m freed up to improvise within the confined space allotted to me. Bookers still want me to spell out my opinions and arguments in advance, but since I’m not supposed to be directly addressing the ideas of whomever I’m on with, I can occasionally work in a fact that reflects the sometimes fuzzy contours of what I really believe. The downside of this approach is that it’s still not so much a conversation as a series of mini-monologues. Occasionally, I wonder if this is what viewers enjoy. Twitter often lets me know if I did well, or at least hit a nerve (is there a difference?). But the people who watch cable news and immediately tweet about it are freaks (like me). What constitutes good infotainment for the rest of the nation? I’m worried that the answer is Dancing with the Stars. Am I insane to think that there’s even a tiny bit of educational value in the discussions we have on cable news? Because despite all I’ve said, I do believe that. I suppose I have to. If I think about it rationally, there’s probably a lot more to be learned about the state of the American economy in a half hour of Pawn Stars than in any block of dayside news, though it’s also true that you can’t fact-check Pawn Stars while it’s happening, and sometimes you get to say something worthwhile right in the middle of a news event. I often describe my role in the pageantry of election season as “color commentary,” the equivalent of what a SportsCenter anchor does, though probably with less impact. The relationship between what happens on cable news and what happens in a campaign is much more direct than the relationship between cable news chatter and what happens to the country as a whole. Campaign staffers react to what reporters say about them, but voters’ desires and opinions are more mysterious. I wish I understood these relationships better. That said, I’m happy to offer my opinion on them. What time will you be sending the car?t

Being driven around by someone can generate a sense of pleasant alienation, a numbness on par with heading to a gangland sit-down: I am different, I am not in control, I am being driven to an appointment that I may not emerge from alive.

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 69

[ S a lvos ]

Can’t Stop Believing Magic and politics [ pa r t 2 ] 3 David Gr aeber

mid all the routine distortions, opportunistic half-truths, and fanciful ideologies that now make up the political discourse, any honest interlocutor has to wrestle with the question of how self-deception functions as a self-administered belief system. Students of the art of propaganda have long noted its close formal mimicry of empirical science, but the problem of mendacious packaging doesn’t account for the deeper quandaries of self-conscious belief in one’s own preferred form of propaganda. The conventional formulation of the problem asks how some people can make themselves believe something that looks illusory to other people. But this formulation assumes people can’t be wrong about what they believe. Is it possible to think that you do believe something when, in fact, you don’t, or to think that you don’t believe something when, in fact, you do? Actually, there is an entire strain of thought dedicated to understanding how this might be possible. The term fetishism appears to have been coined by European merchants working in West Africa, in order to explain how their African counterparts made business deals. This was back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Europeans were after gold, mostly before they began trading in slaves. It seems that in many African port towns at that time, it was possible to improvise a new god to fit the commercial occasion; you could bring together some beads, feathers, and bits of rare wood, or just pick up any peculiar or significant-looking object you happened to find along the beach, and then consecrate it with a mutual oath. More elaborate fetishes that served to protect whole communities could consist of sculptures, often strikingly beautiful, into which the contracting parties could force nails, thus angering the newly created god to ensure it was in a 70 1 The Baffler [no.21]

proper mood to punish transgressors. But for a mere business deal with a foreigner, even an interesting piece of driftwood would do. The act of swearing the oath transformed the object into a divine power capable of wreaking terrible destruction on anyone who violated his new commitments. The power of the new god was the power of their agreement. All of this was just one step away from saying the object was a god because the humans said it was, but everyone would insist that, no, in fact, the objects were now vested with terrible invisible power. And if some unexpected catastrophe did befall one of the contracting parties—which was not at all uncommon as Europeans were constantly getting wrecked in storms or dying of malarial fever—someone could always say it never would have happened had the dead men not somehow broken their word. Did African merchants really believe in the power of their fetishes? Many seemed to think they did, even if they often acted as if fetishes were just a convenient commercial expedient. But the world of magical charms is full of such paradoxes. What is absolutely certain is that Europeans, used to thinking in theological terms, simply could not get their minds around this practice. As a result they tended to project their own confusion onto the Africans. Soon the very existence of fetishes was being held out as proof that Africans were profoundly confused about spiritual matters; European philosophers began arguing that fetishism represented the lowest possible stage of religion, one at which the fetishist was willing to worship absolutely anything, since he had no systematic theology at all. Before long, of course, European figures like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud began asking, But are we really all that different? As Marx noted, Western history is a story of our

[

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

creating things and then falling down before our own creations and worshipping them like gods. In the Middle Ages we did it with wafers, chalices, and reliquaries. Now we do it with money and consumer goods. Hence Marx’s famous argument about commodity fetishism. We are constantly manufacturing objects for our use or convenience, and then speaking of them as if they were charged with some strange, supernatural power that makes them capable of acting on their own accord— largely because, from an immediate practical perspective, that might as well be true. When a commodity trader reads the Wall

Street Journal and learns that gold is doing this, oil or pork bellies doing that, or that money is fleeing this market and migrating somewhere else, does he believe what he reads? Certainly he doesn’t think he does. There would be absolutely no point in taking the trader aside and explaining that gold and oil are really inanimate objects that can’t do anything. The response would be pure exasperation. Obviously it’s just a figure of speech. What do you take me for, some kind of moron? But in every practical sense, he does believe it, because every day he goes out on the trading floor and acts as if it were true.t The

Baffler [no.21] ! 71

Ob i t u a ry

The A lternative Press In Retrospect 3 Eugenia Williamson

n August, LA Weekly published something so incendiary that it yielded a bigger online readership than nearly anything else the paper had recently published. The piece in question, the result of the combined efforts of a half-dozen LA Weekly staffers working under the direction of music editor Ben Westhoff, gave rise to heated debate, death threats, and at least one Tumblr, which, during its short life, bore the unambiguous name “Ben Westhoff Can Suck My Dick.” It was a neat trick: LA Weekly managed to conjure so much controversy with limited context, hardly any content, and the lowest possible stakes. “20 Worst Hipster Bands: The Complete List” was an exercise in pure attitudinizing. Many of the bands it mocked—Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire—are so superannuated that even thirtysomething rock fans should know they aren’t anywhere near hip. Writing for the website Bullet Media, music critic Luke O’Neil sneeringly praised Westhoff and company for their prescience: “A lot of these bands didn’t even exist back in 2005 when this must have been written, a time when the concept of hipster band jokes seemed fresh.” But the prefab familiarity of the outrage was precisely the point. The formulaic presentation of random derision—or praise—is the premier linkbait currency of the Internet. The content-free listicle is among the most reliable offerings in the web-specific genre of ersatz journalism, as you can learn via a quick search of “hipster lists.” There you will behold, just for starters, entries from the Huffington Post (“Top 10 Hipsterhoods”), BuzzFeed (“11 Tired Hipster Fashion Trends That Are All Over Instagram”), and Yahoo (“Six Best Careers for Hipsters”). The only novelty here is that the alt-weekly is now locked into the same tawdry chase for pageview exposure that has driven the de facto war on the human attention span at shops such as BuzzFeed, HuffPo, and Yahoo. And Ben Westhoff, for one, didn’t have to wait long to see how this career strategy paid off. A week after his linkbait listicle made the rounds, Village Voice Media—the corporation that owns LA Weekly and twelve other alt-weeklies, including the Voice—promoted him to senior music editor of all their outlets. Just days prior to Westhoff’s elevation, the chain fired Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston. As New York Times media reporter David Carr noted (in a blog, of course), Johnston consistently “resisted the kinds of light, easily consumable items, like Top 10 lists and photo compilations, that tend to draw the most traffic online.” Although Westhoff, on the other hand, has dabbled in nuance—he is the author of last year’s Dirty South, a book roundly praised for its thoughtful analysis of Southern rap—he’s making top editorial dollar for, well, something else altogether. As alt-weeklies scramble to adapt the web model of attitudinizing 72 1 The Baffler [no.21]

P. S . M U E L L E R

over distant popcult targets, they move further away from entertainment writing. In one recent, all-too-representative print edition of LA Weekly, readers of the music section found listings, featured listings, a one-page profile of a national Pitchfork-approved act, and a one-page article about local music. The anodyne, earnest writing seems like an afterthought—designed, like the listings section, to deliver bland information with a minimum of offense. (It’s true that Westhoff’s trademark listicles—in addition to the worst hipster bands, there were grandiose entries such as the best musicians of all time, in any genre—aim to provoke controversy, but they, too, are written in effortless afterthought style; snidely packaged afterthoughts, but afterthoughts nonetheless.) A piece about a former department store turned underground nightclub focuses on the question of the space’s legality and employs the phrases “whimsically nicknamed” and “smashing success”; another, about the band Divine Fits, leads with the aging rockers “snacking on pita chips and hummus.” Elsewhere in that week’s LA Weekly, the editor-in-chief profiles an Angeleno who takes nice photos and shares them with Instagram, and a columnist laments the miseries of being single in her thirties. Notably absent: reportage. Although the city of Los Angeles’ dysfunctional school system and city government would certainly provide ample news fodder for robust feature coverage, and—for fuck’s sake!—Hollywood and the entertainment industry are right there, the print edition of LA Weekly contains just one certifiable news story per issue. This stolid aversion to criticism and reportage is endemic across the alt-weekly publishing industry—and it’s one of the structural reasons that the industry as we’ve long known it now seems ready to disappear. A few weeks after Village Voice Media appointed a list-monger to oversee its music coverage, it created a new holdings company, disengaged from its adult services website (which has been linked to child

The formulaic presentation of random derision—or praise—is the premier linkbait currency of the Internet.

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 73

sex trafficking), moved its offices to Denver, and renamed itself Voice Media Group. Earlier that month, the Voice itself lost editor-in-chief Tony Ortega, who stepped down in order to write a book about Scientology, and laid off or cut the hours of its already anemic editorial staff. Management announced that it was instituting the same measures at Voice-owned papers in Minneapolis, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Palm Beach. In an all-too-fitting new-media eulogy, a former Voice staffer proclaimed the paper dead in a post on BuzzFeed. The endgame at the Voice had a sickly familiar ring for me. In August, my own former employer, the Boston Phoenix—for more than forty years, among the most respected alt-weeklies in the country—officially announced its conversion from newspaper to glossy magazine. In the process, it halved the lengths of its feature stories and cut editorial staff, including me. Alt-weeklies first started to conglomeratize—and to sacrifice more of their distinctive, dissenting identities—in the nineties, but the industry entered its current, far more desperate tailspin in 2009 with the bankruptcy of Creative Loafing, the Atlanta-based corporation that formerly owned the Chicago Reader, the Washington City Paper, and four other outlets. This spring, it sold the Reader, the last of its assets, to Wrapports LLC, which also controls the legacy daily paper the Chicago Sun-Times. That’s right: the Chicago Reader, founded with the mission of defying the wan, establishment-friendly worldviews put across in the politics and arts coverage of the city’s major dailies, is now a wholly owned, vaguely youth-oriented sub-brand of one of those dailies. When the Sun-Times founded a lame subway giveaway, the whimsically named Red Streak, in a desperate bid for the ever-elusive young daily readership, the seasoned journalistic insurgents at the Reader roundly mocked the idea. It’s safe to say that no one left inside the shrunken husk of the erstwhile alt-weekly is laughing now. In 2011, the former Association of Alternative Newsweeklies admitted into its ranks its first web-only publication and became the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. “With the increasing number of apps, digital, mobile, and web platforms our companies use, it was time to reflect those changes in our name,” AAN president Fran Zankowski said in a press release. Among the most commercially successful—if not quite alternative—of these is Cocktail Compass, a syndicated app that draws on its host newsweekly’s extensive, frequently updated bar listings.

here today’s alt-weeklies rely on happy hour listings, they used to thrive on enmity. Norman Mailer’s Voice took up arms against the city’s Democratic establishment on a routine basis—indeed, Mailer himself mounted a doomed insurgent candidacy for mayor in the 1969 Democratic primaries. Over time, the Voice carried its crusade into the target-rich environment of the great city, with exposés on local slumlords and industry barons running alongside critical essays and spirited music, literature, and theater reviews. (Impossible as it may be to fathom for readers who know the paper only in its present listicle-besotted form, the Voice published its own Literary Supplement

74 1 The Baffler [no.21]

during the eighties and early nineties, seeking to turn it into a downtown version of the New York Review of Books.) In the “Press Clips” column, which debuted in the seventies, the Voice all but invented the modern profession of left-leaning press criticism. But the heyday of alt-weekly ambition didn’t last. Alt-weeklies found themselves confronted with the same economic forces that were homogenizing the major dailies they were founded to compete with—conglomeratized owners in distant cities, the standardization of content across chain-owned properties, and a single-minded focus on the bottom line. These days, the Voice Media Group would rather take on Death Cab for Cutie than lose a “like” on Facebook. This enforced blandeur has resulted in some strange editorial choices, such as a Seattle Weekly cover story exonerating a convicted murderer written by the murderer’s fiancée, and a 1,400-word Voice cover story on the Westchester punk scene in the nineties. The web-generated dementia that’s gradually overtaken the altweeklies is also directing editorial decision-making in the mainstream print press. While alt-weeklies set their sights on content-free web product, legacy dailies seem determined to mimic the personalitybased conventions of web-based journalism. In 2009, the New York Times hired Ross Douthat, a blogger for The Atlantic, as its representative conservative, making him their youngest—and lamest—op-ed contributor. Shortly thereafter, it purchased Nate Silver’s statistics-based presidential election prediction blog, and it has increasingly tapped bloggers for its arts coverage. Similarly, in 2009, the Washington Post plucked twentysomething bloggerkind Ezra Klein from his post at The American Prospect and installed him as a brand-name sub-editor and columnist. Two years later, they hired then twenty-three-year-old Alexandra Petri to deliver what the late-middle-aged proprietors of the Post op-ed shop took to be a hip, youthful perspective on current issues. The result, predictably enough, was a nightmarish union of sensibilities, as though the execrable musical comedy troupe the Capitol Steps had taken in Lana Del Rey. Here is one entirely representative Petri quip (I cannot in good conscience advise sampling any others): “Every time [Romney] tries to crack jokes or make hip references, I cringe. It’s like watching John Quincy Adams do the Macarena.” In elevating these web-savvy youngsters from the digital ghetto, legacy dailies are trying to integrate or compete with a medium whose standards they don’t seem to understand. Instead of infusing their brand image with ostensibly cutting-edge ’tude, they’re lowering their stature with writers who aren’t ready for the big leagues. At the same time, the managers at such papers are making it painfully clear to the younger demographic they desperately crave that they are completely tone-deaf. Meanwhile, alt-weekly content has migrated into the mainstream. Examples abound, from a Washingtonian magazine cover story on the suburban pot industry to a Boston Globe cover on the hijinks that ensued when a group of artists sought to thwart a defense contractor trying to build a helmet factory in their co-op building. Shifts in the culture have also affected the alt-weekly, which was

While altweeklies set their sights on contentfree web product, legacy dailies seem determined to mimic the personality-based conventions of web-based journalism.

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 75

once the only mass medium with the luxury of publishing profane language and risqué content. Now, of course, swear words proliferate on blogs and cable television—and in an effort to preserve both its revenue model and a residual impression of downtown edginess, the Voice wound up saddled with an adult listings operation that was a glorified message board for prostitution.

nd so the alt-weekly, born at the same time as the counterculture, is disappearing alongside the sinking taste hierarchies of the Internet age. Upper-market outlets have lately taken up the more pioneering coverage as the city papers process their listicles. Sasha Frere-Jones broke the pretty good teenage band No Age in the New Yorker; at the time, they were playing in Los Angeles coffee shops. Meanwhile, the bands that LA Weekly identifies as “hipster” have been exhaustively covered on NPR and in the New York Times. Such confusion has created a vortex in the space-time-coolness continuum that no doubt has left Pierre Bourdieu spinning in his Parisian grave. As the web and the mainstream press push the alt-weekly off its small patch of land, the alt-weekly talent pool has likewise abandoned its underfunded squats. In the past, alt-weeklies have nurtured major

While it may be true that the news industry in print is going down slow, oncevital alt-weeklies have gone in record time from political scourges to canaries in the coalmine.

76 1 The Baffler [no.21]

talents like Katherine Boo and James Wolcott. Today, clever writers who aren’t snapped up by legacy dailies are lured away by websites. Even Seattle’s still-hardy alt-weekly The Stranger lost a writer to the web when the excellent and hilarious Lindy West migrated over to Jezebel, where she’ll no longer be a heartbeat away from a demotion to listings blogger. In the dispiriting ouroboros known as the Internet age, what, exactly, is alternative journalism an alternative to? Why should readers dally with their local alt-weekly when they can get restaurant recommendations from local blogs? Glossy city magazines are chasing fringe subculture beats, the Washington Post is publishing talent-challenged young’uns, the New York Times has packaged Ross Douthat as a serious conservative intellectual when, not too long ago, he would have been a third-tier New York Press columnist. While it may be true that the news industry in print is going down slow, once-vital alt-weeklies have gone in record time from political scourges to canaries in the coalmine. Then again, check that. You’re not about to encounter an exposé of the mining industry—or work that engages deeply with any other industry, political formation, or cultural movement—in today’s lifestyle-diminished, venally viral alt-weekly scene.t

BRAD HOLLAND

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 77

O TH E R P E OPLE’S P ROBL E M S

The Code [pa rt 1] 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić

ou need to know how to talk to these small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star, Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she acquitted herself with exceptional humility, declaring with complete sincerity that she’d fallen in love with Bosnia; that Bosnia had suffered terribly in a war started by the Serbs; yes, of course, she added, the whole region had suffered too, in its own way. But she really got them when she said that she made the film (not without cinematic merit) to showcase Bosnia’s suffering to the world. Her words cooled the gaping Bosnian wound like a balm. She was a hit with everyone, the men in particular, so much so that no one noticed that her deferential manner was the kind you put on when talking to children. With an unfailing human instinct, Angelina Jolie unlocked the code. She kissed the finger slammed in the drawer, gave the naughty drawer a good smack, naughty, naughty drawer, and the evil spirits slunk away. The Croats and Serbs waited in line with outstretched pinkie fingers, and I’m pretty sure that, at least in their heads, the Slovenes, Macedonians, Albanians, and Montenegrins were all there lining up somewhere too. Angelina Jolie blew them an air kiss. The Serbs were pissed and beat their fists in the dung heap: they’d expected more than just air. If the rules of political correctness prevent us from abusing ethnic, national, racial, gender, and other types of difference—all unreliable in any case—and we’re looking for something to fall back on, there’s always the code. Social groups, tribes, sects, gangs, religious communities, mafia structures, families, Internet fan clubs—they’re all characterized by codes of behavior, written and unwritten, conscious and unconscious, enduring and susceptible to change, respected and disrespected. If not by a code of social behavior, how might we explain why Americans—just for example—almost never bellyache when meeting an acquaintance, but rather portray their lot in life as shiny and good, while Croats and other Yugozone* residents can’t wait to start bitching the second they clap eyes on someone they know. If they’re not whining about their personal problems—a toothache, a bad haircut, the long line at the post office that morning, a neighbor who turns his TV up too loud, a relative who landed in the hospital, their kid who got an F at school—then they’ll be bitching about rising prices. There’s an authenticity to the bitterness there, because prices seem to * The Yugozone is my coinage for the region encompassing the disintegrated and disappeared

former Yugoslavia. Someone recently came up with the term “Yugosphere,” and although the meaning is the same, I still prefer Yugozone.

78 1 The Baffler [no.21]

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

go up every day. The thing is, however, the bitcher-in-question gives you the impression that the price rises are directed at him personally. His bitching and our attendant commiserations work like morphine on him. It’s like Yugozone residents spend their lives wandering around with a little finger outstretched, just waiting for someone to blow on it and give it a kiss. And when someone does, presto, the pain disappears as if it’d never been there. Yugozone residents, the men in particular, all behave in a similar manner toward their leaders. The genius of Slobodan Milošević wasn’t that he said, C’mon, let's go smash some Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians, but that with an unfailing fatherly impulse he put his finger on the code and promised Serbs: No one will dare beat you again. The genius of Franjo Tuđman was not that he created the Croatian state, but the way he delicately positioned himself among the Croats, the very same way Milošević positioned himself among the Serbs. And Tuđman could even boast the advantage of a doctoral title. Yugozone residents love “doctors” and “generals” (it’s in our ganglions is how my former countrymen like to put it, just because they like the word ganglions), because only “doctors” and “generals” can decree—sorry, I meant guarantee—that everything will be as it should. This explains a square in downtown Zagreb being called Dr. Franjo Tuđman Square, the doctoral honorific probably making the square a world first. Although a number of doctors and generals, beloved leaders of the Yugozone peoples, have met inglorious ends—one currently languishes in a Hague jail (Dr. Radovan Karadžić), another in a Zagreb jail (Dr. Ivo Sanader)—their political successors rely on the same code. Current Croatian President Dr. Ivo Josipović recently encouraged the almost half a million unemployed and disenfranchised Croats with the following: “Look after your health and fight for your rights.” While this sort of tripe would sink anyone else on earth into a deep despair, Croatian workers took solace and comfort.

If the rules of political correctness prevent us from abusing ethnic, national, racial, gender, and other types of difference—all unreliable in any case—and we’re looking for something to fall back on, there’s always the code.

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 79

Social groups, tribes, sects, gangs, religious communities, mafia structures, families, Internet fan clubs—they’re all characterized by codes of behavior.

The consequences of behaving in accordance with the given code are as one might expect. Yugozone residents frequently elect doctors to represent them, and on a regular basis these doctors drag them into armed conflicts and other sundry financial and moral dead ends. And so the circle remains unbroken. It explains why in everyday life, for example, our Yugozonian will always stop the first passerby to ask for the street he’s after. It wouldn’t cross the mind of an American, German, or Englishman—he’s got his map, his guide, his iPhone. And I’m sure about all this, right? Absolutely! I myself am an exemplar of “transition”; I’ve got my maps, guides, and iPhone, but I still prefer stopping the first passersby in the street. What’s more, I get a vague sense of satisfaction in doing so, like I’ve outfoxed all the crap “other dumbasses” use. Don’t Yugozone residents, the men in particular, behave like children? For chrissakes, no way, that’d be an inadmissible colonial prejudice in our postcolonial time, a politically incorrect claim in these politically correct times. But the thing is, any observer, any Freudian amateur, might well hit upon the thought that Yugozone residents, particularly the men, are stuck in the cozy anal phase. What’s more, it might occur to such an observer that Yugozone men don’t want to grow up, which perhaps explains why they give their all to cut down those who have. It was wise of Angelina Jolie to not linger longer in the Yugozone. Why? Because if she had hung around, the Yugozonians would’ve gnashed their teeth and bared their fangs. Naturally, they’ve got the softening-the-foreigner-up act down to a fine art. First of all you drown him in local wine (which is of course the best in the world), and then you stuff him with local food (also incidentally the best in the world). In the process you invent tribal customs (such as guests not being allowed to refuse food or drink lest the host take offense), whistle local songs, pluck your tamburica, and wander around showing the alienated foreigner your region’s natural beauty and miraculously weed-free local ruins. Finally you adopt and domesticate him: you turn Jeroen into Janko, John into Ivica, Angelina into Angie. The Yugozonians will indulge in hearty backslaps with our

Bombay Duck is not an avian

species indigenous to Mumbai. It is long and thin, a favorite food consumed along the coastal regions of India, either dried and salted or freshly cooked. This common variety of fish is less commonly known as bummalo. The word is derived from bombil in Marathi.`

—Manohar Shetty

80 1 The Baffler [no.21]

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

Bandobast is not the name of

a rock band but commonly used in India when police are organized for watch duty. As in: “The police enforced a strict bandobast during the twenty-four-hour mill workers’ strike in the city.”

—Manohar Shetty

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

foreigner, con him into partaking of imaginary local customs (we kiss five time here!), all until his muscles relent and soften, until he’s pliable. And when they’ve finally reduced the foreigner to their own size, when they’ve got the foreigner well-marinated in their own toxic slime (and Angelina’s become Angie), it’s only then that the symbolic mastication begins. Yugozonians hate everything foreign, they down only what’s theirs, and if they do manage to get something new past their tonsils, then oh boy do they give it a mauling first. Albert Einstein, for example, to them he’s just “our Bert,” the guy who had a Serbian mother-in-law. That’s the only way they can take him. Yugozone residents, the men mainly, hate pretty much everything and everyone, yet stubbornly and irrationally insist that others love them. To the commonsense question of why anyone might thus love them, and whatever happened to reciprocity in matters of the heart, oh don’t worry, they’re not lost for words, they’ve got a ready answer. They remember well those moments of unconditional love. They remember their mothers burbling, “Who did a big poo for mummy? Who did a big poo for mummy?” They remember their joyous kicking little feet and gurgling confession, “Gu-gu-gu-I-did-a-poo.” The magnificence of this moment is forever fixed in their memory. And consequently, they delight in dumping everywhere for as long as they might live.t Continued on page 95.

Mela is not just the famous religious

Hindu Kumbh Mela held every twelve years at Allahabad, Haridwar, Nasik, and Ujjain, but any village or town fair. Another usage: “It was a real mela out there during the political rally.” Also a good name for a soft rock band—or a baby girl. —Manohar Shetty S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG

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Summit Meeting 3 Tony Hoagland The Germans fly in the day before and get the hotel rooms promised to the Palestinians. The Bolivians are nervous but expectant, having promised not to make a scene this time. They say that money isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t passionate but you can see the way it pulses in the groin of the rich country right before it expels a big aid package into the groin of the needy secondary country and how the face of the senator flushes and glows pink as he bends to sign the paper for the symbolic transfer of the funds. Have you ever heard the sound a peso makes when it scurries inside a euro and holds still? or the chamber music of distant dollars turning into zlotys into Deutschmarks into yen? It is a symphony now being played by an orchestra of diplomats on corporate cello, whose strings are numbered bank accounts plucked by supercomputer fingers.

