No23 by The Baffler

No. 23

L O U B E AC H

My other brain is

t he ba f f ler.com

No. 23

T he jo u r n al tha t bl u n t s the c u t ti n g ed g e

Once Upon a Town

LO U B E AC H

lphabetically there is no such thing as unspoiled territory, which is why the black chalkboard became white and why the white chalkboard became green. Yes a squirrel might run through a long intestinal tunnel, but only in Vermont is it possible for two people to walk and share the same slice of face-bread. This occurs, all crawling things are forced to believe, when a clean, white church roots us against us. The central energy of the Soul should be the Food Co-Op, where the tree curves into a punctuation of hug despite being interrupted by a milky shard of sky-sperm. In both cases, a genetically, modified modifier, dangles a body. None of the leaves are money. No, anorexia is not a thing to be boiled like ginger unless the runway gurus are emphasizing sinus infection fashion. I, too, would like to grow out of my own grave and hitchhike across the lawn of an abolitionist while rolling a joint of good blue smoke. Information Lake. Data Spring. Scientific Sea. Even though it moves through the loading bar like water, I hesitate to call the electronic, gray substance “light.” From a bowl of biotechnology comes, the fake flow of aggressive, pouring narrative. Empire and toast, Colored toast. For organic produce, I will become a member of the monopoly of me—once a week near a Bayou, twice near a Beauty Box committed to hosed theory. Worth taking from the house behind me: one lime stock. Oops. I meant: one nuclear sock. About the blue jean’d genetics of gender, there is this. I caused the crime simply by standing up when my lips, unattached to speech, began to evict consonants and freak. All we are asking is that you “Take Us to Your Leaders” before “We Take You . . .” because even our issues have issues, especially the lies buried alive in deadlines. —Thomas Sayers Ellis

LO U B E AC H

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

No. 23

E DI T OR I N C H I E F

John Summers

F OU N DI N G E DI T OR

S E N IOR E DI T OR

Thomas Frank Chris Lehmann

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

The Flynstitute 9

M A N AGI N G E DI T OR

Lindsey Gilbert

A S SI S TA N T E DI T OR

Rhian Sasseen

L I T E R A RY E DI T OR

Anna Summers

P OE T RY E DI T OR

Thomas Sayers Ellis

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

Susan Faludi David Graeber George Scialabba Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) Catherine Tumber Eugenia Williamson

C ON T R I B U T I N G A R T I S T S

Michael Duffy Mark S. Fisher Brad Holland Ralph Steadman 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 No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

M A R K S . FI S H E R

his is our first issue since we moved our office to Industry Lab, a “coworking space” located in Cambridge’s Inman Square, so we may as well take this opportunity to thank our coworking engineers, scientists, designers, and technologists for gamely pretending to understand just what it is that we do. The following friends and collaborators understand all too well, but helped us with the issue anyway: Catherine Buxton, Mike Crawford, Dave Denison, Ari Ebstein, Christian Engley, Melissa Flashman, Ekaterina Golubeva, David Grewal, Jaron Lanier, Jennifer Lockwood, Jeanne Mansfield, Jeff Mayersohn, Carolyn Oliver, Ryan Petersen, David Rose, and James Wolcott. Yours in buncombe . . .

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA | thebaff ler.com © 2013 The Baffler Foundation, Inc. No part of this magazine may be republished in print or electronically without the written permission of The Baffler Foundation. That means you!

2 1 The Baffler [no.23]

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

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 3

Con t e n t s ( Th e B a f f l e r, n o. 23 ) Magical Thinking

Once Upon a Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Magic Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Buncombe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

S P E N C E R WA LTS

Thomas Sayers Ellis John Summers

David Gr aeber Daniel A aron

Landowners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Internment Camp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

James Agee

Jim Frederick

Photo Graphic

Safe Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E L E A N O R DAV I S

Today’s looks for tomorrow’s threats Paul Shambroom

Carnival of Buncombe

Academy Fight Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Networking into the Abyss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thomas Fr ank Susan Faludi

Inside the empty bubble of SXSW Interactive Jacob Silver man

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

Ann Friedman

High Low Washington

Street Legal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Good Enough for Government Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The national security state comes home Chris Br ay Conservatism in the tank Jim Newell

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen . . . . . . . . . 104 Liberalism in the tank Ken Silverstein

Vocabulary Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Basta ya que el Yanqui mande Dana Fr ank M A R K S . FI S H E R

4 1 The Baffler [no.23]

114

A Carnival of Buncombe

Stories

Bizness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dmitry Gorchev Adam Haslett

Poems

American Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex Dimitrov

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

Without Which He Would Not Have Written His Greatest Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Story Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jelly Donut, NYC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here We Name Them ‘Way’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My Daughter Night Terrors the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Anis Shivani

Kiki Petrosino

Genine Lentine Ed Roberson

Farid Matuk

P E TE R K U P E R

A Monkey Could Do This (and) You and me are not friends, OK? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Simone White

Where Is It Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sharon Olds

137

Idols Abroad

A Nod to Ned Ludd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Richard Byr ne

On Wittgenstein’s Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

130

Sacking Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138

A letter from unified Europe Dubr avk a Ugrešić

How hipsters, expats, yummies, and smartphones ruined a city Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling

JA KO B H I N R I C H S

Americana

Sartre for Sartre’s Sake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Seth Colter Walls

Smile, Buster! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Farr an Nehme

152

Graphic Art

3 Michael Duffy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Baff lomathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

Br ad Holland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

P H I LI P B U R K E

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 5

Ma g i c a l Th i n k i n g THE CUTTING EDGE

Magic Brain

A minor but telltale

moment of relief from the country’s paralyzing austerity broke through a few months back, when the Obama Administration announced major funding for a new group called Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Yes, the group’s acronym is BRAIN. BRAIN is slated to recruit top neuroscientists and molecular biologists from our premier private foundations, military intelligence agencies, and government bureaucracies. Their mission? To map a circuit of the one hundred billion or so neurons spiking and twirling through the human noggin, yours and mine. Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have, of course, agreed to consult on the job of capturing and analyzing the resulting data. Reporting all this landmark innovation, the New York Times grew tongue-tied before the task of solemnizing the corporate-militarygovernment alliance: “It has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than a year.” Translation: Ka-ching! 6 1 The Baffler [no.23]

M A R K S . FI S H E R

lose your eyes and try to conjure a country where art, criticism, and ideas geared for social change enjoyed the same prestige and liquidity as utopian projects such as BRAIN. We wouldn’t need a year to divine our goals from our values—reducing waste and cruelty in society, sharing power democratically in politics, replacing competition with cooperation in economic affairs, sweeping away cant in cultural expression. We might begin by urging the firing of every corporate manager and academic dean. But a fixed “endpoint” we’d be obliged to disavow. Instead, we might propose a guiding metaphor that couldn’t be of any less interest to our actual techsavvy resource allocation specialists: “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do

exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” That’s how the terminally unfashionable liberal journalist John Stuart Mill sketched the human prospect in his 1859 study On Liberty. Since then, alas, both liberalism and journalism have been downsized to a mere speck of computer dust. So don’t expect to encounter that particular metaphor again anytime soon.

eanwhile, you can count on The Baffler no. 23 to assail the computerized dicta and cutting-edge crapola that the country’s most serious persons in academia, business, and government pass off as its most significant thinking. Our world of art and criticism may not boast investment-grade salaries or neuron-spying sinecures. But in catching the carnival of American life in plain sight, we offer a camaraderie of taste, candor, humor, and irony—an asylum, you might say, from digital buncombe. Enjoy! t —John Summers

CHIN STROKE

Buncombe

America is a country

made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe. It is the birthplace of both modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics, and a country where, for at least thirty years, the economy has been driven by the engine of finance—that is, by the magical creation of wealth through financial securities and derivatives. When you consider that those U.S. companies that still produce commodities now devote themselves mainly to developing brands and images, you realize that American capitalism conjures value into being chiefly by convincing everyone it’s there. On some level, we understand that this kind of magic is everywhere. However, we’ve grown so accustomed to thinking of ideology in theological terms that we’ve failed to cultivate the intellectual tools to understand not only how our country’s magic really operates, but also that it does, in fact, operate in the world of effects. We don’t typically trace the effects of belief because we are so used to thinking of belief in terms of the inward soul, the state of grace.

M A R K S . FI S H E R

Capitalism conjures value into being chiefly by convincing everyone it’s there.

It helps to live elsewhere once in a while. Once in Madagascar, I was standing at the foot of a sacred mountain with a friend named Chantal and a magician named Rakoto, widely rumored to be a master of love magic. I asked if the rumors of his powers were true. He replied that yes, they really existed, and they worked. He was a master of such spells. “But come on,” Chantal interjected, “do spells really work?”

“You don’t believe me?” Rakoto asked. “Well, let’s put it to the test. Just give me some object from your pocket—a comb, a ribbon, anything like that. I’ll come here to this mountain tomorrow at midnight, perform the appropriate ceremonies, and I’ll bet you anything that within an hour, you’ll be here too, brought as if in a trance, completely naked. Do you want to try?” She declined, of course. The

Baffler [no.23] ! 7

Ma g i c a l Th i n k i n g

What would a theory

of America look like that featured stories like this one? It would start by calling out our telltale assumption that all political systems must possess some sort of legitimacy in the eyes of those over whom they rule. It would then note that our own system attains its legitimacy by asserting a series of simple belief statements, such as

dirling

A dirling is a tingling sensation of any kind, but it’s the most apposite word for describing the vibrations produced by a bang on the “funny” or “crazy” bone—the point on the elbow where the S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG ulnar nerve runs close to the surface. Dirling is a restless word. It whirls and twirls. —Daniel Aaron

As anyone who has spent any time in working-class bars or diners or church picnics can testify, almost no one in America really does believe “We are all equal before the law.” Instead, most Americans are utterly convinced that most other Americans believe. “America is a democracy,” “We are all equal before the law,” and “In a free market everyone is rewarded according to his or her merits.” Next, the theorists would observe how our politics, conducted in this fairy tale universe, is largely a matter of trying to convince every-

one to believe that these statements are true. Still, our new theory would hardly have touched the real question, which is: How in the world do Americans manage to believe such propositions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

dwale

A deep sleep or torpor. It can be induced by ingesting narcotic plants such as deadly nightshade but also by sitting too long in the sun. A drowsy S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG word, dwale evokes the voices of sirens and kindred malevolent nymphs and seductive young witches who lure men into their bowers, lull them to sleep with sweet songs, and gouge out their eyes. —Daniel Aaron

8 1 The Baffler [no.23]

Do Americans believe such propositions? Obviously we must, or else why would they be so effective? But as anyone who has spent any time at working-class bars or diners or church picnics can testify, almost no one in America really does believe “We are all equal before the law” or “America is a democracy.” Instead, the controlling conviction is this: most Americans are utterly convinced most other Americans believe such things. Most Americans, that is, think most other Americans are profoundly stupid. The ideology works by turning the cynical superiority of the huckster, who believes that the common run of humanity is composed primarily of hapless suckers, into

a tool of social control. “Hey, I can see through it all,” we say. “The game is rigged. But let me tell you: most people are really that naive. They actually believe this shit.” This America turns up not only on Wall Street but in supermarket tabloids like the Sun or the Weekly World News—not the kind that feature celebrity diet plans and related fare, but the ones that consist almost entirely of stories about satanic toasters and space aliens. These publications have now been rendered largely irrelevant by the web, with its labyrinths of conspiracy, trolling, and double-think, its bigfoot sightings, UFO abduction narratives, exposés of the great lunar landing hoax, lizards, black helicopters, and debates over suppressed memories of ritual abuse. In their heyday, the tabloids had a devoted following among college students. The students, like those who click on the web-enabled stories today, picked them up largely for the pleasure of scoffing at their imagined readership, which they assumed to consist of ignorant working-class housewives who believed the stories. But the joke is on the huckster. No one believes the buncombe. The only people being hoodwinked are those who imagine anyone else could be so naive. t —David Graeber

DAV I D M c LI M A N S

Don’t Think Don’t think. If you think, then don’t speak. If you think and speak, then don’t write. If you think, speak, and write, then don’t sign. If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don’t send. If you think, speak, write, sign, and send, then don’t be surprised. The

Baffler [no.23] ! 9

Ma g i c a l Th i n k i n g DE PR E SS ION E XCE R P T

Landowners

The essential structure of

the South is, of course, economic: cold and inevitable as the laws of chemistry. But that is not how the machine is run. The machine is run on intuition, and the structures of intuition are delicate and subtle as they can be only in a society which is not merely one thing but two: a dizzy mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its latter stages. Moreover, everyone born in the South, and no one born outside it, has a nose for this intensely specialized chemistry of local intuition: so that relationships between landlord and tenants are settled and crystallized, as a rule, quietly and even inarticulately. A tenant knows to a hair’s breadth just when and where he is out of line and just how to get back on it. Usually he does get back on it, and there is no further “trouble.” If he doesn’t, there is the whole natural system of boycott. And if these things fail there is, quite naturally, violence. Because so much goes by intuition and the power of custom, and because the trap the tenant is caught in is not only as huge as the structure of his civilization but as intimate as every breath he draws, the general inter-class

10 1 The Baffler [no.23]

WA L K E R E VA N S

tone or taste of air in the South is peculiarly tranquil. It is a tranquility both real and deceptive. It is real, and importantly real, simply because it exists. It is deceptive because of what it takes the place of, and hides. It takes the place of, and hides, and is essentially more terrible than, a “terrorism” which becomes necessary only when the enormous,

all but hypnotic strength of the tranquility has failed to suffice. The “terrorism” becomes necessary not through moustache-twirling and fiendish deliberation but once again very simply and inevitably and chemically, by intuition and by reflex. It is perfectly irrelevant to law and it goes as far as either as it “needs” or “happens” to. A given landlord may or

may not take active physical part in it but you may be sure he countenances it: you may be sure there is not one in any hundred who would think twice about countenancing or, for that matter, instigating it. There is in Southern white man, distributed almost as thickly as the dialect, an epidemic capability of sadism which you would have to go as far to match and whose chief basis is possibly, but only possibly, and only one among many, a fear of the Negro, deeper and more terrible than any brief accounting can suggest or

explain. This flaw of sadism can turn its victims loose into extremities which the gaudiest reports have only begun to suggest. Trouble begins in the galled spots. That, too, is where organizers come; and, later, the sympathizers, the investigators, the reporters. By the time the latter get there all hell has broken loose and there is nothing pretty about it. Through ignorance and shock and rage fully as much as through bias, the reporters take what they find as representative of the South as a whole.

What they find is, to be sure, not a circumstance on what in the course of time seems likely to happen in the South as a whole. But what they find is also not true of the general South as the South is today, and day by day. And if the truth is not only more interesting and more complex but also more valuable than falsehood, then the truth had better be recognized.t â&#x20AC;&#x201D;from James Ageeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cotton Tenants (1936), published this summer by Melville House and The Baffler

HENRIK DRESCHER

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 11

Ma g i c a l Th i n k i n g

More Equal Than You

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

12 1 The Baffler [no.23]

B Books from Ba fflers Cotton Tenants

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“ Illuminated, page after page, with poetic leaps of transcendent clarity.” —Fortune

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“ The most influential radical political thinker of the moment.” —The New Yorker

There Once Lived a Girl . . .

By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Translated by Anna Summers $15 Available now! PENGUIN BOOKS

“ Dark, fatalistic humor and bone-deep irony.” —New York Times

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“ This is the kind of analysis—historically astute, irreverent and droll—that makes Frank such an invaluable voice. . . . He’s as good at this as any writer working today.” —San Francisco Chronicle

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“ George Scialabba is a rare bird, the sort of independent general intellectual whose disappearance is so often lamented.” —Bookforum

Skin, Inc.

By Thomas Sayers Ellis $23.00 Available now! GRAYWOLF PRESS

“ In work like this, Ellis is writing some of the finest, truly public poetry of our time.”

—David Orr

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 13

W E TO L D YO U S O

. . . from The Baffler no. 9 (1997)

Internment Camp

The intern economy and the culture trust

t’s safe to say that when 35 black sugar workers were shot dead while striking for a dollar a day in 1887 or when 500,000 Southern textile workers walked off the job in 1934, no one was thinking ahead to the summer of ’96 when Jessica from Swarthmore would be sweating over the green glow of the Xerox machine, logging hundreds of unpaid hours as an MTV intern, assuring herself that this doesn’t suck because now her CV will have “résumé radiance,” as the authors of America’s Top Internships like to put it. And granted, the intern class does not make a particularly sympathetic symbol of exploitation. It’s hard to care about the plight of privileged college students when they themselves have volunteered for—demanded, even— this demeaning servitude. The inconvenient fact remains, however, that labor laws apply even to the rich, white, naive, and stupid (all necessary attributes for being an unpaid intern). For Chip and Jessica and their classmates, the imagined benefits of an internship are so great that real benefits—you know, wages—have been bid out of existence. Businesses, obviously, have a real, bottom-line incentive to encourage the trend toward labor that is not only free, but without any type of obligation whatsoever. In other words, interns are restructuring the labor market. Thanks to those who can afford to win the labor auction with the lowest possible price— I’ll work for free!—those without outside (read “parental”) support are forced to take tremendous real-dollar losses to stay competitive, or they are simply priced out of competition entirely. This ensures that the glamour industries remain the land of the rich and privileged, for they are the only people who can absorb a short-term

14 1 The Baffler [no.23]

M A R K S . FI S H E R

loss to get an imagined long-term gain. But why stop there? Left unchecked, a labor market knows no boundaries when it comes to exploitation. Although the intern price floor can’t go any lower dollar-wise, it can go lower by the amount of time served, or by the size of the labor segment drawn into the swindle. As more people do internships, the supply of intern-alums increases, driving the value of that “experience” down even further—a phenomenon you could call “intern inflation.” So college kids feel pressure to do more of them, or for a longer stretch of time. And those previously thought of as obvious employee potential, like college graduates, grad students, and career-changers, are increasingly told, “Have you thought of doing an internship?” Without some sort of check, this admirably efficient market will just continue on its merry way. Not long from now we will begin hearing: “Summer internships don’t really give you that much experience because they are only 12 weeks long. You need at least a semester or even a year to get a real grounding.” It is not outlandish to imagine a day when a year’s internship is explicitly required before you get hired for a new job, or when employers start charging interns for, let’s say, “training costs.” Before we laugh at Jessica and Chip for exploiting themselves, we should consider that years of Jessicas and Chips have already made unpaid internships for certain jobs an unspoken requirement, and the longer the intern economy hums along unhindered, the more this labor inflation will increase. By giving away work, interns reduce the value of everybody’s labor. t — Jim Frederick

years of blunting the cutting edge

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 15

* Photo gr a phic

Safe Styles

Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s looks for tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s threats 3 Paul Shambroom

Level A hazmat suit with radiation and chemical detectors

16 1 The Baffler [no.23]

Level A hazmat suit with aluminized fiberglass oversuit

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 17

* Photo gr a phic

Bomb suit and robot

18 1 The Baffler [no.23]

automatic rifle,

handgun, and gas

mask

ÂŠ 2 0 0 5 PAU L S H A M B RO O M | I N S TIT U TE FO R A RTI S T M A N AG E M E NT

SWAT outfit with

The

Baffler [no.23] ! 19

Ca r n i va l of Buncom be

Academy Fight Song 3 Thomas Fr ank

his essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperitybringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry. The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the fouryear luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence. It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know. When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, 22 1 The Baffler [no.23]

always, that it is so very beautiful. And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen. Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.

College and Mammon Both Go back to the beginning, back to the days when people first understood a characterbuilding college diploma to be the ticket to middle-class success. We would forge a model republic of citizen-students, who would redeem the merit badges of academic achievement for spots in the upper reaches of corporate capitalism. The totems of the modern American striver were to be the University Credential and the Corner Office, and prosperity would reward the ablest. And so the story remains today, despite everything that has happened in the realms of the corporation and the university. We might worry from time to time about the liberal professors who infest the academy, but school is still where you go to “write your destiny,” to use President Obama’s 2010 description of education generally. Go to college, or else your destiny will be written by someone else. The bachelor’s degree that universities issue is a “credential” that’s “a prerequisite for 21st century jobs,” says the White House website.

S P E N C E R WA LTS

The university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

9 The

Baffler [no.23] ! 23

Ca r n i va l of Buncom be Obama himself equates education with upward mobility—more schooling equals more success—as well as with national greatness. “The kinds of opportunities that are open to you will be determined by how far you go in school,” he declared a few years ago. In other words, the farther you go in school, the farther you’ll go in life. And at a time when other countries are competing with us like never before, when students around the world are working harder than ever, and doing better than ever, your success in school will also help determine America’s success in the twenty-first century.

This is commonplace and unremarkable to the point of being utterly hackneyed. Everyone says this. It is obvious. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who has refashioned himself into the Lord Protector of Learning in recent years, says the same thing, constantly: you’d better have the schooling and the skills that the entrepreneurial class demands if you want to make even a minimal living. The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life. And so the dreams proliferate. Education is the competitive advantage that might save our skins as we compete more and more directly with China and Vietnam and the Philippines, the journalists say. Education is what explains income inequality, chime the economists, and more education is what will roll it back. In fact, education is just about the only way we can justify being paid for our work at all; it is the only quantifiable input that makes us valuable or gives us “skills.” Quantifiable, yes, but only vaguely. No one really knows the particular contents of the education that is supposed to save us. It is, again, a dream, a secret formula, a black box into which we pour money and out of which comes uplift or enrichment or wish-fulfillment. How a college education manages to do these mar24 1 The Baffler [no.23]

velous things—Is it calculus? Is it classics?—is a subject of hot controversy. All we know for sure is that people who go to college are affluent; it follows naturally that if you send more people to college, you will have yourself a more affluent country. Indeed, to judge by the popular understanding of the dream-institution, the whole thing might as well be some sort of self-perpetuating cabal, akin to Skull and Bones or Sigma Chi. Maybe college is able to work its magic because college grads hire only college grads, and after decades of “networking”—which everyone knows is more important than booklearning—they have managed to colonize the entire economy. No one knows for sure how it works, but everyone can see that it does work, and that’s good enough. Get yourself a bachelor’s degree from a “good school,” and those dreamy dreams of yours can come true. Get something else, like a cosmetologist license or a membership in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and you lose. We don’t pause to consider that maybe we’ve got the whole thing backwards—that the big universities expanded in their heyday to keep up with industry demand, not to build the middle class. Instead, what everyone agrees on is this: higher education is the industry that sells tickets to the affluent life. In fact, they are the only ones licensed to do this. Yes, there are many colleges one can choose from—public, private, and for-profit—but collectively they control the one credential that we believe to be of value. Everything about them advertises it. The armorial logos, the Gothic towers, even the names of the great colleges, so redolent of money and privilege and aristocracy: Duke and Princeton and Vanderbilt. If you want to succeed, you must go to them; they are the ones controlling the gate. What they sell, in other words, is something we believe to be so valuable it is almost impossible to measure. Anyone in her right

Get yourself a bachelor’s degree from a “good school,” and those dreamy dreams of yours can come true. Get something else, like a cosmetologist license or a membership in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and you lose.

9 mind would pay an enormous price for it. Another fact: This same industry, despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives indistinguishable from the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds. Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory institution squares off. He comes loping to the bargaining table armed with about the same amount of guile that, a few years earlier, he brought to Santa’s lap in the happy holiday shopping center. You can be sure that he knows all about the imperative of achieving his dreams, and the status that will surely flow from the beloved institution. Either he goes to college like the rest of his friends, or he goes to work. He knows enough about the world to predict the kind of work he’ll get with only a high school diploma in his pocket, but of the ways of the University he knows precious little. He is the opposite of a savvy consumer. And yet here he comes nevertheless, armed with the ability to pay virtually any price his dream

school demands that he pay. All he needs to do is sign a student loan application, binding himself forever and inescapably with a financial instrument that he only dimly understands and that, thanks to the optimism of adolescence, he has not yet learned to fear. The disaster that the university has proceeded to inflict on the youth of America, I submit, is the direct and inescapable outcome of this grim equation. Yes, in certain reaches of the system the variables are different and the yield isn’t quite as dreadful as in others. But by and large, once all the factors I have described were in place, it was a matter of simple math. Grant to an industry control over access to the good things in life; insist that it transform itself into a throat-cutting, marketminded mercenary; get thought leaders to declare it to be the answer to every problem; mute any reservations the nation might have about it—and, lastly, send it your unsuspecting kids, armed with a blank check drawn on their own futures. Was it not inevitable? Put these four pieces together, and of course attendance costs will ascend at a head-swimming clip, reaching $60,000 a year now at some private schools. Of course young people will be saddled with life-crushing amounts of debt; of course the university will use its knowledge of them— their list of college choices, their campus visits, their hopes for the future—to extract every last possible dollar from the teenage mark and her family. It is lambs trotting blithely to the slaughter. It is the utterly predictable fruits of our simultaneous love affairs with College and the Market. It is the same lesson taught us by The

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Virtually every aspect of the higher-ed dream has been colonized by monopolies, cartels, and other unrestrained predators. The charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow, and everyone has got a scheme for slicing off a porterhouse or two.

9 so many other disastrous privatizations: in our passion for entrepreneurship and meritocracy, we forgot that maybe the market wasn’t the solution to all things.

An Accounting of Sorts An educational publisher wrote to me a few months back; they wanted to reprint an essay of mine that they had seen on the Internet, where it is available for free. The textbook in which they wanted to include it, they said, would be “inexpensively priced,” and authors were therefore being asked to keep their reprint fees to a minimum. The low, low price that students were to pay for this textbook: $75.95. “Approximately.” I was astounded, but it took just a few minutes of research to realize that $76 was, in fact, altruistic by the standards of this industry. Paying $250 for a textbook is more like it nowadays; according to one economist, textbook prices have increased 812 percent over the past thirty-five years, outstripping not only inflation (by a mile) but every other commodity—home prices, health care—that we usually consider to be spiraling out of control. The explanation is simple. The textbook publishers use every trick known to the marketing mind to obsolete their products year after year, thus closing off the possibility of second-hand sales. What’s more, textbook publishing is a highly concentrated industry—an oligopoly—which means they can drive prices pretty much as high as they feel like driving

them. Meanwhile, the professors who assign the textbooks and who might do something about the problem don’t have to pay for them. Actually, that explanation isn’t simple enough. The truth is that rip-offs like this abound in academia—that virtually every aspect of the higher-ed dream has been colonized by monopolies, cartels, and other unrestrained predators—that the charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow, and everyone has got a scheme for slicing off a porterhouse or two. Consider the standardized testing industry and its shadow, the test-prep industry. One of them is supposedly charitable, the other ebulliently profit-minded, but both of them have raked it in for years by stoking a pointless arms race among the anxious youngsters of the nation, each one fearful lest her dream be cancelled out by someone else’s. The testing companies, each of which holds a monopoly over some aspect of the business, charge students hefty registration fees, pay their executives fantastic salaries,* and scheme endlessly to enlarge the empire of the standardized test—persuading more people to take advanced placement exams, for example, and invading grade schools, where “No Child Left Behind” and the push for a “Common Core” have opened up vast frontiers for testing. The test-prep people, meanwhile, match them step for step, charging students far, far heftier fees to help them beat the standardized tests and endlessly scheming to persuade

* Fantastic, that is, by the standards of public charities. The testing companies clearly see themselves as participants in the

larger world of business and pay their executives accordingly. This is why the president of the College Board received “compensation” to the tune of $1.3 million in 2009.

26 1 The Baffler [no.23]

new demographics—grade schoolers, notably—that they need cram school too.* Occasionally, news stories appear announcing that test-prep of this kind has little effect on SAT scores, but it’s really the news stories themselves that have little effect. What parent is going to be stingy when their child’s future appears to be at stake? And so the test-prep industry has boomed extravagantly for decades now; there are numerous entrants in the field, and the best established of them, Kaplan Inc., has branched out around the globe and into all manner of educational provinces. Although technically owned by the Washington Post

Company, its revenues have dwarfed those of the newspaper for many years. And we’re not even going to start with the test-fraud industry, which is apparently booming as well, as cases of mass cheating surface at Harvard, at prestigious Stuyvesant High, at the benchmark-crazy Atlanta Public Schools, and in South Korea, where SATs for the entire country had to be cancelled a few months back. Consider the “enrollment management” industry, which helps colleges and universities acquire the student body they desire. Since what this means in many cases is students

* “ It takes the concept all the way to zero years old!” Jonathan Grayer told Forbes in 2000. Grayer was then the CEO of Ka-

plan, the well-known test-prep company; he was speaking to Forbes about Kaplan’s acquisition of a company that aimed to improve the math and reading abilities of kids in elementary school. Forbes continued: “In the case of a very young child, he explains, the parent who buys the book Curious George could be supported online with tutorial help: Instead of just reading the book to little Caitlin, a tutor might suggest the parent ask, ‘What did Curious George learn from his experience with the broken bicycle?’”

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be who can pay—the opposite of the “inclusiveness” most universities say they treasure—enrollment management is a job best left to quiet consultancies, who use the various tools of marketing to discover a student’s “price sensitivity.” In other words, if you give a discount of a certain amount to a student with a certain SAT score, will that be enough to persuade them to pick up the rest of the tab and attend your school? What will it take to lure them to their second choice? Their third? Enrollment management consultants know the answer, just as they know what kind of discounts to offer in order to maximize the institution’s revenue and boost its all-important test scores. Consider the sweetheart deals that are so commonplace between university administrations and the businessmen who happen to sit on the university’s board of directors. Consider universities’ real estate operations, which are often thuggish and nearly always tax-free. Consider their army of Washington lobbyists, angling for earmarks and fighting accountability measures. Consider their massive investments in sports. Or their sleazy arrangements with tobacco companies and Big Pharma and high-tech startups. And lastly, consider the many universities that have raised their tuition to extravagant levels for no reason at all except to take advantage of the quaint American folk belief that price tags indicate quality. From this faith in price correctness the nation apparently cannot be moved—there is simply no amount of exposure or reporting that will do it—and so the university inevitably becomes a luxury good, like a big Armani label you get to wear through life that costs a fortune but that holds no intrinsic worth at all. “It serves as a trophy, a symbol,” the former president of George Washington University told Washington Monthly magazine in 2010, describing his own (successful) strategy for making GWU into a top-tier school via gigantic tuition hikes. “It’s a sort of token of who they think they are.” 28 1 The Baffler [no.23]

It is all so wonderfully circular, is it not? We know college degrees make us affluent because affluent people have college degrees; and we also know that we must spend lots of money on college—signing up for a life of debt, essentially—because we believe status signifiers like college ought to be fantastically expensive. Think about it this way for long enough and you start to suspect that maybe those fancy stickers you put in your rear window are what education is all about, the distilled essence of the whole thing.

