No22 by The Baffler

No. 22

BRAD HOLLAND

“A compendium of literary curveballs.”

—New York Times

“ Beautifully discontented prose written by people who’d rather be out scrapping. Quite right, too.” —The Guardian “ Sassy, irreverent, often down but never quite out.” —Boston Globe “ Like The Baffler of old, the sharpest pieces are readable and show a caustic, playful ability to zero in on a pie-eyed media hypnotized by the zeitgeist.”

—Chicago Tribune

No. 22

M A R K S . FI S H ER

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

No. 22

E DI T OR I N C H I E F

F OU N DI N G E DI T OR

S E N IOR E DI T OR

DE SIG N A N D A R T DI R E C T ION

M A N AGI N G E DI T OR

L I T E R A RY E DI T OR

P OE T RY E DI T OR

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

G E N E R A L M A N AGE R

John Summers 9

Thomas Frank

Chris Lehmann 9 The Flynstitute 9

Lindsey Gilbert Anna Summers

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Susan Faludi David Graeber George Scialabba Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) Catherine Tumber Eugenia Williamson 9 Jeanne Mansfield 9 F OU N DE R S

Thomas Frank Keith White

PA S T P U B L I S H E R

Greg Lane, 1993–2007 9

COV E R I L LU S T R ATI O N BY B R A D H O L L A N D

Praise be to Ekaterina Golubeva for

permission to translate her late husband’s fiction and to Joachim von Puttkamer for his comments on Thomas Bernhard’s “Jean-Arthur Rimbaud.” Dave Denison, Claire Lewis, Liam Meyer, Carolyn Oliver, Ida Rothschild, and Rhian Sasseen took the issue out for a spin, and brought back reports of the most egregious errors. Which we corrected. The Opaline Fund of the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund kicked in a few pennies. Which helped. With this issue, Susan Faludi and David Graeber join our masthead as contributing editors—a good thing, too, because after this, we may soon be out of ideas.

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

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

2 1 The Baffler [no.22]

q Graphic Art | B r a d Hol l a n d

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 3

Con t e n t s ( Th e B a f f l e r, n o. 2 2 ) Philosophical Intelligence Office

Negative Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Camera Shy, Blah, Blah, Blah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Slavoj Žižek

A Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 HENRIK DRESCHER

Dmitry Gorchev

Daniel’s Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11, 12

Daniel A aron

Hope Is a Kiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Peter K ayafas

Politics

To Galt’s Gulch They Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thomas Fr ank

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse . . . . . . 23 DAV I D S U TE R

David Gr aeber

Culture

The State of Stretching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Yoga in America Jorian Polis Schutz

Modem & Taboo

Passions of the Meritocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Marketpiece Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD Chris Br ay

Nicholas Kristof and Milton Friedman rescue the world Anne Elizabeth Moore R A N DA L L E N OS

The Meme Hustler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk Evgen y Morozov

66, 125

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Predator Drone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The United Sades of America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Heather Havrilesky

Jimmy Savile will see you now Christian Lorentzen M I C H A E L D U FF Y

4 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Hussein Ibish

Modem & Taboo

Poems

Diaspora: Breakfast with Mahmoud Darwish . . . . . . . . . .

Taverna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Grim Sleeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kristina K. Robinson Manohar Shetty Terese Svoboda

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

Underground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

John Keene

Di$claimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Accounting for the Damage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A my Gerstler

Jocelyn Burrell

Inside the House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Cathy Park Hong

Sphinx Infinitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

120

The Robots Are Coming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

124

Tyrone Williams Kyle Dargan

Stories

The Agony of Leaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mahesh R ao

R A L P H S TE A D M A N

111

Up in Birdland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Monica Hileman

Ancestors

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For his 100th birthday Thomas Ber nhard

148 JA M E S GA L L AG H E R

Graphic Art

Brad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Mark Dancey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steve Brodner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

DAV I D J O H N S O N

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 5

Philosophical Intelligence Office THE CUTTING EDGE

Negative Capability Here’s a surprising story

in our climate of austerity and lowered expectations. The Baffler, a quarterly magazine long in the habit of appearing now and then, published three issues in succession last year—the first time three issues have appeared in a single year since the magazine stirred to life in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1988, just before the end of history. The issues, Bafflers 19, 20, and 21, featured salvos in cheerfully independent muckraking, plus poems, stories, and illustrations agile and vivid enough to call adverse attention to the mass production of bureaucracy that props up our national consensus. Because contemplating America’s stagnation was harrowing even for veterans like us, we looked abroad for signs of progress and wound up covering the disintegration of European politics and morals, too. On the way there and back, we translated prose and poetry from Croatian, German, Hindi, and Russian, and watched our own entertainments go into Polish, French, and Italian and commence bothering readers in those languages. Even in the upper reaches of the U.S. media,

6 1 The Baffler [no.22]

the most censored in the de-developing world, certain of our more Awful Tales were singled out for praise, as was the generally high quality of our discontent. That’s right, we figured out print a mere two hundred years after our Enlightened ancestors began retailing art and criticism, and a decade after our much more Enlightened contemporaries pronounced the printed magazine over and done with. And now behold The Baffler no. 22. We mark our twenty-fifth anniversary in color. As if our surprising story weren’t enough to tie the cutting-edge narrative of technological progress into knots, consider this twist. You may recognize the name Aaron Swartz from the outpouring of public grief that followed his suicide, at age twentysix, in January. Aaron was a computer programmer and democracy activist. He was also a prodigy. What does that mean? Here’s what it means to me. When I was fourteen, my mental world was scarcely

larger than the combined square footage of my attic bedroom and the basketball court. When Aaron was fourteen, he helped develop RSS, a protocol for sharing information over the Internet. Just as printed magazines are supposed to get out of the way of history, so computer programmers endowed with Aaron’s gifts are supposed to go to Silicon Valley, where they are supposed to, you know, start companies, improve efficiencies, and save the world through market-directed use of their creativity, while making millions of dollars, by the way. They aren’t supposed to become contributing editors of magazines that blunt the cutting edge. Nor are they supposed to turn their creativity to fighting big business’s conception of intellectual property. Least of all are they meant to become the target of bullying federal prosecutors. Aaron was different, though. He was his own man. We love and mourn him for that.t —John Summers

J OS E P H C IA R D I E L LO

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 7

Philosophical Intelligence Office MONOLOGUE

Camera Shy, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah My basic idea is that Jewish, or anti-black racist. our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with safe sex, and so on. I think the only true consumerists that we have are, if you ask me, drug addicts, those who say, “Fuck it, I want to go to the end, I don’t care.” No, our consumerism is not dead. It’s a very strategic, calculating consumerism.

Isn’t there an Indian guy

[Pranav Mistry] in Cambridge who developed “SixthSense”? A simple mechanism: you have a camera, a small one, digital, on your head. You have a kind of a projector on your breast, and you are connected to the net through a cellphone in your pocket, and it works like this. The camera identifies the object in front of you. Because it’s connected, the computer can identify the object. And then immediately the Internet gets the data about the object and projects them onto any plain surface. You interact with a real object, but at the same

8 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Isn’t it exactly the same as what happens when you see a real Arab or Jew or black guy? It is as if you project on him all your implicit racist knowledge. You see that he’s evil, a danger to you, or whatever, blah blah. I think it’s a perfect metaphor for our spontaneous ideology.

Pornography is the most

HENRIK DRESCHER

time you can project on it all the data. And I think it’s an interesting thing because the effect is a kind of magic. Objects answer you, telling all about themselves. You can imagine my first reaction: it must be wonderful to do this in seduction. Okay, it holds also for women, but from my male chauvinist perspective, I look at the woman, and it’s projected on her. She likes anal sex, she likes her breasts pinched, she likes this music, she likes that. You get instant data on the girl. This is ideology at its purest. And isn’t it how our real lives are structured? Let’s say you are an anti-Arab, anti-

censored genre you can imagine. First, you notice how totally regulated it is. In standard heterosexual porn, what happens? First, you have some fantasizing, masturbation, cunnilingus, fellatio, then full sex, then maybe an orgy, whatever. It’s absolutely codified. But more important, I absolutely disagree with Laura Mulvey, the cinema theorist, that in heterosexual pornography, the woman is reduced to the object of the male gaze. Not at all. Do you notice how the woman being fucked is allowed to break the basic rule of fiction movies and look directly into the camera? Men, no. You don’t identify with the man fucking the woman. He is a pure instrument. If you are a hetero guy observing a hardcore movie, what you are looking for—and this is signaled to

First (she says), your fingers, then put your hand on my breasts. No (he says) put your finger into my ass, not there. You get totally caught in these bureaucratic negotiations.

9 you by the woman—is some confirmation that the woman really enjoys it. The true object is the poor guy, usually some poor sailor fucking her. Which is why the woman, as a rule, has to make all those sounds all the time. The second aspect of censorship in pornography I noticed when I was young, when I saw my first hardcore movies. When you have a full hardcore movie—like one

hour, one hour and a half—of course you cannot just fuck all the time, there has to be a story. And how openly ridiculous the story is. It’s so humiliatingly stupid. I mean, even now, I am shocked. I remember one of the early movies: a plumber comes and fixes a hole in the kitchen. [And she says], “But I have another hole down there, can you also fix that for me.” And then it came to me. My god,

it cannot be that they are so stupid. This is censorship. The idea is, you can either be totally emotionally identified [as in mainstream films], then you don’t see it all, or, you see it all, all the details [in porn films], but then the story has to be ridiculous, so you shouldn’t take it seriously. Now the censorship even goes further. Now the predominant form of pornography is so-called gonzo,

HENRIK DRESCHER

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 9

Philosophical Intelligence Office where even a story is not allowed. Gonzo means, you know, when actors directly face the camera [and say], “Am I doing this well, or should we do this, that?” I was always suspicious of [Bertolt] Brecht, this idea that the moment you get caught into the story, it’s a kind of bourgeois emotional identification, and alienation is good, I mean, externalization. No! I think that precisely this is censorship. The horror is that you would really fall into this story. It’s spontaneous social censorship. But that’s what makes it so much more mystical. There is no direct censor, and all the hard-

core movies obey these rules.

A seduction to be success-

ful has to imply a moment of impotence and failure, in the sense that you playfully acknowledge your limitations. Seduction never works with perfection. People are totally wrong when they think that you should present yourself as perfect, blah blah blah blah. I talked with a sex adviser who told me, when you have a couple where, I don’t know if the guy’s impotent or whatever, the worst thing to do is to give him some bullshit like, “Don’t think about, just do it, spontane-

ously.” This is where you kill him. He told me one way to do it—and he told me it works with couples—is to tell them to imitate a purely externalized bureaucratic procedure. Like, you want to make love, okay, sit down with your partner and make a Stalinist plan. First (she says), your fingers, then put your hand on my breasts. No (he says) put your finger into my ass, not there. You get totally caught in these bureaucratic negotiations. And then usually somebody says, “Fuck it, why don’t we just fuck, let’s go.”t —Slavoj Žižek

BRAD HOLLAND

10 1 The Baffler [no.22]

X- C E R P T

Smile and Say Please

“E

sther, have you ever seen a man?” The way he said it I knew he didn’t mean a regular man or a man in general, I knew he meant a man naked. “No,” I said. “Only statues.” “Well, don’t you think you would like to see me?” . . . “Well, all right, I guess so,” I said. I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. “They’re cool,” he explained, “and my mother says they wash easily.” Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey

H A ZE L L E E SA NTI N O

neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed. Buddy seemed hurt I didn’t say anything. “I think you ought to get used to me like this,” he said. “Now let me see you.” But undressing in front of

forlornity

Alice James, the sister of Henry and William James, alludes to her “forlornities”—the aches and pains that vexed her invalidish life. Adding the suffix “-ity” to the stem “forlorn” (a dark and resonant word) lightens, almost frivolizes, her burden. —Daniel Aaron S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG

Buddy suddenly appealed to me about as much as having my Posture Picture taken at college, where you have to stand naked in front of a camera, knowing all the time that a picture of you stark naked, both full view and side view, is going into the college gym files to be marked A B C or D depending on how straight you are. “Oh, some other time,” I said. “All right.” Buddy got dressed again. Then we kissed and hugged a while and I felt a little better.t —from Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963) The

Baffler [no.22] ! 11

Philosophical Intelligence Office (VE RY)

SHORT STORY

A Beauty

Peter Fedorovich was gor-

geous as a morning star. The moment office ladies glimpsed his shimmering locks at the door they fell on the floor in a deadly swoon. A bookkeeper once had to be hospitalized: she fainted still hugging her enormous electric typewriter, and it crushed two of her ribs. Any woman who stared at Peter Fedorovich for longer than five minutes abandoned her husband, her children, her work, took to drink for consolation, and a week later would be seen fishing through dumpsters for empty bottles. Peter Fedorovich was a kind-hearted man. All those ruined lives upset him terribly. He tried leaving the house as little as possible, but since no one was going to pay him for his pretty eyes alone, he had to go to the office. He tried to hide his face behind a scarf. That didn’t help. A gust of wind disturbed the scarf. A lock of hair came out—voilà, another unfortunate lady would wallow, heartbroken and drunk, in a cold puddle. Over time, Peter Fedorovich thought of a remedy. He stopped washing and combing his hair. He found an old, filthy jacket and wore 12 1 The Baffler [no.22]

D M ITRY G O RC H E V

it every day. He sniveled, scratched his crotch, picked his nose constantly, spat on the floor—in general, acted like a complete swine. At first, this behavior jarred him, but he adjusted. He drank a lot, stuffed himself with everything that came his way, even scraps out of trashcans. He grew terribly fat and constantly burped and hiccupped. Then he picked up parasites, and became skinny as a corpse. All in all, Peter Fedorovich transformed himself into such a disgusting specimen

that even police patrolmen, who had seen all kinds, couldn’t walk by without kicking him in the ass. The way he wallowed in the mud, you just longed to strangle him, the swine. One patrolman, a recent recruit, developed such a taste for slugging Peter Fedorovich with his baton that they had to literally drag him away to the station and calm him with vodka. Eventually, though, Peter Fedorovich found a lady friend. Klara Borisovna wasn’t a finished lush like Peter Fedorovich, but she didn’t mind a nightcap now and then, especially when she ruminated about her womanly fate, which had turned out to be quite different from her girlish dreams. She agreed that despite his unappetizing flaws Peter Fedorovich was still a man about the house, someone to fix the faucet and bring home crumbs to go with their drinks.

ne night, Klara Borisovna woke up from a dream and

bombilation

This onomatopoeic and semicomic word mimics the objects and actions it refers to. Bombilation makes a humming and buzzing S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG sound. It evokes not only the rumbling of guns, but also the intonations of pundits, speechifying politicians, and orotundity in general. —Daniel Aaron

saw Peter Fedorovichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face in the moonlight. Klara Borisovna swooned and flopped on the floor. In the morning, she was gone. Peter Fedorovich waited all day. In the evening he went to the outdoor market to look for her. Sure enough, there she was, dancing like a gypsy in front of a beer kiosk, flashing a newly missing tooth. Peter Fedorovich ran up to her and slugged her on the jaw, hard. Klara Borisovna stopped dancing. She stared at him with murky eyes, feeling a little better. To be on the safe side, Peter Fedorovich punched her again, in the gut, and then dragged her home by her hair. She downed a bracer and fell asleep. After this incident Peter Fedorovich became doubly vigilant. He never allowed himself to come home sober. Klara Borisovna protested; in response he would curse her up and down, she would slug him, he would slug her back, then they would share a nightcap and go to bed. They had a baby boy. Peter Fedorovich worried the baby would take after him, but the boy turned out just fine: big head, buggy eyes, bowed legs. Never says a word, just picks his nose from time to time. Knock on wood.t

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Baffler [no.22] ! 13

years of blunting the cutting edge

14 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Philosophical Intelligence Office CUTTING-EDGE SEX

( T H E N)

From The Baffler, no. 4, 1993. Read more at thebaffler.com. The

Baffler [no.22] ! 15

Philosophical Intelligence Office CUTTING-EDGE SEX

(N OW)

Consuming Passions

his course examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, space, and popular culture. Ranging across media—film, literature, television, and music—the class analyzes how these different forms represent and constitute gendered and sexed bodies. How does the Lifetime channel, for example, represent itself as a woman’s space? Spike as a man’s space? Are these distinctions breaking down, resulting in more hybrid genres? How do race, ethnicity, age, and class figure in? We connect media to sites of production, distribution, and consumption, such as the theater, the home, and cyberspace with particular emphasis on the affective and often passionate realm of consumption. Questions of access are considered: which technologies have provided access to marginalized groups, and on what terms? What are the political possibilities of popular culture, and what are the intersections of politics and pleasure? —Spring 2013 course listing, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Cornell University

16 1 The Baffler [no.22]

E L E A N O R DAV I S

Pants Squared

If SpongeBob Squarepants is anything to go by, and I believe

he is, then children can find all kinds of examples of ambiguous embodiment in the materials that TV and cinema market to them. SpongeBob Squarepants and his crew of spongy life forms all experience a soft relation to reality, and while life in Bikini Bottom bears some resemblance to life above the water, it also operates according to its own set of rules, code violations, morality, and propriety. The villain of the piece is the money-grabbing Mr. Krabs, but SpongeBob and his best friend Patrick also often square off against a mean-spirited octopus named Squidward. The significance of SpongeBob Squarepants to contemporary gender norms, I believe, cannot be overstated. —from Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

* Photo gr a phic

Mexico City Hope is a kiss

3 Peter Kayafas

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 17

P H OTO G R A P H S BY P E TE R K AYA FA S

18 1 The Baffler [no.22]

ore than half of Mexico City’s twenty-one million people are under twenty-five. They congregate in El Zócalo, Plaza Garibaldi, Metros Chapultepec and Insurgentes, and La Zona Rosa; in front of Las Bellas Artes; and around the markets of El Chopo, Sonora, and La Merced. No sign of the drug caches, piles of weapons, and bloody corpses that saturate U.S. media coverage. You see young people who look like their counterparts in any big city of the world—though maybe they are a little more animated than Parisians and more spirited than New Yorkers. They’re certainly more publicly amorous.t The

Baffler [no.22] ! 19

1. Gary Hart (D-CO) While seeking the nomination for president, Senator Hart answered allegations of extramarital affairs by challenging the press to put a tail on him. He was then photographed with model Donna Rice on a trip to the Bahamas and dropped out of the race. 2. Ken Calvert (R-CA) Representative Calvert was arrested for soliciting a prostitute in 1993. A champion of the Christian Coalition, Calvert later said, “We can’t forgive what occurred between the President and

12. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) In 2003 it became known that segregationist Senator Thurmond had fathered a child by a fifteen-year-old black servant of the Thurmond family. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged the child. 13. Gary Condit (D-CA) Representative Condit’s affair with intern Chandra Levy was exposed after Levy disappeared in 2001. Her body was discovered a

20 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Lewinsky.” (See No. 5) 3. Mel Reynolds (D-IL) Representative Reynolds’s relationship with a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer led to his 1995 conviction on charges of sexual assault, obstruction of justice, and solicitation of child pornography. 4. Robert Packwood (R-OR) Senator Packwood resigned in 1995 after twenty-nine women accused him of sexual harassment, abuse, and assaults. His

denials were contradicted by his own diaries, which boasted of his sexual conquests. 5. President Bill Clinton (D) In 1998, after it was revealed that intern Monica Lewinsky had oral sex with the President in the Oval Office, he went on TV to declare, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about the affair under oath.

year later, and an illegal immigrant was blamed for her murder. Condit had often insisted that President Clinton “come clean” about his affair with Lewinsky.

gay rights, Representative Schrock cut short his career in 2004 after allegedly being caught on tape soliciting a male prostitute.

14. David Dreier (R-CA) Representative Dreier voted against several gay rights proposals and in 2004 was outed over his relationship with his male chief of staff.

16. John Ensign (R-NV) Senator Ensign resigned in 2011 after admitting he had an affair with the wife of a close friend, both of whom were working on his campaign. Ensign had called for President Clinton’s resignation during the 1990s.

15. Ed Schrock (R-VA) An aggressive opponent of

3 By Mark Dancey

Displayed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol, a painted panorama depicts the sexual exploits of federal officials from the founding of the republic through the present day. Detailed here is a selection covering the years 1987 to 2012.

6. Dan Burton (R-IN) Condemning the Lewinsky affair, Representative Burton said, “No one . . . should be allowed to get away with these alleged sexual improprieties.” In 1998 he admitted that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. 7. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) Representative LaTourette voted to impeach Clinton. In 2003 it became known that he himself had been having a long-term affair with his chief of staff while he was married.

8. Bob Barr (R-GA) Representative Barr was the first congressman to call for Clinton’s resignation over the Lewinsky affair. In 1999 evidence of his own extramarital affair came to light.

10. Henry Hyde (R-IL) In 1998, while pushing for the impeachment of Clinton, Representative Hyde’s own late 1960s affair became public. Hyde dismissed it as a “youthful indiscretion.”

9. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-ID) Representative Chenoweth-Hage demanded Clinton’s resignation. When confronted in 1998 with the fact of her own affair with a married rancher in the 1980s, she claimed that her case was different because, “I’ve asked for God’s forgiveness, and I’ve received it.”

11. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) Representative Gingrich has admitted he had an affair with a Congressional aide while he was leading the impeachment of Clinton. When prosecution of the president did not lead to electoral gains for his party, Gingrich resigned from the House.

resigned in 2007 after confirming that he had been a client of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the legendary “DC Madam.”

Representative Weiner vacated his House seat after sending sexually explicit photos of himself to several women via his Twitter account.

19. Mark Foley (R-FL) Representative Foley stepped down in 2006 after being accused of sending sexually explicit emails and instant messages to underage male congressional pages.

21. Mark Souder (R-IN) Representative Souder resigned in 2010 to avoid an ethics investigation into his admitted affair with a staffer, who appeared with him in a video promoting the virtues of family values and sexual abstinence.

M A R K DA N C E Y

17. John Edwards (D-NC) Senator Edwards’s 2008 presidential campaign was derailed when it became known that he had an affair and a child with filmmaker Rielle Hunter while his wife was dying of cancer. 18. Randall Tobias (R) As deputy secretary of state and “AIDS czar,” Tobias declared that U.S. aid should be denied to countries that allowed prostitution. He

20. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) In 2011 newlywed

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 21

P OL I T IC S : Wa k e Up

Over the boom and through the bust . . .

To Galt’s Gulch They Go 3 Thomas Fr ank

here was a time when Atlas would frown and the world of nations would tremble. He was as mighty as Zeus and as petulant as a teenager. His wrath was irresistible, and he was easily provoked. Badmouth him and he might just drop his burden and walk away. Elect someone he didn’t approve of and he’d put a lightning bolt up your ass. Chile learned the hard way about minding the feelings of the business-class god. In 1970 that country selected as president one Salvador Allende, a socialist of the old school who quickly set about nationalizing banks, telecom concerns, and so on. American companies naturally feared these developments and laid plans to push the country down a different path. They would withdraw investments, executives mused; they would halt purchases of Chilean goods; and they would persuade others to do the same. President Richard Nixon, who was clearly thinking along the same lines, told his CIA director to “make the economy scream.” And scream it did. Still, these were the early days of collective capitalist action, and there was a certain brutality and clumsiness to the proceedings. Not every American firm doing business in Chile went along with the program—the high-minded banks, for example, squealed about their policy of “non-involvement in the political affairs of the countries where they do business.” And in the end, Atlas’s goals for the Southern Cone were achieved only by means of an ugly military coup. In later years, Atlas would grow more subtle in expressing himself, more refined. When François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981—another socialist pursuing an array of nationalizations and expanded rights for labor—there was no need for a junta 22 1 The Baffler [no.22]

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of generals to intervene. Mitterrand pumped the depressed French economy full of Keynesian stimulus, but his nationalizations were too much to take: the private sector simply refused to play along. The New York Times spoke of an “investment strike,” rich Frenchmen moved abroad, and Mitterrand himself moaned about a guerre sociale conducted by the bosses. This socialist was no Salvador Allende: he came into office at the head of a good-sized majority, he presided over one of the largest economies in the world, and he was fully committed to the American-led security program of the era. But none of that mattered to peevish Atlas. It took only two years for Mitterrand to capitulate. In 1983 he embarked on his famous economic U-turn, one of the most depressing episodes in the entire gloomy history of the neoliberal conquest. Economic orthodoxy re(Continued on top half of page 24.)

P OL I T IC S : Ge t D ow n

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse 3 David Gr aeber

e used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille. At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense. Already by the time of the French Revolution, Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt,

This article is an excerpt from The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

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just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the “world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,” which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political lib(Continued on bottom half of page 24.) The

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3 Fr ank turned to France in triumph. Entrepreneurs were celebrated. Labor unions went into a decline from which they have never recovered. A similar episode took place in those days in Jamaica, where the socialist prime minister, Michael Manley, pleaded with the business community to invest, but without result: their mistrust was simply too great. Another unfolded in Canada, where large national corporations, according to one witness, threatened to pick up their marbles and go home unless Pierre Trudeau’s government abandoned plans to close certain tax loopholes. And finally America itself got a taste of Atlas’s power. The immortal remark Bill Clinton addressed to his economic advisers shortly after being elected president in 1992—“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”—will stand forever as testimony to the

power of the visible hand. Seven years later, the administration had been converted to the cause so utterly that it now rationalized the things Atlas did to states that dared to regulate: “In a global economy where capital can be invested anywhere,” quoth vice president Al Gore in 1999, “red tape is like an economic noose that says: if you send your investments here, we’re going to strangle them with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and forms, fees, and requirements you can barely even understand.” Even for Americans, certain conventional acts of public administration were now beyond the horizon of the permissible. By 1999, not even a red-baiter like Richard Nixon would have been able to escape the wrath of the business god, thanks to his worshipful hours at the altar of Keynesianism. Just let the infidel try his wage and price controls in the decade of “globalization,” and it’d be his economy that would scream.

3 Graeber eration, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism. Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to 24 1 The Baffler [no.22]

lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion. Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements: an expanded franchise, universal primary education, the welfare state. The world revolution of 1968, in contrast—whether it took the form it did in China, of a revolt by students and young cadres supporting Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution; or in Berkeley and New York, where it marked an alliance of students, dropouts, and cultural rebels; or even in Paris, where it was an alliance of students and workers—was a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, or anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing of not just political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they

“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”

n France they have a phrase for the inveterate hostility of financial interests to the political Left: the mur d’argent, a wall of money against which reformers fruitlessly hurl themselves. In English-speaking lands we use a more active term: we call it a “capital strike.” The phrase comes down to us from a period of economic desperation and left-wing righteousness. Faced with a severe recession in 1937–38, officials of the second Franklin Roosevelt administration chose to blame a “strike of capital” undertaken for political reasons—

a collective act of sabotage by the economic royalty. Today, of course, we know that the actual cause of that recession was the Roosevelt administration’s own abrupt clampdown on Keynesian stimulus, a policy it undertook in an ill-advised attempt to balance the federal budget. But the hatred for the super-rich ran hot in those days, and the class-war explanation for the slump is what sold. A “capital strike,” according to the 1938 understanding of the phrase, is a highly unusual event: a coordinated action directed by people like the group that Roosevelt’s advisers called the “sixty families,” a term they borrowed from a conspiracy-minded bestseller of the day. This is also the version enshrined by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, where it’s organized money versus the idiot pee-pul, only the moral poles are reversed, and the rich supermen masterminding the walkout are heroes rather than villains. #

saw that apparatus as itself the problem. It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure. A case can be made for that view. It’s certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any widespread change in political common sense—a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire; a hatred of bureaucracy; and suspicions about the role of government—was the political Right. Above all, the movements of the sixties allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the eighties, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—

even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism. The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy. The

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3 Fr ank Were we to apply the term strictly, a “capital strike” would mean a confrontation in which the wealthy decline to take short-term profits in order to gain an advantage that might open up after the capitulation of the other side— meaning the left-wing politicians who always darken the horizons of the wealthy. This strict definition would also imply a certain amount of organization in order to maintain discipline—an owners’ committee, or a sort of radicalized Chamber of Commerce. Striking capital, defined this way, wouldn’t just want to get a better return somewhere else; it would be after political changes here at home. In this narrow sense of the term—in which the business community comes together as a politically motivated cartel—capital strikes are fairly rare. But if we understand a “capital strike” more like an investors’ version of a union work-to-rule campaign—financiers go through the motions and show up for work,

but their hearts aren’t in it—we start to see examples all over the place. Now a “capital strike” is just another name for everyday financial functions: the movement or idling of money that occurs when companies go looking for optimal business environments. When companies demand concessions from a city or a county or a state, for example. Or when rich people flock to a tax haven. Or when money flees a country that has started nationalizing certain industries. Or when lobbyists threaten to move an operation abroad if a certain regulation is enforced. By this definition, “capital strikes” are everywhere, happening all the time. We are afraid to tax financial transactions, lest the home bases for our own financial markets decamp to swinging London. We dare not regulate credit default swaps, lest the geniuses who make them decide to “shift their activity to jurisdictions that provide more appropri-

3 Graeber

Future Stop In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower. I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest—and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart by the early seventies—that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 26 1 The Baffler [no.22]

9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome”—and even then, the war planners made an almost obsessive effort to ensure the wars were effectively protest-proof. Propaganda was incessant, the media was brought on board, experts provided exact calculations on body bag counts (how many U.S. casualties it would take to stir mass opposition), and the rules of engagement were carefully written to keep the count below that. The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up “collateral damage” in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldn’t obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this.

# ate legal and regulatory frameworks,” as some official someone actually said back in 1999. A presidential candidate tells us we must give big banks a tax holiday, or else they won’t ever repatriate the billions that they’ve parked overseas. Each of these is a capital strike, as is the far less exotic spectacle of a company choosing suburbs over city or locating the site for its new plant in open-shop South Carolina instead of union-friendly Illinois. And they are, if we think about the matter this way, both common and extremely effective.

hatever specifics we associate with it, the phrase “capital strike” is intended to be an expression of great contempt. It was the deed, declared Robert Jackson, a Roosevelt official who would later become a Supreme Court justice, of an “economic oligarchy of autocratic, self-constituted and self-perpetuating groups,” which society had

little power to control. Unable to get their way at the ballot box, these aristocrats now demanded it by threat of economic force. Their relationship with We the People, according to this picture, is one of constant extortion. Of course, the preferred brand image for most businesses is precisely the opposite: pure, mystical oneness with the vox populi. The common man speaks and corporate America listens, in every situation giving the little people exactly what they want. No business wants to be seen as a peevish, grasping tyrant. The pro sports franchise owner who insists that taxpayers build him a new stadium, and skyboxes too, if you please, is hardly a beloved figure in American culture. Over the last few years, however, certain reaches of the political Right have developed an outright cult of the capital strike. We can see it, for example, in the resurgent popularity of Atlas Shrugged and its reversal #

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It didn’t matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power? The thought first occurred to me when participating in the IMF actions in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Coming on the heels of 9/11, we were relatively few and ineffective, the number of police overwhelming. There was no sense that we could succeed in shutting down the meetings. Most of us left feeling vaguely depressed. It was only a few days later, when I talked to someone who had friends attending the meetings, that I learned we had in fact shut them down: the police had introduced such stringent security measures, canceling half the events, that most of the actual meetings The

Baffler [no.22] ! 27

3 Fr ank of the strike-novel tropes of the thirties. In 2011, John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, characterized the economic slump as a matter of “job creators” being “on strike.” Before long, certain conservatives were even trying to flip the script of the Great Depression itself—announcing that what happened in 1937–38 really was a capital strike. In his syndicated newspaper column, Michael Barone, the coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics, has used the supposed capital strike of the Roosevelt years as a warning for Barack Obama no fewer than seven times since 2010. Every news item, to these apostles of the capital strike, vibrates with the universal political chorus: Do what business wants! Do what business wants! Do what business wants! Or! Else! Hence the grasping at stray news stories for any hint that the uprising of the moneyed is

finally on. Phil Mickelson, a golfer who makes almost $48 million per year, announced in January that he was considering moving out of California due to high state taxes there; the Right leapt for joy to hear it, with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal urging this man who chases a little white ball for a living to “vote with his Gulfstream” and find some low-tax somewhere to sulk in. Libertarians cheer to see Gérard Depardieu, a star of the French film industry, give up his French citizenship in order to avoid paying the higher taxes imposed by the country’s new Socialist government. They roll over with Randy ecstasy to see Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH and the richest man in Europe, apparently do the same. In both cases, these poor tax refugees, along with their bold billionaire friends, are said to be “going Galt.” In fact, this is the second time Arnault has deprived the ingrate patrie of his genius: he also ran brave-

3 Graeber had been carried out online. In other words, the government had decided it was more important for protesters to walk away feeling like failures than for the IMF meetings to take place. If you think about it, they afforded protesters extraordinary importance. Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle? What if those currently running the system, most of whom witnessed the unrest of the sixties firsthand as impressionable youngsters, are—consciously or unconsciously (and I suspect it’s more conscious than not)— obsessed by the prospect of revolutionary social movements once again challenging prevailing common sense? It would explain a lot. In most of the world, 28 1 The Baffler [no.22]

A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line.

9 the last thirty years has come to be known as the age of neoliberalism—one dominated by a revival of the long-since-abandoned nineteenth-century creed that held that free markets and human freedom in general were ultimately the same thing. Neoliberalism has always been wracked by a central paradox. It declares that economic imperatives are to take

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ly away back in 1981, when Mitterrand got elected and frightened everyone out of their wits. In the fullness of time, however, Arnault returned to France, where the Mitterrand government kindly helped him to take over a floundering textile conglomerate; Arnault promptly dumped the less profitable divisions

of the enterprise, and thus launched—with government help—his empire of tawdry luxury brands. Depardieu, for his part, has enjoyed a long career in the heavily subsidized French film industry, appearing in such governmentbacked winners as the Asterix movies . . . Ah, but I see I am beginning to wander into one of the perennial dead ends of writing about the Right: thinking that contradictions matter. In truth, Atlas just doesn’t care about such boring details. I mean, how many times have we heard that some libertarian hero earned his pile in Stalin’s U.S.S.R, or made millions off some invention pioneered for him by big government, or spent his entire career at some business-subsidized think tank, never once venturing out into the “free market” that he prescribes ritualistically for everyone else? Libertarian hypocrisy is an old story—and in the bubble world of laissez-faire, it’s a story that counts for nothing. #

priority over all others. Politics itself is just a matter of creating the conditions for growing the economy by allowing the magic of the marketplace to do its work. All other hopes and dreams—of equality, of security—are to be sacrificed for the primary goal of economic productivity. But global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse. If, on the other hand, we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. The politicians,

CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment. How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major The

Baffler [no.22] ! 29

3 Fr ank

nstead, what conservatives wonder—what confounds them utterly—is why no one is making the economy scream over here. Inside the bubble of libertarian purity, everyone knows we are suffering under the thumb of a tyrant who is worse than Mitterrand, worse than Pierre Trudeau, worse than Michael Manley—maybe even worse than Allende. You might point out to them that personal taxes are still relatively low in America; that we just finished bailing out the banks; that the stock market is booming; that organized labor is weaker today than it has been since the year 1900; that businesses get whatever they want from state and local governments; that the free-trade agreements just keep coming . . . none of it would make any difference. Inside the bubble, everyone knows that fundamental American values are under attack, that average people are persecuted by arrogant college professors and power-mad bureaucrats,

Unable to get their way at the ballot box, the aristocrats demand it by threat of economic force. Their relationship with We the People is one of constant extortion.

9 that the free-enterprise system is breathing its last. Inside the bubble, this is a matter of complete conviction. It does not require proof. What it requires, given our failure to unseat the dictator Obama by conventional means, is action. Direct action. But where are the leaders? Why is Atlas allowing this to go on? Why isn’t Wall Street issuing ultimatums to the Kenyan commie?