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At night, if you put your ear against the sidewalk you can hear the clean rustle of the cash rushing through the pipes, pouring from one vault to the next, into bigger and bigger pockets. It was all designed so long ago, no one remembers whyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to keep misery organized? In the mansions on the hill the rich are taking showers: turning the handles of silver faucets to get a clean cold gush of cash. Over and over they come out on the balcony to wave, or make a speech, and there are roses in their cheeks: crushed hopes which changing hands has turned into the fragrance of fresh flowers.

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O TH E R P E OPLE’S P ROBL E M S

Cities of Night 3 Belén Fernández

n 2009, the American economist Paul Romer took to the prestigious forum of the TED Talks (that would be “technology, entertainment, design,” for you unfortunate creative-class have-nots) to explain how to solve world poverty. Where old-economy governments once sowed scarcity and corruption with their outmoded ideas of sovereignty and economic nationalism, today you can simply plug in new-economy investors and create administrative zones called “charter cities.” And my, how they will prosper. As Romer lays things out in “Why the World Needs Charter Cities,” poor countries suffer from a typical case of “bad rules.” The solution, of course, is to adopt better rules that ensure private-sector success. Or, as Romer tried to put the idea across in TEDspeak: “If we can keep innovating in our space of rules, and particularly innovate in the sense of coming up with rules for changing rules so we don’t get stuck with bad rules, then we can keep moving progress forward.” Right. But how do these magical innovations work, exactly? Romer instructs his listeners to ponder the former British colony of Hong Kong, which, when viewed from space at night, looks brighter than mainland China—all because the country had operated under “rules that were copied from working market economies of the time and administered by the British.” And since nocturnal illumination is a sturdy sign of individual economic well-being, the TED-branded moral is clear: “In a sense, Britain inadvertently—through its actions in Hong Kong—did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.” Of course, given this particular island nation’s history, Romer was smart to insert that coy “inadvertently” into his celebration of Britain’s economic legacy. Prior to a landmark series of anti-colonial youth riots in 1967, Hong Kong was known as “the sweatshop 84 1 The Baffler [no.21]

colony.” Still, Romer knows that the less inadvertent features of the charter cities plan— the bankrolling of overseas development via corporate schemes of governance, for example—can prompt negative visceral reactions to perceived colonialism, and so he warns his audience that “the kind of emotions that come up when we start to think about these things can get in the way, can make us pull back, can shut down our ability and our interest in trying to explore new ideas.” In the cloistered social world envisioned on the TED stage, charter cities are hives of rulebased innovation around the Western record of colonial exploitation—an old idea!—while colonialism itself becomes chiefly a function of attitude: The thing that was bad about colonialism . . . is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This [charter city] model is all about choices, both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places, and choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension.

In practical terms, as Romer goes on to explain, the fundamental choice available to non-leaders in this novel scheme is whether or not to immigrate to a charter city; they do not have a say in whether their leaders partition and auction off national territory to corporate sponsors to govern by remote control. Nor will the inhabitants who choose to immigrate be burdened with the cumbersome choices that come with regularly scheduled elections; the idea is to phase in such luxuries gradually, as they are earned via other metrics of investor performance. It’s meanwhile safe to assume that, were the Chinese to build a charter city in half of Paul Romer’s house and give him the option of living in the other half of it, he might well be hailing this incursion as something other than an “antidote to coercion and condescension.”

HENRIK DRESCHER

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Recipes for Disaster Paul Romer came to his big idea of streamlining global investment in charter cities via his faith in, well, big ideas. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Romer—who had initially been trained as a physicist—sought to revive the beleaguered discipline of development economics with something called New Growth Theory. Romer’s pet doctrine was a forerunner to the faddish pop-economic theories of our own enlightened age of Freakonomics, holding as it did that “ideas” were a principal driver of economic growth. By 2010, Romer had landed himself a coveted perch in the global roster of big thinkers, with Foreign Policy magazine designating him a solid No. 54 among its Top 100 Global Thinkers changing, you know, the globe. The magazine enthused that the charter cities plan was nothing less than “the world’s quickest shortcut to economic development,” while its progenitor, then an economics professor at Stanford, happily assumed the role of bad-boy academic iconoclast. (“I’m quite happy to offend everyone,” Romer likes to say.) Within a year, he was installed as the new director of the Urbanization Project at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Romer’s physics background has apparently imbued him with the conviction that the many ills of international poverty can be dispelled with a little unabashed technocratic experimentation. Defining economic growth as “whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable,” he deploys scientific-sounding jargon (“Rearranging involves connecting things, or modifying them chemically or structurally”) and culinary metaphors (“Human history teaches us . . . that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking”) to sell his recipe for recipe-making. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere—situated firmly in the path of long-standing U.S. free-market interventions in Latin America—is serving as Romer’s first kitchen-laboratory, after the national legislature there passed a constitutional 86 1 The Baffler [no.21]

amendment last year authorizing the creation of Special Development Regions (REDs). Far from coincidentally, Honduras’s civic plunge into ever-increasing corporate fealty has occurred under the illegitimate administration of Porfirio Lobo, who ascended to power via fraudulent elections held in the aftermath of a U.S.-facilitated coup d’état and whose reign has been characterized by politically motivated killings and other forms of oppression. For all the voguish globalizing chatter surrounding the charter cities movement, there is nothing new about American investors parking their money in countries that happily do their bidding. Historian Greg Grandin has spelled out the symbiotic modern union of U.S.-brewed free-market theory and antidemocratic strongman rule in Latin America in his book Empire’s Workshop—a relationship that bore ripest fruit under the bloody dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The “Chicago Boys”—a cohort of University of Chicago-trained Chilean economists who were disciples of the libertarian shock therapist Milton Friedman—fashioned the military regime into an obliging way station for foreign investment, and crafted in the process a new model for investor-driven governance in the developing world. “Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group institutionalized that hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after [Friedrich von] Hayek’s 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty,” Grandin writes. “The new charter enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as complementary elements.” And so, despite the new-economy apothegms of Romer, the brave new Honduran economic order is little more than the latest franchise of the Chicago liberty charter. There is, to begin with, the small matter of native dispossession. Though Romer specifies in his TED Talk that model cities are to be constructed on “uninhabited territory,” the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization has noted that the area slated for development includes local populations who may not realize that

Lobo’s aggressive courtship of global capital has come with ample hidden costs for ordinary Hondurans—crude reminders that when financial elites chase simple economic formulas across national borders, local populations pay.

9 their lands are uninhabited: “Government authorities have indicated that the first RED will be located between the Bay of Trujillo and the Sico river—an area with 24 Garifuna communities that are considered to be a cultural sanctuary.” But the Honduran project has furnished a cultural sanctuary of another sort—a last-gasp bid, in an era of dire global economic crisis, for champions of globalization to intone a few nineties-era slogans, squeeze their eyes shut, and watch the world prosper in their preferred image. In December 2011, The Economist, with nary a trace of postcolonialist irony, hailed Lobo’s pursuit of a bona-fide “Hong Kong in Honduras.” This crisp neoliberal plaudit offered a brief (if no less vague) summation of Romer’s “meta-rules” for economic success: the idea, the august weekly explained, was “to move from bad rules, which keep people in poverty, to the sort that lets them thrive.” To believe such facile formulas is to overlook nearly all of the meta-politics in the equation. Just for starters, the 2009 military coup that produced the Lobo presidency was spurred in large part by former president Manuel Zelaya’s 60 percent increase in the minimum wage paid to workers in Honduran cities. Evidently, a baseline living is neither a choice nor a “good rule” that Honduran citizens will enjoy in their freshly chartered state. And Lobo’s aggressive courtship of global capital has come with ample hidden costs for ordinary Hondurans—crude reminders that when financial elites chase simple economic formulas across national borders, local populations pay. A few of the better-known casualties of Lobo’s ascension include communities contaminated by international mining operations and landless farmers pitted against Hon-

duras’s wealthiest oligarch, biofuels magnate Miguel Facussé. Most observers agree that Zelaya’s ouster came about at least in part from the president’s willingness to pay lip service to such causes. That error won’t be repeated by a Honduran leader anytime soon. Just to drive the point home, the Honduran National Association of Industrialists, the business trade group headed up by Miguel Facussé’s nephew, Adolfo, rushed to hail Roberto Micheletti—the putschist interim president who governed between Zelaya and Lobo—as the country’s “first national hero of the twenty-first century.” Lobo, meanwhile, came to power after a clumsily rigged election in 2009 ratified the coup’s results, and was installed in the presidency the following year. (He subsequently won praise from Barack Obama for his putative commitment to democracy.) When the real work of Lobo’s presidency began, however, the nation’s second great hero of the new century set about scouring all traces of Zelaya’s faintly populist agenda from the economic scene. The region’s elite need no longer fear the rumored expropriation of their superfluous houses, or the specter of universal, free health care. As for their counterparts abroad, whose fund managers might well be contemplating a fresh look at Honduran portfolios, well, what better way to get the message across than a 2011 gathering called “Honduras is Open for Business”? Held in the city of San Pedro Sula, the conference brought together investors from fiftyfive countries. Distinguished guests included Carlos Slim (aka the world’s richest person), Colombia’s former president-cum-war criminal Álvaro Uribe, a clutch of U.S. officials (including Under Secretary of Commerce The

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Francisco J. Sánchez and the U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa), and panelist Paul Romer. According to the Honduran daily El Heraldo, Romer cheerfully announced that the charter cities initiative now means that “the eyes of the world” are on Honduras, and that the nation as a whole can’t help but benefit from the new influx of foreign capital and technology into a Honduran Hong Kong. One draws a blank, however, trying to determine possible benefits for the average Honduran. For one thing, the country’s institutionalized crime, its designation by the United Nations as the homicide capital of the world, and the corruption of its political class and military are presumably what makes “Hong Kong in Honduras” scenarios attractive to foreign investors looking to secure a hermetic social setting for their wealth to multiply in. The Economist delicately notes that, according to Romer, Honduran charter cities “are supposed to be open to anybody, but the inflow of people may have to be controlled. What is more, success or failure will depend not just on good rules, as in laws, but on the social norms that are established by its first inhabitants.” Needless to say, the Hondurans who belong to what American University anthropologist Adrienne Pine has labeled the country’s “excess demographic”—“[y]oung men, especially poor young men who are undisciplined by the factory workplace or by institutions like Alcoholics Anonymous or Evangelical Christianity”—aren’t going to win residence in the controlled environment of the REDs. The plan to assign charter city policing duties to private security firms, which have been implicated in political murders and routine streetlevel crackdowns on civil liberties, certainly doesn’t bode well for the security of individual persons, especially if the industry continues to build on the country’s well-established precedent of violently suppressing unsightly evidence of youthful despair for the sake of foreign revenue. As the UN Special Rapporteur informed the Commission on Human Rights in 2002 with regard to the extrajudicial killing of Honduran youths, “every child with a tattoo and [every] street child is stigmatized as a 88 1 The Baffler [no.21]

criminal who is creating an unfriendly climate for investment and tourism in the country.” Nor do things look so bright for citizens who’ve been detained and processed in the charter cities’ customized justice system, reconfigured on overtly colonial lines in an ostensible effort to crack down on drug trafficking. As The Economist reported, the Honduran legislature has recently approved “a ‘constitutional statute’ that creates [the charter cities’] autonomous legal framework”—a novel provision that enables the outsourcing of justice to a former British colony existing to the east of the African continent: “Mauritius has just announced that it will allow its supreme court to hear cases from the new entities (beyond that, in a relic of colonialism, is Britain’s Privy Council, to which the decisions of the island state’s supreme court can be appealed).” But charter-city boosters insist, as always, that they’re not reviving colonialism—they’re promoting futurism! Here’s how Mark Klugmann, an adviser to the Honduran government on the charter city program (and a veteran policy hand from the Reagan White House’s uniquely brutal, narco-dependent machinations in Latin America) explained the wonderment of it all to the BBC: “The reality is that if you want credible institutions you can wait five hundred years or you can bring them in now.” Democracy, on the other hand, must by all means be put on hold, to be introduced only when—The Economist notes—“the time is ripe.” As rendered in the free-market patois of the Wall Street Journal’s exultantly misanthropic editorialist Mary O’Grady, the civic innovations in Lobo’s investors’ paradise are actually breakthroughs in the struggle for “freedom”: “Now the little country that stood up to the world to defend its democracy”—by staging a military coup, formalized with fraudulent election returns—“seems to be affirming a belief that it needs to change if it wants to ward off future assaults on freedom.” In other words: War is peace. Ignorance is Strength. We have always been at war with Oceania. Such logic-chopping is all-too-common fare in the U.S.-choreographed economic takeover of the colonial south. “It’s interesting how the

charter cities concept unmasks the libertarian dream as deeply undemocratic,” critic Doug Henwood told me. “The compatibility of Pinochet and Milton Friedman offered plenty of hints, but this Honduran experiment looks like conclusive proof. First you need a coup. And then you need to set up a zone of freedom—but a special kind of freedom. Not the freedom of association, or of individual expression and development, but the freedom of maneuver for an economic elite to do as it pleases under a special kind of state protection.” Heedless of such plank-in-the-eye contradictions, O’Grady proceeds to lay bare the real basis of her infatuation with the project. It is, you see, an untrammeled exercise in libertarian wish-fulfillment fantasy: “What advocate of free markets hasn’t, at one time or another, fantasized about running away to a desert island to start a country where economic liberty would be the law of the land?” This brand of First World skylarking has lately become fashionable among the Randian right; libertarian legal theorists have been peddling plans to

“seastead”—i.e., to create free-market utopias on board ocean vessels that remain anchored in international waters beyond the sovereignty of the hateful regulatory nation-state. The obvious retort to such Star Trek–style reveries is to suggest that the free-market faithful simply bypass the cumbersome start-up fees and naval training entailed in such schemes, and migrate directly to a free-range failed state like, say, the pirate-friendly Somali coast. But such prospects offer few tangible perks for the privileged First World pioneer of the freemarket faith. Better by far to lease out a client state like Honduras and let local populations incur the uglier transaction costs. It was not for nothing, after all, that the great leader Tom DeLay dubbed the Mariana Islands—an openair sweatshop and human trafficking hub—a “perfect petri dish of capitalism.” The ideological enthusiasms of O’Grady and her colleagues on the libertarian Right are drearily predictable. What’s noteworthy about the charter cities movement is the bald admiration it’s garnered in the neoliberal

L E W I S KO C H

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Equations 3 Kwame Dawes The calculation is simple enough; he comes for you when you least expect, when you are minding your own business in the middle of a pecan grove, shells at your feet, the sweet rot of overripe fruit, birds feasting all about, and suddenly, like light, he rests on you and you think that all this dirt you feel, all the lies you have told, all the ways your body has gone, breaking bones, pressing against a woman harder than she wants it— all that filth will fall away if you wade out into the water; and Jesus is the white man at the end of the road where the two roads cross; and he is clean as anyone who has a bath made for him every afternoon at 3 o’clock with bath salts, with a white towel, soft from a well-water scrub. And he talks to you, tells you to come follow, and you follow because he has you bound, tied up. And you work for him, pick cotton for him, plow the land for him, plant seed for him, scare away crows for him, and he promises you that you won’t die, never die,

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that you will always be whole like this, that he will always feed you, always give you a suit of clothes, always anoint you with holy oil in the sanctuary, and your cup runneth over, and over, and over, and all you have to do is pick his cotton, clear his land, make him shine. Eventually, you do the calculation and you figure two oughts are oughts, and you figure that Jesus should be satisfied now, that your bones are hurting deep down now, that the clothes you are wearing are worn out, that heaven forever doesn’t look like a good idea. A pot of liquor, some rot gut, and you see the way the world will end, and dying is like sleeping, but better because you don’t know; that is when you curse Jesus and watch how his neck pimples and turns all red, how he loses his soft in his throat, and how when he calls your name, it cuts across the sky like lightning— so you run, like any sensible nigger will run, looking for the North Star, leaving this piss-ass, God-forsaken state behind, so you can get some rest.

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mainstream. Consider, for instance, the testimony of Adam Davidson—the NPR economics correspondent and New York Times Magazine columnist lately found to be feathering his own revenue model with bank-financed speaking fees and junkets. In a de facto advertisement for Romer’s scheme titled “Who Wants to Buy Honduras?” Davidson cited the precedent of the authoritarian free-market regime of Singapore in approving fashion: Singapore, Romer said, provides a good (if sometimes overzealous) model. Its strict penalties for things like not flushing a public toilet may make for late-night jokes, but they signal to potential immigrants that it is a great place if you want to work hard and play by the rules.

Not all foreign nationals working in Singapore find the country’s rules so beguiling. British journalist Alan Shadrake, for example, was arrested in 2010 for publishing work critical of the Singapore regime’s shockingly common use of the death penalty. According to a 2004 report by Amnesty International, Singapore

(which doesn’t supply reliable records on the practice) was potentially the world leader in executions per capita. What’s more, Amnesty noted, the nation’s jurists typically imposed the death penalty “on the most marginalized or vulnerable members of society including drug addicts, the poorly educated, the impoverished or unemployed, and migrant workers.” Of course, a freedom-of-speech case involving the egregious abuse of the death penalty doesn’t serve as a winsome punch line the way that toilet flushing does—any more than there’s any incentive for a speaker-fee journalist like Davidson to regard the corporate colonial adventure afoot in Honduras with a modicum of skepticism. Davidson, meanwhile, notes that Romer is “expected to be chairman” of the board of overseers for the adventure, despite Romer’s humble TED Talk plea: “You wouldn’t want to let us [university professors] run the cities, go out and design them. You wouldn’t let academics out in the wild.” It turns out that, false humility or no,

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Romer correctly surmised the market mood on this question. This fall, he was muscled out of his leadership role in the project in a deal that was drenched in all sorts of irony. For one thing, the RED initiative was found, in a battery of Honduran court challenges, to be operating without its ballyhooed transparency board, supposedly one of its central selling points to foreign investors leery of Honduras’s traditionally corrupt and cronyist political culture. And in an equally chastening development, Romer was shunted aside by a rival American band of libertarian investors, headed up by activist Michael Strong, a frequent past collaborator with the famously libertarian CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. That’s right: the self-appointed baron of international capital innovation was caught up short by a stateside corps of his own ideological brethren. In other words, those who can’t do, preach transparency. What’s more, the recent convulsions atop the RED project board have left some Hondurans suspicious that there may not, in fact, be any real money or operational momentum behind the charter-city initiative. The confident dispatchers of foreign-bred investment savvy might be all talk—the question here isn’t so much “Who is John Galt,” but where the hell did he go? In any event, the finances of the project now appear to be an academic question. In what looks to be the final death knell for Romer’s Honduran dream, the country’s supreme court ruled in a lopsided 13-to-1 decision that the whole undertaking was an unconstitutional violation of the nation’s sovereignty. Tomorrow, the World The Honduran project may now be a dead letter, but Romer is determined to continue puffing his big idea across new frontiers. After all, as he explains: “We can scale this model. We can go do it over and over again.” Romer has already sought to make a postideological splash in this hemisphere by trying to enlist Raúl Castro to help launch a charter city on Guantánamo Bay—not far from the experiment in extralegal detention that the

United States has erected for noncitizen “enemy combatants” in the war on terror. (It’s not yet been suggested to recruit Guantánamo’s inmate population as a charter city workforce, but perhaps that will be the sort of flat-world synergy calculated to transcend at last the bitter ideological clashes of the Older World Order.) Romer’s bid to remodel Cuba certainly coincides with U.S. schemes to pry open free-market opportunities in the Communist state by any means necessary. Caleb McCarry, onetime Cuba “transition coordinator” for the United States (and son of the right-wing spy novelist and former spook Charles McCarry) struck a perfect nonsensical balance in announcing his dual objective of permitting Cubans to both “recover their freedom” and “recover their sovereignty”—even as the U.S. installation on Guantánamo stands as a seemingly permanent rebuke to both ideals. This is all to say nothing, of course, of the none-too-subtle neocolonial aim of transition coordination. But never mind. Paul Romer has already sussed out how Cuba can perform a deft end run around the untenable American position: Outsource it all to Canada! Here’s the scripted appeal to the Canadian prime minister he’s urging on Castro: Look, the Yankees have a terrible PR problem. They want to get out. Why don’t you, Canada, take over? Build—run a special administrative zone. Allow a new city to be built up there. Allow many people to come in. Let us have a Hong Kong nearby. Some of my citizens will move into that city as well. Others will hold back. But this will be the gateway that will connect the modern economy and the modern world to my country.

Hong Kongs are everywhere for hire in the Romer universe; it’s just a matter of brokering the right deal uniting the right backers with the right client states. It’s altogether fitting that a restless sovereignty entrepreneur like Romer is something of a Where’s Waldo figure in the work of another hack New York Times neoliberal, the globetrotting corporate courtier-cum-columnist Thomas Friedman. The

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In Friedman’s bestselling 2005 tract The World Is Flat, Romer has repeat walk-on appearances (duly paraphrased by Friedman) composed largely of buzz concepts and neologisms: If you come up with the next Windows or Viagra, you can potentially sell one to everyone in the world. So idea-based workers do well in globalization, and fortunately America as a whole has more idea-driven workers than any country in the world.

There is also a cautionary addendum about the obsolescence of mere material production, in the firmly established tradition of Friedman’s globalizing gospel: “But if you are selling manual labor—or a piece of lumber or a slab of steel—the value of what you have to sell does not necessarily increase when the market expands, and it may decrease, argues Romer.” Of course, if you lay these fearless pronouncements side by side, they work out to a vision of globalization that diametrically contradicts the arguments favored by both Friedman and Romer: “idea-based” workers, churning out Viagra in the American core, will crush the colonials condemned to making useful products out on the colonial periphery. Poverty isn’t solved; it’s just outsourced ever further off the developed industrial world’s grid. But things get immeasurably worse when Romer turns his gaze toward continents that are—to him, anyway—undiscovered territory. Romer revealed to his TED crowd, for instance, that Africa is prime territory for the charter city movement: “I’ve talked with leaders in Africa. Many of them totally get the notion of a special zone that people can opt into as a rule. It’s a rule for changing rules.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remarked in 2006 that “the one place in the world that has been least benefited by globalization—and I would say has been perhaps in some respects most hurt by it—has been Africa. The number of people in absolute poverty in Africa today is twice the number of what it was twenty years ago.” The Paul Romers of the world are not, however, detained by the mundane historical re94 1 The Baffler [no.21]

cord. After all, as Romer patiently explained to his TED listeners, the continent is a veritable creative-class frontier. There is, you see, “lots of land in Africa where new cities could be built . . . immense stretches of land . . . land where hundreds of millions of people could live.” And just to nail the point down, Romer displays a photo of the African coastline that he’d snapped from his airplane. What the crowd is looking at, he assures them, is nothing less than a vast repository of unrealized capital. All it needs is simple— but not colonial!—harnessing via a bundle of strategic land transfers: “some arrangement that’s a little bit like an escrow account, where you [in other words, Africa] put land in the escrow account and [a] partner nation takes responsibility for it.” Africa, in other words, is expected to hand over its most precious asset to Western investment concerns in exchange for the promise of shared future prosperity. What could possibly go wrong? That’s not all, however. Just as charter cities can pioneer a magically pain-free, stalwartly profitable brand of international development, so too will they usher in a new environmentally benign model of urbanization. Here’s how Romer glibly sums up the case: “We’d dramatically reduce the human footprint on Earth by building more cities that people can move to.” As Max Ajl, a researcher in global development at Cornell University, notes, this aim is not achievable in any actually existing economic universe. The notion of “low-footprint population densities with which Romer is so infatuated . . . is based on the hidden premise that Africa and the rest of the global South should repeat, step-by-step, the development path of the global North. As is well known, we would need a couple extra worlds to supply the resources for the world’s population to live at consumption levels equaling those in Europe and the U.S.” Still, there’s one crucial respect in which Paul Romer has drawn the most vital moral from the Hong Kong precedent. The charter city movement no doubt looks immeasurably better in the dark. And from outer space.t

O TH E R P E OPLE’S P ROBL E M S

The Dream of Dorian Gray 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [pa rt 2]

he shows me a photograph. In the photo are children from her class, the image taken at the end of the school year. She points to a sweet little face. “Dora’s the prettiest in the class,” she says. Dora’s a little girl with long blond hair. My eight-year-old niece has short brown hair. She’s staring at the photo, but she’s all ears. I wonder what I should tell her. I know that responding with questions like “But is Dora smart?” or “Is she a nice person?” won’t help any in getting my message across. It won’t help if I say, “No, I think you’re the prettiest.” There’s some kind of consensus in her class that Dora is the prettiest, and there’s no disabusing her of this. The virus of insecurity has already wormed its way inside her. “You’re right, Dora’s got pretty ears,” I reply, though you can’t see her ears in the photo. Lookism is a widespread and devastatingly powerful prejudice based on a person’s physical appearance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful of course, to have it placed in the same category as racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism. It’s a word with plenty of synonyms—aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination—all signifying the same discriminatory practice: fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the ugly are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners. When I was my niece’s age, other little girls seemed more beautiful to me, too. Lidija had auburn hair and bushy eyebrows. Zlatica a light, translucent complexion, with tiny bluish veins below the surface. Jasminka full lips and oval baby teeth, shiny like silky candies. It was back then, in elementary school, that we all got it into our heads that the prettiest girl in the class was also the best little girl. With time the grind of everyday life bumped the painful subject of physical appearance from our list of priorities. The dream about the frog that turns into a princess, and those thousands of before-and-after photos that we absorbed like thirsty sponges, they worked in parallel, shunting our unconsciousness toward a hazy future in which we’d leave the miserable before far behind, and the desired after would last forever. In the meanwhile, small women’s sizes have become smaller, skinny women skinnier, cosmetic surgery more popular, and clothes

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

Lookism has plenty of synonyms— aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination— all signifying the same discriminatory practice: fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the ugly are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners.