Where the Money Goes The most poignant educational scandal of the moment concerns Cooper Union, the prestigious Manhattan art and architecture school which, from its founding in 1859 up till last year, offered an excellent education for free to everyone who was admitted. The way it did this was by carefully living on the limited funds generated by its endowment. Now that can no longer be sustained, and the school announced that it will begin charging students $20,000 for tuition next fall. The reason everything had to change is that Cooper Union, like . . . well, like every other institution of higher ed in America, decided a few years back that it needed to think big and embrace change and build the brand. The first step in that process: erecting a fantastically expensive bit of trophy architecture across the street from its main building. (There was also a growing corps of administrators, and a departing president who needed to be paid close to $1.1 million, but we won’t go into that now.) Unfortunately, Cooper Union couldn’t pay for this glamorous new tower, and so it had to borrow an enormous sum, like other corporations do. The “free education” thing was collateral damage. Better to be known for “vibrant” architecture, I guess, than for some old-fashioned nonsense about uplifting the non-wealthy. The story of Cooper Union is a typical an-

The “free education” thing was collateral damage. Better to be known for “vibrant” architecture, I guess, than for some old-fashioned nonsense about uplifting the non-wealthy.

9 ecdote of the age of collegiate capitalism, and it’s easy to come up with other examples of the lavish, unnecessary spending that characterizes American academia nowadays, that makes it “the best in the world.” It’s not just the showy new buildings, but the sports teams that give the alumni such a thrill, the fancy gymnasiums and elaborate food courts that everyone thinks you have to have if you want the cool kids to choose your diploma mill over all the others. It’s the celebrity professors everyone has decided they must furnish sinecures for regardless of whether those celebrities know anything about the subject they are hired to profess.* Above all, what the masters of academia spend the loot on is themselves. In saying this, I am not referring merely to the increasing number of university presidents who take home annual “compensation” north of a million dollars. That is a waste, of course, an outrageous bit of money-burning borrowed from Wall Street in an age when we ought to be doing the opposite of borrowing from Wall Street. But what has really fueled the student’s ever-growing indebtedness, as anyone with a connection to academia can tell you, is the insane proliferation of university administrators. Political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg tells the sorry tale in his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty. Back in the day, Ginsberg tells us, American universities were governed by professors, who would take time out from their academic careers to manage the institution’s business affairs. Today, however, the business

side of the university has been captured by a class of professionals who have nothing to do with the pedagogical enterprise itself. Administrators: Their salaries are generous, their ranks expand year after year, and their work requires no peer review and not even much effort. As Ginsberg reminds us, most of them don’t teach courses, they don’t squabble like English professors at the MLA, and no one ever suggests replacing them with adjuncts or temps. As tuition balloons, it is administrators who prosper. In fact, their fortunes are an almost exact reverse image of the tuition-indebtedness of the young. According to Ginsberg, “administrators and staffers actually outnumber full-time faculty members” nowadays, even though it’s the faculty members who do the real work of education that we believe is so goddamned important. The numbers are startling. While the ranks of full-time professors have grown at about the rate of university enrollment generally since 1975—which is to say, about 50 percent—administrations have expanded at an amazing pace. Administrators proper are up 85 percent, Ginsberg reports, while the number of “other professionals” employed by universities has grown 240 percent. Their share of university budgets has grown by similar margins. Naturally, an ugly new class conflict has begun to play out amidst the leafy groves. Administrators, it seems, have understood that the fortunes of their cohort are directly opposed to those of the faculty. One group’s well-being comes at the expense of the other,

* Example: Chelsea Clinton, who was hired by NYU as an assistant vice provost and then made cochair of a new campus institute, even though she has not yet finished her doctorate.

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The grotesque top-heaviness of the American corporation is an old story: we have more supervisors per worker than any other industrialized nation, and we have developed an extensive literature of bogus social theory assuring those supervisors of the rightfulness of their place in the world.

9 and vice versa. And so, according to Ginsberg, the administrators work constantly to expand their own numbers, to replace professors with adjuncts, to subject professors to petty humiliations, to interfere in faculty hiring, to distill the professors’ expertise down to something that can be measured by a standardized test. It is not until you read Ginsberg’s description of the day-to-day activities of administrators that the light bulb goes on, however. The particular pedagogy that motivates this class of university creatures is . . . management theory. They talk endlessly about “process management” and “excellence.” They set up “culture teams.” They attend retreats where they play team-building games. And whole divisions of them are dedicated to writing “strategic plans” for their universities, which take years to finish and are forgotten immediately upon completion. Last year’s attempted coup at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, gave us a glimpse of how this conflict can play out. The university’s president, a sociologist, is a traditional academic; the university’s Board of Visitors is dominated by wealthy figures from finance and real estate who wanted (of course) to dump the classics department and who thought the university needed to get with the online thing toot sweet because David Brooks had said it was a good idea in his New York Times column. When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the

putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit. When the coup took place, there was at first no explanation given at all. Then there appeared a leaked email from a super-wealthy trustee of the business school—Mr. Jefferson’s university suffered from a troubling paucity of “strategic dynamism,” he moaned. Oh, but that would change now that the plutes were in charge: “There will also be a strategic planning initiative commenced by the Board of Visitors with a focus on strategic dynamism.” Billionaire alumnus Paul Tudor Jones II soon chimed in with a newspaper op-ed informing Virginians that Jefferson himself would have welcomed the coup because he was a “change agent.” Reading these preposterous declarations at the time, I was convinced there had to be some deeper motive, that no one really talked this way. Since then, however, we’ve learned that these people meant this stuff. Read the board members’ emails back and forth to one another* and you start to realize that the poor president was the casualty of a long-running argument the University brass had been having among themselves about . . . “the rate of change.” That the people who hold the ultimate authority at our institutions of higher learning are dedicated to a notorious form of pseudoknowledge is richly ironic, and it is also telling. The point of management theory, after all, is to establish the legitimacy of a social order and a social class who are, in fact, little more than

* T hey were obtained with a FOIA by the student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily.

30 1 The Baffler [no.23]

drones. The grotesque top-heaviness of the American corporation is an old story: we have more supervisors per worker than any other industrialized nation, and quite naturally we have developed an extensive literature of bogus social theory assuring those supervisors of the rightfulness of their place in the world—a literature that also counsels everyone else to acquiesce to their subordinate station in the Great Chain of Free-Market Being. And it’s that “everyone else” you start to wonder about when you see copies of Who Moved My Cheese? in the hands of university administrators—the ones who must learn to accept the precariousness of their economic lives. Who might those people be, in the context of higher learning?

Professors, Of Course The de-professionalization of the faculty is another long-running tragedy that gets a little

sadder every year, as teaching college students steadily becomes an occupation for people with no tenure, no benefits, and no job security. These lumpen-profs, who have spent many years earning advanced degrees but sometimes make less than minimum wage, now account for more than three-quarters of the teaching that is done at our insanely expensive, oh-so-excellent American universities. Their numbers increase constantly as universities continue to produce far more PhDs than they do full-time, tenure-track job openings, and every time cutbacks are necessary—which is to say, all the time—it is those same full-time, tenure-track job openings that get pruned. What can I add to this dreadful tale? That it continues to get worse, twenty years after it began? Is there anything new to be said about the humiliation that the lumpen-profs suffer at the hands of their so-called colleagues? Can I shock anyone by describing the shabby, des-

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be perate lives they lead as they chase their own university dream? Will it do any good to remind readers how the tenured English dons of thirty years ago helped to set the forces of destruction in motion simply because producing more PhDs meant a lighter workload for themselves? No. What matters now is that the deed has been done. We have all seen how it went down and which disciplines have fared the worst—as it happens, the very disciplines that, back in the 1980s, housed the most fashionable, the most respected, the most theoretically advanced, the most aggressive, the most intimidating people on campus. Their heirs—their own students—have been transformed into minimum-wage flunkies. They were once the consummate academic players, and look at them now. What their downfall shows us is just how easily systems of this kind can be made to crumble. There is zero solidarity in a meritocracy, even a fake one, as the anthropologist Sarah Kendzior demonstrates in a recent series of hard-hitting articles on the adjunct situation. Just about everyone in academia believes that they were the smartest kid in their class, the one with the good grades and the awesome test scores. They believe, by definition, that they are where they are because they deserve it. They’re the best. So tenured faculty find it easy to dismiss the de-professionalization of their field as the whining of second-raters who can’t make the grade. Too many of the adjuncts themselves, meanwhile, find it difficult to blame the system as they apply fruitlessly for another tenure-track position or race across town to their second or third teaching job—maybe they just don’t have what it takes after all. Then again, they will all be together, assuredly, as they sink finally into the briny deep.

We Have Only Words Against The system can’t go on this way. It is too ob32 1 The Baffler [no.23]

viously a rip-off on too many levels, with too many victims. One of these days a breaking point will come, just as it did with Enron and the dot-coms and the housing bubble, and all the fine words spoken by our thought leaders will once again be recalled to make them look like imbeciles. The means by which cosmic justice will make itself felt is not clear just yet: free online courses, maybe, or a national tuition strike, or the debt-driven failure of a prestigious U or two, or maybe a right-wing backlash that finally figures out how the university’s economic logic corrodes its social liberalism. It’s easy to understand what ought to be done about the higher-ed situation; there is a huge literature on this subject. The scandal has been understood, to varying degrees, for decades. Every example I have used here, every argument I have made, has been made or used by someone else already; after all, the people who have seen this go down are people who can write. The country was up in arms about tuition inflation in the late 1980s. Bill Readings published his depressing prediction, The University in Ruins, back in 1996. The Wall Street Journal ran a shocking page-one story on enrollment management that same year. The proletarianization of the PhD has been a subject of countless exposés since the days of a teaching-assistant strike at Yale in the mid-nineties; I own two books of essays on the subject; no doubt there are a dozen more. Chris Newfield’s account of managerialism and higher ed appeared in 2003, and Jennifer Washburn’s University Inc. in 2005. Stanley Aronowitz predicted the slow demise of the professoriate in 1997, and Frank Donoghue told us exactly how the end was coming in The Last Professors, published in 2008. What ought to happen is that everything I’ve described so far should be put in reverse. College should become free or very cheap. It should be heavily subsidized by the states, and robust competition from excellent state U’s

Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed higher ed for their own benefit.

9 should in turn bring down the price of college across the board. Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up. Accrediting agencies should come down like a hammer on universities that use too many adjuncts and part-time teachers. Student loan debt should be universally refinanced to carry little or no interest and should be dischargeable in bankruptcy, like any other form of debt. But repeating this feels a little like repeating that it will be bad if newspapers go out of business en masse. Of course it will. Everyone who can think knows this. But knowing it and saying it add up to very little. Despite the academy’s noisy radicalism, its endangered meritocracy simply cannot summon the will to reverse the market tide. Despite the extreme prominence of the highly educated—the only members of President Obama’s first-term cabinet to have no advanced degrees were the secretaries of transportation and education—virtually no one in politics has proposed taking the obvious steps that are needed to solve the problem. What actually will happen to higher ed, when the breaking point comes, will be an extension of what has already happened, what money wants to see happen. Another marketdriven disaster will be understood as a disaster of socialism, requiring an ever deeper penetration of the university by market rationality. Trustees and presidents will redouble their efforts to achieve some ineffable “excellence” they associate with tech and architecture and corporate sponsorships. There will be more standardized tests, and more desperate testprep. The curriculum will be brought into a tighter orbit around the needs of business, just

like Thomas Friedman wants it to be. Professors will continue to plummet in status and power, replaced by adjuncts in more and more situations. An all-celebrity system, made possible by online courses or some other scheme, will finally bring about a mass faculty extinction—a cataclysm that will miraculously spare university administrations. And a quality education in the humanities will once again become a rich kid’s prerogative. And so we end with dystopia, with a race to the free-market bottom. What makes it a tragedy is that President Obama is right about education’s importance. Not because college augments our future earning power, or helps us compete with Bangladesh, but because the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right. This is why every democratic movement from the Civil War to the 1960s aimed to bring higher ed to an ever widening circle, to make it more affordable. Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed it for their own benefit. The only way out is for students themselves to interrupt the cycle. Maybe we should demand the nationalization of a few struggling universities, putting them on the opposite of a market-based footing, just as public ownership reformed the utilities in the last century. Maybe the college-aged should forgo the annual rituals and turn their eyes to German or Argentinian universities, in the same way that their grandparents use Canadian pharmaceuticals to hitchhike on a welfare state that hasn’t yet been completely compromised. Maybe it’s time for another Free Speech Movement, a nationwide student strike for tuition reform and debt relief. Whatever we do, it’s time to wake up from the dream. t The

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be

Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not 3 Susan Faludi

he congregation swooned as she bounded on stage, the prophet sealskin sleek in her black skinny ankle pants and black ballet flats, a lavalier microphone clipped to the V-neck of her black button-down sweater. “All right!! Let’s go!!” she exclaimed, throwing out her arms and pacing the platform before inspirational graphics of glossy young businesswomen in managerial action poses. “Super excited to have all of you here!!” “Whoo!!” the young women in the audience replied. The camera, which was livestreaming the event in the Menlo Park, California, auditorium to college campuses worldwide, panned the rows of well-heeled Stanford University econ majors and MBA candidates. Some clutched copies of the day’s hymnal: the speaker’s new book, which promised to dismantle “internal obstacles” preventing them from “acquiring power.” The atmosphere was TED-Talk-cum-tent-revival-cum-Mary-Kaycosmetics-convention. The salvation these adherents sought on this April day in 2013 was admittance to the pearly gates of the corporate corner office. “Stand up,” the prophet instructed, “if you’ve ever said out loud, to another human being—and you have to have said it out loud— ‘I am going to be the number one person in my field. I will be the CEO of a major company. I will be governor. I will be the number one person in my field.’” A small, although not inconsiderable, percentage of the young women rose to their feet. The speaker consoled those still seated; she, too, had once been one of them. When she was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, she confided, she had begged a year34 1 The Baffler [no.23]

book editor to delete that information, “because most likely to succeed doesn’t get a date for the prom.” Those days were long gone, ever since she’d had her conversion on the road to Davos: she’d “leaned in” to her ambitions and enhanced her “likability”—and they could do the same. What’s more, if they took the “lean in” pledge, they might free themselves from some of those other pesky problems that hold women back in the workplace. “If you lean forward,” she said, “you will get yourself into a position where the organization you’re with values you a lot and is therefore willing to be more flexible. Or you’ll get promoted and then you’ll get paid more and you’ll be able to afford better child care.” If you “believe you have the skills to do anything” and “have the ambition to lead,” then you will “change the world” for women. “We get closer to the goal of true equality with every single one of you who leans in.” The pitch delivered, Lean In founder and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg summoned her deacon to close the deal. Rachel Thomas hustled onstage, a Sandberg Mini-Me in matching black ensemble (distinguished only by the color of her ballet flats and baubled necklace, both of which were gold). She’s Lean In’s president. (Before Lean In hit the bookstores, it was already a fully staffed operation, an organization purporting to be “a global community committed to encouraging and supporting women leaning in to their ambitions.”) “I really want to invite you to join our community!” Thomas told the assembled. “You’ll get daily inspiration and insights.” Joining “the community” was just a click

E L E A N O R DAV I S

There is no entry into Lean Inâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Emerald e-Kingdom except through the Facebook portal; Sandberg has kept her message of liberation confined within her own corporate brand.

9 The

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be away. In fact, the community was already uploaded and ready to receive them; all they had to do was hit the “Lean In Today” button on their computer screen . . . and, oh yeah, join Facebook. (There is no entry into Lean In’s Emerald e-Kingdom except through the Facebook portal; Sandberg has kept her message of liberation confined within her own corporate brand.) Thomas enumerated the “three things” that Lean In offered. (In the Lean In Community, there are invariably three things required to achieve your aims.) First, Thomas instructed, “Come like us on Facebook” (and, for extra credit, post your own inspirational graphic on Lean In’s Facebook “photo gallery” and “tag your friends, tell them why you’re leaning in!”). Second, watch Lean In’s online “education” videos, twenty-minute lectures from “experts” (business school professors, management consultants, and a public speaking coach) with titles like “Power and Influence” and “Own the Room.” Third, create a “Lean In Circle” with eight to ten similarly aspirational young women. The circles, Lean In literature stresses, are to promote “peer mentorship” only—not to deliver aid and counsel from experienced female elders who might actually help them advance. Thomas characterized the circle as “a book club with a purpose.” All they had to do was click on the “Create a Circle” button on LeanIn.org and follow the “three easy steps.” “We provide everything that you need to do it,” Thomas assured. “All the materials, all the how-to information, and a very cool technology platform called Mightybell.” Mightybell’s CEO, it so happens, is Gina Bianchini, cofounder of Lean In. “So it’s really easy to do, and don’t wait!” Thomas said. “Go do it for yourself today!” Since its unveiling this spring, the Lean In campaign has been reeling in a steadily expanding group of tens of thousands of followers with its tripartite E-Z plan for getting to the top. But the real foundation of the move36 1 The Baffler [no.23]

ment is, of course, Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, billed modestly by its author as “sort of a feminist manifesto.” Sandberg’s mantra has become the feminist rallying cry of the moment, praised by notable figures such as Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Marlo Thomas, and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. A Time magazine cover story hails Sandberg for “embarking on the most ambitious mission to reboot feminism and reframe discussions of gender since the launch of Ms. magazine in 1971.” Pretty good for somebody who, “as of two and a half years ago,” as Sandberg confessed on her book tour, “had never said the word woman aloud. Because that’s not how you get ahead in the world.” The lovefest continues on LeanIn.org’s “Meet the Community” page, where tribute is paid by Sandberg’s high-powered network of celebrities, corporate executives, and media moguls (many media moguls), among them Oprah Winfrey, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, Newsweek and Daily Beast editor in chief Tina Brown, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, Cosmopolitan editor in chief Joanna Coles, former Good Morning America coanchor Willow Bay, former first lady Laura Bush (and both of her daughters), former California first lady and TV host Maria Shriver, U.S. senators Barbara Boxer and Elizabeth Warren, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, Dun & Bradstreet CEO Sara Mathew, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, CocaCola marketing executive Wendy Clark, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, supermodel Tyra Banks, and actor (and Avon “Global Ambassador”) Reese Witherspoon. Beneath highly manicured glam shots, each “member” or “partner” reveals her personal “Lean In moment.” The accounts inevitably have happy finales—the Lean In guidelines instruct contributors to “share a positive ending.” Tina Brown’s Lean In moment: getting her parents to move from England to

The comments read like a Sandbergian amen corner: “Congratulations Sheryl! You diserve [sic] it! ♥ ”; “sheryl is inspirational! I missed zumba for this and happy I did!”

9 “the apartment across the corridor from us on East 57th Street in New York,” so her mother could take care of the children while Brown took the helm at The New Yorker. If you were waiting for someone to lean in for child care legislation, keep holding your breath. So far, there’s no discernible groundswell. When asked why she isn’t pushing for structural social and economic change, Sandberg says she’s all in favor of “public policy reform,” though she’s vague about how exactly that would work, beyond generic tsk-tsking about the pay gap and lack of maternity leave. She says she supports reforming the workplace— but the particulars of comparable worth or subsidized child care are hardly prominent elements of her book or her many media appearances. Sandberg began her TED Talk in December 2010, the trial balloon for the Lean In campaign, with a one-sentence nod to “flex time,” training, and other “programs” that might advance working women, and then declared, “I want to talk about none of that today.” What she wanted to talk about, she said, was “what we can do as individuals” to climb to the top of the command chain. This clipped, jarring shift from the collective grievances of working women to the feel-good options open to credentialed, professional types is also a pronounced theme in Lean In, the book. In the opening pages, Sandberg acknowledges that “the vast majority of women are struggling to make ends meet,” but goes on to stress that “each subsequent chapter focuses on an adjustment or difference that we can make ourselves.” When asked in a radio interview in Boston about the external barri-

ers women face, Sandberg agreed that women are held back “by discrimination and sexism and terrible public policy” and “we should reform all of that,” but then immediately suggested that the concentration on such reforms has been disproportionate, arguing that “the conversation can’t be only about that, and in a lot of ways the conversation on women is usually only about that.” Toward the end of the Q&A period at the Menlo Park event, a student watching online asked, “What would you say to the critics who argue that lower socioeconomic status makes it difficult to lean in?” Sandberg replied that leaning in might be even “more important for women who are struggling to make ends meet,” then offered this anecdote as evidence: She had received a fan email from a reader who “never graduated from college” and had gone back to work in 1998 after her husband lost his job. “Until she read Lean In, she had never asked for a raise. And last week, she asked for a raise.” Pause for the drum roll. “And she got it! That’s what this is about.” Lean In’s rank-and-file devotees don’t get the marquee billing accorded the celebrity and executive set on the handpicked “Meet the Community” page. Nevertheless, they seem eager to “join the community”: as of July 12, 2013, they “liked” Lean In 237,552 times. Their online participation on Lean In’s Facebook page is limited to making comments—in response to the organization’s announcements of the latest Lean In marketing triumphs. (“Very excited that Lean In is #1 on The New York Times Book Review - Six weeks in a row!”; “Very excited to see Sheryl Sandberg on the TIME 100 list of the most inThe

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For the last two centuries, feminism, like evangelicalism, has been in a dance with capitalism.

9 fluential people in the world!”; “We’re excited to watch Sheryl Sandberg Lean In with Oprah this weekend. Tune in to watch Oprah’s Next Chapter on Sunday, March 24 at 9 p.m. ET/ PT on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network!”) Evidently the “likers” are excited too: they cheer the media conquests of the LeanerIn-in-chief, whose success began at the top (thanks not to “peer mentoring” but to her powerful college adviser, former Harvard University president Larry Summers) and who has remained there ever since—a stratospheric hurtle from Harvard to the World Bank to the U.S. Treasury Department to Google to Facebook. The comments read like a Sandbergian amen corner: “Congratulations Sheryl! You diserve [sic] it! ♥”; “This is such an awesome book! It has really energized me with refocusing on my career goals.”; “am reading book on my kindle now, awesome so far!”; “Awesome talk!!!”; “God Bless! And lets [sic] continue to spread this message and lean in!”; “Sheryl is igniting the new feminine movement!”; “THANK YOU FOR LEADING THE REVOLUTION!!!!☺”; “sheryl is inspirational! I missed zumba for this and happy I did!” The scene at the Menlo Park auditorium, and its conflation of “believe in yourself” faith and material rewards, will be familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a Sunday inside a prosperity-gospel megachurch or watched Reverend Ike’s vintage “You Deserve the Best!” sermon on YouTube. But why is that same message now ascendant among the American feminists of the new millennium? Sandberg’s admirers would say that Lean In is using free-market beliefs to advance the cause of women’s equality. Her detractors would say (and have) that her organization is using the desire for women’s equality to ad38 1 The Baffler [no.23]

vance the cause of the free market. And they would both be right. In embodying that contradiction, Sheryl Sandberg would not be alone and isn’t so new. For the last two centuries, feminism, like evangelicalism, has been in a dance with capitalism.

All As One In 1834, America’s first industrial wage earners, the “mill girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, embarked on their own campaign for women’s advancement in the workplace. They didn’t “lean in,” though. When their male overseers in the nation’s first large-scale planned industrial city cut their already paltry wages by 15 to 20 percent, the textile workers declared a “turn-out,” one of the nation’s earliest industrial strikes. That first effort failed, but its participants did not concede defeat. The Lowell women would stage another turn-out two years later, create the first union of working women in American history, lead a fight for the ten-hour work day, and conceive of an increasingly radical vision that took aim both at corporate power and the patriarchal oppression of women. Their bruising early encounter with American industry fueled a nascent feminist outlook that would ultimately find full expression in the first wave of the American women’s movement. Capitalism, you could say, had midwifed feminism. And capitalism, Sandberg would say, still sustains it. But what happened between 1834 and 2013—between “turn-out” and “lean in”— to make Lean In such an odd heir to the laurels of Lowell? An answer lies in the history of those early textile mills. The Lowell factory owners had recruited “respectable” Yankee farmers’ daughters from

the New England countryside, figuring that respectable would translate into docile. They figured wrong. The forces of industrialization had propelled young women out of the home, breaking the fetters binding them to the patriarchal family, unleashing the women into urban areas with few social controls, and permitting them to begin thinking of themselves as public citizens. The combination of newly gained independence and increasingly penurious, exploitative conditions proved combustible—and the factory owners’ reduction in pay turned out to be the match that lit the tinder. Soon after they heard the news, the “mill girls”—proclaiming that they “remain in possession of our unquestionable rights”—shut down their looms and walked out. From the start, the female textile workers made the connection between labor and women’s rights. Historian Thomas Dublin, in his book on the Lowell mill girls, Women at Work, cited an account in the Boston Evening Transcript. “One of the leaders mounted a pump,” the article reported, “and made a flaming Mary Woolstonecroft [sic] speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘monied aristocracy.’” The speech “produced a powerful effect on her auditors, and they determined ‘to have their own way if they died for it.’” In a statement the mill workers issued on the first day of the turn-out, titled “Union is Power,” they elaborated: The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us, and to gain their object, they gravely tell us of the pressure of the times, this we are already sensible of, and deplore it. If any are in want, the Ladies will be compassionate and assist them; but we prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands; and as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.

The mill proprietors looked on with unease at what they regarded as an “amizonian [sic] dis-

play” and “a spirit of evil omen.” The Lowell turn-out was a communal endeavor, built on intense bonds of sisterhood forged around the clock: by day on the factory floor, where the women worked in pairs, with the more experienced female worker training and looking out for the newcomer, and by night in the company boarding houses, where they shared cramped quarters, often two to a bed, and embroiled themselves in late-night discussions about philosophy, music, literature, and, increasingly, social and economic injustice. As Dublin observed of the web of “mutual dependence” that prevailed in the Lowell mill workforce, the strike was “made possible because women had come to form a ‘community’ of operatives in the mill, rather than simply a group of individual workers.” An actual community, that is—not an online like-a-thon. Tellingly, the strike began when a mill agent, hoping to nip agitation in the bud, fired one of the more voluble factory workers whom he regarded as the ringleader. The other women immediately walked out in protest over her expulsion. The petition they signed and circulated concluded: “Resolved, That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.” In a matter of years, the Lowell women would become increasingly radical, as crusaders for both worker and gender equality. They had originally been encouraged to write ladylike stories for the mill girls’ literary magazine, the Lowell Offering, which was launched by a local minister and supported by the textile companies. By the 1840s, many young working women were filing copy instead with the Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper published by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. The paper’s “Female Department,” edited by the association’s president, Sarah Bagley, featured articles by and about women workers, with a declared mission both to revamp “the system of labor” and “defend woman’s rights.” “You have been degraded The

Baffler [no.23] ! 39

Ca r n i va l of Buncom be long enough,” an article in the Voice advised its female readers. “You have sufficiently long been considered ‘the inferior’—a kind of ‘upper servant,’ to obey and reverence, and be in subjection to your equal.” No more. “Enter at once upon your privileges,” the article exhorted, calling on women to demand their equal rights to education, employment, and respect from men. The mill workers went on to agitate against an unjust system in all its forms. When Lowell’s state representative thwarted the women’s statewide battle for the ten-hour day, they mobilized and succeeded in having him voted out of office—nearly eighty years before women had the vote. Mill women in Lowell and, in the decades to come, their counterparts throughout New England threw themselves into the abolitionist movement (drawing connections between the cotton picked by slaves and the fabric they wove in the mills); campaigned for better health care, safer schools, decent housing, and cleaner water and streets; and joined the fight for women’s suffrage. Sarah Bagley went on to work for prison reform, women’s rights, and education and decent jobs for poor women and prostitutes. After a stint as the first female telegrapher in the nation (where she pointed out that she was being paid two-thirds of a male telegrapher’s salary), she taught herself homeopathic medicine and became a doctor, billing her patients according to her personal proviso, “To the rich, one dollar—to the poor gratis.” Increasingly, the mill girls were joined in these efforts by their middle-class sisters. Cross-class female solidarity surfaced early in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after the horrific building collapse of the Pemberton Mills factory in 1860, which killed 145 workers, most of them women and children. (The mills in Lawrence would later give rise to the famously militant “Bread and Roses” strike of 1912, in which female workers again played a leading role.) In the aftermath of the Pemberton disas40 1 The Baffler [no.23]

ter, middle-class women in the region flocked to provide emergency relief and, radicalized by what they witnessed, went on to establish day nurseries, medical clinics and hospitals, and cooperative housing to serve the needs of working women. By the postbellum years, with industrialization at full tide and economic polarization at record levels, a critical mass of middle-class female reformers had come to believe that the key to women’s elevation was not, as they once thought, “moral uplift,” but economic independence—and that cross-class struggle on behalf of female workers was the key to achieving it. A host of organizations launched by professional women, like Sorosis and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), sprang up to campaign for the economic advancement of both middle- and working-class women. “From its first days,” historian Mari Jo Buhle observed in Women and American Socialism, “Sorosis encompassed broader purposes than aid to a handful of aspiring women professionals. All workingwomen, the leaders believed, shared a common grievance and a common need for organization.” The WEIU in Boston, like Lean In, held lectures to promote women in business—but it also sent investigative teams to expose poor conditions for women on the factory and retail floor, procured legal services for working women denied their rightful wages, offered job referral services for women of all classes, and set up cooperative exchanges for homebound women to sell their handcrafts so that even they might achieve some measure of fiscal independence from their husbands. In Chicago, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance launched a full-bore probe of abusive sweatshops that spawned a congressional investigation, successfully lobbied for a shorter workday for sweatshop workers, and even demanded legal rights for prostitutes, including the right to be free of police harassment. From the sounds of recent pronounce-

What happened between 1834 and 2013—between “turn-out” and “lean in”—to make Lean In such an odd heir to the laurels of Lowell?