3 Graeber rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight. 30 1 The Baffler [no.22]

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks. It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution,

# Why aren’t the fucking bond traders crushing his program? Why has business investment grown almost 8 percent a year for the past three years? I mean, come on: Is a sulking pro golfer really the best we can do? Inside the bubble, none of it makes sense. The only possible answer is that corporate America has become so devitalized, so compromised by the tyrant’s cash, that it can no longer fight. Big business has dropped the torch; only small entrepreneurs can save the situation, can restore the dream to the parched desert of statism. And so have flowered a hundred wild schemes in which lesser individuals imagine how they might withdraw from the life of the nation and rouse Atlas from his slumber. “How many times since Obama came to power has withdrawing your services sounded like a good idea to you?” wrote an essayist recently on one prominent right-wing website, noting that he was speak-

ing to anyone who “works hard to make more than $200,000 a year in a small business.” Yes, strike! Strike! Strike! But how? How can you “withdraw” the “services” that net you such an admirable annual haul without, you know, actually endangering your bank account? How can you arrange matters so you won’t have to endure the will of the majority, but they and their beloved state will still have to protect you? Democracy is a problem, all right. Fortunately, entrepreneurs are at work on a solution. And all their innovations point in one direction: withdrawing physically into some libertarian laager—some mountaintop or island or remote state—where free-market principles will be observed with the zealotry they require. There are, for example, several different plans floating around out there to launch a free-market hideaway named “Galt’s Gulch,” # to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

Work It Out, Slow It Down

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were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s The

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3 Fr ank after the fictional place Ayn Rand’s fictional billionaires went to hide during their walkout. One of them is in Chile—made forever safe by that early, bloody act of free-market utopianism—while another, following closer to Rand’s text, is located in Colorado, which its organizers hope to make a center for the “Asset Management” industry. Glenn Beck, the Constitution-minded conspiracy theorist, is also promoting a model town/theme park where entrepreneurial genius can “retreat from the world” and where all the civic gods of the nineteenth century will be restored to their rightful place. Oh, there will be TV studios, small businesses, a church, and freedom by the bushel. Beck has of course referred to it as a real-life Galt’s Gulch, and has compared it to Disneyland—or what Disneyland was meant to be before it sold out. What a combination: a veritable Skousenland. Another model libertarian town, “the Cit-

Democracy is a problem, all right. Fortunately, entrepreneurs are at work on a solution.

9 adel,” builds on three of the lousiest ideas in city planning, each making the others even worse. This burg, intended for an Idaho fastness, is not merely to be gated. It will be a medieval-style walled village—like Carcassonne, I suppose, only minus the nineteenthcentury improvements. It is to be an American suburb, only without the rules about recycling or architecture. It is to be a factory town, like Pullman, only one that manufactures guns instead. Don’t let this last fact scare you, though. Although everyone in the Citadel is expected to be a crack marksman,

3 Graeber blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be 32 1 The Baffler [no.22]

only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors. The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.

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there will surely be no hostility between factory owners and factory workers, since the prospectus warns “Marxists, Socialists, Lib-

erals, and Establishment Republicans” to live somewhere else. Then there are the usual libertarian schemes to launch a microstate in the middle of the ocean, or in space, or by seceding from the union, or by luring so many wingers to a given area (New Hampshire; the mountains of North Carolina) that its flavor is permanently altered. There’s a group of American management thinkers who want to (and probably will) carve privately owned cities out of the country of Honduras—itself delivered to “freedom” by a good old military coup in 2009—in order to set up their own free-market utopias. Places like Kansas are enthusiastically entering what economists used to call the “race to the bottom,” aiming to cut taxes to zero in the complete assurance that this is how you win the peripatetic billionaire’s favor. (And don’t fear the state’s regulatory apparatus: they’re only keeping it around to ha#

Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like? I don’t know, but I can think of any number of pieces of conventional wisdom that surely need challenging if we are to create any sort of viable free society. I’ve already explored one—the nature of money and debt—in some detail in a recent book. I even suggested a debt jubilee, a general cancellation, in part just to bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated. Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is

a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely. What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundThe

Baffler [no.22] ! 33

3 Fr ank rass abortion clinics.) Legislators in Hawaii, meanwhile, have discovered a detour to the ocean floor, proposing that the state compete for the favor of the peripatetic celebrity by cracking down on annoying newspaper photographers. A real estate developer in Michigan has dreamed up a plan in which an island off the coast of Detroit becomes an independent commonwealth and thereby transforms itself into a second Saipan, where taxes are low, schools are private, and everyone is rich (it will cost $300,000 a head to join up). The main industry in this magical place will be the good clean businesses of finance, real estate, and more finance—mmmm, you can almost see the money and the talent fleeing there already. And so packed with quality will it be, this bantustan of the rich, that it will ironically spark a revival of the city from which it has hived itself off. Unless a resentful Cana-

There are the usual libertarian schemes to launch a microstate in the middle of the ocean, or in space, or by seceding from the union.

9 dian navy has blasted it back to wilderness by then, of course. What do you call it when average people try to mimic the behavior of bond traders and the great corporations, withdrawing into a fortified enclosure the moment they don’t get their way? Is it really Disneyland or Hong Kong? Isn’t Dubai more like it? Or apartheid South Africa? Or the Branch Davidian compound? Or maybe Brook Farm, reconfigured for the Bushmaster set?

3 Graeber ry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation. At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point 34 1 The Baffler [no.22]

where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace. Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is

# As I read over the plans for these nasty little anti-utopias, these projects born of delusion compounded by delusion, I can’t help but think that the closest parallel is to be found in the first half of the nineteenth century, when ideologues of white supremacy launched private military expeditions in order to peel away pieces of Central America for the slaveholding American South—and then, when those endeavors failed, built their whip ‘n’ chains utopia by seceding from the insufferably righteous United States, which had just chosen as president a man they all knew to be a crazy radical. If a work of inspiring fiction is required, the utopians might consider F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which a Southern slave owner moves, Galt-like, to an uncharted valley in remotest Montana, convincing his human property that the Confederacy won the Civil War and thus, through a clever falsification of history, managing to keep

them in bondage while he himself grows fabulously wealthy. After all, if the truth won’t set you free, well, then neither will Atlas.

he larger question of the capital strike will still be with us long after each of these schemes lapses inevitably into failure: Who really rules in this republic of ours? The people and their elected representatives? Or the crotchety god of private business? From campaign finance rules to free trade agreements to the Internet itself, it seems sometimes like nearly everything has been designed to empower business further, to persuade the self-righteous rich that they need tolerate the bullshit of democracy only in tiny amounts. We laugh today at Glenn Beck’s desperation to withdraw into a Jeffersonian Disneyland of his own. But tomorrow, when the bond traders are back on their feet, the joke assuredly will be on us.t #

going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be. Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything

else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.

ll this might still seem very distant. At the moment, the planet might seem poised more for a series of unprecedented catastrophes than for the kind of broad moral and political transformation that would open the way to such a world. But if we are going to have any chance of heading off those catastrophes, we’re going to have to change our accustomed ways of thinking. And as the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.t The

Baffler [no.22] ! 35

Diaspora: Breakfast with Mahmoud Darwish 3 K r is t i n a K . Robi n s on

An Invitation for the Fifth of June, 1967

You come back

on your back

Barefoot skin roughened like burlap, glaring Six days of war every year this same day, Glaring. Skin, barefoot like burlap, roughened. More have always died on my side of the line but what does that matter to a narrative? II.

Sadaam

They were shouting Muqtada Muqtada Muqtada While he stood frozen perched with us watching sectarian mouths watering to the point of pain The noose tickling his chin he contemplates wobbling the legs of the stool he thinks how might is the last thing one craves in the moment before it breaks. III. Osama

Shot. Pakistan. Washed in accordance with tradition. A body raised tipped eased into the sea. IV. Cairo

Loose of their chains, who should fear the unfettered?

36 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Libya: Bani Walid

Say a student launches a rocket in the wrong direction you cannot sit on the battlefield moping brother, I need you to hold me somewhere a [golden] fist might be being melted down to make more of what is needed somewhere black men are being gathered in the quiet aftermath of freedom on the eve of democracy a dictator is shot in the street this is on film for you to see the others go silently into dawn. VI. Identity Card

All you can hope is that one day, they will at least at last eat your words. To sling rocks is tiresome I want to start a fire. VII.

Mali

War on our borders death is thinning the edges between bodies and states Some deaths go unaccounted for to protect the project to protect the project to protect the project Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll take my imperialism brown thank you Sooner or later Mother we all must choose a side I want your mouth open Spill it Whose child am I ?

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 37

hCultur e

The State of Stretching Yoga in America 3 Jorian Polis Schutz

mid all the regimens available in America’s soul-cure marketplace, the unlikely maneuver of folding yourself into a pretzel and standing on your head for five minutes is more popular than ever. Some twenty million people practice yoga in more than twenty-five thousand studios scattered around the country. Yoga is booming—and decked out in the telltale chain studios, retailers, empire-building egomaniacs, and attendant litigation. If you have not tried yoga yourself, then you’ve surely heard of its amazing popularity and beneficence from middlebrow (or middle eye–brow) magazines, newspapers, sitcoms, and ad campaigns, which bring news of its aphrodisiac effects. You have probably heard of the elite yoga teachers, mountaintop gurus, and ancient sages, although you have probably not heard that nowadays most kick their earnings upstairs to corporate and cycle through franchises as part of the same class of journeyman laborers produced by other bastions of enlightenment. Yet many lives have been radically altered and improved, lifted out of the mire of physical malaise and the psycho-spiritual illnesses of the times, and there is no reason to believe that the present organization of the industry is natural or necessary. On the contrary! Yoga cultivates generosity of spirit, and its essence (and definition, in Sanskrit) is union. If our present swoon exhibits certain pathologies, these are probably not symptoms of yoga itself but of larger defeats that we have suffered, and continue to suffer, in our history of seeking union. When the labor movement failed in its pub38 1 The Baffler [no.22]

lic and communal dimension—when it lost its power to champion the union idea—the union idea migrated inward, toward the battered American soul. Once you would have discharged your suffering by joining a march for your (or other people’s) rights. Now you spend hours contorting yourself, suspending yourself upside down, sweating your brains out in private—in short, belaboring your body—as if in some sort of karmic redress of the visions of right living and livelihood that once marched in the streets, partially at the expense of personal practice. When one aspect (or posture) of union is overemphasized, the neglected aspect (or counterpose) is readied for primetime. In the more private arena of yoga today, you find our utopian forebears’ beloved community, with its effervescence, eternity, and spacelessness; you find their urge to dissolve the categories of past, present, and future, to know heaven on earth—so to speak. The yogic conception of union is an ideal state of being in which objective and subjective truths are fully consistent. You strip the world of layers of projection, free things from their fixed representations, and open yourself to what they might have to say or reflect. This is the path of “absorption” (samadhi), or identity with the superconsciousness that flows through the world and animates all living things, an idea that has resonated with seekers of all stripes, entering the American scene with particular gusto through the transcendentalists and the poetry of Walt Whitman. But there has always been a social and economic dimension to this goal, and so it has real parallels with, for instance, those midtwentieth-century classics—psychoanalysis

The yogic conception of union is an ideal state of being in which objective and subjective truths are fully consistent.

HENRIK DRESCHER

and Marxist theory—that attempt to free the self from psychological and historical attachments in order to manifest a new reality in which self and society can achieve greater harmony. Yet these movements have been all but eliminated from our midst, replaced by pundits and pills. After a half-century of enforced conformity to the mythical disunion of the Cold War—without and within—it is difficult to escape its reenactment in any domain. With the idea of union thus already besieged from multiple angles, yoga sings of a “body electric” firmly ensconced in a grid.

he private practice of yoga in America has dispensed with its ritual superstructure and strong sense of spiritual discipline. For thousands of years it was practiced primarily by men in monastic environments, or at the very least taught by teachers with monastic training. The matrix from which the practice developed is far closer to what we would recognize as religious fundamentalism than it is to the new age lifestyle, with its corresponding forms of sexual liberation and radical anti-authoritarianism. Brahmacharya (sexual abstinence) is one of the central yamas The

Baffler [no.22] ! 39

h (personal strictures)—though it is often translated as “moderation” or “continence”—and the niyamas (interpersonal codes), in addition to a strong emphasis on scriptural study (svadhyaya), are said to include surrender to God (ishvarapranidhana) and firm faith (astikya) in the teacher. Yoga can claim an origin independent of religion, in the strongly dualist Samkhya school of philosophy, but it has been incorporated into Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh contexts, and integrated with their texts and laws. The greatest yogis were not mere pretzel-posers but great scholars of scripture, devotees of prayer—and also scientists and phenomenologists of the depths of the human mind and sensorium. Which is to say that when yogic intelligence is awakened today, it does not necessarily have a clear outlet, and it can easily overwhelm. The journey from the pathologies of our unnatural society to full reorientation toward the eternal light is not as smooth as a drivethru. As Carl Jung once said, the highly potent breath-based (pranayama) practice of Kundalini yoga could lead you to either the monastery or the mental institution. So long as the spiritual practice of self-perfection lacks a public sphere to carry it, all such visions of self and society, all revelatory impulses, miscarry into a simulacrum of transformation, and yoga is reduced to a regime of righteous consumption and an accessory of snobbish superiority. Imagine svelte acolytes with mats hung over their shoulders, strutting through the streets of upscale urban neighborhoods in the late morning, stopping for a latte, and scowling at lower forms of life, and you have glimpsed yoga’s social class problem. It’s written all over the glossy magazines and resort packages. The attractions of a professional career in yoga have led to a flourishing of teacher-training programs, a dubious accreditation system, and a glut of teachers with questionable credentials. The seemingly wide variety of training options—with more or less anatomi40 1 The Baffler [no.22]

cal rigor, devotional practice, contemporary style, and studio heatedness—obscures the essential homogeneity of these programs. They might incorporate the study of essential texts like the Yoga Sutras, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana, in addition to contemporary Buddhist works. Some might integrate accompanying material like chakra science or bodywork, astrology, herbalism, chanting, or sacred dance. All these magical arts certainly have something to be said for them, especially when measured against what is drummed into our souls by measurement addicts wielding the latest version of the DSM. But few of these programs attempt to connect with critical thought, history, and the arts, and certainly not with biblical hermeneutics, liturgy, or the sacred poetry and song that springs from and nourishes the Abrahamic traditions, or for that matter with ecology, psychoanalysis, the history of science and madness, educational reform, or avantgarde dance and performance art. We remain victims of our own narrowness, even as we attempt to correct for it. Too often, today’s yogis flee from precisely what holds the unique power to give balance and stability: rootedness not only in a posture, but also in time, through historical truth. This atrophied aspect of union is a particularly conspicuous absence because yoga teachers are charged with both training the bodies of practitioners (for which all too few teachers are truly qualified) and supplying souls with one to two hours of accompanying homiletical and philosophical material. Of course, a few excel at this dual calling naturally, sharing the fruits of their own practice with their students, or bringing alive metaphors from the classical texts. Some allow the practice to speak for itself; some focus on alignment, believing that the true philosophy inheres in its perfection. Some yell at you, according to the franchise formula. And the rest muddle through aspirational language, taking on the

g Will we be able to choose a path of union now, or will we have to wait— as so many of us do in our lives, and as so many civilizations have done —until a major collapse forces our hands from our algorithmic games into a unified gesture of reverence toward the sky?

9 added responsibility of guarding (or policing) the souls of those whose bodies are under their control. This is a lot of power for one person to hold—precisely when students are at their most vulnerable—and it is especially dangerous for someone who may never have heard a sermon, much less studied homiletical literature, political rhetoric, or the language of union rallies, and may not even recognize the form of authority he or she wields. Yoga in America has produced a growing number of master teachers who unite several strands of yoga and instruct with generosity and grace. Georg Feuerstein, Wendy Doniger, Richard Freeman, and Roberto Calasso are excellent historians and philosophers, more than equal to the tradition’s rich heritage of thought. A new generation of yogic musicians is making kirtan (devotional chanting) into their own. Still, whatever general voice yoga once had in India to address the various infringements of psychology, society, government, and economy on the principles of union and communion

has been lost in translation. When the monastic contexts that thrive in India do take root over here, they’re headed almost exclusively by Indian sages (or charlatans) who, while providing a much-needed and invaluable contemplative respite, fail to integrate their message into a broader program. Because of the rifts between Indian and American traditions, Hindu and Judeo-Christian roots, Sanskrit and English, many senior teachers today remain stuck in a cultural double HENRIK DRESCHER bind: they cannot adopt the devotional life of their Indian gurus, rooted deep in Vedic thought and Sanskrit language, but they cannot resurrect what shards of the sacred they inherited from mom and pop, because these are associated with the bugaboos of dogma and Western domination. Those teachers who leap into the rich, disorienting, and perhaps over-enchanted universe of Sanskrit find themselves purveyors of exoticized pearls to audiences without a frame to set them in. And so the ancient streams of devotional The

Baffler [no.22] ! 41

Taverna 3 M a noh a r Sh e t t y

After twenty years of yoga And mastery of its Acrobatic asanas—forehead On the floor, feet round The neck, total breath control— He tripped over the doormat And died of cardiac arrest— All of 44. Clean living, As he put it once,

Moped without Troubling the potholes Or the pigs and sleeps The sleep of the just. This his ritual the past 40 years though every Christmas doc warns him It’s his last. I asked him once

Is the path to nirvana.

Over a peg, boiled eggs

At the Goodluck Taverna

And a saucer of peanuts

Eddie, 74, pours three Quarters of cashew feni Topped by a shot Of doctor’s brandy Down the hatch below A picture of Mother Mary Between sunset till

The secret of his long life And sound health. He blinked behind his soda Water bottle lenses and said, Drink. Siesta. And God bless; What for you is poison

The bar shuts at twelve.

Is for me tonic

He goes home on his

And medicine.

42 1 The Baffler [no.22]

g practice and self-discernment that flowed into and made possible Gandhi’s transformative conception of satyagraha have failed to produce anything of the kind over here. Instead, we have Yoga Journal, which recently celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary atop the yoga pile amid the “rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump” (to cop a phrase from that great crypto-yogi and enthusiast of inversions, Vladimir Nabokov), and which is perhaps the poorest excuse for a magisterium ever devised. What is being sold or promoted is hopelessly entangled with what is supposed to be the message, as if saying: “Breathe free, pose well, and buy enlightenment, sexiness, joy, and peace!”

oga is an engine for clear, focused vision and peaceful, powerful breath. Through it, you strip yourself of the garments that confound your best intentions, and you enter the dynamic experience of what is real, here, now. You come to understand how often and ingeniously you hide away from what is, and could be. You learn to distinguish what is pain and what is transformation. And along with the pathologies within yourself, you bring light to the pathologies of everyday life. You see the place of alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and salt in our cities, cultures, and brains. You see the cruel claim of professional sports, commercialized spectatorship, and “modeling” over our experience of the body and what it means to be beautiful and

free. You see what cars and computers do, literally and figuratively, to our hearts. You feel the limits of the medicalized view of the body and what is needed for healing. You experience how we take historical traumas into ourselves—individually and collectively—as root scars (samskaras), and suffer because of them. You recognize how many of our habits and systems are married to the goal of selfdestruction. You might even see how many people bring these very complexes with them into yoga, and abuse themselves (or others!) through it, eventually causing serious injury— and giving yoga a bad name. And then—what? What do you do? How does vision forged in strenuous practice (tapas) emanate out from corpse pose (shavasana)? Will yoga become the next “portable ecstasy corked up in a pint bottle” (as De Quincey referred to his laudanum), relegated to high status in the feeling-good industry for a spell, until it is thrown HENRIK DRESCHER away? Will we be able to choose a path of union now, or will we have to wait—as so many of us do in our lives, and as so many civilizations have done—until a major collapse forces our hands from our algorithmic games into a unified gesture of reverence toward the sky? A social movement for yoga has already begun. Cooperatively conceived, donationfunded studios are still a tiny segment of the market, but they are growing, and more classes are moving to public recreation centers, The

Baffler [no.22] ! 43

h hospitals, churches, and synagogues. Small, underfunded nonprofits are delivering “wellness practice” to the kids who most need it, in poor schools; and even monastic centers-cumretreat havens are beginning to come out a bit. Academics are approaching yoga in a more integrated way, while activists, having noticed how youth obesity and school diet have become political issues, are linking yoga to a more complete physical education as well as a quantifiable long-term investment in health. If yoga as a social movement is to grow, it will need yogic artists, activists, and philanthropists offering it to truck drivers, graduate students, retired athletes, and policymakers— to break the stranglehold of studio culture. From the variety of experiences thus accumulated, a new educational union must form to challenge the current monopoly on posture (physical and metaphysical) as exhibited in museums, ministries, and health centers, with respectful reaching toward the unified roots of these domains, and to remind yogis

of their duty to rigorous self-observation and composition. We need to crack the walls of the laboratory, opening to flowing “interdepartmental” breath and sensorial self-practice fields like experimental psychology, or what could be called metaphysiology. We have only begun to scratch the surface of the mysteries that the body-mind holds, and I, for one, will go on the record for all time with the assertion that far more of these will yield themselves to the sharpened inner gaze than to the primitive MRI. Maybe yoga’s maturity will come not when it carves out a new cultural zone, but when it is integrated into what we already aspire to do. Even now it could be doing its work in a more underground way, helping our collective roots to breathe—as collectivist movements and religions never quite did. Perhaps it will fulfill its function precisely by disappearing, when it becomes such a natural component of our pursuit of union, without and within, that we no longer need to notice it.t

P. S . M U E L L ER

44 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Modem & Taboo

“ A magazine that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.”

—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now M A R K S . FI S H E R

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 45

M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD INFLUENCE

Passions of the Meritocracy General David Petraeus and his wandering PhD 3 Chris Br ay Well, my goal tonight was twofold: first, to explain the changes we made in our Army in 2006; and, second, to give a speech that I’d like to think Irving Kristol might have enjoyed.

—Gen. David Petraeus, May 6, 2010,

speech to the American Enterprise Institute

t was an aberration, a break from the exemplary pattern, and so David Petraeus’s fall from power was a tragedy. At least that was the story in all the usual places. Once Petraeus loosened his legendary personal discipline long enough to let a biographer roll around under his desk, all the conventional armature of meritocratic achievement fell away as if by magic. As Tara McKelvey explained on The Atlantic’s website around the time the great general’s dalliance became public, Petraeus was like “a hero in a Shakespearean tragedy”: “Military men, and especially retired officers who head up the CIA, are supposed to be icy and methodical, even more so now that killing is done remotely through aerial drones. Journalists are supposed to cover these issues in a dispassionate way. Neither side is being honest, and the fact that he fell for her, and she for him, is a reminder of our common humanity.” In a less epic but still impressively pretentious register, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik counseled tolerance with all the chastened sagacity of a middle-aged oracle. “Desire,” he observed, “is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own.” It was all just a terrible mistake, and we 46 1 The Baffler [no.22]

shouldn’t judge. This is what happens when the American meritocracy finally repairs behind closed doors to go fuck itself.

Thrice Cursed In the narrative of the pundit class, Paula Broadwell was plowed by Cincinnatus. Or, to invoke the abstract formulations favored by the Gopnik set: a four-star narrative construct was caught last year rubbing its actual body on a particularly vigorous narrative constructor. The harsh light of public exposure thus brutally cut short the public service of a humble soul who had risen from obscurity to heal a clinically depressed military occupation. As the longtime journalist Thomas Ricks constructed his own pleasing version of the David Petraeus character, the general’s selection to command the war in Iraq “expressly was not the choice of the military. He was regarded by many of his peers as something of a thrice-cursed outlier—an officer with a doctorate from Princeton who also seemed to enjoy talking to reporters and even to politicians and who had made his peers look bad with his success leading the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul in 2003–4.” Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

This is what happens when the American meritocracy finally repairs behind closed doors to go fuck itself.

9 The

Baffler [no.22] ! 47

outcasts, rebels, and the socially obscure. He secured higher military rank even though he had been successful in combat. He adroitly worked CBS News, the Washington Post, and the United States Senate, yet still rose to prominence. Another humble fact about Petraeus that Ricks forgets to mention: as a freshly minted West Point graduate, barely commissioned as a second lieutenant, the future Princeton PhD brought still greater adversity down on his head by marrying the daughter of West Point’s commandant, an army general who would hang around and impede his son-inlaw’s career path with the taint of high rank and considerable institutional power. It’s really a miracle this Petraeus person ever amounted to anything, isn’t it?

Der Putz The American political press is willfully blind to power, the pursuit of power, and the operation of power. And practitioners of the craft usually elect to make up for their habitual neglect of the blindingly obvious by compulsively personalizing the political. In this strategic alignment of blind spots, transactions and schemes become happy accidents: a West Point cadet marries the daughter of the West Point commandant, earns a doctorate, and yet somehow succeeds in the military. Or take Paula Broadwell, who at Century High School in Bismarck, North Dakota, managed to be the student body president, the homecoming queen, a basketball star, and the valedictorian. “By the end of her senior year,” a creepy newspaper story later explained, “she’d held nine leadership positions at Century and had been involved in 24 extracurricular community activities.”* Then she went to West Point, then went on to earn two master’s degrees, then worked as a research associate at

Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, then left to pursue a PhD in a highly regarded military studies program in London— and at last she let her passions run away with her, accidentally bringing her to greater connection and intimacy with an increasingly prominent government official. She was, as you can see, a girlish daydreamer, an unfocused wanderer swooning in her momentary passion. Her feet were swept out from underneath her. She was tickled and she giggled; cue fate. Luckily, the former student body president and homecoming queen and valedictorian and Harvard associate somehow managed to avoid being helplessly attracted to, say, a handsome and virile staff sergeant. No, Broadwell fell for Petraeus. The products of her desire were a book deal and a spot on The Daily Show, but the desire itself was not subject to the language of judicious choice. There was no icy judgment, like when human beings are killed by drones. Doesn’t every passionate combat zone love affair lead to a contract from a publisher? Back at The Atlantic, Tara McKelvey recounted her personal interactions with Broadwell, the swooning girl who had been swept away by bad judgment and her swollen ladyparts. At a party in Washington, D.C., attended by journalists and government officials, McKelvey mentioned that she had been unable to get Petraeus to sit down with her for an interview. “I’ll talk to him about it,” Broadwell replied, announcing her personal access to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in a room full of people who live and die by access to senior government officials. She was supposed to be icy and methodical, but she fell for him. And still McKelvey managed to miss the point. She would later come to discover Broadwell’s sexual affair with Petraeus, an act

* The story, in the Charlotte Observer, reports at remarkable length on the post-divorce bickering that went on between

Broadwell’s parents. Readers learn, for example, that in November 1982 her father demanded that his ex-wife return “a family heirloom sausage maker, his accordion from childhood and his golf gear.”

48 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all.

9 of coupling that she would find disturbing. “Equally troubling,” McKelvey concluded, was the revelation that Broadwell “was cashing in on her relationship, gaining a national profile and speaking gigs because of her book.” The person who announced at a D.C. party that she could call the CIA director and get him to do things for her turned out to be— wait for it—cashing in on her relationship. Tara McKelvey will one day discover that liquor stores don’t sell their product just to be festive, and her local Mercedes dealership isn’t merely part of a well-appointed floating global party run by car enthusiasts. But McKelvey was surely not alone in her failure of perception. Here’s Adam Gopnik again: “The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, ‘Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd’—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.” Sitting in the heart of the empire, surrounded by schemers and climbers, journalists watch a pair of particularly methodical careerists work one another for the enhancement of their power and status, one getting to write a book for a national press and one getting to be the subject of a fawning book celebrated in the national press. The passion, the journalists say. The putz apparently shteht, and so pfft. He fell for her, and she for him, and it’s a reminder of our common humanity. Do you trust people who reach this conclu-

sion from the available set of facts to understand or explain anything at all to you?

Massaging Kimberly’s Institute If you are determined to track the real governing passions of our military elite, however, you must be prepared to brave a world far more unsightly and seamy than anything summoned by the urgent coupling of the forever climbing amour-propre of Lady Broadwell and Commander Petraeus. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, one of the last journalists in the imperial city who apparently notices anything at all, wrote one of the shrewdest political stories of 2012. It produced an immediate firestorm of not being noticed very much. The topic of the story was David Petraeus and his personal relationships in war zones, and it doesn’t matter that there was no sex in it. Even in Chandrasekaran’s quite cunning narrative, some conventional newspaper framing creeps in. Start with the first sentence: “Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, a husband-and-wife team of hawkish military analysts, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold for almost a year to work for Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.” No they didn’t, and the story that this sentence introduces makes it clear that they didn’t. The Kagans are a curious pair, only tangentially trained and experienced in their area of putative expertise. They’re like surgeons who did their postgraduate training entirely in cellular biology: their experience is not irrelevant to the tasks at hand, but it’s also not the task The

Baffler [no.22] ! 49

M o d e m & Ta b o o The person who announced at a D.C. party that she could call the CIA director and get him to do things for her turned out to be—wait for it—cashing in on her relationship.

at hand—and you kind of wish they had been taught to use a scalpel before they started cutting into your chest. Kimberly holds a PhD in ancient history; Frederick, identified by Chandrasekaran as an expert in “the Soviets,” wrote a dissertation titled “Reform for Survival: Russian Military Policy and Conservative Reform, 1825–1836.” Neither had contemporary strategic training or experience; neither has ever spent time in the military.* But the name counts: Donald Kagan, Frederick’s father, and Robert Kagan, his brother, are prominent neoconservatives who played a substantial role in the now-quaint Project for the New American Century, which, among other things, helped to choreograph the immensely wrong-headed 2003 invasion of Iraq. And the Kagans had already used their socalled expertise to argue that Petraeus should be given more resources and more power; indeed, in 2006, Frederick Kagan’s research for the American Enterprise Institute “provided the strategic underpinning for the troop surge Bush approved in January 2007.” So the Kagans’ expertise was just right. With those credentials, Kim and Fred hung out at Dave’s headquarters like old roommates, nestling down in Afghanistan for months at a time. As Chandrasekaran writes, Petraeus made the pair “de facto senior advisers, a status that afforded them numerous private meetings in his office, priority travel across the war zone and the ability to read highly secretive transcripts of intercepted Taliban communications.”

Petraeus also flattered and seduced the Kagans like a particularly shameless lover, telling an audience—in their presence—that the pair “grade my work on a daily basis.” Thus tickled, they cooed in the language of institutional love. “In March 2009, they co-wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that called for sending more forces to Afghanistan,” a conclusion curiously like the one Frederick had reached three years earlier about the Iraq mission. And the party kept going until everybody had gotten off three or four times and the front desk clerk was pounding on the door and shouting something about checkout time: The Kagans said they continued to receive salaries from their think tanks while in Afghanistan. Kim Kagan’s institute is funded in part by large defense contractors. During Petraeus’s tenure in Kabul, she sent out a letter soliciting contributions so the organization could continue its military work, according to two people who saw the letter.

On August 8, 2011, a month after he relinquished command in Afghanistan to take over at the CIA, Petraeus spoke at the institute’s first “President’s Circle” dinner, where he accepted an award from Kim Kagan. To join the President’s Circle, individuals must contribute at least $10,000 a year. The private event, held at the Newseum in Washington, also drew executives from defense contractors who fund the institute. Petraeus got a connection to a family of prominent neoconservatives who held posts

* If you have never seen Frederick Kagan speak, do yourself a favor and find some online video. You will be fairly certain, after a few minutes, that Lumbergh took Frederick Kagan’s stapler.

50 1 The Baffler [no.22]

A R N O L D ROTH

at hawkish think tanks, influenced Republican politicians, and had easy access to the leading op-ed pages; the Kagans got to draw their salaries while writing fundraising letters from his headquarters; and then they gave him an award at a dinner funded by the com-

panies that sold the products he used to make war.* The Kagans, in other words, put their jobs at influential Washington think tanks on hold to volunteer at a generalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wartime headquarters. Then Paula Broadwell wandered in, and passion took over. The

Baffler [no.22] ! 51

If you are determined to track the real governing passions of our military elite, you must be prepared to brave a world far more unsightly and seamy than anything summoned by the amour-propre of Lady Broadwell and Commander Petraeus.

9 Husky Groaning Transactional sex is about as alien to the U.S. military as heat is to fire and water is to fish. Away from home for a year and more at a time, soldiers borrow, buy, and approximate sex with anything that floats by. This is not a secret. It recurs as a reformist theme throughout the history of modern warfare; much as the Committee on Protective Work for Girls took on volunteers to patrol army posts during World War I and sternly rebuke anything too plainly feminine lurking near military personnel, the American military irritated servicemembers during the Iraq War by making payment for sex a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.** The contemporary Middle East is the military’s Las Vegas: what happens on deployment stays on deployment. It could not have been a secret that General Petraeus had a special visitor at his headquarters in Afghanistan, and it would not have been regarded as unusual or shocking. But sex in military settings also reflects power. It has a rank structure and institutional implications. In fictional armies, as in real ones, men marry into power; officers, like princes, form alliances through strategic coupling. And the ability to couple is a basis of power.***

Once an Eagle, a 1968 novel by Anton Myrer, a Marine Corps veteran of World War II, charts the course of two infantry officers in the twentieth-century U.S. Army. Army officers regard it as a how-to manual and a description of a long cultural war inside their own institution. The book describes a sustained competition for power between Sam Damon, the working-class protagonist, and Courtney Massengale, his antagonist from a privileged background. (In a triumph of military efficiency, everything you really need to know about these characters is telegraphed in their names.) Damon is kind to enlisted men, skilled in combat, bored by internal politics, and married to the hot daughter of his battlefield commander. Massengale is a preening staff officer, resolutely political and reflexively contemptuous of subordinates. He is also, of course, unable to have healthy sex with women. “He was weeping now, a dry, husky groaning,” goes a sex scene with his young wife. “Was this what men did?”**** Massengale’s manly inability with his wife is very precisely a reflection of his inability to lead men under fire despite bossing them around on post: “She had assumed he would lead in this, as he had in everything else,” his wife thinks, splayed out beneath

* In a letter to the editor, fellow think tanker Anthony H. Cordesman wrote that Chandrasekaran was being terribly unfair

about the whole thing. Indeed, Cordesman knew the Kagans while they were bunked down with Petraeus, and “never saw them act as ideologues or misuse their access.” And he was correct: writing fundraising letters from Petraeus’s headquarters and soliciting contributions from defense contractors so they could come to a dinner where the Kagans celebrated their patron, they were not misusing their access; they were using it for precisely its intended purpose.

** “Next, they’re going to tell us we can’t drink or only on the weekends,” Sgt. 1st Class Henry Mims told Stars and Stripes. *** Though some Air Force generals are known to withhold the life essence. ****“Are you in pain?” his wife asks him—twice. 52 1 The Baffler [no.22]

him but barely led at all. She gets her hands on a medical journal, later, and looks up “ejaculatio praecox.” Weeping, groaning, collapsing in a helpless pile moments after he has begun: not really a soldier. Thirty pages later, Damon is deployed overseas, sent to prepare for war. Massengale lingers in safety back home, and he ends up alone with Damon’s wife, who is brought to arousal by his strutting posture of command. They should be a couple, she realizes, suddenly knowing that she married the wrong man. “Oh, we two, together—do you realize what we could have accomplished?” Massengale asks her; his sexual power promises accomplishment, the commencement and completion of ambitious tasks. And so she finds herself “adrift on a sea of yielding,” desperate to be incorporated into his command presence as she ponders the potential of its power over other men. Other men, and therefore women: “‘Take me,’ she breathed. ‘Please. Take me now.’” And then he can’t. “His eyes were full of fear now; she could see it clear as day. . . . It was all clear to her now, what no one—not Fahrquahrson or MacArthur or the AG’s office or the Chief of Staff—knew about Courtney Massengale. She knew; but the cost, the cost of knowing—!” All of this has happened in the rain, and Massengale has covered Damon’s wife in a military jacket, his own costume from a party. She begs to be fucked while covered in the uniform of a soldier, then removes the coat and returns it, bitterly, when he fails to do the fucking. “She yanked the hussar’s jacket off her head and shoulders and flung it in his face. ‘You dirty—oh God, oh God, you coward!’” Cowardice in battle, failing to lead a uniformed subordinate: still not really a soldier. This narrative blending of sexual power with martial prowess is familiar enough that someone was bound to suggest it in the wake of the Petraeus affair, and one of the usual someones did. “History offers some rough guidelines to the real men who wore masks

of command,” wrote National Review military pundit Victor Davis Hanson—like Kimberly Kagan, an armchair strategist principally schooled in ancient history and the classics—a few days before Christmas. “In a word, many of the best were as pursuant of women as they were of the enemy—and the former did not seem to impair the latter.” David Petraeus worked in an environment in which everyone was getting something for their involvement. Volunteering, the Kagans drew salaries; getting nothing for their effort, they wrote fundraising letters for their think tanks, then used some of the cash to reward the person who gave them a desk in a war zone to write those letters. (And for good measure, the site of the awards ceremony was the Newseum, the Gannett-funded monument to the achievements of the capital’s obedient stenography-elite—a stirring vision, all in all, of access as its own reward.) The cultural knowledge surrounding all these transactions was that the best warriors pursued women like they pursued the enemy. And yet a general somehow came to have a sexual affair with his much younger hagiographer, getting something and giving something and ending up with yet another person willing to gush about his brilliance to a credulous nation. Desire, I mean to say, is not subject to the language of judicious choice.t

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The

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Grim Sleeper 3 Ter e se Svob oda

O what is that sound—a shot in the night?