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for the fuller figure both harder to find and more expensive. If the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen, luxury Italian fashion designer Marina Rinaldi would have had to shut up shop. Today her clothes are all the rage with Europe’s “Easterners,” women whose husbands have made a quick mint in the intervening years. Rinaldi has boutiques all over Eastern Europe, even in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, where Russian women shop on their summer vacations, alongside the odd solvent and more corpulent Montenegrin woman. Weight is a class marker. Only poor people are fat. Fat is ugly because poverty is ugly. While the poor pack on the pounds, the wealthy remain elegantly hungry. Research suggests that every second American man would have no qualms about divorcing a fat wife. There’s no mercy anywhere for the fat. Bloomingdales in New York recently amalgamated its clothing section for plus-size women with the one for baby clothing: fat women are either pregnant or losers who don’t manage to wiggle into size Victoria Beckham the day they waddle out of the maternity ward. Saks Fifth Avenue is closing its plus-size section Salon Z, formerly a temple of solace for the well-to-do fuller-figured woman. The message is clear: being fat—right there next to being a smoker—is an intolerable social evil. Sometimes you see the fatal fusion on New York streets. The smoker will be the fat girl. Let’s be straight with one another now: ever since beauty stopped lying in the eye of the beholder and the marketplace began enforcing its own standards, the world has become a boring place. There are fewer and fewer unique faces around, and all the interesting “honkers,” “beaks,” and other factory defects have pretty much disappeared. Gone are the men who stink of cigarettes, garlic, and sweat; hairy chests, beer bellies, and black vodka bags under the eyes have gone the same way. It’s enough to cast a cursory glance over the gallery of new Russians making waves at home and abroad. Former KGB man Alexander Lebedev, an oligarch who in 2010 bought the English Independent newspaper, is a well-read gentleman with stylish thin-frame glasses on his nose. He looks more like an intellectual than an ex-spy. Punching a fellow guest on a Russian talk show and declaring that anyone who doesn’t have a million dollars deserves to burn in hell hasn’t harmed Lebedev’s domestic or international reputation in the least. Alexander Mamut, a former Yeltsin adviser who not long ago bought the bookstore chain Waterstones, well, he looks like a learned post-perestroika man of letters. Vladimir Doronin (Naomi Campbell’s boyfriend), Roman Abramovich, even Mikhail Gorbachev, once the brains behind perestroika and today mascot for Louis Vuitton travel bags—these guys have all repositioned themselves. Not one of them looks how we might expect. Dorian Gray can rest easy; his dream has been realized. Even Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Russian oligarch (albeit one who’s languishing in jail for apparently no reason), has a pretty face adorned by thin-frame glasses. He’s become such an inspiration and icon of compassionate capitalism that celebrated Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya has published a book of correspondences with this most capitalist of all 96 1 The Baffler [no.21]

martyrs, a fledgling saint. An Estonian composer has even composed a symphony dedicated to this most innocent of oligarchs. A Croatian taxi driver, a former Gastarbeiter, returned to his homeland, fiddled his way to an overnight million, managed to usurp public space for a private parking lot, killed three people (one with a car, two with a yacht), and yet still walks the streets a free man. He’s svelte, got a perma-tan, and wears those smart glasses on his nose too. Without peer, however, is the artistic production inspired by patriotic-homoerotic love for Ante Gotovina, a former French foreign legionnaire and Croatian general convicted of war crimes by the Hague tribunal. Ante Gotovina is a Croat and he’s a handsome man, and in and of itself this is proof enough of absence of sin. Today everyone is beautiful. Successful female tennis players are beautiful, and beautiful female tennis players successful; successful classical musicians are beautiful; violinists and cellists are beautiful; opera soloists give supermodels a run for their money; high jumpers are beautiful; soccer players are sex symbols; Nadzeya Ostapchuk aside, even shot-putters have been going in for a makeover. Because aesthetic capital is critical for success. Beauty Pays—that’s the unambiguous message of Daniel Hamermesh’s book. Catherine Hakim, author of the bestselling Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, argues the same. And research confirms it: beautiful people earn more than ugly people, beautiful women are more likely to find a wealthy provider. Statistics suggest that our annual spending on cosmetics is enough to end global hunger, yet the question remains as to who’s willing to give up their face cream for a noble cause. No one, I suspect. I wouldn’t either. In any case, let the men first give up their weapons, much more is spent on them. On the map of the body there are no zones outside the jurisdiction of aesthetic arbitrage. Enchanted by the charms of the surgeon’s knife, and having modified their breasts, faces, eyelids, double chins, lips, jawlines, stomachs, you name it, women now don’t just want any old vagina, but a tight one, a neatly mown one. There are plastic surgeons specializing in transforming everyday vaginas into pretty ones, tired old ones into rejuvenated youthful ones. And with the standards of physical beauty clear and generally accepted by all, everyone can, if they want to, be beautiful. Boredom might yet prove the only resistance factor to this mass bodily beautification. Maybe all this explains why women are presently so obsessed with their rears. New York women seem to love wearing teenager tights. A pretty ass in elastic, skintight leggings (let’s forget for a second that they look like diving gear) gets way more attention than a pretty face. I spotted this kind of ass near Central Park and promptly joined a small throng who had stopped to let their admiring eyes glide along after her. Stylish in body-hugging tights and a snug leather jacket that barely made it to her waist, the ass’s owner paraded Central Park like royalty. It was a Saturday, and the young woman was taking her amazing erotic capital out for a walk.t

Ever since beauty stopped lying in the eye of the beholder and the marketplace began enforcing its own standards, the world has become a boring place.

Continued on page 110.

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RALPH STEADMAN

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Anything for the Libor Boys 3 Christian Lorentzen

n a Tuesday evening last July, I was walking south across the Thames over the Millennium Bridge. The entrance to the Tate Modern was blocked off with police tape, and a blue tarp was spread across the ground. Under it was the corpse of someone who’d jumped from the members’ bar five floors up. A Tate membership costs £60 a year, and many members work within walking distance of the museum, just across the river in the City, the primary zone of banking here since the late sixteenth century. A few days later, the London press reported that the body under the tarp belonged to Michael Foreman, forty-eight years old, married, a passionate trombonist, frequent visitor to Hong Kong, and senior bank manager for HSBC. Foreman’s suicide and its dramatic staging caused at least one onlooker to vomit and left a musician about to go on in the Tanks, the Tate’s newly opened exhibition space, too traumatized to perform. But no one learned anything more about why the banker took his own life—he might have been distressed over personal problems, professional troubles, or Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull For the Love of God, which the Tate was featuring as part of its popular Hirst retrospective. In a sense, the mystery of Foreman’s death didn’t matter. All summer long, the bankers of London were locked into a different kind of Totentanz, pantomiming their profession’s moral vacuity. They were making headlines as interest-rate riggers at Barclays, Mexican drug-money launderers at HSBC, and accomplices to the systematic violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran at Standard Chartered. By August the cascade of financial news had become so relentlessly grim that the British began spitting bile across the Atlantic, displaying all the telltale symptoms of a persecution complex. “I think it’s a concerted effort that’s been organized at the top of the U.S. government,” Labour MP John Mann

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told the BBC. “This is Washington trying to win a commercial battle to have trading from London shifted to New York.” An unnamed Standard Chartered group director, quoted in a New York State Department of Financial Services filing against the bank, put things a bit more succinctly: “You f---ing Americans. Who are you to tell us, the rest of the world, that we’re not going to deal with Iranians?” Meanwhile, the rest of the world, or at least some of its better athletes, had come to town, and the Olympics had pushed the bankers off the front pages of every London paper but the Financial Times. The Friday after Foreman jumped, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremonies offered an image of Britain that ran from The Wind in the Willows through Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Chariots of Fire, and Harry Potter, with nods to the Industrial Revolution, the National Health Service, the Tube, the Thames, black cabs, classic rock, the invention of ultrasound, the first clicks of the World Wide Web, and the fact that not all Britons are white. Stuntmen dressed as James Bond and Queen Elizabeth II jumped from a helicopter. Most reactions chimed with that of BBC sportswriter Tom Fordyce, who called the ceremonies “so gloriously daft, so cynicism-squashingly charming and—well, so much pinch-yourself fun.” Other critics weren’t so inclined to gush. The Conservative MP Aidan Burley, who last year embarrassed his party by attending a Nazi-themed bachelor party in the French Alps, called the proceedings “leftie multicultural crap” on Twitter, and was told off for his somewhat vile honesty by Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson. But the novelist and essayist Jenny Diski, writing on the blog of the London Review of Books (where I work), confirmed that Burley had a point: “I’m pretty sure that nothing more overtly political or antagonistic to government policy could have been staged

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The bankers of London were locked into a different kind of Totentanz, pantomiming their professionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s moral vacuity. They were making headlines as interest-rate riggers at Barclays, Mexican drug-money launderers at HSBC, and accomplices to the systematic violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran. The

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in such circumstances, and Danny Boyle, his writer and the performers are to be saluted for giving the dissenting left a morale boost.” But still, “It was a wishful tale of things long gone.” It’s true that Danny Boyle, a diehard Labourite of socialist leanings, seized upon the unlikely format of the Opening Ceremony to mount a popular-front period piece. In this vision of British history—equal parts détournement and wish-fulfillment fantasy—kinetic Mod music producers and fashion designers overlap indistinguishably with suffragists, striking miners, and Chartists. This scepter’d isle had become, in this postmodern confabulation, a beachhead of inexhaustible dissent, channeled through everything from mobile phones to Harry Potter novels. If Boyle and his production crew had been intent on portraying the London of today, they would have painted the black cabs over with bank ads and shown a few Old Etonian MPs cutting £20 billion from the NHS budget and defunding universities while tabloid reporters hacked into the voice mail boxes of pols, comedians, and dead little girls. They would have featured legions of East European baristas and Scandinavian retail clerks attempting to duct-tape the windows of their Starbucks, Costas, H&Ms, and Topshops against a multiethnic horde of council estate–dwelling looters, rendered ravenous by austerity; and, for that element of swashbuckling Ian Fleming menace, they would have had an equally cosmopolitan group of bankers, hedge funders, and private equity managers drop 007 in a body bag from a private jet en route to Mallorca, placing bets whether he’d land zipper up or zipper down. The Queen would sit alone sipping tea, listening to Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Not exactly the stuff, in other words, of pinch-yourself fun. Then again, the real institutional armature of the Olympic Games traced rather closely the broad, emerging contours of the Libor rate-rigging scandal—news of which broke in June, and kept on breaking, the taint soon spreading industry-wide. The International Olympic Committee has engaged in more than its share of raterigging, whether via cash-in-the-envelope 102 1 The Baffler [no.21]

bribery schemes or ritual high-stakes graft. If London was putting its most jaunty, global-market face on the launching of the 2012 Games, the anxious organizers of the event had to be mindful of the distressing precedent of two Games past, when Athens went on a giddy spending and construction binge to burnish its profile as a bona fide global capital of, well, capital. After the final tab was tallied, Greece had spent $11 billion—roughly double the original projected budget. And the Greek economy, already spun into an unsustainable paper fiction to satisfy neoliberal reveries of debt-driven growth, became a full-fledged basket case six years later, threatening to drag down the entire Eurozone with it. Anything for the Libor Boys For a bracing parallel narrative to the antic faux-populism of Boyle’s Opening Ceremony, you would do well to glance at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s June filing in the matter of Barclays bank and its manipulations of the Libor and Euribor exchange rates. Here are notes from traders in London and New York in 2005 and 2006 requesting adjustments to Barclays’ rate submissions: “WE HAVE TO GET KICKED OUT OF THE FIXINGS TOMORROW!! We need a 4.17 fix in 1m (low fix) We need a 4.41 fix in 3m (high fix)” “You need to take a close look at the reset ladder. We need 3M to stay low for the next 3 sets and then I think that we will be completely out of our 3M position. Then its on. [Submitter] has to go crazy with raising 3M Libor.” “Your annoying colleague again . . .Would love to get a high 1m Also if poss a low 3m . . . ifposs . . . thanks” “This is the [book’s] risk. We need low 1M and 3M libor. Pls ask [submitter] to get 1M set to 82. That would help a lot” “We have another big fixing tom[orrow] and with the market move I was hoping we could set the 1M and 3M Libors as high as possible” “Hi Guys, We got a big position in 3m libor for the next 3 days. Can we please keep the libor

In this vision of British history—equal parts détournement and wish-fulfillment fantasy— kinetic Mod music producers and fashion designers overlap indistinguishably with suffragists, striking miners, and Chartists.

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fixing at 5.39 for the next few days. It would really help. We do not want it to fix any higher than that. Tks a lot.”

The frat-boy diction here suggests that the correspondents could be ordering pizzas— “Your annoying colleague again, I was hoping we could order two extra mushroom pies tonight. It would really help. Tks a lot”—or calling in computer repairs or dialing up strippers. Instead, of course, they were rigging interest rates that peg the disbursal of more than $700 trillion in credit contracts (including funds fed directly into Libor and Euribor). And here are the sort of replies they received: “[Senior Trader] owes me!” “For you . . . anything.” “Always happy to help, leave it with me, Sir.” “Done . . . for you big boy”

There are 150 Libors (London interbank offered rates) published every day, for ten currencies and fifteen durations (in the above chatty requests, 1M indicates one month and 3M three months). Thanks to the sheer volume of money routed through the Libor system, financial commentators have dubbed the rates the most important numbers in the world. One could indeed make the case that there is as much edifying sport in tracking the composition of Libor rates as there is, say, in charting the reliably corrupt judging of the Olympics Boxing Committee—which, in the London Games alone, resulted in the expulsion of a referee who failed to calculate

six knockdowns in one egregiously miscalled match, and the suspension of another referee who disqualified an Iranian boxer on trumped-up technicalities. Sure, Libor-setting can’t really compete on the level of sheer spectacle: the rates get formulated in an office in London’s Docklands by a pair of employees of Thomson Reuters on behalf of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA). Every weekday morning around 11 a.m., the pair receives estimates from a set of banks—numbers that designate the rates at which banks believe they could borrow money from other banks for a given loan period on the day of submission. The top and bottom quarters of submitted rates are discarded; the remaining numbers, in distinctly unscientific fashion, determine the Libors-of-themoment. (Often the Barclays traders were requesting that the bank’s rate “GET KICKED OUT” at the low or high end—a procedure that would still tilt the overall rate up or down by skewing the rest of the averaged sample.) The Libor benchmark then fans out across the global banking system; parallel rigging was happening with the European Banking Federation’s similarly calculated Euribor rate. The settled figure determines tens of trillions of dollars in adjustable-rate mortgages, student loans, and other loans—together with more than $500 trillion in interest-rate swaps. It was swaps that the Barclays traders in London and New York were betting on, and they were calling in requests to the bank’s rate submitters to ensure that their bets paid off. Here, the Olympics analogy holds in anThe

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other way: the clamor to rig Libor was a nonetoo-subtle brand of dousing the markets in performance-enhancing substances. It was, as the CFTC filing alleges, a simple case of gamblers rigging the game, and the submitters acquiescing, “for you big boy.” The agency also found that “led by a former Barclays senior Euro swaps trader,” Barclays traders called in rate requests for traders at other banks and had their favors returned in kind, submissive submitters “always happy to help” even if they were helping somebody at a bank across town. The con transcended institutional boundaries and thrived on fraternal cooperation. Usually the rigs, frequently arranged by instant messenger, were a matter of a hundredth of a point: TRADER: hi . . . Sorry to be a pain but just to remind you the importance of a low fixing for us today. SUBMITTER: no problem, I had not forgotton. The [voice] brokers are going for 3.372, we will put in 36 for our contribution.

In the narrative of the scandal that took hold over the summer, these two aspects of the Libor case—the rigged gambling in house and the bank-to-bank collusion racket—turned out to be minor next to the story of the manipulation of Libor during the financial crisis. Manipulation here was a side effect: the bank brass weren’t trying to alter Libor itself, but rather were fudging their submissions to place a fig leaf over their own impotence—to protect themselves, and their share prices, from a predatory market. In September 2007, Bloomberg reported that Barclays had twice borrowed from the Bank of England’s emergency lending facility and noted that its Libor submissions had been relatively high. “So what the hell is happening at Barclays and its Barclays Capital securities unit that is prompting its peers to charge it premium interest rates in the money market?” Bloomberg asked. The Financial Times and the Evening Standard picked up the story. The irony, according to the documents, is that here Barclays was being honest in its Libor submissions—or at least perceived itself to be more honest than its peers. Barclays officials were 104 1 The Baffler [no.21]

reporting rates in line with the bank’s actual ability to borrow in the market. But once the bank realized its honesty was hurting its share price, as its high Libor submissions looked like the sign of a bank in distress, it started to shave its submissions to protect itself—in much the same way that Olympic weightlifters or Tour de France contestants start downing any and every substance on offer to keep pace with their amply doped, high-performing competitors. The Barclays brass was well aware just how fraught this moment in Libor-rigging would prove to be. Senior managers instructed submitters that the bank shouldn’t seem as if it was “sticking its head above the parapet.” One supervisor told submitters that if Barclays was twenty points above “the pack,” “it’s going to cause a shit storm.” Supervisors said the same thing in 2007 to the BBA: “no one will get out of the pack, the pack sort of stays low”; “[s]ome banks are getting close to looking like they are actively not recognizing the actual market levels.” This is how a Barclays employee spelled out the scenario to a Fed analyst in an April 11, 2008, phone conversation: BARCLAYS: Now, um, you know, obviously there has been a lot of speculation about LIBORs and, you know. FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: I’ve read some really interesting articles about them. FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: Um, and uh, w-, you know we, w-we, we strongly feel it’s true to say that. FRBNY: Hmm. BARCLAYS: Dollar, Dollar LIBORs do not reflect where the market is trading which is you know the same as a lot of other people have said. FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: Um, wha-, it depends on which part of the curve you’re looking at. FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: Um, currently, we would say that in the three months, um, if we as a prime bank had to go in the interbank market and borrow cash, it’s probably eight to ten basis points

“Hi Guys, Can we please keep the libor fixing at 5.39 for the next few days. It would really help. We do not want it to fix any higher than that. Tks a lot.”

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above where LIBOR is fixing. FRBNY: So you’re above ten to fifteen? BARCLAYS: About eight or ten above. If, if, if we had to go in the market and FRBNY: Yeah. BARCLAYS: Properly borrow money, it would be FRBNY: Yeah. BARCLAYS: About eight to ten above and in the one year FRBNY: Okay. BARCLAYS: It would probably be about twenty basis points in the market. FRBNY: And, and why do you think that there is this, this discrepancy? Is it because banks maybe they are not reporting what they should or is it um . . . BARCLAYS: Well, let’s, let’s put it like this and I’m gonna be really frank and honest with you. FRBNY: No that’s why I am asking you [laughter] you know, yeah [inaudible] [laughter] BARCLAYS: You know, you know we, we went through a period where FRBNY: Hmm. BARCLAYS: We were putting in where we really thought we would be able to borrow cash in the interbank market and it was FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: Above where everyone else was publishing rates. FRBNY: Mm hmm.

BARCLAYS: And the next thing we knew, there was um, an article in the Financial Times, charting our LIBOR contributions and comparing it with other banks and inferring that this meant that we had a problem raising cash in the interbank market. FRBNY: Yeah. BARCLAYS: And um, our share price went down. FRBNY: Yes. BARCLAYS: So it’s never supposed to be the prerogative of a, a money market dealer to affect their company share value. FRBNY: Okay. BARCLAYS: And so we just fit in with the rest of the crowd, if you like. FRBNY: Okay. BARCLAYS: So, we know that we’re not posting um, an honest LIBOR. RBNY: Okay. ARCLAYS: And yet and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn’t do it FRBNY: Mm hmm. BARCLAYS: It draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves.

By this time—and indeed for many months— senior managers at Barclays, the BBA, the Bank of England, and the Fed all knew about these manipulations. Five days after that one-sided conversation between the Barclays employee and the Fed official, the Wall Street Journal published a report headlined “Libor Fog: Bankers Cast Doubt on Key Rate Amid The

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Crisis” outing the low-balled rates, at least speculatively. On the phone, a Barclays manager told the BBA, “We’re clean, but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean.” “No one’s clean-clean,” was the reply. Indeed—though charting the complete evacuation of clean-clean financial transactions from the London scene is still very much a work in progress. Soon after that cynically chipper exchange, Angela Knight, then head of the BBA, was telling the Bank of England that the task of setting Libor had gotten too big for the BBA to handle, according to another Wall Street Journal report this September. But the trade association’s member banks rebelled. They preferred to police—or not to police—their own rate. One banker on the BBA’s Libor panel said artificially low rates should be handled “by just picking up the phone . . . and hav[ing] a conversation behind closed doors.” The Bank of England also preferred to keep the rate in the BBA’s hands. So did the Fed, although Timothy Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed, did send a memo with a few recommendations, including this prayerful suggestion: “Eliminate incentive to misreport.” Even amid such feints at improved reporting discipline, banks that strayed from the pack or put their heads above the parapet would be still allowed some anonymity: “The banks whose reports fall above or below the midrange would not be publicly identified, nor would the level of their outlying rates. This random sampling from an expanded panel would lessen the likelihood that the market would draw a negative inference regarding a particular bank’s continued absence from the list of published quotes.” No need to lie in public, in other words, if no one knows who you are. Had Geithner’s recommendations been followed, the lowballing and the trader rigging might never have come to light. An odd aspect of the CFTC’s Barclays filing is the difference in tone conveyed in different sorts of false Libor rate submissions. Because the brass were asking for enormous falsifications (relative to the traders’ petty point-shaving), when the Libor submitters at Barclay were instructed to lower their submis106 1 The Baffler [no.21]

sions to protect the bank’s share price, they sounded nothing like they did when they were hit up by a fellow trader. “Following on from my conversation with you,” wrote one disgruntled submitter to a manager in the latter scenario, “I will reluctantly, gradually and artificially get my libors in line with the rest of the contributors as requested. I disagree with this approach as you are well aware. I will be contributing rates which are nowhere near the clearing rates for unsecured cash and therefore will not be posting honest prices.” Tks a lot. Within days of the CFTC’s filing, Barclays chairman Marcus Agius resigned. The next day, American-born CEO Bob Diamond was out. Agius would tell Parliament that Diamond’s exit came about via the intervention of Bank of England Governor Mervyn King—a pointed contrast with the dilatory regulatory response to King’s stateside counterpart Geithner. “We had a conversation,” Agius drily reported, “in which [King] said that Bob Diamond no longer enjoyed the support of his regulators.” Then again, there was a longstanding personal animus here. King and Diamond had been rivals since 2007, when King was blaming the crisis on heavy bonuses paid to bankers and Diamond was blaming central banks for allowing confidence to erode. The British papers enjoyed pointing out that they were both the humble sons of schoolteachers. “To paraphrase a great wartime leader,” King said in 2009, “never in the field of financial endeavor has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.” The Tory / Lib Dem coalition that came to power in 2010 supported plans to give the Bank of England the regulatory powers of the Financial Services Authority, but in the face of the City lobby stopped short of King’s wish for the banks to be split up. King at least displayed a healthy antagonism toward the banks of the kind you don’t generally see from Geithner or Ben Bernanke toward Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon. But if he was able to take on the role of enforcer in the public mind after the scandal had come

The Olympics analogy holds in another way: the clamor to rig Libor was a none-too-subtle brand of dousing the markets in performanceenhancing substances.

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to light, it was not so clear, as more documents emerged, that the Bank of England’s hands were clean in 2008. Specifically, in the midst of the financial crisis, King’s deputy and anointed successor Paul Tucker appeared to have instructed Bob Diamond to lower the Barclays Libor submissions. In late October 2008, Tucker had emailed Diamond to talk and Diamond had reported to his colleagues on the discussion’s substance: Further to our last call, Mr Tucker reiterated that he had received calls from a number of senior figures within Whitehall to question why Barclays was always toward the top end of the Libor pricing. His response was “you have to pay what you have to pay.” I asked if he could relay the reality, that not all banks were providing quotes at the levels that represented real transactions, his response “oh, that would be worse.” I explained again our market rate driven policy and that it had recently meant that we appeared in the top quartile and on occasion the top decile of the pricing. Equally I noted that we continued to see others in the market posting rates at levels that were not representative of where they would actually undertake business. This latter point has on occasion pushed us higher than would otherwise appear to be the case. In fact, we are not having to “pay up” for money at all. Mr Tucker stated the levels of calls he was receiving from Whitehall were “senior” and that while he was certain we did not need advice, that it did not always need to be the case that we appeared as high as we have recently.

Did the last line indicate that Tucker had relayed an order from on high that Barclays should report lower rates to project confidence in the midst of the liquidity crisis? Diamond and Tucker said there was no order to lower the rates, but that the phrase “it did not always need to be the case” was interpreted that way by Jerry del Missier, president of Barclays Capital, who sent the order down the line. Del Missier was another of the summer’s casualties. During an intense round of questioning from Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee over the summer, Tucker was able to maintain plausible deniability. Parliament’s report pointed out that the manipulation of the Libor rate by traders had only come to light in the first place because Barclays had cooperated with American authorities investigating the curious pattern of lowballed Libor rates over the course of the crisis. For his part, Diamond gamely sought to shift the blame down the corporate hierarchy, in the tradition of humiliated and scandal-tarred executives everywhere: he argued that the fourteen traders singled out in the Fed’s probe were rogues who were rigging the rates for the sake of their own personal books. In a neat pirouette, Diamond was able to argue that Barclays might have been a victim of its own traders’ efforts to rig an artificial Libor. New quotations from the traders showed again that they were on chummier terms with the bank’s pliant rate submitters than the senior managers were: “Dude. I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.” The

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Song of Whiteout and Blackache 3 Ailish Hopper 1 Well I’m so white, when the lights go out, I glow in the dark. So white, when I wear white clothes all you see are the stripes on my socks. White as the sun’s bare rays—iron-heavy and hot. White as the grass that’s decomposed, bleached-away by a leaf pile. 2 Well I’m so black when I walk at night I absorb all the light of the stars. So black—I can’t drink milk, sing White Christmas, drive a white car. Black as a vinyl record—issuing song, not blood. Black—as the ocean’s depths, where fish swerve: translucent, unreal.