9 ments, it might seem that efforts to elevate the woman worker have finally paid off. With giddy triumphalism, books like Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women and Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family (both published in 2012) celebrate the imminent emergence of a female supremacy. “For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men,” Rosin declared, noting that twelve of the fifteen jobs projected to grow the fastest in the United States in the next decade “are occupied primarily by women.” The female worker, she wrote, is “becoming the standard by which success is measured.” Mundy, who called this supremacy the “Big Flip,” predicted that, thanks to the new economy, we would soon be living in a world “where women routinely support households and outearn the men they are married to,” and men “will gladly hitch their wagon to a female star.” A star like Sheryl Sandberg, whose feminism seems a capstone of female ascendancy. Never mind that the “fastest-growing” future occupations for women—home health aide, child care worker, customer service representative, office clerk, food service worker—are among the lowest paid, most with few to no benefits and little possibility for “advancement.” Progress has stalled for many ordinary women—or gone into reverse. The poverty rate for women, according to the Census Bureau’s latest statistics, is at its highest point since 1993, and the “extreme poverty rate” among women is at the highest point ever recorded. But there seems to be little tangible crossclass solidarity coming from the triumphalists, despite their claims to be speaking for

all womankind. “If we can succeed in adding more female voices at the highest levels,” Sandberg writes in her book, “we will expand opportunities and extend fairer treatment to all.” But which highest-level voices? When former British prime minister Margaret (“I hate feminism”) Thatcher died, Lean In’s Facebook page paid homage to the Iron Lady and invited its followers to post “which moments were most memorable to you” from Thatcher’s tenure. That invitation inspired a rare outburst of un-“positive” remarks in the comment section, at least from some women in the U.K. “Really??” wrote one. “She was a tyrant. . . . Just because a woman is in a leadership position does not make her worthy of respect, especially if you were on the receiving end of what she did to lots of people.” “So disappointing that Lean In endorses Thatcher as a positive female role model,” wrote another. “She made history as a woman, but went on to use her power to work against the most vulnerable, including women and their children.” Even when celebrating more laudable examples of female leadership, Lean In’s spotlight rarely roves beyond the uppermost echelon. One looks in vain through its website statements, literature, and declarations at its public events for evidence of concern about how the other half lives—or rather, the other 99 percent. As Linda Burnham observed in a perceptive essay on Portside.org, Lean In “has essentially produced a manifesto for corporatist feminism,” a “1% feminism” that “is all about the glass ceiling, never about the floor.” The movement originally forged to move the great mass of women has been hijacked to serve the individual (and privileged) girl. As it turns out, it’s a hijacking that’s long been under way. The

Baffler [no.23] ! 41

When former prime minister Margaret (“I hate feminism”) Thatcher died, Lean In’s Facebook page paid homage to the Iron Lady. Dream On

The landmark year in the transition from common struggle to individual enhancement was 1920—ironically, the same year that women won the right to vote. In the course of the twenties, an ascendant consumer economy would do as much to derail feminist objectives as advance them. Capitalism, feminism’s old midwife, had become its executioner. And a cleverly disguised one: this grim reaper donned a feminist-friendly face. The rising new forces of consumer manipulation—mass media, mass entertainment, national advertising, the fashion and beauty industries, popular psychology—all seized upon women’s yearnings for independence and equality and redirected them to the marketplace. Over and over, mass merchandisers promised women an ersatz version of emancipation, the fulfillment of individual, and aspirational, desire. Why mount a collective protest against the exploitations of the workplace when it was so much more gratifying—not to mention easier—to advance yourself (and only yourself) by shopping for “liberating” products that expressed your “individuality” and signaled your (seemingly) elevated class status? The message was ubiquitous in 1920s advertising pitched to women. “An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed,” decreed a Lucky Strike banner, above a picture of an unfettered flapper girl wreathed in cigarette smoke. Enjoy “positive agitation” at home, Hoover vacuum ads entreated, with the new machine’s “revolutionary cleaning principle.” “Woman suffrage made the American woman the political equal of her man,” General Electric cheered. “The little switch which commands the great servant Electricity is making her workshop the equal of her man’s.” That “workshop,” of 42 1 The Baffler [no.23]

course, was the domestic bower, to which privileged women were now expected to retire. In 1929, at the behest of the American Tobacco Company, Edward Bernays, the founding father of public relations, organized a procession of debutantes to troop down Fifth Avenue during the Easter Parade, asserting their “right” to smoke in public by puffing “torches of freedom.” Women’s quest for social and economic freedom had been reenacted as farce. Where industrial capitalism had driven women as a group to mobilize to change society, its consumer variant induced individual women to submit, each seemingly of her own free will, to a mass-produced culture. They were then encouraged to call that submission liberation. This is the mode that much of American feminism has been stuck in ever since, despite attempts by late-1960s radical feminists to dismantle the female consumer armament of cosmetics, girdles, and hair spray. (The dismantling became quite literal in the 1968 demonstration against the Miss America Pageant, where young radicals hurled “instruments of female torture” into a “Freedom Trash Can.”) In the postindustrial economy, feminism has been retooled as a vehicle for expression of the self, a “self” as marketable consumer object, valued by how many times it’s been bought—or, in our electronic age, how many times it’s been clicked on. “Images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate,” British philosopher Nina Power observed of contemporary fauxfeminism in her 2009 book, One-Dimensional Woman. “The city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine—and would have us believe that—yes—capitalism is a girl’s best friend.”

In the 1920s, male capitalists invoked feminism to advance their brands of corporate products. Nearly a century later, female marketers are invoking capitalism to advance their corporate brand of feminism. Sandberg’s “Lean In Community” is Exhibit A. What is she selling, after all, if not the product of the company she works for? Every time a woman signs up for Lean In, she’s made another conquest for Facebook. Facebook conquers women in more than one way. Nearly 60 percent of the people who do the daily labor on Facebook—maintaining their pages, posting their images, tagging their friends, driving the traffic—are female, and, unlike the old days of industrial textile manufacturing, they don’t even have to be paid or housed. “Facebook benefits every time a woman uploads her picture,” Kate Losse, a former employee of Facebook and author of The Boy Kings, a keenly observed memoir of her time there, pointed out to me. “And what is she getting? Nothing, except a constant flow of ‘likes.’” When Losse came to Facebook in 2005, she was only the second woman hired in a company that then had fifty employees. Her

job was to answer user-support emails. Lowwage customer support work would soon become Facebook’s pink ghetto. Losse recalled the decor that adorned the company walls in those years: drawings of “stylized women with large breasts bursting from small tops.” On Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday, the women at the company were instructed to wear T-shirts displaying his photo, like groupies. “It was like Mad Men,” she wrote of the office environment in Boy Kings, “but real and happening in the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress.” A few years into her tenure, Losse was promoted to oversee the translation of Facebook’s site into other languages. The promotion didn’t come with an increase in pay. When Losse, like the woman in Sandberg’s anecdote, asked for a raise, she was refused. “You’ve already doubled your salary in a year,” her manager told her, “and it wouldn’t be fair to the engineers who haven’t had that raise”—the engineers (virtually all male) who were already at the top of the pay scale, unlike her. Her final job at Facebook was to serve as Mark Zuckerberg’s personal “writer and researcher.” The job, or rather “the

P. S . M U E L L ER

The

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be role,” as Zuckerberg called it, required her to write “his” blog entries on Facebook and post “his” updates to the Zuckerberg fan page. Losse quit in 2010 to become a writer—of her own words, not her boss’s. Earlier this year, she wrote a thought-provoking piece about Lean In for Dissent, “Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning In?” The winners, she noted, are not the women in tech, who “are much more likely to be hired in support functions where they are paid a bare minimum, given tiny equity grants compared to engineers and executives, and given raises on the order of fifty cents an hour rather than thousands of dollars.” These are the fast-growth jobs for women in high technology, just as Menlo Park’s postindustrial campuses are the modern equivalent of the Lowell company town. Sandberg’s book proposed to remedy that system, Losse noted, not by changing it but simply by telling women to work harder: Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands.

For her candor, Losse came under instant attack from the Sandberg sisterhood. Brandee Barker, a Lean In publicist and former head of public relations for Facebook, sent Losse the following message: “There’s a special place in hell for you.” Losse defended herself the only way you can in the age of social media: she took a screenshot of Barker’s nastygram and tweeted it. “Maybe sending Hellfire and Damnation messages is part of the Lean In PR strategy,” Losse wrote in her tweet. “LEAN IN OR ELSE YOU’RE GOING TO HELL.” Other Lean In naysayers have been similarly damned by Lean In devotees. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a measured critique of Lean In, Sandberg’s fans 44 1 The Baffler [no.23]

promptly and widely denounced her. Losse said she’s not surprised by the fire-and-brimstone ferocity of the response. “There’s this cult-like religiosity to Facebook and Lean In,” she told me. “If you’re ‘in,’ you belong—and if you’re not, you’re going to hell.” That Lean In is making its demands of individual women, not the corporate workplace, is evident in the ease with which it has signed up more than two hundred corporate and organization “partners” to support its campaign. The roster includes some of the biggest American corporations: Chevron, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Comcast, Bank of America and Citibank, Coca-Cola and Pepsico, AT&T and Verizon, Ford and GM, Pfizer and Merck & Co., Costco and Wal-Mart, and, of course, Google and Facebook. Never before have so many corporations joined a revolution. Virtually nothing is required of them— not even a financial contribution. “There are no costs associated with partnering with Lean In,” the organization’s manual assures. “We just ask that you publicly support our mission and actively promote our Community to your employees.” All the companies have to do is post their logo on Lean In’s “Platform Partners” page, along with a quote from one of their executives professing the company’s commitment to advancing women. The testimonials are predictably platitudinous: • Ed Gilligan, American Express president: “At American Express, we believe having more women in senior leadership is critical to fostering an environment that embraces diverse opinions and empowers all employees to reach their full potential. It’s this spirit of inclusiveness that helps us make better decisions today to drive our growth for tomorrow.” • Paul Bulcke, Nestlé CEO: “At Nestlé we are committed to enhancing the career opportunities for both men and women, and the knowledge and expertise provided by Lean In will help accelerate our journey.”

Never before have so many corporations joined a revolution. Virtually nothing is required of them—not even a financial contribution.

9 • Jeff Wilke, Amazon senior vice president, consumer business: “At Amazon, we lean in to challenge ourselves to develop as leaders by building things that matter. We solve problems in new ways and value calculated risk-taking; many decisions are reversible. Bold directions that inspire results help us to think differently and look around corners for ways to serve our customers.”

That last statement manages to endorse Lean In without even bothering to mention women. Many of the high-level executives dispensing quotations are male—and a notable number of the female executives are in “communications,” “human resources,” or “diversity” posts. And funny—or not—how often professed “commitment” to women’s advancement fails to bear up under inspection. Run some Platform Partner names through databases that track legal cases, and you will find a bumper crop of recent or pending EEOC grievances and state and federal court actions involving sex discrimination, sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, unfair promotion policies, wrongful terminations, and gender-based retaliations against female employees. Here are just a few: • Lean In Platform Partner Citibank: In 2010, six current and former female employees sued Citibank’s parent company, Citigroup, for discriminating against women at all levels, paying them less, overlooking them for promotions, and firing them first in companywide layoffs. Their federal court complaint held that the company “turns a blind eye” to widespread discrimination against women and detailed the paltry numbers of women in upper management in every division—with

the proportion of female managing directors in some divisions as low as 9 percent. All nineteen members of the bank’s executive committee are male. “The outdated ‘boys club,”’ the complaint concluded, “is alive and well at Citigroup.” • Lean In Platform Partner Booz Allen Hamilton: In 2011, Molly Finn, a former partner at the firm who had been fired after serving as its highest-ranking female employee and a star performer, sued for sex discrimination. She charged the company with creating an unwelcome environment for women and intentionally barring them from top leadership posts. During a review for a promotion (which she was subsequently denied), she was told to stop saying “pro-woman, feminist things,” she recalled. Soon after Finn’s suit, a second longtime partner and leading moneymaker, Margo Fitzpatrick, sued the company for sex discrimination and retaliatory termination. In court papers, she charged that the firm has “maintained a ‘glass ceiling’ that intentionally excludes highly-qualified women.” The complaint went on to note, “Currently, The Firm has no female partners in the pipeline for Senior Partner.” With the termination of Fitzpatrick and Finn, “the number of females in the partnership has dwindled to 21—or only 18%.” • Lean In Platform Partner Wells Fargo: In 2011, the bank reached a class-action settlement with 1,200 female financial advisers for $32 million. The sex discrimination suit charged that the bank’s brokerage business, Wells Fargo Advisors (originally Wachovia Securities), discriminated against women in compensation and signing bonuses, denied The

Baffler [no.23] ! 45

Funny—or not—how often professed “commitment” to women’s advancement fails to bear up under inspection. Run some Lean In corporate partner names through databases that track legal cases, and you will find a bumper crop of recent or pending EEOC grievances.

9 them promotions, and cheated them out of account distributions, investment partnerships, and mentoring and marketing opportunities. • Goldman Sachs (whose philanthropic arm, the Goldman Sachs Foundation, is a Lean In Platform Partner): In 2010, former employees of Goldman Sachs filed a class-action suit against the company, accusing Wall Street’s most profitable investment bank of “systematic and pervasive discrimination” against female employees, subjecting them to hostile working conditions and treating them “like disposable, second-class citizens.” • Lean In Platform Partners Mondelez and Nestlé: In 2013, an Oxfam investigation in four countries where the two companies outsourced their cocoa farms found that the women working in the cocoa fields and processing plants that the companies relied on “suffer substantial discrimination and inequality.” When women at a cocoa processing factory demanded equal treatment and pay, the investigation noted, all of the female workers were fired. The same companies that “put women first in their advertisements,” Oxfam concluded, “are doing very little to address poor conditions faced by the women who grow cocoa.” • Lean In Platform Partner Costco: In 2012, a federal judge approved a huge class-action lawsuit that alleges Costco discriminated against about seven hundred women and denied them promotions. The company, the suit charged, maintains a “glass ceiling” that prevents women from advancing to assistant

46 1 The Baffler [no.23]

manager and general manager positions. Costco’s senior management, the complaint observed, is virtually all male, and less than 16 percent of general managers nationwide are women. Costco cofounder and longtime CEO Jim Sinegal (who retired in 2011), has argued that women don’t want warehouse management posts because “women have a tendency to be the caretakers and have the responsibility for the children and for the family.”

And then there’s Lean In Platform Partner Wal-Mart. In 2011, the world’s largest retailer famously managed to dodge one of the largest class-action sex-discrimination suits in U.S. history (involving 1.5 million women), after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on technical grounds that the case didn’t constitute a single class action. In preparation for a second round of individual and regional class-action proceedings, thousands of female employees have already refiled sex-discrimination grievances in forty-eight states. Here’s what Mike Duke, Wal-Mart CEO and president, had to say in his statement on Lean In’s Platform Partner page: “As we lean in to empower women, it helps us to better serve our customers, develop the best talent, and strengthen our communities.” And what about Facebook? When asked about women’s representation at the company during media appearances for her book tour, Sandberg was vague. “We’re ahead of the industry,” she told one interviewer, noting that a woman heads Facebook’s “global sales” and another is “running design,” before briskly changing the subject.

I contacted Facebook’s press office and submitted questions about the numbers and percentage of women in management, engineering, and so on. Ashley Zandy, media spokeswoman at Facebook, emailed me back, thanking me “for reaching out” and offering a “chat.” The chat was off the record and, in any case, provided no additional information on women’s representation at the company. Then she offered me an “off the record” conversation with Sandberg, which I declined: off the record meant I couldn’t repeat what Sandberg told me—and, considering Sandberg’s polish and power, I didn’t understand her reticence. Zandy said she’d try to get the figures I’d requested and arrange interviews, including ones with Sandberg and Facebook’s head of human resources. Two days later, she sent me a second email. “I appreciate you reaching out,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to arrange any of the interviews you requested.” Nor provide statistics. “Unfortunately, we don’t share much of the detailed and quantitative data you have asked for.” She was able to tell me the following:

interview”: “Statement: Facebook supports the message of Lean In—that women should pursue their goals with gusto, no matter what they may be. We work hard to create a work environment that supports women and gives them the opportunities to have impact and lead. Our management and employees are incredibly passionate about not just recruiting and retaining women, but developing the right leadership, policies and support to create a culture and workplace where they can thrive.”

I wrote back to say I appreciated the information and still wished to talk to Sandberg. “Though some of my questions are skeptical,” I said, “I hoped that they might open an actual and meaningful dialogue on a subject both she and I care about.” I presented four questions for Sandberg. Here are the first two: 1. A number of Lean In’s corporate Plat-

• The names of Facebook’s top executives (which the company, by law, has to disclose in its annual report). Except for Sandberg, they were all male. • Names of “female leaders in operational roles.” Of the nine, only one was on the engineering side of the aisle; the others were mostly in traditionally “female” roles like communications, consumer marketing, and human resources. • Examples of Facebook’s “incredible benefits” (a generous four-month paid parental leave and a $4,000 “baby cash” payment) and “strong resources for ALL employees—and for women” (“Women Leadership Day,” “hosting speakers and mentoring student groups,” etc.). • And finally, “a FB statement in lieu of an

P. S . M U E L L ER

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Ca r n i va l of Buncom be form Partners seem to have a woman problem—most notably (though not alone), the sex-discrimination legal actions against Wal-Mart and Costco. How do you ensure that corporate partners are not signing up as a way of whitewashing (agreeing publicly with the concept of women’s advancement, and securing Lean In’s imprimatur, to avoid addressing more systemic problems)? Is there an instance where you’ve said to such a company that you’d be glad to have it as a partner, but only after it cleans up its act? Wouldn’t such a demand be an example of what you champion—that having women in power will benefit ordinary women? 2. Lean In Circles have been described as peer mentoring and as a sort of consciousness-raising for our times. If a Lean In Circle decides that members of its group have actual grievances with the companies they work for that require a political response, would Lean In be supportive of them taking political or legal action against those companies? Would you, for example, encourage a Lean In Circle to picket a discriminatory employer?

Zandy replied: “As I mentioned before, I do think an off the record conversation between you and Sheryl would be a great place to start the dialogue. Let me know if you would reconsider that.” I again declined. In the middle of the next week, I received an email from another media spokesperson, this one with Lean In. Andrea Saul (formerly the press secretary for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign) informed me, “Unfortunately, an interview will not be possible.” Instead, she sent me written answers to my questions, evidently drafted by Lean In’s public relations apparatus (see sidebar, p. 50), and “a quote for your use”: Lean In is a global community committed to encouraging and supporting women leaning in to their ambitions. We’re incredibly

48 1 The Baffler [no.23]

grateful to our community and the individuals, and institutions, who have already made progress changing the conversation on gender. But we know there is so much more to do before we live in an equal world. That’s why we’re not just encouraging, but supporting, everyone and every company that wants to lean in. It’s time to change the world, not just the conversation.

Upstairs, Downstairs One Saturday several weeks into Sandberg’s protracted multimedia tour, I drove to the mother root of American industry, the city that, as its historical literature puts it, “gave birth to the modern corporation.” So many of New England’s old textile factories have been gutted and converted into boutique and condo space. But in the 1970s, Lowell, Massachusetts, turned over millions of square feet of abandoned mills to the National Park Service. The 141 acres of factories, boardinghouses, and power canals are now the preserve of the Lowell National Historical Park. Its centerpiece is the Boott Cotton Mills, “the cathedral of industry,” a red brick behemoth that sits alongside the Merrimack River like a medieval fortress, ensconced within a rampart of thick red brick walls, accessible only by a single bridge spanning a deepwater canal. A huge bell tower presides over the courtyard: for decades, its 4:30 a.m. toll summoned a nearly all-female workforce to a fourteen-hour day. The Boott Mills is now a museum, its exhibition space a reminder of the vast divide between the men who owned it and the women who labored there. Upstairs, a wing is adorned with large oil portraits of the gentlemen mill proprietors who formed the WASPy Boston Associates. Downstairs, the “weave room,” a sprawling factory floor, has been restored to its early glory (minus the humid, lint-choked air that incubated spectacular rates of tuberculosis

Like so many mill workers, they saw accidents: women who were mauled, women who lost body parts, women nearly scalped when the loom mechanism seized their hair.

9 and other lung diseases, and minus the mass infestation of cockroaches that swarmed over employees’ clothes and lunch pails). During visiting hours, museum staffers run a portion of the eighty-eight power looms to provide visitors with a modest sense of the earsplitting cacophony. (Even at reduced levels, the museum must dispense earplugs.) On the day I visited, two middle-aged women were operating the clanking looms. As I stood, half-hypnotized by a power shuttle flinging itself back and forth between the warp threads, they came over to ask if I had questions. Several minutes into our conversation, it was apparent that they were no ordinary docents. Francisca DeSousa and Cathy Randall were lifelong mill workers. The textile factory where DeSousa had worked for more than a quarter century had hightailed it to Mexico, and she’d taken the job at the museum. Randall has continued to work in the few remaining mills, including for a time at one that has made certain adjustments to the times: it weaves carbon fiber for microchips. She was working, that is, at the industrial production end of the empire that Sheryl Sandberg presides over as chief operating officer. DeSousa, like Randall, started at $3 an hour. Later, she recalled, “they paid you four to five cents per piecework—to make you work faster.” In the course of her employment, she and her husband, who also worked full time, had four children. After she gave birth, “I took one week off, unpaid,” she said. “You didn’t dare take more than that—you’d get fired.” “There was no vacation time,” Randall recalled of her first job, “no health insurance, no

benefits, and no sick days.” After eleven years, she was making $11 an hour. “Now they just don’t give you the forty hours,” she said, “so they don’t have to pay you benefits.” DeSousa and Randall, like so many mill workers, saw many accidents: women who were mauled, women who lost body parts, women nearly scalped when the loom mechanism seized their hair. On the factory floor one day, Randall witnessed an “amputation”: a young woman’s arm was sucked into the machinery. The memory still haunts her. “She was one of the ones I trained,” she said. None of these jobs were unionized. At the first mill Randall worked for, she became involved in an organizing effort. The union campaign never came to a vote. “People were too afraid,” she said, recalling how one of the women “came to me crying, ‘Don’t do this, I can’t lose my job.’” DeSousa led two ad hoc protest efforts of her own. The first was in response to a company announcement that the workers would no longer be given a lunch hour—which was actually a lunch half hour. “I told them we are going to sit down for half an hour, because we deserve it,” she said. At first, her coworkers were leery of taking a stand. “It was hard keeping people together. I mean, I was scared, too—my God, what were they going to do to us?” But finally she convinced her colleagues. “I told them, ‘Listen, if we stick together, they can’t fire all of us.’” After two weeks of sit-downs, the company relented. Then the company announced that mill workers would be required to work overtime on Saturdays. While the women were glad for the extra money, many were single mothers with no The

Baffler [no.23] ! 49

My Questions for Sheryl Sandberg . . . and the Answers from Her PR Department Q: A number of Lean In’s corporate

Platform Partners seem to have a woman problem—most notably (though not alone), the sex-discrimination legal actions against Wal-Mart and Costco. How do you ensure that corporate partners are not signing up as a way of whitewashing (agreeing publicly with the concept of women’s advancement, and securing Lean In’s imprimatur, to avoid addressing more systemic problems)? Is there an instance where you’ve said to such a company that you’d be glad to have it as a partner, but only after it cleans up its act? Wouldn’t such a demand be an example of what you champion—that having women in power will benefit ordinary women?

A: We reject this premise. There are over

200 companies who have joined as platform partners, and it seems early to judge their motivations. We are not setting up a watchdog organization or an audit function. Rather, we are providing high-quality educational materials and technology at scale that companies can use to improve their understanding of gender bias. We want to make these materials available to everyone—because every company can get better, and we want them to.

Q: Lean In Circles have been described as peer mentoring and as a sort of consciousness-raising for our times. If a Lean In Circle decides that members of its group have actual grievances with the companies they work for that require a political response, would Lean In be supportive of them taking political or legal action against those companies? Would you, for 50 1 The Baffler [no.23]

E L E A N O R DAV I S

example, encourage a Lean In Circle to picket a discriminatory employer?

A: Lean In Circles are a starting point,

not an endpoint. We are encouraging people to set up Circles and take them where they will through an open and constructive dialogue—and share their learnings with other Circles. Lean In provides a framework but we want each Circle to decide what it does or focuses on, because each Circle is different and has different needs.

Q: Lean In has described itself as a “move-

ment.” Social movements in my experience are all about solidarity and confrontation—that is, a collective response that

confronts powerful institutions and people who are holding a group down. What is the confrontation here, and who or what is being confronted? Or does the sort of selfawareness endorsed by Lean In Circles stop where external confrontation begins? Put another way, is the confrontation all with one’s self, to appeal to the corporation?

A: Again, we reject this premise. We

are a community that seeks to promote awareness and empower individual, as well as collective, action. Lean In is made up of individuals and organizations coming together to further the common aim of understanding gender bias and helping other women achieve their goals.

Q: Lean In emphasizes individual solutions to problems of individual advancement. How do you keep this focus on individual initiative from undermining an alternative group awareness necessary to fuel an actual movement? A: This is not a zero-sum solution. It

takes both individual and collective initiative. In fact, Lean In makes clear that individuals can facilitate institutional reform. The more people are focused on issues for gender, the more of both there will be. We think Lean In is already demonstrating results—individuals taking action, women asking for and getting raises, companies changing policies. The question we would ask back is: “Has overall group awareness of these important issues increased since Lean In launched?” Our answer is that while there is so much more to do, changes have begun.

weekend day care. “If you didn’t show up on Saturday, they’d give you a yellow slip,” DeSousa recalled, “and after you got several of them, they could fire you.” DeSousa and another mill worker proposed a plan: “We stop all the looms—it’s the only way to get their attention.” The workers did, and a few minutes later, their overlords rushed in. “Even the big bosses from the main office came running.” After a tense negotiation, the women won their fight. DeSousa’s supervisor, though, let her know that she better not try for a third victory. “My boss came over,” DeSousa recalled, “and he said to me, ‘Some day, Norma Rae, I’m going to get you.’” I asked the two women if they had heard of Lean In. Randall said she had seen a couple of Sandberg’s TV appearances, but didn’t quite understand the message. I told her that Lean In argues that women need to break down “internal obstacles” within themselves that are preventing them from moving up the work ladder. “There are a lot of barriers women face,” Randall said. She ticked off a few: lousy pay, no benefits, no sick leave, no unions, sexism, and a still highly sex segregated workforce. “There are lots of jobs that are still considered women’s work,” she said. “In one of the mills, I was actually referred to as ‘the girl.’” What Randall described is what most American working women face. And they are also the sort of problems that the advocates of Lean In and its sister impulses must address if they are not to be seen as individual women empowering themselves by deserting other women—if they are to be called, as Sheryl Sandberg calls herself, feminist. What about “internal obstacles,” I asked Randall—the sort of obstacles that cause women to curb their ambitions because they’re afraid they won’t be likable? She pondered the question for a time. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “That’s just not the world I came from.” t The

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e

Networking into the Abyss Inside the empty bubble of SXSW Interactive 3 Jacob Silverman

or ten days each March, Austin, Texas, becomes suffused with an ambient hucksterism. It creeps into the city like a low-lying fog, concentrating in the downtown area, where numbing displays of corporate extravagance and desperate marketing stunts become the order of the day. Occasionally, this hucksterism condenses into one insufferable person, who comes to symbolize all that is wrong with South by Southwest Interactive, the tech-themed portion of the rapidly metastasizing SXSW festival—and, by extension, the vacuous blather of the technology industry itself. At this year’s SXSWi, I met several such types. At a bar called Javelina, I ran into a twenty-five-year-old employee of a social media startup, backed by Marc Andreessen’s high-flying venture capital firm. We were both attending yet another party hosted by yet another tech firm. When I told her I was a journalist, she showed her disgust by pantomiming a hand job. Why, she asked me, speech slurred almost beyond intelligibility, do we need journalism when we have social media? I met another person at an otherwise anodyne dinner for Israeli startups, where a dozen or so entrepreneurs presented their companies to potential investors and partners, along with a few journalists. To protect the guilty, I’ll call him Brian. In his late twenties and hailing from South Florida, Brian had the kind of hazy résumé that defines a number of unaffiliated SXSW participants. (While many SXSWi attendees, buoyed by expense accounts, are sent by their employers, 37 percent paid full freight this year.) He was some sort of entrepreneur or consultant, or a 52 1 The Baffler [no.23]

serial entrepreneur, someone who had helped launch others’ startups and was now working on his own. I learned this in fragments. When Brian first sat down at our table, gulping from what would be one of at least five glasses of red wine, I asked him what he did. “What do I do? I do many things,” he said, before flashing a wide smile, pleased with himself. “I prefer to ask people what they’re passionate about,” he said. “What are you passionate about?” It was a line he used on anyone who had the ill fortune to approach our table. He delivered it—and a windy, opaque explanation of the community-building website he was developing—with the stilted pacing of someone trying to make a much-practiced speech seem off the cuff. By the end of the evening, I still had little idea what Brian’s company did, though it sounded like some version of Facebook’s Pages feature. He hadn’t honed the sort of logline that is de rigueur at SXSW: “It’s like Twitter but for videos”; “It’s Tumblr meets Airbnb— but for business”; “It’s a place where people can meet and exchange career advice.” Like LinkedIn? “Yeah, but better.” I never learned what he was passionate about. None of us could stomach flipping the question around, as he clearly wanted us to. Finally, he stood up and reached out to shake hands. “Follow me on Twitter,” he said. “I’ll follow you back.” He stumbled to the door. I saw him enter the hallway and spin around, confused. A

M I C H A E L D U FF Y

During SXSW, Austin becomes a money-soaked mĂŠlange of hyper-consumerism and techno-utopianism.