Down in South L.A., a shot, then a round?

Only the cops, practicing for a fight, The cops, clowning around. O what is that shadow I see—just the toes—

next to the dumpster, that look so cold?

Only the trash, my dear, an old pair of hose, twisted, dirty, covered with mold. O why are these women being murdered again?

Why are these women now dead in a ditch?

All those years, my dear, then a shift in the brain, some kind of desperate, terrible itch. Why haven’t they arrested the neighbor? Why haven’t they sent out an alert? Why do none of them use a lie detector? Why are none of them experts? O is it the white dude they want,

is it the white dude? Is it?

No, the white dude’s run off to Vermont, my dear, and the judge can’t issue a writ.

54 1 The Baffler [no.22]

O it must be the coked-up cop caught with a prostitute

though he died before the new murders began—

That will be a bit hard to prosecute. Now they think it’s a married man. O what are they doing with our son’s DNA,

what are they doing with their chemistry?

Only the usual, dear, for the catch-of-the-day, or perhaps they’re hoping for efficiency. O where are you going now? Stay with me here.

Were the vows you made out of nothing?

It seems I’m not such a good liar, dear, I must be leaving. O our lock’s broken, the door is smashed, O the intercom’s screeching, screeching. They throw our grandkid’s toys in the trash, and their eyes are burning.

The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o

Marketpiece Theater

( BAD TV

Nicholas Kristof and Milton Friedman rescue the world 3 Anne Elizabeth Moore

n one way or another, last year’s frenzied election spectacle offered an array of occasions for our coverage-battered electorate to return to one basic question: “Where on Earth did they get that idea?” It didn’t matter, really, if what occasioned the weary refrain was news of yet another drone attack, bizarre conjecture on the biological function of women’s bodies after sexual assault, or the working thesis that fully 47 percent of the voting public was made up of zombified robots hooked on the federal dole. Amid the genuine divisions wracking our republic, our bafflement over how the political class believes we—and the world—work was truly nonpartisan. As it was designed to be. For the consensus ideology guiding issues of policy and piety was designed for popularization, and then massdisseminated through the mass-est media of all: TV. The girders of our modern political, economic, and cultural structure can be seen clearly in a nicely bookended pair of television franchises—oddly enough, for the Romneyfied Right, both broadcast on PBS. The first is Free to Choose (1980), starring the Nobel Prize–winning, kindly seeming yet fire-breathing economist Milton Friedman. The second, flashier offering is Half the Sky (2012), starring Nicholas Kristof—the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist—in an instructive series about women’s central role in the great market order. The Friedman series presented neoliberal thought as nonpartisan—even apolitical—common sense, and thus the only reasonable path to global salvation. Kristof merely glosses the utopian vision Friedman put into action: the great man’s 56 1 The Baffler [no.22]

views are self-evident, it seems, a fait accompli only in need of a bit of pizzazz. Yet the beams upholding our political and economic beliefs are shoddily constructed of fluff and dreams, lies and unlikelihoods, ego and spite. Come, let us watch them crumble, together.

What We All Want The economic mythology born in Free to Choose was conceived in 1977, when Bob Chitester, general manager of the Erie, Pennsylvania, PBS affiliate, approached Friedman about filming a free-market counterpoint to liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s series The Age of Uncertainty, then airing on the network. Friedman jumped at the chance; history was made. In ten hour-long episodes, he laid out the principles of what came to be called Reaganomics—and later, the globalized order of neoliberal free trade. A year after the show’s first broadcast in 1980—with Friedman acting as unofficial economic adviser to the newly elected president— Reagan met with U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher; the two world leaders entered their own special relationship (the actual diplomatic term)—busting unions, slashing taxes, and privatizing substantial swaths of the public sector. The alliance was merely the first and highest-profile affirmation of Friedman’s new world order. Today, leaders of former socialist and communist states commonly claim that Free to Choose furnished the conceptual building blocks for their reforms. The reach of Friedman’s television show marked, among other things, the triumph of market Orwellianism. Once Free to Choose

The Friedman series presented neoliberal thought as nonpartisan common senseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the only reasonable path to global salvation. Kristof merely glosses the utopian vision Friedman put into action.

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

The

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aired, freedom meant economic license. Choice meant market competition. And people meant consumers. The basic metaphors governing the world shifted, with value now conferred in accordance with the new terminology. Free to Choose hardly offered a portrait of freedom. Instead, it drove home the totalizing ambitions of Friedman’s vision. Each episode (“The Tyranny of Control,” “Created Equal,” “What’s Wrong with Our Schools?”) begins with a travelogue: a short, grainy film showing Friedman in some remote or developed corner of the world; in the former setting, he utters laconic dispatches about poverty and red tape, and in the latter, he rhapsodizes anapestically about freedom and government deregulation. (Milton’s wife, Rose, also an economist, has an associate producer’s credit on the show and coauthored a book of the same title based on series transcripts, but does not speak when onscreen.) We then cut to the Harper Library at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s institutional home base. There Friedman fields queries from fellow economists (and other experts, on occasion), who provide him opportunity to explicate his theories regarding the market-challenged state of the world. Robert McKenzie, a Canadian-born psephologist and professor of politics and sociology, moderates. McKenzie’s intervention proves necessary more than once. The diminutive Friedman possessed an affable, camera-friendly manner, but in intellectual terms, he was wiliness personified. (Interviewer Lawrence Spivak, the journalist who cofounded Meet the Press, practically says as much in the final episode of the series, “How to Stay Free.”) When Friedman died in 2006, and then again last year on what would have been his hundredth birthday, Friedman was eulogized for his supposed ability to make complicated economic principles comprehensible to average folk. It is more accurate to call him a master polemicist—if a terminally myopic one. (Friedman was known in his circle to make only collect calls when 58 1 The Baffler [no.22]

phoning people long-distance.) In every episode of Free to Choose, someone calls him out on basic misstatements of fact. But Friedman doesn’t let the cavilers get him down. He just smiles, widely and paternalistically, chuckles, and reframes the debate—usually as one that the dissenter does not fully comprehend. His leaps in logic are often neatly sidestepped as McKenzie follows his mandate to keep the debate on track—the “track” being Friedman’s economic propositions as stated, and not the way they redefine notions central to American thought. Other leaps are visual in nature: most episodes provide viewers an insane hodgepodge of things that seem relevant, things that are interesting, and things that, it is assumed, everyone desires. In one segment, for example, Friedman is clad in a dapper suit and seated atop a massive stack of gold bars. Clearly, his policies will be lucrative for all. The visual and verbal non sequiturs multiply: Marlene Dietrich’s legs! A gainfully employed black construction worker! India! Muhammad Ali! Young white students playing classical music! Of course, amid this Google-image-searchstyle representation of market-fostered desire, less bedazzling moments of clarity seep through. Women and people of color, for example, are excluded from most panels, but featured heavily in the fourth segment, the one on welfare and Medicaid. This casting decision amounts to an acknowledgement that market logic works only for certain folks, but Friedman is too wrapped up in his own avuncularity to parse the symbolism here. No one brings up Friedman’s consulting gig with the recently installed Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet until the fifth segment. When political scientist Frances Fox Piven mentions the Chicago economics school’s troubling and otherwise high-profile role in advancing the violent suppression of dissent and the rapid privatization of public resources in the country, Friedman interrupts her to provide an ag-

Friedman was eulogized for his supposed ability to make complicated economic principles comprehensible to average folk. It is more accurate to call him a master polemicist—if a terminally myopic one.

9 grandizing view of the brutal regime. When Piven brings it up again, McKenzie changes the subject. The net effect of the whole decontextualized exchange is to suggest that Piven might be crazy. At no point does Friedman look discomfited, let alone shaken. Segments thereafter become chaotically detached from reality, but the descent into madness bottoms out in episode eight. “Who Protects the Worker?” opens with a wacky account of how unions hold back laborers and thwart economic prosperity, citing Hippocrates as an ally in the present-day struggle to free the world of organized labor. Cut to an ambulance arriving at the scene of a medical emergency. Cut to Joe Dolphin, president of a private ambulance service; he’s with Friedman and Hippocrates on this one. Cut to actual dolphins. Cut to the vice president of Sea World—another union foe. The viewer is left with a vague sense of PBS-approved edification—we’ve made a series of twists and turns, leapt the span from ancient to modern history, and traversed a couple of continents. But it’s not at all clear how we got here, and the underlying logic behind the segment’s central claim—that labor unions harm the potential for worker prosperity—is never fully explained. As would soon be the case with MTV’s stylistic innovations in the field of consumer-friendly montages (as well as those that would follow several decades later, Tumblr and Pinterest), the curious visual semiotics of want-for-want’s-sake simply perpetrates a logic that casual viewers are urged to accept as self-evident. Beyond the show’s visual innovations, it was clear from the start that Friedman had hit

upon a ridiculously successful formula—and business model. Viewership of Free to Choose was reportedly larger than that of Masterpiece Theatre, PBS’s top program at the time, which then boasted some three million domestic viewers per episode. Friedman’s show was also a huge financial success—as one could expect for a talk show lauding multinational corporations as protectors of core American freedoms, however unhinged that show’s presentation format may be. Friedman kept production costs low by improvising from loose outlines on camera, thereby eliminating the need to pay writers, but the real boon came in on the bottom line: the Friedmans’ junkets were financed privately by PepsiCo, General Motors, and Bechtel, among others, saving the Public Broadcasting System thousands of dollars while privatizing a tiny corner of it. If Friedman’s policies were to be implemented, all these companies would profit handsomely. (Spoiler alert: They were. They did.) Meanwhile, the book version of Free to Choose became a top-selling nonfiction title in the United States for 1980, and was eventually translated into seventeen languages. The series was also broadcast in several major national markets (except France, as Rose noted with contempt in the Friedmans’ autobiography). And in 1990, PBS recut and reaired Free to Choose, slicing the number of episodes in half, updating the discussion panel, and adding a slew of celebrity hosts. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Allen, and Ronald Reagan were just a few of the hulking arbiters of the now-accepted market consensus who turned up to reframe and amplify Friedman’s arguments. It, too, was a resounding success. The

Baffler [no.22] ! 59

M o d e m & Ta b o o But to appreciate just how instrumental Free to Choose was in changing the world, one need look no further than the later career of its host network, the Public Broadcasting Service. In 1981, with the same sort of marketosculating passion that Friedman heartily endorsed, Congress and the FCC began deregulating media ownership. Television licenses were extended, and lawmakers increased the number of television outlets any single broadcast enterprise could own. Six years later, the FCC overturned the Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated local community representation and contrasting points of view in broadcast media. President Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 further expanded the rights of private entities to buy up more media outlets, which brought about unprecedented media consolidation. PBS, only ten years old in 1980, quickly began allowing for more and more privately financed programs to develop broadcast sponsorship messages—making the public network virtually indistinguishable from advertising-supported networks by the time Free to Choose was rebroadcast in 1990. Chitester’s production company, named (of course) the Free to Choose Network, was there to cash in from the start, under a mission statement seemingly written by Friedman himself: “To use accessible and entertaining media to build popular support for personal, economic, and political freedom. We believe these freedoms are interdependent and must be sustained by the rule of law,” it reads, noting elsewhere that this agenda is distinctly nonpartisan. The 501(c)(3) company offers both versions of Free to Choose for free online streaming, sells educational videos, and sponsors a Winning Ideas Weekend, where folks of all ages can learn about “the ideas that give rise to free and prosperous societies,” according to the company’s website. The Free to Choose Network is also behind izzit.org, “a not-for-profit providing more than 300,000 teachers with engaging educational videos 60 1 The Baffler [no.22]

and materials promoting critical thinking and thoughtful discussion among students.” Perhaps it goes without saying that some of this programming, available for cheap to increasingly profit-minded educational institutions and broadcast entities, offers truth-challenged content on climate change and other subjects likely close to Friedman’s heart. In 2010, for example, Free to Choose Media released a three-hour documentary on Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz called Turmoil and Triumph, financed by corporations that had retained Shultz as a board member. (He also introduced the 1990 Free to Choose segment “The Tyranny of Control.”) On July 12, 2010, before the program aired, FAIR Media pointed out to PBS that it had previously pulled programming when funders were too closely aligned with its subject matter; labor unions, lesbian rights organizations, and domestic violence groups, for example, had been reined in over similar allegations. The ombudsman of the network agreed that broadcasting such biased programming likely represented a conflict of interest. Yet the Free to Choose Network’s Turmoil and Triumph aired unaltered on that putative broadcast oracle of liberalism, PBS. Some critics of the rightward drift of national economic policy seem inclined to downplay Friedman’s successful popularization of economic debate as the work of a libertarian iconoclast. Yet to grasp the full reach of Friedman’s legacy, we need to reckon with something far more banal, and therefore more terrifying: Free to Choose gave America a new guiding consensus, the common-sense view among liberals and conservatives alike that market regulation unfairly limited the potential for liberation throughout the world. Impervious to both logic and fact, and viral before viral media existed, Free to Choose forged a new cultural accord on the uncontested reign of the market that had not yet existed in quite this way before. In truth, there was barely a

The viewer is left with a vague sense of PBS-approved edification— we’ve made a series of twists and turns, leapt the span from ancient to modern history, and traversed a couple of continents.

9 national news story in 2012 that wasn’t presaged by one of the Free to Choose episodes— presented thirty-two years earlier as educational programming.

Sky’s the Limit Yet the executives at PBS apparently decided that, on the eve of the 2012 election, American viewers must be reminded of the true path to global freedom. So on the first two days of October, Nicholas Kristof’s fiercely neoliberal series Half the Sky reprised the tried-and-true Friedman formula, in content, form, and financing. Kristof, a lauded op-ed columnist for the New York Times, might seem at first blush an unlikely standard-bearer for the Friedman televisual tradition—but that is exactly the point. After three decades of steady high-market consensus in American culture and politics, the formerly doctrinaire libertarian Friedman and the putatively pragmatic liberal Kristof are now advancing the same policy objectives. The bestselling book on which the series is based (which Kristof coauthored with his wife, journalist turned banker Sheryl WuDunn) hits all the high notes of market triumphalism masquerading as considered social policy; its subtitle is Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, not Ending Gender-Based Oppression Because It Sucks and Is Immoral. Half the Sky presents a litany of reforms tailored for a market-besotted (but, you know, concerned) viewing public. The show focuses obsessively on a distinctly Westernized notion of education (and the entrepreneurial opportunities that duly market-reformed schools provide), casts state-crafted barriers to market freedom as human rights issues, and under-

stands women and girls in terms of “untapped” economic returns. “Time and time again,” WuDunn says, “what impressed us the most is that girls represent an opportunity. Think of all that untapped potential.” Yet in the great tradition of debate-reframing pioneered by Friedman, Kristof’s show displays a chronic lack of interest in women’s lived experiences under conditions of poverty. Stripped of its you-gogirl trappings, the basic argument is the same: more people should have access to the free market. Even the core format of the presentation—famous and flashy guest presenters, gritty travelogue footage, and a rotating corps of state-sanctioned or academic weigher-inners— is lifted from the Friedman series script. Indeed, Kristof remains one of the Times’ most ardent parroters of free-market dogma. From his prestigious perch in the paper’s opinion section, he has downplayed the grievances of striking workers, single-handedly revitalized the Welfare Queen scare, and thumped the tub for neoliberal educational reform— i.e., the gradual privatization of the American public school system. On screen, however, Kristof is happy to let others share the spotlight—and he has plenty of celebrity takers. George Clooney, in the Arnold Schwarzenegger role, opens the series. While images of a young female rape victim in Sierra Leone appear on screen, Clooney’s voiceover explains that stories such as hers are “interesting.” But the real story, we quickly learn, is Kristof himself: “Nick is the guy doing the legwork,” Clooney proclaims. “The celebrity involvement may be able to amplify the story,” the actor adds. “That’s all. That’s all we can do!” Clooney, long known to covet elected The

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office, says this in the surprised tone of a man who has been asked to do more but has regrettably proven incapable. Of course, in a given year, George Clooney earns close to a full percentage point of Sierra Leone’s entire GDP from his film work alone, so he could do more if he wanted to. But what he wants is for viewers to honor the underappreciated work of a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Times columnist while images of young brown women living under severe repression flash across the screen, context-free. (The corollary footage in Free to Choose has Friedman droning on about the failures of Social Security to promote market competition while brown urban youth play gleefully around an open fire hydrant.) If this were a publicly funded project, a sense of accountability might have crept into the script. But like much of what now passes for public media, the film was funded by a coterie of foundations—longstanding ones, like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and

Ford Foundations, but newer players, too: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, the IKEA Foundation, and the Nike Foundation. These are all, in other words, philanthropic arms of businesses that have derived enormous profits by taking advantage of some of the same women in developing nations we meet over the ensuing four hours. Yet what happens during this pair of twohour episodes is difficult to parse. Bookended by Clooney’s boosterism, the series is divided into six forty-minute segments, each filmed in a different developing nation now struggling to emerge from recent geopolitical and human rights conflicts. Each installment boasts a celebrity guest, a host activist, and a star victim. These last play support roles in the narrative, rather like Rose Friedman in Free to Choose: each designated victim is easy to overlook because she is so often spoken for. So even though it’s a documentary, about a New York

P. S . M U E L L ER

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The Friedmans’ junkets were financed privately by PepsiCo, General Motors, and Bechtel, saving the Public Broadcasting System thousands of dollars while privatizing a tiny corner of it.

9 Times journalist, on PBS, it’s hard to tell what exactly transpired, and what did not. In journalism, activism, and foreign aid—arguably the three pillars of Half the Sky—the distinction between fact and fiction should be clear, but it collapses completely. Let’s look, for example, at the second segment, filmed in Cambodia, in which movie star Meg Ryan and local activist Somaly Mam join Kristof in saving victims of sex trafficking. Much of the episode focuses on a woman named Somana, formerly Long Pros, of the Somaly Mam Foundation’s Voices for Change program, an NGO that trains survivors of sex trafficking in advocacy and public speaking. Since 2005, when she first moved to a shelter run by another of Mam’s foundations, Somana has served as a high-profile symbol of the human trafficking problem in Cambodia. She is also an ardent and outspoken activist on sexual health and women’s rights issues. Her disability—she is missing an eye—marks Somana as one who has survived. Heroically. She’s met with Hillary Clinton. She’s been featured on Oprah. With prodding from Kristof, Somana reveals her tragic tale on camera to a group of sex workers she seeks to aid. “My eye was stabbed by a brothel owner,” she says, describing continued abuse, rape, and degradation in the wake of the attack. But this was only the start of her story, she tells the young women gathered around her, as the crowd’s mingled sympathy and horror mounts: “Believe it or not, when I returned home, my mother and father didn’t want me around.” That’s not what Somana’s parents told the Cambodia Daily, which questioned the eye-stabbing tale soon

after it aired on PBS. They describe a healthy relationship with their daughter, who, they say, visits regularly. Her facial deformity is explained by the removal of a tumor in 2005, they claim. Dr. Pok Thorn of the Takeo Eye Hospital confirmed that the girl had undergone surgery and recovery in his care. Other doctors the Daily contacted reported that her scar did not appear to be consistent with violent trauma; the police chief of the antihuman trafficking bureau in Phnom Penh similarly reported that he had never received word of such a stabbing. Indeed, an earlier version of Somana’s story left the incident out entirely: in 2008, she told another writer her face had been kicked in, and doctors had removed her eye as a result. A spokesperson for the Somaly Mam Foundation apologized and announced days later that Somana would be demoted pending a review of her case. This outcome was especially unfortunate, given Somaly’s own history of truth-bending. In April 2012, Mam presented false information to the UN, stating that when her center was raided in 2004, eight girls were murdered. She later apologized, claiming ambiguous statements had been misinterpreted. No such deaths have ever been reported, although anti-trafficking police acknowledge that a number of women did leave the shelter at that time, perhaps willingly. Earlier, in her 2007 autobiography The Road of Lost Innocence, Mam claimed her own daughter had been kidnapped; Mam’s ex-husband disputes that claim. The ambiguity mirrors an even more pressing issue. Several of Mam’s—and, by extension, Kristof’s and the New York Times’—“rescue The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o The problem is not just that Kristof is a bad journalist for failing to see clear inaccuracies, follow up with questions, and provide readers an accurate look at the developing world, or any world. (Although, of course, he is.) The deeper problem is that the truth—here, and in Free to Choose—isn’t valued.

9 missions” have been, well, not so rescuey. Together, Mam and Kristof have raided brothels and reportedly saved girls allegedly abducted by sex traffickers. Shortly after the duo’s wellhyped adventures, though, many “saved” girls simply returned to their jobs. (Remember when Kristof “bought” two girls from a brothel in 2004—a crime, by the way, for which he has never been charged? One of them later returned.) Mam claims that rescued women suffer something like Stockholm syndrome, but another explanation may be even more distressing for certain readers: some sex workers prefer their jobs to the available alternatives. In Cambodia, there is really only one other choice for women: jobs in the too-lowwage-to-survive garment factories. Rehabilitation, as shown in Half the Sky, includes sewing lessons. Reports have surfaced that some supposed trafficking victims are held against their will at Mam’s centers. (“Don’t talk to me about sewing machines. Talk to me about workers’ rights!” is a rallying cry for sex workers in Southeast Asia.) The problem is not just that Kristof is a bad journalist for failing to see clear inaccuracies, follow up with questions, and provide readers an accurate look at the developing world, or any world. (Although, of course, he is.) The deeper problem is that the truth—here, and in Free to Choose—isn’t valued. Somana’s lies, delivered as recruitment speeches to the women she aims to enlist to Mam’s cause, may have been learned from Mam herself. Certainly Mam did not seek to uncover them. And who 64 1 The Baffler [no.22]

can blame either? There are too few options for women’s employment in Cambodia, as the nation moves into the wage-and-rights-indifferent vanguard of today’s global capitalism. Somaly Mam’s funding comes largely, if not exclusively, from American sources—which, in turn, come to her organizations through Kristof’s regular coverage. The service Mam provides in exchange for Kristof’s attention may seem distasteful to you, but the narrative sells papers. That’s market logic. Or as Friedman himself famously put it: “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are . . . it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.” What you want to buy is the Superman myth, although you will settle for rags-toriches inspiration and good old lesbian porn, which, luckily enough, is also on offer in Half the Sky. Indeed, the final episode is a crude celebration of market viability, starring ladies. Olivia Wilde, the smartest celebrity in the Kristof retinue, arrives alone at the Umoja Women’s Village in Kenya. They welcome her with a vagina song. They visit an actual market. They devise business plans. They talk microlending. They position U.S. trade as a central component of any successful business. It’s like a girl-on-girl slashfic version of Free to Choose. In the end viewers are left not with an organization to support, a child to sponsor, or

an accurate understanding of the world useful for eradicating further injustice. No: They’re left with only Half the Sky—the book. It is the primary focus of the whole enterprise, in fact, netting more mentions than any single victim, activist, or celebrity. In the six-segment, four-hour complete run, Nicholas Kristof, the brand, gets six plugs. And Half the Sky, the book, gets nine.

Guns, Sweat, and Butter In 2009, Kristof devoted a Times column to extolling the virtues of Cambodian sweatshops. “The central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough,” he wrote on January 14. His argument was that labor standards in trade agreements limited the ability of multinational corporations to offer jobs to workers in developing nations. He could have noted that Cambodia’s labor standards and trade agreements already ensure that licensed garment factories are definitely not sweatshops, which is kind of true. (I have elsewhere debunked both the modern usage of the term sweatshop and the apparently willful misapprehension of it by Western journalists.) He also could have used the term “employ” instead of “exploit,” but in both instances he is going for racy. Clearly, Kristof learned polemics from the master: Milton Friedman. After Friedman’s death, an American Progress eulogy noted that the economist once asked pointedly: “Is anyone forcing those Vietnamese to work in Nike factories at the point of a gun?” Perhaps not the Vietnamese, no. But in Cambodia, maybe—and while the two Southeast Asian neighbor states differ in many ways, the trade agreements that bind them to the United States, and to the multinational companies that profit from them on American soil, are similar. We know this much: some Cambodian sex workers are being held against their will, and guns are common enough in the country that it’s not a stretch to

believe that they’re used by guards—at least until the coerced women in question get jobs in the garment factories. And in February 2012, three garment workers were shot by the governor of a southern province for protesting wages at half the level they need to survive. Fear of a gun, fear of starvation: the two are fungible. Nike, which operates in Cambodia and Vietnam, could simply raise its workers’ pay. Certainly a Kristof-penned New York Times column would do wonders to bolster the effort. An initiative like that, and the standard it would set for other garment manufacturers, would significantly increase the likelihood that women would willingly leave the sex trade. Instead, the Nike Foundation deploys its fortune to fund Half the Sky, ensuring that women in developing nations stay in poverty, ensuring their need for a commercial sex industry, ensuring itself a feel-good name-check, ensuring Nicholas Kristof a job, and ensuring an enduring legacy for Milton Friedman. Or, you know, for as long as this shoddy construction holds.t

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M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD IDEA

The Meme Hustler Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk 3 Evgeny Morozov

hile the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. This is not to deny that many of our latest gadgets and apps are fantastic. But to fixate on technological innovation alone is to miss the more subtle—and more consequential—ways in which a clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason. In the last decade or so, Silicon Valley has triggered its own wave of linguistic innovation, a wave so massive that a completely new way to analyze and describe the world—a silicon mentality of sorts—has emerged in its wake. The old language has been rendered useless; our pre-Internet vocabulary, we are told, needs an upgrade. Fortunately, Silicon Valley, that never-drying well of shoddy concepts and dubious paradigms—from wiki-everything to i-something, from e-nothing to open-anything—is ready to help. Like a good priest, it’s always there to console us with the promise of a better future, a glitzier roadmap, a sleeker vocabulary.

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Silicon Valley has always had a thing for priests; Steve Jobs was the cranky pope it deserved. Today, having mastered the art of four-hour workweeks and gluten-free lunches in outdoor cafeterias, our digital ministers are beginning to preach on subjects far beyond the funky world of drones, 3-D printers, and smart toothbrushes. That we would eventually be robbed of a meaningful language to discuss technology was entirely predictable. That the conceptual imperialism of Silicon Valley would also pollute the rest of our vocabulary wasn’t.

A clique of techno-entrepreneurs has hijacked our language and, with it, our reason.

9 The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with reli-

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M o d e m & Ta b o o gious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.

racing O’Reilly’s intellectual footprint is no easy task, in part because it’s so vast.* Through his books, blogs, and conferences, he’s nurtured a whole generation of technology thinkers, from Clay Shirky to Cory Doctorow. A prolific blogger and a compulsive Twitter user with more than 1.6 million followers, O’Reilly has a knack for writing articulate essays about technological change. His essay on “Web 2.0” elucidated a basic philosophy of the Internet in a way accessible to both academics and venture capitalists; it boasts more than six thousand references on Google Scholar—not bad for a non-academic author. He also invests in start-ups—the very start-ups that he celebrates in his public advocacy—through a venture fund, which, like most things O’Reilly, also bears his name. A stylish and smooth-talking self-promoter with a philosophical take on everything, O’Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Lévy of Route 101, the favorite court philosopher of the TED elites. His impressive intellectual stature in the Valley can probably be attributed

to the simple fact that he is much better read than your average tech entrepreneur. His constant references to the learned men of yesteryear—from “Archilochus, the Greek fabulist” to Ezra Pound—make him stand out from all those Silicon Valley college dropouts who don’t know their Plotinus from their Pliny. A onetime recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant to translate Greek fables— “Socrates is [one of] my constant companions”—he has the air of a man ready to grapple with the Really Big Questions of the Universe (his Harvard degree in classics certainly comes in handy). While he recently told Wired that he doesn’t “really give a shit if literary novels go away” because “they’re an elitist pursuit,” O’Reilly is also quick to acknowledge that novels have profoundly shaped his own life. In 1981 the young O’Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Alas, O’Reilly and the dead Germans parted ways long ago. These days, he’s busy changing the world; any list of unelected technocrats who are shaping the future of American politics would have his name at the very top. A Zelig-like presence on both sides of the Atlantic, he hobnobs with government officials in Washington and London, advising them

* In researching this essay, I tried to read all of O’Reilly’s published writings: blog posts, essays, tweets. I read many of his

interviews and pored over the comments he left on blogs and news sites. I watched all his talks on YouTube. But I decided against interviewing him. First of all, I don’t believe in interviewing spin doctors: the interviewer learns nothing new while the interviewee gets an extraordinary opportunity to spin the story even before it’s published. Second, my goal in writing this essay was not to profile O’Reilly. Of course, I could have told you all about the wonderful jams—plum, blackberry, raspberry, peach—that he likes to make in his spare time. I left out such trivia on purpose, as my main interest has been O’Reilly the thinker, not O’Reilly the human being. Serious thinkers can be judged by their published output alone. Third, the only two emails that I ever received from him hinted at his penchant for heavy-handed manipulation of the media. The first email arrived long before I started working on this essay. It was a complaint about something I had written about him in the past, a throwaway line in a long essay—a complaint I believe to be without merit. The second email came right after I finished writing the first draft, which, by coincidence, happened to be on the very day that O’Reilly and I had a brief but feisty exchange on Twitter (he initiated it). In that second email, he offered to explain all his positions to me face to face—an opportunity I turned down, having just spent three months of my life reading his tweets, blog posts, and essays. That said, I have no doubt that everything in this essay will be meme-engineered against me.

68 1 The Baffler [no.22]

A stylish and smooth-talking self-promoter with a philosophical take on everything, Tim O’Reilly is the Bernard-Henri Lévy of Route 101, the favorite court philosopher of the TED elites.

9 on the Next Big Thing. O’Reilly’s thinking on “Government 2.0” has influenced many bureaucrats in the Obama administration, particularly those tasked with promoting the amorphous ideal of “open government”— not an easy thing to do in an administration bent on prosecuting whistle-blowers and dispatching drones to “we-can’t-tell-you-whereexactly” destinations. O’Reilly is also active in discussions about the future of health care, having strong views on what “health 2.0” should be like. None of this is necessarily bad. On first impression, O’Reilly seems like a much-needed voice of reason—even of civic spirit—in the shallow and ruthless paradise-ghetto that is Silicon Valley. Compared to ultra-libertarian technology mavens like Peter Thiel and Kevin Kelly, O’Reilly might even be mistaken for a bleeding-heart liberal. He has publicly endorsed Obama and supported many of his key reforms. He has called on young software developers—the galley slaves of Silicon Valley—to work on “stuff that matters” (albeit preferably in the private sector). He has written favorably about the work of little-known local officials transforming American cities. O’Reilly once said that his company’s vision is to “change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators,” while his own personal credo is to “create more value than you capture.” (And he has certainly captured a lot of it: his publishing empire, once in the humble business of producing technical manuals, is now worth $100 million.) Helping likeminded people find each other, sharpen their message, form a social movement, and change the world: this is what O’Reilly’s empire is all about. Its website even boasts of its “long his-

tory of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.” Who says that spiritual gurus can’t have their own venture funds? O’Reilly’s personal journey was not atypical for Silicon Valley. In a 2004 essay about his favorite books (published in Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell, brought out by O’Reilly Media), O’Reilly confessed that, as a young man, he had “hopes of writing deep books that would change the world.” O’Reilly credits a book of science fiction documenting the struggles of a young girl against a corporate-dominated plutocracy (Rissa Kerguelen by F. M. Busby) with helping him abandon his earlier dream of revolutionary writing and enter the “fundamentally trivial business [of] technical writing.” The book depicted entrepreneurship as a “subversive force,” convincing O’Reilly that “in a world dominated by large companies, it is the smaller companies that keep freedom alive, with economics at least one of the battlegrounds.” This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology. The Randian undertones in O’Reilly’s thinking are hard to miss, even as he flaunts his liberal credentials. “There’s a way in which the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,” he wrote in 2012. But it’s not just the hacker as hero that O’Reilly is so keen to celebrate. His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable The

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obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword. Hiding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism that we associate with Randian characters. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness. However, it’s not his politics that makes O’Reilly the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley; a burgeoning enclave of Randian thought, it brims with far nuttier cases. O’Reilly’s mastery of public relations, on the other hand, is unrivaled and would put many of Washington’s top spin doctors to shame. No one has done more to turn important debates about technology—debates that used to be about rights, ethics, and politics—into kumbaya celebrations of the entrepreneurial spirit while making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject. As O’Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

’Reilly got his start in business in 1978 when he launched a consulting firm that specialized in technical writing. Six years later, it began retaining rights to some of the manuals it was producing for individual clients and gradually branched out into more mainstream publishing. By the mid-1990s, O’Reilly had achieved some moderate success in Silicon Valley. He was well-off, having found a bestseller in The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog and having sold the Global Network Navigator—possibly the first Internet portal to feature paid banner advertising (“the first commercial website” as O’Reilly describes it today)—to AOL. It was the growing popularity of “open source software” that turned O’Reilly into a national (and, at least in geek circles, in70 1 The Baffler [no.22]

As O’Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.

9 ternational) figure. “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reilly. This is where he tested all his trademark discursive interventions: hosting a summit to define the concept, penning provocative essays to refine it, producing a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivating a network of thinkers to proselytize it. It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing. Open source software was born out of an ideological cleavage between two groups that, at least before 1998, had been traditionally lumped together. In one corner stood a group of passionate and principled geeks, led by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public—but even this seemed revolutionary compared to what one could do with most proprietary software sold at the time. Software that ensured the aforementioned four rights was dubbed “free software.” It was “free” thanks to its association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”; there was no theoretical opposition to charging money for building and maintaining such software. To provide legal cover, Stallman invented an ingenious license that relied on copyright law to suspend

M A R K S . FI S H E R

its own most draconian provisions—a legal trick that came to be known as “copyleft.” GPL (short for “General Public License”) has become the most famous and widely used of such “copyleft” licenses. From its very beginning in the early 1980s, Stallman’s movement aimed to produce a free software alternative to proprietary operating systems like Unix and Microsoft Windows and proprietary software like Microsoft Office. Stallman’s may not have been the best software on offer, but some sacrifice of technological efficiency was a price worth paying for emancipation. Some discomfort might even be desirable, for Stallman’s goal, as he put it in his 1998 essay “Why ‘Free Software’ is Better Than ‘Open Source,’” was to ask “people to think about things they might rather ignore.” Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric iden-

tification presented no major mysteries. Stallman is highly idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, and there are many geeks who don’t share his agenda. Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills. Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association. By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand. The timing was right. Netscape had just marked its capitulation to Microsoft in the so-called Browser Wars and promised both that all future versions of Netscape Communicator would be released free of charge and that its code would also be made publicly available. A few months later, O’Reilly organized a much-publicized summit, where a number of handpicked loyalists—Silicon democracy in action!—voted for The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o “open source” as their preferred label. Stallman was not invited. The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time. In 1997, even before the coup, Eric Raymond—a close associate of O’Reilly, a passionate libertarian, and the founder of a group with the self-explanatory title “Geeks with Guns”—delivered a brainy talk called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which foresaw the emergence of a new, radically collaborative way to make software. (In 1999, O’Reilly turned it into a successful book.) Emphasizing its highly distributed nature, Raymond captured the essence of open source software in a big-paradigm kind of way that could spellbind McKinsey consultants and leftist academics alike. In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda. As Raymond himself put it in 1999, “what we needed to mount was in effect a marketing campaign,” one that “would require marketing techniques (spin, imagebuilding, and re-branding) to make it work.” This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined. Instead, it put all the emphasis on how it was pursuing those ends—in an extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination. In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component. According to Raymond, “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results.” O’Reilly concurred. “I don’t think it’s a religious issue. It’s really about how do we actually encourage and spark innovation,” he announced a decade later. While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical 72 1 The Baffler [no.22]

dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia. Even before the coup, O’Reilly occupied an ambiguous—and commercially pivotal—place in the free software community. On the one hand, he published manuals that helped to train new converts to the cause. On the other hand, those manuals were pricey. They were also of excellent quality, which, as Stallman once complained, discouraged the community from producing inexpensive alternatives. Ultimately, however, the disagreement between Stallman and O’Reilly—and the latter soon became the most visible cheerleader of the open source paradigm—probably had to do with their very different roles and aspirations. Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate. O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events, especially at a time when some analysts were beginning to worry—and for good reason, as it turned out—that the tech industry was about to collapse. The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR. To make his narrative about open source software credible to a public increasingly fascinated by the Internet, O’Reilly produced a highly particularized account of the Internet that subsequently took on a life of its own. In just a few years, that narrative became the standard way to talk about Internet history, giving it the kind of neat intellectual coherence that it never actually had. A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform. (Continued on page 125.)