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“We’re clean, but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean. No one’s clean-clean.”

9 When Congress questioned Geithner on Libor in July, some Republicans chided him for not referring the matter straight to the Justice Department in 2008. Barney Frank came to his defense, joined by Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee: “We cannot lose sight of the fact that the Libor issue, at its core, is about fraud. I want you to commit to me and the American people that the administration will make sure that those involved in Libor fraud will be held accountable and prosecuted.” “Absolutely,” Geithner replied. “I’m very confident that the Department of Justice and the relevant enforcement agencies will meet that objective.” But the Justice Department doesn’t tend to prosecute Wall Street, and the Barclays settlement with the CFTC for $200 million included a waiver on prosecution. More than a dozen other banks are now facing Libor investigations, and the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office has said that it may seek prosecutions. RBS is reported to be the next up, and as the summer wound down, the scandal intensified. In August Reuters reported that a fired trader in Singapore named Tan Chi Min had alleged in a wrongful dismissal suit that the minutes of his disciplinary hearing had been altered to conceal some damaging allegations, including a mention of a yen swaps trader who had interfered with Libor submissions and Tan’s own assertion that “the bank’s internal procedure in London seemed to be that ‘anyone can change Libor.’” Investigators are also reportedly trying to establish whether routine Libor rigging by traders had started earlier than the bubble-fueled instances that reportedly started in 2005. Douglas Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley trader, wrote in the

Financial Times that it was common knowledge that “banks misreported the Libor rates in a way that would generally bring them profits” when he started out in 1991. He’d offered his testimony to the Treasury Select Committee and had been turned away because his story “contradicts the narrative.” In that narrative, financial malfeasance began in annus mirabilis 2005 and lasted until 2009, by which time the banks were broken and the game had turned out to be quite losable indeed. By October, despite general resistance (or at least whining) from bankers, Libor reform was inching forward, under the aegis of the U.K. Treasury’s new Financial Conduct Authority. BBA would be out of the business of rate-setting, and replaced by—well, something. Banks would have to back up their submissions with evidence of some kind of actually existing transaction. And Kevin Milne, the former head of clearing at the London Stock Exchange, was setting up a rival benchmark rate in the capital markets of Singapore. Meanwhile, American municipalities bankrupted by Libor-poisoned interest rate swaps are lining up lawsuits against the London banking system. The Libor narrative was always harder to follow than HSBC’s money laundering for Mexican narcos or Standard Chartered dealings with the Iranians. Indeed, as the headlines have dragged their way across the British press, I’ve heard some people say that Libor is a fake scandal, a crime where there were as many victims as there were unwitting beneficiaries on either side of the rigged rates. Of course, you could say the same of the London Games—which had, among other things, yielded BBC footage of a Bulgarian member of IOC agreeing back in 2004 to exchange his vote to site the Games in London for a healthy bribe. The only difference is that it would be extremely difficult even for Danny Boyle to confect a populist allegory out of a scheme that compounded the penury of mortgage and student loan holders to pad the bonuses of the global financial elite. No, for a job like that you’d need a James Cameron—or better yet, a Tim Geithner.t The

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A Middle Finger 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [Pa rt 3 ]

often go shopping in Amsterdam’s Osdorp neighborhood, mainly because I enjoy the long bike ride through the park on the way there. But the chance to head out on my bike isn’t the only reason. I sit there in a café surrounded by drab residential buildings and shops, my gaze set on a sculpture of an ugly stone coil simulating a gush of water into a perennially dry fountain. There are countless Dutch housing estates built in the sixties like this one. Today they’re home to immigrants and to elderly Dutch who in a distant time swallowed the line about prosperous, functioning social housing, and all the rest that goes with it. We eventually come to love our own unfortunate choices, particularly if righting them requires too great an effort. I sit there in a café with a depressing view, with a dishwater coffee, and waiters like you don’t even get in Montenegro anymore. There’s a lovely café with a calming view of the lake barely a hundred meters from here. Why, then, do I slouch in this one? I do it for the three, four, or five specimens I encounter here; it depends on the anthropologist’s luck. I imagine that I’m here on a secret research mission, that I’m on a periodic follow-up visit to confirm previous results. The men are all around my age, my “countrymen”—a word that makes me wince. Every morning they descend from their apartments in the surrounding tower blocks, landing here like paratroopers. My ear, a keen hunter for spoken nuance, remains bizarrely tone-deaf, unable to discern the region they’re from. Maybe because they’re too much from some former Yugoslav backwoods. Their garishness and stubborn typologies eliminate linguistic or ethnic specificities; they’re simply sons of the culture in which they grew into the men they are today. Their clothes and gait give them away. Their faces are sponges that have soaked up the faces of the men they grew up alongside, one imprinted on the other. These faces bear the traces of fathers and grandfathers, maternal and paternal uncles, men from the neighborhood or village, from their army days, from their local bars, from their workplaces, the faces of their countrymen, friends, men you see in the newspaper, on the TV screen, the faces of politicians, generals, soldiers, murderers, criminals, thieves, the faces of all those who brought them here, to Amsterdam’s Osdorp, where every day they descend from their apartments like paratroopers to drink their morning coffee among their own, because they don’t have anyone else but their own. This is the ground they’ve been allocated. It’s a rare occasion they make it downtown; they’re not that keen in any case, curiosity’s not their strong point. So they sit on their chairs, legs spread wide, faces radiating sovereignty over the territory conquered, bodies suggesting they’ve planted their flag. “Historically” settled, they liberate their hands from their pockets 110 1 The Baffler [no.21]

and gesticulate wildly. They rarely smile, but snigger often. A snigger is their defense, it’s how they get one over each other, hide a momentary defeat. They’re not capable of engaging in conversation of any length or depth, not even with their own; they’ve never learned. A snigger is a reprieve, an eraser with which they wipe clean what’s been said, their own speech or that of another; a snigger turns everything into a josh. They frequently let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, spurring each other on, approving or condemning, a backslap and circle jerk. Ehee-heee . . . They know everything, they’ve always known everything, no one needs to explain anything to them; they know it all too well. The first phrase out of their mouths is: I’ve always said . . . They talk about money, politics, sports. Sometimes they lose it a little, and sniggering as they go, exchange information about the horrors of health checks, prostate and rectal exams, and the like. They rarely mention womDAV I D M c LI M A N S en, and if they do, it’s to take the piss out of each other, like schoolboys. Eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-heee. They don’t know what they’re doing here, but they’ll be going back, they’ve got a share in a house, an apartment, a bit of land somewhere, it’ll be enough to survive on. The Dutchies will throw them a crumb or two, which by God they deserve, having blessed this country with their arrival. They drink coffee or slurp beer from the bottle, swap what they’ve read in the papers from down there, pick over the bones of Milošević, Tuđman, the present, Karadžić, Mladić, the future . . . When’s down there getting into Europe? (What the fuck do you care? You’re already in Europe!) They’re the real victims of the war, and, adding insult to injury, they messed up their choice of country—they went from a small one to a smaller one, Christ, you can’t even see the sun or moon from here. The Poles get ahead better than they do (Goes without saying. Poles are like Jews), even the Bulgarians are doing better (Maybe so, but only the Bulgarian Turks, you didn’t know the Turkish mafia runs everything here?), only Bulgarians would clean Dutch toilets, they wouldn’t do it dead. They’re the ones sucking the big one, sifting about here not knowing why, and down there everything’s going for a song, everything’s been stolen or sold, foreigners have bought up the coast, and now they’re schlinging their schlongs, raving and partying, pollut-

A snigger is a reprieve, an eraser with which they wipe clean what’s been said, their own speech or that of another; a snigger turns everything into a josh. They frequently let out an eee-he-hee, heeeeh-hee, spurring each other on, approving or condemning, a backslap and circle jerk.

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Jeweler 3 Dante Micheaux Diamonds are a girl’s best friend; so let her have them. My work is strictly for the primitive sex and I deal only in pearls. In my showroom you will find any assortment of boys dripping with them—from the ears, wrists. You should see the dapper ones, all clamoring for my necklaces. The pearl is simply biological, full of life, necessary. See that one there, fat and smooth, gleaming as if wet, oyster’s gift to man. I polish the boys to the pearl’s luster. Look how they glow, born for this. The secret is in the display; it’s within them too, such luxury.

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ing our ocean (Whaddya mean “ours” bro? Uh yeah, I meant the former “ours”. . .). Down there foreigners are multiplying like Gypsies, that’s what you get for not respecting your own—others start living it up . . . Eee-hee, hee-eh-hee, the whole world’s gone crazy, and those fags have been breeding too, you don’t know who’s a man and who’s a woman anymore (You don’t even know who’s a Serb and who’s a Croat! Look at that little shit on the HEMA billboards . . .Who? You know who I mean, the little fucker’s everywhere. That fag kid from Tuzla! Paić! Nah, it’s Pajić, Nah bro, it’s Pejić! He was my kid I’d drown him with my own hands!). The trio of my countrymen wouldn’t have heard of the “fag kid from Tuzla” if he hadn’t been plastered all over sumptuous billboards for the Dutch chain HEMA, advertising a push-up bra. But who is Andrej Pejić? Andrej Pejić was born in Bosnia the same year Yugoslavia fell apart and the war machismo and thievery began. Andrej Pejić, the child of a Serbian mother and Croatian father, immigrated to Australia, emerging from the slimy Balkan darkness as a new human species, as a brilliant unicorn, a divine lily, a god and goddess in a single body, a miraculous metamorphosis, an enchanting transgender beauty, the world’s most famous catwalks falling at his feet. Pejić is a middle finger flipped at the land where he was born, a divine error to take one’s breath away, a middle finger to Balkan men, and Balkan women too. Pejić is a symbolic figure who at this very moment is tearing down cruel gender barriers faster and more effectively than all the gender activists, academics, and advocates combined. Pejić is a middle finger to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, a middle finger to myths of Balkan heroism, to macho-martyrdom, a finger up the snouts of commanding officers, police, thieves, and politicians. Andrej Pejić is a youth with breasts, or a girl with a penis, or worse still: he’s a Croatian woman with a penis and a Serbian man with breasts, in a single body. Having got as far away as one could ever get, Pejić has become a dazzling ray of light for the tens of thousands of Yugoslav children dispersed to the four corners of the world by the wars. I often run into them on my travels: a smart girl from Pirot, hustling her way into an academic career in Berlin, a lesbian; a finely etched young man (the son of a chest-beating, big rig–driving Serb and a cowering Croatian mother), conscientiously studying at Harvard, a homosexual; a young guy from Banja Luka, a receptionist at the Hilton in London, a Thai son-in-law and passionate reader of Hannah Arendt; and many, many others . . . My three from the café in Amsterdam’s Osdorp shopping center (just like their numerous male countrymen down there) are still crapping on about politics, dribbling, gulping their morning coffees or beers, sniggering away. Finally they get up, thrust their hips out, linger over their goodbyes, let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, just to carve their names into the indifferent surface of the surrounding concrete, just to leave some kind of scrape to mark their existence. Then they go their own ways; it’s lunchtime. They depart not understanding that they’ve been dead a long while already, that the morning encounter with their own has been but a brief outing from the grave.t

At this very moment, Andrej Pejić is tearing down cruel gender barriers faster and more effectively than all the gender activists, academics, and advocates combined. Pejić is a middle finger to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, a middle finger to myths of Balkan heroism, to machomartyrdom, a finger up the snouts of commanding officers, police, thieves, and politicians.

Continued on page 120.

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Call of the Wild Detroit on screen 3 Will Boisvert

fter so many decades spent languishing in the shadows of depopulation and deindustrialization, Detroit is finally ready for its close-up. It’s become one of the most filmed places on earth, a tableau, in the words of a Time magazine photo essay, of “beautiful, horrible decline.” Empty skyscrapers cling to their elegance; ruined mansions gaze forlornly through burnt-out windows; the iconic slab of the Michigan Central train station, where mutating automobiles battled at the climax of Transformers, rears up like a giant tombstone. No film documentarian with a camera and a theory about the direction that civilization is heading can bear to pass this up—or afford to, since it offers for free the kind of striking postapocalyptic visuals that would normally require a CGI shop. Detroit has become a mythic landscape to the filmmakers who have flocked to the city, and they’ve invested it with the most potent of American mythologies, positing the city as the new frontier. The myth thrives, as in the French documentary Detroit: Ville Sauvage, on images of the city’s urban prairies, the fields of waisthigh grass where neighborhoods once stood— a terrain much like the plains that pioneers traversed on their treks out West. And as with any frontier, Detroit seems to offer limitless freedom to reinvent society and self and recapture imaginary pasts. The eruption of prairie has struck Green ideologues as an antidote to industrial blight and a path back to agrarian values; so it is in Grown in Detroit, a Dutch film that celebrates the city’s ofttoasted urban farming movement by following students at a school for pregnant teens as they are taught to raise crops, tend goats, and reclaim their souls from fast food. Detroit Bike City, a Critical Mass manifesto, pedals an in-your-face victory lap around the Motor 114 1 The Baffler [no.21]

City’s crestfallen car culture. Countless docs chronicle the artists and bohemians who have flocked to the city as a tabula rasa for installations and scenes, with lofts so cheap as to be almost literally free. Stoking their heady sense of liberation are the shuttered, crumbling factories that lie all about, Ozymandian remnants of once-mighty industries now withered and impotent, smashed idols testifying mutely to the overthrow of the old order. The city has therefore attracted no less an anarchist than Jackass star Johnny Knoxville; in Detroit Lives he surveys the city’s cool underground night spots and hangs out with hipsters, savoring the cultural provocations as he would an exploding latrine. Even filmmakers who see past Detroit’s bleak-chic blank spaces to its perpetual hardship and threadbare public services can get in on the frontier spirit. So it is with Burn, a helmet-cam vérité-style doc that follows the city’s firefighters in their rattletrap engines as they fight an arson plague. Indeed, with joblessness, derelict housing, and gnawing insecurity the new normal, the country that so long shunned Detroit has embraced it as America’s Ruin, symbol of a now-universal embattled grittiness that never gives up despite never succeeding. The ennoblement was made official by Clint Eastwood in his celebrated “Halftime in America” ad for Chrysler during this year’s Super Bowl. “The people of Detroit know a little something about this,” Eastwood rasped of the high unemployment that his audience had forgotten about during game time. “But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. . . . The world’s going to hear the roar of our engines.” Eastwood got the ad because of his 2008 movie Gran Torino, in which he played retired Polish-American autoworker Walt Kowalski, the last white man in De-

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Stoking their heady sense of liberation are the shuttered, crumbling factories that lie all about, Ozymandian remnants of once-mighty industries now withered and impotent, smashed idols testifying mutely to the overthrow of the old order.

9 troit, defending his lawn against black, Latino, and Hmong gangbangers. It’s an oddly fitting contemporary coda for Hollywood’s last Western star, letting him wave his guns on an urban frontier where a dwindling police presence opens the way for direct action. Walt ends up crucifying himself and passing the titular cherry-red Ford muscle car on like a blazing torch of Americanism to the next generation of immigrant strivers.

new documentary, Detropia, surveys these strands of Detroit mythology with a critical eye, an absorbing visual style, and a salutary attention to the vicious economics behind the city’s sublime disrepair. Directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a native of suburban Detroit, and benefitting from the fine cinematography of Tony Hardmon and Craig Atkinson, the film regales viewers with images that are by now clichés of the ruins-porn genre, but invests them with an unabashed aesthetic intensity that feels fresh. We see a tenor singing arias in the echoing, vine-covered interior of the train station, a wrecking claw shredding a house that seems as flimsy as cardboard, a rippling urban meadow complete with pheasant and coyote. We spelunk through the dark, debris-choked halls of a grand apartment building until a window suddenly opens out on the gorgeous vista of downtown looming above the prairie. We happen upon men “scrapping” copper from a derelict factory at night, blowtorches lighting their tense faces as if in a Caravaggio painting. We take in a carnival parade of mainly white The

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hipsters draped in Goth and retro finery, apparently on their way to New Orleans. And we take in an avant-garde performance piece consisting of two models standing in front of vacant mansions wearing gold gas masks and holding up a sign that reads “Give Us Your Money.” But Detropia cuts its artiness with prosaic and powerful lessons in the brutality of capitalism, as seen through the eyes of the mainly black working- and middle-class protagonists who bear the brunt of the economic collapse. We watch as the UAW workers at an American Axle plant debate the choice between acceding to wage givebacks—biggest at the bottom of the scale, which would shrink from $14.35 an hour to $11—or losing their jobs. (They fought the pay cuts, and the company duly closed the plant and sent their jobs to Mexico.) We meet restaurateur Tommy Stevens, who recalls how the nearby Poletown factory, before the GM bankruptcy, used to send customers streaming into his Raven Lounge after every shift. We listen to a woman plead with cash-strapped city officials not to eliminate the bus line she rides to work. “I’m trying to improve myself,” she explains, but gumption alone can’t get her to her job. The film casts a jaundiced look at the nostrums floated by planners and dreamers to remedy Detroit’s woes. Urban farming raises a round of derisive laughter from Detroiters who want to shop for food, not grow it. Mayor Dave Bing’s “Detroit Works” proposal, a scheme to triage the city by demolishing dicier neighborhoods and providing city services only to the more viable ones, has a town hall hearing up in arms; residents parse it as more of the same arson and segregation that wrecked Detroit in the first place. “It’s the arts that can help revitalize the city,” insists an official of the Michigan Opera Theatre, but its audience of wealthy white suburbanites barely keeps MOT afloat. Work hard and innovate, intone the radio pundits who pronounce in voiceover, but not even this foundational creed of the marketplace seems like it will save the city. We follow Stevens to the Detroit Auto Show, where the 116 1 The Baffler [no.21]

new Chevy Volt is all the rage; the forwardlooking electric car is to be the salvation of the Poletown plant and catapult Detroit back to high-tech preeminence. Alas, nearby is the display of a Chinese company that’s selling its own electric car—at half the price of a Volt. “How can China do this?” Stevens asks the evasive Volt spokesman, but the answer needs no elaboration: Chinese auto workers earn in a day what Poletown workers earn in an hour. With its deft counterpoint between the apparent freedom of Detroit’s wide-open fields and the cocoon of the Raven Lounge, aglow with bluesy conviviality, Detropia is a compelling meditation on the Detroit frontier. But it also explodes that myth, explaining quite explicitly that a frontier is really just a projection of the civilization behind it. In between the ruins ogling, Grady and Ewing take time to see that Detroit isn’t an artist’s blank canvas or a patriot’s testing ground; it’s a very poor and straitened town that lacks the indispensable means—money—to support either freedom or community.

nfortunately, Detropia shares the failing that compromises every Detroit movie, as it restricts itself to Detroit; it never crosses the border to decipher the larger pattern of which the city is but a part. There are plenty of arresting visuals out there. My favorite is the nameless edge city sprawling to the northwest of Detroit along the Lodge Freeway. Here one finds what amounts to a second downtown, full of sleek skyscrapers sheathed in reflective tinted glass—a new race of parvenu gods disdainfully aloof from the desolate Art-Deco Olympus of old downtown. Sporting marquee logos like IBM, Sprint, Siemens, and General Electric, these buildings and their surrounding office parks house the economic base that could have sustained a postindustrial Detroit but which fled beyond the city limits to liberate itself from the city’s black citizens and the taxes required to provision them with public services. Strewn with gleaming monuments surrounded by unwalkable, unbusable expanses of parking lot, this is a landscape as alienating as any of Detroit’s ruins. It’s a per-

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Detropia cuts its artiness with prosaic and powerful lessons in the brutality of capitalism, as seen through the eyes of the mainly black working- and middle-class protagonists who bear the brunt of the economic collapse.

9 fect vision of soulless wealth, of contemptuous disregard for the claims that communities make on moneyed interests, and it brings to mind an ethos that can best be summed up in two words: Bain Capital. So a really trenchant Detroit movie wouldn’t be about Detroit at all, but about Detroit’s purest son—Mitt Romney. Romney lived in Detroit until the age of five, after which his family decamped to the posh suburb of Bloomfield Hills. (His childhood house

was bulldozed in 2010 after falling derelict.) He left Michigan, he likes to say, so he could make it on his own without the influence of his father, George, the American Motors CEO and Michigan governor who called in federal troops to put down the 1967 Detroit riot. Like many sons of towering fathers, he essentially lit out for the frontier—only his was the frontier of extreme finance. For while Romney projects a front of all-American rectitude, it’s simply astonishing how anarchic Bain Capital’s deal-making has been. Sometimes Bain saved the companies it invested in. Sometimes it shut them down and offshored their jobs. And sometimes it bought into solvent companies with little money down, borrowed wildly against the company’s assets, distributed the funds to murky investor accounts in offshore tax havens, and walked away when the debtburdened cash cow collapsed into bankruptcy. Romney insists he never broke any rules, yet he is also clearly a man for whom rules pose only slight obstacles. A Romney movie would be a delocalized montage featuring a mansion in Massachusetts, a New Hampshire summer home, a Utah The

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The Free World 3 Camille Rankine I bind my old grievances to a helium balloon. A long memory, I have been warned, is a curse. Everywhere I go,

someone

has something they must say about you. Nobody knows who we are. Wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you say, nobody agonizes like we do. Elsewhere is a promise and a threat. I have been proscribed compassion of the wrong sort, and so I am alone. I am invisible within you. Seeking companionship I spend my afternoons before the windows of pet shops and strangers, trying to decide. After all, I was told I could have everything. I thought this was meant to be a romance: I was delivered here in order to love you. I was delivered here and ordered to love you. If we could be friends. I wore this new dress for you.

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ski chalet, a La Jolla oceanfront property, and a beach in the Cayman Islands. But Detroit still maintains a hold over him. He never lived down his 2008 “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” oped for the New York Times, perhaps unfairly: by bankruptcy he didn’t intend a going-out-ofbusiness sale, just a chance to “restructure” the auto industry by breaking union contracts and slashing wages and benefits. Nothing against Detroit, just a reprise of what Romney has done all his life—seek out opportunities for profitable restructuring—and not too different from the gutting and restructuring of the city that other visionaries have contemplated. Nevertheless, he felt sufficiently tarnished to invite Mr. Detroit himself, Clint Eastwood, up to the convention podium to bless his candidacy. Eastwood happily obliged, even though his Chrysler commercial made him a material beneficiary of the Detroit automakers’ bailout that Romney opposed. Referring to Obama as his “employee,” he reminded his Republican audience that “we own this coun-

try . . . when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.” It was quite a performance: the pickled Hollywood essence of autoworker endorsing the high-handed prerogatives of the CEOs. The movie should end with Romney returning to make his peace with Detroit. He would see that it is no longer the quagmire of organized labor and restrictive work rules and negotiated pay scales and expansive government he knew as a child. Instead he would find a place as freewheeling and go-getting as he is, a place where “with a little bit of motivation, you can make anything happen,” in the words of a graffiti artist dazzlingly profiled by Mother Jones. He would find a desperate, pliant place with no rules, or at least no one to enforce them, a place where subsistence agriculture is aspirational, where even the bohemians spout self-help slogans, where a whole lot of money buys a whole lot of restructuring. Prick up your ears, Mitt—the frontier is calling.t

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Who Is Timmy Monster? [ Pa rt 4 ] 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić

omeone in my building in otherwise docile Amsterdam has been terrorizing the rest of us. How? Simple. Late at night and early in the morning the mystery man (or woman?) starts shunting furniture around his apartment. That’s our best guess as to what’s going on; we’ve got no way to be sure. There’s just this ghastly scraping that penetrates every floor and apartment, its effect like an electric shock. We all think the racket’s coming from the apartment directly above us. We suspect each other, and the more vociferous among us knock on doors, wag their fingers, and leave warning notes. We all plead innocence—no, it’s not us. When the mystery man cranks up his racket, we vent our distress on the central heating pipes that connect all the apartments. The scraping falls silent for a second, as if it’s got the message, and then the torture erupts again, more brazenly than before. We’re at war. And what drives us most insane is that we don’t know who our enemy is. For months we’ve been walking around with cupped ears, leaning against walls, none the wiser as to who’s behind the damn scraping. Yes, we’re at war. Our fears multiply from one day to the next. They arrive as a scraping that makes the walls of our apartments quiver, they arrive via the television screen, the telephone, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter; the more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fueled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch. I meet up with an acquaintance. She’s approaching sixty, two adult sons. She and her husband are modest Dutch folk. For a time she worked as a teacher, and then she started doing charitable work teaching young Moroccans Dutch. She does so firm in her belief that the cultivation of neighborly relations, a smile on the dial, and small interventions make life on planet Earth a little more bearable. She was telling me about a new course she’d just been on: touch therapy, something between tapping therapy and haptonomy. She does it with Moroccan kids, boys mostly, the kind who mark the territory out front of their tower blocks until late into the night, brawling and stealing, dishing out beatings and dreaming up childish ways of making others’ lives hell. Sometimes it’s shitting on a neighbor’s doorstep, other times it’s pissing up the door. “What do you do with them?” I ask. “I tap them a little, give them a hug, like a mother would her baby. Touch reduces aggression, you know that.” I look at my acquaintance—her face radiating a somewhat unhealthy enthusiasm—and I’m not sure what to make of it all.