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The event’s Twitter hashtag provided its own unwitting miniaturist commentary on the self-regarding folly of it all: #perfect.

9 fleeting look of sadness appeared on his face, before he found the stairs and was gone. That evening, as I unloaded the day’s haul of business cards out of my pocket and left them on a table, likely never to be examined again, I imagined Brian doing the same. Perhaps he called his wife and told her he had made some important contacts. More likely, he passed out with his shoes on. In fairness, many of the people I met in Austin were nothing like this. From the Belgian startup founder working on a new kind of courier service to the average attendee in the convention center elevator, SXSWers were often friendly and solicitous—a style of self-presentation entirely consistent with the festival’s networking ethos. But these aren’t the encounters that stick. And the attitudes reflected above—the condescension and privilege, the irrational self-belief and contempt for opposing views—indicate something wrong at the heart of the tech industry’s preeminent festival of ideas. More broadly, they’re part of a rotten culture that garishly celebrates itself while remaining divorced from the concerns of its customers. During SXSW, Austin becomes a money-soaked mélange of hyper-consumerism and techno-utopianism. In the bazaar of terminally bad ideas—amid the panels on DJ epistemology, the hackathons, and the Spotify parties—it was completely unexceptional, say, for a VP from Demand Media, the notorious content farm, to be preaching from his designated panel (which was, of course, called “Perfection: Algorithms to Optimize Human Existence”) that ubiquitous sensors “will usher in a new golden age of humanity.” (The event’s Twitter hashtag provided its own unwitting miniaturist commentary on the self-regarding folly of it all: #perfect.) 54 1 The Baffler [no.23]

Bubble Vision South by Southwest started as a small music festival in 1987. It has seen continual growth, with film and media components joining in to cosponsor the annual event starting in 1994. The digital side of the gathering was renamed SXSW Interactive in 1999, and since then, the tech arm has absorbed its host: a greater number of people now pay to attend SXSWi (30,621) than SXSW Film (16,297) or Music (25,119). (These numbers include press and other complimentary registrations.) Recently, SXSW added separate education and environmental festivals, and August will see the first installment of SXSW V2V, a venture capital conference hosted in Las Vegas. For a minimum registration fee of $695, V2V promises the usual mix of pitch sessions, themed lounges, mentorship opportunities, snack breaks (“food is the great leveler,” says V2V’s website), and “meaningful, one-on-one connections with fellow innovators.” Featured speakers include meme hustler Tim O’Reilly and the CEO of Zappos. The choice of Sin City is explained as an appeal to “the tenacity of spirit and vision inherent in the Las Vegas ideal” but could be better understood as the union of two easily confusable concepts: venture capital investment and gambling. This year, registered attendance for SXSWi increased by almost 25 percent over 2012. And that’s just the badge holders. Many festival veterans (or those unable to afford Interactive badges, which start at $695) swear off the official events, and instead go to parties and networking events, or just walk the streets. The festival’s soaring success has drawn the usual criticisms that it’s no longer what it once was or that it has somehow jumped the shark. These same complaints—and the me-

teoric growth and subsequent franchising— have of course dogged other large festivals that claim vague indie or altcult birthrights, from Coachella to Burning Man. But while SXSW still touts the virtues of networking and DIY culture, it has become increasingly difficult for small companies to distinguish themselves from the corporate and VC herd— or for individual attendees, surrounded on all sides by crass marketing gimmicks and blocklong lines to pose with a famous Internet cat, to sift much signal from the noise. Still, in the case of SXSWi, there aren’t widespread laments that the event’s plucky DIY founding spirit has been sold out to the Man—largely for the simple reason that, in this social construction, the heroic innovator and the Man are on the same continuum of aspiration. The whole goal of SXSWi is to sell out, to arrive one year as a plucky upstart (as, for example, Foursquare in 2010) and then to graduate into

festival lore and VC riches, ready to throw the kind of reputation-cementing parties that are SXSW’s most valuable currency. Last year, SXSW estimated its economic impact, across all festivals, at $190.3 million, making it the biggest single event in Austin. All of that money has done little to make up for a general poverty of imagination. As San Francisco Chronicle technology columnist James Temple recently wrote, Silicon Valley, while claiming that it will change the world, “concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.” A signature case in point is the search giant Google, which promotes its hugely ambitious “moonshot” projects and its “Don’t Be Evil” motto, but still makes 96 percent of its revenue from advertising. This disconnect was on display at SXSW this year.* You couldn’t move from one bar to the next, it seemed, without encounter-

* Google, for example, showed off a pair of talking shoes that the company doesn’t intend to bring to market.

P. S . M U E L L ER

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e ing another unsurprising social startup—nor could you hope, for more than a minute or two, to dodge the festival’s nonstop blizzard of grandiose-sounding yet deeply petty business argot hailing the esteemed body of digital “influencers,” the inevitable tide of ceaseless “innovation,” the savvy doings of an executive “ninja,” or the hyped-up business plans of “disruptive” companies. (The Onion, typically blistering and on point, ran the following headline: word “innovate” said 650,000 times at sxsw so far.) That’s not to say that there aren’t any worthy events. 3-D printing was big this year and produced some of the best conversations about manufacturing and creativity. A panel on Reddit dissected the popular site’s culture of misogyny and racism; as Rebecca Watson noted, “There’s no social cost of being a bigot on Reddit. In fact, it’s the opposite. You’re rewarded for it.” A town hall event devoted to activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year, included some very fine discussion about intellectual property, overzealous federal prosecutors, and the role of technology companies in making Internet policy. But the hall was mostly empty, despite the presence of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web; scholar Tim Wu; and Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Swartz’s partner. Stinebrickner-Kauffman was particularly impressive. “Aaron is one of the most privileged of the victims of our criminal justice system,” she acknowledged. “And it’s the reason why we’re all talking about him.” She implored the audience to think rigorously and critically about their work, particularly if they aimed to leverage their own conspicuous privilege in the knowledge economy to become the next generation of tech moguls. “You probably understand design and you probably understand code, but do you understand power?” she asked. “Have you broken out of your bubble?” 56 1 The Baffler [no.23]

For many, the answer is no. Austin during SXSW is a bubble. With everyone staring at their phones, it resembles a roving and only notionally offline social network, in which something cooler and more interesting is always happening elsewhere. Hoping to find some way to address the gnawing suspicion that digital technology often leaves us feeling more connected but less fulfilled, I attended a panel called “Is This Progress? More Meaning In Our Digital Life.” The panel—made up of designers from Frog and Amazon; Facebook’s manager of location services; and Evan Smith, CEO and founder of the Texas Tribune—started off promisingly but never lived up to its mandate. An audience member posed a philosophical question: Do we lose something with these heavily mediated digital interactions, and is it a problem that these mediators, like Facebook, are trying to monetize our social interactions? “No one is forcing you to be on Facebook,” Smith responded sharply. “Don’t join Facebook, don’t join Twitter. If it offends your sensibilities, you have the option of opting out.” I wasn’t the only one disappointed. In a bathroom line after the event, an Australian man commiserated with his friend: “There was no meaning, no depth.” I told him I agreed. “It was such an awesome theme,” he said, “and then . . .” His voice trailed off.

Heart of Glass Part of the yearly allure of SXSW—especially for the striving would-be leaders of the innovator class—is its reputation as a kingmaker event. The conference now serves as a digital coming-out party, where brash new startups such as Twitter can abruptly leap into public view. The quickly established consensus this year was that no company or product dominated the festival, although Google Glass— a set of eyewear featuring a head-mounted display and smartphone-like functionality, including voice search—was much discussed.

With everyone staring at their phones, SXSW resembles a roving and only notionally offline social network, in which something cooler and more interesting is always happening elsewhere.

9 SXSW does in fact give out awards, and you can tell something about the festival’s values— a mix of the frivolous and the mendacious—by who and what it chooses to honor. So, for example, while the festival admirably supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it also gave its Digital Campaign of the Year award to KONY 2012, the site devoted to publicizing the crimes of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony—a campaign that has come to epitomize do-nothing slacktivism while also providing a trendy new digital spin on the white-savior complex. The Business award went to a magnet that a customer can push to order pizza. This year’s Technical Achievement belongs to the Nike FuelBand, a $149 electronic wristband that tracks physical activity and rewards exercise with the invented metric of NikeFuel points. (It’s also received pretty mixed grades, with some of the more laudatory reviews calling it “maddeningly expensive” and “clunky”; few have openly questioned whether NikeFuel points, based on an algorithm inspired by something called “oxygen kinetics,” are in fact bullshit.) SXSW now reaches far beyond the Austin Convention Center on Cesar Chavez Street.* It’s difficult to exaggerate how thoroughly the event dominates downtown Austin and its surrounding neighborhoods, with the festival now spilling south across the Colorado River, which bisects the city. Many thoroughfares are blocked off—including large portions of Sixth Street, the city’s answer to Bourbon

Street. This main artery of Austin’s music scene is thronged during the festival with pedestrians, pedicabs, party buses, and young people strapped into banana costumes, hawking a ride-sharing service. Lampposts, parking meters, and concrete pillars are wrapped in cellophane-like material, providing adhesive surfaces for marketers to wallpaper with posters and stickers, which eventually become stacked upon one another, inches thick. Festival marketers have become notorious for their marketing gags, which, in the manner of Super Bowl commercials, have become something of a main event, parsed and celebrated by attendees and the media alike. Last year, this competitive shilling reached its nadir when a marketing firm turned homeless people into mobile 4G hotspots. Festivalgoers were encouraged to donate to homeless workers—who wore T-shirts that read “I’m a 4G hotspot”—in exchange for an access code. This year was relatively tame, with popular displays including 3M’s interactive hologram festival guide** and Oreo’s green-screen photo booth. A successful but little-known HR outsourcing company earned an inordinate amount of praise for mailing yams to some attendees and journalists under the guise of a fictional company, Yamtrader.com. Mashable, the social media news site, created lines blocks long by offering a chance to pose for a picture with Grumpy Cat, the feline Internet celebrity of the moment. Besides these stunts, sponsors curry favor

* A n ironic address for an event filled with temporary, low-wage employees taking part in demeaning marketing gimmicks, such as the middle-aged man dressed in tight undershirt and tutu, harp in hand, dancing on a bed for Central Desktop.

** This same technology was recently spotted at Logan International Airport, where it’s used to urge travelers to report suspicious activity.

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The marketing machine doesn’t only want to sell to you; it wants you to sell your own networked persona on its behalf.

9 with attendees through free concerts, swag (the press suite in the Austin Convention Center offered GoToMeeting-branded underwear and harmonicas), phone-charging stations, goofy photo ops, and the two most beautiful and most dangerous words in the English language: open bar. Attendees are also implored to tweet photos and hashtags so as to have a chance to win gadgets—the lesson being that the marketing machine doesn’t just want to sell to you; it wants you to sell your own networked persona on its behalf. The cumulative effect of all this is to erase the distinction between advertisement and the surrounding environment. Everything and everyone is pushing something—in the case of the tech conference’s constant networking, the product on offer is ourselves—and anything that doesn’t seem like advertising is surely just a bit of covert viral marketing. You begin to get suspicious of people whose shirts don’t have logos. Soon it is no longer a surprise that a shuttle bus has been transformed into a massive owl—which, after a moment of disorientation, you realize is the logo of an app on your iPhone. A Porta Potty that shows bystanders how long you’ve been in the loo and whether you’re sitting or standing comes to be seen not as an invasion of privacy but as an example of clever engineering.* Even the panel on Aaron Swartz’s legacy was not immune; when I entered the hall, a volunteer offered me a wristband bearing a quote from Swartz’s blog: “Take the outside view.” Each band had an attached tag bearing the name of the manufacturer, twistbands.com. This was Livestrong for the socially conscious tech set.

Policing for the Privileged SXSW is now dotted with celebrities, both on panels and at events about town. But tech moguls, and their gadgets, are the event’s real stars. Tech blogger Robert Scoble was spoken of in reverential tones. Each sighting of someone wearing Google Glass created a gravity well of attention. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was received with fanfare and plied for his wisdom on a range of subjects. Asked by a Twitter user how he would improve education, Musk responded, “Generally you want education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game.” This celebrity effect is quite real, but it obscures the myopia and privilege that define SXSW, where only 15 percent of attendees make less than $50,000 per year. It’s a world that, for most of us, is a far cry from perfect. Many tech outsiders, for example, express a mix of shock and envy upon reading about the luxurious amenities at the offices of Facebook and Google. Recently, Rebecca Solnit, writing in the London Review of Books, mourned the tech industry’s effects on the Bay Area— soaring housing prices, poor tenants evicted to make way for thirty-year-old millionaires, an erosion of the region’s cultural history, and private luxury buses undercutting support for public transport. She writes: Poverty is cruel and destructive. Wealth is cruel and destructive too, or at least booms are. The whole of the US sometimes seems to be a checkerboard of these low-pressure zones with lots of time and space but no money, and the boomtowns with lots of money, a frenzied pace and chronic housing scarcity. Neither version is very liveable.

* This toilet was by Frog Design, which was also part of the lackluster “More Meaning In Our Digital Life” panel. 58 1 The Baffler [no.23]

During the five days of SXSWi, this boomtown effect is recreated in downtown Austin, which is no longer Austin but is in fact a Vegas-ized version of the Google life, down to the private buses. (I rented a place in North Austin and took a city bus, which was convenient and cost only a dollar.) Parts of downtown Austin are booming too, with the attendant housing shortage; Austin’s real estate barons can’t put hotels up fast enough. In his closing remarks, festival director Hugh Forrest promised that there would be more accommodations next year. There are cracks in this image of digital Austin as the geek-chic Vegas, though— places where the boom meets the low-pressure zones. On my way to the Sheraton hotel for a panel about cyberbullying, I walked past the Coyote Ugly bar on Sixth Street. It was just after noon, and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was blasting at tremendous volume while a bartender, armed with a PA system, exhorted passersby to come in and start drinking. A block further, I stumbled upon the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH). Dozens of homeless men and women were outside, mingling, sleeping,

drinking, eating, playing music. I couldn’t help but think of the previous year’s Wi-Fi stunt (perhaps some of these people had been recruited for it), and a story from a couple days prior, in which Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who’s worth $43 billion, had docked his 288foot yacht next to a homeless encampment in Hawaii. I started talking to some of the people outside the resource center and ended up visiting it a couple times. I met Chris Hudlin, who is in his early forties and has lived in Austin for more than three years. “I’m a worker,” he said, showing me his callused hands. His wife is a few months pregnant, and they’ve only recently been on the streets. He likes the programs at ARCH but doesn’t want to sleep there because, as he said, “It’s too many people with broken spirits. It’s too much animosity, too much hardship.” Hudlin described Austin as a “mecca” for the homeless—“a wonderful town”—but the influx has caused some stress. He’s seen his share of violence and theft among the homeless community. The bigger problem, as he sees it, is the police, whom he accuses of harassment.

P. S . M U E L L ER

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e A few days before SXSW this year, Hudlin said, the police came through the area and began issuing tickets and making arrests. Friends told him that this sweep was a common occurrence as the city prepared to host the big festival. In his own experience, he’s bothered by officers who tell him to leave the street opposite the shelter, only to return later to say that he can’t be in front of the shelter either. “This is just harassment now,” Hudlin said. “It’s just something to do.” He doesn’t mind the festival but said that “as far as the homeless situation goes, the businesses coming down for South by Southwest, that money doesn’t go here.” “Every city has its basis, what it was built on,” he said. “And Austin is built on partying. And it’s built on the college, on U.T. As long as you don’t interfere with those two things right there, you’ll be okay, hunky-dory.” A few cops stood by a barricade in the nearby intersection, watching us. “You see those cops there?” Hudlin asked. “I bet they’re looking at ten things that are illegal right now.” He started pointing to homeless people around us, singling out someone smoking weed, someone drinking out of a Styrofoam cup (alcohol, Hudlin said), and so on. The implication was that as long as the illegal activity in question didn’t penetrate the charmed circle of the festival, the cops would simply look the other way, satisfied they’d kept out the undesirables. On the other hand, past experiences showed that the police could be capricious. As I left, moving toward the police Hudlin had pointed out, I ended up walking behind another homeless man. The police stopped him as he neared their position. His face had the look of someone who realized he had just made a mistake.

Big Bother Is Watching Defenders of SXSW say that no one is required to attend the festival—just as Evan Smith says you don’t have to be on Facebook—or that you can have fun taking in the films and bands of SXSW Film and Music. Both counterclaims are true enough—but largely beside the point. SXSW Interactive is now the main event, subsidizing the rest of the festival; it’s Samsung, not some music blog, that pays to bring in Prince, the marquee performer at this year’s festival. And more important, SXSW isn’t some discrete event, after which the sponsors pack it all in until next year. It’s a year-round operation. The ideas promulgated there, the companies celebrated and partnerships made, reverberate through an industry that increasingly holds more of Americans’ data, attention, and discretionary income.* SXSW also plays an influential role in the life of Austin and some of its people, like those who work downtown or live outside the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless. Some of the festival’s featured speakers are noted libertarians, but like much of the festival, they don’t tend to talk about technology’s political or sociological ramifications. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey—an Ayn Rand fan who has said that climate change is “not necessarily bad,” compared unions to herpes, and called the Affordable Care Act fascistic—gave a speech about “liberating the heroic spirit of business.” In his talk about “secret truths,” Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and committed libertarian, spoke, without apparent irony, in favor of large, government-funded civil engineering projects (the transcontinental railroad, Robert Moses’s New York). Continuing the theme was Russian investor Yuri Milner, who said that “it’s almost a heroic effort” to be an entrepreneur. If SXSW has a political sensibility, then,

* In the case of festival “super sponsor” AT&T, the telecom giant provided technical infrastructure and access for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

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“A billion apps have been sold,” Sterling declared. “Where’s the betterness?”

9 it’s a very masculinist form of corporatism. Great men lead great corporations that know what’s best for us. That is also the inescapable message of the festival’s just-in-time built environment. For at least ten days, downtown Austin becomes privatized, a company town controlled by Miller Lite, Google, Doritos, AT&T, and Pepsi. Businesses are temporarily renamed, so that the Cedar Door restaurant becomes the Fast Company Grill and the Champions Sports Bar becomes the Rackspace Open Cloud Experience. Streets are closed except to pedicabs and vehicles from official sponsors. In this context, police officers aren’t just keepers of the peace. They’re tour guides and enforcers of the corporate ideal. They patrol convention halls and direct attendees. They make sure that sponsorship agreements are respected. In the lobby of the Hilton one afternoon, I watched as a police officer helped break up a marketing stunt—FounderDating, a networking organization, had hired a University of Texas a cappella group to sing a medley—that hadn’t been authorized. “Hilton is an official sponsor of South by Southwest and this was an unofficial event,” a hotel employee told me. “It’s the bad part of the job, but we have to do it.” With hundreds of people around, few bystanders even noticed the aborted spectacle. Outside, a rented fire truck drove by promoting Livefyre, a company that runs website comment sections. Young employees leaned out of the truck’s windows, hectoring passersby and tossing them plastic red firemen’s hats emblazoned with the firm’s logo. Thanks largely to the tremendous marketing cachet of South By Southwest, Austin has become a year-round events city. The coun-

try’s thirteenth largest city by population, Texas’s capital is blessed with good weather, excellent restaurants, solid public transportation, and a lively music scene. Austin City Limits, the Republic of Texas Biker Rally, the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival, the Food & Wine Festival—the city is awash with celebrations and shows (and tourists) from about March to November, when Austin’s true religion, UT football, takes center stage. A $400-million racetrack, the Circuit of the Americas, recently opened in southeast Austin, near the city’s airport. In November, the facility hosted the first Formula 1 race in the United States in five years. About 117,000 people crowded into the stadium, with thousands more estimated to have spent the weekend in town. Temporary helipads sprang up around the city to ferry in well-heeled visitors from Houston. In response, the city passed an emergency ordinance limiting the number of helicopter flights allowed per day. “We’re not going to let tourism drive our city past the tipping point,” one city council member told the Austin Chronicle. All of this has made for a vibrant cultural calendar, but SXSW represents the pitfalls of subordinating the “culture” aspect of this kind of programming to corporate largesse. As Chris Hudlin told me in front of the homeless shelter, “It’s money. Money makes the world go round.”

Disruption for What? It’s the custom at SXSW Interactive for the event’s closing remarks to be delivered by science fiction author Bruce Sterling. A longtime Austinite, Sterling has been part of SXSW for years (people still talk about the post-festival parties he used to throw) and has become The

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known for mixing rants about the state of the technology industry with savvy predictions about where it’s headed. Silver hair slicked back, his face puffy but smiling, Sterling took the stage wearing an Arizona State University sweatshirt, its arms riven with holes that he said were produced by lasers—the byproduct of a series of laser experiments he’d been involved in at ASU. Around his neck was a bolo tie whose fastener was a miniaturized, 3-D printed model of himself. In a freewheeling, eccentric, and often brilliant speech, delivered in a croaky voice that recalled The Office’s Kevin Malone, Sterling directed a rare bit of criticism at SXSW and the crowd’s ideology. About “disruption,” a term that in Silicon Valley receives sacramental treatment, he said: “The thing that bugs me about your attitude toward it is that you don’t recognize its tragic dimension.” That is, e-books and online shopping killed off bookstores, digital music and file sharing wrecked the music industry, Google and Craigslist upended newspapers. New technologies don’t just supplant the old; they change our culture and society; sometimes they destroy more jobs than they create. In his reproof was an echo of Rebecca Solnit: wealth can be cruel and destructive. Turning to the festival’s undercurrent of techno-utopianism, Sterling said that SXSW ers who talk about making the world better “haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naïveté.” He cited author Evgeny Morozov and his critique of technological solutionism—the belief that new digital technologies like smartphone apps and social networking can fix a range of social and political problems. “A billion apps have been sold,” Sterling declared. “Where’s the betterness?” Through all this Sterling was less a scold than a kind of deeply literate jester. He pivoted from disquisitions on the region’s preColumbian civilizations to an elegy for the 62 1 The Baffler [no.23]

PC, from arch condemnations to satirical riffs about his own mortality. At times, he laughed more than the audience did, but I was thrilled. This was exactly what I had been hoping for— Sterling’s event was only the second SXSW gathering where I heard the word “privacy”— and yet there was little enthusiasm for it. A small but steady exodus increased as Sterling passed the forty-minute mark. What those leaving this closing talk, this dark benediction, didn’t seem to realize is that Sterling is on their side. He’s a selfproclaimed futurist, in love with technology and its possibilities, but he’s not deceived by it. He knows that criticism should be part of the bargain, both because it’s socially responsible and because it helps make better, more humane products. “How can we get past the wow factor?” he asked, his froggy voice turning imploring. “How can we treat it with moral seriousness? “I think the first step, the proper step, is to accept that our hands are not clean. We don’t just play and experiment. We kill.” Was this it? Could Sterling, one of the original and best-regarded SXSW participants, someone who even has become an advisor to tech companies, foment a change in the culture? He was insisting that the lords of Silicon Valley—and their customers—desperately need an “ethical turn,” as well as an ideas festival worthy of the name. This was my first in-person Sterling speech, but it struck me as far more critical of SXSW than the ones I had read about. I turned over these questions as Sterling exited the stage and the attendees, many of them on their way to various closing parties, assembled to head out. A man and woman next to me began debriefing one another. The man made some remark of mild appreciation. “What’d you think?” he asked her. She let out a self-deprecating sigh. “I don’t think I have the attention span for that,” she said. t

American Nothing 3 A l e x Di m it rov

Tonight the wind tears through a flag building a religion from cruelty. Someone lifts their face out of privacy, out of death. I’m here to marry you, lonely American nothing— with my useless name and your aimless car ready to take me out of myself. If the body was harmless, history would read lighter and we’d take our drinks long. I can smell your hair from here and it’s years after. Below my window boys eat chocolate with their fingers and the taste of their cheap sweetness keeps me awake. Even now the voice on your radio takes me home where I never lived. The question I sleep with grips stronger than any stranger that finds me. What do we want when we ruin each other? I’ve done terrible things and I still want to know.

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Without Which He Would Not Have Written His Greatest Poems 3 A n is Shi va n i Use a lot of saliva to lubricate the lower part of the shaft, which you can stimulate with your hands. About Nietzsche, I am sorry to say that your suggestion had completely slipped from my mind. Do not zone in right away on the clitoris, and then rub away madly. The unphilosophical historian doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stay high on his ladder. The angle of her pelvis will enable the erect penis inside her to put sustained pressure on the front wall of the vagina and G-spot. Apparently the Neue Rundschau has not heard from him either. The man can thrust upward at the same time, but it may take a while to get the timing right together. About the Dutch literature. The man or woman can end up in a position in which the head is completely off the mattress and is resting against the floor. One might approve of the maintenance of The Church of England in our time and yet deplore its origin. Using your third and fourth finger, caress your clitoris and the surrounding areas in a cross-like movement, moving from north to south and then east to west, with your clitoris as the central point. By the way, I wrote some little time ago to Ortega y Gasset to ask him for a contribution and have had no reply. The man kneels back on his heels on the bed with the woman kneeling on top with her knees on either side of his. Having advanced so far, a Word of caution. Grip the top of the head like a water tap and twist as you would if

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turning a tap on or off. My policy is frankly a waiting one. You can roll your stockings down your legs—one at a time—either by yourself, or involve your partner in the action. I agree with you about Christ and I do not disagree with anything else. If being tied to the bedpost while your partner makes slow, tantalizing love to you or gives you orgasmic oral sex interests you and you plan to act it out, then make sure he or she does not tie the knots too tight, and that they can be undone immediately if you request it, or whenever necessary. On page 79 line 308 there are two commas to be deleted and I intended the four “burnings” to be printed with double spacing between each. The woman sits and raises one foot to point vertically over her head, steadying it with her hand. I am returning to you the “Metaphysical Posters” after long consideration. Purse your lips and then plant a light kiss, a little like a peck, but at the rate of about three a second. Oh I suppose the only thing to be done about W. Civilization is to think as clearly as one can. An armchair lends itself very well to rearentry lovemaking, if the furniture is deep enough to take both partners on its seat. The style of wrappers is somewhat different here from that usual in America; they do not put on so much letterpress. There is no rule that dictates how often a couple should make love. I will buy a Cake.

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e

All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go 3 Ann Friedman

n a jobs economy that has become something of a grim joke, nothing seems quite so bleak as the digital job seeker’s all-butobligatory LinkedIn account. In the decade since the site launched publicly with a mission “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the glorified résumé-distribution service has become an essential stop for the professionally dissatisfied masses. The networking site burrows its way into users’ inboxes with updates spinning the gossamer dream of successful and frictionless advancement up the career ladder. Just add one crucial contact who’s only a few degrees removed from you (users are the perpetual Kevin Bacons in this party game), or update your skill set in a more marketfriendly fashion, and one of the site’s 187 million or so users will pluck you from a stalled career and offer professional redemption. LinkedIn promises to harness everything that’s great about a digital economy that so far has done more to limit than expand the professional prospects of its user-citizens. In reality, though, the job seeker tends to experience the insular world of LinkedIn connectivity as an irksome ritual of digital badgering. Instead of facing the prospect of interfacing professionally with a nine-figure user base with a renewed spring in their step, harried victims of economic redundancy are more likely to greet their latest LinkedIn updates with a muttered variation of, “Oh shit, I’d better send out some more résumés.” At which point, they’ll typically mark the noisome email nudge as “read” and relegate it to the trash folder. Which is why it’s always been a little tough 66 1 The Baffler [no.23]

to figure out what LinkedIn is for. The site’s initial appeal was as a sort of self-updating Rolodex—a way to keep track of ex-coworkers and friends-of-friends you met at networking happy hours. There’s the appearance of openness—you can “connect” with anyone!—but when users try to add a professional contact from whom they’re more than one degree removed, a warning pops up. “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies that you know them well,” the site chides, as though you’re a stalker in the making. It asks you to indicate how you know this person. Former coworker? Former classmate? Fine. “LinkedIn lets you invite colleagues, classmates, friends and business partners without entering their email addresses,” the site says. “However, recipients can indicate that they don’t know you. If they do, you’ll be asked to enter an email address with each future invitation.” You can try to lie your way through this firewall by indicating you’ve worked with someone when you haven’t—the equivalent of name-dropping someone you’ve only read about in management magazines. But odds are, you’ll be found out. I’d been confused, for instance, about numerous LinkedIn requests from publicists saying we’d “worked together” at a particular magazine. But when I clicked through to their profiles, I realized why they’d confidently asserted this professional alliance into being: the way to get to the next rung is to pretend you’re already there. If you don’t already know the person you’re trying to meet, you’re pretty much out of luck. This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of

J . D. K I N G

A century or so ago, critics worried that the rise of scientific management in the industrial workplace would deskill the American worker; now, in the postindustrial order of social-media-enabled employment, skills (or, you know, quasi-skills) multiply while jobs stagnate.