Underground 3 Joh n K ee n e

Listen: the squealing melody like someone’s baby as the train lumbers into the station. I am listening to a song but I can barely hear myself listening. What are you writing about? Nothing and everything at once. The last best test of existence. The cry the wheels make as they begin to brake. So many songs that sound like someone shouting. The young men who keep leaping in front of the train. The conductor who can’t pull the brake fast enough to stop the train. The people watching them soar like magpies into the air under the archways, their ankles holding fast to the crowd’s last glimpse. Crossroads. That was a song I sang often in childhood. I am listening but I can barely hear you. Perhaps because the city is suffering once more from a metabolic disorder. Head on head. They are gathering at the entrance with petitions and placards. Writing, waiting. Desire has a gift for implicating itself. Your touch pulls a trip switch in my throat. Mice shrieking down the black, iron track. Wherever they disappear to. Without resemblance. What are you writing? Whatever lives on the other side of a dollar.

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The man half-asleep and raggedy and hungry holding his heart in a sack on the bench. Nobody watches him fly, little magpie: listen. The blues sweating through the phone’s radio. What is the name of that song? Everything at once. One for sorrow, two for mirth. They are gathering on the platforms with drums in their hands. That rhythm is the kind that makes me dance. Waiting, exhaling. Only in the darkness could I feel myself. Are you listening? I know a song that is written in breath. A blues as bright as molten lead. Sometimes when you enter me I can hear the truth. What are you writing? Under, under. Three for a wedding, four for birth. On the other side of the hidden doorways when the trains used to run. Not that tunnel, the other one. Often in its darkness I could dream myself. Are you listening? Dogs whispering down the gray, iron track. The live-long day. Where it’s darkest under the archway it’s harder to see me. The future is no longer trying to steal away. Life at the beginning of the end of the tunnel. Somebody’s heart on the seat beside me. 74 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Waiting, breathing. What were you writing? When we enter each other we cry out together. The last best test of existence. An old woman holding fast the hands of a lover trying to leap through the next window of his existence. It is possible we are all suffering from a metabolic disorder. That rhythm is the kind that fills my pants. I am not sleeping, just listening. Can you hear me? Static. I have no more dollars to hand out, so I offer you my skin. You never sang that song or the last one. The first blues, hot as a brand, is the best one. Plying the track with imprecation and agony. No one is listening, they can barely hear me. Gathering everything left on the bench. I am writing nothing, nothing at all. The train is approaching like a past mystery. The lovers retreating quick to the wall. The man rising and steadying himself as if called by a bell. The brakes as they slide into their blues-like squeal. The chanters growing louder in their appeal. The young man who announces this is his final ride on this train. My heart is so close you can hum its refrain. I am inside, starting, singing. What I am writing: Hold fast, my ankles.

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M o d e m & Ta b o o

Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism

( BAD BOOK

3 Heather Havrilesky

hile we are still recovering from the trauma that finance capital has inflicted on our public world, a late-capitalist fairy tale manages the pain in the more private and intimate reaches of the sexual daydream. In one version of the story, a wide-eyed mermaid cleverly disguises her essential self in order to win the heart of a prince (The Little Mermaid). In another, a hooker with a heart of gold navigates her way to a happy ending by offering some happy endings of her own (Pretty Woman). Or there’s the sassy secretary who shakes her moneymaker all the way to the corner office (Working Girl). Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper. Forget that E. L. James’s threebook series captures the intricacies of BDSM about as effectively as a “Whip Me!” Barbie doll decked out in a ball gag, dog collar, and assless leather chaps. Although admirers of the series sometimes credit it with liberating female desire by reimagining pornography for ordinary women (and introducing them to the unmatched thrills of leather riding crops and hard spankings), the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey isn’t really about dominance or bondage or even sex or love, despite all the Harlequin Romance–worthy character names. No, what Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performanceenhancing drugs. Just as magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Chic, and Oui (speaking of aspirational names) have effectively equated the moment of erotic indulgence with the ul76 1 The Baffler [no.22]

timate consumer release, a totem of the final elevation into amoral privilege, James’s trilogy represents the latest installment in the commodified sex genre. The money shot is just that: the moment when our heroine realizes she’s been ushered into the hallowed realm of the 1 percent, once and for all.

So Brazen The fantasy life of Fifty Shades certainly isn’t focused on the sublime erotic encounter. The sex becomes hopelessly repetitive sometime around the third or fourth of the novels’ countless, monotonously naughty encounters. Each dalliance begins with the same provocative come-on: the naive college graduate Anastasia and the dashing mogul Christian describe their desire to each other with all of the charmless unpredictability of servers mouthing their prescribed scripts at an Australian-themed steakhouse. Awkward openers (“I think we’ve done enough talking for now,” “Now let’s get you inside and naked”) conjure the raw provocation of “How about a Bloomin’ Onion to get you started?” Even tougher to take are the coy responses (“Oh my!” “Why, Mrs. Grey, you have a dirty, dirty mouth!” “You’re insatiable and so brazen”), repeated with gusto despite a total lack of shock value in evidence. Readerly expectations tick up ever so slightly as Grey issues some bossy commands—Stand here! Undress! Bend over! Spread your legs!—which seem at first blush to foretell a curve in the carnal road. But no such luck. Give or take a blindfold here or a butt plug there, the same hands explore the same places in the same ways with the same results.

V I C TO R K E R LOW

What Fifty Shades of Grey offers is an extreme vision of late-capitalist deliverance, the American (wet) dream on performance-enhancing drugs.

9 The

Baffler [no.22] ! 77

After the fifteenth or sixteenth time Anastasia and Christian “find [their] release together,” they start to resemble tourists with no short-term memory, repeating the same docented visit to Graceland over and over again, drooling over the claustrophobic upholstered pool room and the mirrored wall and the fourteen-foot-long white leather couch afresh each time. By the third volume in the series, as every word out of Christian’s mouth (“I see you’re very wet, Anastasia”) still triggers an overheated response from his paramour (“Holy shit!”), readers may find themselves hissing, “Mix it up a little, for fuck’s sake!” But let’s not mistake sex for the main event. The endless manual jimmying and ripped foil packets and escalating rhythms and releasefindings are just foreplay for the real climax, in which Anastasia recognizes that she’s destined to abandon her ordinary, middle-class life in favor of the rarefied veal pen of the modern power elite. Until then, like a swooning female contestant on The Bachelor, Anastasia is offered breathtaking helicopter and glider rides, heady spins in luxury sports cars, and windswept passages on swift catamarans. She is made to gasp at Christian’s plush office, with its sandstone desk and white leather chairs and its stunning vista, or his spacious, immaculate penthouse apartment, with its endless rooms filled with pricey furniture. She is treated to Bollinger pink champagne and grilled sea bass. She is offered a brand new wardrobe replete with stylish heels and gorgeous gowns and designer bras. She is lavished with diamond jewelry and flowers and a new luxury car of her own. Soon the numbing parade of luxe brands— Cartier, Cristal, Omega, iPad, iPod, Audi, Gucci—takes on the same dulled impact as endlessly tweaked nipples and repeatedly bound wrists. Curiously (but perhaps not surprisingly), our heroine’s responses to these artifacts of her ascendance are eerily similar to her sexual responses: “Oh, my!” “Yes.” 78 1 The Baffler [no.22]

“Holy shit!” After that, the superior quality and enormous cost of each item are mulled in excruciating detail. Just as traditional, malecentered pornography seems to feature a particularly clumsy, childish notion of sexiness, the concept of luxury on offer in Fifty Shades is remarkably callow. Like an update of the ostentatious, faux-tasteful wealth of Dynasty, Christian’s penthouse, with its abstract art and dark wood and leather, represents the modern version of enormous flower arrangements and white marble and a house staff trussed up in cartoon-butler regalia. No detail of the environment feels organic or specific to Christian himself; instead, it reflects a prescribed corporate aesthetic of enormous wealth that for some reason James approaches with reverence rather than repulsion or dread. By the time this compulsive lifestyle voyeurism starts invading our narrator’s routine visits to the bathroom (“The restrooms are the height of modern design—all dark wood, black granite, and pools of light from strategically placed halogens”), the author’s veneration of arbitrary signifiers of class has begun to take on grotesque, faintly comedic proportions. Against this backdrop of gleeful consumption, Anastasia’s total life makeover takes shape. Having just graduated from college, she scales the corporate ladder from assistant to book editor in a matter of weeks, since Christian has thoughtfully purchased the publishing company where she works. When her boss bullies and sexually harasses her, Christian confronts him, has him fired, and installs Anastasia in his place. Her mild protests over this creepy, control-freak show of power—now that’s some hard-core domination play—are just for show, of course. The underlying message is that Prince Charming swooped in and saved her from the indignities of the underclass. As if that’s not enough, in the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, Christian announces that he’s going to give the pub-

Give or take a blindfold here or a butt plug there, the same hands explore the same places in the same ways with the same results. After the fifteenth or sixteenth time Anastasia and Christian “find [their] release together,” they start to resemble tourists with no short-term memory, repeating the same docented visit to Graceland.

9 lishing company to his new wife, telling her, “This is my wedding present to you.” Sounds just like a wildly successful, ultra-competitive entrepreneur, doesn’t it, to give an entire business to his inexperienced inamorata, so that she can play make-believe at the office all day, while he adds a red mark in the “failures” column of his imperial spreadsheet?

Of Quasi-human Bondage There’s nothing that money can’t buy in this world, whether it’s respect, dignity, or imaginary political correctness. When Christian leads Anastasia to a palatial Mediterranean house with an expansive view of Puget Sound, then explains that he wants to demolish it so he can build a house for the two of them, Anastasia balks. “Why do you want to demolish it?” she asks. “I’d like to make a more sustainable home, using the latest ecological techniques,” he replies. “Using the latest ecological techniques” is just another prescribed lifestyle choice, of course—a matter of image over substance, implying that, in the great march of progress, wrecking and discarding a massive old building is somehow more responsible than working with what’s there. When it comes to wasted resources, though, nothing is quite as indulgent as real live humans who are at your beck and call around the clock. Maybe this is why hundreds of pages in the Fifty Shades trilogy are dedicated to outlining even the most minor exchanges between this privileged couple and their army of handservants:

“This is a Bolognese sauce. It can be eaten anytime. I’ll freeze it.” She [the cook Mrs. Jones] smiles warmly and turns the heat right down. Once we’re airborne, Natalia serves us yet more champagne and prepares our wedding feast. And what a feast it is—smoked salmon, followed by roast partridge with a green bean salad and dauphinoise potatoes, all cooked and served by the ever-efficient Natalia. The waiter has returned with the champagne, which he proceeds to open with an understated flourish. Sawyer reenters, bearing a paper cup of hot water and a separate tea bag. He knows how I take my tea! Taylor opens the door and I slide out. He gives me a warm, avuncular smile that makes me feel safe. I smile back.

Like the most loyal and dedicated refugees from Downton Abbey, every one of the series’ cooks and chauffeurs and security guards and assistants demonstrates polite restraint and obedient discretion in Christian and Anastasia’s presence. Every careful movement and gesture, each bland remark and welltimed retreat into the background, evokes the ultimate service-economy fantasy. These interchangeable, faceless humans, whose ubiquity and professionalism we’re meant to marvel over repeatedly, represent luxury possessions. They are warm but impassive, friendly but reserved, omnipresent but invisible. They register no disputes, no grudges, The

Baffler [no.22] ! 79

M o d e m & Ta b o o no rolled eyes, no missed days of work. Nothing seems to bring these strange, shadowy figures more satisfaction than serving Lord Grey and his Lady. Like the growing pile of high-end watches and cars and bracelets that the mildly transgressive power couple accumulates, these humans start to melt into an idealized mass of blindly loyal subservience, bestowing upon their masters an oversized sense of power. And in the midst of these deferential encounters, the long-suffering reader of the series finds some bitter and fugitive consolation in recalling that Anastasia’s Russian royal namesake was exiled by the Bolsheviks. Even though Anastasia is flanked by a cook who stands over her steaming pot like an adoring mother and a security guard who’d happily lay down his life to keep her safe, she soon develops a haughty attitude toward the help. By the second book, she’s independently instructing Christian’s staff on how to fulfill her wishes. By the third, she’s fretting openly about her white-person problems. “I suppose it will be up to me to set the parameters by which Mrs. Jones and I will work together,” she muses, wondering how she’ll carry off the illusion of becoming the ultimate, dreamy wife fixing food for her man when there’s a skilled cook in the kitchen at all times. Although we’re meant to applaud Anastasia’s down-to-earth urges (She still wants to cook! How adorable!), her inevitable devolution into an utterly useless, pampered aristocrat is naturally assumed—indeed, her growing incapacities are arguably the chief source of titillation and suspense in the whole series. Late in the third book, we find Anastasia upbraiding Gia, the female architect redesigning their brand-new house, for making eyes at Christian. Apparently Gia is blissfully unaware that she’s just another faceless possession among many—but Anastasia is there to set her straight: “You’re right to be nervous, Gia, because right now your work on this 80 1 The Baffler [no.22]

project hangs in the balance. But I’m sure we’ll be fine as long as you keep your hands off my husband.”

Yes, Ladies, He’s Mine Of course, Christian and Anastasia encounter each other as the most precious of highend possessions. “You’re mine,” they tell each other over and over. Like a manicured update to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, Anastasia imagines a world inhabited primarily by covetous rivals, from Gia (“Her isn’the-dreamily-gorgeous-wish-he-were-mine flush does not go unnoticed”), to a friend of Christian’s sister’s, to Christian’s “bitch troll” ex-girlfriend, to two random women in an elevator (“Yes, ladies, he’s mine”). Likewise, Christian panics at Anastasia’s smallest exchanges with her boss and male friends, even the coat-check guy at a club. (“Beside me Christian bristles and fixes Max with a back-off-now glare.”) After punching out a guy who gets grabby with Anastasia on the dance floor, Christian tells Anastasia, “No one touches what’s mine.” In case we can’t grasp that his woman is his most cherished commodity, jealously safeguarded with the mien of a bouncer, he spells it out for us: “You’re so precious to me,” he tells her in Fifty Shades Freed. “Like a priceless asset, like a child.” To Christian, every man alive wants Anastasia. To Anastasia, every woman alive wants Christian. They navigate the world like matching, customized, his-and-her luxury sports cars, outfitted with matching (if, alas, faulty) emotional GPS systems. In the real world, such severe possessiveness would create big problems for both parties. But in the fantasy world of Fifty Shades, pathology is recast as its own special kind of indulgence, a way of heightening the sensation of two superior humans looming over the mortal realm like demigods. The slow seduction that culminates in total possession and total power, which the first book some-

The numbing parade of luxe brands—Cartier, Cristal, Omega, iPad, iPod, Audi, Gucci—takes on the same dulled impact as endlessly tweaked nipples and repeatedly bound wrists.

9 times depicts as a dark force to be escaped, is portrayed with accelerating breathlessness and adoration in the second and third volumes. Echoing the lawless privilege of girlie magazines, the so-called control freak within Christian (and subsequently, Anastasia) demonstrates not just that members of the moneyed class are above the law, but that they exist beyond ordinary ethical guidelines too. (This, by the way, is also the moral of the higher-brow forerunner of Fifty Shades: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho—which is a much more self-aware, if also somewhat numbing, excursus into the nexus between high consumer capitalism and soulless bondage sex, with the significant and oddly more realistic difference that Ellis’s alpha-male protagonist is also a serial killer.) Having complete and total control over every single aspect of your experience, including everyone around you, is the textbook definition of alienation—precisely how human beings are severed from each other and from their own humanity. Perversely, in Fifty Shades, this radical isolation is portrayed as a moment of transcendence rather than one of debasement. Armed with an apparently limitless will-to-commodification, our narrator recognizes that anything and everything in the world—objects, people, qualities one would like to appear to have—can be bought for a price. And the qualities of each owned thing reflect more glory back on the owner. “Six stallions, say, I can afford, / Is not their strength my property?” offers Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. “I tear along, a sporting lord, / As if their legs belonged to me.” Once you arrive at the tippity-top of the

heap, you see, it’s only natural that you should have complete freedom to do as you please. There’s no need to apologize for bullying or throwing your weight around or expecting others to conform to your desires for them. You can wreck the house, or redesign it. You can shame the former submissive, or pay for her art school education and thereby keep her forever in your debt. And when there’s trouble, it’s your choice either to call the cops or take matters into your own hands. (Christian, predictably, likes to do the latter.) You are the master of all fates, including your own. You can run rampant over anything or anyone in your path. Shakespeare captured this spirit of heedless oppression in Julius Caesar, when Brutus says of his friend and rival, “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” Anastasia, who’s been showered with priceless goods until she shares her paramour’s reckless sense of entitlement, puts it a little differently: “Maybe I need to be restrained.”t

P. S . M U E L L ER

The

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Di$claimer 3 Amy Gerstler

Though unmoored and fearful in spirit, you, trembling investor, rather than ourselves or our affiliates, will incur the bulk of the risk the bulk of the punishment The value of your investments may fluctuate as psychotics’ moods do If you meet minimum suitability requirements if your miracle bra lifts your assets’ value if our strategic partners emerge from the loving embrace of their regulators you may then be eligible . . . though there is no guarantee of any level of return on your investment no assurance your entire investment will not be lost or that it won’t ultimately fund some hand’s hunger for scepter or weapon We trust you have read: the Trading with the Enemy Act the Sad Proxy Documents the Alternative Realities Declaration the Specially Designated Global Terrorist Checklist the Multiple Minds of God Adjustments the Foreign Narcotic$ Kingpin De$ignation and the Unacceptable, Sweaty, Crestfallen Investor Dialectic— Right now, nobody has reliable data in any of these fields, so we can provide no assurances based on current expectations, plans, estimates, projections, or fuzzy globular masses of feeling which represent incompletely processed and more or less 82 1 The Baffler [no.22]

melted childhood dreams and beliefs provided by blinkered individuals beyond our control who may splatter your lap with liquidity events We may not be able to raise substantial funds without feasting on portion controlled steaks daily as well as full-bodied single malt scotches with rose-gold highlights the costs of which would be passed along to you Our officers face significant conflicts of interest as the drug wears off This is considered a “blind pool” offering. Therefore, you may see flashes of orange and yellow when tired. The corners of your eyes may fill with a milky discharge. You may see pulsating bars in your peripheral vision at times, especially when there are sudden changes in illumination and thus you may not be able to adequately evaluate our ability to achieve investment objectives If your reality is so vibrant and exciting, fool, if you’re so almighty high-minded, then simply give your wealth away

for the purposes of this document, the words “we,” “us,” and the phrase “ourselves or our affiliates” refer to the lives of the pious for whom all things turn out for the best certain categories of purchasers who take an unscheduled doze at a crucial moment will incur hefty exit fees

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 83

M o d e m & Ta b o o

Predator Drone

( IN PLAIN SIGHT

Jimmy Savile will see you now 3 Christian Lorentzen

hat Americans call “track suits” and “tank tops” the British call “shell suits” and “string vests.” These terms are important to keep in mind in the case of Jimmy Savile, because his typical outfit consisted of a garish shell suit over a matching string vest. Savile, who died in October 2011 at age eightyfour, gained immense celebrity in Britain as a disc jockey, television host, newspaper columnist, wrestler, runner, cyclist, and fundraiser for charitable causes. When news of his rampant pedophilia over four decades—long the subject of rumor—broke last September, one of his accusers speculated that he wore the shell suits because it made it all the easier for him to pull his pants down. That rough-and-ready image of arousal and discharge may jibe with the crude notions of “chav” youth culture propagated by the British media for the past fifteen years—and Savile seemed in his last years to be casting himself as an elderly mascot for the stereotype. But it flies in the face of many things we presume to know about the post-Victorian society of Savile’s actual youth. The heirs to the repression of the late nineteenth century are supposed to be supremely discomfited by the idea of sex— and supremely weird in finding alternate ways of releasing all the unaddressed sexual tension percolating in their brains. (See Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott’s 1971 comedy No Sex Please, We’re British, about a middle-class couple besieged by an onslaught of pornography, a crossroads along the way from repressed Victorian Britain to the Blighty of Page 3 girls and pedophile-obsessed tabloids of today, when Britain is ranked first in promiscuity

84 1 The Baffler [no.22]

among large industrialized nations.) In reality, though, Victorian repression has always bred Victorian double standards, whereby privileged men are permitted most any form of pleasurable release precisely on the grounds of their unappeasable animal urges. Public repression has long abetted private impunity in this, the mother of all repressed Protestant empires. And the sordid tale of Jimmy Savile’s predatory sexual career is nothing if not a story of impunity. The initial results of Britain’s first comprehensive police investigation into the celebrity TV presenter’s past have uncovered more than 450 accusations of molestation and rape, mostly from girls in their early teens at the time of the assaults, but from about 80 boys and men as well. Savile was a pioneer in the art of getting rich off the new youth culture, but he was interested in more than money and adulation, exploiting the permissive aura of the sixties pop scene to maximize his access to vulnerable children. And in a twist on repressed British rectitude, Savile also used his later career as a sponsor of medical charities and philanthropies to continue preying on young, admiring Britons—this time of a more eleemosynary disposition. The Savile scandal shows how rapidly and thoroughly the highest reaches of British society—all the way to Buckingham Palace— could be infiltrated by an enterprising sexual predator bent on multiplying his conquests, one who practically flaunted his pedophilic predilections during his long career in the limelight. Savile was able to become one of Britain’s best-loved, most ingratiating celeb-

R A L P H S TE A D M A N

The

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rities largely on the basis of a life story that, on the surface, anyway, was an appealingly Algeresque study in upward mobility in a rigidly class-bound social order. Savile rose from the below-oblivion, working-class status of a crippled miner to become a full-fledged knight; he purveyed (if he did not, in fact, invent) the new profession of disc jockeying before a new urban mass audience for rock music; he hosted variety and inspirational shows on the telly; the royal family solicited his considered PR counsel in their own moments of scandal and compromise. And he was all the while using his image as national maestro and court jester to the crown to cover his career as a serial child molester.

Screening Out the Past Given the many stories that were never told, only whispered, about Jimmy Savile during his life, it’s fitting that the Savile scandal, upon its first impact last fall, was almost instantly transformed into a meta-scandal about the BBC’s handling of the story. Savile was for decades one of the BBC’s own. A documentary broadcast last year by the commercial network ITV presented the testimony of five women who’d been sexually assaulted by Savile as teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s, the assaults ranging from unwanted kissing to rape, some of the offenses taking place in his BBC dressing room. Then it came out that ITV only had the story because former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas brought it to the network after the BBC program Newsnight declined to run it. (Around the time the dropped report was to run, in December 2011, the BBC aired two tributes to Savile—who had died that October—instead.) The BBC program Panorama reported on Newsnight’s spiking of the Savile story and aired the testimony of Karin Ward, a fiftyfour-year-old cancer patient who said that Savile had coerced her into performing oral sex when she was a fifteen-year-old at the 86 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Duncroft Approved School for troubled girls. Panorama also interviewed Newsnight staffers about why the story had been dropped. They complained that their superiors were myopically intent on finding “institutional failure” on the part of the Surrey police, who had questioned Savile in 2007 but never charged him. But as Panorama proceeded to observe, if Newsnight’s producers were looking for institutional failures, they would have been far better served to look at the BBC itself—as was painfully evident in the new testimony that Williams-Thomas was bringing to light. By this January, the London Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree had heard from 600 complainants, including 450 alleged victims of abuse by Savile, 34 of them alleging rape. Nine men, among them the rock star Gary Glitter, whom Ward said she had seen having sex with an underage girl in Savile’s BBC dressing room, had reportedly been arrested in connection with the case. In the meantime, the BBC had gone into conniptions of self-scrutiny over the Savile affair. For weeks in the fall it was impossible to turn on Radio 4—a typical Sunday morning series of reports would segue from a massacre in Syria, to Savile, to archival spots on Hitler and Stalin—without hearing a range of arguments about the Savile case and the network’s role in burying it over the years. Defenders of the BBC harped on the peculiar pathologies of the offender, contending that Savile was a singularly monstrous master of predation and deceit whose misdeeds shouldn’t taint the whole institution. And longtime critics of the government-funded network pointed to Savile’s ugly story as Exhibit A in the case that the BBC was simply a sclerotic haven of middle managers long past their creative prime—and that the network’s inept handling of the Savile scandal was a clear signal that it was time for the bloodletting to begin in the network’s executive suites. The BBC’s World Service, which has an odd penchant

The BBC went into conniptions of self-scrutiny over the Savile affair. For weeks in the fall it was impossible to turn on Radio 4 without hearing a range of arguments about the Savile case and the network’s role in burying it.

9 for airing stories about itself, even reported that one of its correspondents in an African affiliate had to fend off charges that he was a child molester because his name sounds like Savile. That case of mistaken identity might have proved cautionary in another media climate, but in London, it was open season (and then some) on the BBC. Things got incalculably worse when the network sought to make up for its earlier lapses by trumpeting a disastrously wrongheaded Savile-type scoop of its own, one that might have turned the tables on the state-owned network’s right-wing critics. A reporter at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit based at City University in London, brought Newsnight a story of child abuse at care homes in Wrexham, in North Wales, during the 1970s and 1980s, implicating a senior figure from the Thatcher government. “If all goes well,” Iain Overton, head of the BIJ, tweeted twelve hours before the broadcast, “we’ve got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile.” From there, nothing went at all well for the BBC. The previous evening at an Oxford Union event, Overton had told Michael Crick, politics editor at Channel 4 and a onetime Newsnight staffer, about the story, naming former Conservative Party treasurer Lord McAlpine as the abuser. Crick, who had his doubts, contacted McAlpine and within hours was on Channel 4 reporting that the accused was denying the allegations and was preparing to sue the BBC for libel. And indeed, the charges that Newsnight

had unearthed against McAlpine had been proven false fifteen years earlier by an investigative body known as the Waterhouse Inquiry. It turned out that the name McAlpine had then come up in the initial investigation only in relation to the politician’s cousin, Jimmie, a local businessman who played golf with the Wrexham care home’s deputy head Peter Howarth. It was Howarth who had in fact been jailed for molesting teenage boys. Newsnight’s one source, Steven Messham, wasn’t shown a photograph of Lord McAlpine, and Newsnight had never called McAlpine about the story. The BBC settled McAlpine’s libel claims for £185,000. (Britain’s libel laws, which are far more generous toward plaintiffs than is the case in America, are often cited as one of the reasons Savile’s accusers never came forward during his lifetime.) But the story hadn’t stopped with the BBC. On ITV’s This Morning, host Phillip Schofield, grandstanding in a strangely McCarthyite fashion, presented Prime Minister David Cameron with a list of Tory politicians he’d printed out from the web who were supposedly linked to pedophilia. Viewers who paused the broadcast could make out some of the names, McAlpine’s among them. ITV agreed to pay McAlpine £125,000 in damages for what Cameron aptly characterized as a “witch-hunt.” McAlpine’s lawyer was also talking about suing twenty “high-profile tweeters” who’d participated in the story’s circulation on social media. In the feeding frenzy on the Savile scandal, it seemed that anyone could air charges of pedophilic misconduct in the highest reaches of British power—and that The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o At church dances, Savile would set up a room and a bottle of sherry for the clergy: “Great chaps priests, full of laughter and practical jokes.”

9 anyone might also be in for a libel suit when such charges proved false. The bleeding didn’t stop with the libel bills. BBC director general George Entwistle found himself out of a job after he fumbled questions about his handling of the McAlpine scandal on his own network’s Today program. Commentary in the wake of his resignation held that he’d been chosen by BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten because—above any qualifications as a journalist or crisis manager— he was a good public school boy. Questions were raised about the role of his predecessor Mark Thompson, who had been in charge at the time Newsnight dropped the original Savile broadcast and by now had moved on to a new job as CEO of the New York Times. The BBC’s Pollard Review of the Newsnight affair reported that Thompson had been behind a “firewall” insulating him from the decisions involved in the Savile story and only heard about it at a Christmas party after other BBC executives had ditched the report. Whatever he knew, he didn’t want to know too much.

Crumpet Nights At least the real villain was dead. If you (like me) didn’t grow up watching Jimmy Savile, and only heard of him as a confirmed pedophile a year after his death, it’s not simple to understand the nature of his celebrity. I can’t think of any direct American equivalent. Like Casey Kasem or Dick Clark, he was a nationally famous promoter of pop music long after he had decades on his teenage audiences. Like Hulk Hogan, he was a physically formidable, goofy-looking, blond-haired wrestler. Like Fred Rogers, Savile hosted a children’s program, Jim’ll Fix It, where viewers wrote in with problems and wishes, to be neatly ironed out 88 1 The Baffler [no.22]

by Savile sitting in a “magic” armchair with secret compartments from which he would pull letters from children asking him to grant their wishes and produce other goodies like tea sets. Like Jerry Lewis, over the years Savile’s activities as a fund-raiser for charitable causes started to overshadow his other activities, until he was an elderly man, no longer regularly on television, running in charity road races in his ridiculous shell suits. Like Bob Barker, Savile projected an obvious sleaziness that was part of his televisual appeal. After a hairy incident involving a stunt with the Royal Air Force, Savile hated to fly, so with the exception of one early trip to America to meet Elvis Presley, he never spent much time in the States, settling for Blighty ubiquity rather than the transatlantic fame of Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Piers Morgan, and all the many rock acts Savile put before the British public on Top of the Pops. And though he was a national celebrity from around 1964 until his death, he was always a doggedly provincial one, never letting go of a foothold in his native Leeds, and at the same time running around the country staging talk shows like Savile’s Travels, ingratiating himself with the local authorities and grandees, and bringing out crowds to make hospital donations. After the revelations of his predations, it’s hard not to think he was casting his net wide. He often traveled in a van with a mattress in the rear. Savile’s rise coincided with the revolutions of television and rock music and their attendant transformations of British society—changes Savile himself wasn’t shy about taking credit for. Savile’s 1974 autobiography, As It Happens (the title comes from one of his many catch phrases; another is “now then,

now then,” deployed to calm excitable kids), is written with a certain colorfully amateurish British fluidity—you could call it a demonic latter-day Dickens novel, chronicling an improbable tale of class ascent that now seems like the stuff of Victorian melodrama. Savile was born on Halloween, 1926, the last of seven children. Pneumonia, which finally claimed his life in 2011, nearly killed him before the age of two. His father was an insurance agent and his mother a bookmaker’s clerk, and the family lived in a big house but survived on an income of “a few quid a week.” At age eleven Savile started working in a Leeds dance hall as a drummer. He made extra money picking up not quite empty packs of cigarettes from under the seats. He liked to have money and to project the image of someone who had money: that was why, he explained, he always drove a Rolls-Royce and had a cigar sticking out of his mouth. During the war, after a short stint as an evacuee in Lincolnshire, he had jobs as an office boy, selling fruit, and dealing in scrap.

His neighborhood was bombed, and he once picked up a discarded glove to find a severed hand still inside. In 1944 Savile was conscripted, at the age of eighteen, to work in the Yorkshire coal mines as a so-called Bevin Boy. He was still slight of build, and for some years had a job sitting at a bend in the three-mile track in the tunnel, monitoring the trucks of coal to see that they didn’t go off the rails and righting them when they did. He took to smuggling books into the mine and reading them by the light of his lamp: “After three years of six shifts a week living like a walled-up Tibetan monk I was fully conversant with the wonders of astronomy, physics, maths, ancient and modern religions and a variety of languages. ‘One off’ subjects like politics, economics and world history I treated as light entertainment.” Other vivid details from his time in the pits include the day he showed up late to work in his best suit, tucked it in a newspaper, and did duty naked; the day he incompetently drove a tram full of miners home because of a transit workers strike; and the constant farting of the

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pit pony. Throughout Savile’s life story, the scatological is never far from the memoirist’s mind. After seven years in the mines, Savile injured his spine when he was caught too close to a routine coal blast. He was given a medical discharge, sixteen shillings a week sick money, and a steel corset to straighten his back, and moved in with his parents to convalesce. He would live, on and off, with his mother until her death; he called her “the duchess” and elevated her to minor celebrity status. In his memoir he says she was “my only real true love to date.” As Savile was casting about for a new occupation, a friend of his was tinkering with connecting a gramophone to a radio in order to play records louder. The two agreed to a fifty-fifty deal, booked a hall, charged a oneshilling admission to hear records by Glenn Miller and Harry James, and had their mothers prepare refreshments. By 9 p.m. they’d blown the hall’s main fuse, Savile’s partner had almost been electrocuted, and the contraption was melted. Savile’s mother was called in to entertain their guests on the piano. “Disaster or not, dear reader, there can be no doubt,” Savile writes, that this was “the world’s first disco.” He was booked that night for a teenage girl’s birthday party. Savile held beauty contests and promoted his events to “the local male wolves” with posters proclaiming “‘Saturday Night Is Crumpet Night.’ In those non-permissive days this was equal to showing a nude photo of Marilyn Monroe ten feet high.” (“Crumpet” is an especially queasy-making British slang term for “young girls.”) Disciplined by club owners, he replaced the poster with a sign that substituted a less well-known, but still readily recognizable, piece of synonymous army slang: “Saturday for KIFE.” He bought a used Bentley and attached a Rolls-Royce radiator grill from a scrapyard to the hood, and got his picture with the car in the Manchester Evening 90 1 The Baffler [no.22]

News. He couldn’t yet afford cigars—“no cash for flash”—so he had night watchmen pick “the larger dog ends” out of the dance hall ashtrays for him. At church dances, he’d set up a room and a bottle of sherry for the clergy: “Great chaps priests, full of laughter and practical jokes.” But as he recounts, his new vocation also came with some occupational hazards: To run a dance hall is better than running a harem because all your wives go off home to reappear, fresh and lovely, the next night. There are two reasons why I could not tell the story of all the girls I have known. One is because I respect and would you believe love them for their incredible days, and nights. The other is that, were I to tell all, no one would believe it, plus I’d have to take up residence in some inaccessible Himalayan village. Rarely if ever do I go to parties as I always seem to finish up in some trouble not of my seeking. Being a personality, even then, makes the world a far different place than if you are normal. At one party I narrowly escaped being knifed, with a breadknife as it happens, by a slightly intoxicated young lady who disapproved of a girl she didn’t like sitting on my knee.

To put things more bluntly, Savile didn’t like parties he didn’t host because these were occasions where he couldn’t be firmly in control—unlike the dance hall meet-ups that spread his fame. (Reinforcing this need for strict self-supervision of his excesses, Savile was also a teetotaler for most of his life, until some elderly indulgence in whiskey, so his crimes have nothing to do with the typical cause of sex in Britain.) By the late 1950s, Savile was running the Mecca dance hall in Leeds, his hair bleached and sometimes twotoned, or “dress stewart tartan.” He later liked to point out that Mick Jagger had acknowledged that Savile was wearing his hair long a decade before the Stones did. Around this

At a party at Buckingham Palace, First Lady Barbara Bush was so happy to see Savile that she spilled a drink on another guest.

9 time his memoir records an episode that was seized upon by Panorama: A high-ranking lady police officer came in one night and showed me the picture of an attractive girl who had run away from a remand home. “Ah,” says I all serious, “if she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward.” The law lady, new to the area, was nonplussed. Back at the station she asked “Is he serious?” It is God’s truth that the absconder came in that night. Taking her into the office I said, “Run now if you want but you can’t run for the rest of your life.” She listened to the alternative and agreed that I hand her over if she could stay at the dance, come home with me, and that I would promise to see her when they let her out. At 11:30 the next morning she was willingly presented to an astounded lady of the law. The officeress was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.