120 1 The Baffler [no.21]

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

There’s definitely something not right with humanity. Some psychopath from Belgrade bought a little girl from her father for a thousand euros. Why? So he could rape her on a daily basis. In Texas a twelve-year-old strangled a four-year-old with a skipping rope. Senior high students from Karlovac raped a classmate with a chair leg. A fifty-year-old from Zagreb garroted his seventy-seven-year-old mother with a piece of wire. In a Croatian village a grandson twice set fire to his grandfather’s house, and eventually pummeled him to death. A husband and wife with a three-year-old jumped from the sixth floor of a Belgrade hotel. A Frenchman bundled his three-year-old son into the washing machine and turned it on. Why? The kid had been naughty. Yes, there’s definitely something not right with humanity. We each haul an invisible psychiatric couch along with us. We seek understanding, yet few are ready to understand others. There’s only the market, ever ready to offer comfort. With every new year that rolls around, more and more people have started wishing each other Happy New Fear. The words fear and stress have entered our everyday lexicon, like bread and milk. Fear of an itch, fear of the dark, fear of noise, fear of madness, fear of pain, fear of open space, fear of enclosed space, fear of the road, fear of crossing the road, fear of sharp objects, fear of cats, fear of the opinions of others, fear of dust, fear of driving, fear of insult, fear of looking up, fear of people, fear of anger, fear of floods, fear of touch, fear of bees, fear of amputation, fear of numbers, fear of fire, fear of falling, fear of thunder, fear of asymmetrical objects, fear of ruins, fear of failure, fear of filth, fear of loneliness, fear of flying, fear of microbes, fear of steps, fear of depth, fear of change, fear of mirrors, fear of bats, fear of money, fear of food, fear of theft, fear of sleeping, fear of the grave, fear of sweating, fear of glass, fear of animal fur, fear of crowds, fear of knowledge, epistemophobia, fear of ideas, ideophobia, fear of speech, laliophobia, fear of words, logophobia, fear of memories, mnemophobia, fear of everything new, neophobia, fear of everything, pantophobia . . .

The more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fueled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch.

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Fear of knowledge, epistemophobia, fear of ideas, ideophobia, fear of speech, laliophobia, fear of words, logophobia, fear of memories, mnemophobia, fear of everything new, neophobia, fear of everything, pantophobia . . .

122 1 The Baffler [no.21]

In a distant episode of The Muppets, the forgotten comic Zero Mostel recites the Jerry Juhl–penned poem Fears of Zero. Mostel enumerates his manifold fears: fear of spiders, fear of dentists, fear of baldness . . . Fear muppets appear from somewhere in the darkness and crawl all over Mostel, threatening to swallow him up. Although terrified, Mostel insists that he needs to count his fears, confront them, overcome them, and that they’ll then disappear of their own accord (Once they are counted and compelled, they can quickly be dispelled!), and miraculously, they really do vanish. The fears were figments of Mostel’s imagination. Having dissipated his lesser fears, Mostel senses that a new, greater fear is to come. And indeed one does come along, in the form of Timmy Monster, and this time Mostel’s magic formula proves of no help. Mostel disappears, and from Timmy’s stomach we hear his voice. Mostel admits that he’s just a figment of Timmy’s imagination. Humanity has never been more terrified than it is today. We each haul our psychiatric couch along with us. People cry as if hit by tear gas and withdraw into their safety zones. Computer screens are our bunkers, the virtual world offering security, a place no one can reach us. People hang out less and less frequently, they avoid relationships, avoid touching, are scared of one another, intolerant of one another, get along only with the greatest of difficulty. Of course some men make appropriate arrangements and buy “real dolls,” “boy toy dolls,” “love dolls,” perfect silicone partners. They sleep with their “babies,” clothe them, bathe and comb them, take them out for walks, on little adventures, spend the weekends with them, and occasionally take them in for repair. The wealthier are collectors and have multiple partners. Some, like Kevin, are in complex relationships: he keeps “real dolls” at home, and goes out with organic women. Some claim the dolls are “perfect listeners,” others that “they can’t get pregnant,” others that a doll “improves quality of life,” others are enchanted by their “beauty and stoicism,” others maintain that only a doll is able to “love them in spite of everything.” Gordon from Virginia dreams of joint burial (“We’ll be turned into dust together, and it’ll be a beautiful thing”). Matt, a doll maker, claims his handicraft is therapeutic, because it’s better “to have sex with a piece of rubber than not have it at all.” Some women are also taking appropriate steps. The marketplace has provided them with “reborn dolls.” At first glance it’s hard to tell the difference between the artificial and the organic. Sharon Williams has a collection of forty-one such “babies,” all one of a kind, totally unique, each sleeping in his or her own idiosyncratic way. Maybe these “baby” owners, these weirdoes and sickos, are the moral avant-garde of our time. Instead of shoving their children in the washing machine, or waiting for someone else to, it’s possible these women have worked out that it’s better they cradle and coddle hyper-realistic silicon surrogates. Perhaps the many aging mothers who have raced out to buy reborn babies are acutely conscious of the fact that they’ve given birth to potential monsters, who tomorrow might rape a classmate with a chair leg, so these women buy a comforting ersatz, a simulacrum. Reborn dolls, they say, “fill the emptiness in your soul,” they don’t scream, don’t pee,

don’t let out a squeak, they don’t grow up, they sleep an eternal sleep. Family life with them is straightforward, just sometimes you need to wipe the dust off them, position them, reposition them. Simulacra are simultaneously our defeat and our solace. Manufacturers try their hands at making all kinds of stuff “lifelike,” from chocolate-scented USB sticks to strawberry-scented earrings. Autumn Publishing, for example, is preparing a collection of children’s books, which they’re going to call Smellessence. When touched, the books release the scents of chewing gum, berry fruits, and the like. “This advanced technology and the smells it creates are so real they take children’s reading to a magical new level. We wanted to inject some fun into the reading experience and this is a powerful way to do just that,” said the company’s director, Perminder Mann. Given that farting has recently made inroads into children’s publishing (Walter the Farting Dog; The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts; The Fart Book; Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder, and many, many others), Autumn Publishing is having a go with its own picture book, The Story of the Famous Farter, which on the last page is to smell like a lowdown, dirty ripper. Yes, there’s something not right with people. Whether with our voluntary acceptance of the virtual world we are to mutate into different people—just as pet kitties that play with artificial mice eventually turn into different kitties—it’s hard to say. One thing is certain: we’re all volunteers in a mega-experiment. We’re all the figment of someone’s imagination. And just as no one in my building knows who among us is making that hellish scraping, humanity doesn’t actually know who the Timmy Monster is. Or it’s pretending it doesn’t know. What if Timmy Monster is all of us?!t

Humanity has never been more terrified than it is today. We each haul our psychiatric couch along with us. People cry as if hit by tear gas and withdraw into their safety zones. Computer screens are our bunkers.

Translated from the Croatian by David Williams.

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

Oh, the Irony! 3 Chris Lehmann

n the long-ago time of the nineties, tech markets boomed and day traders roamed the far horizon. Neoliberal trade policies flattened the globe; centrist Third Way statesmen rolled up budget surpluses and doled out tax cuts. The pop-cultural soundtrack to this cheerful abundance was a mood of studied irony. Artists, musicians, and writers dwelled lovingly on the coy telescripts, broad sitcom humor, and emotional guile of their not-toodistant youths, exposing the hollow conceits behind it all with a gentle, telltale whimsy. And the crown prince of that sweet ironic caesura was Dave Eggers. Eggers was a rarity in the slacker-fied precincts of nineties irony: a savvy self-marketer and an institution builder. At the center of his many enterprises was the brand called Dave Eggers. After launching an arch popcult monthly called Might (the name was its own pointed study in irony, suggesting both the inherent power and precariousness of cultcrit ventures), Eggers published his great reputation-making work. It was, naturally, a memoir, bearing the ironic title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The memoir opens with the irony-resistant story of Eggers’s family; both of his parents died of cancer within six weeks of each other, while Dave was still in college. It fell largely to the young man to raise his elementary-school-age brother, Toph; in the great tradition of American literary self-reinvention, the two traumatized brothers headed west—to the San Francisco Bay area, where Dave underwent his own passage into the rites of nineties adulthood with young Toph looking over his shoulder. Other bad things happen in the memoir, but the bulk of the action is devoted to songs of the Eggersian self: measured purely on the basis of page count, a single baroque account of the author’s audition to be on the then-buzzy MTV reality 124 1 The Baffler [no.21]

franchise The Real World far outweighs the spare and moving chronicle of his parents’ death. The final scene of the book is a tableau of Dave and Toph playing Frisbee alongside the Pacific Ocean and pondering the limitless expanse of the future. This, in a nutshell, was Eggers’s optimism of the ironic will: when life dealt him unimaginable loss, he hurled a plastic disc into the air. As the many fond reveries of nineties culture have collapsed, Eggers, like the rest of us, has had to square up to many more unpleasant social facts. His follow-up 2002 novel, bravely titled You Shall Know Our Velocity, was a gloss of sorts on the runaway success of A Heartbreaking Work—this time, the central characters faced down the awful unfairness of life by giving away large sums of money on a weeklong world tour. (This trope of privileged youthful flight later took Eggers into his first foray into screenwriting, Away We Go, to truly dreadful effect.) He went on to found the quite worthy 826 National foundation in San Francisco and several satellite cities to support young writers in poverty. He also launched the twee satirical website known as Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency; a separate McSweeney’s indiepublishing imprint soon followed, as did The Believer, a literary magazine produced by, for, and about young writers. A later novel, What is the What, and his 2009 nonfiction book Zeitoun movingly evoked the experience of exile, displacement, and deprivation: the former work hinged on the fictionalized odyssey of a young Sudanese refugee, and the latter recounted the horrific story of a Syrian immigrant detained by paramilitary forces in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The avatar of the ironic sensibility had, in short, done one of the most unironic things imaginable: he had grown a social conscience. Now that the McSweeney’s empire has outlasted the plum economic circumstances

V I C TO R K E R LOW

The avatar of the ironic sensibility had, in short, done one of the most unironic things imaginable: he had grown a social conscience. The

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v that attended its birth—the interval in our recent economic past we might call the Irony Bubble—Eggers seems to have embarked on a serial quest for social relevance. This quality always comes across in his writing as carefully observed if not exactly hard-won. For all of Eggers’s honorable intentions, there remains something stubbornly abrasive and discomfiting about his documentary enterprises, rendered as they are in the dry, pat, and self-distancing fictional rhetoric of the McSweeney’s age. It’s a bit like what you’d get if The Grapes of Wrath or Manchild in the Promised Land were to be pared down and illustrated by onetime Eggers collaborator Maurice Sendak. Indeed, one component of the grim narrative of outraged innocence Eggers had painstakingly assembled in Zeitoun has lately come loose: the hero of the book, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, has been jailed for attacking his ex-wife, Kathy, with a tire iron and attempting to kill her. Naturally, any person like Abdulrahman, who’s been on the receiving end of a shocking miscarriage of justice, is under no obligation to live the balance of his life as a paragon. But the powerful, loving bond that the couple shared during the Katrina crisis was a central theme of Zeitoun, and served in emotional terms to heighten the sense of outrage. Here was a man who had not only traveled the storm-devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans by boat until he was caught up in the brutal xenophobic dragnet of law enforcement; here was also a loving, devoted family man, as is the case with most Muslim immigrants tarred unfairly with stereotypes of anti-American extremism. Abdulrahman’s immigrant allegiance to American civic life, which Eggers foregrounded in Zeitoun, may prove another collateral casualty of his protagonist’s recent troubles, at least by Kathy’s account. She suggested in an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune that his recent violent conduct could be bound up with his embrace of a “radical” religious philosophy, at odds with mainstream Muslim worship. Again, one can well understand how the trauma 126 1 The Baffler [no.21]

that Abdulrahman suffered in Katrina’s wake could radicalize anyone, in any number of directions—but the larger point here is that Abdulrahman’s seeming lurch into the Islamic fringe violates the prime directive of an Eggers protagonist, who is never to hold any conviction too firmly, and should never be too rigid in his outlook and observances to prevent the adaptive flourish of whimsy that life always demands of the culturally attuned subject. Put another way, it’s awfully difficult to imagine Eggers lavishing a book-length narrative on a victim of a Katrina-related travesty of justice who was both a blameless innocent and an adherent of Islamic fundamentalism. And if he had been a domestic violence offender into the bargain, well, then all the didactic irony on offer couldn’t elicit the requisite sympathy from readers.

n his new novel, A Hologram for the King, Eggers seems determined to circle back to some of the themes of his early career, now armed with the sadder, wiser truths he’s encountered in his middle age: fling all the Frisbees you like into the sunset, but a fair amount of failure, frustration, and cosmic indifference is the human lot. And the protagonist bearing this glum message is no longer an exoticized Other from far-off Sudan or Syria, but a suburban American man-on-the-make, very much in the Eggers vintage. One might well note further that the novel’s protagonist, Alan Clay, shares some clear affinities with his creator: a romantic attachment to the Midwest, a pained nostalgia for childhood pastimes, and a resolute flight from a political world that refuses to heed the redemptive message of his wonder. Only Alan—a fiftysomething corporate consultant on the steep downward side of his career trajectory—is an older, more hapless, and more battered ambassador of the American spirit than members of the Eggers generation are used to encountering. That is only fitting; America and its productive economy have weathered a punishing round of reversals since the nineties heyday

v For all of Eggers’s honorable intentions, there remains something stubbornly abrasive and discomfiting about his documentary enterprises, rendered as they are in the dry, pat, and self-distancing fictional rhetoric of the McSweeney’s age.

9 of the high ironic mood—a theme that Eggers plumbs early and often in the novel. As Alan endures a marathon flight to Saudi Arabia, he falls into conversation with a seatmate, a retiring businessman who drunkenly pronounces that the productive chapter of economic life in the United States is over—“without a doubt it was, and now we had to be ready to join western Europe in an era of tourism and shopkeeping.” America has devolved into “a nation of indoor cats,” the buttondown Savanorala pronounces, while the real manufacturing and enterprise has taken root in the former Third World: “People were done manufacturing on American soil. . . . Jack Welch said manufacturing should be on a perpetual barge, circling the globe for the cheapest conditions possible, and it seemed the world had taken him at his word. The man on the plane wailed in protest: It should matter where something was made!” Alan is sympathetic to the man’s complaint: he, too, is a chastened survivor of the making-things age, a onetime salesman and plant manager for Schwinn—what could be more purely American and forward-looking than a senior perch at a brand-name suburban bicycle assembly? But Alan is in crisis—now working as an erratically employed sales consultant, he has his overvalued house in suburban Boston on the market, an ex-wife targeting his dwindling cash reserves, and his

daughter preparing to enroll in a sophomore year in college that he can’t pay for. And he’s deeply in debt from a misguided effort to revive the Schwinn-style tradition of making durable, well-designed bikes in a boutique manufacturing concern that’s yielded him nothing but a single super-sleek, all-chrome prototype of the ideal velocipede of his fond imagining. So now, in a grand Willy-Loman-style flourish of desperation, he’s gone all in with a tech firm that’s launched a high-stakes bid to win a contract to handle digital services for the King Abdullah Economic City, an ambitious but underfunded Saudi settlement functioning mainly as a monument of royal vanity in the tradition of Dubai. Even though Alan is a relic of the industrial past—he’s more than twenty years senior to the savvy American tech engineers who are handling the real detail here—he landed the managerial gig on the basis of his long-ago friendship with a nephew of the eighty-five-year-old king. The team’s crowning achievement is to be the debut of, yes, a hologram—an augur of the cutting-edge communications that Alan’s client company, Reliant, will be supplying to the model city, itself little more than a digitized projection of building plans and oil money. As Alan discovers, the King Abdullah Economic City is a

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v mirage rising alongside the Red Sea: a clutch of pink condominium developments flanked by a central office building—and lots and lots of unstarted building projects on vacant lots.

ith this portentous economic conflict—wireless digital imagery crowding out the old industrial world of solid manufacturing—very much in the foreground, the plot and characterization on display here render Eggers’s novel something of a rickety industrial contraption of its own. There are abstractly summoned simplifications of recent economic history, rendered in the trademark twee McSweeney’s style. (“His decisions had been short sighted,” goes the arch summary of Alan’s wayward recent fortunes. “The decisions of his peers had been short sighted. These decisions had been foolish and expedient.”) There are mock-heroic moments of industrial-age nostalgia, such as when Alan summons forth the geist of his tenure in the Schwinn headquarters in Chicago: Those were bright days. In the morning he’d be at the West Side factory, watching the bikes, hundreds of them, loaded onto trucks, gleaming in the sun in a dozen ice-cream colors. He’d get in his car, head downstate, and in the afternoon he could be in Mattoon or Rantoul or Alton, checking on a dealership. He’d see a family walk in, Mom and Dad getting their ten-year-old daughter a World Sport, the kid touching the bike like it was some holy thing.

And there are half-hearted critiques of the noncommunal cast of consumer capitalism. Alan’s father, an angry retired foreman at a shoe factory, scorns his son’s courtly digital errand to the Saudi king: “Every day our people are making their websites and holograms, while sitting in chairs made in China, working on computers made in China, driving over bridges made in China. Does this sound sustainable to you, Alan?” The sum total of these semi-jaundiced reflections in an ironist’s eye is to strategically distance Alan, and the reader, from any sense of responsibility for the many looming reckonings that the global market has 128 1 The Baffler [no.21]

in store for us. Alan doesn’t know the first thing about hologram construction, after all—he’s just trying to parlay an old friendship into a lucrative business agreement, just like any character on Mad Men might. And as he ponders the world he has lost, Alan can’t do anything more than meekly gesture at the power of the colorful Schwinns of his heroic commercial past; turning over the memory of how locally produced goods shine more brightly and enduringly in locally constituted consumer markets, he confesses to himself that he “couldn’t say” why such a vision of fused Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft might be superior to the border-decimating, wagesweated variety that has transformed him into an unlikely courtier of the Saudi king. Indeed, this broadly panicked flight from the social world and its consequences is why Eggers and his cohort of smart-guy fiction writers—your Jonathan Safran Foers, Ben Kunkels, and Chad Harbachs—share a telltale penchant for rapidly delivered yet tediously involuted abstraction. The trademark narrative strategy of the Ironist Bubble permits character and reader alike to hover safely above the messy dramas of history and social conflict, substituting glib monologues and deadpan asides for more closely hewn and emotionally demanding characterization. Foer, in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is thus able to translate the horror of 9/11 into a redemptive children’s fable (and yet more offensively, to render the violent death of a World Trade Center worker as fodder for a child’s flipbook). Kunkel takes the restlessyoung-man materials of a Hermann Hesse– style bildungsroman and renders them (in Indecision) as an extended paean to compulsively self-narrating developmental stagnation—the polar opposite, in other words, of a fictional coming-of-age. And Harbach burnishes the rawer stuff of closeted gay identity into a sepia-toned meditation on baseball and fraternal male innocence in the mid-twentiethcentury collegiate Midwest. Likewise, Alan, the man who stands at the vaguely rendered center of all of Eggers’s broad-brush globalized anomie, is less a fully

v Like any good ironist, Alan recognizes that history itself is his gravest enemy—it’s the thing that he can’t outwit in a bar or a conference room, nor deny amid the rampaging night thoughts that keep him awake for days on end in his anonymous Jeddah hotel room.

9 rounded character than a convergence of halfformed attitudes about the personal costs of industrial decline. (His last name, Clay, seems to evoke both his not fully formed adult character and his chronic urge to return to the loamy preindustrial earth.) Everywhere he faces economic adversity, Alan translates the experience into an unappeasable personal slight. For instance, Alan pinpoints a snafu in the processing of a Banana Republic credit card as a pivotal moment in his own economic downturn, and arrives at this chilling syllogism: “Banana Republic was killing the ability of entrepreneurs like himself to move this country forward. Banana Republic killed his credit, and that had killed America.” The brunt of all such indictments boils down to Alan’s own bathetic bewilderment over his historical obsolescence: “He thought he could make . . . $200k at will, in any given year. How could he have predicted the world losing interest in people like him?”

f course, if Alan were taking these things to heart, he could pursue a political education—either on the Tea Party right or among the left populists of Occupy Wall Street. (It’s unlikely that he would end up allied with the union movement, however, since for all of his gauzy evocations of the Age of Making Things, Alan is himself a career management lackey.) Yet Alan can’t situate his plight in any account of public

life beyond the dimly perceived and peevish logic of the market. Alan’s depoliticized soul is more than a function of his place in the hierarchy of production, though. He remains imprisoned by his own over-abstracted life narrative, his crippling suburban nostalgia, and his terror of intimacy. He is, in other words, a classic child of the irony age, now improbably fending for himself in a newly brutal stretch of global capitalist history. The one moment when he encounters a clutch of construction workers harbored on a seedy and neglected floor of the city’s show condominium, he recoils in instinctive incomprehension and terror. For all of his resolute sense of victimhood, Alan clearly wouldn’t know a tremor of solidarity, or a shared historical plight, if it were to strike him in the face (as at least one among the nameless wage-earning horde here threatens to do). Like any good ironist, Alan recognizes that history itself is his gravest enemy—it’s the thing that he can’t outwit in a bar or a conference room, nor deny amid the rampaging night thoughts that keep him awake for days on end in his anonymous Jeddah hotel room. The thought of the past is quite literally intolerable to him: he isolates a defining moment of crisis in his failed marriage that came during a cross-country trip. His wife, Ruby, wanted to talk about her former lovers: She wanted Alan to know why she’d left them and chosen him, and Alan wanted none of it. Was a clean slate too much to ask for? Please stop, he begged. She continued, glorying in her history. Stop stop stop, he finally roared, and no words were spoken between Salt Lake City and Oregon. Each silent mile gave him more strength and, he imagined, bolstered her respect for him.

Ruby is also intolerably public-minded—another telltale concession to the regime of history: “She was exasperated by the persistence of global crises that seemed to her imminently solvable. She wrote letters to senators, to governors, to people of influence at the IMF. . . . She thought, each time, that The

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v she’d written the Magna Carta.” In contrast to such embarrassing grandiosity, Alan prefers his past to be doled out in small, insular dollops, without any other human on hand to intrude—let alone the dreary stuff of the collective past or present. In the absence of any grand narrative beyond the collapsing structure of his shabby self, Alan retreats into familiar tribal comforts, obsessively reviewing the DVD of the historic Boston Red Sox World Series victory of 2004 and musing on the vanished glories of the Schwinn empire. He has a series of amorous encounters over the course of his vigil for the King, but they come to naught; he’s indeed spent the past eight years in a hermetic state of self-imposed celibacy. He manages at least to bring one partner to manual climax by pondering his effort as another species of productive use value: “We push the buttons that provide the rewards. Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.” In back of such self-distancing homilizing is an all-too-palpable fear of commitment and its emotional entanglements that nudges the hapless Alan toward something close to psychopathy. All of Alan’s sexual encounters take place in water—including a flashback to his first courtship of Ruby on board a cruise ship on the Amazon, which resolves into a traumatic encounter with hungry crocodiles. The thudding symbolism of the dreamlike immersion in water—the loss of control, the suspension of ego boundaries, and the background fear of drowning—is brought into unmistakable relief here by another recent memento mori for Alan: one of his Massachusetts neighbors, a nature-worshiping transcendentalist, strides purposefully into a nearby lake on a cold day and stands there motionless for five hours, dying of an apparent bout of hypothermia. It’s also no less blindingly significant that Alan’s dad, who has retired into a rustic New Hampshire widowhood on a large farm spread, becomes a randy and virile produc130 1 The Baffler [no.21]

tive man of the Earth in his golden years: he has shunned both the perils of getting by in the postindustrial global economy and the fatal water-feminine principle, leaving his ego boundaries and productive self-esteem gratifyingly intact.

lan bears a superficial resemblance to many deeply conflicted male strivers in popular literature—most strikingly, perhaps, to Chip, the similarly resourcechallenged middle-class washout in Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel The Corrections. Only Chip, unlike Alan, remains painfully aware that his scam—a convoluted stock deal plundered from the remains of the former Soviet Union—is neither productively nor ethically defensible. And as a result, when the final reckoning comes for him, Chip, while beholden to many other delusions, is not given much to self-pity. Alan, by contrast, is compulsively driven to eke out any semblance of personal or productive redemption from the stark and unforgiving landscape of the King Abdullah Economic City. When al-Ahmad, one of the King’s advisers, prevails upon Alan to take a new yacht out for its maiden spin on the city’s harbor (water again!), Alan is briefly returned, in reverie at least, to his full stature as a wonder-making man-on-themake—and also, importantly, a history-less American Adam on hand for the opening act of the great financial city’s founding: There wasn’t much of anything there now, just an enormous disc of land in the middle of the water, but it was stunning nevertheless. . . . Alan wanted to stay here. He wanted to watch the city grow, and he wanted to be a charter owner. Maybe in Marina Del Sol. What had they wanted for condos there? After this deal, he could afford it. And the deal, now, seemed well in hand. . . . Al-Ahmad liked him, and trusted him enough to allow him to pilot a gleaming white yacht through the pristine canals of the city. Alan was already part of the early history of this place. . . . They were both happy men, men of vision. Alan felt, for the first time since he’d arrived, that he belonged.

v In a grimly complementary set piece, Alan finds himself, during one of his many vacant business days awaiting the King’s eternally postponed arrival, musing on the allied misfortunes of a stateside business acquaintance, betrayed even more gruesomely by the wiles of globalized finance capital than Alan was. His friend represented a Pennsylvania glassmaking company called PPG, which had been originally contracted to provide an expensive bank of high-security windows for the post-9/11 Freedom Tower project—and at the last minute, the company’s bid was undercut by a Chinese firm making the same windows under a licensing agreement with the same Pennsylvania company. Sitting in the high-symbolic setting of a sunken Saudi construction pit, Alan marvels at the base conduct of the Port Authority of New York in the whole sick tale: It was the fact that they would go abroad for such a thing, would knowingly lead PPG on— millions in equipment upgrades and retooling to enable them to build the glass—my God, the whole thing was underhanded and it was cowardly and lacking in all principle. It was dishonor. And at Ground Zero. Alan was pacing, his hands in fists. The dishonor! At Ground Zero! Amid the ashes! The dishonor! Amid the ashes! The dishonor! The dishonor! The dishonor!