9 The

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder. On one level, of course, this world of aspirational business affiliation is nothing new. LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other. LinkedIn does have some advantages over the sad old world of the perennially striving, sweating minor characters in Glengarry Glen Ross. After all, it doesn’t require a registration fee or travel to a conference center. Sometimes there are recruiters trolling the profiles on the site. It’s a kinder, gentler experience for the underemployed. It distills the emotionally fraught process of collapsing years of professional experience onto a single 8½ x 11 sheet of paper into the seemingly more manageable format of the online questionnaire. In the past year, the site has made the protocols of networking even more rote, allowing users to select from a list of “skills” and, with a few clicks, declare their proficiency. “You can add up to 50 relevant skills and areas of expertise (like ballet, iPhone and global business devel68 1 The Baffler [no.23]

opment),” chirps an infobox on the site. A century or so ago, critics worried that the rise of scientific management in the industrial workplace would deskill the American worker; now, in the postindustrial order of social-media-enabled employment, skills (or, you know, quasi-skills) multiply while jobs stagnate. Sure, you probably won’t get hired at most places on the basis of your proficiency in ballet—but if you’re so inclined, you can spend some of your ample downtime on LinkedIn endorsing the iPhone skills of select colleagues and acquaintances.

These Thoughts for Hire LinkedIn’s architects are self-aware enough to know that, even in the age of social-media following, some of us must be leaders. In October, the site enabled users to “follow” a handpicked set of “thought leaders.” LinkedIn has given this “select group” permission “to write long-form content on LinkedIn and have their words and sharing activity be followed by our 187 million members.” So far, 190 leaders have made the cut. The “most-followed influencers” are familiar names to anyone who’s ever killed time in an airport bookstore: Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington, Tony Robbins. The animating vision behind the thought leader initiative is that great digital-economy will-o’-the-wisp known as the flattened hierarchy. “It used to be that the only way to hear what someone had to say on LinkedIn was to ask to connect with them. And you’re supposed to only do that with people you know and have done business with,” Isabelle Roughol, one of LinkedIn’s editors, wrote me in an email. “The average professional won’t chat at the coffee machine with someone like [Virgin Group founder] Richard Branson, but we still want to know how he got his start in business, how he manages his team or why he thinks private space travel is the future. That’s the space our ‘Influencers’ program fills.”

Take the click-bait and you get a list of bland encouragements rather than practical advice. Listen more than you talk. Keep it simple. Take pride in your work. Have fun. And, if you should fail, rip it up and start again.

9 Still, there’s a distinctly perfunctory quality to the offerings of the charmed circle of “influencers.” They often simply repost things on LinkedIn that they’ve written (or had ghostwritten, in some cases) for their personal sites. Their advice—on LinkedIn, “thoughts” almost always equal “advice”—ranges from the semipractical (embrace three digital media trends; get all of your employees on social media) to the lofty (be on a mission that doesn’t suck; search for a noble purpose) to the downright confusing (how to create time; how do careers really work?). The worst of the bunch reads like management-speak Mad Libs, such as this bit of gobbledygook about the career success ladder: “Failure to make a decision is often worse than making the wrong one. This ability is developed and honed over time based on both successes and failures,” writes one thought leader, who includes a complicated chart that is in no way ladder-like. Cue the vacuous, grammar-challenged sloganeering: “High-level thinking, problem-solving and critical decision-making is the cornerstone of long-term success.” A few influencers venture into the realm of politics, where apparently the appeal of conventional wisdom is just as strong as in the business world. How does the CEO of Panera Bread suggest we end gridlock in Congress? Heed a few Thomas Friedman quotes about how bad partisanship is, and then throw our support behind the “nonpartisan” advocacy group No Labels, which promotes relentlessly centrist agendas in the service of publicizing reliably unelectable centrist candidates. Even this wan brand of opinion-making is

suffused with LinkedIn’s trademark brand of acute striver-anxiety. On the one hand, it seems risky to put forth political views on a networking site, where the goal is to appeal to as many potential employers (or followers) as possible. On the other hand, weighing in on topics beyond the realm of management is also a way to prove you’re justified in using such profile buzzwords as “creative” and “analytical.” The higher synthesis, of course, is a weirdly totalizing kind of centrism: keep your political ideas as anodyne as your business aphorisms, and all the recruiters and CEOs out there will be reassured that you are safely tucked into the zone of acceptable consensus. Still, most of the thought-leading counsel on offer at LinkedIn boils down to searchengine-friendly, evergreen nuggets of business advice. An article titled “Three Pieces of Career Advice That Changed My Life” is illustrated with stock photos showing street signs at the corner of “Opportunity Blvd.” and “Career Dr.” At this very promising intersection, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explains that readers can do anything they put their minds to, that technology will come to rule everything, and that changing lives is a better goal than merely pushing paper around. This set of warmed-over management nostrums is one of the all-time top five “influencer posts” on the site. Sure, the post’s author is the site’s CEO. But the appeal runs deeper than that. Listicles take the LinkedIn promise of a cleaner, neater networking experience and apply it to your entire career. Their reassuring, vague steps provide comfort and the illusion of control, The

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The roots of the LinkedIn vision of prosperity-through-connectivity lie in the circular preachments of the positive-thinking industry.

9 in just the same way that we call on carnival fortunetellers or syndicated astrologists to dispense useless vagaries that sound concrete, helpful, and familiar. This brand of advice makes even more sense on LinkedIn than it does in business-to-business publications or corporate newsletters, since it provides a perfect antidote to the inherent depression of the fruitless job search. And in the frenetic world of just-in-time professional connectivity, LinkedIn’s vision of the listicled life is more and more the norm. Just take, for example, another recent influencer post by another social media guru, Dave Kerpen, who helms a network concern bearing the ominously bland name of Likeable Local. In reviewing his own tenure as a regular contributor to the LinkedIn news site, Linked In Today, Kerpen runs the pageview numbers and, in short order, blows his own mind. The twenty-eight posts he has contributed since the fall of 2012, Kerpen reports, “have generated over 5 million page views, a staggering number by any standard.” But the real wonderment here, he observes, is the ridiculously high level of reader engagement he’s earned in the site’s “new media empire”: on average, he’s logged “over 600 comments and over 10 thousand shares per post. My top post, ‘11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader,’ has generated over 5 thousand comments.” Of course it has. If you click over to Kerpen’s all-time most commented post, you see yet another listicle culled from the chapter headings of his book Likeable Business. There’s this comically self-deconstructing morsel from Oprah Winfrey, for instance: “I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.” Or perhaps you’d prefer 70 1 The Baffler [no.23]

something more aggressive and imperial in the way of business advice, such as this Navy SEAL mantra: “Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.” Not quite spiritual enough? All right, how about G. K. Chesterton, reminding you that “gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder”? Kerpen’s self-singing fable of media success, in other words, ultimately has a chilling moral—you can achieve unparalleled likeability on LinkedIn’s mammoth media platform, but at the considerable cost of surrendering anything that might remotely resemble a coherent or challenging message to the LinkedIn masses. An entire subgenre of thought leadership is devoted to the cult of Apple. (Kerpen’s mandatory inspirational quote from Steve Jobs: “The only way to do great work is to love the work you do.”) A post by “Technology Futurist, Innovation Expert, Business Strategist, Bestselling Business Author, & Keynote Speaker” Daniel Burrus instructs would-be Steve Jobses to “take the time to think both short-term and long-range. Build your future by competing on things other than price, and by asking the right questions, especially when it comes to consumers.” Never mind that Burrus hasn’t built an Apple-like company; such perorations are like the incantation of a devotional prayer: they call down the mercies of a remote techno-deity in order to ritually cleanse the grubbier aspirations of the business-strategizing, keynote-speaking class. And in the same circular fashion, the point of encouraging users to connect and follow and exchange points of view on LinkedIn is to marshal those users behind the simple, world-conquering faith in networked connectivity. The thoughts that lead the LinkedIn

experience, in other words, are usually subtle advertisements for the LinkedIn experience. Or not-so-subtle come-ons: one post promises to help people answer the question “What should I do with my life?” in three steps—by using LinkedIn. The most hectically advertised spiritual advisers on the site all support some version of this worldview. According to the site’s leaderboard, Virgin founder Branson was the first thought leader to crack one million followers. Branson’s most shared and commented post is tantalizingly headlined “Five Top Tips to Starting a Successful Business.” It’s not crazy that people on all rungs of the career ladder would want to hear from Branson: the billionaire has undoubtedly learned a few things during his rise to the top. But take the click-bait and you get a list of bland encouragements rather than practical advice. Listen more than you talk. Keep it simple. Take pride in your work. Have fun. And, if you should fail, rip it up and start again. Who’s to say whether the followers of these tirelessly flogged thought leaders—the folks eagerly inviting others to connect—find this information useful? Surely the gospel of LinkedIn life improvement isn’t dramatically enhancing their immediate job search. But on the devotional level, it probably fuels their fantasies of conquering their cluttered professional playing fields in the fashion of that great business demigod Steve Jobs. If the poor, as John Steinbeck once observed, see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, it seems fair to assume that on LinkedIn, followers see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thought leaders.

How to Click Friends and Influence People To understand the appeal of the site, it’s necessary to reach back to the beginnings of the modern American gospel of success. The roots of the LinkedIn vision of prosperity-through-

connectivity lie in the circular preachments of the positive-thinking industry, a singularly American gloss on the sunny doctrine of achieving personal success through inoffensive sociability. This modern branch of the thought-leading discipline began about a century ago, in true rags-to-riches fashion, when an unsuccessful door-to-door salesman named Dale Carnegie started teaching courses in public speaking at his local YMCA. Carnegie—Carnegay, actually, as it would be another seven years before he changed his name to match that of the famous industrialist—was an unlikely motivational speaker. He was kind of a loser. After graduating from the Warrensburg State Teachers’ College in Missouri in 1908, he sold correspondence courses, bacon, soap, and lard. But he found the work insufficiently glamorous, and after saving up $500, he moved to New York in 1911 to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He failed. Nor could he make a go of it as a truck salesman or a novelist. He decided that the best path to success was to tell other people how to find it. Carnegie’s lectures at the Y earned him a modicum of success and prompted him to publish The Art of Public Speaking in 1915. But it wasn’t until the country was in the grip of the Great Depression that Carnegie’s ideas began to really catch on. Simon & Schuster published his best-known book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936, the same year Dorothea Lange snapped her iconic photo of a despondent migrant mother named Florence Owens Thompson. The book was an instant success, and the enduring appeal of How to Win Friends makes it clear that Carnegie touched a powerful nerve in the nation’s professional id: the book spent years on the bestseller list and still sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year in the United States alone. Carnegie, of course, didn’t stop with How to Win Friends. He founded a conventionalThe

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C a r n i va l o f B u n c o m b e wisdom empire, churning out books, conferences, and lectures. The pamphlets handed out at Carnegie courses had titles that are indistinguishable from the thought leadership now being followed on LinkedIn: How to Get Ahead in the World Today, How to Put Magic in the Magic Formula, How to Make Our Listeners Like Us, How to Save Time and Get Better Results in Conferences, The Little Recognized Secret of Success. “The ideas I stand for are not mine,” Carnegie once said to critics of How to Win Friends. “I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?” Carnegie-style aphorisms and self-esteemboosting quotes were once relegated to the world of management conferences, leadership training seminars, and the business-to-business press. These days, along with everyone else who’s publishing the modern equivalent of Oprah-style self-help dressed up as business advice, you can find the Dale Carnegie Training company on LinkedIn.

Wish Fulfillment as Business Model Nowadays the gospel of motivationalism is so universal that Americans don’t even recognize that we live in a golden age of positive thinking. At a time when user-generated content is king and the economy is in the doldrums, there have never been so many aspiring Carnegies with so many outlets permitting them to push their own particular brand of technofuturism, business essentialism, or practical optimism. In this sense, LinkedIn is much more a thought-following enterprise than a thought-leading one. Outlets such as Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, which were always home to business tips alongside bigthink pieces on the future of American capitalism, have thrown open the gates to amateur motivational speakers and self-styled consultants who bring in pageviews and in exchange 72 1 The Baffler [no.23]

are granted the illusion of a rapt audience. Most are guys like Greg McKeown. It’s hard to tell, based on his LinkedIn profile, exactly what he does. Until recently, his profile picture was a photo of his face framed by two artfully held Sharpies—a set piece that conveyed the look and feel of Office Space, but without the sarcasm. (It has since been replaced with a photo of him gesticulating in front of a whiteboard.) “I write and speak around the world on the importance of living and leading as an Essentialist,” he explains. His personal site bears his own name in the URL but has the branding and plural language of “a company with the strategic intent to inspire 1,000,000 people to take a step toward a higher point of contribution by the end of 2014.” His résumé is full of consulting gigs and courtesy titles; in 2010 he cowrote a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. He links out to the website of his one-man consulting company, THIS Inc., which hawks nebulous, though evidently “essential” services; he vows to help clients “Evaluate the trivial many from the vital few, Eliminate the nonessentials and . . . Enable the team to almost effortlessly execute on the essentials.” He’s a professional thought leader, and LinkedIn has recognized him as such, letting him through the gates to join the ranks of the Chopras and Bransons. For aspirants such as McKeown, who presumably have yet to accumulate a fortune, thought leadership is a hopeful self-fulfilling prophecy. Just start leading and the thoughts will come. Then the wealth will follow. If it seems like anyone could do what McKeown is doing, you’re right. LinkedIn allows any user to apply to be an influencer. In exchange for a theoretical mass readership of millions upon millions of eager job seekers, all you have to do is provide LinkedIn with content and pageviews. “Our members are looking for professionals who can write engaging original posts and share links to

Story Problem 3 K ik i P e t rosi no Suppose: a Device for measuring subdural space. Let your Device be audible in all nightmares. Suppose: all nightmares stick to the nerves & veins. All veins get injured. Let that be true. It’s a great honor to get injured in a nightmare. The honor is: you can activate your Skeleton-Gear. Let X equal the force of your Skeleton-Gear striking a Life Token. Let M equal the length of one nightmare. Now multiply your Devices. The shearing pain in your head comes from linear force. You must have filled your head with Life Tokens. Or: you’ve kicked a headful of Tokens with linear force. Try to locate your Life Token without touching it. Try to release your Life Token without locating it. Then press ‘ESC’ to affix your nightmare to a plane. Your Device will jangle when it’s ready to start affixing. Let your nightmare expand along the inside of your Skeleton-Gear. It’s true that some nightmares have flags. Indicate your readiness by smashing a handful of turf. Collect: the Feelings Token. Collect: the Flag Token. You can step right out at any time.

The

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relevant, thought-provoking presentations, articles, polls, SlideShares, videos, infographics, and more,” the site says. “Think you’ve got what it takes? To apply, please complete the form below and we’ll be in touch within a week.” The form doesn’t ask you about your greatest accomplishments or leadership experience. It doesn’t require you to list how much money you’ve made or the companies you’ve founded. It asks you about which topics you’d blog about and which links you want to share today. But that’s another beautiful thing about thought leadership: unlike many of the jobs you might pursue on LinkedIn, no experience is required for the gig. Sure, according to Forbes, “it’s a truism that thought leaders tend to be the most successful individuals or firms in their respective fields.” But Forbes itself is run by a silver-spoon publishing scion whose only real achievement has been a pair of laughably overfunded, failed runs at the GOP presidential nomination. In the same vein, actual business acumen and leadership skills usually take a back seat in the LinkedIn system to simple digital renown. Some of the best-known gurus on the site have had the most success in the realm of . . . thinking about stuff. Take the case of one of the most popular thought leaders on LinkedIn: Newark Mayor Cory Booker. He has 1.3 million Twitter followers. He’s appeared on The Daily Show. He wrote a bestselling book. His picture is highlighted alongside other LinkedIn-approved thought leaders like Barack Obama, Guy Kawasaki, and Ari Emanuel. Meanwhile, back in Newark, the city has laid off a thousand workers. Crime and unemployment are up. The city’s cash-strapped schools are still struggling, under the control of the state. Newark’s “finances remain so troubled that it cannot borrow to fix its antiquated water system,” reports the New York Times. It’s tough to be both a thought leader and an action leader—which is presumably why Booker is now vying for a 74 1 The Baffler [no.23]

yet more prominent thought-leading spot, as U.S. senator from New Jersey in a notoriously do-nothing Congress. Thanks to such fast-and-louche appropriations of the mantle of thought leadership, even its apostles are denouncing the fast-multiplying apostasies that dilute the essence of the one true faith. “In only 15 years we’ve managed to dumb down the idea of thought leadership from someone who has changed their area of business to someone who can create a marketing plan that implants the idea that they are a thought leader,” wrote sales guru Paul McCord in 2009. “When everybody’s one, nobody is one.” Every once in awhile, though, you’ll run across some decent practical advice on LinkedIn. A post about avoiding frequentflier miles scams—another one of LinkedIn’s top “influencer” posts of all time—has some unwittingly trenchant advice for aspiring thought leaders. “First,” author Christopher Elliott explains, “only a few people at the top of the scam benefit in any meaningful way. . . . And second, many of those elite program apologists will do anything to defend the system that has rewarded them.” You don’t say. t

P. S . M U E L L ER

Jelly Donut, NYC 3 Ge n i n e L e n t i n e

Whatever that humming is it stopped the garbage trucks for a moment crushed their cargo in silence underground the trains glided soundlessly revolving doors deferred their revolving uptown a dentist suspended all drilling when the guy at the worksite made a circle with his hands when he brought his hands together thumbs touching fingertips touching when he held the empty circle out to his friend when he directed the circle toward him like a searchlight and said, See if he has my round jelly donut

The

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wS T O R Y

Bizness 3 Dmitry Gorchev

f you were born in a decent, settled country, you may work for decades as an accountant, you may eat a nutritious dinner every night, and then you may die peacefully in your fluffy little bed, thinking you have lived a life. Not so in my country. Its path is capricious and rocky; among its citizens, only a newborn baby can’t boast of engaging in some remarkably strange activity to cope with its many world-defining upheavals. A college professor may tell you about dealing in ladies’ fur coats from Turkey or an opera diva about giving a private concert in a sauna. Many respectable citizens will just blush and say nothing. As for myself, in the early nineties, the school where I worked paid me regularly but so little that you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I had a wife and a child to support—the usual story. At the time, everyone (literally everyone) engaged in bizness, that is, they bought and tried to sell stuff they didn’t need. A few found riches; many more transactions ended in a cemetery. I got off easy because I started small—in cigarettes. Where I lived, cigarettes had all but disappeared, and my fellow citizens gave over their entire monthly salaries for one pack, so I decided to bring a few cartons from Moscow for resale. I raised some capital, talked a high school friend into a partnership, and bought plane tickets to Moscow—in those amazing times a plane ticket cost as much as a carton of smokes. Oh Moscow of the early nineties! Those who saw it will never forget. The entire Garden Ring had become an unbroken open-air marketplace, and even Red Square in front of the Kremlin was lined with grandmas selling pantyhose. 76 1 The Baffler [no.23]

Oh Moscow of the early nineties! Those who saw it will never forget. The entire Garden Ring had become an unbroken open-air marketplace, and even Red Square in front of the Kremlin was lined with grandmas selling pantyhose.

We found the cigarettes in a supermarket on Novy Arbat, but the woman at the counter refused to sell us fifty cartons. Instead, she sent us to the “back” to speak with a “manager.” We met a huge man in a camouflage suit with a name tag—obviously a new breed of security guard—who waved to us to follow him into the basement. After many turns, we found ourselves in an empty chamber with cinderblock walls—and no manager. Despite my naïveté, I knew that our money and our lives were probably as good as gone, and I pitied my young widow and little daughter. “I’m listening,” the giant announced. I recited why we came. At that moment, a small boy of no more than twelve walked in and spoke sharply to the man: “Nikolai! Again? Haven’t we warned you enough?” The man drooped, mumbled that we came willingly, and slinked away. “Now, you,” the boy addressed us sternly. “Out. Fast. And never again.” We bought cigarettes in another store and even managed to bring them home, but then we smoked them ourselves, for it seemed stupid to sell something only to buy it again for three times the price. But that’s not the point. The point is that on that very first try,

PAU L A S E A R I N G

I learned I wasn’t meant to be a highflier in bizness, to rob trains carrying oranges and drive a black Beemer. My destiny was to crawl in the mud from paycheck to paycheck, from fee to fee . . . How grateful I was for this lesson! Take a friend of mine. After several successful speculations, he grew full of himself, borrowed a heap of cash, and commissioned five carloads of furniture from Belarus. Fabulous profits were guaranteed him. Two months later, when he finally realized that the furniture hadn’t been stolen along the way—it had never existed—he wisely decided not to wait for them and do it himself. He got hold of some pills, swallowed them, promptly called his friends and rela-

tives to say goodbye, but then didn’t die: the pills, like everything else in those days, were fake. He found more pills, this time genuine, again made the calls, again survived. Pretty soon, his near and dear were fed up and stopped picking up the phone, and when he finally managed to hang himself on a bathroom pipe, everyone sighed with relief. As for his creditors, they never even bothered to come for his children’s throats: they must have known that the money had long been gone, and most likely they were the ones who had sold him the damned furniture in the first place. As you say—bizness. t Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers. The

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Here We Name Them ‘Way’ 3 Ed Rober s on Cart and horse scaled streets, some cities have Alleys couched that way enough the British might say mews, Doors silent the size to walk through Not interrogate your journey, big Mouthing in stasis the importance Of their place, ready to say not your Destination; but here, actually home in the alley. The neighborhood is changing People are moving in as out Faster than we can see who is Going to be here, who the violence will leave Unclear, who unafraid; The street scale without moving I could talk across A line of words as easily as walk To hand some of the first fresh ripe Tomatoes I’d hosed clean because I know You’re going to bite into one right there Your way to let me know you think I know How to live across the street

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wS T O R Y

The Act 3 Adam Haslett

he boy grows up in Toledo in the fifties, where his father works at the tire plant and for the union as a shop steward. He does well in school, studies hard, and on the advice of a teacher applies to a bunch of small, East Coast schools. His father thinks he should go to Ohio University or maybe Michigan. They fight about it, but not much, because when it comes down to it, his father is proud of how well his son has done, and he trusts his wife, who says these other places will give the boy more opportunities. For the first time, his father skips the Labor Day parade and spends that weekend driving his son eleven hours to the campus and helping him move into his dorm room. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much

L E W I S KO C H

to say to each other on the drive or across the table of the various diners they eat in, nor as they arrive at the college. Most of the other kids have come with both parents and more belongings. They are polite to the boy and his father in a way neither of them is used to, more like salespeople at a fancy department store than neighbors. Inevitably, the boy is eager for his father to leave, to get the awkwardness over with, and his father feels much the same. They shake hands in the parking lot, and the boy promises to phone his mother on Sundays. As heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unpacking in his room, the boy hears a knock at the door and looks up to see his dad. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something I meant to say, he The

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w Leaning in close, the man says, I want to tell you something. Can you hear me? His father nods. I’m a ball-buster, he says. I break up union contracts. I’ve been doing it for years.

9 says, his arms crossed over his barrel chest. Before I head off. I’m not leaning on you to study one thing or another, you can do whatever draws you, you’ll be fine at it. It doesn’t matter if I don’t understand it. But one thing. Whatever this place gives you, he said, indicating with a slow nod of the head the room, the view out the window, the campus beyond, wherever you end up, don’t work for the ballbusters. There’s decent management, you’d probably be good at it, you’re smart. I’m not saying don’t go into an office. I’m just saying, remember what brought you here. Okay, the boy says, amazed to hear his father speak at such length. All right, then, his father says, good luck.

he boy excels at college, studies philosophy and literature, and is told by a professor he should go on to graduate school. He’s tempted. The play of concepts gives him pleasure. His parents don’t object, they just don’t say much about it when he floats the idea, as if he’s announcing that he’s moving to another continent, one they’re unlikely to visit. He ponders the possibility for a long time. Despite the enjoyment they give, there is something about the immateriality of ideas and novels that seems too abstract to him. Too impractical. They seem to lack consequence. In the end, he decides to go to law school instead, where he figures writing and thinking can be turned into more useful things. When he tells his mother, she is delighted, as he knew she would be. His father he doesn’t speak to much anymore, other than the brief hellos and how-are-yous when he happens to answer the phone. 80 1 The Baffler [no.23]

After graduating, he’s offered a position at a firm in Philadelphia, and a few years later he marries a young woman who works in one of the curatorial departments at the museum. They buy a small house near the train station in Bryn Mawr and wait several years before having their first child, a boy, whom they name Gabriel. As a senior associate, the man, now in his thirties, works on mergers and acquisitions. This is in the mid-eighties, when hostile takeovers are becoming more frequent. Often, the client’s goal is to acquire a struggling company and sell its parts for a profit, dissolving it in the process. Among the things that complicate the deal are labor contracts that the target company may have with unionized employees. The man’s under no illusion about what’s happened: he’s participating, more or less directly, in the one thing his father asked him not to do. His parents have moved out of the city of Toledo by now, to a suburb, and he takes his family to visit them twice a year, once in the summer and once at Christmas. His wife is the one who knows the position he’s in, and whenever they discuss it, which is not often, they decide that all in all the best course is not to say anything to his parents about it. What would be the point? What he does has no immediate bearing on his father, who’s now retired and whose pension and benefits are secure. But it eats at him, and one Christmas, when his own son is already ten, the man tells his mother about the nature of his work. The two of them are standing in the kitchen at the end of the night after his father has already gone upstairs to bed. She is silent for

a time, as she wipes down the counters. She hangs the dishcloth on the door of the oven to dry and without raising her eyes from the stovetop says, for his sake, I’m asking you, don’t ever tell him that. He’s proud of you, even if he doesn’t say it. You should hear him talking to his friends. Never tell him this. You understand? And so he doesn’t. His son Gabriel decides to go to the same East Coast college that the man did, and on the Labor Day weekend of his first semester, the man drives him to his dorm and helps him move his belongings in. Though the campus is much the same, everything else is different. There is no silence in the car. He and Gabriel, both Democrats, are political junkies, and it’s a presidential campaign year. They devour and dissect poll numbers like box scores. His son wants to study political science and run campaigns. And when they’re not talking about politics his son tells him other things, about girls, about insecurities he harbors about his looks, intrigues with high school friends going off to other schools. And the man describes to him what his first year in college was like and what his son has to look forward to. When the time comes to leave, he gives no speech and they don’t shake hands. They just hug for a good, long time, and less than half an hour after he’s back on the road, Gabriel is already texting him to report the latest numbers from Iowa. A few months later the man gets a call from his mother saying that his father, who already has emphysema and a heart condition, has gone into the hospital with severe pneumonia. He flies from Philadelphia to Toledo the next day and is at his father’s bedside by late afternoon. His father lies by the window, separated by a nylon curtain from a softly groaning man well into senility. Clear plastic tubes run from his nostrils, and his mouth and nose are covered by an oxygen mask. He hasn’t been shaved in several days,

and because the man has never seen his father with a beard, it is the gray hair on his face more than the medical devices that make him appear weakened and forlorn. The room smells of bleach and urine and the half-eaten cheese sandwich on the tray suspended over the bed. His father pulls his mask aside to grunt hello but immediately begins to cough, and the man tells him to replace it. On the muted television mounted to the ceiling a fake judge presides over two hapless litigants. The man knows that this will be his last visit home to see his father. He takes the food tray out into the hall to get rid of the odor and at the nurses’ station finds a copy of the local paper. The fortunes of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Indians have for years been the stuff of his brief exchanges with his father at the holidays or before the phone is passed off to his mother. He suspects that these days his father, like himself, pays only enough attention to the teams’ progress to allow for these fleeting conversational moments. Sitting in the plastic chair between the bed and window, he reads aloud an article describing the Cavs’ win the previous night over the Celtics. His father raises one eyebrow and nods. He reads the next article about their latest draft pick and then the commentator’s column complaining about the coach, and by the time he is done he is genuinely interested, not to mention relieved at the transport into a familiar, closed universe. When it comes time for him to leave, his father gives his hand a squeeze, and reaches his other hand up to clasp his forearm. I’ll be back tomorrow, the man says, I’m not going anywhere. The next day his father is worse. The IV antibiotics are not enough. His lungs are filling with fluid. His mother comes to the hospital along with his father’s younger sister, whose two children also come and go. Standing vigil, shuttling people between the house and the hospital, going to the store to buy the The

Baffler [no.23] ! 81

w small items his mother requests for his father’s last comforts, an anxiety begins to grow in the man that he will never get to see his father on his own again. That he will slip away too soon, while everyone is there. The thought quickly obsesses him. He cannot let this happen. When his aunt suggests she and his mother get dinner outside the hospital, the man sees his chance and importunes his mother to go. The nurses switch shifts, and soon his father’s gruel of a dinner is served. Now that everyone has gone the anxiety has been replaced by concentration on the act. He removes his father’s mask and helps him take small bites of the chicken in brown sauce. Wiping the leavings from his whiskers, he places the mask back over his mouth and nose. Leaning in close, speaking directly into his father’s ear, the man says, I want to tell you something. Can you hear me? His father nods. I’m a ball-buster, he says. I break up union contracts. I’ve been doing it for years. I’m good at it. I’ve invented new ways to do it. It’s how I bought my house. It’s what we raised Gabriel with. I wanted you to know. Before you die. Close as he is to his father’s head, he can see the ropy vein running down his temple distend with blood and start to pulse. Despite his pallor, red blooms on his wrinkled cheek. He tries to mutter a response but it ends as another cough into his mask. Watching this, the man feels giddy as a boy in a store stealing for the first time, all his senses heightened, light-headed to the point of fainting, his victory against the world invisible and immense. He leaves the hospital that evening in a state of great calm. Around dawn, his father’s heart gives out. When the phone rings back at the house, his mother takes the call. From under the door of the bedroom he slept in as a child, he can hear her crying. The service is held at their old church in Toledo. His father is buried two blocks from the old house, just up the road from the shuttered tire plant. 82 1 The Baffler [no.23]

hen Gabriel graduates from college, he volunteers for a congressional campaign and then gets a paid position in a gubernatorial race. After a few years he has worked his way up to being the field director for a primary candidate in New Hampshire. The man speaks to him two or three times a week about how the race is progressing, about polls and get-out-the-vote infrastructure and what it’s like to work seven days a week. The man organizes a fundraiser for the candidate at his law firm, and his son comes down to speak at the event. When he goes up to New Hampshire on the last weekend of the race to volunteer, he’s happy to let his son hand him instructions and tell him what to do. And when the candidate loses, the man spends hours on the phone counseling his son, comforting him, talking through what he should do next, encouraging his desire to keep going in such an uncertain field. He’s able to watch with pride as, over time, his son gains a reputation for being a skilled organizer and political staffer, eventually going to work for a senator in Washington. Though he and his longtime girlfriend do not marry, she becomes a member of the family, and the four of them take vacations together at least once every other year. The man is a partner now at his law firm. He still works on cases but spends more of his time assuaging the worries of clients and cultivating new ones than drafting the details of merger agreements. When he visits his mother and they go to place flowers on his father’s grave, he barely recalls his last moment in the hospital with him, so far in the past it already seems. When his mother dies she is buried in the plot that has been awaiting her beside her husband. The house and most of its contents are promptly sold. The man and his wife are enthusiastic runners and have been since they were first married. They belong to their local club,

The room smells of bleach and urine and the half-eaten cheese sandwich on the tray suspended over the bed.