This reminiscence points to another side of Savile’s celebrity: in addition to his many other mythic turns as a popcult impresario, Savile cultivated a distinctly gangsterish alter ego. On page 71 of his memoir, he starts to refer to himself as “the Godfather,” and continues regaling his readers with stories of head-butting encounters with bookers, producers, police, and media hangers-on as his fame continues to grow. In How’s About That Then: The Authorized Biography of Jimmy Savile, Alison Bellamy, a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post, quotes many Savile intimates from this era saying things like “Jimmy did have a dark side to his character

though” or “There were certainly rumours that he had a fondness for young girls and we would joke that, if they were over 17, then he didn’t want to know. But a lot of people were the same back then.” His attraction to thuggery was evidently more than an impish affectation. In 2000 he was seen in a documentary by Louis Theroux bragging that he’d had men tied up and beaten in the basements of clubs. Theroux was asleep, the conversation took place late at night with his producer, and Savile, claiming to be unaware he was being filmed, insisted that he had been joking, a denial judged plausible in Savile’s by then retired state. At Broadmoor Hospital, a treatment facility for criminals, Savile had enjoyed fraternizing with the gangster Ronnie Kray and with Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer convicted of thirteen murders and seven attempted homicides in 1981. In the late 1980s, Savile was appointed to a task force managing Broadmoor; he got himself his own room in the facility, had access to the wards, and arranged for a friend of his from Leeds to become its head. It would become another site of his assaults.

Top of the Pops But the predatory gangster wannabe was also a determinedly beguiling courtier of the public’s favor. In 1958, Savile was hired as a DJ by Radio Luxembourg, and within a few years was hosting Top of the Pops on BBC television. (The No. 1 song on the first episode was “Love Me Do”—a tune that sheds a great deal of its legendary Mop Top innocence when pondered as a comment on Savile’s criminal exploits.) “The term ‘rat race’ is oft used in the world of showbiz,” Savile writes. “Fashions change, The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o there is much fiddling and if the new arrival is not good at business then he or she or they are plucked clean as a Christmas goose and slung on the heap. It is only a rat race when you’re unsuccessful. By the time I arrived on the front doorsteps of Radio Luxembourg I was an expert wheeler-dealer, company politician and masterstroke-puller.” Television celebrity opened up a new world of masterstrokes for Savile to pull. He leveraged his celebrity to get his Catholic mother introduced to Pope John XXIII, and in the popcult equivalent of a papal audience, Savile arranged to fly to Hollywood to meet Elvis by presenting him with one of his gold records for sales in the U.K. But his real career aims were never far from view. “California,” he writes in reminiscence of the Elvis trip, “to someone from the moors of Yorkshire, is a contender for the Garden of Eden. . . . Gleaming cars and the gleaming bodies of beach girls made the head turn and I felt it officially criminal that the age of consent in that admirable state is eighteen. It really is unfair because everyone knows that everything matures quicker in the sunshine.” When the Beatles played the Hammersmith Odeon, Savile was in charge of allowing teenage fans access to the Fab Four, a job he botched when a couple of the Beatlemaniacs went into hysterics in their dressing room. “Ah well, Jim,” said Paul McCartney, “we won’t be seeing much of you then.” The Beatles seemed to be the only people capable of firing him. It’s worth quoting at length a passage from Savile’s memoir weirdly laying out his philosophy of fame because it sounds not too different from what experts in child abuse call “grooming,” the pedophile’s way of gaining the community’s—or, in this case, a nation’s—trust: Let me dwell on the phenomenon of being famous. I’ve not really had much time to think of it before. When I was ordinary I used to go to a turkish bath in Leeds. Sitting

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in the steam room would be an assortment of glistening, naked men. I used to wonder, why is that naked body rich and that one not? They look so alike just now. It was easy to see why a rugby player was a rugby player. God had just dished out a heavier or more muscular body than the norm. But why should one naked body command respect from another and what was the charisma that put one man well above his neighbour when we all sweated the same. I searched long for the answer. Time was one factor I came up with. It was necessary for a man to be successful by degrees, over a period of time, without any slip-ups along the way. Therefore patience seemed to be a vital thing. Without patience there comes exasperation. Exasperation could cause you to step back instead of inching forward. Lying on the smooth beds afterwards I would reflect that if one kept going one became more credible each day. As my progress was snail slow at the time it was obviously going to take me ages to reach a command situation. Time therefore was important and effort secondary. Such a theory was apt for the situation, whereupon I would fall into a deep sleep. Purely as a statistical postscript if I slept for two hours, during that period several hundred people would die violent deaths, somewhere else, so I wasn’t all that bad a judge.

Strange for its setting and its final, off-kilter lunge toward morbid humor, this anecdote is oddest for the caveat “without any slip-ups along the way” because at the time it comes in the memoir, according to the ITV investigation, Savile had been warned that he was “living dangerously” by flaunting that he was sleeping with a twelve-year-old girl. Savile assured the man who told him this, Wilfred De’ath, a young BBC producer, that he was too big at the BBC to be at risk. (De’ath himself would later be arrested by Operation Yewtree, accused by a woman who told police

Savile held beauty contests and promoted his events to “the local male wolves” with posters proclaiming “Saturday Night Is Crumpet Night.”

9 he’d assaulted her when she was a teenage actress; he has claimed it was a case of mistaken identity.) Refreshed by his meditations on the curious vagaries of fame and violent death, Savile presses blithely on to recount more creepy celebrity antics. By the end of the chapter featuring the Turkish-bath interlude, we’re treated to an anecdote about the time Savile joined the crew of a garbage truck in Scarborough, was spotted by “some schoolgirls on a day trip,” and suddenly “surprised holidaymakers stood aghast at the unlikely scene of forty fine-bodied young girls running, with shrill cries, after a dust cart. The explanation that Jimmy Savile was one of the dustmen brought back forth much of ‘whatever will he get up to next.’” Little did they know. In a more forthright variant on his Turkish-spa musings, Savile confesses at one point that “I’ve always said that brains can be a handicap and keep insisting that I don’t have many, but will admit to plenty of animal cunning!” Cunning is certainly one word for the way that Savile set himself up as a charity fund-raiser and volunteer porter in hospitals: “The biblical saying, ‘those who give shall receive’ is very true. In my case anyway, because the more I make for all sorts of charities, most definitely the more health and happiness I get from the Good Lord.” He goes on: “Let me tell you about the fun part of the charity deal.” He then recounts an invitation from a local authority to attend a charity youth dance. He agrees “if you will arrange for me to sleep in a tent up the local hillside with another tent alongside with six girls to sleep there as my bodyguards!” An ad is placed in the papers, receiving, by Savile’s account, one hundred applications.

The council had to decide which six, so they called a special meeting. Some of the members only then realized what they were doing. “We can’t have a council meeting to decide which six of our girls sleep with this man,” said several, more bewildered than outraged. So half the council left and half stayed. Six girls were selected and all of them were given matching mini skirts and white boots, as befitting a ceremonial bodyguard. They looked good enough to eat.

A father of one of the girls comes to the dance to drag her away. Savile and his “millionaire pal” spend the night on a hill in the rain with the five remaining bodyguards. Savile recounts the denouement with relish: Needless to say the girls’ tent fell over and we all had to finish up together. Dawn came and with it the council chairman and his cars. It was seven totally exhausted campers that fell back down the hill to a breakfast we couldn’t eat because we had all laughed too much. There hangs on my wall in Leeds a picture with which I was presented and the inscription gives the details of our great night. So who says charity isn’t fun?

The scene is repeated at another event, with another set of bodyguards, this time on a less than comfortable raft. Fourteen pages later Savile writes, “It just occurs to me that I have not yet, overmuch, mentioned girls,” as if his compulsive shagging of teenagers, much of it obviously unseemly if not illegal and coercive, hasn’t so far been a constant motif of the memoir. Twelve pages on the subject follow: his theory that girls “are 2,000 years old when they are born”; his losing his virginity in the bushes to a woman who The

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It’s always easier to tell the story of how the famous are famous and the powerful are powerful.

9 picked him up in a dance hall and running seven miles home; his experience having sex on a plane; his missing out on sex because of overvigilant security at a press reception; his having sex by the sea with a girl who jumped from her parents’ car and ran to his when she saw him drive by (she sent him Christmas cards for years); his theory that a certain percentage of females in every audience will “fancy” a man on stage (10 percent for most, 20 percent for him, “over the nineties” for Elvis or “the early Osmonds”; “the social dangers of such temptations are immense”); his “lively horror at getting caught at anything”; his twice nearly being caught in vans with girls by their parents. The next chapter details his acquaintance with members of the royal family and his friendships with millionaires—surely part of the reason he got away with publishing this stuff. When As It Happens came out, Savile had received the Order of the British Empire for his charity fundraising. In 1990—sixteen years after the book’s publication—he was knighted. By this time Sir Jimmy had befriended Prince Charles and Princess Diana as well as Margaret Thatcher, all of whom he enlisted in his charity projects. At a party at Buckingham Palace, First Lady Barbara Bush was so happy to see him that she spilled a drink on another guest. In The Palace Diaries, Charles’s secretary Sarah Goodall refers to Savile’s efforts to keep the royal couple together: “The counseling of Jimmy Savile has come to naught. Jim cannot fix this one.” On tapes of Diana talking to her alleged lover James Gilbey—documents in a minor criminal scandal called Squidgygate—she calls Savile a “sort of mentor” to Charles and refers to his efforts to “help out the redhead,” 94 1 The Baffler [no.22]

apparently a form of media counseling for Sarah Ferguson. It makes a sort of sense that the hapless royals would turn to Savile for advice on how to cope with celebrity. While they had been born or stumbled into it through matrimony, he had groped for it and clung to it for decades. He was also far better than them at protecting his image. As the tabloids reported after he was exposed, when reporters threatened to out him during his lifetime, he would tell them that all they were doing was endangering the millions he was raising for Stoke Mandeville Hospital. But of course for royalty, charitable works are simply noblesse oblige; it never would have occurred to the straying royal couple that they could use their image as caring patrician overlords to shield their sexual peccadilloes (which were, of course, far more innocent than Savile’s crimes) from public view. No, that innovation required the rare animal cunning of Jimmy Savile.

“Everybody Knew” When Operation Yewtree issued its official report on the Savile scandal, the British press went into a fresh set of convulsions. The Guardian compiled the results of the investigation into multicolored infographics breaking down Savile’s documented criminal offenses by gender (174 female; 40 male), date (starting in 1955, with the last report from 2010, and a peak in 1975–76), age (36 percent 13–16 years old among females; 38 percent 10–13 among males), and location (Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Leeds General Infirmary, Duncroft School for Girls, and the BBC Centre, among others). The whole grim collated litany of celebrity sexual impunity called to mind a line from an old movie: “You’d be pathetic if you

weren’t so disgusting.” (In the 1948 noir classic The Big Clock, it’s what Luce-like publisher Earl Janoth’s mistress Pauline York says to him just before he kills her with a sundial.) But this soon ceded way in my memory to Claude Rains’s much more famous declaration in Casablanca, as he closes down the gambling at Rick’s Café Américain: “I’m shocked, shocked.” After all, as De’ath put it to WilliamsThomas, “Everybody knew.” Savile’s memoir bears this out, as does much of the footage of Savile trotted out in the wake of his exposure: Savile and Gary Glitter in their silly sub-Bowie glam costumes trotting down from the stage to sit on stools between teenage girls; “I,” Savile says, “ought to be giving girls away.” Instead, of course, he just kept on abusing and stockpiling them—with, it seems, plenty of institutional complicity, which probably goes a long way toward explaining the BBC’s bungling approach to the Savile scandal. The official Pollard Review of Newsnight’s spiking of the Savile story confirms the essentials of Panorama’s initial report on the matter, but it adds a few telling details. Newsnight editor Peter Rippon initially believed that the Surrey police had stopped their investigation into Savile’s abuse because he was “old and infirm,” which is the reason Savile’s accusers said they had been given by the police. Rippon dropped the story when Surrey police said they had halted “due to lack of evidence.” But Newsnight still had Williams-Thomas’s sources, and they were still willing to talk. Rippon admitted to Pollard’s investigation that he might have been “guilty of self-censorship.” More than a year earlier, while Savile was still alive, another form of self-censorship transpired in another corner of the BBC. George Entwistle, then a mid-level executive, was in charge of factual programming for BBC Vision, the wing of the network that would air the tributes to Savile in the months following

his death. Entwistle received an email from a colleague, Nick Vaughan-Barratt: George, I understand jimmy is very ill. We have no obit and I’m not sure we’d want one. What do you think? I have a personal interest here: my first job in tv was on a JS show—I know him well and saw the complex and sometimes conflicting nature of the man at first hand—if you know what I mean! Do you have an opinion? Mine is ironic, flawed and fascinating. But all a long time ago! —N

Vaughan-Barratt later added: “I’d feel v queasy about obit. I saw the real truth!!!” By the time of Savile’s death, Entwistle had risen to the top spot at BBC Vision. He heard from a second employee: “I gather we didn’t prepare the obit because of the darker side of the story. So something celebrating a particular part of his TV career is probably better than the [life] story as there are aspects of this which are hard to tell.” It was settled that the BBC would commission a new Jim’ll Fix It Christmas special, in tribute to the sentimental image of the departed knight. It’s always easier to tell the story of how the famous are famous and the powerful are powerful. Sir Jimmy Savile was someone people liked to watch but no one wanted to look at.t

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Accounting for the Damage 3 Jocelyn Burrell

Sixty seconds the earth shook beneath their feet God-fumbled porcelain, the colonial palace rushing to pieces in the city center. Atlas rolls a shoulder in fitful sleep, and hearts crumble. Dazed palm trees studding the horizon, bayonet the sky while soldiers wander upturned roads traffic patterns bewildered by broken lights. Missing parts. There is the scent of apple-wine, white grape or is that frangipani. Beneath their feet, the dead unavenged the murmur of sugar whatever else history absconds. Above, streaming ticker tape of heaven besotted with photos though not as many. Video though not as much. On scene the sound cuts out. In studio, talking heads are gumming the words. Lip-synching the news, pantomime grief. You are the poorest nation they assure us what they leave unsaid just might kill you. Think we too understand such disasters as natural and forgot the ones who preferred shark and water-lung to hell on earth. Sixty seconds and Anacaonaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair undone rebraided tight as any noose with the world already winding its watch

and moving on without you

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M o d e m & Ta b o o ( BAD SEX

The United Sades of America 3 Hussein Ibish

DAV I D J O H N S O N

ot long after I took refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of Washington, I visited one of D.C.’s landmark bookstores, Politics & Prose—a literary venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the conceit that they’re browsing and shopping in a vaguely subversive fashion. But as I walked up to join the store’s cultivated and edgy communitas, I committed a terrible error: I asked a clerk where I might find the works of the Marquis de Sade. My request made its way up through an increasingly consternated group of shop assistants; I had to repeat it several times

before they fully registered what I was asking for. At that point, I was told to leave the store immediately. The scene concluded on a perfect grace note when I was sternly conducted to the store’s exit by a female employee who was obviously French. It was as if I had asked for a how-to manual for murder, kidnapping, or child abuse—or, at a minimum, the most objectionable form of pornography. That scene spoke volumes about the curious legacy of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the great and demented aristocratic theorist of unrestrained desire, in our own republic of consumer longing. Here, in the self-regarding intellectual center of a city justly famed for the free play of unleashed personal ambition and the basest kinds of instrumental manipulation of others, Sade was a fourletter word. Nor can I say that I was entirely taken aback by this reception; as I completed work on my doctorate, my professors took me aside to warn me that I should never attempt to teach any of Sade’s work until I was securely tenured—and even then, they stressed, I should proceed with enormous caution. On one level, of course, it’s clear enough why Sade and his work make people squeamish: that was often his goal. To a degree not even rivaled by Sigmund Freud and other later explorers of the id (and its indispensible partner, the sadistic superego), Sade seemed to insist that the darkest, most destructive urges of humanity are core elements of our nature—that the drive to inflict pain, to dominate, even to murder, needs to be affirmed as part of the same complex of erotic and creative desires that keep human society viable and individuals “free.” This is perhaps why, despite the careful strictures against uttering his name—let The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o If the point of Sade’s work was to marry sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture and declare it a fait accompli.

9 alone marketing his work—in polite consumer society, the shade of Sade is a markedly unquiet one in our America. Like other repressed ideas, Sade is everywhere and nowhere—indeed, there appears to be a strong inverse proportion between the popular reach of his name and image and actual familiarity with his writings and thought. (In an irony that Sade himself would likely have appreciated, the only European thinker with a similar universal-yet-unread profile in American intellectual life is probably the great Puritan theologian John Calvin.) Sade is, indeed, enough of a household name among us that he functions as a sort of shorthand consumer brand for transgressive naughtiness, and the outright flouting of civilization’s taboos. He is commonly associated with sexual sadomasochism as a commodity, and pornography in general—including the mommy porn marketing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey. He’s popularly synonymous with cruelty and evil, much like the “murderous Machiavel” of the Renaissance Englishspeaking world. And he is also frequently, and reasonably, cast as the most extreme of misogynists. At the same time, Sade is also often represented as a proto-Romantic rebel— among the first, and certainly the most radical, protesters against the rational certainties of Enlightenment humanism (this was indeed the basis of the largely sympathetic portrait of Sade in Peter Weiss’s 1963 play Marat/Sade). A bowdlerized version of Sade has cropped up occasionally as a generic embodiment of artistic and intellectual freedom struggling against authority and restriction—a Larry Flynt of the eighteenth century, as it were. This 98 1 The Baffler [no.22]

was the Sade featured, for instance, in Philip Kaufman’s 2000 film Quills. And this is all to say nothing, of course, about the sprawling popcult traffic in the graphically violent genre we might dub thanato-porn: the voyeuristic cult of invasively depicted death experiences as famously anticipated in the 1973 J. G. Ballard novel Crash. David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Ballard’s book reveled in the erotic allure of death while affecting to critique its exploitation, but by now we’ve dispensed entirely with the conceit of critique; thanato-porn now runs the gamut from the Saw movie series to Grand Theft Auto videogaming and the latest network TV spinoff of the CSI franchise. If the point of much of Sade’s work was to marry the most intense modes of sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture, and declare much of this project a fait accompli. But there was always much more to Sade than the simple lionization of the urges to objectify and dominate—and Sade’s legacy assuredly doesn’t end here, in the overstimulated agoras of our media world. If we broaden the aperture a bit to take in the official scenes of governance—a procedure that Sade himself strongly encourages—we can also see that he haunts our political culture in all sorts of unacknowledged ways. While many on the intellectual left have sought to grapple with Sade more directly, Sade also exerts a suitably perverse influence on the present-day American right. To take just one example, elements of Sade’s thought—via an embarrassingly reductive caricature of Nietzsche—thrive in the ro-

bust American cult of Ayn Rand. Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan frequently cited Rand as his most important inspiration, and Rand’s unabashed championing of economic elites was also echoed by Romney’s own notorious dismissal of the 47 percent of Americans who don’t earn enough money to pay income tax and therefore needn’t be bothered with. At least one of Sade’s fictional monsters, Roland, anticipated this Randian attack on all forms of socially conscious responsibility to others as pathologically self-indulgent. In Justine, Roland rebuffs Justine’s plea that she be spared since she saved his life. “What were you doing when you came to my rescue?” he demands. “Did you not choose [this] as an impulse dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure? How in the devil’s name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense you for the joys in which you indulge yourself?” Similarly, there are echoes of Sade’s celebrations of personal violence (as opposed to the state-sponsored variety) in National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre’s infamous response to the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. LaPierre suggested that the appropriate response to the epidemic of gun violence is increased gun ownership in a country already awash with firearms of every variety. One could easily imagine Sade also making the argument that the only rational or natural re-

JA M E S GA L L AG H E R

sponse to violence is additional and opposing violence—with the sole exception of the death penalty, which he opposed with all-encompassing passion. Indeed, Sade’s deeply idiosyncratic views on the morality of personal violence are probably Exhibit A for why he cannot pass muster as any kind of guide for left-liberal cultural resistance. If we take his work at face value, he was not opposed to individual murders. He frequently had his characters argue that murder should not be punished by the state at all. Yet there probably has never been a more passionate opponent of capital punishment—the only form of premeditated homicide that normative “rational” thought typically considers potentially justifiable. This is Sade’s challenge to his readers in a nutshell: he specializes in The

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It’s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement.

9 justifying the conventionally unjustifiable while absolutely and passionately condemning what many would regard as, at least plausibly, defensible and rational. There is, however, a much surer gauge of what might be called a vulgar Sadean legacy: the mainstreaming of American porn. Pornography is now so ubiquitous in contemporary American culture—so impossible to get away from—that the two things one may be assured of being offered in even the cheapest motel are pay-per-view porn on the television and a Gideon Bible in the bedside table, should you find yourself in sudden need of one form or the other of shameless mystification. I’m sure I’m not the only frequent traveler who has never availed himself of either of these kindly offerings, but they’re always there. One can’t help but imagine both Sade and Calvin bitterly grousing, in whatever mutually disappointing afterlife to which they’ve been jointly consigned, about how their intellectual legacies have been downgraded into all-but-interchangeable items of consumer convenience.

Can’t Touch This There’s an especially bitter irony in Sade’s image as a cheap pornographer: he was not in any recognizable sense creating pornography at all—nor can he be neatly pigeonholed into any other literary tradition. Sade was an astonishingly prolific writer who produced an enormous oeuvre covering a huge variety of genres. Much of it is mediocre to the point of being unreadable, particularly his conventionally sentimental or comedic dramas and stories. There seems little doubt that without his notorious “libertine novels,” most notably Justine, 100 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Juliette, Philosophy in the Boudoir and, especially since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, 120 Days of Sodom, Sade would have been quickly forgotten. Instead, these works, and a few others, have assured him of a profound— albeit highly contested and unstable—artistic and intellectual influence. Because of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer, representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is deeply misleading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of mass-marketed and stylized representations of sexual practices, Sade is better seen as an anti-pornographer. His work is unquestionably obscene, and transgressive in the extreme, but its impact is neither conventionally pornographic nor erotic. Although much of his fiction bears a great deal of similarity to the Gothic novel genre (of which he was a noted and serious critic), his best work, in the “libertine” series of fiction, is sui generis. It doesn’t correspond or submit to the stylistic or thematic patterns established by any previous writer—nor has it been successfully reproduced by any successor. Though stultifyingly repetitive in themselves, Sade’s most provocative works are simply not containable or assimilable by others. They subvert themselves in an infinite loop of contradiction, contortion, and, in many ways, ultimate incomprehensibility. To see how completely Sade fails to permit even highbrow visual interpretations of his work, one need look no further than Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, a loose adaptation of 120 Days. As any patient reader soon discovers, Sade’s project is an exercise in

stretching, in certain very limited directions, language and imagination (and repetition) beyond all conceivable boundaries. His images of unimaginable, and physiologically impossible, cruelty, indulgence, and excess belong entirely to the medium of the wordsmith. Any graphic representation transforms Sade’s literary surplus into heavy, grounded imagery, unmoored from the fantastical lightness of prose. It inevitably literalizes, contains, and forestalls Sade’s overflow of deranged fantasies and rhetorical overkill. In Salò, we see Sade’s scenes staged with graphically represented bodies—a process that makes the horrible more horrible, but also much more mundane, and empties Sade’s grotesque fantasies of all their dark humor. Salò tries very hard to be funny, but it just can’t. By contrast, no matter how horrible the images described by Sade’s unnamed narrator in the first part of 120 Days, he rarely fails to amuse. In his effete verbosity, one can almost smell the powdered wig, see the overrouged cheeks, and feel the faint, exasperated swishing of the handkerchief before the face of the world-weary, jaded, and supremely haughty late eighteenth-century aristocratic storyteller (yet another of Sade’s outlandish fictional characters). Because Sade can’t be successfully reproduced, he can’t be mass-marketed. Beyond simply being pornographic, erotic words and images require the fetishism of branding to

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become viable commodities. This means there must be a recognized set of styles of pornography—or of any commercial genre, for that matter—that are easily reproducible and that will at least promise the consumer some foreknowledge of the product in question. To be successfully mass-marketed, porn is best watered down or sprinkled into other well-established genres of fetishism, especially what’s now called romantic fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, boils down to an execrably written version of “Cinderella” for our time—a familiar and reassuring fairy tale, albeit larded with a supposedly edgy brand of erotica. Porn is particularly prone to sub-generic classification, for the simple reason that it’s intended to reproduce a given set of symbolic fantasies, some of which are already psychiThe

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M o d e m & Ta b o o A powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed sadistic, thought of Ayn Rand.

9 cally or socially fetishized before they become commodified. Hence pornographic novels or videos within a given subgenre are not merely allowed to repeat, in effect, the same book or film over and over again; instead they must be quite monotonously re-created. Endless, precise, and meticulous reproduction is required by the audience. This is, to some extent, true of any genre of popular fiction, but porn’s commercial impulse to be innovative is even more deeply suppressed than it is in other highly repetitive genres such as action thrillers or romantic comedies. And even the silliest, most repetitive genre can, under the right circumstances, open up the possibility for real subversion of its central tropes and motifs. Porn, of whatever variety, seems to foreclose that prospect. It is designed to meet an audience’s expectations and satisfy its fantasies, certainly not to complicate them or subject them to critical examination. These fantasies are not meant to have any broader personal, social, or political significance, and their pornographic representations must never imply that they do. They are presented and used as if they really were merely ends in themselves. In this context, it’s painfully evident that pornography that subverts or implicitly critiques the fantasies it reproduces—the sort of sexual writing, in other words, that Sade specialized in, to the ruthless exclusion of anything resembling standard-issue titillation— will fail in its overt mission by provoking reflection rather than arousal. This would have a self-defeating effect similar to that of an insomniac trying to remedy his or her condition by assiduously taking notes on the experience while trying to fall asleep. It’s dif102 1 The Baffler [no.22]

ficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement. A plethora of other affects are infinitely more plausible: fascination, boredom, amazement, amusement, disgust, horror, frustration, anger, admiration, or indifference are all more readily produced by his baroque narratives and verbose prose style than erotic arousal. This effect turns up on nearly every page of the libertine novels. If we avoid the more ghastly passages—which, believe me, is not easy—we can see how deliberately countererotic Sade’s thought is by simply pointing to his persistent predilection for the foul, as exemplified by this passage from 120 Days: “Beauty, health never strike one save in a simple way; ugliness, degradation deal a far stouter blow, the commotion they create is much stronger, the resultant agitation must hence be more lively. . . . [A]n immense crowd of people prefer to take their pleasure with an aged, ugly, and even stinking crone and will refuse a fresh and pretty girl.” The description of the crone Fanchon that follows makes the point even more vividly. And the murder of Augustine in Part the Fourth is virtually unreadable, and unsurpassed in its unmitigated horror. Sade not only invites the reader to reflect on the nature and origins of the sexual acts, deviations, and perversions that he so exhaustively catalogues, he demands it. And he insists that they have profound philosophical and political implications. Commercial porn, since at least the late nineteenth century, has been based on the most straightforward possible commodity fetishism, and is not only intended, but fully expected, to mask the power relations it represents. By contrast, Sade’s best

work coldly and unflinchingly lays bare those relations—but only for sustained consideration, not in any neatly programmatic prescriptive or political schema. Far from presenting any actionable or even coherent model for liberation, Sade’s work resists the reader’s effort to draw any stable conclusion at all. For good or ill, Sade cannot be appropriated politically, or even philosophically, because of the internal inconsistencies, incongruities, and contradictions that make up the core of his thinking and writing. He raises an infinite loop of questions, but neither offers nor allows any answers.

The Cunning of Unreason If we cannot view Sade as an apostle of political deliverance or personal liberation, he nevertheless was far ahead of his time, in subject matter if nothing else. His writings anticipate a huge cross-section of twentieth-century Western art, scholarship, and politics. Indeed, we could reasonably posit that his work laid the cornerstone for the entire anti-humanist project. Surely Sade’s most important contribution, at its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to absurdist logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its implosion, and anticipating the backlash against it that culminated in the sixties and seventies. What he bequeathed us was nothing less than a slow-growing but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep in

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the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism. It’s impossible to know whether Sade—who was almost certainly mentally ill for much of his life, if not for all of it—deliberately sabotaged the Enlightenment by ruthlessly parodying it or really held the philosophical and political convictions his characters voice ad nauseam. They appear to champion reason, based on quasi-philosophical sophistry, but their arguments seem deeply arbitrary and profoundly irrational. Whether Sade intended to create a systematic satire of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant or sought simply to take the logic of the laws of nature and the categorical imperative to their unsustainable conclusions in a mad trajectory of narcissism and self-gratification, his writings delved one yard below the mines of the Enlightenment’s The

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To everyone but the faithful, this “host” would appear to be some sort of damp wafer, the sexual use of which would be odd but inconsequential and hardly scandalous.

9 humanist conceits, even though his own ordnance exploded more than a century later. All of Sade’s major works pursue—and, indeed, relentlessly repeat—his anti-Enlightenment arguments. But he airs them most compellingly in the demented and appalling, but also absurd and hilarious, introduction to 120 Days, and, above all, in the claims made by its leading character, the Duc de Blangis. They are further elaborated in a lengthy polemical pamphlet, “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” that Sade shoves incongruously into the middle of Philosophy in the Boudoir by simply having its leading character, Dolmancé, read it aloud to the other characters. The pamphlet, she tells them, argues that “murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State.” Insofar as they can be coherently summarized, Sade’s monstrous antiheroes’ ideas— constantly restated—are of a piece with such horrific broadsides. If one laid them side by side, their message would amount to this: individual liberty and autonomy are absolute; anything that interferes with the use of an object (including another human being) to satisfy one’s caprices, whatever they might be, is immoral; human impulses of all kinds, including theft, rape, and murder are the dictates of “nature,” and hence no law should forbid them; private property is an intolerable evil as it deprives others of that property’s use, thwarting their “natural inclinations”; religions, especially Christianity, are monstrous evils designed to justify the repression of individuals’ “natural rights”; atheism of the most iconoclastic variety is, therefore, the only defensible religious attitude; and the accumula104 1 The Baffler [no.22]

tion of power by elites should be constantly and violently resisted by bloodthirsty and “immoral” citizens eager to defend their individual prerogatives by smashing any social or political institution that might restrain them. This logic explains Sade’s apparent defense of murder but passionate opposition to the death penalty. Individual murders are “natural,” because the blood-thirsty impulses behind them arise spontaneously from organic being. Therefore, it is tyranny to punish them. The state, however, is an artificial and inorganic structure that has no vital being in nature—and it therefore has no right to take a life, even under the most extreme circumstances. It is natural for individuals to objectify each other for whatever purpose, but it is intolerable for the state or any inorganic institution to do so. In short, Sade created a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment rationality that—as the limitations of reason became increasingly apparent toward the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth—became increasingly powerful. It is, of course, extremely difficult to know to what extent Sade agreed with these precepts, though he goes to great lengths to encourage readers to assume that he does. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, some characters accuse Dolmancé of being the secret author of “Yet Another Effort,” a sly suggestion that identifies the author with the character, and both with the pamphlet’s arguments. In 120 Days, Sade uses similar feints with Blangis, who is often cast as an ironic self-portrait of the author. The novel even makes reference to “the brave Marquis de S*** who, when informed of the magistrates’ decision to burn him in effigy, pulled his prick from his breeches and

exclaimed: ‘God be fucked, it has taken them years to do it, but it’s achieved at last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, for I’ve got absolutely to discharge’; and he did so in less time than it takes to tell.” Such self-distancing irony again raises the question of authorial intent: How seriously did Sade mean to be taken? Even if he was mad and dangerous, Sade was certainly no hypocrite. He paid for his chosen way of life, and dearly. Sade proved utterly unable to live in accordance with any of the social or political systems of his times. He was jailed under the ancien régime for eleven years, ten of them in the Bastille, for various forms of libertinage and criminal abuse. He was released after the Revolution and became a member of the extreme Left, but was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Jacobins. After the Reign of Terror, he was again released, only to be ordered arrested in 1801 by Napoleon for his “immoral writings”; declared insane, he was held at the Charenton asylum for the remainder of his life. Sade spent at least twentysix of his seventy-four years in incarceration of one kind or another. That he sacrificed such an exceptionally large swathe of his adult life to confinement by the state strongly suggests that although much of Sade’s work is based on a dark and twisted humor, he wasn’t simply kidding. Likewise, even if we view him in earnest, doesn’t Sade simply end up reinforcing the

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kinds of cultural authority that he professes to attack head on? Don’t his arguments remain trapped in a binary from which he cannot escape—in which vice, in order to be praised, must remain clearly identified as vice and opposed to virtue? How can one transgress without acknowledging the moral authority of the forces that one is transgressing against? Don’t his extensive arguments in favor of blasphemy all, in effect, come full circle to make him, de facto, a defender of the spiritual legitimacy of the Church? Blasphemy requires some acknowledgment that what is being profaned is, at some level, actually sacred. Many of his fictional outrages, for instance, involve the abuse of a consecrated host. To everyone but the faithful, this “host” would appear to be some sort of damp wafer, the sexual use of which The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o would be odd but inconsequential and hardly scandalous. Sade must have seen this tension himself, since it appears in his novels time and again. After a lengthy diatribe in which Blangis defends theft and other crimes, Sade’s narrator in 120 Days dryly observes, “It was by means of arguments in this kind the Duc used to justify his transgressions, and as he was a man of greatest possible wit, his arguments had a decisive ring.” Sade’s antiheroes are often described in his narratives—sometimes even by themselves—as “criminal,” “sick,” “depraved,” and other adjectives obviously designed to appall the reader, but that are incompatible with any sincere philosophical defense. Are they good because they are evil? Or does that make them, in the end, simply “evil” after all? Or are they beyond good and evil—in which case, why the remorseless cat-and-mouse game with readers over his antiheroes’ moral nature and their endless depravities and crimes? This is precisely the kind of systematic selfsubversion that makes Sade so slippery, difficult to systematize, and impossible to appropriate. Such incoherencies and contradictions in Sade’s work have led a number of scholars, including Laurence Bongie, the prominent historian of Counter-Enlightenment thought, to deny almost any value in his libertine fiction (although Bongie does highly praise his famed prison letters). But the temptation to dismiss Sade’s work, whatever its merits as literature, has to be tempered by a realistic assessment of the profound influence it has exerted on the Western world over the past century and a half.

Choosing Sades Critical elements of Nietzsche’s attack on Enlightenment “reason” appear to be rooted in Sade, although scholarly opinion is divided over how direct this influence may have been. The imprint of Sadean precepts can be seen clearly in Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals and, above all, in his bitter denuncia106 1 The Baffler [no.22]

tions of Christianity, which seem to mimic in both substance and language those of Sade’s antiheroes. And Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand’s ideas, though she pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle. Rand essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and therefore some elements of Sade’s legacy. She notably claimed to have been the most implacable philosophical enemy of Kant, a title that surely belongs to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Rand. Ironically, while Sade, Nietzsche, and Rand all champion the primacy of the individual will, Sade’s antipathy toward all forms of private property could not have been more absolute. Sade’s contempt for property and the rationalist philosophical system derived from its defense indeed places him well to the left of the Jacobins and most other French revolutionaries. For Sade, property is the essence of despotism. Conversely, Rand and her present-day followers on the American right (along with many others) cast private property as the essence of liberty. Like so much else having to do with Sade, his historical descent into present-day influence doesn’t follow anything resembling a straight line. Sade is so subversive that all efforts to directly appropriate him politically have been entirely restricted to the Left, usually as a vehicle for attacking the Right. Scholars began to systematically rediscover Sade’s work, after decades of censorship and obscurity, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This recovery took place in two related contexts. The first was the growth of interest in the full range of human sexual behavior, most notably through the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis popularized the term sadism (derived from Sade’s own name, of course). Soon thereafter, Freud famously began excavating the psychic origins of sexuality, often drawing on the same primal fantasies that inform the Sadean land-

Sade became identified in psychoanalytic thought as the voice of the shadowy “obscene superego” that regulates the libidinal economy by prompting and structuring enjoyment while simultaneously enforcing the “law” that prohibits it.