And not surprisingly, given the ironystraitened logic of Alan’s character, this raw outburst leads to no discernible change in our protagonist’s ineffectual conduct or broadly aggrieved-yet-passive outlook. The shallow catharsis here tapers off just as randomly as it seems to have begun: a Saudi security retinue fetches the fulminating businessman from his hole in the ground, “making big scooping motions, as if conjuring him from the underworld by urging him up, up, up.” Alan knows the moral of the scene all too well: “Their faces said, You are not supposed to be there, fifty feet under the earth, walking like that, pacing, angry, recounting unchangeable events from not just your own past but that of the country as a whole.” No, he is not, and eventually Alan takes the lesson to heart. He faces much adversity, and some heartbreaking reversals of fortune in the remainder of his Reliant junket, but like any good American Innocent Abroad, he resolves at the book’s climax to make the best of things. When we take leave of him, he settles into the courtly vigils of the King Abdullah Economic City on a more-or-less permanent basis. Unfortunately, we don’t learn whether he was able to wire home to have his cherished chrome-plated Schwinn sent on to his new desert digs—together, perhaps, with a Frisbee or two.t

Everything about this scene—from the barely contained violent gesture to the curiously Victorian diction of Alan’s rage (even the most rabid foes of globalization don’t depict its ravages as a matter of sullied national honor)—rings false. This outburst, with its obsessive repetition of key phrases and manic pacing, is much more plainly in the emotional register of a spurned lover; for Alan, at this late date, to recognize that the borderless havoc of finance capital corresponds to no recognizable human virtue is a bit like him being scandalized by the news that there is no Santa Claus—or that the 2004 Red Sox World Series victory might have been tainted by the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs.

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The Missionary Position 3 Barbar a Ehrenreich

ost critics have regarded Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in much the same way that Arthur Miller probably thought of Marilyn Monroe—gorgeous, but intellectually way out of her depth. No one denies the film’s visual glory, which begins the moment a giant chalk-white alien strides out into the Icelandic wasteland, guzzles some gunk from a can, and splits open to release thousands of wriggling worm-like DNA strands into a waterfall. But when it comes to metaphysical coherence, the critical consensus is that Prometheus has nothing to offer. “There are no revelations,” the New York Times opines, “only what are called, in the cynical jargon of commercial storytelling, ‘reveals,’ bits of momentarily surprising information bereft of meaning or resonance.” In its refusal to offer an adequate accounting of the universe and our place in it, the film can even be accused of anti-intellectualism. “We were never really in the realm of working out logical solutions to difficult problems,” Geoffrey O’Brien complains in the New York Review of Books, just a “cauldron” of “juicily irrational ingredients.” But Prometheus does have a clear-cut metaphysical proposition to offer, one so terrible as to be almost inadmissible. Consider the basic plot, minus the many alien invasions of human flesh, the references to corporate greed and alien WMDs, and the enigma of the devious HAL-like android: Guided by archeological clues found in prehistoric rock art, a group of humans set out on a trilliondollar expedition to visit the planet (actually a moon) that the giant white alien came from. There, among innumerable horrors, since under its bleak surface this moon seems to be a breeding ground for lethal predators of the dark and squirmy variety, they find a cryogenically preserved clone or sibling of that original alien “creator” who seeded earth with DNA. The humans foolishly awaken 132 1 The Baffler [no.21]

him, perhaps expecting some sort of seminar on the purpose of life. Instead, the alien starts knocking heads off and strides away to resume his pre-nap project of traveling to and destroying the planet earth. This, and not the DIY abortion of a squid-like alien fetus, is the emotional climax of the film, the point when Noomi Rapace screams at the homicidal alien, “I need to know why! What did we do wrong? Why do you hate us?” True, we don’t know whether the big white aliens are gods, manifestations of a single God, or operatives working for some higher power. But just how much theological clarity can you expect from a Hollywood action film? It doesn’t take any great imaginative leap to see that Scott and his writers are confronting us with the possibility that there may be a God, and that He (or She or It or They) is not good. This is not atheism. It is a strand of religious dissidence that usually flies well under the radar of both philosophers and cultural critics. For example, it took about five years before the critics noticed that Philip Pullman’s popular trilogy His Dark Materials was not just about a dodgy or unreliable God, but about one who is actively malevolent. Atheism has become a respectable intellectual position, in some settings almost de rigueur, but as Bernard Schweizer explains in his enlightening 2010 book Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, morally inspired opposition to God remains almost too radical to acknowledge. How many of Elie Wiesel’s admirers know that he said, “Although I know I will never defeat God, I still fight him”? Or that Rebecca West declaimed that “the human will should [not] be degraded by bowing to this master criminal,” and that she was echoing a sentiment already expressed by Zora Neale Hurston? Barred from more respectable realms of speculation, the idea of an un-good God has been pretty much left to propagate in the

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s fertile wetlands of science fiction. One of the early sci-fi classics of the twentieth century, H. P. Lovecraft’s 1931 At the Mountains of Madness, offers a plotline that eerily prefigures Prometheus. An Antarctic expedition uncovers the ruins of a millions-of-years-old civilization created by extraterrestrial aliens, who awaken and kill most of the explorers. A couple of humans survive to determine, through a careful study of the ruins, that the aliens had “filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake.” Not all sci-fi deities are so nasty. C. S. Lewis offered a Christlike lion god in the Narnia series; Battlestar Galactica’s climax featured a vision of a benevolent, and oddly Luddite, god. But many of the great sci-fi epics derive their philosophical frisson from a callous or outright wicked deity: the impertinent Vulcan god of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the tyrannical worm-god of God Emperor of Dune, the trickster sea god of Solaris. There are less satanic sci-fi gods too— more ethereal, universal, and even intermittently nonviolent. Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 Star Maker ends with its far-traveling human protagonist encountering the eponymous “eternal spirit”: “Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy.” In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Tibetan monks who have set themselves the task of generating all the possible names of God finally get some assistance from a computer brought to them by Western technicians. As the technicians make their way back down the mountainside from the monastery, they look up at the night sky to see that “without any fuss, the stars were going out.” The monks had been right: the universe existed for the sole purpose of listing the names of God and, once this task was accomplished, there was no reason for the universe to go on. The theme of an über-Being who uses humans for its own inscrutable purposes is developed more fully in Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, in which an “Overmind” of remote extraterrestrial provenance sets humans on 134 1 The Baffler [no.21]

a course toward ecstatic communion with each other—and, somehow, at the same time, with it. When that goal is achieved, the earth blows itself up, along with the last human on it, after which the Overmind presumably moves on to find a fresh planet—and species— to fulfill its peculiar cravings.

he idea of an un-good God, whether indifferent or actively sadistic, flies in the face of at least two thousand years of pro-God PR, much of it irrational and coming from professed “people of faith.” God is perfectly good and loving, they assert with an almost infantile sense of entitlement; he “has a plan” for us, no matter how murky or misguided that plan often seems. Otherwise, they ask, as if evaluating a health care provider, what comfort does he have to offer us? Or they petulantly demand a “perfect” God—all-good, omnipotent, and omniscient—in the name of what amounts to human vanity. If we, the top dogs on our planet, are to worship some invisible Other, he (or it) had better be unimaginably perfect. But you don’t have to be a theist to insist on the goodness of God. Generations of secular social scientists and others writing in the social-science tradition have insisted that a good God, whether he exists or not, is good for us. The argument takes the form of a historical narrative: in the ancient past—and its seeming equivalent in small-scale or “primitive” societies—deities were plural, female as well as male, and often of no detectable moral valence. The ancient deities of Mediterranean peoples, for example, a pantheon that ranges from Zeus to Yahweh and Baal, were psycho-gods—insatiable consumers of blood sacrifice, abettors of genocide, even, in the case of Zeus, a serial rapist. They offered no rationales for their behavior, and when Job insisted on an explanation for the travails visited upon him, he was told, in effect, “Because I can.” Further back, in prehistory, lurk deities too wild and bloody minded to take fully human form. They were predatory animals like Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of ancient Egypt, and the man-eating goddess Kali, who wears a tiger skin.

s If God is an alternative life-form or member of an alien species, then we have no reason to believe that It is (or They are), in any humanly recognizable sense of the word, “good.”

9 Then, the official narrative continues, somewhere between 900 and 200 BCE, the so-called “Axial Age,” God underwent a major makeover. Blood sacrifice was gradually abandoned; diverse and multiple gods fused into a single male entity; a divine concern for peace and order supposedly came to permeate the universe. In the often-told story of divine redemption, Yahweh matures into the kindly shepherd of the Psalms and finally into the all-loving person of Jesus, who is himself offered up as a sacrifice. Comparable changes occur outside the Mediterranean world, including in persistently polytheistic Hinduism, which gives up animal sacrifice and reaches for a sublime über-deity. What brought about this transformation? Religious historian Karen Armstrong, probably the best-known living celebrant of axial progress, proposes in her 2006 book The Great Transformation that people simply got tired of the bad old gods’ violence and immorality. Speaking of the late Vedic period in India, she writes that the traditional gods “were beginning to seem crude and unsatisfactory,” leading to the search for a god “who was more worthy of worship.” As people became nicer and more sensitive, they lost interest in the grand spectacles of animal sacrifice that constituted pre-axial religious ritual and sought a more “spiritual” experience. (She also mentions, but only in passing, that in some parts of the world people had a less exalted reason for abandoning blood sacrifice: they were running out of animals to sacrifice.) To Armstrong, the axial transformation had only one flaw—its “indifference to women,” which is a pretty wan way to describe a theological shift that eliminated most of the planet’s goddesses. But she humbly accepts the limits set by patriarchal monotheism: “Precisely because the question of women was so peripheral to

the Axial Age, I found that any sustained discussion of this topic was distracting.” In his 2009 book The Evolution of God, the polymathic scholar Robert Wright offered what promised to be an even more objective and secular explanation for God’s “transformation.” He argues that, for various reasons, people, or at least key peoples, were becoming more cosmopolitan and tolerant, hence in need of a single, universal, morally admirable deity. This seems like a useful approach, until you recall that the ultracosmopolitan and theologically tolerant Romans readily absorbed the gods of conquered peoples into their own polytheistic pantheon. But Wright hardly needs any concrete historical forces, because “moral progress . . . turns out to be embedded in the very logic of religion as mediated by the basic direction of social evolution”—which I suppose is a way of saying that things could only get better, because such is their “logic” and “basic direction.” As Wright informs us, “cultural evolution was all along pushing divinity, and hence humanity, toward moral enlightenment.” The “New Atheists”—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—easily flicked away the argument that God’s axial upgrade was accompanied by a general increase in human goodness and mercy. They note that the new-model deities, with prophets like Jesus and Muhammad, have proved just as effective at abetting cruelty and war as the old ones. If the gods have any of their reputed powers, and if they got nicer while humans did not, then we have to question the depth and sincerity of the gods’ transformation—or whether it occurred at all. Interestingly, though, neither Armstrong nor Wright cedes any power or agency to the God whose growing goodness they applaud: to do so would be to give up their own claims to The

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s scholarly detachment. Their God is presented as nothing more than a projection of human needs and desires, an assessment no atheist could disagree with. There is another theory of how humans became attached to “good” and increasingly monotheistic gods—and one that is refreshingly free of sweetness and optimism. As Jürgen Habermas and, more recently, in rich historical detail, Robert Bellah have pointed out, the “Axial Period” was a time of endemic warfare, intensified by the introduction of iron weapons across Eurasia. The maintenance of armies and the practice of war require strong central authorities—kings and eventually emperors—who discover that it is both risky and inefficient to try to rule their domestic populations entirely by force. Far easier to persuade the public that the king or the emperor is deserving of obedience because the deity he represents, or even embodies, is himself so transcendentally good. The autocrat who rules by divine right—from Constantine to Hirohito, the God-emperor of Japanese State Shintoism—demands not only obedience, but gratitude and love. The good, post-axial God has not, of course, always been a reliable ally of tyrants. Christianity has again and again helped inspire movements against the powerful, such as, for example, the abolitionists and the twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. But this does not mean that the good God is necessarily good for us, or at least for the downtrodden majority of us. The unforgiveable crime of the post-axial religions is to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice. When the pious bow down before the powerful or, in our own time, the megachurches celebrate wealth and its owners, the “good” God is just doing his job of what Habermas called “legitimation.”

n 1974, Philip K. Dick experienced a theophany—a “self-disclosure by the divine”—which deftly summarizes science fiction’s contribution to theology. It was a shattering revelation, leaving him feeling more like “a hit-and-run accident victim than 136 1 The Baffler [no.21]

a Buddha.” He disintegrated into mental illness, at least to the point of earning a bed in a locked psychiatric ward for several weeks. As related in his novel Valis, in which the author figures as the protagonist, he fought back by working obsessively to understand and communicate his encounter with a deity of extraterrestrial origin that is “in no way like mortal creatures” (his italics). This deity or deities—for there may be at least a half dozen of them in Dick’s idiosyncratic cosmogony— bear some resemblance to biological creatures: they have their own agendas, and what they seek, through their self-disclosures to humans, is “interspecies symbiosis.” If God is an alternative life-form or member of an alien species, then we have no reason to believe that It is (or They are), in any humanly recognizable sense of the word, “good.” Human conceptions of morality almost all derive from the intensely social nature of the human species: our young require years of caretaking, and we have, over the course of evolution, depended on each other’s cooperation for mutual defense. Thus we have lived, for most of our existence as a species, in highly interdependent bands that have had good reasons to emphasize the values of loyalty and heroism, even altruism and compassion. But these virtues, if not unique to us, are far from universal in the animal world (or, of course, the human one). Why should a Being whose purview supposedly includes the entire universe share the tribal values of a particular group of terrestrial primates? Besides, Dick may have been optimistic in suggesting that what the deity hungers for is “interspecies symbiosis.” Symbiosis is not the only possible long-term relationship between different species. Parasitism, as hideously displayed in Ridley Scott’s Alien series, must also be considered, along with its quickeracting version, predation. In fact, if anything undermines the notion of a benevolent deity, it has to be the ubiquity of predation in the human and non-human animal worlds. Who would a “good” God favor—the antelope or the lion with hungry cubs waiting in its den, the hunter or the fawn? For Charles Darwin,

s the deal-breaker was the Ichneumon wasp, which stings its prey in order to paralyze them so that they may be eaten alive by the wasp’s larvae. “I cannot persuade myself,” wrote Darwin, “that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” Or, as we may ask more generally: What is kindness or love in a biological world shaped by interspecies predation? “Morality is of the highest importance,” Albert Einstein once said, “but for us, not for God.” In Prometheus, the first alien releases DNA on earth about five hundred million years ago, on the eve, in many viewers’ interpretation, of what has been called the Precambrian evolutionary explosion. If so, it was not life that the alien initiated on earth, because life predated the Precambrian. What he did may have been far worse; he may have infected the earth with the code or script for interspecies predation. Before the “explosion,” terrestrial life was mostly unicellular and, judging from the low frequency of claws, shells, and other forms of weaponry found in the fossil record, relatively peaceful. Afterwards, living creatures became bigger, more diverse, better armed, and probably either meaner or a lot more frightened:

the “arms race” between predator and prey had begun. The causality remains in question here, with scientists still puzzling over the origins of predation and its role in triggering the runaway evolutionary process that led, from the Cambrian on, to humans, to science fiction, and to the idea of God. If the doughy aliens are not the ultimate deities whose morality we need to assess, then who or what is? Who do these aliens work for—or against? At the end of the movie, with all of their human comrades dead, the android and the Noomi Rapace character rebuild an alien space ship and set off to find the planet that, according to the android’s research, the aliens themselves originally came from. The possibility of a good God or gods, signaled by the cross Noomi wears around her neck, remains open—as it must, of course, for the sequel. But, contra so many of the critics, we have learned an important lesson from the magnificent muddle of Prometheus: if you see something that looks like a god—say, something descending from the sky in a flaming chariot, accompanied by celestial choir sounds and trailing great clouds of star dust—do not assume that it is either a friend or a savior. Keep a wary eye on the intruder. By all means, do not fall down on your knees.t

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Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter? 3 Josh MacPhee

t least twice a week I get an email asking for support for a new project via Kickstarter. More often than not I pledge money, wanting to act in solidarity with friends and acquaintances with giant ideas but small bank accounts. And Kickstarter, once a promising platform for artists and other cultural producers to raise money, has become the go-to tool for fundraising by writers, artists, designers, political activists, and even popular musicians and award-winning filmmakers. As more friends use it, and as I cough up more and more money with every visit to the website, it seems a good time to try to crack it open to see how it works—and who it really works for. The basics are easy to understand. You have a project that requires financial help to realize. You choose an amount you want to raise, make a short video advertising the future project, and then post it on Kickstarter.com as a “campaign.” In order to entice people into supporting this campaign—or, in the site’s parlance, to become “backers”—you offer “rewards”: goods and services people will receive if they pledge money. Generally, the more money a backer pledges, the more valuable the reward. If you reach your fundraising goal within a fixed time period, between one and sixty days, then the money is yours. If you fail to raise the full amount, you don’t get any of the money; you just get sad. Crowd-sourced, or community-based, funding models are not new. Bake sales and lemonade stands have been around for a while, funding everything from Parent Teacher Associations to small-town historical societies. As a kid, I went door to door selling Christmas wreaths for the Boy Scouts, and most of us have gained at least five pounds eating Girl Scout Cookies. The value that Kickstarter adds to these relative138 1 The Baffler [no.21]

ly common fundraising models is threefold. First, it provides software tools that make it easy to plug your campaign into existing online social networks, primarily Facebook. Second, Kickstarter offers a clean interface and a convenient payment mechanism, giving your project a gloss of professionalism it might otherwise lack. Third, Kickstarter links projects through its website, so people who help fund your project might also click on a completely different film project and become a “backer.” This means your own project may get support from strangers far outside your direct personal networks. These three features are why setting up a Kickstarter page seems so much more efficient than setting up a bake sale. More efficient, and more necessary than ever. Since the eighties, state funding for the arts has dwindled, and we cultural producers have turned toward private foundations for grants. Now many of us are exhausted by an endless cycle of grant applications to foundations where who you know is more important than how interesting your project is. Kickstarter, meanwhile, has announced that it’s distributing more arts funding than the National Endowment for the Arts. According to bloggers at InformationDiet.com and the Los Angeles Times, while Kickstarter is looking at facilitating the funding of $150 million in projects (compared to the NEA’s funding of $146 million) in 2012, at least a quarter of the money is going into technology development and product design projects—nothing that could honestly be considered the arts. Even so, Kickstarter still looks to be a promising and seemingly innovative way to raise funds. Hundreds of friends and acquaintances are trying it out. But any time there is a suggestion of free money, we should get suspicious.

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Welcome to Your New Boss, Kind of Like Your Old Boss Kickstarter cultivates the illusion that when you use its fundraising tools, you are opting out of wage labor. You are rejecting the usual game of winners and losers that comes with capitalism and turning to a model that allows everyone to win—one that combines the freedom of self-employment with the shared experiences of community building. Yet for all the talk of a crowd-funded revolution, Kickstarter manages goods, services, and labor in ways that are quite familiar. In 2009, the Guardian and other mainstream news outlets began reporting on teenagers—and prisoners—in China being employed to play video games like World of Warcraft for upwards of ten to fifteen hours a day. They were “mining” for “gold”—virtual money, weapons, and other resources that their bosses could sell to wealthy American and European gamers for real-world profits. This news tidbit caught a lot of interest because it so clearly illustrates the blurry line between the virtual and material worlds, and the quick hop, skip, and jump from one person’s entertainment to another’s imprisonment. Most of these news articles safely located the exploitation end of the equation halfway across the globe. But is it possible that the ultra-hip, intellectual artist set, building digital platforms controlled by corporations that deal in virtual goods, is also mining for someone else’s gold? The Kickstarter platform and website might not look like a shop floor, but when you are there, you are working. The exchange goes like this: rather than work for a wage with minimum protections and some semblance of benefits, you marshal all your friends, and their friends, to ante up small amounts of money for your project. If you reach your goal, you get to keep the money you raise, but Kickstarter peels off a dime for every dollar your family and friends chip in. Then a nickel of that dime goes to Kickstarter’s exclusive money broker, Amazon.com, for processing the financials. So Kickstarter’s gross revenue is 5 percent of all the money brought in by all of our projects. (On four recent, celebrated, multimillion140 1 The Baffler [no.21]

dollar projects alone, Kickstarter brought in more than $1,175,000.) Since Internet infrastructure is relatively inexpensive, the costs of running a website that doesn’t produce or distribute any material goods is limited. The scaling up of web traffic doesn’t translate to an equal scale-up in costs, and at a certain point, costs max out, and profit skyrockets. Running a Kickstarter campaign is work, so what do you get for your labor? The money you raise, of course. You do keep it, right? Well, say you run a campaign for $10,000— somewhere between a third to two-thirds of what a struggling artist might make in a year. You send out thousands of emails about your campaign, post it on dozens of friends’ Facebook pages, send out lots of tweets, talk it up with everyone you meet, and try to get as many people as possible to do the same. You’re a popular person living in a major city, with an active social network and a compelling project, so you hit your mark—$10,000 is pledged. Kickstarter and Amazon take 10 percent right off the top, so now you are down to $9,000. If the money is coming in to you as an individual, Kickstarter treats you like a selfemployed contractor, so it’s on you to figure out your tax burden and pay it, likely at least another 15 percent, so now you’re at $7,650. For a $10,000 campaign, you will have around 200 donors, of whom 150 will want rewards. If your rewards are physical objects, and you were generous in your offerings (a good idea when raising money), you’re going to have to wrap 150 packages, all of which need shipping supplies and postage to get to their destinations. On average, you’re likely spending $8 per package, so that’s another $1,200 off your total; so now you’re at $6,450. Within a few weeks a third of the money you raised is gone, and you haven’t begun to spend it on the project you were raising it for. But using up $3,600 isn’t the end of it. In addition, you’ve tapped out and stressed out most of your creative network in the process of generating the rewards, the introductory video, the reminders to donate to the campaign, and the personal requests to popular acquaintances to mobilize their networks to

Kickstarting a project demands that we transform ourselves from artists into marketers. Are these two selves compatible? We are forced to streamline our heterogeneous senses of self, the complicated pushes and pulls that make up our personalities, for the sake of attracting investors.

9 donate as well. Your close friends have helped you pack all the rewards and drag them to the post office. All in all you’ve taxed your community to a bending (if not breaking) point, and spent a good 150–200 hours—not on your project, remember, but on raising money in hopes of eventually getting to work on the project. If you were to pay a reasonable wage for that labor, you’re looking at another $2,500 in costs, lowering your total intake to under $4,000, or close to a third of what you raised. And suddenly a day spent on a grant application doesn’t seem so bad. Kickstarter and Amazon made a grand sitting back and watching you do all that work. This is money they made not only on your friends directly paying it, but also on using you to tap into a deep-seated belief in our culture that volunteering is an important social value. Kickstarter gets its rentier-style money, you get a small portion to fund your project, and everyone else gets to bask in the glow of how wonderful it was for them to participate. What could be more exciting to venture capitalists and CEOs than a way to make money that on the surface seems completely non-coercive and non-exploitative of the raw materials, labor, and consumers involved? Meanwhile, data on you and your networks has been collected along with the fees. Whether or not Kickstarter is turning around and selling your information, its collection adds value to the company based on the possibility of doing this. The founders and employees of Internet start-ups don’t make money from providing products or services, but by selling their companies to bigger fish, often for data mining and social networking potentials. Kickstarter has also absorbed your

friends into its immense, undifferentiated labor force. Kickstarter’s founders are sitting in the yard watching you and your friends haul your furniture around on moving day, offering up a supportive, “Boy, does that look heavy!”— then peeling your friends off as the day goes by to help them plant their garden. Scratching the Neoliberal Itch When we launch a Kickstarter campaign we are attempting to liberate ourselves. We smell the promise of freedom from the bureaucrats at state funding agencies. The possibility of escaping the whims of more successful artists who lord it over the granting panels of private funders is intoxicating. Hell, why should these people have control over our lives? But mixing liberation and capitalism always comes with a price. Kickstarting a project demands that we transform ourselves from artists into marketers. Are these two selves compatible? We are forced to streamline our heterogeneous senses of self, the complicated pushes and pulls that make up our personalities, for the sake of attracting investors. The edges are rounded, our rowdier aspects brought into line. In order to be successful, our drive to self-promotion has to outstrip all other drives. Our goal—our imperative—is to harden ourselves and our projects into cohesive, likable, and salable commodities. We wake up as brands, joyously exulting in these flattened, logo-like versions of ourselves. Clean and efficient with soft, smooth corners and antiseptic Helvetica expressions. What is not to love about these new forms, so sleek and attractive on the outside, with the promise of aiding us in the fulfillment of the last remaining human right in our The

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Kickstarter extracts value from our communities— 10 percent of the capital raised and an unknown amount of networked and social value—but it does something less obvious as well. It converts community building into a shopping experience.