9 attend races up and down the East Coast, and do at least five kilometers each morning before breakfast. They have brought Gabriel up to run as well, and though he’s stuck with it, he’s not as fanatical about it as they are. Nonetheless, he and his girlfriend agree to take a vacation in Hawaii, where his parents plan to run a half-marathon. They arrange to spend a week together beforehand on one of the smaller islands. It drizzles for much of the week, and the running is treacherous. On the first pleasant day, the man asks Gabriel to run with him, and the two of them head up a muddy track behind their rented house onto a winding road that extends to the far side of the island. Soon they have their windbreakers tied around their waists and are enjoying the uninterrupted view of the ocean. They come to a turnoff for a path that leads steeply up the hill, skipping to a higher section of the road. Breathing heavily, Gabriel stops, leans his hands down on his thighs and shakes his head. I can’t, he says. You go. Come on, the man says, it’s just a few hundred yards. He’s still jogging in place. He taps Gabriel on the back. Come on. They start up the stony path rutted by the rains and crisscrossed with the exposed roots of trees, eyeing the ground carefully as they go, both of them huffing now. It’s just as he looks up to see the opening in the vegetation where the path rejoins the road that the man feels the contraction in his chest, as if an invisible hand that had rested open inside him all these years had suddenly clenched into a fist. He opens his mouth to call out, but no sound comes. Then he is tripping, his shoulder and thigh meeting the

ground with terrifying speed, his head smashing against the embankment. The world vanishes from sight. He hears the bellow of his breath and water rushing down the creek. When his vision returns he is staring upward, where the blinding noonday sun is erasing the tops of the trees, forcing him to look away into the fern-covered bank opposite, where birdsong fills the shadows, giving shape to the damp, echoing air. The fist in his chest grips tighter, sucking more breath from his lungs. His son’s face appears above him. He is speaking too fast for the man to understand him. Gabriel reaches his hand down and brushes the side of his father’s head, and when he retracts it, the man can see blood smeared across his fingers and palm. His son takes off his T-shirt and uses it to wipe away the blood and dirt. He looks terribly, terribly young as he does this, and it occurs to the man that his son has never contemplated the world without him. He is saying that he needs to get an ambulance, that he is going to run back to the house and call one. The man knows that this is futile. They are on a small island. His life is out of their hands. He holds on to his son’s wrist, keeping him kneeling there on the dirt path. Now is the moment, he thinks. Staring into Gabriel’s face, he awaits his condemnation. He needs it to come soon. The hand in his chest is constricting the pumping of his heart. Yet Gabriel says nothing as he folds his windbreaker into a pillow and places it beneath his father’s head. There is only care in his eyes. And then the moment is gone and the man is released, unpunished and unseen, into the realm of the dead. t The

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Street Legal The national security state comes home 3 Chris Br ay

n the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities weren’t locked down, armored personnel carriers with police logos didn’t rumble in, and SWAT teams in combat uniforms and body armor didn’t storm through the suburbs for a loosely ordered set of (ultimately hapless) house-tohouse searches. Somehow, though, 2013 was the year it became appropriate to close cities, turning off taxis, buses, and trains and telling residents that the governor was suggesting— okay, strongly suggesting—that they not leave their homes until the police said so. One of those familiar moments in which officials ask the public to be on the lookout turned into a remarkable new moment in which officials ask the public to cease to exist in its public form so that the police can have the streets. And you’d better believe they had the streets. News photographs showed Boston emptied like the opening reel of The Last Man on Earth. The quaint idea that cities can be made safe by sharing public burdens in public space—by, in Jane Jacobs’s words, neighborly “eyes on the street”—vanished into an annihilated space in which the only players with a role in the maintenance of order were the mandarinate that makes social control its profession: the helicopters flying overhead, the military police conducting block-by-block

inspections, and the local media relaying their instructions.* Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described modern bureaucratic culture as a “garden culture,” a system of behavioral expectations that aims to make tidy flowerbeds of human societies: “It defines itself . . . through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order.” Pulling weeds, the bureaucracies of the modern order are restrained by “the pluralism of the human world,” that great enemy of order. How routine it felt—how uncontested it was—when the pluralism of the human world was simply told to go indoors until further notice.

A New England Democratic governor and Democratic mayor turned metropolitan Boston into cop Disneyland.

9 The disease of police militarization is usually diagnosed as a pathology of the political right: born in Richard Nixon’s hippie-loathing heart, nurtured by Ed Meese and Co. in the Reagan years, delivered from adolescence into the full blossom of adulthood during the Cheney administration. For years, liberalminded journalists have mocked the cartoonish sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, a far-right yahoo so beyond redemption that he

* The surviving member of the brotherly duo alleged to have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings was discovered out-

side the search perimeter after police lifted the lockdown and allowed residents of Watertown to go outside again. Leaving his house, a neighbor quickly spotted the person the police had been unable to locate, hunkered down in a boat stored in his backyard. Ordinary people are effective observers of their personal environments, when permitted to view them.

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M A R K S . FI S H E R

The

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We’re trying to figure out what has gone so badly wrong with our criminal justice system. Didn’t it used to work? Didn’t it used to be fair and reasonable? It didn’t.

9 polices his jurisdiction with an armored personnel carrier. And look how the right-wing project came to fruition this year, as a New England Democratic governor and Democratic mayor turned metropolitan Boston into cop Disneyland. Spot the place of the political right in the following sentence: Cambridge, Massachusetts, was locked down and filled with police and military personnel dressed for combat, a set of actions that occurred under the executive authority of governor Deval Patrick. And here you thought Americans were divided by their differences.

This Weak Man Touring the South in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal found that law enforcement had split from criminal justice and that the role of a policeman was to enforce racial “caste rules” imperfectly reflected in statutory formalities: It is demanded that even minor transgressions of caste etiquette should be punished, and the policeman is delegated to carry out this function. Because of this sanction from the police, the caste order of the South, and even the local variations of social custom, become extensions of the law. To enable the policeman to carry out this function, the courts are supposed to back him even when he proceeds far outside normal police activity. His word must be taken against

Negroes without regard for formal legal rules of evidence.

“This weak man,” is how Myrdal described the Southern cop, “with his strong weapons.” Social disease piled up behind the screen of the police badge, hiding power and hatred and repression in the act of keeping the peace. Cops were the principal armed component of power in a society structured by race.* We’re trying to figure out what has gone so badly wrong with our criminal justice system. Didn’t it used to work? Didn’t it used to be fair and reasonable? It didn’t. We have new forms of injustice and excess, so we think the injustice and excess themselves are entirely new. Our strong weapons remain in weak hands. Large and foundational pieces of our criminal justice system constitute an internal security regime that regards policing as being little different from war-making. “The Justice Department is not a domestic agency,” attorney general William French Smith said in a cabinet meeting shortly after taking his place in the Reagan administration. “It is the internal arm of the national defense.” National defense is everything, and everything is national defense. Childhood obesity, Michelle Obama explains, is a “national security threat.” Federal deficits, Hillary Clinton reveals, are a “national security threat.” Melting icebergs?

* The Federal Bureau of Investigation, that great Cold War apparatus of repressive and politicized state security, blossomed

into full flower from the progressive high point of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as president. The emergence of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, writes the historian Claire Potter, “required structural reforms and cultural interventions that reflected and reinforced other types of political consolidation during the New Deal. Recasting the federal government as inherently moral and good policing as a central democratic value, Hoover’s campaigns against kidnappers and bank robbers produced political narratives that articulated the benefits of an interventionist state.”

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Dissent and resistance are blown away in a light breeze of official announcement.

M A R K S . FI S H E R

“Does Global Warming Compromise National Security?” Time magazine asks. (You’ll never guess the answer.) With pervasive national security consciousness comes a metastasizing national security elite. No one has yet charted its entire form and substance, but many have seen its outlines coming. Early in World War II, for example, political scientist Harold Lasswell predicted the emergence of the “garrison state,” a “world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.” Residents of Boston and Watertown are to be forgiven for thinking Lasswell wholly correct. But his scenario missed the reality of what eventually happened: his predicted “abolition of ‘the unemployed’” in the service of total state mobilization, for example, seems bitterly funny under current conditions. Still, some form of the garrison state has come into being, even if it looks different from Lasswell’s. It’s now streamlined into a highly specialized, technical, data-driven form of expertise—as disconnected from criminal justice as any Southern cop back in the bad old days. These specialists exert their power via big

data, connecting National Security Agency product to the latest kill list and subpoenaed email messages to whistleblower prosecutions. Information is their weapon. A reporter who receives classified information from a government employee about the North Korean nuclear weapons program may have his email account searched as a “coconspirator,” an unindicted criminal who warrants a fullexistence pat down, and, like the Jim Crow courts in the South of yesteryear, our ultramodern courts will back it. The NSA is putting the finishing touches on a million-square-foot data center in Utah, merely the latest of its many and powerful facilities. Military and intelligence officials speak openly of the decades of war still ahead of us. Everything, sooner or later, will come down to data. And so the professional instinct to seek total control of information shows up in the disproportionately aggressive prosecutions of Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning, two young men who shared the unfortunate-for-the-historical-moment belief that information should be free. After allegedly forwarding piles of classified government material to WikiLeaks, Manning was arrested and held for a punitive pretrial detention period of three years before his trial finally began in early June. Swartz, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-six, faced federal charges that could have led to decades in prison—for downloading articles from JSTOR, a database of academic research articles, shortly before JSTOR decided to make 4.5 million of those articles available online for free to nonsubscribers. Neither Manning nor Swartz destroyed The

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Hi g h Lo w W a s h i n g t o n The contest between the centralization and decentralization of information is the real culture war of our moment.

9 anything; Swartz, a Harvard research fellow with authorized access to the database he supposedly plundered, can barely be alleged to have committed a theft. But they released information, and they gestured at the social and political meaning of the act in ways that left a distinct professional chill in the government’s spine. To possess data is to possess power; to give information away is to deplete power. My god, don’t you know we’re at war? Twentieth-century state power, the thing that administered society from central offices and hierarchically arranged regional hubs via a system of top-down memoranda implemented by credentialed, professional middle-class managers, is today faced with the apparently disintermediating effects of a new century’s technology. Distributed action, fractured and scattered communication: a world that resists regulation. So government wants to capture all of it, wants to consolidate its fractured and scattered currency of power, wants every train from every scattered line to transit a central depot. This contest between the centralization and decentralization of information is the real culture war of our moment. This is why Bradley Manning was stripped naked and kept in solitary confinement: he represents a guerrilla victory in an existential war for status. “Once effectively dehumanized, and hence cancelled as potential subjects of moral demands,” the sociologist Bauman wrote, “human objects of bureaucratic taskperformance are viewed with ethical indifference, which soon turns into disapprobation and censure when their resistance, or lack of co-operation, slows down the smooth flow of bureaucratic routine.” Manning and Swartz 88 1 The Baffler [no.23]

dispersed accumulated power, deliberately, as a matter of principle, while organizations like the NSA are trying to hoard it for future use. This is also why Edward Snowden is a traitor and a criminal: he publicly identified actual state actions, a dreadful offense against the industry that wrote his paychecks. Tellingly, Snowden worked not at the NSA but at Booz Allen, a piece of the shadow state embodied in corporate power. In the wake of Snowden’s leaks, the news media leapt into its usual dismal role, working to provide all of the really important information. Why is Snowden such a bad person? What’s wrong with Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and activist who was Snowden’s contact at the Guardian? Is it bad for individuals to reveal the projects of state power, or is it unspeakable? But a few stories hinted at the outlines of our burgeoning reality, describing telecom and Internet companies as active partners in an exchange with government rather than mere victims of bureaucratic overreach. An employee of Booz Allen showed us, at least in outline, the intimate connections between the security state and its adjuncts in what we quaintly refer to as the “private sector.” That’s treason. Patriots don’t interfere with healthy business relationships.

A Man’s Home is His Caste Two recent books have tried to explain different pieces of these developments in state power: Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (2009) and Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, released this summer. Both are important

Obama pantomimes dissent from his own power, gesturing against the choices he continues to make.

M A R K S . FI S H E R

efforts by exceptionally admirable people.* Both offer sharp-eyed description—but also end with magical prescriptions, as if to demonstrate what happens when decent people try to understand indecency. Federal prosecutors use increasingly obscure federal laws in increasingly opaque and unfair ways, bringing criminal charges against people who never intended to act criminally or never realized they were committing criminal acts. The examples are so plentiful and the narrative so thorough as to become tedious: one outrage, and another, and another, and fifty more. Physicians, for example, find themselves targeted as drug dealers, especially for treating patients who experience chronic pain, as the Drug Enforcement Administration second-guesses clinical decisions. The classification of drugs into schedules, the

product of federal legislation passed in 1970, was supposed to build clear lists of harmful narcotics and beneficial medications. “Such, however, turned out not to be the case,” according to Silverglate. “Instead of achieving a medically-rooted balance, the feds drew an arbitrary line between what they believed to be the appropriate medical administration of pain-killing drugs versus ‘drug dealing’ by physicians.” And then comes the important part: “Worse, the regulatory language made it virtually impossible for even the most responsible pain specialist to discern when he or she crossed the line into an area the DEA would consider akin to ‘street dealing.’” So a federal agency declined to establish clear limits on its own power. Obscurity of rules is a bureaucrat’s freedom; arbitrary authority is unbounded. For a government to say plainly what actions will lead to criminal charges would be to simultaneously designate those acts it won’t punish. It’s a choice that costs an organization something to make, but nothing to avoid. Actually, it’s a choice that it pays a bureaucracy to evade: draw a line that only you can see, and then you can never be the one who gets caught crossing it. Like Silverglate, Balko exhausts his topic, describing in great detail outrages that come to feel endless. “In Riverside, California, police staged fourteen simultaneous raids over a two-and-a-half block area,” goes a typical

* Silverglate is a criminal defense lawyer in Boston, directly involved in long personal efforts against overly aggressive federal prosecutors. Balko, a libertarian journalist and former Cato fellow, has spent years of his life digging into police militarization and (in particular) Mississippi’s dismal justice system. The

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Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz dispersed accumulated power, deliberately, as a matter of principle, while organizations like the NSA are trying to hoard it for future use.

9 story that ends with a multijurisdictional cluster of SWAT teams finding “very little contraband.” Half-assed investigation leads to insane acts of official violence; in this case, “fifty-year-old Richard Sears and his wife Sandra woke up to flash-bang grenades and armed men in their bedroom.” Disoriented and shocked awake, Richard Sears “resisted and was repeatedly struck in the face with the butt of a rifle.” Sensibly running from explosions, Sandra Sears “was pulled back into the room and thrown to the floor.” The story ends with criminal charges being dropped and police admitting that the couple “had done nothing wrong.” Then it’s on to the next paragraph, which describes a police officer shooting an unarmed man in the back because he thought a police flash-bang grenade was a gunshot. Next paragraph: panicked cops shoot a colleague in the back of the head; the officer who dies had “himself shot an unarmed, fleeing suspect during a drug raid in 1982.” And so on. And then the benefits: police officers raid a trailer outside a truck stop in rural California, with a pair of SWAT teams that “swarmed the building as part of a predawn drug raid.” The sleeping occupant of the trailer, a truck stop employee named Richard Elsass, who woke to the sound of breaking windows, shot and killed one of the black-clad men storming into his trailer in the dark—prompting the other officers to pour gunfire through the walls. “The police found no drugs in Elsass’s trailer,” Balko writes, “nor any evidence linking him to a drug crime.” A police investigation quickly cleared the officers of wrongdoing. Drug warriors, the police had followed the rules of the 90 1 The Baffler [no.23]

battlefield. “The police conducted a violent, volatile drug raid on the home of an innocent man, killed him, and got one of their own killed in the process,” Balko concludes. “Yet by their own measure, they followed all the proper procedures, and nothing about those procedures needed to be changed. The inescapable conclusion: raiding and killing innocent people is an acceptable outcome of drug policing.” Official acts are presumed proper. If proper procedures are followed, no culpability attaches. And the procedures are always proper, because if they’re not, then new ones will be invented to make them so. See? Balko notices how criminal justice turns into national security, linking the “policies, rhetoric, and mind-set of the Reagan-Bush all-out antidrug blitzkrieg” (for example) to a 1989 poll that showed the willingness of sizable American majorities to surrender “a few of the freedoms we have in this country if it meant we could reduce the amount of illegal drug use.” Silverglate similarly acknowledges the willingness of a credulous public to perceive outrageous federal prosecutions as bold efforts against some “dire threat to the nation.” But then both authors, moving from problems to solutions, veer into magical thinking. “Testimony and sentencing deals must be scrutinized by an independent press, not by Fourth Estate lackeys,” writes Silverglate, as if that outcome can be attained by wanting it. With similar implausibility, Balko suggests that politicians should “be held accountable when they use war rhetoric to discuss crime and illicit drugs.” How? As illustrated by the

Draw a line that only you can see, and then you can never be the one who gets caught crossing it.

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poll Balko cites, large majorities have no idea what you’re talking about when you say politicians should be held accountable for talking about a war on drugs and crime, or that police should be held accountable for conducting it. “But it’s still rather remarkable,” Balko writes, that “domestic police officers” are “breaking into homes and killing dogs over pot. They’re subjecting homes and businesses to commando raids for white-collar and even regulatory offenses, and there’s barely been any opposition or concern from anyone in Congress, any governor, or any mayor of a sizable city.”

Resistance is Futile Police power in the Jim Crow South followed the dominant assumptions of time and place, and the courts threw their weight behind it even when the results fell “far outside normal police activity,” as Myrdal wrote. Now the NSA builds a million-square-foot data center so it can store all of your email messages, prosecutors design questionable criminal charges

from the hazy material of statutes carefully structured to hide their purpose and scope, and Private Bradley Manning is a dire threat to national security. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, something close to the bluest and reddest politicians in the country, agree on the utility of armored personnel carriers in domestic policing. Dissent and resistance are blown away in a light breeze of official announcement. Sometimes resistance gets a voice, in brief and empty interruptions to the bigger story. Barack Obama, for example, gave a speech in May in which he announced that he is “insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability” for the use of deadly force against suspected terrorists; that framework, he explained, “is now codified in presidential policy guidance that I signed yesterday”— that is, five years into his presidency. The president orders drone strikes, but regrets them; commands a military that detains prisoners indefinitely, but feels sorrow over that ongoing act; controls armed forces that candidly go on planning for decades of continuous war, but warns that “perpetual war— through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments—will prove self-defeating.” He pantomimes dissent from his own power, gesturing against the choices he continues to make. Someone should really do something about this unrestrained national security state, says the current president of the United States. Give him credit for believing any of it, but don’t expect his words to be made real. These weak men with their strong weapons: they are always with us. t The

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My Daughter Night Terrors the State 3 Fa r id M at u k yes moneys and birds settle by night in what formations on the lake the roofs replaced leaves the hail brought down flake in the sun and winds push and mound them into berms there is no color in straw but fuel in nerves my leg shakes and big planters hold trees outside the stately houses around the water I can make my bad teeth better and hang a little gold at your wrist and my system-loving heart says our song will change at each new economy who doesn’t wake glad to remain an owner? whiteness a property of legal rights you slept through the night in a house that stands we are far from wars and our papers are filed with the state we can hike up in the mountain see the ancient pyramid above the valley of Tepoztlán honored a tax collector bureaucracies precede us there’s a tribe somewhere we say of whites trade in fear even their names such a stab at beauty that you should assume they know our histories our books our sayings and tones whites trade in fear so scare them sudden drop of the floor when I’m far from you and too such a picking at the earth’s curved surface and all laid on it that I am to hold a space and from it project the gaze you’ve trained in me onto the back sides of docking bays brake places parking lots and turnabouts and above them the sky a bigger more respectable more competent friend love collects at the run-off of this valley your mother says rides like a Cadillac maybe an aesthetic theory two dogs same caramel color off-leashed to chase and echo one another in the green patch by the metro stop gold embossed grass threaded streets can I be in that picture one day with you? 92 1 The Baffler [no.23]

return to a room with sadness made crystal touches us on the thigh in a brotherly way quickening flashes of teeth as the people in the video are about to come or you can tell our architect what color glass for the office tower low clouds reflected advance into their next sky next weather let’s say our right to pleasure is a withholding as a president lies in state do you wake in state as a medium screaming for all of us? I carry no one in my eyes only a path I don’t know to where you can stretch your finitude a little I can be your thing you scream you want in your terror to bite my mouth “right side up with care” Henry “Box” Brown’s Mirror of Slavery panorama show interrupted the magisterial fields the hills muscular the valleys with char with effects black bodies used up Marina Abramović’s heroics a magisterial emptying out I don’t trust Henry’s fields give the lie to performance there is a tribe somewhere people say fear because it feeds them the gull by night wheels round its technology for falling such a handling stuns the thing is not gentle to its otherness be thou gentle to your animal my finest sculptors to shape a woman Guanshiyin means observing the sounds of the world glaze her hand and leave it loose to turn or withhold and call it a figure for compassion the sun comes up through the city trees a thing wastes not want what to do with a woman’s form whose labia are pierced and stretched her pubic hair to be burned breasts in vices and the men who punch their own nuts and women who press heels into scrotums on my computer all civilians of the state trying to outpace their likenesses sell the shadow or Henry who made the thing in which to hide then left it on the stage The

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Good Enough for Government Work Conservatism in the tank 3 Jim Newell

hen Sen. Jim DeMint, the upper chamber’s godfather of Tea Party nihilism, abruptly announced his retirement from his lawmaking career and his plans to take over as president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the consensus in Washington was that this was a step down for a guy who had never done all that much in the first place. For goodness’ sake, the pundits wailed, what legacy does this man think he’s leaving behind? What authorship can he claim for any significant—or, for that matter, trivial or failed—piece of legislation? He must be going from do-nothing legislator, the thinking went, to a sinecure outside the official branches of power purely for the money. The money! What a useless person that Jim DeMint is, and ever shall be. So far as it goes, this appraisal of DeMint’s legacy is accurate enough—he’s the sort of lawmaking mediocrity who makes, say, Montana’s onetime senator-cum-Abramoff-bagman Conrad Burns look like Daniel Webster. But measuring DeMint’s career move on the usual Washington grid of legislative achievement also completely misses the point. Just consider, in this regard, the verdict of—yes—the Heritage Foundation. According to Heritage Action for America’s first-ever legislative scorecard, released in August 2011, DeMint was the finest legislator in the federal government that year. “Heritage Action’s legislative scorecard isn’t graded on a curve—it is tough and we don’t apologize,” the new advocacy group, spun off from the Heritage Foundation proper, explained. “After all, we are

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conservatives, not tenured university professors.” Heh, indeed—and behold the ambitious sweep of the grading curve: With each vote cast in Congress, freedom either advances or recedes. Heritage Action’s new legislative scorecard allows Americans to see whether their Members of Congress are fighting for freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society. The scorecard is comprehensive, covering the full spectrum of conservatism, and includes legislative action on issues both large and small.

Jim DeMint scored a 99 percent on this proudly nonacademic report card, just edging out one of his Tea Party protégés, freshman Utah Sen. Mike Lee. Rounding out the top ten were DeMint’s other pupils, who similarly voted against most everything that had any chance of going anywhere that year. The whole curious DeMint affair bespeaks the ongoing shift of power in Washington away from the people’s business—and toward the ideological donor class. Heritage’s new advocacy shop, Heritage Action, brings the organization the sort of power that Washington’s predominant think tanks never previously considered theirs to wield: that of enforcing conservative ideological orthodoxy among lawmakers. Instead of handing them conservative policy research to inform decision-making, it’s issuing scorecards that gauge lawmakers’ ideological fealty to pet conservative causes—and ensuring that these scores get circulated far and wide among the powerful donors behind the conservative

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

Welcome to the new incarnation of the “think tank” world, over which Jim DeMint—its ideal-type avatar—now presides.

9 movement. While technically separated from its ideological parents at the Heritage Foundation by its 501(c)(4) status, Heritage Action “seeks to convert the think tank’s more than 700,000 members into a potent political force,” according to an admiring notice in the National Review. As outgoing Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner described

Heritage’s two wings upon Heritage Action’s conception—riffing on a Ronald Reagan quotation—“The Heritage Foundation makes [politicians] see the light, Heritage Action makes them feel the heat.” Welcome to the new incarnation of the “think tank” world, over which Jim DeMint— its ideal-type avatar—now presides. Instead of The

Baffler [no.23] ! 95

Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n letting scholars of various shades of true believership study what interests them without predetermined conclusions, think tanks are now expected to formulate new ways to echo one or another approved ideological dogma— and then marshal lawmakers, none too subtly, to march in lockstep behind it. DeMint, a top advocate of banning earmarks and other parliamentary tools that might actually induce a fence-sitting lawmaker to vote for something, now sits atop a stockpile of direct-mailsolicited cash overseeing all legislative action, demanding constant “no” votes and signatures on petitions for actions that will never materialize, running scary ads, and sending stern email “alerts” back home to those who dare to defy DeMint and the movement he manages. In other words, to consider DeMint’s legacy simply because he’s exiting the Senate after eight years is silly, when he’s just beginning to craft it, finally, from a position of actual power.

Right Thinking The thing about modern think tanks, or advocacy organizations, pressure groups, whatever you call them now—the line has been blurred enough by this point to send IRS investigators into panic attacks as they try to determine a group’s taxable status—is how cheap and reproducible they’ve become. Lawmakers frequently grumble about the need to spur twenty-first-century entrepreneurship in our economy, and in the think tank sector, all by itself, we find a true American success story. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s most recent Global Go-To Think Tanks Rankings report, as explained by former George W. Bush policy aide Tevi Troy, the number of think tanks has grown “from about 45 after the Second World War to about 1,800 today, including nearly 400 in the Washington, D.C., area alone.” Wherever a federal, state, municipal, or company-level policy decision is to be made nowadays, a think tank is there to offer its opinion. 96 1 The Baffler [no.23]

But don’t worry, prospective think tank entrepreneurs: not all of them have to be good, long-lasting, creative, or thoughtful. Consider the example of Bill Kristol, the neoconservative operative who edits The Weekly Standard but moonlights as a developer of insta-thinktanks filled out with half-employed partisan policy veterans. Kristol works in creating rickety, fly-by-night think tanks the way a prolific impressionist might toss off a series of gauzy pastel watercolors. Reporter Jason Zengerle, writing in The New Republic, notes that Kristol “may in fact be the most talented political operative of his generation,” touting not only his accomplishments in helping to quash Hillary Clinton’s 1993 health care reform proposal and advocating successfully for the arbitrary killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but also his “methods.” Kristol, Zengerle writes, specializes in “cooking up conservative think tanks that churn out pseudo-intellectual arguments to serve the GOP’s immediate political interests.” Over the years, Kristol’s projects have included the Project for the Republican Future, the Project for the New American Century, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and, more recently, e21, a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to economic research and innovative public policies for the 21st century” that, in Zengerle’s words, “turns out to be nothing more than a political pressure group.” Perhaps the focus on “economic research and innovative public policies” may be new in its domestic mission, as opposed to most of Kristol’s work, which involves getting lawmakers to bomb whatever country in the Middle East is next on the list. But whatever policy area they’re customized to mine, all of Kristol’s organizations, after half a second of inspection, turn out to be nothing more than political pressure groups. You may be noticing that most of these think tank/advocacy/pressure/message organizations land on the conservative side of the

Bill Kristol works in creating rickety, fly-by-night think tanks the way a prolific impressionist might toss off a series of gauzy pastel watercolors.

9 political spectrum. Liberals, as we’ll explain in a bit, have tried to catch up in the last decade. But the American think tank explosion over the last forty years mostly served as a means for conservatives to move their historically outsider views to a place of influence within Washington circles. The oldest generation of established think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a handful of others that are nearing their centennial anniversaries, thought of themselves as nonideological “universities without students” that offered Washington crash pads for academics to guide lawmakers through the array of complex policy issues suddenly facing the new American empire. Members of Congress and their staffs needed help, mostly to avoid sounding stupid on important subjects, and these institutes were there to provide them with the necessary white papers. To the nascent conservative movement, however, this nonpartisan, “nonideological” view was precisely the problem. Because in the conservative mind, the consensus of the time—a liberal, Keynesian technocracy that readily availed itself of the machinery of government intervention—was itself the fierce ideology keeping the business community and its pet free-market prescriptions for social improvement out of the policy discussion. The first major conservative think tank erected to combat this liberal consensus was the American Enterprise Association, foundedin 1938 and now known as the American Enterprise Institute. According to scholar Jason Stahl of the University of Minnesota, who wrote his dissertation on the post-war growth of the conservative think tank, AEI’s lead-

ers were careful not to play up their privatesector origins at first, since a pro-business lineage was, oddly enough, a liability in Washington before the age of Reagan: AEI’s first well-known president, William Baroody, knew this liberal consensus discourse well and fully understood just how hard it would be to challenge this specific ideology in the early 1960s. Thus, when he became president of [the American Enterprise Association] in 1962, he immediately changed the name to the American Enterprise Institute so as to distance the think tank from any “business association” understandings while simultaneously adopting the more academic “Institute.” Baroody even went so far as to state to one of AEI’s fellows in 1962 that the “Institute does not press any particular policy position or even attempt to form, suggest, or support any particular policy position. The Institute does attempt to provide the research assistance which will bring to bear upon any policy consideration the most pertinent facts available and the most knowledgeable considerations by acknowledged authorities in the field.”