9 scape. Here, modern interpreters have cast Sade’s writings, particularly 120 Days of Sodom, with its obsessive lists of and commentaries on paraphilia, as precursors to both Krafft-Ebing’s documentation of human sexual behavior and Freud’s investigations into its deeper psychological origins. Sade’s novels are also rightly regarded as neurotic symptoms, par excellence, in and of themselves. Freud’s work exerted a strong ideological influence on the early twentieth century Left, which viewed his brand of psychoanalysis as fundamentally subversive of the dominant bourgeois social order (though Freud made it amply clear that his system offered little hope for a more democratic alternative). But Freud’s ideas also informed the strategies of corporate mass culture and advertising—particularly through their practical application in propaganda pioneered by his American nephew, Edward Bernays, the founder of the new twentieth-century discipline of public relations—as well as those of the fascist Right. With “mass society” increasingly subject to manipulation at the unconscious level, often through highly sexualized imagery, Sade— with his “eroticized” fantasies of harsh punishment and arbitrary, rigorous discipline— was to some degree rehabilitated as a writer who channeled a crucial subconscious dynamic. Sade eventually became identified in a good deal of psychoanalytic thought as the voice of the shadowy “obscene superego” that regulates the libidinal economy by prompting and structuring enjoyment while simultaneously enforcing the “law” that prohibits it. Likewise, various artistic and intellectual

movements, especially the Surrealists, rediscovered Sade’s shortcuts to the unconscious— and embraced them. Existentialist, structuralist, and poststructuralist critiques that expand on the anti-humanism pioneered by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals all have roots in elements of Sade’s writings. Sartre and Camus, and even Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky, all expanded on themes originating in Sade—wittingly or unwittingly. In her 1955 essay “Must We Burn Sade?” Simone de Beauvoir wrestled with the fact that, in spite of existentialism’s obvious debt to Sade, as a feminist she found his writings deeply troubling. Somewhat grudgingly, Beauvoir concludes that Sade was indeed engaged in an existentialist project avant la lettre, and takes him seriously as a moralist, but ultimately she condemns his ethics and artistic values. The anti-humanist agenda, arguably initiated by Sade, culminated in French poststructuralism, and above all in the work of Michel Foucault (who reveled in homosexual sadomasochism in his personal life). The Left has been drawn to Sade’s attack on Enlightenment reason from two perspectives. The first values Sade’s anticipation of the logic of various contemporary evils, including fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, or corporatedriven mass consumer culture. In their influential 1944 study of the limitations of the rationalist tradition in capitalist economies, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were probably the first to draw a direct link between Kant and Sade. Sade and Nietzsche, they wrote, “both took science at its word,” and pursued “the implicaThe

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While Sade cannot be successfully appropriated, let alone commercialized, he has managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost ubiquitous.

9 tions of reason still more resolutely than the positivists.” Moreover, they added, “because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the rooftops,” they are “still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers.” Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Kantian rationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, lends itself perfectly to totalitarian systems. They further note that Sade’s arbitrary but rigorous and ruthlessly imposed sadomasochistic orders prefigured the elaborate mechanisms of repression that flourished under totalitarianism, which (much like their Sadean predecessors) vacillate between utopian and dystopian impulses. They hold that Sade’s anti-heroine Juliette already explains and enacts the ruthless but logical consequences of a purely rational categorical imperative when such ideas are placed in the wrong hands. Horkheimer and Adorno see Sade’s protagonists as callous automatons of alienated, but rational, Kantian orders, as well-developed proto-fascists—or, indeed, as modern bureaucratic functionaries of any ideological persuasion. A similar argument by the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan holds that Sade, in effect, “completes” Kant by monstrously closing the circle left gaping by the open-ended categorical imperative. Moreover, Lacan identified the categorical imperative as simply another term for the superego itself. Ever the surrealist of theory, Lacan argues that Sade can be presented as if he were Kant. If Sade’s arbitrary but rigorously enforced imaginary social systems are a parody of law, Sade him108 1 The Baffler [no.22]

self can therefore be cast as a parody of Kant. A different, though happily much less influential, strand of left-wing thought has identified in “Sadean” violence, if not a liberatory potential as such, at least a necessary revolutionary impulse. In 1930, Georges Bataille cited Sade as the exemplar of the “ecstasy and frenzy” that characterize “the urges that today require worldwide society’s fiery and bloody Revolution.” Michel Foucault, greatly influenced by Bataille, seemed to see in the 1978-79 Iranian revolution an eruption of the kind of spontaneous revolutionary violence envisioned by Sade in “Yet Another Effort,” and defended in the name of virtuous “immorality.” Sade appears to be arguing through Dolmancé that “insurrection . . . indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness . . . has got to be a republic’s permanent condition,” and that “the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes into, and identifies him with, the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government.” Foucault’s woeful misreading of revolutionary violence in Iran as exemplifying these “virtues” has done lasting and significant harm to his reputation.

Assume the Position While Sade cannot be successfully appropriated, let alone commercialized, he has slowly but surely managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost ubiquitous. These Sadean echoes are hardly restricted to—and probably not even mainly to be found in—commercial pornography.

By linking Enlightenment and mythology at the hip in their pioneering and still relevant critique, Horkheimer and Adorno identified traces of Sade’s obscene, highly regimented social orders not just in the horrors of fascism and Stalinism, but also in the more mundane tyranny of industrialized mass culture. They repositioned for us the ongoing conundrum, apparently inherent to modernity, that people demand their own subjugation at least as much as they yearn for their own empowerment. And they found, at the core of this problem, Sade and Nietzsche’s critiques of reason. The heavy tension between egalitarianism and egoism is common to both Sade’s thinking and contemporary American political culture. As Julie Hayes notes, after the French Revolution, Sade “was prey to conflicting notions of society, government, and class structure. He hated the abuse of power, particularly as it applied to him, but his sense of class consciousness was stronger than ever.” In a letter to his attorney at the end of 1791, he confronted the “mobility” of his perspectives, asking him, “What am I at present? Aristocrat or democrat? You tell me, if you please, lawyer, for I haven’t the slightest idea.” This irresolvable tension between radical egalitarianism and radical individualism in Sade is precisely what makes him and his work politically and philosophically “impossible.” What could be a more resonant puzzle for the way we live now? Is anything, in this sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party slogans such as “keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare?” Much of American culture is committed to egalitarianism, and demands and expects certain social and economic protections from government. But simultaneously, and often in the same breath, it venerates extreme wealth, individual privilege, and the prerogatives of the rich. This dichotomy is driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion of widespread social mobility and the idea that anyone can

join our morally unrestrained power elite by hewing to the character-defining virtues of hard work, while also incongruously courting the favor of fortune. Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn Rand. Economic Darwinism is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corporate amorality—as well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as bailouts for financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.” So to rephrase Sade’s quandary slightly, what are we, Americans, at present? Oligarchs or egalitarians? The normative response to the tension between individual rights, which protect the prerogatives of the powerful, and collective rights, which protect those of the general public, is that we seek to find a balance between the two. This is the consensus view of both the notional “center-right” and “center-left” in our punitive-minded political culture—and this may really be the only politically plausible or reasonable answer in this otherwise untenable standoff. But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment, still lurks in the dark corners and liminal spaces of our culture, whispering that reason often carries a very hefty price tag—and with ever more elaborate punishments to come.t

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The

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Inside the House 3 C at h y Pa r k Hong I’m no frail eel, no damsel steal, My costume’s a bathrobe, secure as hazmat one look at me, I’m addictive as transfat you can’t touch my towel-rack. My batcave’s this needlepark, But it’s being converted to luxury condos, so I’m gonna sing you my vendetta rondeaus. My hustling’s to get Ovidian, zapping all them white asses, Sri-Lankan tan to black Papua-New-Ginean Smoke me some super power gungeon, Ain’t nothing like loose Lipton, Then I blast developers to the ghettos of Trenton. So quill it, or I’ll shoot you a bindi bleeding between your periwinkle twinklers. Make bankers squat like Untouchable tinklers, My last attack? Razzed a Koch plutocrat and he turned to Mohammed Has-sad He tried to rush out of airport Halifax But Customs held him back. Mistook him for a wanted Yemen foe. Pistol-whipped him when he made a row. He was a no show at Chevron Texaco, cuz shit, now he’s in Guantanamo. So I’m your Conradian nightmare, Go dance in that blackface. But after the show, won’t get your fare back, you’re still black.

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wS T O R Y

The Agony of Leaves 3 Mahesh Rao

do not want to beat about this bush or that bush. I will say it straight: I am not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone other than my wife. I was always faithful to Lata and she will certainly vouch for that, wherever she is resting now. I am from a decent family; I have a good position in the community; I have clean hands. Unfortunately for me, I am in love with my daughter-in-law. And without a doubt, it is love. It is necessary to say this to challenge the obvious conclusion, that my predicament is a matter of lust and libido. The problem is society, which over and above everything else, has a filthy mind. People will say: look at the dirty bugger, he has no shame, how could he even think such a thing? What I would say in response is this: look at my track record and my intentions, look at my character. After such an examination, only a clean chit can be the result. But it is my bad luck that things are not so simple.

very morning Meera and I sit on the verandah with our coffee, just like Lata and I did the time we went to Kodaikanal. Meera scans the paper and I scan her, although not in a way that would make her feel uncomfortable. My son Vikram usually sleeps till late, so it is just the two of us, apart from Venu running back and forth from the kitchen. That boy never walks. Meera reads out some interesting tit-bit: “Principal absconds with student and college cook.” Then she gives me a half-smile and shakes

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her head in that special way: what will people do next? The smile that also means: what will we do next? Long after our second cup, when the paper has slid onto the floor and Venu has trotted off into the kitchen garden, we continue to sit here, staring at the slopes. There is no need for this type of attendance on her part or on mine, but we do it anyway, feeling something between thrill and anxiety. “I really need to have my bath and start the day,” she often says, not moving. “The day is not going anywhere,” I say. In a few weeks the rains will be here and the water will smash against every side of the bungalow. I suppose then we will have to go back inside. But I am not going to think The

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w about that; at the moment the sunshine is still lighting up the hillsides, every bush aching with green. I have said that my feelings are not based on lust and I maintain that position. But it has to be said that Meera is beautiful. At times, when she is lost in her own world, her face reminds me of one of those fifties tragedy queens. The expression is a little sulky; the determined chin is lowered; that loose strand is tucked behind her ear. Then our eyes will meet, I will say something about Venu or the constant damn mist up here and her spirit returns, the laughter springing out of her eyes. This week her nail polish has been chipped: it makes her look a little bold, a little mischievous. I can imagine her hands pinning my wrists down as her hair falls over my face.

hree or four tiles have fallen off the roof. Early in the day, all the taps splutter mindlessly and then spew out a muddy trickle. Somewhere there is a leak and the drip goes on through the night. I am not going to mention these things to Vikram again, as it will only annoy him. All over the house there are items that seem to have been left behind by previous occupants. There is a broken pram in the storeroom off the kitchen. A framed painting of a woman nuzzling a deer gathers cobwebs on the top shelf in my room. They are using a cricket bat as a doorstop. And there is the smell of tea always. There are packets of dust stacked up in the storeroom. Export quality cartons fall out of the kitchen cupboard. Cloth bags full of leaves sit in a basket on the dresser, and there is more tea in its drawers. The smell is like burnt bread or sawdust or damp wood. I can’t stand the stuff. My home in Coimbatore was very different. Smaller, of course, but neater. I sold it two years ago and came to live here. Vikram

112 1 The Baffler [no.22]

They like to explain to the layman the meaning of a “second flush”; how the product can become “chesty” when it is tainted with the smell of packing materials.

9 got a tip that a chemical plant had been given permission to set up just five kilometers away from our old neighborhood. He strongly advised me to sell the place before the property prices crashed. I can’t blame him for wanting to safeguard his inheritance. So I sold the place, put the money in a fixed deposit and now I’m cooling my heels here in tea country. Vikram has been the manager of the estate for nearly three years. He is hardly at home and spends most of his time “whipping the place into shape,” as he likes to announce to any visitor. According to him the pluckers are lazy, the field supervisors are cheats, and the fuel suppliers are racketeers. He explains these things to me as if I have never been in proper employment; as if I am under the impression that running an enterprise is like playing a game of gully cricket. “We could be affected by a political crisis on the other side of the world, by fashions in Japan, incomes in Russia. You really have to keep your eye on the ball in this game,” he said a few mornings ago. “When Russians become rich, I am sure the first thing they dream of is a hot cup of Nilgiri chai,” I said. “Really? And when you were at the bank, rubber-stamping some clerk’s thirty thousand rupee loan to finance his daughter’s wedding, what international considerations were going through your mind then?” “Vikram, please,” said Meera.

days. They play golf. They go horse riding. I am sure Vikram will have said that he has ridden ever since he can remember. I have learnt that there are many things about his past that have been adjusted for the benefit of the Sisodia family.

RALPH GIBSON

He shrugged and walked out onto the verandah, yelling for one of the workers. The estate is owned by the Sisodias, and they are the center of our universe here, although sometimes they are not seen for months. Old Man Sisodia, what more can be said about him? I think even God is afraid to tell him his innings are nearly over. The elder Sisodia son concerns himself with other aspects of their businesses: the plastics and the cement. The younger Sisodia son is in charge of the sugar and tea. I mentioned that he just needs to buy a dairy farm and then he will be all set but Vikram did not even smile. That boy thinks the Sisodias are gods. There is also a Sisodia nephew and he is the one that we see the most. He comes here in his jeep, wearing sunglasses even when the afternoon is thick with fog. When he is around, we see even less of Vikram. They say they are going to Coonoor for meetings and auctions, and then do not return for a few

few nights ago I lay in bed listening to that damn drip. I thought a slow count during the interval between each drop would send me to sleep. But it only made me more restless. I found myself becoming anxious if the drop did not arrive on time. So I got up to go to the bathroom. In the corridor I could see a rectangle of light coming from their room. I walked to the edge of the door. In the gap between the hinges, I saw what Vikram hides from the world. He was asleep on the bedspread, his shirt still tucked into his trousers, his mouth twisted in contempt. Meera was sitting up on her side, her head leaning back against the wall. There was a book open in her lap but her eyes were closed. Her plait hung down one side, stopping at the place where the buttons on her nightie began. This was not a woman asleep; this was a woman in suspense. I have been a husband. I know that there are secrets from the world, other lives in the darkness. But Meera is an exceptional woman and does not deserve to be treated in this shabby way. Look at you, Vikram, I thought; look at this tiptop man. A man who comes home too drunk even to talk to the woman who has spent the day sitting on the verandah, wondering what her life would have been like in a place far away from this wilderness. Meeraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head did not nod or drop as I watched. That is how I know she was awake. I think she sensed my presence and yet she did not move. She left the door ajar and the light on for me, in defiance of her husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sour breaths. I withdrew. In the bathroom I looked at The

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w my face, sitting solidly above these too big pajamas. A man my age must be allowed to have a last frolic in his head. Allow me Meera, I said to myself: whom does it hurt? It is not as if anything will actually happen.

ot all happiness has to be big. Lata knew that and I have no doubt that it was a certainty she had even before we were married. I turned down promotion after promotion because I did not want to be transferred to some godforsaken place every few years. I did not want to be involved with the politics of the managers. I did what I was asked, and that was enough. It did not diminish us. When Lata and I went to Kodaikanal, on the final day we decided to have coffee at a big hotel. There was no one sitting at the table next to us; only a dog asleep on a chair. About a half dozen silver bowls were spread across the white tablecloth, all nearly full of soupy ice cream. Various hotel staff members were loafing near the restaurant door, but we were simply left to sit there for a long time. We did not mind, as it gave us ample opportunity to take in the surroundings: the huge windows looking out on to the lawn, the yards of red velvet, the fireplace. A bearer finally came to take our order, wearing a turban that looked like a giant bird was seated on his head. As he turned away from us, a woman came into the restaurant to retrieve the dog. Her hair was piled up in a strange sculpture and she wore a black furry jacket. “Chikita,” she said. The way she swung her large hips reminded me of the gait of a boar. “Chiki-liki-tiki-ta.” The dog sprang off the chair and they left the restaurant together: the dog and the boar. When it came, the coffee was expensive, lukewarm, and tasteless. Lata and I left the restaurant, barely able to hide our giggles. We 114 1 The Baffler [no.22]

were just like little children. And we strolled back down to the lake, as if we were the only people in the place who knew a precious secret. So that is what we were. Dinner dances were for people in films. We never owned a car. The first time I tasted beer, I was in my forties. The only people in our lives were our relations and neighbors. In our house there was some coming and going, there were festivals, I thought there was fun. But all this holds no value for Vikram. All he can see is that I shared the same desk at the same bank for twenty years and that one night at his club I mixed up Canada and Canberra.

o get to this estate, you have to leave Coonoor on NH67, the road to Mettupalayam, and take a left after the sign for the army memorial. Then just past the Lakshmi Devi Women’s Cooperative building there is a side road, too narrow for two vehicles to pass each other. The road rises through a stretch of silver oaks and eucalyptus trees. After a couple of kilometers there is a board indicating the road to the Greencrest Tea Estate. The planters who live there are our nearest neighbors, a most dismal couple that Vikram seeks out when he is in the mood. The man mumbles and looks like he wears face powder; the woman laughs in an inappropriate manner and is always spilling food on herself. After the Greencrest turning, the road narrows further and continues for another six or seven kilometers before stopping at our high metal gate. “Private Estate” it says. But who is there to read it? Venu does most of the cooking. There is an old woman who comes in to scrub and sweep, but God only knows what she really does when she is here. Meera is not the domestic type, but that is not a problem because she has never had the need; nor will there ever be a need, I am sure. We have been playing rummy all after-

Venu has a cough: an uneven, high-pitched, bouncing affliction. Apart from the whooshing of the drizzle, it is the only sound in the bungalow.

9 noon. I am not really fond of the game. But it is something to do here and we can prolong our chat around the routine of the cards. I am wearing my maroon sweater, the stylish one. “It looks like it’s getting clear outside,” says Meera. “Shall we take a small walk?” “No, I think better to leave it for today. I still feel a bit of heaviness in my chest.” “Maybe tomorrow, then. Here, show.” She drops a card and then splays the rest out, her elegant fingers resting between us on the sofa. “I think you were just trying to distract me with all your chattering about walks. Points on this game to be discounted.” “You are the chattering one, appa. Not only will we count the points, we’ll double them as a penalty for your attempted cheating.” “Who do you think you’re calling a cheater?” She laughs and begins to gather up the cards. I clasp her hand to stop her. Our hands are locked, my palm sliding back over her knuckles, warmth passing between us. My fingers curl up and press into her buttery skin. I run my thumb up her little finger in the most natural way. She stands up, and the cards fall from her lap. I try to grab her hand again but she shakes me off. Even though my heart is racing, I take comfort from the fact that she does not look angry. Hers is not a face of disgust or shame or fury. It is something else entirely, that I cannot place.

“Venu,” she calls, heading to the kitchen. “Venu.” I pick up the fallen cards one by one, peeling them off the floor. I look at the two faces on the jack of clubs. They look back at me.

ikram seems to be in an unusually good mood tonight. That indicates to me that Meera has not said anything to him. They are going to the club to meet a German tea taster, some sort of world champion in the business. “You know, appa, it is such a bloody pleasure to meet someone who really knows what he is talking about, especially when you share the same passions,” says Vikram, knotting his tie. I don’t know what passions he is talking about but I assume it is tea, since that is what this poor German spends his life tasting. As far as I know, Vikram never gave two damns about tea. I still don’t think he does. If the Sisodias offered him a more senior position in an insurance company or a car business, he would run there before the words had even fully left their mouths. But this poor German will never know that. “I met Jürgen and his wife at the Sisodias’ place in London,” says Vikram. “Lovely couple.” Meera has not said one word since she came out of the room, dressed for their dinner. She is wearing a pink sari with a silver border and her hair is up, making her neck look long and regal. While Vikram is fussing with his shoelaces, she walks over to the window. The night is completely black already, and Venu has switched on the verandah lights. Her blouse is cut low at the back: its arc is making my head spin. There are about two hand spans of skin above the fastening, a complicated knot with silver tassels. I am now sure that she has not mentioned anything to Vikram. She has decided to let The

Baffler [no.22] ! 115

w I crouch down and pick up a high heel with a silky bow attached to it. Where would that bow be positioned? Across the toe or around the ankle or perhaps higher up somewhere. I pick at the bow, working at the knot with both hands. I tear at it with my teeth, sputtering out the glossy fibers that stick to my tongue.

9 it pass, a malfunction in her father-in-law’s head, momentary and not serious. Maybe she did not even recognize it as anything irregular. These things happen: a brush or a knock or a bump. The scent she uses for special occasions is in the air. “His English is excellent,” says Vikram, smiling at Meera’s back. “He certainly knows all the lingo.” She does not turn around. These tea fellows think they have invented a language. They like to explain to the layman the meaning of a “second flush”; how the product can become “chesty” when it is tainted with the smell of packing materials; that when boiling water is poured over tea, the agitation in the cup is “the agony of leaves.” To make sure you understand, they tell you twice, and then a third time. “Darling, shall we go?” Vikram is ready. Meera nods and walks towards the door. My head is filling with more and more blood. She will not leave without wishing me a good night, without giving me some indication. “Appa, we will see you in the morning. If you need some coffee or something, can you wake Venu and ask him to do it? You know what happened last time,” says Vikram. She is adjusting her shawl in the doorway. I stand up and take a step forward. It will remind her that I am here, that all I need is one look. “And don’t touch the bolts. We will lock it from the outside.” 116 1 The Baffler [no.22]

She is now standing by the balustrade. I stop myself from calling out. Vikram pats his jacket pockets and steps outside. The door swings shut and I hear her heels move away on the verandah boards.

ata went through a bad time after her mother died. Only now do I realize how bad it was. One night I returned to our house and not a single light was on. It was all the more mystifying because it was the day before Deepavali. Ours was the only house on the street looking like that, a hole where a home should have been. Inside, there was more darkness. Vikram was at a neighbor’s house. Lata was lying on our bed, her arms crossed over her face. I shook her shoulder. “I’m awake,” she said. “Are you sick?” I could barely hear my voice over the sound of the fireworks rattling and cracking up and down the street. “I can’t get up,” she said. I thought she meant that there was something wrong with her back or her legs. I asked her if she needed to go to the hospital. “I have been trying for months but I just can’t get up,” she said. It was then that I understood. “You must not be weak,” I said. “You must be strong.” She reached out and took my hand with a force I had not felt before. She held it in that strange spinning light and we stayed that way for most of the night, watching the

RALPH GIBSON

colors rocket past the window. Here, at night in the Nilgiri Hills, there is no light, no noise. This is a place where dogs don’t howl, babies don’t cry, people don’t speak. Out on the terraces, I have noticed that under every shrub there exists a different kind of silence.

“W

here is Meera?” I ask Venu. “They came in very late. Madam said she has a headache. She’s sleeping.” I continue with my brainteaser. It’s a complicated affair involving balls placed in a series of boxes. The aim is to identify the number and color of the balls in each box but I can’t even work out how many colors there are supposed to be. I give up again. It has started to rain. Not the forceful storms that we expected but something meager and gasping. The slopes have lost all color. Today they are only slabs of charcoal, ready to slide down towards the wet plains. Venu has a cough: an uneven, high-

pitched, bouncing affliction. Apart from the whooshing of the drizzle, it is the only sound in the bungalow. Meera does not leave her room all day.

he TV screen here features a range of shades from blue to grey. I have been informed that it is something to do with the altitude and the way in which the cables are laid, but I have not attempted to understand this reasoning. So whether it is an evening serial or the news or a music program, the participants always look depressed or terminally ill. It takes away the fun of watching. Meera’s avoidance tactics have been continuing. There can be no doubt that my foolish action has scared and upset her. I have to return us to our previous positions, no matter what it takes. There is no other way for us to live here. I will beg her for forgiveness and she will take pity on me. Vikram will never have to know about any of this. I am a fool: a detestable old fool. The

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eera is nowhere to be seen. I was on my own at breakfast, with Venu being excessively polite, as if he was mocking my presence. Maybe I was imagining it. According to him, a friend came to pick her up, but I am sure this is a tall tale. I have been on the lookout since early morning and I did not hear any car outside. I go into their room and look around: there are no clues. Her brown handbag is on the dressing table, but she could have taken a different one I suppose. I open the wardrobe door and stare at the jumble of shoes. I crouch down and pick up a high heel with a silky bow attached to it. Where would that bow be positioned? Across the toe or around the ankle or perhaps higher up somewhere. I pick at the bow, working at the knot with both hands, plucking and pulling, but it won’t come undone. With my nails I burrow into the fabric. I tear at it with my teeth, sputtering out the glossy fibers that stick to my tongue. It seems ridiculous that I cannot do anything with this knot. In the end I exhaust myself and drop the shoe back into the wardrobe. It is so difficult without her. There is the sound of a blade hitting a board in the kitchen and I go in there because I can’t be alone. Venu is sitting on the floor, cutting the eyes out of potatoes. It only now occurs to me that he seems to be here all the time. Since I arrived he does not appear to have taken any leave, visited any family, or gone off to have a good time. I want to ask him something about his life but he gives me a look of such wariness; a look that says he is tired of living with the obscene knowledge in his possession. I turn around and leave the kitchen. In the sitting room cabinet there is a nearly full bottle of foreign whisky. You see that in films. The man facing a crisis strides into a room; he pulls the bottle towards him, unscrews the cap and tosses it over his shoulder; 118 1 The Baffler [no.22]

I lay my forehead on the ground and plead with her to listen to me. Her feet give off the chill of these hills and I know that she will jerk them free at any moment.

9 the very sound of the liquid glugging into the glass is comforting; we know that he will soon be restored; he throws it back in one gulp; his eyes return to focus; he repeats. They don’t tell you that you will get a headache even before your second sip; that its smell will make your eyes water; that what you fear will leap from your heart into your head. “Not with soda, appa. Never with soda. With ice, fine. If you must,” Vikram once said to me. So in spite of myself, I begin drinking the whisky as it is, with neither soda nor ice. It is what Vikram would want.

hen Meera returns home, I am still in the sitting room. She turns on the light and starts. “You gave me a shock. Why are you sitting in the dark?” These are the first words she has said to me for days. I draw myself off the sofa, reordering the sentences that I have prepared, the thing that must be said. As if sensing that what I am going to say will not be to her liking, she turns away. “Wait, please wait,” I say. Her gaze falls to the glass on the floor. “You’ve been drinking?” “I’ve been thinking, about you.” “You sound strange. Are you drunk?” “No. I am sorry.” “What?” I move forward but my legs are so unsteady

that I drop to my knees, clutching the side of the armchair for support. I dare not look at her so instead I look in her direction, where there are books and cushions and leather and wood and the floor. I begin to speak. “I don’t want you to misunderstand me, about what happened, which was a mistake, a misunderstanding you see, but I am very sorry, I never meant to make you angry or hurt you when you have been so kind to me, the type of kindness I can’t explain.” “Appa, stop.” “No, please, you need to understand because I don’t think you understand my position at all.” I stop speaking because a wave of nausea comes over me. Her voice is a whisper: “Don’t do this. I don’t know what you want from me.” I wish she would understand that I am doing this in order to stop it; to reassure her that it will never happen again; that our lives will return to that gentle order on which we are both so dependent. She does not seem to understand, so I need to make one last effort to bring clarity. I need to end the confusion. I think of getting to my feet but instead approach her on my hands and knees, going from the softness of the carpet to the hard wooden floor where she is standing. I stretch out but slip. I am lying on the floor now and my hands reach out and touch her ankles. “Meera,” I say. I look up. In her eyes, there is the pity that comes with horror. She begins to sob, great shuddering breaths that terrify me. I lay my forehead on the ground and plead with her to listen to me. Her feet give off the chill of these hills and I know that she will jerk them free at any moment. I know what I am saying but I cannot be sure if she is able to hear me. Her sobs are too loud, the lights are too bright, the hour is too late. I have to reverse the clock and I

am prepared to keep explaining until I have made amends. I begin again when there is the sound of footsteps on the verandah, snuffing out my words. The door crashes open, snapping back with the force. But there is someone there to take its weight. I turn my head and see Vikram in the doorway, his proportions all wrong, the head so far away, the torso wide, the legs endless. Through the smears of my sight I now see that he is not alone. Behind him stands the Sisodia nephew, his head to one side, as if he has averted his eyes.

he rain seems to have disappeared. Solid bands of mist have encircled the bungalow over the past few days. Yesterday I could not even see the fence from my window. Today is not much better. The bands are the same shades of blue and grey as the TV screen. I am trying a new brainteaser. This one involves ordering a set of circles, each with a number in the center, so that applying a given formula to the set yields a specific number. It is more difficult than I thought it would be. I hear Venu’s tread. It is accompanied by the trembling of a cup on a saucer. Strange that it should be so loud, this rattle, and curiously slow, as if it has something to announce. Even though it is only a few paces from the kitchen to where I am sitting, the sound continues, the clattering of china. I recognize that I am expecting the cup to fall, to shatter into a thousand pieces. Then I see Venu and he puts the cup and saucer down in front of me. “Sir had phoned,” he says. “They are staying there a few more days. They are coming back, maybe next week, maybe later.” “I see.” “Sir, tea?” I look at the steam rising from the cup on the table. “No, not for me,” I say; “no more tea.”t The

Baffler [no.22] ! 119

Sphinx Infinitives 3 Ty ron e Wil l i a m s

Here—ahead-

Tunisia, Tunisia, wherefore art, Tunisia?

a first crossdressing humanimal

Dizzy chicken

an index finger over the lips of God,

careens skyward squawk ex-x

pursed

where for every exuberant here! hear

sleight-of-smile

ye/you—

a bow suspended

string instrument of the middle finger

above the bridge

excluded

overture to an overture

Morocco-pressed into service elevates Egypt—

bent slight.

revolver with a rifle scope

abases Syria— Here looms

raised brow

doors/power—

heir to heir-

Unmoved.

loom and ‘fro the sweat-

So moved:

revolving v. reinforced fire-

Hor-Em-Ahket tomb of the unknown slave

is to be, the

where for every Khafre work

motion, having passed,

there will have been a Khulu work

shop chopped

inflates to as it wards

off

off-peak ad

ankh sans an

120 1 The Baffler [no.22]

hoc olfactum

wS T O R Y

Up in Birdland 3 Monica Hileman

hey could eat and not care about bad cholesterol, heart disease, or cancer. They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again. No more wearing a mouth guard at night to keep the teeth from grinding. No more worrying how to stretch the money ’til the end of the month. Knowing the finite contour of their future—the very word that had taken on such weight and dread—freed them from all that. It would be like a vacation, only instead of having to go back to the coupon clipping, not knowing for how long or how bad it would get, they could relax and meet the end together, on their own terms. They walked past the Perfect Finish Expo, the gold pyramid of the Pharaoh’s Rest Haven. Fred and Sylvia exchanged a glance. “Do they mummify you?” he whispered as they walked into the little Swiss chalet, where a Nordic-looking gentleman welcomed them. Alpine Haven, located in the Rockies, overlooked a river and, depending on the season, offered hiking and canoe trips or sleigh rides and skiing, the diversions of nearby Aspen, and a variety of lavish spa treatments. Françoise, in the quaint French provincial booth next door, encouraged them to consider that they could meander down country lanes, wander the very fields and hillsides immortalized by the Impressionists, do all the painting or sightseeing they wanted, or do nothing but enjoy the best wine and cuisine in the world. Fred had spent a summer in Paris many years ago and had always wanted to go back and visit the South of France, but could they afford it? Thinking of how long it

K ATH E R I N E S TR E E TE R

had been since she’d picked up a brush, Sylvia sighed and shook her head. Politely, they thanked her and moved on. Suspended over the long aisles that stretched across the cavernous convention center, a rippling banner promised, The Best End of Life Experience. Many of the booths had little fountains, the sound of gently pouring water or soft New Age music playing, scenes of forests and palm trees. Cruise the Caribbean. Run Naked in Brazil. Find It in the Himalayas. The Mariposa Haven in Costa Rica had walls made of plants and rooms full of butterflies. The sales representatives, a former Miss Universe, graciously assured them that they would have an unforgettable experience, then hesitated and quickly called their attention to the video showing laughing guests zipping The

Baffler [no.22] ! 121

w across the lush green canopy, perhaps having realized she had slipped into the old spiel; these guests would not be having memories. Sylvia accepted a brochure, and they continued on, past the booth done up Mediterranean-style with a backdrop of whitewashed houses, past the Eco-Luxe booths with sites in the Maldives and the Philippines. International travel was not in their budget. Michigan’s Angler’s Haven claimed to be trout fishing heaven. At the Extreme Sports Haven the physically adventurous could sign up for skydiving, bungee jumping, mountain climbing, or wind surfing. Other sorts of adventures could be had at Plato’s Retreat Haven or the less pretentious Gals and Guys Ranch in Nevada, boasting “the hospitality of an old time bordello.” On the back wall an elderly man in a cowboy hat soaked in a hot tub with three of the “hostesses.” Aging hippies or button-down types who

missed out on the sixties could go to Peace and Love Haven, where recreational drugs and Grateful Dead jams would let you “rock out on a high note.” The spiritually inclined could spend their days at the Taos Sagebrush Haven taking nature walks and meditating; their evenings in ecstatic dance. A consult with the resident shaman was complimentary. In the Upper Pasture Haven’s sand-colored tent, a rose-tinted light bathed the wide face of the blonde representative, giving her hair a pinkish hue. The ranch had been in her family for generations, since her sheep-herding great-grandfather came from the Basque Country to the rugged terrain of southern Oregon. Tired from all the walking, Fred and Sylvia were happy to sit and watch the virtual tour of the farmhouse with the handsome sheepdog relaxing on the porch, the barn with a hayloft, the horses in the meadow. Due to their dwindling funds, they didn’t get

R U TH M A RTE N

122 1 The Baffler [no.22]

They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again.

9 out much, and stayed chatting with Lou and Marie from Cincinnati who wandered in, the four of them momentarily forgetting their reason for being there.

rom the Club Med getaways to the renovated Catskill resorts, everyone in the hospitality industry was eager to get in on End of Life Havens. Fred imagined the marketing must have been a challenge for the industry which had grown quickly after statutes passed, first in Florida, and then across the country, that amended the laws allowing assisted suicide for those with terminal illnesses to include people with severe financial hardship. But a startling number of elderly couples who could no longer pay their property taxes and other bills were turning on the gas. A widower who had jumped off the roof of the insurance building where he used to work left a note apologizing for the mess, as did the couple who drove the old Dodge into a quarry. Federal hearings were held, and legislators decided there had to be more humane, less hazardous options made available that put no burden on already strapped cities and towns. Like casino gambling, End of Life Havens had made it into the general comfort zone and now received tax breaks and ads on state websites. “Come to the Land of Lakes, where each of those last days can be magical.” “In Vermont, naturally.” “Montana, Your Last Best Place.” Fred might have considered investing if he hadn’t lost his pension. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at the small cabin perched in a simulated tree branch up near the ceiling. They could use the wood slat steps to climb up the trunk or

have the two men standing beneath hoist them up. Fred helped his wife into the sling and watched as she ascended, then climbed up himself, into a replica of one of Higher Up Haven’s tree houses. “We try to keep it all low-tech,” said a slightly stooped, rail-thin man, inviting them in. Sylvia was not aware of it at first, paging through the Mylar booklet of photographs, but she could hear distant birdcalls and the soft hush of wind-blown leaves gently rustling. They sat on the rustic wicker couch listening to Jacob explain how the villas were placed in such a way that the only views were of trees and countryside. Each had a camp-style shower, a butane cook stove, cute druid-like details in the carpentry with bark showing on the edges. A motorized lift came optional. Fred picked up a pricelist—here they were readily available—and murmured appreciatively. They were no spa treatments; instead they featured a state-of-the-art sound system and an extensive choice of musical programming: African, Bebop, Classical, Doo-wop, Folk, Irish Traditional; the list, cross-indexed by performers and composers, went on and on. Guests could request a customized playlist. “You folks just relax, see how it feels,” said Jacob, climbing out the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Fred sat cupping one of his knees in both hands, his head tilted back as if he were listening. “Instrumental or vocal?” said Sylvia. “You know, I was just thinking of Sarah Vaughan singing ‘Lullaby of Birdland.’” “Oh, that would be nice,” she said. “That and ‘September Song.’”t The

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The Robots Are Coming 3 Ky l e Da rg a n with clear-cased woofers for heads, no eyes. They see us as a bat sees a mosquito—a fleshy echo, a morsel of sound. You’ve heard their intergalactic tour busses purring at our stratosphere’s curb, awaiting the counter intelligence transmissions from our laptops and our earpieces, awaiting word of humanity’s critical mass, our ripening. How many times have we dreamed it this way— The Age of the Machines, the post industrial specter of tempered paws, five welded fingers wrenching back our roofs, siderophilic tongues seeking blood, licking the crumbs of us from our beds. O, it won’t be pretty, America. What land would you trade for our lives? A treaty inked in advance of metal’s footfall. Give them Detroit. Give them Gary, Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten nurseries of girders and axels. Tell the machines we honor their dead, distant cousins. Tell them we left those cities to repose of respect for the bygone era of molten metal. Tell them Carnegie and Ford were giant men, that war glazed their palms with gold. Tell them we humans mourn the ecosystem of manufacture all the same.