9 society: the right to be an entrepreneur? Yet our neoliberal metamorphosis doesn’t leave us as free and independent as we’re led to believe it will. The transformation and entrepreneurial promise are similar in many ways to an older economics, one a bit less slick and gloss—the pyramid scheme. Growing up, I had a friend named Andrew. I loved playing at his house because it was much more run-down than mine, his yard a playground of tangled bushes, abandoned tools, rotting fences. His single mom was always struggling to make ends meet, and while their fridge was often verging on empty, its door always featured a giant photo of a bright pink Cadillac. She was a Mary Kay cosmetics seller, and as far as I could tell, she spent more time peddling cheap makeup than with Andrew. It turns out that selling makeup would never get you the car; only signing up more people to sell makeup could do that. The product wasn’t makeup, but the women needed to sell it. The true product for sale on Kickstarter is not your art project, but your community and networks. It’s no surprise this reality is hidden: Who wants to see their exciting, new brand-selves as reincarnated Tupperware salespeople? But that is what a sober look in the mirror reveals. For our bio-economic change to take hold, we have to convince all our friends, and families, and our increasingly nebulous social networks to participate—to invest in our brand and themselves become entrepreneurs, for us. This carries the tacit promise that when the time comes, and they wake up to their gorgeous new brand-state, we’ll do the same in return. Except pyramids are built for pharaohs, who don’t exactly spe142 1 The Baffler [no.21]

cialize in reciprocity. The pharaoh at the top might be decked in jewels, but the structure is built by slaves—those poor souls who changed themselves too late, after all the good logos were taken, and the marketing tricks used up. Social Enclosures “R” Us The friends we mobilize to support our projects appear to us as a community, but to Kickstarter they are raw material to be converted into commodity—a conversion we must also embrace. Members of our networks become investors, not so much in our projects, but in Kickstarter itself. Every fundraising campaign that is launched reaches into our intersecting communities. Newer and newer layers of people are extracted to invest in Kickstarter. Like any other for-profit entity, its goal is to make money. Our projects that facilitate the funding are a side effect, a cost of doing business—the business of drilling our relationships for all they are worth. This is the logic we are allowing to dictate the whos, hows, and whats of cultural funding in our society. Clearly, Kickstarter extracts value from our communities—10 percent of the capital raised and an unknown amount of networked and social value—but it does something less obvious as well. It converts support and community building into a shopping experience. By building a commodity-based rewards system into the platform, Kickstarter naturalizes the idea that supporting a friend is similar to any other online purchasing experience. You charge your credit card and something cool shows up in the mail in the future. But meaningful communities can’t be built on the exchange of commodities. No matter the monikers, a Niketown is not a town, and a

Home Depot isn’t a home. A rich social fabric demands an equally dense and complicated set of social relationships. Kickstarter demands this social fabric, but only extracts from it, giving nothing of social value in return. It is up to us, those who run the campaigns, to invest the labor and capital back into our communities to keep them running, and to keep them sustaining us. In this light, the 10 percent taken off the top is a form of usury, taxation. We’re paying for harnessing the economic power of our community, yet how does the community benefit? I sincerely hope our art projects are enough, but I have my doubts. Throwing Money at the Stars As celebrities begin using Kickstarter, hailed by the company as a “new model” of fundraising for recording artists, we get a glimpse of the long-term vision. Kickstarter will become just another tool for the parasitic extraction of wealth from fans, and celebrities will become the only ones with enough real and cultural capital to launch significant and successful fundraising campaigns. None of the rewards for these campaigns will be material, because fans will upend couch cushions to find the money

to have a Skype session with Bret Easton Ellis, to have him tweet his review of your short film, to get a “special hug” from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman, or to get access to a film star’s “secret” Twitter feed—inevitably written by some other fan naive enough to ghostwrite it for free. These celebrities are honey, attracting unpaid or low-paid interns to fill out the immense army of worker bees. Let’s just come out and say it: these people don’t need our money! Why are pop stars, bestselling authors, and successful video game designers coming to us to raise money? Because they love the grassroots and it brings them closer to their fans? Hardly. They simply don’t want to take the money they’ve already earned entertaining us and invest it into pet projects with questionable returns. Why spend your own money when there are tens of thousands willing to let you spend theirs without any expectation of compensation? I don’t want to speculate on whether it was ironic or not, but Amanda Palmer’s recent fundraising campaign was entitled “The Grand Theft Kickstarter.” And how do these celebrity campaigns affect everyone else’s chances at raising money?

The Baffler’s Kickstarter Campaign March 27–May 11, 2011, 308 backers

$20,762 . . . . . . . . . . . . . total pledged

minus $1,038 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kickstarter’s 5 percent cut

minus $769 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amazon’s 3.7 percent fee

minus $464.40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 tote bags at $4.30 unit price

minus $257.63 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 bubble mailers at 99¢ each plus mailing labels

minus $240. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 T-shirts at $4 unit price

minus $53.76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 postcards at 32¢ each

minus $927.29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . mailing costs

minus $550 . . . . . . . . . . . . . video and space

minus $1,200 . . . . . . . . . . . . . labor for rewards fulfillment

total received . . . . . . . . . . . . . $15,261.92

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

The

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Instead of an expropriation in the name of an abstract entity like “the State,” we need an expropriation by and for the actual, unique, and individual workers: us.

For a long time there has been a cottage industry of experts consulting on how to run a successful Kickstarter (a quick web search finds more than two dozen articles promising help in mounting a strong campaign, such as “Kicking Ass & Taking Donations: 9 Tips on Funding Your Kickstarter Project” and “9 Essential Steps for a Kickstarter Campaign”), and some of these tips expose just how far Kickstarter has strayed from most people’s conception of community. In particular, it is now common for people running campaigns to send out press releases to drum up media exposure. Earlier this year, well-organized and well-capitalized project hopefuls began hiring consulting firms for their campaigns. When a project’s funding depends on bending the ear of the mainstream media, Kickstarter will no longer be a tool for the aspiring artist or amateur filmmaker, but just another way for those already laden with cultural or actual capital to attract more of it. This converts the rest of us into a new marketing demographic, likely already being talked up by the sharpest consultants. We’re now consumers willing to front-end pay for the creation of a project, and then willing to pay for it again when it comes to market. It’s venture capitalism for the huddled masses, no stakes and no returns; the act of pretending to be an investor is prize enough. The action is entrepreneurial and material, but it’s couched in philanthropy, with a commensurate benefit in the realm of the purely psychic. Working the System? So far we’ve been assuming that you’ve successfully raised the money—and that it’s the amount you really need. Kickstarter, of course, encourages you to assume that. It presents a front of victorious projects, and it can—after four years and counting, everyone 144 1 The Baffler [no.21]

knows someone who has succeeded. But there is also evidence that Kickstarter hides failed projects. Not surprisingly, projects that don’t reach their fundraising goals are never featured on the website. But in addition, journalist Dan Misener has found that metatags are added to failed projects so their Kickstarter pages are actively hidden from third-party search engines. According to Kickstarter’s own data, almost 56 percent of projects fail, but this information never shows up in the boosterish media juggernaut the company has built around itself. Let’s also look at Kickstarter’s “all-ornothing” rule. In order to maximize extraction, and make you work harder for them, you only get the money if you reach your goal, a goal even more motivational because you set it yourself. This has led to a popular intervention and campaign insurance model, a secret weapon for success if you will. When mobilizing your social media army fails to convert to cash, you have to fall back on much more traditional relationships. In order to make sure you’ll reach your goal, it’s smart to have a close friend or family member with some extra cash willing to front a significant chunk of the money you are trying to raise in case you can’t reach your limit. If you are trying to raise $10,000, but only reach $5,000, it makes sense at the last minute to have someone jump in and pledge the rest, so you don’t lose the half that was already pledged. For something more expensive and complicated, like a feature film, you might be trying to raise $200,000. Unless you’re already famous, or have the luck of a cultural zeitgeist swirling around the ideas in your project, it’s going to be hard to find ten thousand people to donate $20 each, especially through disembodied networks like Facebook. In all likelihood you’ll raise half,

and need a friend to chip in the second half. But either way, Kickstarter takes its $20,000, the government its $20,000, and the rewards process eats up another $10,000. And you still need to pay back your friend $100,000 with the $150,000 you have left, leaving you a quarter of the fundraising total to make your film. You’ve gotten five thousand people to support your project, but two-thirds of them are actually only supporting Kickstarter and your rich friend. Brilliant. It is extremely taxing on our community networks to be continually donating rewards, paying money, promoting campaigns, and volunteering labor to fulfill the rewards, never mind any help needed actualizing any of the projects that the fundraising was for. I was involved in a campaign that raised $22,000 through Kickstarter. More than 250 people received rewards, and almost all of those rewards were material objects that needed to be mailed. Reward fulfillment alone became a twenty-hour-a-week job for one member of the group, having to be in constant contact with donors and continually negotiating international customs specifics. Hundreds of dollars in mailing supplies had to be ordered, and two full days of labor from half a dozen people were needed to roll, and pack, and tape, and label all the parcels. A minimum of $2,500 was spent on reward fulfillment, not including labor, which easily topped one hundred total hours of work. We bent over backward to please those who supported us, but unlike a sale at a traditional store, there is no guarantee with Kickstarter rewards. The person being funded is not obliged to fulfill rewards or complete the actual project. So it’s the worst of all worlds: there’s a weaker system of social accountability because the web interface abstracts you from an embodied community, while there is none of the regulation assumed to exist between two parties making a financial exchange. Our campaign was so much work, and so taxing on our ability to mobilize people, that I doubt we could ever be as successful if we decided to try to run another one. This seriously hinders the motivation to

be particularly forthright with the rewards. Why bother sending out rewards if you are not going to ask people for money again? We felt we had to fill all of ours, but I can see why people wouldn’t. The Boss Needs You, You Don’t Need the Boss Given all these concerns, you might think I’m trying to get you to stop using Kickstarter. Actually, not at all. There is no liberation in purity, and removing your project from the platform would be meaningless. The real issue is whether Kickstarter could be better, and how we all could make that happen. The first and most important step in that direction is asking a simple question: Why shouldn’t, or couldn’t, Kickstarter be owned and run by those that invest in it? The initial capital has long since been paid back; it’s time to expropriate! But instead of an expropriation in the name of an abstract entity like the state, we need an expropriation by and for the actual, unique, and individual workers: us. Those who use the platform to raise money should control the platform, collectively, and share in the benefits generated. How would this work? I don’t know all the details, but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t worth considering. There are thousands of interesting and unique models for running successful worker-owned and -operated entities in the United States, from small print shops to large grocery stores, from bakeries with nationally distributed products to industrialscale eco-laundries. Throughout history, the people doing the toil have struggled to control the means of production, and have often succeeded on a small scale. What is being bought and sold is now changing, as is the nature of work—how we do it, where we do it, and how we are compensated for it. We need to recognize platforms like Kickstarter not only as tools to raise money, but as tools that harness new forms of our labor power. Which means we need to learn how to organize around these forms. Communizing Kickstarter seems as good a place to begin as any. Who wants to join me?t The

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T O R Y

Invasion of Grenada 3 George Singleton

aybe we weren’t meant to be foster parents. It’s important to learn these things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed us up for the project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn’t have firearms scattered around the house or booze bottles within reach. That we didn’t keep Pine-Sol bottles on the floor, or rat traps. I’m sure they looked into our backgrounds enough to conclude we weren’t child pornographers, dope smokers, domestic batterers, gunrunners, arsonists, that sort of thing. I had some questionable decisions in my past, but nothing worse than anyone else. Vandalism, mostly. Trespassing. I’d been married before, too young, and the vandalism and trespassing involved her. But I wasn’t violent, or a repeat offender. I walked onto my ex-wife’s property once, spray-painted cheater on the side of her house, then left. I spray-painted that, plus bitch and two-timer and whore and Eduardo—really? on the side of what used to be my van. I don’t want to think I’m a racist, but it hurt my ego that she’d fallen in love with a Venezuelan over me. “It’s kind of like being on-call 24/6,” our personal social worker came to tell Bonita and me. I’ll be the first to admit that maybe I married Bonita just because she sounded like she might be Venezuelan, too. She’s not. She’s from West Virginia [insert joke here]. When I met Bonita—at the Mid-Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America Trade Show up in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, inside the old racetrack—that’s how she introduced herself, “I’m from West Virginia [insert joke here].” When I told her I lived 127 miles from Myrtle Beach, you’d’ve thought I asked her to move in with me to a five-bedroom mansion in some place like Orlando or Knoxville. For what it’s worth, her West Virginia daddy owned a driving range outside Buckhannon, but he couldn’t make it to Mid146 1 The Baffler [no.21]

Atlantic Independent Driving Range Owners of America because of a bout of black lung he contracted from breathing in the vicinity of coal mines; so he sent Bonita. She and I had no choice but to fall in love, what with all the complimentary range balls, hand towels, ball markers, and divot repair tools handed out, not to mention the free symposiums that involved everything from fescue to front wheel pickers to tee line turf. When a man began to speak about the importance of ball washers, we couldn’t take it anymore and retired to my motel room, where I had a bottle of Smirnoff. I’ll jump ahead and say that I visited Bonita a few times up in West Virginia, her daddy died, she sold the land to one of those mining companies, and so on. She moved down to Calloustown soon after and helped me watch my hometown disintegrate into near ghosttown status once the younger kids moved away and the older ones died, once the mill closed, and so on. I’m not complaining. The social worker said, “It’s like 24/6 instead of 24/7 because we won’t take children away from their biological parents on a Sunday. We don’t want any child growing up and thinking anything bad about Sundays. You know how maybe your momma dies on Arbor Day, and from then on for the rest of your life you hate trees? That’s how we feel about taking a kid away from abusive parents on a Sunday. Most parents get caught abusing on Saturdays anyway, or Tuesdays. I don’t know why those two days. Someone did a study and concluded that, you know.” Her name was Alberta. Bonita had met the woman at one of those kitchen appliance parties. They noticed they both had names that ended in -ta, and started meeting up at an Applebee’s out by the interstate on Thursdays and calling each other plain old “Ta”; when they encountered one another sometimes you heard “Ta-ta,” like that, kind of racy. “We’re ready,” Bonita had said.

SU-K YUNG LEE

Here’s the situation: Sometimes children had to be taken away from their parents and sent to a safe place for anywhere from one day to a month. It’s called “temporary protective custody,” just like when somebody in prison tattletales on a gang member and the next thing you know the tattletale’s got about six thousand death threats. It should be called something else, if you ask me, but I don’t know what. It should be called something else just so children don’t feel as though they have something in common with prison tattletales for the rest of their lives. “You need to have diapers handy at all time,

and Gerber’s. These kids coming in might be six months old, they may be fifteen. Boys and girls. So you might need to have some tampons in your medicine cabinet, too,” Alberta said. This conversation took place in our den, in our wood-framed house, which sat on two acres of land with another twelve across the road where the driving range stood. My father had started Calloustown Driving Range back in the sixties after he realized that nothing— corn, soybeans, tomatoes, tobacco, whatever—would grow in his soil. When Bonita came into my life she said, “Why don’t we call it the Calloustown Practice Range? That way The

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w it comes out CPR. Get it? That would be cool. People could always say, ‘I need me some CPR,’ and then when everyone’s sitting around, you know, Worm’s Bar and Grill wondering who’s going to give mouth-to-mouth, the first guy can say, ‘No, not that kind of CPR—I need to hit me some dimpled balls.’” It’s not like we had a bunch of advertising in the Yellow Pages, or weekly coupons in the newspaper. We didn’t have either of those things in Calloustown. I just went out and repainted the sign that day to CPR, and kind of liked it. Bonita was also behind the idea that I let the grass grow higher October through February and allow quail and dove hunters to partake of the landscape. She said they used to kill bears on their driving range in West Virginia [insert joke here].

he first boy showed up and he was nine years old, named Pine. Alberta drove him over, and we showed him to the spare bedroom that we’d painted half pink and half blue. I said, “Pine? Are you sure about that?” I thought maybe Alberta had some kind of odd dialect, that she meant “Payne,” and that the kid was named after the great golfer Payne Stewart who died an airplane death. What would be the chances of a kid being named Payne coming to live temporarily, under protective custody, with the owners of a driving range? “Pine,” she said. “Daddy got hooked on oxycodone, and mother got hooked on Loritab. You might’ve seen it on the news. They went into that Rite Aid up thirty miles from here and tried to rob the place. Both of them are in jail, and Pine doesn’t have any aunts or uncles we can find yet to take care of him.” Bonita and I hadn’t seen it on the news, because we didn’t have cable TV or one of those satellite dishes. We got one good channel some days, but mostly watched static and pretended like it snowed on the Weather Channel. “Well, we’ll take good care of Pine,” Bonita said. “This is exciting! You know, we always wanted to have a child, but maybe we met too late in life to have one. We were both thirty.” I was glad we didn’t have good television re148 1 The Baffler [no.21]

ception or newspaper delivery, because Bonita might hear about how women now had kids halfway into their forties. Sometimes I listened to an NPR station while sitting around CPR’s “clubhouse,” which was a metal storage shed filled with buckets of balls, a card table, four chairs, and an ice chest. Alberta gave us a sheet of paper with some emergency numbers, and said she’d be checking in daily to see how Pine fared, et cetera. She said, “His parents homeschooled him, so you don’t need to deal with getting him back and forth to Calloustown Elementary.” I should mention that this entire conversation took place in a whisper. I thought, I bet a nine-year-old kid is smart enough to realize that some things have changed in his life, and we don’t have to be all hush-hush about it. But I didn’t want to come off as a bad pre-foster parent. Bonita said, “Edwin here’s good in English, and I’m good in math. We can help out.” Well I don’t know that I’m so great in English. I can read, you know. I read a lot! Sometimes I’ll go over and sit around across the road and finish a Mickey Spillane book in a day, if we got customers who don’t mind retrieving their own balls. Sometimes I give special deals on people who want to go pick up their own balls. “Okay,” Alberta said. “So we have his clothes, and we have his books and assignments—though I don’t think he really ever follows any kind of schedule, from what we’ve figured out. I’ll call tomorrow.” She went to walk out the door. I said, “We look forward to hearing from you. Listen, is there any kind of special meal he likes? Like cheeseburgers or hotdogs? Shrimp? Vinegarbased barbecue? Macaroni and cheese? I used to love macaroni and cheese when I was that age. I still do!” I tried to come off as both concerned and gastronomical. To be honest I was brought up by parents who put a plate in front of me and said, “Feel lucky there’s anything, seeing as we can’t grow corn, soybeans, tomatoes, or tobacco in the field.” “Well, yes, there is a thing you should know,” Alberta said. “He’s a quiet boy. He

“You need to have diapers handy at all times, and Gerber’s. These kids coming in might be six months old, they may be fifteen. Boys and girls. So you might need to have some tampons in your medicine cabinet, too,” Alberta said.

9 might have a speech impediment. Listen, I hate to drop Pine off and run, but I have a kid I need to pick up in Orangeburg whose mother left him straddled to a moped for four hours while she went into a bingo parlor.” When she left, my wife and I stood there and looked at each other. From back in the spare bedroom it sounded like termites were eating our molding. It sounded like the kid was clicking his tongue over and over. It sounded like an old LP skipping, or one of those bush people clicking and clacking when a pride of lions has surrounded the encampment, or when a pickup truck’s not running on all its cylinders, or a pileated woodpecker’s intent on making its mark on fiberglass. I said, “Well, you’re not in West Virginia anymore.” Bonita laughed. She said, “I’m glad our first one doesn’t need to breast-feed,” which I thought was kind of a strange first response, but maybe I’d been shielded growing up in Calloustown.

would ask the kid a question and he made only those noises—dit, dat, dah, dit, dat, dah. I brought him out to our den on that first night, and asked him things like, “Are you scared?” and “Do you know that we’re here to protect you from harm?” and “Do you know what the state capital of South Carolina is?” only to get “Dah-di-dah-dah dit di-di-dit” or something like that. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Ptooey, ptooey—those kinds of noises. Pine looked like a normal nine-year-old kid. He didn’t have head lice, which was good. His parents—drugstore robbers—made sure that his bangs weren’t crooked, I’ll give them that. He had good posture, wasn’t knock-

kneed, didn’t seem affected by rickets. His ear had healed nicely from where he had a piercing for a day. It looked like only two green freckles on his arm where his father’d gotten the idea that his son should have a tattoo, then reconsidered. Pine didn’t make much eye contact, and kind of reminded me of these kids brought down on a field trip to CPR one time from the School for the Blind. That was a catastrophe. A few of them had fine eye-hand coordination—well, except for the “eye” part—but their inner compasses didn’t work well, and I lost two windows on the house when this one child in particular got turned around on the tee box and smacked a three-wood straight across the road the wrong way. I tell you who ought to be placed in temporary protective custody, and it’s those good blind kids. They need to be protected from sadistic teachers who take them to a driving range, ruining what little self-esteem they had. “We had a boy back home who had a similar speech impediment,” Bonita said. “I did some research on it when I went to college. It was called ‘echolalia,’ and he would mimic things that he heard. In the real world, a child with echolalia might just take off singing the theme song to Gilligan’s Island or The Addams Family, ’cause that’s what he heard a week or more ago. Back in Buckhannon, this boy made the same noises as Pine because all he heard was the machinery from the coal mines. And his daddy’s misfitted false teeth.” Pine didn’t seem either happy or distraught. He sat down and did his homework. Bonita brought him over to the Calloustown Practice Range and Pine hit balls, playing like most people do, hitting some solidly, whiffing every sixth shot, topping most of them. His The

Baffler [no.21] ! 149

w reaction to every swing was about the same, either a series of dits or dots or dats. I concentrated on the kid, and tried to figure out if he followed the melody of a song, and sure enough sometimes it sounded like he rocked out on the opening guitar licks of “Sweet Home Alabama,” though Alberta told us over the phone one night that the kid had never left South Carolina. “You should take him down to the Invasion of Grenada Festival,” Bonita told me ten days into Pine’s stay with us. “What the hell? You never have any business on that day ’cause all the locals are over there. Nobody even hunts on that day.” She spoke the truth. Every year since 1984, Calloustown had hosted the Invasion of Grenada Festival—more of a reenactment than a festival, though Bonita hoped that one day there might be rides and craft shows—because one of Calloustown’s own, a young Marine named Clarence Reddick, was one of the nineteen fatalities. After Clarence’s death, some of the more forward-thinking denizens of Calloustown thought it tribute-worthy to reenact the United States’ great exploit by dressing up people as either Grenadian and Cuban supporters of the New Jewel Movement, or as members of the Marine Amphibious Unit, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Navy Seals, members of Delta Force, and so on. There, on a small island in the middle of Lake Calloustown, a couple of skydivers came in to join the reenactors who arrived via pontoon boat, and so on. People fired shotguns into the air and shot off Roman candles in a lifelike rendition of the actual invasion. In the end, somebody planted an American flag on the island—though that’s probably not what really happened—and then the “body” of Clarence Reddick got brought back to shore on the pontoon boat. It was supposed to be an honor to get picked as Clarence’s body, and even women put their names in a bucket in hopes of being selected. Afterwards, there was a community-wide covered-dish picnic, square dance, and regular carnival-type games to play. 150 1 The Baffler [no.21]

I said, “I don’t know, Bo. You might want to call up Alberta on this one. Do you think exposing an echolalia-ridden homeschooled child under temporary protective custody from his drugstore-robbing addicted parents to the horrors of what was also known as Operation Urgent Fury, dreamed up by President Ronald Reagan in order to shift Americans’ focus from the 10 percent unemployment rate, is a wise decision?” I’d done some research. I’d been reading up on U.S. history, in case I needed to help out Pine with homework in that area. Bonita said, “It might make him feel better about his upbringing.” She said, “My father took me one time to a John Brown thing down at Harpers Ferry, and I knew right away that I was better than okay.”

don’t know exactly how many Civil War reenactments take place yearly both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it has to be over eighty-five. I know this because one day before I met Bonita I drove down to Charleston and met a guy in charge of the Fort Sumter Museum, but he kind of scared me all dressed up in regalia and I didn’t trust him, so I drove to the closest library and looked it up. I counted eighty-six of the things, not including the unsanctioned ones in Hawaii and Alaska and Puerto Rico. Civil War reenactments bring in droves of people, both participants and spectators, so you can imagine how many people drive from afar to witness Calloustown’s Invasion of Grenada reenactment, the only one in the country. Pine and I got there a good hour before two paratroopers flew in from Fort Jackson outside of Columbia. I doubt the Air Force used a Cessna in Grenada, but it was still quite exciting to see a skydiver in faux action. Pine looked up from where we sat at a wooden picnic table on the outskirts of the Lake Calloustown Public Swimming Area #2—that had been labeled for Blacks Only up until 1968—surrounded by locals, older veterans wearing their garrison caps, half-stoned long-haired Vietnam vets, and a couple women who kept yelling “U.S.O.! U.S.O.! U.S.O.!’ like sad forgotten debutantes.

When she left, my wife and I stood there and looked at each other. From back in the spare bedroom it sounded like termites were eating our molding. It sounded like the kid was clicking his tongue over and over.