Karl Hess, a former Goldwaterite who would eventually wind up as a tax-dodging radical left-libertarian living off the barter system, worked at AEI in the early sixties. He described in one of his memoirs, Dear America, how the conservative think tank would operate below the level of overt advocacy. Calling AEI “the strongest intellectualeffort bastion of conservative thinking in all America,” Hess wrote: Month by month, Administration by Administration, the American Enterprise Institute, The

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What there was of a Left academy in the eighties gave up on policy to stick their thumbs up their asses and pursue useless niches of deconstructionism and identity theory.

9 through solid research, reliance on studies by the most respected authorities, and the most cautious, low-profile approach in all political influence—by all these ways, the American Enterprise Institute presses the conservative cause more effectively and persistently than any group in America and perhaps in the entire world.

This system of handing out conservativetinged research to legislators to do whatever they wanted with was a start, but it left the conservative movement craving greater influence. Fortunately for the harder-right advocacy set, the post-war liberal technocratic consensus spent the seventies in a period of crisis marked by stagflation, self-defeating unions, and collapsing profit margins: all the elements, in other words, for a coming-out party. And the event planner par excellence was the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973. “Heritage was a different breed of think tank,” Tevi Troy writes, “and augured the new direction in which such institutions were headed.” A far cry from its avowedly hands-off predecessors, Heritage tried explicitly to “formulate and promote conservative public policies,” as the organization’s mission statement put it. It sought not only to serve as a source of basic research and analysis but also to help drive the agenda on behalf of conservatives around the country. To that end, Heritage pursued direct-mail fundraising, a tactic more typical of political campaigns and mostly unheard of among think tanks at the time. It rightly considered itself as much an organ of the conservative movement as of 98 1 The Baffler [no.23]

the Washington intellectual world. During Ronald Reagan’s two terms, his administration adopted 60 percent of the more than two thousand policy proposals outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership.

A Despicable Vacuum But what of the liberals? Where were the liberal think tanks to offer a counterweight to their aggressive, activist conservative peers? Ha ha, the liberals were nowhere. The technocratic consensus collapsed, or at least stumbled along in hated zombie form for perpetuity. And this state of affairs—talk about stagflation!—freed up the strictly conservative “free-market” think tanks to continue currying access to their beloved savior, Ronald Reagan. What there was of a Left academy in the eighties sort of gave up on policy to stick their thumbs up their asses and pursue useless niches of deconstructionism and identity theory. In other words—and this may just square up with the layman’s observation—liberal economic policy as a force died in the seventies and eighties and never came back. (Too harsh? Well, then, riddle me this: See all that trade union power shaping our economic agenda today? Alright, then.) To recall just how badly liberalism was beaten in the eighties and how poor the prospects for its revival were at first, look at the first wave of activist Democratic think tanks that emerged in the eighties to combat creeping Reaganism. The Democratic Leadership Council was established during that era of three consecutive presidential defeats, to move the party away from post–New Deal

liberal orthodoxy and toward neoliberal, market-based, Wall Street–friendly solutions to social and economic problems. The DLC may have shuttered in 2011, but not after getting one of its former chairs, Bill Clinton, elected to the White House twice, and leaving a procorporate legacy in the party that plays no small role in the current president’s thinking. The second wave of activist Democratic think tanks came to be after George W. Bush’s election when, again, the party realized it was being systematically out-jousted by the array of conservative organizations working closely with the Republican Party to put its politicians in power. The Center for American Progress (CAP), started by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta and featuring a mix of old Clinton hands and future Obama policy aides, launched in 2003 with the aim of serving as a liberal version of the Heritage Foundation— seemingly forgetting that Heritage never

intended to be a conservative version of anything, but merely to win, over and over and over again. At places like CAP, AEI, Heritage, and many of the other approximately 1,812 American think tanks, policy studies are still part of the operation, but their most vital public role is to act as partisan hacks for whichever side of the major-party duopoly they’re associated with. And the conservative think tanks are now reliable dispensers of ideological discipline on the right: they do exactly what is best in the short term for the Republican Party at all times and punish anyone who dissents.

Purge, Rinse, Repeat During Obama’s presidency, the GOP’s strategy has been never to compromise or vote for anything and then to blame all the ensuing dysfunction on the president. When American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, wrote

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n in 2010 that Republicans should have cut a deal with Obama on health care reform, AEI president Arthur Brooks asked him to leave because donors were complaining. (Brooks got a rare dose of poetically just comeuppance, though, when it was revealed that a conversation with the AEI sachem was what inspired eventual 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney to ad lib so destructively before a group of Boca Raton fundraisers on the shiftless socialist leanings of the 47 percent of Americans who allegedly pay no income taxes.) Also in 2010, the Cato Institute, the top libertarian think tank in Washington that’s less partisan than others on the free-market right but is nevertheless the go-to place for perpetually trendy D.C. proposals such as Social Security privatization, fired two of its scholars known for developing a “liberaltarian” set of policy proposals designed to bridge the gap between the Left and libertarians. More recently, two of Cato’s four shareholders, industrial billionaires Charles and David Koch, attempted to reassert their control over the think tank for not doing enough to help elect Republicans in the 2012 campaign cycle. The Kochs’ remedy was the now-standard ploy in conservative think tank circles: pack the board with Republican Party operatives. Some libertarian purists blanched initially at the putsch, but soon enough, Cato’s new leaders brokered an accord in which the Kochs backed off—only after getting a new Cato president in place. And then, again, we have the new Heritage Foundation with its new wingnut president and new action-fund wing, all of which exists to punish legislators who so much as give an open-minded reading to a Democratic policy proposal. Keep in mind that when President Bush was in power, Heritage and AEI didn’t so much as lift a finger when Bush would do something heretical to apostles of free enterprise, such as distributing free prescription 100 1 The Baffler [no.23]

drugs at sticker cost to all seniors with no offsets in the federal budget. Occasionally, a dissenting voice like former Reagan economic adviser Bruce Bartlett would come along and point out, in book form, all the very non-conservative things the Bush administration was doing. But one scarcely needs to point out the sort of karma that such outbursts would call down. When Bartlett’s 2006 work Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy was about to come out, he was fired from his position as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank in Dallas, under donor (and White House) pressure. Over the past seven years, Bartlett has moved further into conservative apostasy. In a recent Fiscal Times column titled “The Alarming Corruption of the Think Tanks,” Bartlett writes of how the pseudo-intellectual arms race among competing, cheaply built institutes represents “a very dangerous trend”: Policymaking must, ultimately, rest on a foundation of facts, data, analysis based on scientific methods, and be as free as possible of partisan bias. But these days, policymakers, like the public and the media, care more for congenial opinions that suit their partisan or philosophical predisposition than solid research that may undermine simplistic but deeply held opinions.

Bartlett doesn’t get his hopes up, and neither should we. Just consider the limit-case example of where the think tank industry appears to be headed. FreedomWorks, another Koch-funded operation peddling ideological purity on the right is, by one measure, the biggest intellectual success story in Washington. Not only has it ruthlessly enforced movement discipline on the small-government right, it’s done more than any traditional ideas shop in Washington to ensure that actual lawmakers do its bidding, by funneling all sorts of freshly

FreedomWorks had both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on seven-figure retainers to say flattering things about the group and its initiatives.

9 unregulated PAC money into activist efforts and primary campaigns. The downside, of course, is that FreedomWorks has also instilled a hard core of Tea Party lawmakers in the House GOP caucus who, in many key respects, keep the GOP from tilting in the direction of self-interested compromise. This, it turns out, is bad for both electioneering and governing. Tea Party orthodoxy has effectively prevented the Republicans from winning control of the Senate over the past two cycles, thanks to the conservative base’s stubborn insistence on nominating inflexibly dogmatic candidates who stand roughly zero chance of appealing to independent voters. And FreedomWorks has also used its clout on Capitol Hill to drive Republican House members away from endorsing a deal on spending cuts far more favorable to the Reaganite GOP than the eventual accord to sidestep the alleged “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012. That record alone should give any pragmatic conservative pause, but FreedomWorks is also, like Cato and AEI, recovering from a bitter purge, one that drove out former House majority leader Dick Armey, who then chaired the group, amid charges of managerial improprieties and possible violations of tax law. Armey claims that FreedomWorks president and CEO Matt Kibbe, a muttonchopped fixture on the cable news scene, was using the group’s research staff to work on a book that Kibbe was writing under a contract that benefitted Kibbe exclusively. Kibbe dismissed Armey’s claims as trumped-up distractions from the real struggle between the group’s leaders, which concerned (wait for it) FreedomWorks’ fiercely independent alignment with the Tea Party right

over against the Republican mainstream. Since Armey’s abrupt departure from the group, a torrent of sensational charges has ensued—including the claim in a front-page Washington Post story that Armey tried to stage an armed “coup” by taking charge of the group in the final weeks of the 2012 election, with his wife stage-managing many of his staff directives and an Armey ally standing menacingly on site with a gun on his hip. No coup occurred, Armey later insisted—and the heat-packing associate in question was actually a security guard volunteering his services to both Armey and FreedomWorks. The funny thing here, of course, is that the idea of an armed enforcer following former GOP lawmakers in and out of influence-peddling confabs, without even drawing a paycheck for his trouble, is apparently less bizarre in today’s Washington than an armed organizational putsch, but hey, whatever. Meanwhile, lost in all the rancor and rumored shows of force was a telling detail about the way ideas are packaged for consumption in today’s Washington: Armey revealed that FreedomWorks had both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on seven-figure retainers to say flattering things about the group and its initiatives in their daily broadcasts. By any reasonable measure, this is full-on journalistic and ideological corruption, in the vein of the radio payola scandals of the fifties or the Bush administration’s paid placement of op-eds from conservative journalists touting its education programs. However, the arrangement scarcely merits comment in today’s Washington—it’s now widely taken for granted that this is just the sort of thing that think tanks do. All of which suggests that the perpetually aggrieved American right can rest easy: the The

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The perpetually aggrieved American right can rest easy: the conservative movement has, indeed, won the war of ideas.

9 conservative movement has, indeed, won the war of ideas. Real firearms are strictly optional—for now, anyway.

Nonprofits for Profit For all the money and bells and whistles that have so expertly streamlined the new breed of think tanks expressly to deliver just-in-time ideological talking points, there’s still nothing to prevent their leaders from shooting themselves in the foot. Just consider the big comingout moment for the new Jim DeMint–helmed Heritage Foundation—the 113th Congress’s springtime legislative session, and a perfect opportunity to make a “power play.” The Heritage shop sees a key opening: the chance to destroy President Obama’s top legislative priority of his second term, a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Imagine the power and prestige DeMint would gain by destroying an “amnesty” bill that looks, for now, to have rare bipartisan support! This would be a fusillade of creative destruction perhaps even bigger than Bill Kristol’s famous wrecking job on the Hillarycare proposal. It is, in short, Jim DeMint’s moment, and he and his “think tank” will take complete credit if they successfully engineer this purely political operation. So, in early May, Heritage released a comically heavy-handed report claiming that the bipartisan immigration proposal then under the Senate’s consideration would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. What a big scary number! Stupid Washington! There’s just one problem, though. This impeccable work of scholarship, commissioned solely to produce a nominal figure large enough to give House Republicans a serious-sounding excuse for killing another 102 1 The Baffler [no.23]

immigration reform bill, arrives at its number by applying a certain . . . subjective set of economic measures to its findings. Instead of using a typical ten- or twenty-year window, authors Robert Rector and Jason Richwine go with an ambitious fifty-year window. See, over fifty years, stuff costs a lot more! Especially when it balloons with the sky-high (projected) medical inflation that’s driving all of our (projected) long-term budgetary problems, and which will destroy us if left unaddressed—with or without millions of new legal immigrants. The report curtly dismisses any notion that new blocs of legal immigrants could drive economic growth over all that time. On the other hand, it includes every possible way in which new legal immigrants might mooch from the public. Aside from the major social spending programs they’d be eligible to participate in, these sneaky legal immigrants would also send their children to school: “Public education. At a cost of $12,300 per pupil per year, these services are largely free or heavily subsidized for low-income parents.” You can imagine what other public services these welfare junkies are planning to seize. Will they walk on our public sidewalks? Over a two-thousand-year window, they could very well cost us $900 trillion dollars. We can’t afford to give out lifetime luxury passes to the thrill-a-minute amusement park that is America all willy-nilly, can we? Things got bad for Heritage when it came to light that Jason Richwine, the report’s coauthor, had devoted his Harvard dissertation to trying to document permanent, and evidently irremediable, IQ deficits among Hispanic immigrants to the United States. As it so often does in its more unbuckled moments of raw ideological confrontation, the right-

wing zeal for austerity bled into overt racial reaction. Embarrassed by the controversy over Richwine’s past scholarship, Heritage accepted his resignation. In the dominant D.C. narratives of the ebb and flow of ideological power, Heritage’s misfire should serve as a chastening moment. Any responsible think tank, after all, would not seek merely to distance itself from the xenophobic past of an in-house thought leader; it might also be moved to revise some of the crackpot speculations it was peddling as serious budget analysis. But the chastening moment was not long in the fires of redemption, since the Obama administration came to the rescue, as it has done so often, and spared the enemy more than a small moment of public ridicule. Only days after Heritage’s study collapsed in scandal, it came to light that the IRS division certifying tax-exempt think tanks and policy shops has been targeting Tea Party–affiliated applicants. Never mind that none of the conservative applicants was denied a charter, or that immediately following the IRS’s apology and the Justice Department’s decision to investigate on behalf of aggrieved Tea Partiers, the Justice Department itself was revealed to have spied extensively on the nonpartisan, nonprofit reporters for the Associated Press. No, the IRS disclosure was plenty to distract attention from the less sensational story of the ultramodern insta-think-tank and its role in transmogrifying ideas into blunt-force weapons of moneyed partisanship, so that the parties could get on with their shared business of narrowing debate, rewarding themselves, and spying on us. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent neatly explained after the flimsy scaremongering Heritage study was exposed, the twisted logic driving the report had nothing to do with the integrity of research, or the good name of the institute as an honest broker of information:

In a sense . . . the substance here is beside the point. What’s remarkable about this whole spectacle is that no one is even bothering to pretend that the Heritage study isn’t simply a last ditch effort to kill the bill. That’s widely, publicly, explicitly acknowledged to be the case. Indeed, a Heritage study back during the last immigration reform battle is widely credited with giving the right the ammo they needed to scuttle that proposal, and opponents are openly discussing today’s study as providing the chance of a rerun of that glorious moment.

In other words: This is all politics, to boost the credibility of Jim DeMint and his foundation as bona fide power players on the Washington right. The measure of an “important think tank report” now is how much ideological manipulation it can get away with without misfiring badly enough to cripple the institution. How bad would that misfire have to be? We’ll let you know just as soon as an example appears. But don’t hold your breath. t

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen Liberalism in the tank 3 Ken Silverstein

ry to conjure up the dullest, most vapid intellectual experience you can possibly imagine. A Matthew Perry film festival. A boxed set of Kenny G’s entire discography. Al Gore “in conversation” with Wolf Blitzer. Now imagine something worse. Far, far worse. Once you’ve hit the speculative bottom of the unexamined life, you’d be hard pressed to outdo Thomas Friedman holding forth on “Climate Change and the Arab Spring.” What’s still more disturbing is that Friedman’s maunderings—unlike the foregoing litany of intellectual failures—actually took place, and were recorded for posterity, during a panel event this February at the Center for American Progress, America’s most influential liberal think tank. The great globalizing muse of the New York Times op-ed page was joined on stage by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton University professor and former State Department deputy to Hillary Clinton. You may be assured that the trite speculations came fast, flat, and furious. Between numerous mentions of his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded (not to be confused with 2005’s The World Is Flat), Freidman offered a mix of insights, delivered with his trademark flair for anecdotage in the vein of a Mad Libs pamphlet. Friedman informed the audience, for example, that algebra is an Arabic word—and so clearly the challenge ahead for the tumultuous Arab world is to integrate algebra as

well as Islam into its emerging governments. He then went on to sagely counsel the crowd that understanding the Islamic world requires examining ethnic and religious divisions, as opposed to more recent national rivalries—as though no one else had ever heard about the nearly 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shia split that emerged after Muhammad’s death. The banalities were also interspersed, inevitably, with generous helpings of buzzwords. The world, you see, has gone in rapidfire increments from being “connected” to “interconnected” to “interdependent.” And in a gratuitous show of his own high-tech interdependency, Friedman delivered his remarks with an open laptop balanced on his lap—a prop that he hardly glanced at during the ninety-minute event. Anne-Marie Slaughter, likewise, wasted little time getting into the zeitgeisty swing of things. At one point she and Friedman nodded their heads in approval as moderator Michael Werz, a CAP senior fellow, cited an article Slaughter wrote two years ago in which she proposed that tennis, not chess, provided the better framework for viewing contemporary world politics, given that the weather and other random factors may affect the spin and pace of the ball being played. Sadly, my research assistant Diego AreneMorley,* who just completed his freshman year at Brown, decimated the analogy, noting

* A rene-Morley did not attend the event but watched a video of it. Despite having only recently been hired and receiving a

relatively decent wage, Arene-Morley expressed great bitterness and seemed prepared to quit when I asked him to watch the Friedman video.

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M A R K DA N C E Y

The world of liberal think tanks has been upended, ever so gently, by a steady onrush of corporate funding— and corporate-friendly policy agendas.

9 that the choice of sport “was particularly poor, given that chess is regarded as a more complex and variable game than tennis, which is . . . simply back and forth.” At the event Slaughter herself appeared to concede that tennis was not the most appropriate metaphor and

offered a new one. “We simply have to move from states to networks of many, many different actors,” she said. “I want to see the world the way the millennials see the world. They look at the world like the Internet, not a chess game.” Almost as if she knew that somewhere The

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n a college freshman would mock this argument as well, she quickly proposed yet another, saying that the “old world” was composed of billiard balls, and while there are still billiard balls out there, they’re now made of Legos. Still, Friedman remained the principal fount of corporate-friendly twaddle. At one point he told the audience, evoking Socrates, “It can be dangerous to disagree with me, for one reason: I don’t know anything.” He responded to a question about the future of democracy with this bizarre soliloquy: We need to do big hard things together. Because all things we have to do are hard and big, and you can only do them together. So when you don’t do big hard things together, what you get are suboptimal responses to every big hard thing, done with no due diligence at the eleventh hour, and that’s basically what our politics has become. So you look at everything that has happened in the last four years, I would argue that they are all suboptimal solutions cobbled together with no due diligence of what world are we in, what would be the right solution done at the eleventh hour, and, um, how long do we remain a great country when everything we do at the national level is suboptimal with no due diligence done at the eleventh hour?

How, indeed? But for our purposes, a better question would be: How did an organization like the Center for American Progress, which aggressively markets itself as the intellectual vanguard of a resurgent American liberalism, become so immersed in such nonsignifying management speak? The Arab Spring panel, after all, was just one in a long string of CAP-sponsored policy gatherings. In late May, the think tank hosted “Unfinished Business: The Feminine Mystique at 50,” which looked at “the unfinished busi-

ness of the women’s movement.” The event was introduced by Neera Tanden, CAP’s president and a columnist for The New Republic; moderated by Judith Warner, a onetime New York Times columnist and now a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Time.com; and Gail Collins and Anna Quindlen, who are, respectively, current and former columnists for the New York Times. Evidently, the women’s movement’s real unfinished business is to ensure that every woman can be vouchsafed a column of her own—just like Thomas Friedman! That event was held the day after a CAP event made the case for “Diverse Voices in Public Policy.”* Which is how the days and weeks and months pass at a think tank that has $44 million in its treasury and that on its website describes its driving aim thusly: “We develop a point of view and take a stand. We then build on that and develop bold new ideas.”

o understand just how Thomas Friedman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Gail Collins have been repurposed as purveyors of bold new ideas, it helps to see how the world of liberal think tanks has been upended, ever so gently, by a steady onrush of corporate funding—and corporate-friendly policy agendas. Think tanks have always reflected relatively narrow elite opinion and were never entirely impartial, but the earliest were modeled on academic institutions. Brookings, the first, began in 1916 (as the Institute for Government Research) and subsequently billed its mission as “the fact-based study of national public policy issues.” During the Great Depression, its scholars took sides both for and against the New Deal. The Council on Foreign Relations began in New York five years after Brookings and, as author Peter Grose later wrote, sought to “guide the statecraft of policymakers”

* W hich did at least feature a diverse panel and only one political consultant, Patricia Campos-Medina of Campos Strategies

Group. The other panelists were Kumar Rao of the Bronx Defenders, Christine Soyong Harley of the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations, and Ramatu Bangura of the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women and Families.

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CAP effectively serves as a house organ of the Democratic Party, much as Pravda was to the Politburo during Soviet times.

with in-depth reports prepared by “groups of knowledgeable specialists of differing ideological inclinations.” An emerging, more aggressive perspective was prompted by the specter of economic stagflation and the twin political crises of the early 1970s, Vietnam and Watergate. In 1974 and 1975, top corporate officials convened annually under the auspices of still another ideas consortium called the Conference Board—but this time out, they didn’t feel quite so dispassionate about the policy-debate scene. Feeling pressured by then-powerful labor unions and the demands of what they saw as an ungrateful citizenry, the assembled CEOs feared a popular revolt might be imminent. “We have been hoist with our own petard,” one executive said at one conclave. “We have raised expectations that we can’t deliver on.” Another executive complained, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” In order to recapture politicians, intellectuals, and the media, corporations increased their Washington lobbying efforts and jacked up campaign contributions as well. Just as important, corporations shoveled cash into existing think tanks and established dozens of new ones. The Heritage Foundation began in 1973, and within a decade its annual budget topped $12 million. The American Enterprise Institute, which began life as a fairly nondescript business advocacy group, became more politically emboldened and saw its budget triple between 1975 and 1985. New conservative think tanks founded in the post-Watergate period included the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Over time, corporations also provided ma-

jor support for think tanks aligned with Democrats, especially moderate ones. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) began in 1989 and received millions of dollars from sources such as the Tobacco Institute, Occidental Petroleum, and various Wall Street firms. PPI was affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been founded to regain the White House by pulling the party in a more centrist direction. Bill Clinton was a charter member of the Council, and when he became president, PPI pumped out reams of studies in support of NAFTA, welfare reform, and other “New Democrat” priorities. In effect, Clinton and PPI stand at one end of an era, while Obama and CAP sit at the other—the era in question being that of the full corporate takeover of the Democratic Party and, by extension, American politics. CAP’s founder is John Podesta, the former chief of staff to President Clinton who ran Barack Obama’s transition team following the 2008 election and became an informal adviser to the new president. Podesta is a former lobbyist, and it’s no exaggeration to say that influence-peddling is the family business. His brother, Tony, and sister-in-law, Heather, each head separate lobbying firms that are among the most powerful in Washington. In late 2011, Podesta stepped down as the think tank’s president (he remains as chair). He had good cause to think that his main mission at the helm of CAP had been accomplished: by 2012, and the onset of Obama’s second term, CAP had clearly emerged as the most influential think tank of the Obama era. Neera Tanden, who served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations and, in between, as policy director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, replaced The

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Any suggestion that CAP is in the business of airing dispassionate policy research for the sake of broadening the scope of intellectual debate should, of course, be greeted by a torrent of bitter laughter.

9 Podesta. Former Virginia congressman Tom Perriello heads up the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the group’s advocacy unit. There’s no real separation between the think tank and the fund—they operate out of the same offices and share personnel—but the latter is legally allowed to lobby and the former not, so this alliance gives CAP added power. CAP periodically criticizes the White House, but effectively serves as a house organ of the Democratic Party, much as Pravda was to the Politburo during Soviet times. (To be fair to CAP, during the era of Brezhnev, as opposed to Stalin.) In an amazing break from script, Tanden last October told New York magazine, “Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people.” She immediately apologized via Twitter, saying, “I was trying to say how President Obama, who I admire greatly, is a private person, but I deeply regret how I said it.” For anyone else at CAP, such a personal sideswipe at the premier grandee of the liberal Washington establishment would almost surely have been a firing offense. It was also deeply out of character for the think tank’s carefully tended public image, which brings new meaning to the word banal. On its website, CAP explains that its mission is to “critique the policy that stems from conservative values, challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter, and shape the national debate,” and cites “progressive pioneers” such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. However, when visitors to the site toggle over to the actual content of the group’s policy portfolio, they meet a barrage 108 1 The Baffler [no.23]

of platitudes that sound as if they were lifted directly from the collected works of Ronald Reagan. “As progressives, we believe America is a land of boundless opportunity, where people can better themselves, their children, their families, and their communities through education, hard work, and the freedom to climb the ladder of economic mobility,” CAP states. “We believe an open and effective government can champion the common good over narrow self-interest, harness the strength of our diversity, and secure the rights and safety of its people. And we believe our nation must always be a beacon of hope and strength to the rest of the world.” Such self-advertised vacuity makes perfect sense for an institution like CAP, for the simple reason that these pious word clouds are also the standard argot of corporate America. CAP’s board and roster of scholars are stuffed with the most rancid elements of the Democratic Party, many of them Clinton administration veterans or key political supporters. Last December, it named Lawrence Summers, formerly Clinton’s treasury secretary and Obama’s National Economic Council director, as a distinguished senior fellow. “As our country continues to confront challenges to establishing economic growth that is more broadly shared, there are few thinkers with Larry’s insights, keen intellect, and policy creativity,” Tanden said at the time. Summers was, of course, famously named by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the three members of “The Committee to Save the World,” along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan. They earned that title for pushing through the near complete deregulation of fi-

nancial markets—which then worked, in fairly short order, to engineer the collapse of the global economy. (In a sort of sideline gambit of epic managerial incompetence, Summers also managed to squander hundreds of millions in endowment funds during his Bush-era tenure as president of Harvard, by putting together an enormous 2004 interest-rate swap predicated on a disastrous reading of market trends.) Unlike his two superhero colleagues, Summers has since mildly repented for his worst deregulatory excesses and now calls for greater oversight of the financial industry and some limited government intervention in the private sector to spur recovery and growth. Of course, nothing in his revisionist policy playbook is disturbing enough to prevent him from continuing to make millions by consulting for and speaking to financial giants and hedge funds, and accepting perks such as free jet rides from Citigroup. (This firm, you may recall, was the first major merged financial

titan of the post–Glass Steagall age, which Summers’s pal Rubin matriculated back to after his own term as treasury secretary in the Clinton White House; Rubin, clearly determined to follow in Summers’s distinguished footsteps, nearly bankrupted the flailing investment bank before departing as a “senior counselor” in 2009 after pocketing more than $100 million.) Another board member is Tom Daschle, the former U.S. Senate majority leader who had to withdraw his nomination as Obama’s secretary of health and human services because he cheated on his taxes (“naively,” as opposed to criminally, he claimed). Daschle has made millions since leaving public service as a “special adviser” on K Street and at a private equity firm. Carol Browner, Clinton’s EPA head and Obama’s director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, also sits on CAP’s board. One of America’s premier

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n greenwashers, Browner disclosed income of $1 million to $5 million in 2008 from Downey McGrath, whose partners include her husband, former congressman Tom Downey, and whose clients have included ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and DuPont. Browner is now a founding partner at Albright Stonebridge Group, an international global strategy company led by Madeleine Albright—the onetime Clinton secretary of state who is also a CAP board member. CAP’s parroting of the Democratic Party line reflects not only the collapse of the old Democratic New Deal coalition, which at least gave some voice to labor unions and the poor, but also the collapse of radical journalism. “What’s the point of having this superb military . . . if we can’t use it?” Albright once asked, and one might also wonder what’s the point of having an allegedly progressive media if its inbred male vanguard is made up of figures such as CAP-branded pundits Eric Alterman and Matthew Yglesias.* (Yglesias used to write for CAP’s ThinkProgress blog. Alterman is still a senior fellow there, which at least makes him less distinguished than Larry Summers.) Any suggestion that CAP is in the business of airing dispassionate policy research and then letting the chips fall where they may for the sake of broadening the scope of intellectual debate in Washington should, of course, be greeted by a torrent of bitter laughter. A review of CAP’s research track record shows that the group’s work is dictated by two simple mainsprings: its obvious and overwhelming fealty to the Democratic Party, and the pursuit of corporate cash. For evidence of the former, one need look no further than the frenetically revolving door that connects the think tank and the Obama administration. At least forty CAP staffers have taken administration

jobs since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and at least eight administration officials moved to CAP after leaving their government posts. White House visitor logs show hundreds of meetings between CAP staffers and administration officials; CAP leaders Podesta and Tanden, not surprisingly, are among the most frequent White House visitors. One former CAP staffer described “total synchronization” between the administration and the think tank, which he said routinely allowed Team Obama to vet reports prior to publication. “We were constantly in touch with the White House,” this person said. “Once I was on the phone with four White House lawyers who wanted to know what I was going to say [in an upcoming report].” Another former staffer offered a somewhat more generous interpretation of the group’s tight alliance with the business wing of the Democratic Party. “Corporate influence is a huge part of American politics,” he said. “CAP is interested in politically achievable policy, and if no one is going to profit from it, it is not going to be achievable.” Translation: CAP is going to advance a self-styled progressive policy agenda by greeting the steady creep of plutocratic rule with a variation of “Everybody into the pool!” It’s therefore no surprise that the other plank of the CAP research agenda—the eager acquisition of greater corporate backing— commands an increasing share of the group’s efforts. There’s little functional difference between the Democratic Party and the corporate world when it comes to running campaigns and elections; why should the promotion of policy debate be any different? In 2007, CAP launched the Business Alliance, which is a Membership Rewards–style program for big donors. Though CAP refuses to release any of

* This swaggering pseudo-liberal contrarian is clearly angling to get Thomas Friedman’s column when the great man retires

and his mustache is put on display at the Smithsonian; Yglesias’s recent columns have praised lobbying-drafted legislation, the abolition of the corporate income tax, and Third World factory collapses (as an unfortunate but inevitable cost of global economic efficiencies).