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M o d e m & Ta b o o “Open source software” was the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reilly. This is where he tested all his trademark discursive interventions: hosting a summit to define the concept, penning provocative essays to refine it, producing a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivating a network of thinkers to proselytize it.

(Continued from page 72.)

o understand how O’Reilly’s idea of the Internet helped legitimize the open source paradigm, it’s important to remember that much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses. O’Reilly’s bet was that as software migrated from desktops to servers— what, in another fit of buzzwordophilia, we later called the “cloud”—licenses would cease to matter. Since no code changed hands when we used Google or Amazon, it was counterproductive to fixate on licenses. “Let’s stop thinking about licenses for a little bit. Let’s stop thinking that that’s the core of what matters about open source,” O’Reilly urged in an interview with InfoWorld in 2003. So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”—at least not in Stallman’s sense of the word. O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.” This stood in stark contrast to Stallman’s plan of curtailing—by appeals to ethics and, one day, perhaps, law—the freedom of developers in order to promote the freedom of

users. O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.” The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone. “I am willing to accept any argument that says that there are advantages and disadvantages to any particular licensing method. . . . My moral position is that people should be free to find out what works for them,” he wrote in 2001. That “what works” for developers might eventually hurt everyone else—which was essentially Stallman’s argument—did not bother O’Reilly. For all his economistic outlook, he was not one to talk externalities. According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution. Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation, even if its goal was to promote a greater uptake of open source software, must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software. Occasionally this stance led to paradoxes, as, for example, during a heated 2002 debate on whether governments should be required to ditch Microsoft and switch to open source software. O’Reilly The

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expressed his vehement opposition to such calls. “No one should be forced to choose open source, any more than they should be forced to choose proprietary software. And any victory for open source achieved through deprivation of the user’s right to choose would indeed be a betrayal of the principles that free software and open source have stood for,” O’Reilly wrote in a widely discussed blog post. That such an argument could be mounted reveals just how much political baggage was smuggled into policy debates, once “open source software” replaced “free software” as the idiom of choice. Governments are constantly pushed to do things someone in the private sector may not like; why should the software industry be special? Promoting accountability or improving network security might indeed disrupt someone’s business model—but so what? Once a term like “open source” entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about “innovation” and “progress,” not “accountability” or “security.” To weaken Stallman’s position, O’Reilly had to show that the free software movement was fighting a pointless, stupid war: the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete. There was a fair amount of semantic manipulation at play here. For Stallman, licenses were never an end in themselves; they mattered only as much as they codified a set of practices deriving from his vision of a technologically mediated good life. Licenses, in other words, were just the means to enable the one and only end that mattered to free software advocates: freedom. A different set of technological practices— e.g., the move from desktop-run software to the cloud—could have easily accommodated a different means of ensuring that freedom. 126 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Much as “open source software” gave rise to “open source politics” and “open source science,” so did “Web 2.0” expand its terminological empire. O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan.

9 In fact, Stallman’s philosophy, however rudimentary, had all the right conceptual tools to let us think about the desirability of moving everything to the cloud. The ensuing assault on privacy, the centralization of data in the hands of just a handful of companies, the growing accessibility of user data to law enforcement agencies who don’t even bother getting a warrant: all those consequences of cloud computing could have been predicted and analyzed, even if fighting those consequences would have required tools other than licenses. O’Reilly’s PR genius lay in having almost everyone confuse the means and the ends of the free software movement. Since licenses were obsolete, the argument went, software developers could pretty much disregard the ends of Stallman’s project (i.e., its focus on user rights and freedoms) as well. Many developers did stop thinking about licenses and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour. Sure, there were exceptions—like the highly political and legalistic community that worked on Debian, yet another operating system—but they were the exceptions that proved the rule. To maximize the appeal and legitimacy of this new paradigm, O’Reilly had to establish

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that open source both predated free software and was well on its way to conquering the world—that it had a rich history and a rich future. The first objective he accomplished, in part, by exploiting the ambiguities of the term “open”; the second by framing debate about the Internet around its complex causal connections to open source software. The term “open source” was not invented by O’Reilly. Christine Peterson, the cofounder of Foresight Institute (a nanotechnology think tank), coined it in a February 1998 brainstorm session convened to react to Netscape’s release of Navigator’s source code. Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as “open.” And after O’Reilly’s bombastic interventions—“Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins,” he once proclaimed in an essay—its luster has only intensified. Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech. “Open” thus could mean virtually anything, from “open to intellectual exchange” (O’Reilly in 1999: “Once you start thinking of computer source code as a human language, you see open source as a variety of ‘free speech’”) to “open to competition” (O’Reilly in 2000: “For

me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”). “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement. The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics. As O’Reilly put it in 2010, “the art of promoting openness is not to make it a moral crusade, but rather to highlight the competitive advantages of openness.” Replace “openness” with any other loaded term—say “human rights”—in this sentence, and it becomes clear that this quest for “openness” was politically toothless from the very outset. What, after all, if your interlocutor doesn’t give a damn about competitive advantages? Unsurprisingly, the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness. What the code did was of little importance— the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs. The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd. “The implication of [the open source] label is that we intend to convince the corporate world to adopt our way for economic, self-interested, non-ideological reasons,” Eric Raymond noted in 1998. What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else. It took a lot of creative work to make the new paradigm stick. One common tactic was to present open source as having a much longer history that even predates 1998. Thus, writing shortly after O’Reilly’s historic open source The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o summit, Raymond noted that “the summit was hosted by O’Reilly & Associates, a company that has been symbiotic with the Open Source movement for many years.” That the term “open source” was just a few months old by the time Raymond wrote this didn’t much matter. History was something that clever PR could easily fix. “As we thought about it, we said, gosh, this is also a great PR opportunity—we’re a company that has learned to work the PR angles on things,” O’Reilly said in 1999. “So part of the agenda for the summit was hey, just to meet and find out what we had in common. And the second agenda was really to make a statement of some kind [that] this was a movement, that all these different programs had something in common.” What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene. By linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future, O’Reilly avoided most of those concerns. One didn’t have to choose open source, because the choice had already been made. As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm. As O’Reilly—always the PR man—wrote in a 2004 essay, “It has always baffled and disappointed me that the open source community has not claimed the web as one of its greatest success stories. . . . That’s a PR failure!” To make up for that failure, O’Reilly had to establish some causal relationship between the two—the details could be worked out later on. “I think there’s a paradigm shift going on right now, and it’s really around both open source and the Internet, and it’s not entirely clear which one is the driver and which one 128 1 The Baffler [no.22]

is the passenger, but at least they are fellow travellers,” he announced in his InfoWorld interview. Compared to the kind of universal excitement generated by the Internet, Stallman’s license-talk was about as exciting as performing Mahler at a Jay-Z concert. As O’Reilly himself acknowledged, his “emphasis in talking about open source has never been on the details of licenses, but on open source as a foundation and expression of the Internet.” When something is touted as both a foundation and an expression of something else, the underlying logic could probably benefit from more rigor. Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet. O’Reilly was up to the task. “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,” he said in 2000, “you’ll see the threads that tie together not just traditional open source projects, but also collaborative ‘computing grid’ projects like SETIAtHome, user reviews on Amazon.com, technologies like collaborative filtering, new ideas about marketing such as those expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto, weblogs, and the way that Internet message boards can now move the stock market.” In other words, everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source. The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses. For example, the fact that one could view the source code of a webpage right in one’s browser has little to do with open source software, but it was part of the same “openness” spirit that O’Reilly saw at work in the Internet. No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source. What O’Reilly didn’t say is that, of course, it didn’t have to be

Anyone who wanted to claim that a revolution was under way in their own field could do so by simply invoking the idea of Web 2.0 in their work: Development 2.0, Nursing 2.0, Humanities 2.0, Protest 2.0, Music 2.0, Research 2.0, Library 2.0, Disasters 2.0, Road Safety 2.0, Identity 2.0, Stress Management 2.0, Archeology 2.0, Crime 2.0, Pornography 2.0, Love 2.0, Wittgenstein 2.0.

9 this way forever. Now that apps might be displacing the browser, the openness once taken for granted is no more—a contingency that licenses and morals could have easily prevented. Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws. One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop—as the greatest, and perhaps ultimate, platform—for hosting thirdparty services and applications. This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hackerentrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely. Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users. Stallman had on offer something far more precise and revolutionary: a way to think about the freedoms of individual users in specific contexts, as if the well-being of the megaplatform were of secondary importance. But that vision never came to pass. Instead, public advocacy efforts were channeled into preserving an abstract and reified configuration of digital technologies—“the Internet”—so that Silicon Valley could continue making money by hoovering up our private data. Lumping everything under the label of

“Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression—the religious fervor that many users feel about the Internet has helped catalyze a lot of activist campaigns—but, by and large, the concept also blunted our analytical ability to balance rights against each other. Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.

n the late 1990s, O’Reilly began celebrating “infoware” as the next big thing after “hardware” and “software.” His premise was that Internet companies such as Yahoo and E-Trade were not in the software business but in the infoware business. Their functionality was pretty basic—they allowed customers to make purchases or look up something on a map—so their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed. And all those fancy Internet services that made infoware possible were patched together with open source software. By showing that infoware was the future and that open source software was its essential component, O’Reilly sought to reassure those who hadn’t joined the movement of their pivotal role in the future of computing, if not all human progress. The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas The

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Engelbart, the idiosyncratic inventor who gave us the computer mouse and hypertext, to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor. Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index. The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence” was very appealing to Silicon Valley, not least because it tapped into the New Age rhetoric of the 1970s, but the dotcom crash briefly forced O’Reilly to put his philosophizing on hold. When the tech bubble burst, the demand for manuals and conferences—the bulk of O’Reilly’s business— shrank, while he also had to deal with some unpleasant litigation concerning his office headquarters in Sebastopol, California. He fired a quarter of his staff, and things looked pretty dire. Then, in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly? There was some theoretical ambition to this label—more about that later on—but the primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived. Given how much rhetorical capital had been spent on linking the idea of the web with that of open source, the end of the web would also mean the end of so many other concepts. Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology. “We normally have lots of technical talks focusing on how to use new software, building our conferences for the hackers who are inventing the future, and the early adopters who are taking their work to the next stage,” O’Reilly wrote in a blog post announcing his very first 130 1 The Baffler [no.22]

“Openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics.

9 Web 2.0 conference. “In contrast, Web 2.0 is our first ‘executive conference’—a conference aimed at business people, with the focus on the big picture.” Thus, a high-profile conference was born, aimed explicitly at helping VIPs in the Valley “see the shape of the future,” to be followed by many others. O’Reilly soon expanded on the idea of Web 2.0 in an essay that he coauthored with writer and entrepreneur John Battelle. O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon. What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust. All Silicon Valley companies should heed the lesson of those few who survived: they must find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model. They must become true carriers of the Web 2.0 spirit. O’Reilly’s explanation of the crash is curious. First of all, some tech companies that did go under (Global Crossing comes to mind) couldn’t harness collective intelligence, as they were in the telecommunications business. Most memorable dotcom failures—cases like Pets.com—went under because they were driven by foolish business models and overly exuberant investors. (Pets.com would have made an even worse proposition if it had followed O’Reilly’s playbook and become a Web 2.0 company.) Furthermore, companies

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that didn’t follow the Web 2.0 mantra—like Barnes & Noble, which O’Reilly singled out as a company that, unlike Amazon, wasn’t learning from collective intelligence—didn’t go under at all. By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.” Back in 2004, however, he seemed pretty serious, promoting this concept left and right. The label caught on; like “open source,” it was ambiguous and capacious enough to allow many alternative uses and interpretations. O’Reilly’s partners in organizing the conference duly trademarked the term “Web 2.0,” but this news wasn’t well received by their fellow travellers (a similar effort to trademark “open source” by the Open Source Initiative failed). Once “Web 2.0” was established as a term of cultural reference, O’Reilly could venture outside Silicon Valley and establish its relevance to other industries. Much as “open source software” gave rise to “open source politics” and “open source science,” so did “Web 2.0” expand its terminological empire. O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it. Last year his “Where 2.0” conference on

geolocation was rebranded as just “Where.” The exceptional has become the new normal. Sorting through the six thousand or so academic papers that cite O’Reilly’s essay on Web 2.0 is no easy feat. It seems that anyone who wanted to claim that a revolution was under way in their own field did so simply by invoking the idea of Web 2.0 in their work: Development 2.0, Nursing 2.0, Humanities 2.0, Protest 2.0, Music 2.0, Research 2.0, Library 2.0, Disasters 2.0, Road Safety 2.0, Identity 2.0, Stress Management 2.0, Archeology 2.0, Crime 2.0, Pornography 2.0, Love 2.0, Wittgenstein 2.0. What unites most of these papers is a shared background assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances. Except that there was no coming of Web 2.0—it was just a way to sell a technology conference to a public badly burned by the dotcom crash. Why anyone dealing with stress management or Wittgenstein would be moved by the logistics of conference organizing is a mystery. O’Reilly himself pioneered this 2.0-ification of public discourse, aggressively reinterpreting trends that had been happening for decades through the prism of Internet history—a move that presented all those trends as just a logical consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution. Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.” For O’Reilly, Walmart is a quintessential Enterprise 2.0 company simply because it tracks what its customers are buying in real time. That this is a rather standard practice— known under the boring title of “just-in-time delivery”—predating both Google and Amazon didn’t register with O’Reilly. In a Web 2.0 world, all those older concepts didn’t matter or even exist; everything was driven by the forces of open source and the Internet. A The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o revolution was in the making! This was a typical consequence of relying on Web 2.0 as the guiding metaphor of the age: in the case of Enterprise 2.0, a trend that had little connection to the Internet got reinscribed in the Internet frame, as if attaching the label of 2.0 was all that was needed to establish the logical parallels between the worlds of retail and search. This tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.” And soon Web 2.0 became the preferred way to explain any changes that were happening in Silicon Valley and far beyond it. Most technology analysts simply borrowed the label to explain whatever needed explaining, taking its utility and objectivity for granted. “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union. Everything needed to be rethought and redone: enterprises, governments, health care, finance, factory production. For O’Reilly, there were few problems that could not be solved with Web 2.0: “Our world is fraught with problems . . . from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars . . . many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits. It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits.” Web 2.0 was a source of didactic wisdom, and O’Reilly had the right tools to interpret what it wanted to tell us—in each and every context, be it financial markets or global warming. All those contexts belonged to the Internet now. Internet-centrism won.

n his 1976 book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, Neil Postman pointed to a certain linguistic imperialism that propels crazy talk. For Postman, each human activity—religion, 132 1 The Baffler [no.22]

law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones. Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions “given by one fallible human being about the remarks of another fallible human being,” it can be easily corrected with facts. For example, to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk. Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk. For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments. As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on. If each of them serves the same function, then none of them serves any function. When such a process is occurring, an appropriate word for it is pollution.” Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today. Postman’s thinking on the inner workings of language was heavily influenced by the work of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish count now remembered—if at all—for his 1933 book Science and Sanity. Korzybski founded a movement called general semantics. While it has inspired many weird and dangerous followers—Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have been

With Obama’s election, Washington was game for all things 2.0. This is when O’Reilly turned his full attention to government reform, deploying and manipulating several memes at once—“Gov 2.0,” “open government,” and “government as a platform.”

9 a fan—it also earned the support of many serious thinkers, from cyberneticians like Anatol Rapoport to philosophers like Gaston Bachelard. For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2 (he actually recommended indexing every term we use with a relevant numerical in order to distinguish “science 1933” from “science 2013”). Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality or, as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.” Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us. There was nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations. He wanted to artificially induce what he called a “neurological delay” so that we could gain more awareness of what we were doing in response to verbal and nonverbal stimuli, understand what features of reality have been omitted, and react appropriately. To that end, Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us; he patented the most famous of those—the “structural differential”—in the 1920s. He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware

of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.” There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories for him to be treated as a serious thinker, but his basic question—as Postman put it, “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”—still remains relevant today. Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most highprofile follower of Korzybski’s theories today. O’Reilly was introduced to Korzybski’s thought as a teenager while working with a strange man called George Simon in the midst of California’s counterculture of the early 1970s. O’Reilly and Simon were coteaching workshops at the Esalen Institute—then a hotbed of the “human potential movement” that sought to tap the hidden potential of its followers and increase their happiness. Bridging Korzybski’s philosophy with Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga, Simon had an immense influence on the young O’Reilly. Simon’s rereading of general semantics, noted O’Reilly in 2004, “gave me a grounding in how to see people, and to acknowledge what I saw, that is the bedrock of my personal philosophy to this day.” (In 1976 the twenty-two-year-old O’Reilly edited and published notebooks by Simon after the latter died in an accident; even by the highly demanding standards of the 1970s, those notebooks look outright crazy.) O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books and even showing visualizations of the structural differential in his The

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O’Reilly is perfectly positioned to control our technology discourse: as a publisher, he can churn out whatever books he needs to promote his favorite memes—and, once those have been codified in book form, they can be easily admitted into Wikipedia, where they quickly morph into facts.

9 presentations. It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous. There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate. If general semanticists aimed to reveal the underlying emptiness of many concepts that pollute the public debate, O’Reilly is applying some of Korzybski’s language insights to practice some pollution of his own. O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,” he wrote in response to a critic who accused him of linguistic incontinence. But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see. In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,” O’Reilly writes. His own function is that of an intermediary—someone 134 1 The Baffler [no.22]

who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (or helping them write down) what they’ve learned and then publishing it in books or online.” The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious. Some regular contributors to the Radar blog have titles like “correspondents,” giving the whole operation a veneer of objectivity and disinterestedness, with O’Reilly merely a commentator knowledgeable enough to provide some context to busy Silicon Valley types. An Edwin Schlossberg quotation he really likes—“the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”—is cited to explain his willingness to enter so many seemingly unrelated fields. As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field. In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi. The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public. That essay, in fact, is a revealing ode to what O’Reilly dubs “meme-engineering”: “Just as gene engineering allows us to artificially shape genes, meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more ef-

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fectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted.” In a move worthy of Frank Luntz, O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.” The essay’s putative goal is to show how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry. Leading by example, O’Reilly invokes his success in rebranding “free software” as “open source.” The key to success, he notes, was to “put a completely different spin on what formerly might have been considered the ‘same space.’” To make that happen, O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods. Another apt example of O’Reilly’s memeengineering is his attempt to establish a strong intellectual link between the develop-

ment of Unix—a proprietary operating system that Stallman sought to replace with free software—and the development of open source and the Internet. Thus, for instance, O’Reilly claimed that Unix was built and improved in the spirit of open source because its academic cheerleaders were already swapping code with each other in the early 1970s. That such exchanges were just a regular part of the freewheeling academic culture and had little to do with philosophical attitudes toward code doesn’t weaken the argument; in fact, this is recast as an advantage, as now the open source model can be presented as just a natural extension of the scientific method. (Since O’Reilly himself played an important role in the production of Unix manuals, his own contribution to the Internet and open source suddenly looks even more significant.) But O’Reilly’s meme-engineering around Unix doesn’t just stop at the purely discursive level. In his talks and writings, O’Reilly often points to one highly technical 1984 book—The Unix Programming Environment—as proof that, at least with respect to collaboration, Unix was some kind of proto-Internet. Indeed, the Wikipedia page for the book states that “the book is perhaps most valuable for its exposition of the Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools with standardized inputs and outputs, a philosophy that also shaped the end-to-end philosophy of the Internet. It is this philosophy, and the architecture based on it, that has allowed open source projects to be assembled into larger systems such as Linux, without explicit coordination between developers.” Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998? Well, Wikipedia won’t tell us much here: in a recent Berkeley talk, O’Reilly admitted that he was the one to edit the Wikipedia page for the book. O’Reilly is perfectly positioned to control our technology discourse: as a publisher, he can churn out whatever books he needs to promote his favorite memes—and, The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o once those have been codified in book form, they can be easily admitted into Wikipedia, where they quickly morph into facts. What’s not to like about “collective intelligence”? Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister. His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly. Recently, for example, O’Reilly has been interested in the meme of “the industrial Internet,” forming a partnership with GE to participate in events and cover the company on the blog. Once “the industrial Internet” meme is out of the bag, only a lack of imagination prevents O’Reilly’s writers from seeing it absolutely everywhere. Here is how one of them describes a company that might not otherwise fit the boundaries of the meme: “I’m sure [its founder] wouldn’t use the words ‘industrial Internet’ to describe what he and his team are doing, and it might be a little bit of a stretch to categorize 3Scan that way. But I think they are an exemplar of many of the core principles of the meme and it’s interesting to think about them in that frame.” Five years down the road, would you be surprised if there is, in fact, something called “the industrial Internet” and that the primary goal of most activism around it is to defend the freedom of GE to “innovate” on it as it pleases? Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare. In a recent post on the subject, he muses on just how narrowly we have defined the idea of “cyberwarfare” and suggests we expand it to encompass conflicts between states and individuals. Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding? If O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts succeed, we might end up classifying acts that should be treated as crime, espionage, or terrorism under 136 1 The Baffler [no.22]

the ambiguous label of “war.” Such reframing would be disastrous for civil liberties and privacy and would only exacerbate the already awful legal prosecution of hacktivists. It probably won’t be long before a “cyberwarfare correspondent” is added to O’Reilly’s media empire. In his 2007 bestseller Words That Work, the Republican operative Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context. O’Reilly, while employing most of them, has a few unique rules of his own. Clever use of visualization, for example, helps him craft his message in a way that is both sharp and open-ended. Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it. The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,” writes O’Reilly. Once the meme has been conceived, the rest of O’Reilly’s empire can step in and help make it real. His conferences, for example, play a crucial role: “When you look at any of our events, there’s ultimately some rewriting of the meme map in each of them. Web 2.0 was about distinguishing companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that didn’t. Strata is about defining the new field of data science. Velocity is about making clear that the applications of the web depend on people to keep them running, unlike past generations of software that were simply software artifacts.”

Once-lively debates about reform are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes.

9 There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another. Thus, as he puts it, “‘open source’ was a great reshaping of the meme for its day, moving us off some of the limitations of ‘free software,’ but it may not be the end of the story.” O’Reilly has gradually lost interest in “open source” and “Web 2.0,” moving on to new memes: “government as a platform” and “algorithmic regulation.” We can only guess what comes next. Such dexterity not only helps in organizing new events and investing in cool start-ups; it also, as those six thousand papers that cite Web 2.0 attest, leaves a huge imprint on our culture.

ll the familiar pathologies of O’Reilly’s thinking are on full display in his quest to meme-engineer his way to “Government 2.0.” The free software scenario is repeating itself: deeply political reform efforts are no longer seen as “moral crusades,” but are reinvented as mere attempts at increasing efficiency and promoting innovation. Before O’Reilly went searching for a bigtent meme, there was little cohesion to the many disparate efforts to use technology to transform government. Some hoped that digitization would help reduce bureaucracy and allow everyone to fill out tax returns online. Others awaited the arrival of electronic town halls that would permit citizens to deliberate on the substance of policies that affect them. Yet another group hoped that digitization might make governments more transparent and accountable by forcing them to put some of the documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) online. Finally, there were those who believed that in-

creasing the availability and liquidity of government information would lead to new entrepreneurial projects and boost the economy. Many of these efforts started long before the web and had no obvious connection to Internet culture, let alone Web 2.0. Occasionally, these four efforts—aiming at greater efficiency, deliberation, transparency, and innovation—overlapped, but mostly they have been driven by two very different agendas. One cohort, interested in increasing efficiency and spurring innovation, pursued campaigns that were mostly economic in character; these folks were not particularly interested in the political nature of the regimes they were seeking to reform. Singapore—where anyone can file their paperwork in minutes—was their role model. The other cohort, interested in deliberation and transparency, was primarily concerned with transferring power from governments to citizens and increasing the accountability of public institutions. They argued that citizens have a right to obtain information about how their governments operate. Such explicitly political demands became the cornerstone of various Right to Information campaigns. This second group wouldn’t accept authoritarian Singapore as a role model, since most of its e-innovations do very little to promote meaningful citizen participation in policymaking or increase accountability. Most modern governments, not surprisingly, prefer the economic aspects of digitization reform to the political ones. Innovative schemes, like smart parking systems, can help at election time; lengthy disclosures of government deliberations are likely to cause headaches. Right-leaning governments have The

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an extra reason to celebrate the economism of the first cohort: publishing aggregate information about the performance of individual public service providers may help convince the electorate that those services should be provided by the private sector. By the early 2000s, as O’Reilly and his comrades were celebrating open source as a new revolutionary approach to everything, their discussions wandered into debates about the future of governance. Thus, a term like “open government”—which, until then, had mostly been used as a synonym for “transparent and accountable government”—was reinvented as a shortened version of “open source government.” The implication of this subtle linguistic change was that the main cultural attributes of open source software—the availability of the source code for everyone’s inspection, the immense contribution it can make to economic growth, the new decentralized production model that relies on contributions from numerous highly distributed participants—were to displace older criteria like “transparency” or “accountability” as the most desirable attributes of open government. The coining of the “open government” buzzwords was meant to produce a very different notion of openness. Initially, O’Reilly had little role in this process; the meme of “open source” was promiscuous enough to redefine many important terms without his intervention. But in 2007, O’Reilly hosted yet another summit, attended by technologists and civic hackers, to devise a list of key principles of open government. The group came up with eight principles, all focused on the purely technical issue of how to ensure that, once data was released by the government, nothing would hold it back. As long as this “open data” was liquid and reusable, others could build on it. Neither the political process that led to the release of the data nor its content was considered relevant to openness. Thus, data about how many gum-chew138 1 The Baffler [no.22]

There is nothing “collective” about Amazon’s distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands.

9 ers Singapore sends to prison would be “open” as long as the Singaporean government shared it in suitable formats. Why it shared such data was irrelevant. With Obama’s election, Washington was game for all things 2.0. This is when O’Reilly turned his full attention to government reform, deploying and manipulating several memes at once—“Gov 2.0,” “open government,” and “government as a platform”—in order to establish the semantic primacy of the economic dimension of digitization. A decade earlier, O’Reilly had redefined “freedom” as the freedom of developers to do as they wished; now it was all about recasting “openness” in government in purely economic and innovation-friendly terms while downplaying its political connotations. O’Reilly’s writings on Gov 2.0 reveal the same talented meme-engineer who gave us open source and Web 2.0. In his seminal essay on the subject, O’Reilly mixes semantic environments without a shred of regret. Both Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0, he argues, return us to earlier, simpler ways, away from the unnecessary complexity of modern institutions. “Web 2.0 was not a new version of the World Wide Web; it was a renaissance after the dark ages of the dotcom bust, a rediscovery of the power hidden in the original design of the World Wide

ment 2.0. Yes, it’s a good thing when government data is available so that journalists and watchdog groups like the Sunlight Foundation can disclose cost overruns in government projects or highlight the influence of lobbyists. But that’s just the beginning. The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways. Fortunately, Vivek Kundra and others in the administration understand this distinction, and are providing data for both purposes.

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Web,” he writes. “Similarly, Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time.” Once it’s been established that new paradigms of government can be modeled on the success of technology companies, O’Reilly can argue that “it’s important to think deeply about what the three design principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration mean in the context of technology.” These were the very three principles that the Obama administration articulated in its “Open Government Directive,” published on the president’s first day in office. But why do we have to think about their meaning in “the context of technology”? The answer is quite simple: whatever transparency and participation used to mean doesn’t matter any longer. Now that we’ve moved to an era of Everything 2.0, the meaning of those terms will be dictated by the possibilities and inclinations of technology. And what is technology today if not “open source” and “Web 2.0”? Here, for example, is how O’Reilly tries to reengineer the meme of transparency: The word “transparency” can lead us astray as we think about the opportunity for Govern-

Vivek Kundra is the former chief information officer of the U.S. government who oversaw the launch of a portal called data.gov, which required agencies to upload at least three “high-value” sets of their own data. This data was made “open” in the same sense that open source software is open—i.e., it was made available for anyone to see. But, once again, O’Reilly is dabbling in meme-engineering: the data dumped on data.gov, while potentially beneficial for innovation, does not automatically “enable transparency.” O’Reilly deploys the highly ambiguous concept of openness to confuse “transparency as accountability” (what Obama called for in his directive) with “transparency as innovation” (what O’Reilly himself wants). How do we ensure accountability? Let’s forget about databases for a moment and think about power. How do we make the government feel the heat of public attention? Perhaps by forcing it to make targeted disclosures of particularly sensitive data sets. Perhaps by strengthening the FOIA laws, or at least making sure that government agencies comply with existing provisions. Or perhaps by funding intermediaries that can build narratives around data—much of the released data is so complex that few amateurs have the processing power and expertise to read and make sense of it in their basements. This might be very useful The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o for boosting accountability but useless for boosting innovation; likewise, you can think of many data releases that would be great for innovation and do nothing for accountability. The language of “openness” does little to help us grasp key differences between the two. In this context, openness leads to Neil Postman’s “crazy talk,” resulting in the pollution of the values of one semantic environment (accountability) with those of another (innovation). O’Reilly doesn’t always coin new words. Sometimes he manipulates the meanings of existing words. Cue his framing of “participation”: We can be misled by the notion of participation to think that it’s limited to having government decision-makers “get input” from citizens. This would be like thinking that enabling comments on a website is the beginning and end of social media! It’s a trap for outsiders to think that Government 2.0 is a way to use new technology to amplify the voices of citizens to influence those in power, and by insiders as a way to harness and channel those voices to advance their causes.

It’s hard to make sense of this passage without understanding the exact meaning of a term like “participation” in the glossary of All Things Web 2.0. According to O’Reilly, one of the key attributes of Web 2.0 sites is that they are based on an “architecture of participation”; it’s this architecture that allows “collective intelligence” to be harnessed. Ranking your purchases on Amazon or reporting spammy emails to Google are good examples of clever architectures of participation. Once Amazon and Google start learning from millions of users, they become “smarter” and more attractive to the original users. This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to 140 1 The Baffler [no.22]

comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands. Occasionally, O’Reilly’s illustrations include activities that demand no actual awareness of participation—e.g., a blog that puts up links to other blogs ends up improving Google’s search index—which is, not coincidentally perhaps, how we think of “participation” in the market system when we go shopping. To imply that “participation” means the same thing in the context of Web 2.0 as it does in politics is to do the very opposite of what Korzybski and general semantics prescribe. Were he really faithful to those principles, O’Reilly would be pointing out the differences between the two—not blurring them. So what are we to make of O’Reilly’s exhortation that “it’s a trap for outsiders to think that Government 2.0 is a way to use new technology to amplify the voices of citizens to influence those in power”? We might think that the hallmark of successful participatory reforms would be enabling citizens to “influence those in power.” There’s a very explicit depoliticization of participation at work here. O’Reilly wants to redefine participation from something that arises from shared grievances and aims at structural reforms to something that arises from individual frustration with bureaucracies and usually ends with citizens using or building apps to solve their own problems. As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion

“If Head Start were a start-up it would be out of business. It doesn’t work,” remarked O’Reilly in a recent interview. Well, exactly: that’s why Head Start is not a start-up.

9 of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at “hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through the prism of open source software. Protest is one activity that O’Reilly hates passionately. “There’s a kind of passivity even to our activism: we think that all we can do is to protest,” he writes. “Collective action has come to mean collective complaint. Or at most, a collective effort to raise money.” In contrast, he urges citizens to “apply the DIY spirit on a civic scale.” To illustrate the DIY spirit in action, O’Reilly likes to invoke the example of a Hawaiian community that, following a period of government inaction, raised $4 million and repaired a local park essential to its livelihood. For O’Reilly, the Hawaiian example reveals the natural willingness of ordinary citizens to solve their own problems. Governments should learn from Hawaii and offload more work onto their citizens; this is the key insight behind O’Reilly’s “government as a platform” meme. This platform meme was, of course, inspired by Silicon Valley. Instead of continuing to build its own apps, Apple built an App Store, getting third-party developers to do all the heavy lifting. This is the model that

governments must emulate. In fact, notes O’Reilly, they once did: in the 1950s, the U.S. government built a system of highways that allowed the private sector to build many more settlements around them, while in the 1980s the Reagan administration started opening up the GPS system, which gave us amazing road directions and Foursquare (where O’Reilly is an investor). O’Reilly’s prescriptions, as is often the case, do contain a grain of truth, but he nearly always exaggerates their benefits while obfuscating their costs. One of the main reasons why governments choose not to offload certain services to the private sector is not because they think they can do a better job at innovation or efficiency but because other considerations—like fairness and equity of access—come into play. “If Head Start were a start-up it would be out of business. It doesn’t work,” remarked O’Reilly in a recent interview. Well, exactly: that’s why Head Start is not a start-up. The real question is not whether developers should be able to submit apps to the App Store, but whether citizens should be paying for the apps or counting on the government to provide these services. To push for the platform metaphor as the primary way of thinking about the distribution of responsibilities between the private and the public sectors is to push for the economic-innovative dimension of Gov 2.0—and ensure that the private sector always emerges victorious. O’Reilly defines “government as a platform” as “the notion that the best way to shrink the size of government is to introduce the idea that government should provide fewer citizenfacing services, but should instead consciously The

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provide infrastructure only, with APIs and standards that let the private sector deliver citizen facing services.” He believes that “the idea of government as a platform applies to every aspect of the government’s role in society”—city affairs, health care, financial services regulation, police, fire, and garbage collection. “[Government as a platform] is the right way to frame the question of Government 2.0.” One person who is busy turning the “government as a platform” meme into reality is David Cameron in the U.K. Cameron’s “Big Society” idea is based on three main tenets: decentralization of power from London to local governments, making information about the public sector more transparent to citizens, and paying providers of public services based on the quality of their service, which, ideally, would be measured and published online, thanks to feedback provided by the public. The idea here is that the government will serve as a coordinator of sorts, allowing people to come together—perhaps even giving them seed funding to kick-start alternatives to inefficient public services. Cameron’s motivation is clear: the government simply has no money to pay for services that were previously provided by public institutions, and besides, shrinking the government is something his party has been meaning to do anyway. Cameron immediately grasped the strategic opportunities offered by the ambiguity of a term like “open government” and embraced it wholeheartedly—in its most apolitical, economic version, of course. At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government” and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data, is on the record stating that open government is “what modern deregulation 142 1 The Baffler [no.22]

The reason why David Cameron has managed to get away with so much crazy talk is simple: the positive spin attached to “openness” allows his party to hide the ugly nature of its actual reforms.