9 Pine let off a slew of his noises, and for a second I thought he imitated “Taps,” or a slower version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “You damn right those boys are going to land right on their targets,” this man next to us said. “You got that right, son.” Of course I looked over at the man—he wore a white curled Navy gob on his head, and had his shirtsleeves up to show off two anchor tattoos. I turned my head from watching the pontoon take off and said to the man, “Hey.” Pine went off on a rant, in his clicky way. The man next to me said, “Jesus Christ boy, slow down.” He said, “It’s been a long time since I worked as a radioman.” I learned this later; all I heard at the time was “Di-di-dat didah-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-dah-dah dah-didit dah-dah-dah-di-dah-dah dah-dit.” Pine fucking beamed. That’s the only way I can explain it. He broke out into a smile that would’ve made Miss America look toothless. I said to the man, “Hey. Hey, what’s going on?” and introduced myself and my near-foster child. I said, “Is he talking in a language that no one can understand?” The skydivers came down. Shotguns sounded. People who came by my driving range to hit scarred and damaged range balls whooped and hollered a couple hundred yards offshore. “I’m retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry, and I haven’t been able to keep up with my Morse code since retiring,” the man said in English. I think he must’ve said the same thing in code to Pine right after-

wards, for the radioman went off ditting and dotting until they saluted each other. I looked at Pine, who nodded. Oh, he understood the English language just fine, but had made a pledge not to speak it for some reason. I said to Pine, “Is this part of your homework? Are you taking Morse code for a foreign language and need to practice? You can tell your answer to retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry, and he can translate to me.” Pine took off coding away, gesticulating with his hands. He looked like some kind of foreigner with a stutter. Landry nodded and laughed. I got bored after about ten minutes— it seems to me that the Armed Forces could come up with a quicker form of communication, like plain calling up people and speaking Pig Latin—and watched as the American flag went up on Lake Calloustown Island, then this year’s Clarence Reddick got shoved onto a raft and pushed with the help of reenacting Navy Seals toward the spectators on shore. Presently there would be a celebratory three-legged race made up solely of Purple Heart–awarded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, all of whom teamed up to have left prosthetic and right prosthetic legs in the sack. Those vets could still run the 100-yard dash in something like eleven seconds. “It’s a long story,” Landry finally said to me. “It all boils down to Pine here having an imaginary friend. His name is Di-dah-dahdah dah-dah-dah dit, which comes out to ‘Joe.’ Listen, I used to be an adjunct professor of Morse code over at Eminent Domain College by the Savannah River Nuclear Site before the place self-imploded. If you want, I’d be glad to come over and do some translating, plus give you a crash course in the code. I’ll do it for minimum wage. And beer. Dah-di-di-dit dit dit di-dah-dit. That means ‘beer.’” Pine nodded and smiled, rubbed his stomach in circles like a fifties kid overacting in a TV commercial for whole milk. Then he ran off to partake in the Bobbing for Grenades contest. I made a mental note to tell him not to mention this part of the day to Alberta or Bonita, seeing as it would mean the end of our The

Baffler [no.21] ! 151

w pre-foster days. They weren’t real grenades, but miniature finials. Still, social workers and wives frown on toy guns, too. I don’t know why I said, “That’s a kind offer,” and asked for retired Radioman Petty Officer Ronald Landry’s phone number. I had no intention of calling him. My theory went like this: Let’s say I became fluent in Morse code. By that time, Pine would be back living with relatives or bona fide foster parents. Even if Bonita and I took in another emergency child, what would be the chances that the child communicated only in dits and dahs? What would be the chances that I’d have a field trip of military personnel at CPR who would find it amusing to speak in Morse code? Hell, I would be better off filling my head up with Hindi or Gullah. I walked over to where Pine stood, his head dripping, a wooden pineapple in his jaws. I said, “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah,” just jabbering, not knowing that I had looked at him and said the code for “Zero.”

e got home and I told Bonita everything that I’d learned. She said, “Is that true? Six hundred thirty-eight Cubans were captured in the real invasion? Where did they go?” I said, “That’s not what I want you to focus on. We met an old guy from the Navy. He communicated with Pine just fine, because that noise he’s been making has actually been Morse code. There’s an imaginary friend involved named Joe. Maybe it’s G.I. Joe—and if it is, that would be even more worrisome. I think you need to call up Alberta and tell her this isn’t working out.” Bonita shook her hair out. She laughed. “Are you serious? I had an imaginary friend in West Virginia named Charlie. As in Charles Manson. Who was brought up in foster homes in West Virginia [insert joke here], when his mom was off in prison and whatnot.” Pine had walked straight back to his room. I looked over my shoulder to make sure he didn’t stand in the doorway. To Bonita I whispered, “I think Pine’s parents damaged him in ways we’re not capable of handling. I’m serious.” 152 1 The Baffler [no.21]

“Pine! Come on in here, Pine, I got to get to the bottom of something!” Bonita yelled out. He came running. She spoke in a voice I’d not heard before, with really hard long i sounds, and ts that came out ds. She said, “Why’s your head wet? Back where you come from, you walk around with a wet head all the time? You know who walks around with a wet head all the time? Fish. You just a fish, Pine? That what you consider yourself to be, a fish, ain’t come out of the water yet to join the rest of us humans on dry land?” I looked at Pine and noticed how he teared up. I said, “Goddamn, Bonita. Ease up. It’s my fault about letting him bob for apples.” “You can speak in English, and you’re about to do it pronto, Pine. I don’t care about your mom and dad sitting around in their trailer letting you say dit dot dit dot all the time with your head and shoulders wet, this is a whole new ballgame here where you got to interact with us in a polite and honest procedure.” I’d never seen my wife get so wound up. In a way it made me wish we had had children of our own, but in another way I saw it a blessing that she didn’t go all mountain girl on our kid, yelling, speaking in a way not that much different than Morse code. I walked around my wife, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out two cans of ginger ale. I handed one to Pine. We pulled our tabs open within a half second of each other, to make a dit-dit sound. And then fucking Pine said, in a voice that came out as gravelly as the oldest cigarette-smoking, bourbon-swilling, black blues singer of all time, “I’ll dry off in time. It wasn’t apples. I bobbed hand grenades.” I said, “Hey, you talked,” and Bonita said, “What?” I said, “Okay, Pine, good job. Don’t wear yourself out in one day. Go on back to your room and take a nap. Later on we can go across the road and hit some pitching wedges at doves flying up.” “They bob for hand grenades at the Invasion of Grenada reenactment? No goddamn wonder we got problems with the youth of today,” Bonita said. “What else did y’all do, play ring toss on severed heads? Enter a hollering

Little steps, I thought, kind of like spreading democracy whether Third World nations wanted it or not.

9 contest see who can yell ‘Kill!’ the loudest?” “Dah-di-dah di-dit di-dah-di-dit di-dahdi-dit,” Pine said, which Bonita and I knew spelled out K-I-L-L. She said, “No. You are not going to be having any secret language with a secret invisible friend from this point on.” She pointed at the telephone on the wall and said, “You want me to call up the Department of Social Services and have them come pick you back up and take you to a family that might try to exorcise you? That what you want, Pine?” “Okay, let’s just settle down. It’s only been a couple weeks. Things will smooth out,” I said. I drank my ginger ale and burped accidentally, which made Bonita glare at me. Pine shook his head no. He said in his grating, aging voice, “I’d like to go visit that drugstore my parents tried to hold up. I got me some money. I’d like to go to that drugstore, maybe buy me a Timex watch.” Bonita smiled a self-satisfied smile I hadn’t seen since she found some kind of study that ranked West Virginia ahead of my home state in education, quality of living, and so on. (I felt pretty sure she’d written it herself, sent it to a friend somewhere, and had that person post it on the Internet.) I said, “Well, then let’s go to that drugstore.” I loaded Pine into the car and off we went. We drove past the remnants of the Invasion of Grenada reenactment and saw straggling “Cubans,” “Grenadians,” and “Americans” laughing and clinking beer cans, gauze wrapped around their heads. We drove by the defunct bus station where men still met mornings in order to think up ways to resurrect Calloustown. Out on Old Charleston Road we passed children selling used golf balls—under normal circumstances I

would’ve stopped to make sure they weren’t stolen from me—then another group of children selling sweet potatoes. Pine made his noises off and on, I assumed spelling things out in Morse code. I didn’t have it in me to tell him to stop, that he should speak English, et cetera. Little steps, I thought, kind of like spreading democracy whether Third World nations wanted it or not. I said, “Is there a reason you have to go to this particular Rite Aid?” I didn’t say, “I understand how you might want to apologize for your parents, that it’s a healing process,” that sort of thing. I didn’t even think about it until later that night, when Alberta came to pick Pine up and take him out of our home. Pine shook his head no. We got there. The saleswoman took a small key and opened the rotating Timex display case. Pine chose a regular, old man’s, silver wind-up wristwatch with a stretchy flexible band that caught arm hairs too much, in my opinion. He shoved it all the way up his arm past his elbow, stuck his ear to it, and said, “Tick tick tick tick tick.” The woman said, “I bet we can find you a watch with a band that’ll fit better.” Pine shook his head. “I’m going to use it to make a bomb anyway,” he rasped. The woman stepped back a bit. “Y’all took my parents away from me after they came in here to get what they needed. I’m going to make a bomb.” Maybe there’s a reason Bonita and I never had children of our own. I didn’t know what to say or do. My father would’ve beaten me with a nine-iron right there next to the perfume counter, but I knew that kind of behavior no longer found acceptance. Should I have laughed and said the boy was kidding? Should I have told the woman she should feel honored that he didn’t say that entire monologue in Morse code? I guess, in retrospect, I should’ve waited thirty minutes in line for the pharmacist and asked him or her to explain to Pine how scared everyone gets when a robbery takes place, and how a nation cannot be considered civilized until its citizens stop attacking each other with little provocation. Evidently the wrong thing to say was, “You got that right, son. I don’t blame you.”t The

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A n c e s t or s

If I Were President 3 C. Wright Mills

he new President, like all Presidents before him, began his office by throwing out men unlike himself and by gathering around him men of similar views. But Mills also got two other types into his official and unofficial family of advisors. Some men of very different but still intelligent views he felt might by their opposition sharpen his own views and make his administration aware of a fuller range of fact and possibility. And then, just for laughs and to remind himself of the need to remain sane, he induced a few of the old types—he seemed especially to favor generals and admirals—to sit in on the virtually continuous round table (sometimes private, sometimes public) which he instituted at the heart of the government. When these crackpots became unbearably boring or too shrill in their paranoic hysteria; or when they talked too much or refused to talk at all—merely glowering and grumping—he changed them. It may be that the behavior of these men in the presence of ideas did more than any other thing to discredit all that they stood for; they were laughed out of American power. It was of course predicted that since Mills had been a professor he would probably recruit a lot of professors. He did try, but it turned out that there were two kinds of college professors: smart ones and dumb ones. The smart ones were smart in the same way that anyone is smart, although they usually knew more, having spent more time at it. The dumb ones likewise, although perhaps a little more lazy than most and certainly more pretentious. Every Sunday afternoon, for three hours or so, the round table became altogether public. It went on the air. Each week its personnel changed somewhat depending on the topic, but generally about half of its dozen or so members were in the government and half were not. Entirely unrehearsed and extremely animated, this round table came to serve at least five domestic purposes: by means of their conduct on it, new men were recruited for government work, etc. Many of the key policies of the new administration first came to life in a phrase, an idea, an argument. The general idea of the permanent peace economy, for example, was first outlined by a young economist from California who literally talked continuously for the full three hours. And of course the round table was the prime official means of public information. The transcript was edited into a tighter form and most Monday papers carried it in full. Once a month it became a pamphlet. C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) laid down this incomplete manuscript—published here for the first time—sometime after the 1956 publication of The Power Elite. “What would it mean for the outlook and policies of the USA were its elite to wake up tomorrow morning altogether rid of the military metaphysics, miraculously cured of crackpot realism?” Mills asked in a short preface. “What would I do if I were President of the United States? I am tired of dodging this old question. I am going to answer it.”

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P H OTO G R A P H CO U RT E SY C . W R I G H T M I L L S E S TAT E

But something else began after some six months to come about. Because of the intellectual quality of these discussions—and because of the results of decisions which they saw first take form here, many people came to realize that decisions affecting the way they live are after all made by some changing bunch of men, not by “governments” or some other sort of abstract forces, and so they began to want to get in on the act; they began to take these discussions very seriously, and in this they were encouraged. Before, there had been so-called public opinion polls—a crude and mechanical technique by which the statistics of superficial “opinions” were taken for the opinion of the public. These now became obsolete, as genuine publics of discussion began to form in various towns and sections of larger cities. After several discussions of some issue, international, national, or local propositions were formulated and debated, and an ingenious system of summarizing and reporting these over once a month on a national scale was devised. Probably what kept it alive, what created and maintained such an active public discussion, was the fact that these propositions were not only debated: they became the subjects of the President’s round table The

Baffler [no.21] ! 155

as well as those of the state governors, and as such they were accepted, rejected, acted upon. Finally, a less tangible fact, but one of signal importance to the quality of American life as we know it today, is due in some part to the round table. On it there was created and held up a new model of national character. Any system of society contains such models, which are imitated and become the goals of the young. In terms of them personal success and failure tend to be defined. It soon became obvious under the dispensation that intellectual brilliance, wit, the ability to talk well and to imagine thoroughly and concretely, to translate abstractions into human terms, to see the larger meaning of the small-scale detail, the capacity to reason with others—all the traits which the President honored so easily by virtue of what he was, and which accordingly he honored most in others—became universally admired. It soon became obvious under the dispensation that intellectual brilliance, wit, the ability to talk well and to imagine thoroughly and concretely, to translate abstractions into human terms, to see the larger meaning of the small-scale detail, the capacity to reason with others—all the traits which the President honored so easily by virtue of what he was, and which accordingly he honored most in others—became universally admired.

any observers of those days and months of the first two years of Mills’s first term marveled at the speed with which this great change, at once institutional and personal, seemed to come about. They marveled too at how many old features of American life previously taken for granted as a national part of a going concern simply disappeared. It may be useful to list a few of these in order to indicate the originating period of what is now so everyday among us: 1. Advertising—the practice of lying about various private makes of commodities, spuriously associating them with the curious beings then considered sexually attractive, above all, the continual and shrill public hocking of commodities—all this had disappeared by the sixth month of the first term. In the new newspapers there appeared simple descriptions and pictures of the variety of things available. Grade quality labeling of all foodstuffs became a national law at about the same time. 2. Fashion—along with advertising, fashion as it was known disappeared. It was seen to be not only fearfully wasteful but ugly as well because it was based upon a kind of standardized boasting—to which one in fashion felt compelled to conform. Previously all this had been induced and stimulated by a planned obsolescence of all sorts of commodities, especially automobiles and clothing. Economically, fashion was merely a trick to make for a faster turnover of goods. In clothing for everyday use people came to adopt a kind of costume which we know today. A training suit in three weights—one light cotton, one 156 1 The Baffler [no.21]

BRAD HOLLAND

The

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The great changes occurred in the international scene during the second half of the first term and were fairly well installed as we know them today by the middle of the second term.

158 1 The Baffler [no.21]

half wool, one altogether wool. They were in bright colors and of course very cheap, altogether comfortable. People also began to design and to make their own clothing according to their own taste, and hence they came to admire one another’s appearance all the more because each knew that the other was responsible for whatever appearance he contrived. Genuine individuality of appearance thus came about, although even then most people came to see it as a delightful kind of holiday game especially for adolescent circles. Why did they do this? Why eliminate advertising and fashion? It was in part the utter pollution of all public communications for which advertising was directly responsible and fashion its adjunct. But in even greater part it came about by the realization of the enormous waste of both. People came to see that this waste was in fact a waste of their own human labor with which they were paying for it all. And in accordance with the new way of considering matters rationally, they realized that they would do better to spend their energies on other things. 3. The automobile—this waste was especially notable in the case of personal transportation, for here it involved not only the altogether ridiculous yearly changes in private automobiles but also the enormous frustration of traffic and parking. For the fashion in automobiles had run in the direction of larger and more powerful land monsters. It was the usual thing to see a 160-pound man being carried along—or rather being stalled in traffic—every morning and every evening by a two-ton, eighteen-foot-long, six-foot-wide land monster. With one stroke, the terrible highway and city traffic and parking problems were reduced to a set of merely administrative issues. Previously families had had one, possibly two, huge private vehicles which were used for all private transport. Now it was recognized that for a man to go to work and back in a large city all that was needed was a two-hundredpound two-wheeler. A very ingenious little machine was developed, half scooter and half motorcycle and nicely devised for weatherproofing. For intercity use, of course the VW minibus in its several variations became standard. Most families had one. It was thought that anything as large as thirteen-foot ought to be made to sleep in comfort a mediumsized family and to carry as luggage a scooter in it too. Hotels and motels were replaced by campgrounds as we know them today. These larger vehicles were not allowed in cities. Intercity freight was taken over by railway trains and intracity freight by an expanded subway system. 4. When the President remarked that mother’s home cooking was usually a horrible set of concoctions not worthy of human consumption and that food was too serious a pleasure to throw away like that, at first there was motherly indignation of great furor, but then here and there, soon everywhere, it was asked, Is this food really good? Once it became a subject for really free and open discussion rather than of routine sentiment, the mothers hadn’t a chance. Besides, they began to ask, at first petulantly but soon gladly: Why should we each of us in our little kitchens unfrost this stuff and fry that? 5. Previously, most people who could afford it had “their own house” and those who couldn’t afford it felt that they wanted such a distinct

Luke Cool Hand I’m Your Father 3 Fady Joudah Nurturing people into junkies par for the course pills & fear & salt & sugar & grease @the dollar store they did have a choice

And they me of course they are called lives this life loved you that one got you a newsboy cap gift card for fancy steak or asked you to her house or funeral

Softly killing them softly @consumerist rates science isn’t final on a few points if you want to smear smear just don’t misconstrue me I get paid well for it

In tyranny there’s also love as gesture & as such compassion is easy a deductible or co-pay or who’d do this calling “we-anoint-you-demigod” a who’s who club

And poets who get paid as much wholly we listen to them don’t get all Che on me cheri my patients my as if I own them as long as they’re nothing but patients

As for mass murder it doesn’t need to occur acutely in order for it to be that It’s not the hell one enters but the hell one enters others into & also enters

The

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Then there was the general context and the chief means by which the military metaphysics was replaced by an industrial view of the world problem; by which the permanent peace economy was established and total disarmament achieved.

little dwelling. They were still largely made, as they had been for generations, by hand labor on the site. Before the President turned the White House into an historical museum and moved the government to a better climate in a more central location, he started a large conversation on housing, and the new official city had no private residences. The best Scandinavian patterns were studied and improved upon. The apartment dwelling of some thirty families each contained several kitchens connected by dumbwaiter to small kitchens in each apartment. Usually people found a kitchen output much better and just as cheap. But on occasion women would cook themselves. Since it was not a daily routine for them and since the kitchen’s standard was high, they came to enjoy it and to study it a bit. There came about a lively, culinary interchange between individuals, families, and the centralized kitchen. In the apartment unit also there was of course a centralized nursery and kindergarten and as well a club room and, up in one top corner, a little set of guestrooms for visiting in-laws and friends. There were individual gardens as well as a collective garden. I have mentioned these few changes of the everyday life in America because they were the most obvious changes brought about merely by a little rational reflection of how one might best arrange such matters. Back of them—in fact, part of them—were the decisive institutional changes in political and economic affairs. The origins of these we shall consider later. But of course the great changes occurred in the international scene during the second half of the first term and were fairly well installed as we know them today by the middle of the second term. International Results It began, as did so much in the Mills Administrations, on the round table. At first, a few people—official and unofficial—from West European countries were invited to join the discussions, which were not on international affairs at all but domestic American. Then a few from Eastern Europe: the Poles and the Yugoslavs were particularly exciting. Several of them were much admired as discussants and reasoners. In the meantime a truly huge interchange of professors and students on a worldwide scale was instituted and paid for by a unilateral reduction in the war budget of 3 percent on the part of the United States. As many as one-third of the students of German universities, for example, were in U.S. universities at some time or other during their first three years. Near every university of any size in the world there was built a large dormitory and apartment house entirely free for any qualified student or professor, and of course in all underdeveloped countries big new colleges and universities were speedily erected, along with supporting secondary schools. This interchange program developed in such a way that it became usual for any college student to spend at least one of his four years out of his own country. Came soon the day when a Russian philosopher and a Russian official joined the round table. The topic was housing, and of course the Danish architects ran away with it. But still the Russians were there. You see, in these hundreds of discussions about common human problems, the

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BRAD HOLLAND

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 161

tone, the standard of men and women reasoning together, was established, and also—even more important—the idea and fact that things happened because of these discussions. This was a place of decision, not “just talk.” When international topics finally came up, they came up within that atmosphere. At first they were all American in personnel, but soon it became evident that students and officials of other nations had to be brought in, if only for ready factual information and for statements of policy, and so they were. For the round table as such, of course, no one was official. No one spoke for, or by what he said committed, his government. So firmly was this rule established and understood that people in positions of power felt free to speak in public in a free and open way. There were also a series of official conferences in something of the old manner, but even these were influenced by the manner and by what was said on the round table. Then there was the general context and the chief means by which the military metaphysics was replaced by an industrial view of the world problem; by which the permanent peace economy was established and total disarmament achieved. In a very schematic way, we may now review the arguments and the decisions involved: 1. War had become idiotic, so let’s abolish it. But how? There are only two possible ways, (a) either make the weapons unavailable to everyone, or (b) make them available only in the name of an authority really responsible to all mankind. The first (a) way of disarmament

Trifling Bureaucracies 3 Carmen Giménez Smith

And how did trifling bureaucracies lodge such a vast root in me I forget my real vocation not executive not my want like stepping back into daughterhood rehearsing defiance to empty rooms the black ball of the master’s discontent regaining consciousness inside of a bullet

162 1 The Baffler [no.21]

was thought not too neat a solution, for it seemed difficult to enforce in a world still composed of nation states, and virtually all scientific work seemed relevant to the weaponry of war, so the second way (b) was adopted: physical science itself, and not merely the stockpile of bombs, was internationalized. All laboratories of consequence, previously private and public, were taken over by the scientific center. Scientists of all nations were in completely free interaction with one another, and responsible only to the world authority itself. The scientific center was financed by the scientific and military budgets of every nation—that budget was simply turned over to the world’s authority. This did not happen at once: the first year, 30 percent; the second, 60 percent; the third year, all of it. But the savings resulting from lack of duplication between nations and between industries made reduction quickly possible. 2. The development and the production of weapons—out of the pool and the flow of scientific work—soon dwindled to a trickle, and then ceased altogether. It was simply that no one felt any need for them. What people did feel a need for were ways to quickly industrialize the underdeveloped countries of the world, and in due course the scientific center was devoting most of its budget and personnel to this end. It was, in short, precisely in the area of science and technology that the military metaphysics was abolished and replaced by an industrial view of the problems of the world.t

Credit How much credit do I claim the office of welfare and how déclassé mode in sexts should I get an agent will it be a

and where do I claim it like the office of literary claim did I earn that contempt was it

I suffer how I suffer and it’s my expense in all senses of the word literary and

ceiling made out of canonical

is it ever

do I

of the rhetoric your ilk find both offensive

that

I’m an aesthetic monster and antisocial

will I be a caricature I fear a literal stranger at the my affect

Chihuahua mother

cool kids table and does my diffidence

or my vision

or my gears

even then

as inevitable and sensible

oppositional

will I be

or or

the token the share or touch you

or my perpetual indulgences

when it gets added up and tallied by the chamber whoever that is haven’t earned

anthologies we bump

assuage your guilt

does it seem

is there a grant or

cultural and mask

does my class ascent remind you

my uppity

or or

and what I’ve earned or the confirmation

The

Baffler [no.21] ! 163

u Fa i r Use

* from Eugene Soltes and

Sara Hess, Monocle, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Publishing, July 24, 2012. “Monocle, a magazine on global affairs, culture, and business, was founded by Tyler Brule to counter a perceived deterioration in the quality of print publications available at the newsstand. The case investigates the growth of Monocle and how the publication has developed its unique relationship with readers and advertisers.”

164 1 The Baffler [no.21]

our plane boards in half an hour.* You’re wearing a stylish yet comfortable alpaca wool pullover and your favorite olive green Comme des Garçons scarf. Before abandoning the comfort of your meticulously decorated apartment, you download several new albums of Austrian house and Senegalese hip-hop onto your iPod. Now the only thing between you and your destination is eight hours in the clouds and a selection of appropriate reading material. As you approach the airport bookstore you decide you’re looking for something different. You are a bit tired of your typical magazine selection, which includes The Economist and Architectural Digest. You shuffle through various titles in the magazine display, finding nothing new or exciting. On the verge of giving up, you grab the last title on the shelf and feel immediately that it is somehow different. Monocle. It’s heavier than your average glossy magazine and nearly as long as the novel you packed in your carryon. While the glossy cover is like that of any of the other magazines on the shelf, the print layout is reminiscent of an academic journal. Curious, you open the cover and begin to flip through the pages. The magazine begins with an article on Bujumbura, proceeds with an interview with the Chilean president, continues with a discussion of drinking glass design in Sweden, and concludes with a fashion shoot in sunny Porto—this is enough material to keep you entertained long after you polish off your digestif. Proud of your discovery, you make a mental note of the title as you pass the magazine to the cashier. t

J . D. K I N G

The

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Bafflers No. 21

Will Boisvert is a critic and journalist in New York. Ana Marie Cox is a political columnist for the Guardian and a regular guest commentator on MSNBC and NPR. Kwame Dawes is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of Nebraska. His latest collection, Wheels, appeared in 2011. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of BrightSided, Dancing in the Streets, Nickel and Dimed, and other books. Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. She’s a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine. Thomas Frank is our founding editor and a columnist at Harper’s. An updated edition of his latest book, Pity the Billionaire, is now available. David Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He is currently writing books on bureaucracy and on the origins of social inequality. He teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Tony Hoagland’s books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me and Donkey Gospel. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and at Warren Wilson College. Ailish Hopper is the author of Bird in the Head. She lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

Jason Linkins writes about the decline of America’s institutions for the D.C. bureau of the Huffington Post. He’s an occasional contributor to The Awl, and can be found Tumbling and Twittering at his nom de internet, Dceiver— which was semi-inspired by this magazine. Christian Lorentzen is an editor at the London Review of Books. Josh MacPhee is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, coauthor of Signs of Change, and coeditor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He recently cofounded the Interference Archive. Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd. He lives in London and New York. C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the leading social critics of the twentieth century. His books included The New Men of Power, White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination. Harryette Mullen’s The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be is now available. Her Tanka Diary is forthcoming. Jim Newell has covered politics as a staff writer at Gawker, an editor at Wonkette, and a contributor to the Guardian and Salon. Alex Pareene is a politics writer for Salon and the author of the ebook The Rude Guide to Mitt Romney. Rick Perlstein is an American historian and journalist in Chicago.

Fady Joudah’s second book, Alight, is forthcoming. Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, his translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s poetry, is now available.

Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire and assistant director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College.

Chris Lehmann is our senior editor and Dollar Debauch columnist. He is the author of Rich People Things.

Manohar Shetty is the author of four books of poems and editor of Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa. He lives in Dona Paula, Goa, with his wife and two daughters.

166 1 The Baffler [no.21]

George Singleton’s latest collection of stories is Stray Decorum. Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of Goodbye, Flicker and Bring Down the Little Birds, editor of Puerto del Sol, and publisher of Noemi Press. Roberto Tejada is the author of Mirrors for Gold, Exposition Park, and Full Foreground. Dubravka Ugrešić is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands. Eugenia Williamson, a contributing editor to this magazine, lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Translator David Williams

Graphic Artists

Joseph Blough, Steve Brodner, Philip Burke, Mark Dancey, Henrik Drescher, Michael Duffy, Randall Enos, Mark S. Fisher, Stuart Goldenberg, Tony Hardmon, Brad Holland, Victor Kerlow, J.D. King, Lewis Koch, Stephen Kroninger, Su-Kyung Lee, Sam Lubicz, David McLimans, Pete Mueller, Alain Pilon, Ralph Steadman, 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 E R

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