9 looks like” and that he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government released a white paper on “Open Public Services” that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for national security and the judiciary, all public services must become open to competition from the market. Here’s just one example of how a government that is nominally promoting Tim O’Reilly’s progressive agenda of Gov 2.0 and “government as a platform” is rolling back the welfare state and increasing government secrecy—all in the name of “openness.” The reason why Cameron has managed to get away with so much crazy talk is simple: the positive spin attached to “openness” allows his party to hide the ugly nature of its reforms. O’Reilly, who had otherwise praised the Government Digital Service, the unit responsible for the digitization of the British government, is aware that the “Big Society” might reveal the structural limitations of his quest for “openness.” Thus, he publicly distanced himself from Cameron, complaining of “the shabby abdication of responsibility of Cameron’s Big Society.” But is this the same O’Reilly who once claimed that the goal of his proposed reforms is to “design programs and supporting infrastructure that enable ‘we the people’ to do most of the work”? His rejection of Cameron is pure PR, as they largely share the same agenda—not an easy thing to notice, as O’Reilly constantly alternates between two

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visions of open government. O’Reilly the good cop claims that he wants the government to release its data to promote more innovation by the private sector, while O’Reilly the bad cop wants to use that newly liberated data to shrink the government. “There is no Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ to bring unneeded government programs to an end,” he lamented in 2010. “Government 2.0 will require deep thinking about how to end programs that no longer work, and how to use the platform power of the government not to extend government’s reach, but instead, how to use it to better enable its citizenry and its economy.” Speaking to British civil servants, O’Reilly positions open government as the right thing to do in the times of austerity, not just as an effective way to promote innovation. After The New Yorker ran a long, critical article on the Big Society in 2010, Jennifer Pahlka—O’Reilly’s key ally, who runs an NGO called Code for America—quickly moved to dismiss any parallels between Cameron and O’Reilly. “The beauty of the government as a platform model is that it doesn’t assume civic participation, it encourages it subtly by aligning with existing motivations in its citizens, so that anyone—ranging from the fixers in Hawaii to the cynics in Britain—would be

willing to get involved,” she noted in a blog post. “We’d better be careful we don’t send the wrong message, and that when we’re building tools for citizen engagement, we do it in the way that taps existing motivations.” But what kinds of “existing motivations” are there to be tapped? O’Reilly writes that, in his ideal future, governments will be “making smart design decisions, which harness the selfinterest of society and citizens to achieve positive results.” That, in fact, is how his favorite technology platforms work: users tell Google that some of their incoming email is spam in order to improve their own email experience. In other words, it’s self-interest through and through. “The architecture of Linux, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are such that users pursuing their own ‘selfish’ interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct,” writes O’Reilly. This is also how the likes of Eric Raymond explain the motivation of those contributing to open source projects— they do it for strictly selfish reasons. “The ‘utility function’ Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers,” Raymond writes in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He goes on to say that “one may call their motivation ‘altruistic’, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist.” If it sounds like Ayn Rand, that’s because Raymond explicitly draws on her crazy talk. When pressed, O’Reilly the good cop refuses to acknowledge that his thinking about open government is not very different from Raymond’s thinking about open source software. When earlier this year Nathaniel Tkacz, a media academic, noted these similarities, O’Reilly complained that he was “a bit surprised to learn that my ideas of ‘government as a platform’ are descended from Eric Raymond’s ideas about Linux, since: a) Eric is a noted libertarian with disdain for government b) Eric’s focus on Linux was on its The

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M o d e m & Ta b o o software development methodology.” Well, perhaps O’Reilly shouldn’t act so surprised: as Tkacz points out, O’Reilly’s writings on “government as a platform” explicitly credit Raymond as the source of the metaphor. O’Reilly in 2011: “In The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Eric Raymond uses the image of a bazaar to contrast the collaborative development model of open source software with traditional software development, but the analogy is equally applicable to government.” But is it really? Applied to politics, all this talk of bazaars, existing motivations, and selfinterest treats citizenship as if it were fully reducible to market relations—yet another form of crazy talk. And it doesn’t easily square with the aspirations to active citizenship implicit in the “DIY spirit on a civic scale.” Of course, with some clever PR, one can say that the Hawaiians who rebuilt their park had some “existing motivations,” like having to earn a living to stay alive. But if the bar for “existing motivations” is set so low, then there are no limits to dismantling the welfare state and replacing it with some wild DIY hacker culture. Why do we need an expensive health care system if people have “existing motivations” to selfmonitor at home and purchase drugs directly from Big Pharma? Why bother with police if we can print out guns at home—thanks, 3-D printers!—and we are already highly motivated to stay alive? Once we follow O’Reilly’s exhortation not to treat the government as “the deus ex machina that we’ve paid to do for us what we could be doing for ourselves,” such questions are hard to avoid. In all of O’Reilly’s theorizing, there’s not a hint as to what political and moral principles should guide us in applying the platform model. Whatever those principles are, they are certainly not exhausted by appeals to innovation and efficiency—which is the language that O’Reilly wants us to speak. The fundamental problem with O’Reilly’s vision is that, on the one hand, it’s all about 144 1 The Baffler [no.22]

having the private sector build new services that were unavailable when the government ran the show. Thus, it’s all about citizen-consumers, guided by the Invisible Hand, creating new value out of thin air. But O’Reilly also likes to invoke “DIY spirit on a civic scale” to call on citizens to take on functions that were previously performed by the government (even if poorly); here, we are not building new services—we are outsourcing public services to the private sector. O’Reilly’s logic in a nutshell: the government didn’t have to build its own Foursquare—hence, disaster response should be delegated to the private sector. Is the government meant to be a platform for providing services or for stimulating innovation? It’s certainly both—but the principles that ought to regulate its behavior in each case are certainly different. For O’Reilly, the memes of “Government 2.0” and “government as a platform” serve one major function: they make him relevant to the conversation about governance and politics, allowing him to expand his business into new territories. The Internet and open source have become universal connectors that can relate anything to anything. “Just as the interstate highway system increased the vitality of our transportation infrastructure, it is certainly possible that greater government involvement in health care could do the same,” he writes. Got it? But what if the dynamics of building highways are different from those of providing health care? What then?

’Reilly’s attempts to meme-engineer how we think about politics are all the more disturbing for the deeply reductionist, anti-democratic flavor of his own politics. Positivist to his core, O’Reilly believes that there is just one right answer to policy dilemmas, and that it’s the job of the government (for him, it’s all just “government”) to produce legislation that gets at this “right” answer and then pass the necessary measures to make it

O’Reilly the good cop claims that he wants the government to release its data to promote more innovation by the private sector, while O’Reilly the bad cop wants to use that newly liberated data to shrink the government.

9 happen. The means don’t much matter; it’s all about the ends—and the ends are perfectly knowable, as long as we have the data. O’Reilly’s latest meme, which he calls “algorithmic regulation,” was inspired by—what else?—the Internet. This idea, writes O’Reilly, “is central to all Internet platforms, and provides a fruitful area for investigation in the design of 21st century government.” This is how he explained it in a recent talk at the Long Now Foundation: If you look at, say, the way spam is regulated on the Internet, that’s the beginnings of a kind of an immune system response to a pathogen and works a lot like biology: you recognize the signature of something new and hostile and you fix it. . . . You compare that to how government regulation works, and you go: “It’s just badly broken!” Somebody puts out some rules, and there’s no method of enforcement.

Not a very sharp definition yet, but this is how many of O’Reilly’s memes start. Once he’s cornered the meme, his “correspondents” will do the rest, highlighting it in their blog posts and reports. (“In the future, better outcomes might come . . . through adopting what Tim O’Reilly has described as ‘algorithmic regulation,’ applying the dynamic feedback loops that web giants use to police their systems against malware and spam in government agencies entrusted with protecting the public interest,” writes Alex Howard, the “Government 2.0” correspondent of O’Reilly Radar.) Quite appropriately, the only political institution that corresponds to O’Reilly’s vision

for “algorithmic regulation” is a central bank. Central banks have very clear, numerical targets—they know what’s “right” and don’t have to bother with deliberations—and they try to meet those targets with just a few specific tools at their disposal. They love feedback and think like Google. According to O’Reilly, the way they regulate is “kind of like the way Google regulates. They kind of say: I have an outcome in mind and a couple of knobs and levers. Periodically, I might get a few new knobs and levers, and I tweak them to get the outcome. I don’t just sort of say: This is a rule and I’m going to follow it regardless of whether it has a good outcome or a bad outcome.” Central banks are elegant and simple; they just do stuff, instead of succumbing to, well, politics. “[In central banks] we have a couple of levers, and we keep tweaking them to see if we can get where we want to go. And that’s really how I would like to see us thinking about government regulatory processes.” Expanding on this notion of “algorithmic regulation,” O’Reilly reveals his inner technocrat: I remember having a conversation with Nancy Pelosi not long after Google did their Panda search update, and it was in the context of SOPA/PIPA. . . . [Pelosi] said, “Well, you know, we have to satisfy the interests of the technology industry and the movie industry.” And I thought, “No, you don’t. You have to get the right answer.” So that’s the reason I mentioned Google Panda search update, when they downgraded a lot of people who were building these content farms and The

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putting low quality content in order to get pageviews and clicks in order to make money and not satisfy the users. And I thought, “Gosh, what if Google had said, yeah, yeah, we have to sit down with Demand Media and satisfy their concerns, we have to make sure that at least 30 percent of the search results are crappy so that their business model is preserved.” You wouldn’t do that. You’d say, “No, we have to get it right!” And I feel like, we don’t actually have a government that actually understands that it has to be building a better platform that starts to manage things like that with the best outcome for the real users. [loud applause]

Here O’Reilly dismisses the entertainment industry as just “wrong,” essentially comparing them to spammers. But what makes Google an appropriate model here? While it has obligations to its shareholders, Google doesn’t owe anything to the sites in its index. Congress was never meant to work this way. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws with too much overreach, but to claim that the entertainment industry has no legitimate grievances against piracy seems bizarre. Underpinning O’Reilly’s faith in algorithmic regulation is his naive belief that big data, harnessed through collective intelligence, would allow us to get at the right answer to every problem, making both representation and deliberation unnecessary. After all, why let contesting factions battle it out in the public sphere if we can just study what happens in the real world—with our sensors, databases, and algorithms? No wonder O’Reilly ends up claiming that “we have to actually start moving away from the notion that politics really has very much to do with governance. To the extent that we can fix things without politics, we’d be much better off.” It’s the ultimate conceit of Silicon Valley: if only we had more data and better tools, we could suspend politics once and for all. 146 1 The Baffler [no.22]

The magic “feedback” that O’Reilly touts so passionately is really the voice of the market—and occasionally he lets that slip: “Government programs must be designed from the outset not as a fixed set of specifications, but as open-ended platforms that allow for extensibility and revision by the marketplace. Platform thinking is an antidote to the complete specifications that currently dominate the government approach not only to IT but to programs of all kinds.” But we prefer to have complete specifications at the outset not because no one had thought of building dynamic feedback systems before O’Reilly but because this is the only way to ensure that everyone’s grievances are addressed before the policies are implemented. His treatment of feedback as essentially an Internet phenomenon is vintage O’Reilly. As long as “algorithmic regulation” is defined against a notion like Web 2.0, O’Reilly feels no need to engage with the vast body of thought on feedback systems and the sociology of performance indicators. That most of the ideas behind algorithmic regulation were articulated by the likes of Karl Deutsch and David Easton in the 1960s would probably be news to O’Reilly. Nor is his intellectual equilibrium perturbed by the fact that the RAND Corporation was pitching something very similar to “algorithmic regulation” to American cities in the late 1960s in the hopes of making city governance more cybernetic. The plans, alas, didn’t work; the models could never account for the messy reality of urban life. A decade before he wrote Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski wrote another weird book—Manhood of Humanity. He, too, was very keen on feedback. “Philosophy, law and ethics, to be effective in a dynamic world must be dynamic; they must be made vital enough to keep pace with the progress of life and science,” he proclaimed. Korzybski’s solution, surprisingly, also lay in turning government into an algorithmically driven platform: “A

It’s the ultimate conceit of Silicon Valley: if only we had more data and better tools, we could suspend politics once and for all.

M A R K S . FI S H E R

natural first step would probably be the establishment of a new institution which might be called a Dynamic Department—Department of Coordination or a Department of Cooperation—the name is of little importance, but it would be the nucleus of the new civilization.” Like O’Reilly’s “government as a platform,” this new department would aspire to enable citizens. “Its functions,” wrote Korzybski, “would be those of encouraging, helping and protecting the people in such cooperative enterprises as agriculture, manufactures, finance, and distribution.” Korzybski envisioned this new scientific government to consist of ten sections, which ranged from the Section of Mathematical Sociology or Humanology (“composed of at least one sociologist, one biologist, one mechanical engineer, and one mathematician”) to the Section of Mathematical Legislation (“composed of (say) one lawyer, one mathematician, one mechanical engineer”) and from the Promoters’ Section (“composed of engineers whose duty would be to study all of the latest scientific facts, collect data, and elaborate plans”) to the News Section (its task would be “to edit a large daily paper giving true, uncolored news with a special supplement relating to progress in the work of Human Engineering”).

For all his insight into the nature of language and reality, Korzybski was a kooky technocrat who believed that science could resolve all political problems. He would certainly agree with O’Reilly that there is one right way to decide on pending legislation and that any issues and controversies that come up in deliberations are just semantic noise—clever meme-engineering by the parties involved. Scientism is still scientism, even when it’s clothed in the rhetoric of big data.

t least O’Reilly is perfectly clear about how people can succeed in the future. Toward the end of his Long Now Foundation talk, he admits that [the] future of collective intelligence applications is a future in which the individual that we prize so highly actually has less power— except to the extent that that individual is able to create new mind storms. . . . How will we influence this global brain? The way we’ll influence it is seen in the way that people create these viral storms . . . . We’re going to start getting good at that. People will be able to command vast amounts of attention and direct large groups of people through new mechanisms.

Yes, let that thought sink in: our Mindstormer-in-Chief is telling us that the only way to succeed in this brave new world is to become a Tim O’Reilly. Anyone fancy an O’Reilly manual on meme hustling?t The

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Ancestors

Jean-Arthur Rimbaud For his 100th birthday 3 Thomas Bernhard

enerable Assembly, The saying goes that we honor poets only when they are dead, when the lid of the burial vault or the wet mound of earth has definitively separated him from us, when the creator of lyrical poems, having suffered in hardship and misery—as it is so beautifully and disconcertingly put in the obituaries of inferior spirits—has given up his spirit. And as God would have it, there will appear a national office that will begin leafing through its address book, and so the work of posterity gets underway. Then come the laurels and “laurel-ettes,” and an amusing intercourse develops between wine tavern and ministry until the record of the poet either disappears or someone has resolved to publish his works. There are celebrations and pomp, the pensum of the dead is discovered, dragged into the light—the poet is “staged”—mainly just to stave off boredom, which is what one is actually being paid for. And so (in our country!) it is not the poet who is honored, but rather the gentleman from the cultural office who delivers the greeting, the Honorable Sir, Executor of Poetry; the actor, the performer. Many a Hölderlin or Georg Trakl would turn over in his grave from so much contrived, grafted culture, from so much art-market talk from which nothing but indecency emerges! This is about remembering Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. Thank God he was a Frenchman! Let us then believe in the power and the glory of the poetic word, let us believe in the everlasting life of the spirit, in the resilience of images (of the dead and visions), as they emerge from between the pages of a few great men, exceptions of the sort that appear just once or twice in a century. Let’s not deceive ourselves: the mighty, thrilling, stirring, and calming, the enduring; these do not grow like common sorrel in a summer field! Such great verse, to which humanity owes its glimpse into the depths, does not emerge

Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) wrote this lecture—published in English for the first time here—for Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–1891) one-hundredth birthday. Bernhard was twenty-three when he delivered it at the Hotel Pitter in Salzburg before a small audience that called itself the “Bergen Circle.” It was first published in the May 14, 2009, issue of the German newspaper Die Zeit, and recently included in an anthology of Bernhard’s writings, Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Bernhard’s account of Rimbaud’s life and work is riddled with brazen exaggerations and inaccuracies (Verlaine did love more than the “poetic strength” of his “brother”; Rimbaud was in Yemen for three years before moving to Harare, etc.) of the sort that would become the Austrian writer’s literary trademark. “Without exaggerating,” Bernhard once told a journalist, “you can’t say anything.”

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Never again did Rimbaud take up the quill to write poetry; the disgust of literature had seized him. He was done, it was enough.

Thomas Bernhard, 1981.

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every day, nor every year. Several thousand books must be pounded out before the machine makes an elemental lunge and presents us with one, if only one, significant piece of world literature. Those that forever hang on the big bell and can be heard clear to the pubs, the journal-poets and the export-articles of literature—they are mostly well-coiffed manufacturers of drivel and trend. In literature the only thing that matters is the original, indeed, the elemental. Like JeanArthur Rimbaud. The poet of France was truly elemental, his verses were of flesh and blood. A hundred years is nothing for this master of words, the untranslatable Rimbaud. He grabbed hold of life, unconventionally, by the roots, packed it full of awe and an obsession with death. His poetry is finished; at the age of twenty-three he snapped shut his book, his “Drunken Boat,” his “Illuminations,” his “Season in Hell.” The

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His hair was supposedly as long as the mane of a horse; a passerby offers him four sous to get a haircut, which he—the “Poet from Charleville”—spends on tobacco.

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imbaud was born on October 20, 1854, in Charleville. His father was an army officer, his mother a woman like any other, concerned with the boy’s well-being but suspicious and reserved at the moment the fermentation begins within him, when at age nine he brings his first verses home from school, his first “Essays,” his visions, that belong to the best in France. In July 1870 he wins first prize for some masterly Latin verses in which he has reworked “Sancho Panza’s Speech to his Donkey.” While still a student at the university he writes for an Ardennes newspaper, attacking Napoleon and Bismarck with equal vehemence. In order to see and to suffer the people’s poverty, he walks to Paris, immerses himself in the human wasteland and human fear, and throws himself into the arms of the tortured and the dispossessed among the pristine boulevards. At the time his hair was supposedly as long as the mane of a horse; a passerby offers him four sous to get a haircut, which he—the “Poet from Charleville”— spends on tobacco. Then he is witness to a revolution in the Babylon barracks, that dense mixture of races and classes, and fervently cries out: “I want to be a worker! A fighter!” After an eight-day struggle, government troops storm the capital; the captured revolutionaries—his friends and comrades—bleed to death. He, with the greatest shock of his life behind him, manages by some miracle to escape their fate. But in Charleville he was no longer at home. Rimbaud was a martyr and “socially conscious,” but never a politician. With politics, the alienation of art, he had nothing to do and nothing in common. He was nothing less than a human being and as such was scandalized by the rape of the mind. In Charleville he sat down and wrote the fiery poems “The Drunken Boat”—although he did not yet know anything of the sea—and “Paris is populating itself again”: the orgy, the denunciation of the tumor that is hatred, the poem of Parisian human vice, everything in him was outrage, and when he walked along the river, “it took him hours to calm down inside.” He was seventeen when he penned the wonderful poetic edifice “The Poor in the Church,” with “pounding heart, totally among the dirty children who always gaze at the wooden angel and imagine God to be behind it somehow . . .” Rimbaud was a communist, yes, but rather than being the kind of communist who wanted to torch the palaces

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Never again did he take up the quill to write poetry; the disgust of literature had seized him. He was done, it was enough. “Absurde! Ridicule! Dégoûtant!”—thus did Rimbaud reply when someone spoke with admiration of his poetry, and tried to win him back to French literature.

The orgy, the denunciation of the tumor that is hatred, the poem of Parisian human vice, everything in him was outrage, and when he walked along the river, â&#x20AC;&#x153;it took him hours to calm down inside.â&#x20AC;?

DAV I D J O H N S O N

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Art was thrown overboard,

of the Champs-Élysées, he was a communist of the spirit, a communist in his lyrics and his he strove toward other spiritual graphic prose. Upon sending his verses to Verlaine, the pursuits, equally important, only living poet of France he revered, he reand went on to studies in ceives the now famous reply: “Venez, chère metallurgy, maritime navigation, grande âme!” And how astonished is the “poet of Paris,” who paraded in and out of the sahydraulics, mineralogy, masonry, lons, pregnant as they were with smoke, like carpentry, agricultural machines, a god, when he finds, instead of a “dignified” man, the ragged seventeen-year-old Jean at and sawmills. his door. And this Rimbaud had the “Sensation,” the great burning poem, behind him. Yes. Those were the days! With Verlaine there began for Rimbaud a new era, one of deep friendship and deepest humanity, and they traveled together to England to acquaint themselves with London, the stinking air of the largest seaport in the world, to the Midlands with its black factories, and to Brussels to (temporarily!) part ways. Verlaine had to go “home” to his family, which he had, without “consideration,” as they say, abandoned one morning. How different were the two vagabonds who were allowed to tramp through Europe without a passport, without anything; the ephemeral Rimbaud, who was forever breaking out, driven forward by the monumental new reality “there was to digest” in prose. And then the soft Verlaine, who bent toward Catholicism, salvation, and who was completely taken with Rimbaud, to whom he owed the profound poetry and sanctified songs of a stationary person, written down by the defeated Verlaine in jail after he had shot and severely wounded the young brother from Charleville during an argument. To Rimbaud, Verlaine was the great poet, but soft and obsessive; meanwhile Rimbaud had fashioned himself through Verlaine into a “sole life treasure apart from Jesus Christ.” Lest we misunderstand: Verlaine loved the poetic strength of his “brother” and Arthur’s wonderfully clear face, nothing more. The life of the poet should not be paraded in the street, yet Rimbaud’s life is so violent, so great, so abysmal and yet so religious, like the life of a saint. He stands before us like his poetry: outrageous, truthful, beautiful, and of God! In Germany he served as a child tutor for a Doctor Wagner in Stuttgart, then raced through Belgium and on to Holland. He signed up for the colonial forces and after a seven-week crossing reached Java. But he was just as insincere in his devotion to military service as he had earlier been with the thought “to be a missionary, to see the world.” When he landed in the Dutch East Indies it seemed as though he had reached his goal: to be out of range of detestable civilization!

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He moved on, went to Batavia, lived off advances, battled through the new terrain, lived among animals and halfwits, boarded an English ship in 1876 to return home. He had grown tired for a time. As the ship sailed near Helena he called for a halt. When his wish was refused, he jumped into the sea and began swimming to the island, and he, who at all costs had wanted to see Napoleon’s camp, was barely brought back on board alive. On exactly the 31st of December he was back in Charleville.

or his entire life he was an adventurer, and for half of his existence he was on the road. He had long since turned his back on literature and wrote no more: For a week my boots had been torn apart By pebbles on the road. I’d made it to Charleroi. —At the Cabaret-Vert: I ordered slices of bread and butter, along with lightly chilled ham. Happily, I stretched out my legs under The green table: I gazed at the very naive subjects On the wallpaper.—And it was charming, When the girl with big boobs and lively eyes, —She’s not afraid of a kiss, that one!— Cheerful, brought me slices of bread and butter And warm ham on a colorful plate, Ham rosy and white, fragrant with a clove Of garlic,—and filled my tankard, its foam Turned gold by a ray of lingering sunlight.*

Thereafter was pure enjoyment. He’s back in Marseille and selling keyrings, then goes to Egypt, returns to France, and finally ships out to Arabia as a buyer of coffee and perfume. In November he leaves Arabia and reaches Zeila. In the first half of December, after a twenty-day ride through the Somali desert, he arrives in Harare, an English colony. There he becomes the agent of an English company with a “salary of 330 francs, food, travel expenses, and a 2 percent commission.” But before leaving Aden, he had written to his mother to send him scientific books.** Art was thrown overboard. He strove toward other spiritual pursuits, equally important, and went on to studies in metallurgy, maritime navigation, hydraulics, mineralogy, masonry, carpentry, agricultural machines, sawmills, the trades of miners-glaziers-potters*“Au Cabaret-Vert” (1870) ** Bernhard neglects to mention that Rimbaud was in Aden, Yemen, from 1880 to 1883,

from whence he moved to Harare, a place he had visited for six months on a coffee excursion in 1881.

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One mustn’t overanalyze

metal-founders, artesian wells—he wants to make everything his own, he is hungry like Rimbaud; one must read him, never before, even as an agent! The Harare branch of the trade house blossoms under let him materialize fully like an the direction of the poet Rimbaud. To him earthly vision. One must enter his business is always going badly. In his letters he writes of money and gold to be sought. He world as he entered it, with dirty becomes impatient again and wants to go to shoes and a hungry stomach, once Tonkin, to India, to the Panama Canal. And all he does anymore is business, perhaps just on the road to Mézières. to numb himself: he trades in coffee and weapons, which he sends to the Red Sea, with cotton and fruits—he who had once vouchsafed to France the most beautiful poems of youth. And full of misery he writes: “I am very bored, I’ve never known anyone to be so bored as I am.” In 1890, as he had the desire to marry, he suddenly felt a kind of gout coming on, a bodily pain that this storm-beaten man had never known before. Far away from France, among slaves and negroes, in the stinking desert. The end approaches in giant leaps. He himself wrote of his illness: “The climate of Harare is cold, yet out of habit I wore almost nothing, simple linen pants and a wool shirt, and thus I made senseless daily rides of 15–40 kilometers through the country’s rugged mountains. I think a poisonous ailment must have developed in my knee, brought on by fatigue, heat, and cold. It all began with the blow of a hammer under the kneecap: a light blow that I felt every few minutes . . . I went around and continued to work hard, more than ever, for I thought it was a common cold . . .” An English doctor in the hospital in Aden diagnosed him with a very advanced and dangerous joint infection. Rimbaud decided to have himself put aboard a steamer headed for the Mediterranean. In Marseille one of his legs is amputated. The elderly Madame Rimbaud is with him. “I am a cripple,” he writes despairingly, “what use is a cripple to the world? Better to die, after all that I have already endured . . .” So he wrote after months of tortures had lashed him to the bed. He suffers from cancer. On July 23, he had himself taken, as his sister describes it, to the family. There he hoped at last to find peace and rest. It was 1891. The grain was frozen as he came home, and at the sight of the room prepared for him he cried out: “This is Versailles!” There followed the most horrible months of his life. In October the first signs of death made their appearance. Once more he wants to take off, with one leg, for India, or at least to Harare to the negroes. He is already being brought to the train station, is put on the train, but has to get off at the next station. It was the deepest despair known to a human being. In the “Hôpital de la Conception” he reg-

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istered under the name Jean Rimbaud. Then everything came down to a fight between life—which he wanted—and death. He has spectacular visions, his “Illuminations” return. In agony the poet returns, suddenly he is there again where he had left off at twenty-three when he fled, where the “Barbarism of literature” and the “softening of the intellect” had spat at him from every corner and destination. He is a poet again—even though he writes no more. He is back again—he was in fact never gone but only in Harare, in Egypt, in England, in Java. It was but a detour; now he saw the poetry from Charleville clearly before him and he knew: it is done! His poetry descended on him like a miraculous comfort. “On November 10, at two o’clock in the afternoon, he was dead,” noted his sister Isabelle. The priest, shaken by so much reverence for God, administered the last rites. “I have never seen such strong faith,” he said. Thanks to Isabelle, Rimbaud was brought to Charleville and buried in its cemetery with great pomp. There he lies still, next to his sister Vitalie, beneath a simple marble monument. The work of Rimbaud was always attacked by those who do not honor truth, and yet it all begins with the sublime, revolutionary, utterly poetic school assignment of the nine-year-old, “The sun was still warm . . .” which his teacher and friend Izambard kept. It is among the most powerful and the most raw and original piece that was ever written in French, including those of all the greats: Racine, Verlaine, Valéry, Gide, and, more recently, Claudel. Rimbaud’s poetry is not only French, but European, it is world poetry. There are spells and divinations, perceptions and deliriums of incredible magical power. One mustn’t overanalyze Rimbaud; one must read him, let him materialize fully like an earthly vision. One must enter his world as he entered it, with dirty shoes and a hungry stomach, once on the road to Mézières, then in Paris, in a hopeless situation. One must, as Rimbaud himself did, look into his churches; one mustn’t observe his work, but rather live and suffer along with him, simply look at it as a young girl looks at something that flits across her path. Four in the morning, summer, The sleep of love lasts still. Under the copses dawn evaporates The scent of the celebrated night . . .*

Such things are seldom said and never put in verse. It is full, unsettling, lonely, the Rimbaud of worldly character. Or “Ophelia,” the two poems that encompass the whole world and God along with it. Therein one finds everything that is missing in our time: beauty and awe in the truest sense, and there is desolation and in it the eternal and *This is the first stanza from Rimbaud’s “Bonne pensée du matin” (1872).

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Where had he thrown

only God, the great father, try as they might to drive him out of Rimbaud’s verses. In order the aesthetic? Onto the great, to believe, one need not swallow communion wafers, need not go twice a year to confession. mutually devouring trash heap It is enough if one looks the world in the face, of literature that is forever deep into its core, like Rimbaud. One should never scoff at the Church, but it is all right to spreading its disgusting stink call the bad priests bad and the vile nuns vile. of perfume. Yet one must also offer praise to the glory and goodness of God, as Rimbaud did from the beginning to the end, with elemental force. For what makes his work so great is its closed shapelessness. Rimbaud was quite simply the first to write like Rimbaud. Neither he nor anyone else at the time knew “that it is nothing, but that HE is, and that HE ever shall be.” He is a “Shakespeare enfant,” and not just because Victor Hugo said so. His “Drunken Boat,” the fantastical dream, is eternal. Where had he thrown the aesthetic? Onto the great, mutually devouring trash heap of literature that is forever spreading its disgusting stink of perfume. He was far from the unreality and glassiness of the late Rilke. He was chaste and animalistic at the same time, and the most beautiful, most sensitive reflections come from him. He did not write on bond paper, but on stinking cheese packages—but precisely that was poetry. “Season in Hell” was the only work which he himself published during his lifetime. Verlaine assembled a complete edition of his work after Rimbaud’s death. Poetry was no longer to him like an “attempt to break free,” a “vent for the pressure of excess vitality,” as Stefan Zweig later said. Into such currents one cannot discharge mere vitality; not Rimbaud. Poetry was no refuge for him but rather an intrinsic home. “Religion never brought him to his knees,” wrote the same Stefan Zweig (who deeply revered Rimbaud!). And yet his literature was an only, indeed world-wide, historically free, unbound, unrefined religion, triumphant in dirt and tattered shoes. And this religion of his brought him down, it brought him to his knees! His entire life hung in the balance of his “Infernal Season,” his heartbeat hung on his “Illuminations.” The wealth in Harare was useless, all the money was useless, everything, everything was useless; down he sinks, and seems to diminish ultimately, and down he kneels in deliriums and begs for the final illumination: for the eternal father! Only those who invoke the eternal father have a chance to last forever, can say, as Rimbaud did: I am always!t

S COT T T E P LI N

156 1 The Baffler [no.22]

Translated from the German by Holly Case. John Palattella translated Rimbaud’s poetry from the French.

r Graphic Art |

Steve Brodner

5) Aaron refuses to

plead guilty to charges that carry $1 million in fines and 35 years in federal prison. 6) Ortiz and Heymann 1) Aaron Swartz,

decide to make an example of him. They bleed him dry of resources and stamina.

24-year-old democracy activist, downloads a large cache from the digital academic library JSTOR via MIT systems, technically violating their terms of service.

7) Despite pleas for mercy, and awareness that their victim suffers from depression, they terrorize him for 18 months. MIT presses for prison, refusing to agree to a plea deal.

2) JSTOR decides it will

not press charges. MIT, however, refuses to withdraw, breaking with its heralded open campus, open network ethos. 3) “Stealing is stealing,” says U.S. Atty Carmen Ortiz, who assigns assistant U.S. Atty Stephen Heymann to the case.

9) Aaron’s father says he was “killed by the government,” with a helping hand from MIT.

4) Ortiz and Heymann,

a zealot in the service of power, claim to see no difference between freeing publicly funded knowledge and, say, credit card theft.

8) Aaron, now 26, depressed, scared, and broken as intended, commits suicide in his Crown Heights apartment in New York.

11 10) Ortiz and Heymann

are exposed as menaces to public safety. 11) MIT investigates itself.

12) Aaron loses his life. We lose a friend.

The

Baffler [no.22] ! 157

6Bafflomathy [no. 22] Daniel Aaron (“Daniel’s Dictionary,” p. 11) is Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University and a 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Thomas Bernhard (“Jean-Arthur Rimbaud,” p. 148) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet whose best-known works are the novels The Lime Works and Correction and the play Heldenplatz. Chris Bray (“Passions of the Meritocracy,” p. 46) lives in West Hollywood, California. Jocelyn Burrell (“Accounting for the Damage,” p. 96) is a writer and typesetter and the editor of Word: On Being a [Woman] Writer. Kyle Dargan (“The Robots Are Coming,” p. 124) is the author of three collections of poetry, including Logorrhea

Dementia, and the founding editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. Thomas Frank (“To Galt’s Gulch They Go,” p. 22) is founding editor of The Baffler and the Easy Chair columnist at Harper’s Magazine. Amy Gerstler (“Di$claimer,” p. 82) is the author of Dearest Creature. She lives in Los Angeles. Dmitry Gorchev (“A Beauty,” p. 12) was an illustrator, educator, and author; he died at the age of forty-five in a village outside St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2010. David Graeber (“A Practical Utopian’s Guide” p. 23) is a contributing editor of the magazine and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. His new book is The Democracy Project. Heather Havrilesky (“Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism,” p. 76) writes Bookforum’s Best Seller List column

BRAD HOLLAND

158 1 The Baffler [no.22]

and The Awl’s weekly existential advice column, Turning The Screw. She’s the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness. Monica Hileman (“Up in Birdland,” p. 121) has contributed stories to journals such as American Writing and Georgetown Review. In 2010 her short story collection was selected as one of the ten finalists for the Bakeless Prize in Fiction. Cathy Park Hong’s (“Inside the House,” p. 110) latest book is Engine Empire. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Hussein Ibish (“The United Sades of America,” p. 97) writes frequently on Middle East affairs. Peter Kayafas (“Hope Is a Kiss,” p. 17) is a photographer and the director of the Eakins Press Foundation. His new book of photographs is Totems. John Keene (“Underground,” p. 73) is the author of Annotations and, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, Seismosis. He teaches at Rutgers University–Newark. Christian Lorentzen (“Predator Drone,” p. 84) is an editor of the London Review of Books. Anne Elizabeth Moore (“Marketpiece Theater,” p. 56) is the Fulbright scholar/ award-winning author/scruffy-haired ne’erdo-well behind the new book New Girl Law and the Ladydrawers column at Truthout. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Evgeny Morozov (“The Meme Hustler,” p. 66) is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and winner of the Harvard Kennedy School’s 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize. His new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Utopianism, is available now. Mahesh Rao (“The Agony of Leaves,” p. 111) was born and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, has worked as a lawyer, a bookseller, and an academic researcher, and now lives in Mysore, India. He has just completed his first novel. Kristina K.

Robinson (“Diaspora,” p. 36) is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of New Orleans. Jorian Polis Schutz (“The State of Stretching,” p. 38) is a writer, calligrapher, and publisher whose Orphiflamme Press released its first book, Varitan’s Illustrated Greek Myths, in 2011. Manohar Shetty (“Taverna,” p. 42) is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Goa, India. John Summers (“Negative Capability,” p. 6) is editor in chief of the magazine. Terese Svoboda (“Grim Sleeper,” p. 54) is the author of Weapons Grade, a book of poems. Tyrone Williams (“Sphinx Infinitives,” p. 120) teaches literature at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Slavoj Žižek (“Camera Shy, Blah, Blah, Blah,” p. 8), philosopher and cultural critic, is a madman.

Translators

Holly Case, John Palattella, and Anna Summers.

Graphic Artists

Steve Brodner, Philip Burke, Joseph Ciardiello, Mark Dancey, Eleanor Davis, Henrik Drescher, Michael Duffy, Randall Enos, Mark S. Fisher, Patrick JB Flynn, Ralph Gibson, Stuart Goldenberg, Dmitry Gorchev, Brad Holland, David Johnson, Peter Kayafas, Victor Kerlow, Barbara Klemm, Ruth Marten, David McLimans, P. S. Mueller, Hazel Lee Santino, Ralph Steadman, Katherine Streeter, David Suter, and Scott Teplin. The front cover is illustrated by Brad Holland. The photograph on the back cover was made by Hugh Kretschmer. 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. The

Baffler [no.22] ! 159

The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789 E-ISSN 2164-926X)

M A R K S . FI S H ER

160 1 The Baffler [no.22]

is published three times a year ( March, July, November) by The MIT Press. Subscription orders and address changes should be sent to: MIT Press, Journals Customer Service, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1315. Telephone: 617-253-2889. U.S./ Canada: 800-207-8354. Fax: 617-577-1545. An electronic, full-text version of The Baffler is available from The MIT Press. Subscription rates are: Electronic only ~ Individuals $27.00, Institutions $76.00. Canadians add 5% GST. Print and Electronic ~ Individuals $30.00, Institutions $84.00. Canadians add 5% GST. Outside the U.S. and Canada add $23.00 for postage and handling. Single Issues ~ Individuals $12.00, Institutions $29.00. Canadians add 5% GST. Outside the U.S. and Canada add $6.00 per issue for postage and handling. Claims for missing issues will be honored free of charge if made within three months after the publication date of the issue. Claims may be submitted to journals-cs@mit.edu. Postmaster: send address changes to The Baffler, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1315. For advertising and mailing list information, please visit http://www.mitpressjournals. org/page/advertising or contact the Marketing Department, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1315. Phone: 617-253-2866. Fax: 617-253-1709. Email: journals-info@mit. edu. To request permission to photocopy or otherwise reproduce content from The Baffler, please visit our Rights & Permissions page at http://mitpressjournals. org/page/copyright_permissions, or contact the Permissions Manager directly at MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA. Fax: 617-253-1709. Email: journals-rights@ mit.edu. The Baffler is distributed by Small Changes Inc., 1418 NW 53rd St., Seattle, WA 98107. Phone: 206-382-1980; Ingram Periodicals Inc., 18 Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086; Ubiquity, 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Phone: 718-875-5491. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/bflr

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