110 1 The Baffler [no.23]

There’s little functional difference between the Democratic Party and the corporate world when it comes to running campaigns and elections; why should the promotion of policy debate be any different?

9 these donors’ names, I obtained various lists (as I first disclosed in The Nation), and they have included Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Wal-Mart, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, GE, General Motors, Amgen, Pfizer, and Verizon. For an edifying snapshot of how CAP’s fast-growing roster of funders and independent-minded progressive research can make for an awkward fit, consider the 2011 story of the think tank’s handling of a scandal in private-sector spying. Emails stolen by hackers revealed that lawyers for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plotted with three private security companies—Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal—to spy on the Chamber’s perceived enemies, which included activists, labor unions, and CAP. The think tank earned the Chamber’s wrath in part due to the reporting of Lee Fang, then at ThinkProgress, who had exposed elements of the Chamber’s shady foreign fundraising operations. “We are the best money can buy!” a Palantir executive wrote in one email gloating over the company’s planned Chambersponsored surveillance activities. “Dam it feels good to be a gangsta.” The plotting ended when the emails were leaked—but the revelations were highly embarrassing to the security firms. Two of them soon made their way into CAP’s obliging orbit. In April 2011, two months after the story broke, Berico signed up Heather Podesta to lobby for it. By mid-2012, Palantir, a major contractor to U.S. intelligence agencies, had joined CAP’s Business Alliance. (CAP, for its part, maintains that it has erected a sturdy Chinese wall separating out its fundraising

activities from its policy work. Here’s CAP spokesperson Andrea Purse: “The Center for American Progress is a non-partisan educational institution committed to progress on our country’s most pressing issues, including energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and health care. Our policy formation and analysis is independent, and we have advocated and will continue to advocate for ideas and policies that create progress for millions of Americans. We advance these ideas, no matter who is in power.”) CAP’s standing as a secret sluice gate for corporate money has not prevented it from attacking its enemies for doing the same thing. In an article in Politico last May, Perriello and senior fellow Amy Rosenbaum bashed conservative groups for putting out TV attack ads without revealing that their funders were big companies that stood to gain from positions espoused by the ads. “This Orwellian twist was lost on most voters, because [thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission] there’s no obligation to disclose the donors behind these attacks,” they wrote. When it comes to courting corporate largesse, in other words, Orwellian twists are entirely in the eye of the beholder. It’s hard to scientifically break down the precise ratio by which politics and money influence CAP’s positions on the issues of the day, but there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence. Consider, for example, CAP’s various stands on ballistic missile defense. In April 2008 the group reported that BMD systems were “increasingly obsolete” because “there is no imminent, new ballistic missile threat. The

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n The threat from a North Korean or Iranian long-range missile is still largely hypothetical. . . . A recent GAO report showed that Missile Defense programs are chronically over budget and behind schedule.” But a year later, the group had completely reversed course. In June 2009, CAP released a statement saying, “The United States needs real capabilities to deal with real threats. It must therefore continue to research, develop, and deploy credible missile defenses to protect the United States homeland, allied forces operating overseas, and the territory of U.S. allies.” Of course, the basic assumptions behind the BMD program hadn’t shifted in any way during the intervening year; what had changed, quite obviously, was the partisan alliances around the White House. CAP issued its first assessment when George W. Bush was president and the second one during Barack Obama’s first term. Obama had not changed the White House’s line on the utility of the BMD program, and so, one can only infer, CAP was inspired to toe an entirely new line of its own. Of course, it also helps that Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon, all members of the Business Alliance, are major BMD contractors. CAP’s 2009 statement specifically praised two highly controversial programs, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Aegis system, on which all three companies are primary contractors or subcontractors. CAP’s “Idea of the Day” on January 4, 2010, was “Continue Funding for Reliable Missile Defense Systems,” which said that the Pentagon should “continue research and testing” the THAAD and the Aegis so they could “be perfected to provide the most cost-effective means of missile defense available.” Likewise, the Obama administration’s strong pro-nuclear energy posture may help explain CAP’s curiously evolving (though still inconsistent) stance on that issue. It’s clear enough, at least, that the group’s complex di112 1 The Baffler [no.23]

vagations on nuclear power have also stemmed partly from CAP’s support for the corporateinspired “cap-and-trade” bill on global warming that the then-Democratic Congress tried, and failed, to move out of committee in the heady early days of Obama’s first term. Capand-trade supporters agreed to include pronuclear language in the legislation in a pathetic effort to win GOP support. In July 2010, Senate majority leader Harry Reid announced that he would not even bring the bill up for a vote, producing the most humiliating (and hideously expensive) defeat for the environmental movement of modern time. Even after the bill went down, CAP senior fellow Daniel Weiss was pitiably seeking to rally Republican troops to the lost cause. “Opposition to ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation to reduce global warming pollution is a common refrain among many Republican and a few Democratic officials this fall,” he wrote on the think tank’s website. “The program is derided as a ‘cap and tax’ that would drain voters’ wallets while bankrupting the nation. But ironically enough, the three most recent Republican presidents promoted cap and trade, including Ronald Reagan.” He then hailed Reagan’s achievements, noted that Sarah Palin and many Republicans “greatly admire the father of cap and trade,” and whined that nonetheless Palin still opposed “a global warming plan that would employ the innovative cap-and-trade system first created by President Reagan.” At a cursory first glance, the group’s posture against the spread of nuclear energy could almost be mistaken for a principled stand. In July 2008, CAP published a piece at the group’s website called “10 Reasons Not to Invest in Nuclear Energy.” During congressional testimony that same month, senior fellow Joseph Romm said that nuclear power’s “own myriad limitations will constrain its growth” and that it was “simply not a near-term, costeffective solution to our climate problem.”

CAP continued to criticize nuclear power after Obama took office. In March 2010, it posted another paper on its website, “Protecting Taxpayers from a Financial Meltdown.” The report drew a strong rebuke from the Nuclear Energy Institute, which accused the think tank of “misstatements, unsubstantiated estimates, and inaccurate descriptions of nuclear construction.” Yet CAP’s opposition to nuclear power has softened considerably at times, even after cap and trade was shot down. Last February 9, the day the Nuclear Regulatory Commission granted approval for the construction of new nuclear plants in Georgia, CNN quoted Richard Caperton, director of CAP’s Clean Energy Investment program, as saying, “Moving away from fossil fuels in order to address climate change is the biggest challenge facing our power sector, and safe nuclear power will be an important part of that solution.” CAP released a statement by Caperton the same day saying that completing the plants “would be a critical step in proving that nuclear power can continue to serve as a leading source of low-carbon power.” In October, CAP hosted a conversation with Allison Macfarlane, chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Nuclear power is our nation’s largest low-carbon power source,” read CAP’s invitation to the event. “Over the last two decades, U.S. nuclear plant operators have shown an excellent record of operational safety and have greatly increased the operational performance of reactors.” The pro-nukes positions in the post-cap-and-trade phase of policymaking might well have something to do with the significant stakes in nuclear energy shared among at least half a dozen Business Alliance members: GE, Pacific Gas & Electric, Duke Energy, American Electric Power, Constellation Energy, and Xcel Energy. It’s a safe bet, at any rate, that this powerful group of funders has been quite pleased to see the recent boilerplate pro-nuclear PR

copy going out under CAP’s letterhead. Thus, it seems, CAP really is the perfect liberal think tank for the age of Obama, when the core policy options and alliances that shape American politics are simply dictated by the flow of cash. The former staffer who spoke with me about CAP’s frequent communications with the Obama White House succinctly summed up the gnat-straining fate of the multimillion-dollar think tank. “They totally bought into the Obama vision, and he had no vision,” he said. “When Obama was progressive and talked about the stimulus, they were for that, and when he cut a deal with Boehner, they were for that. They don’t stand for anything themselves.” Except, it seems, for the moneyed regurgitation of the current Democratic mush. t

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n

Vocabulary Lessons Basta ya que el Yanqui mande 3 Dana Fr ank

efore, my Spanish wasn’t so bad; but it wasn’t so good, either. I could go a month in Honduras without speaking English and more or less communicate anything I wanted, if dubiously, although every once in a while I’d land in a pit where I didn’t know the words at all—kitchen implements, say, or anything related to the legal system. I specialized: I could do a three-hour historical interview with a trade union leader in his eighties and catch every word. I had mastered gerente (manager) and contrato colectivo (collective bargaining agreement) and, of course, sindicato (labor union). I’d get stumped only by amusing leftover words from the United Fruit Company if I couldn’t see them in print, like watchiman or los nylon (gloves) or, my favorite, bulldozero (bulldozer operator). Then, at 5:30 a.m. the morning of June 28, 2009, I plunged into a pit so huge and so dark and so endless that it was—and still is—far beyond any words I had ever learned or imagined having to learn. I already knew the biggest, most important word: golpe (coup, or blow). But that morning, the radio said golpe de estado—the full phrase, “a blow to the state”—a coup d’état. As in, a violent overthrow of constitutional order.

hree months earlier, in April 2009, I’d learned encuesta (survey) when Honduran president Manuel Zelaya put a public opinion poll on the ballot for that Sunday, June 28, asking voters in a cuarta urna (fourth ballot box) if they wanted to elect delegates the following November for a constituyente, or constitutional convention, to take place in 2010 or 2011. Zelaya, a member of the Hon114 1 The Baffler [no.23]

duran elite himself, had been democratically elected in 2005, and gradually inched leftward to ally himself with the other Left and CenterLeft governments in Latin America, including those in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. When he pushed too far for many in his own party, the oligarchs and military leaders who had long ruled Honduras balked, and sent in the troops that morning—invading Zelaya’s house before dawn and packing him off in his pajamas to Costa Rica, with the full collusion of the Supreme Court and most of the Honduran Congress. With golpe de estado also came golpista— which translates, clunkily, as “coup perpetrator”—the all-purpose word Hondurans suddenly spat out to describe anyone on the other side of the chasm that opened up in one day, tearing apart families and neighborhoods and the whole country. I myself came to use it so much that I kept forgetting non-Spanish speakers didn’t know what it meant. Opposing the golpistas, a movement arose to combat the coup and defend constitutional order: la Resistencia (the Resistance). Suddenly millions of Hondurans sounded like an underground movement in France during World War II. From that morning forward, much to absolutely everyone’s surprise on all sides, people poured into the streets to try to reverse the coup. A mass social movement came together within hours, naming itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular. I learned movimiento amplio (broad movement) to describe this new coalition, unprecedented in Honduran history, of the labor, women’s, indigenous rights, LGBTI, and Afro-Indigenous movements; human rights groups; Zelaya’s loyalists from the

P E TE R K U P E R

Every day, I was assaulted by a long barrage of verbsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;ultimar, matar, liquidar, tirotear (to shoot up), ametrallar (to machine gun)â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all of which meant to kill, including ultimar a machetazos (to slice up with machete blows).

9 The

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Hi g h L o w W a s h i n g t o n traditional Liberal Party; and people of all class backgrounds committed to the rule of law. I learned movimiento pacífico—peaceful movement, with no guns. I learned words for the tactics they began to deploy: toma—takeover or blockade; paro cívico—a kind of general strike. But as the days of the coup stretched into weeks of crackdowns by the new government against the opposition, I learned the vocabulary of repression, too. It began with easy words, militares (military) and policías (police), but soon escalated to toque de queda (curfew), gas lacrimógeno (tear gas; it took a while to get that accent right), and old-fashioned weapons like toletes (batons) that were shoved into women’s crotches or whacked with full force across people’s faces during peaceful demonstrations. The police and military, I read, were contundente (forceful) when they attacked demonstrations (manifestaciones) full of my longtime friends and colleagues, who would be rodeados (surrounded) by the police and brutally golpeados (beaten)—that word again. The fifth day after the coup, my closest friend was capturado by the army during a peaceful march and thrown into the back of a truck. The weeks turned into months. I learned of mujeres violadas (women raped) by the police. I learned about the cerco mediático, the media blockade, that kept the repression out of the Honduran news. When President Zelaya secretly returned to the country and popped up in the Brazilian embassy on September 21 demanding his restoration, the military and police poured tear gas over the embassy walls until, I learned, the people inside were echando sangre por la nariz—blood was pouring out of their noses. But the Resistencia, miraculously, stood its ground, and grew and grew. I learned long beautiful phrases as they constructed a nationwide movement, and with it a new culture of resistance. The best, Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo (They are afraid of us because we are not afraid), from the song by Liliana 116 1 The Baffler [no.23]

Felipe and Jesusa Rodríguez, took me forever to unpack grammatically and even longer to say quickly. When I visited Honduras for the first time after the coup, I saw posters with Ni golpe de estado ni golpe a las mujeres (Neither blows to the state nor blows to women). Later I saw a wonderful T-shirt from Feministas en Resistencia (Feminists in Resistance) that read Exigimos Democracia en el País y Democracia en la Casa. (Easy: “We Demand Democracy in the Country and Democracy in the Home.”) The new verbal humor of the Resistance was spraypainted everywhere. I liked Nadie Ama a Cristo como el Cardenal Ama el Pisto (No One Loves Christ Like the Cardinal Loves Cash), a reference to the loathed Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, who endorsed the coup on its sixth day. I learned tufoso—stinky—every time we crossed over a local river smelling of sewage known as Rio Tufoso, but popularly renamed after the coup as Rio Micheletti in honor of the post-coup de facto president, Roberto Micheletti. I found plenty of humor at home, too, when I tried to describe in English my own new role. People would ask what I was up to lately, and I would reply that I had a new life as an Honduran Expert since the coup. But that sounded totally far-fetched, even if it was true. So eventually I gave up and laughingly went for, “I have a new life as a Honduran Freedom Fighter.”

knew I’d learned a ton of new Spanish. But it turned out I was also learning and deploying a whole new English vocabulary. As I talked about Honduras on the radio, in opinion articles in the papers, and on TV, I became someone who talked about “human rights,” about “state security forces” that were committing “state-sponsored repression.” I learned the hard-to-grasp word “impunity,” which, over the next three years, extended into “complete impunity.” “Draconian” and “illegally detained” rolled off my tongue and into my op-eds. But the technical precision

I learned the vocabulary of true evil, full of hissing sounds: amenazas de muerte (death threats), sicarios (hired assassins), asesinos (killers), and asesinatos (assassinations).

of those words masked the hours and hours I spent crying over what they described. The Obama administration, in its own wordplay, called it a “coup” but refused to use the phrase “military coup,” which would have legally required an immediate cut-off of all nonhumanitarian assistance to Honduras. In negotiations, the United States recognized post-coup dictator Micheletti as an equal to President Zelaya and never condemned the new regime’s vicious repression of the opposition. Honduras’s previously scheduled presidential elections went forward as planned in November, although almost all the opposition candidates withdrew their names in protest and all major international observers—except two groups financed by the U.S. government, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute—refused to participate. So I learned to write “No Fair Election in Honduras Under Military Occupation” in the Huffington Post. I endlessly debated with a friend from a policy think tank the nuanced usage of “bogus” versus “fraudulent” versus “illegitimate” election (I thought all three applied; he thought only the last). The U.S. government immediately recognized the results of the election everyone knew was illegitimate. In January 2010, new president Porfirio Lobo came into office, and the repression continued as he reappointed the same military figures that had perpetrado (perpetrated) the coup. By a year and a half after the coup, more than ten thousand denuncias had been filed with the government for human rights violations. Denuncias were everywhere, translated as “complaints”—but that was way too mild-sounding, losing the

power of “denunciations.” I learned to say “ongoing coup regime.” I learned the vocabulary of true evil, full of hissing sounds: amenazas de muerte (death threats), sicarios (hired assassins), asesinos (killers), and asesinatos (assassinations). In English, I had nuanced discussions with my various editors about which deaths of opposition activists qualified as “assassinations” and which were merely—merely—“killings,” as in “more than three hundred killings by state security forces.” Every day, reading the Honduran papers, I was assaulted by a long barrage of verbs—ultimar, matar, liquidar, tirotear (to shoot up), ametrallar (to machine gun)—all of which meant to kill, including ultimar a machetazos (to slice up with machete blows). But the Hondurans kept fighting. The teachers’ unions, and the Resistance with them, poured into the streets in mass demonstrations in March and April 2011 in protest against the privatization of education. Now I learned to say “use of tear gas as a lethal weapon” when the police fired a canister at the face of a fifty-nine-year-old teacher, who fell to the ground, was run over by a media truck, and died. Campesinos (small farmers, or peasants) began staging what they called recuperaciones (recuperations) of lands in the Aguán Valley granted to them by agrarian reform in the 1970s and ’80s but gradually seized by elites in subsequent years. In response, more than 104 campesinos were killed by state security forces and sicarios (the assassins, again), many of them allegedly working for Miguel Facussé, the biofuels magnate and über-golpista (to throw a bit of German in there) who is one of the richest and most powerful men in the country. In December 2011, while I watched, The

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The military and police poured tear gas over the embassy walls until, I learned, the people inside were echando sangre por la nariz— blood was pouring out of their noses.

9 his alleged security guards, the military, and the police harassed the entire campesino town of Guadalupe Carney, while helicopteros hovered and francotiradores (snipers) dressed in black crouched in the surrounding hills. I bought trim little suits and went to Washington, D.C., where I learned to speak the language of the United States Congress. I learned “approps” as shorthand for “appropriations” and could soon rattle off “State and Foreign Ops,” as in “Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs of the Senate Committee on Appropriations.” (Eventually I learned to say “s-fops,” even deeper insiderspeak.) I was taught not to talk about “power,” but instead “the ability to get things done.” I learned the acronyms in both Spanish and English for human rights groups and anyone else who would care about what was going on, and then talked to them, from the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) of the OAS (Organization of American States) to HRW (Human Rights Watch), the CEJIL (Center for Justice and International Law), and, most important, COFADEH (Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras), not to mention the acronyms of all the other allies I came to work with and which I’ll spare the reader from spelling out— CCR, CEPR, CRLN, LAWG, SOAW, WFP, and many others, including social justice nuns, whom I learned to call “the Sisters.”

he river of horror didn’t stop. On October 22, 2011, Honduran police killed the son of the rector of the big university in Tegucigalpa and a friend of his, and dozens of other police were implicated in a cover-up. As for118 1 The Baffler [no.23]

mer police inspectors and many others bravely came forward to denounce massive police corruption—and one of them was then assassinated for doing so—public outrage erupted, and during all the subsequent year and a half the headlines were full of the language of corruption and potential reform: I learned patrullas, as in the patrol cars that had openly passed through four police peajes (checkpoints) with the two young men’s bodies. I learned podrido, rotten. I learned depuración, purge. I learned the acronyms for three different new comisiones (commissions) charged with cleaning up the police, and eventually the corrupt military, prosecutors, and judiciary as well. And over the next year and a half, I learned seventeen different ways to say the comisiones were going nowhere. The worst moment was on February 14, 2012, when a fire broke out in a prison in Comayagua. Most of the prisoners were locked in, and their guards deliberately held back firefighters for thirty minutes. Three hundred sixty men and one woman died in the worst prison fire in modern history. I learned reos and deprivados de libertad (prisoners); I learned incendio (fire), en llamas (in flames), and perecieron (perished). To grasp the full terror of what I was watching, on live TV and in the most chilling photographs I have seen in my entire life, I learned siniestro (evil), wore out asesinos, and debated whether it was limpieza social (social cleansing). The horror didn’t stop, either, in every day’s papers. “Vorágine de violencia cierra semana sangriente de Honduras” (Vortex of violence closes bloody week in Honduras), one paper reported matter-of-factly, and I picked up another word, vorágine. By then it was already

old news that Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. Nor was this random violence. It was thick with death squads (escuadrones de muerte) and deliberate assassinations (not just “killings”) of resistance activists. When I interviewed deposed president Manuel Zelaya on May Day, 2012, I learned another word, when he described a deliberate campaign by the elites to infundir (instill) terror. I got an op-ed into the New York Times criticizing U.S. support for the ongoing coup regime. In response, I got letters on behalf of Miguel Facussé, the biofuels magnate, threatening to sue me for difamación de carácter (character defamation). Letters to the Times from the Honduran ambassador to the United States and from a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras attacking me were reprinted in the derechista (right-wing) Honduran newspapers. I had to cancel my upcoming trip to Honduras, and thought I might never return. I learned No te aflijas (Don’t get upset) from a friend who wrote me, “When things calm down you can come back.” Another wrote, in English, “Now you know a new word, desterrado”—exiled. But what I felt was just a tiny inkling of what the real exiles, thousands of Hondurans, were going through. Finally, there were the things for which there were no words in either English or Spanish. What did I say to my close, beloved friend when his daughter and son-in-law were shot and killed in one of those incidents of “random violence” that happen when there is no functioning judicial system, the police are largely corrupt, and you can kill anyone you want and nothing will happen to you? What did I say to another close friend, who’d been sheltering a young victim of domestic violence, when drug traffickers who were tight with the abuser showed up one day and told my friend she had twenty-four hours to leave the house and no one from her family could ever live there again, and she had to flee across the border to Mexico, with no money? What

did I say to the sweet, loving young man who finally found a good job in his cousin’s new shop, and six months later the gangs showed up and demanded a tax, and she said no, and after five days they came back and killed her, and he lost his job in her shop, and the family lost all their investment? For every word I learned, there was a new horror, a new atrocity report to write. I wasn’t the only one who was learning. My words joined with those of hundreds, thousands, all over the United States, Honduras, and beyond—until ninety-four members wrote the Secretary of State to demand that all police and military aid to Honduras be suspended, and the senators and members on State and Foreign Ops put human rights conditions on part of the aid, State itself began finally to respond to the pressure, and over fifty million dollars in police and military aid was, indeed, suspended. It turned out I’d known the most basic word all along. I learned it in college, from the classic Latin American song: “Basta ya, basta ya, basta ya que el Yanqui mande.” Basta! “Enough!” t

BRAD HOLLAND

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h Idols Abroad FRAME BREAKER

A Nod to Ned Ludd 3 Richard Byrne But to return to the Luddites. The danger is of the most imminent kind. I would hang about a score in the country, and send off ship loads to Botany Bay; and if there were no other means of checking the treasonable practices which are carried on in the Sunday newspapers, I would suspend the Habeas Corpus. Shut up these bellows-blowers, and the fire may, perhaps, go out.

—Robert Southey (future British poet laureate),

in a letter to his brother, Tom Southey, May 12, 1812

obert Southey and his fellow reactionaries were right to be affrighted in May 1812. The day before he wrote the passage above, British prime minister Spencer Perceval had been gunned down in Parliament. And while it quickly became apparent that Perceval’s murder was the work of a lone assailant—and a businessman, at that—the machine wreckers who went by the name of Luddites had been sending death threats to Perceval and others for months. The destructive swath cut by the Luddites—who smashed hundreds of knitting frames that made stockings and later attacked gig mills and shearing frames—posed such a threat to public order that thousands of troops had already been sent to occupy the centers of machine-wrecking discontent in Nottingham and Leeds. Majorities in both houses of Parliament were spooked so badly by this highly organized campaign of violence against property that they pushed through a bill making Luddism a capital offense. Flash forward two hundred years. Today’s Luddites (or, as they often self-identify, “neo-Luddites”) pose no threat at all. Their public salvos against technology embrace knotty nuances and eschew the bare knuckles. There’s a touch of Bartleby the Scrivener to them: if this be the future, they’d definitely prefer not to. Yet the disquiet apparent even in a watered-down and largely nonconfrontational Luddism still packs a punch, if only in the Luddites’ refusal to bow down before the tech class’s vision of a benevolent, inevitable march toward Total Information Awareness. In the straitened and highly ritualized discourse of tech boosterism, “Luddite” has become a catchall dirty word for anything that stands in its way. The specter of Luddism is raised and stigmatized again and again as a crank persuasion—the province of the Unabomber and a handful of aging sports columnists loudly proclaiming their contempt 120 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

B R IA N S TAU FFE R

How did it come to pass that Luddism is now almost exclusively remembered as a barely rational movement of rampant machine breaking?

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We can’t keep secrets—and the technological sweep of the surveillance state makes it less possible to do so with each passing moment.

for sabermetrics. Indeed, the concept has become so thoroughly muddled in our market-addled age that the cyber-utopians, who would regard the smashing of Windows or Google Glass as a human rights violation, have expanded their Luddite demonology to include the original enemies of the machine wreckers—i.e., government and industry. Back in ye olde 1998, for instance, John L. Warden, Microsoft’s lead defense attorney in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice, argued that the case wasn’t even an antitrust suit at all. No, no! It was “a return of the Luddites, the nineteenth-century reactionaries who, fearful of competition, went around smashing machines with sledgehammers to arrest the march of progress driven by science and technology.” Nor is it only federal regulators who’ve turned saboteur in this through-the-looking-glass version of machine-related protest. The technology vanguard also arraigns “old” industry as Luddism incarnate, a sentiment succinctly summed up last year by Google Plus user Michael Ricard (and shared into the memeosphere by the indefatigable cyber-tout Jeff Jarvis): Industrialists are the new luddites The industrial age has gone full circle. Now it is industrialists who fight to keep their machine-like corporate structures and copyright monopolies in place in the face of the democratizing forces of the information age. The main difference between that time and today being that capital punishment likely won’t be an option (esp. for bankers/financiers).

See? Any reflexive tendency toward criticism, or skepticism about the aims of our confident new digital elite, must be equated with the doomed rebellion of the first generation of English industrial workers. And the distorted memory of that rebellion swells past the point of coherence to absorb any and all perceived enemies of the Information Order. It seems, then, past time to revisit the original Luddite movement— its devisers, their activities, and the mechanisms of their undoing—and to ask if any facet might be recoverable for critically approaching the imperial gadgets of our own postindustrial machine age. Or failing all that, a basic acquaintance with Luddite history might let us call each other by more accurate names.

Workers’ Breaktime Workers have intentionally broken machines for as long as there have been machines to break, and the particular rampages of Luddism against looms and factories date back to the seventeenth century in England. But Luddism itself has a distinctive beginning in the spring of 1811, when bands of Nottingham workingmen smashed stocking frames (machines used to make hosiery). These attacks, which took 122 1 The Baffler [no.23]

g place under cover of darkness, were followed by others not only in Nottingham—as many as forty-four separate attacks on at least five hundred machines in this one city alone between November 1811 and February 1812—but elsewhere for several more years in England’s industrializing north and west. All of the aggressions carried a message not against “technology” in general but against the repurposing of technology with the specific aim of increasing output. In the Nottingham of 1812, that meant doubling the number of stockings produced (and reducing their quality) via automation, while putting workers out of work under the rationalizing banner of labor-saving “efficiency.” About the Luddite opposition to this mode of progress-free innovation, the historian Eric Hobsbawm said it best: There can, of course, be no doubt of the great feeling of opposition to new machines—a well-founded sentiment, in the opinion of no less an authority than the great Ricardo. Yet three observations ought to be made. First, this hostility was neither so indiscriminate nor so specific as has often been assumed. Second, with local or sectional exceptions, it was surprisingly weak in practice. Lastly, it was by no means confined to workers, but was shared by the great mass of public opinion, including many manufacturers.

Resistance to both practices in Nottingham coalesced under the name of “Ned Ludd,” and a great deal of scholarly effort has been expended in tracing the origins of this apocryphal figure. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter who Ned Ludd might have been, any more than it’s important to certify the corporeal bona fides of the Molly Maguires and Tom Joads and Joe Hills of American labor apocrypha (though for the record, they are fictional, fictional, and actual, respectively). This particular sustained spate of labor unrest was new, however, in its organization and efficiency. The machine wrecking was not wanton or indiscriminate. The Luddites destroyed frames owned by the manufacturers who doled out substandard wages or paid in goods rather than currency. Within the same room, machines were smashed or spared according to the business practices of their owners. An eyewitness to one attack described the perpetrators as a band of “about Twenty men, some armed with Pistols and others with large sticks and their faces disguised with handkerchiefs over their chins.” They used hammers and other sharp tools and sent threatening letters to specific targets before an attack: “Sir if you do not pull don the Frames and stop pay [in] Goods onely for work or make in Full fashon my Companey will visit yr machines for execution against you—Mr Bolton the Forfeit—I visitd him—Ned Lud.” Historians have wrangled mightily over what Luddism meant, especially in the three decades after World War II. While Hobsbawm saw The

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h Idols Abroad it as “collective bargaining by riot,” E. P. Thompson devoted a lengthy chapter in The Making of the English Working Class to making larger claims for the movement, which was, he said, “a working-class culture of greater independence and complexity than any known to the 18th century.” Other scholars, led by Malcolm I. Thomis, argued precisely the opposite—and vociferously. In this view, Luddism was largely a local phenomenon with roots in economic privation, shifting business conditions, and poor trade. Thomis and his cohort believed that Luddism accomplished very little and none of it good, bringing suffering down on the working-class communities of the north while failing to raise the standard of living among workers. Yet despite this scholarly jousting over what Luddism did or did not mean as a working-class movement, there is one thing on which Thompson and Thomis and their respective acolytes agree: Luddism wasn’t a war on machines. Thomis, the ardent detractor of the movement, insists on this point with particular force, arguing that “the continued enterprise of local workmen in the field of invention and the total absence of attempts to destroy new machinery after Luddism confirm that Luddism neither continued nor inaugurated an anti-machinery tradition.”

The War on Terrors So how did it come to pass that Luddism is now almost exclusively remembered as a barely rational movement of rampant machine breaking? The answer resides, not surprisingly, in the popular history of the movement that the victors of the nineteenth-century’s workplace wars have bequeathed to us. Their portrait of the Luddites as little more than a mindless, retrograde mob has proved sturdy enough to resist the revision of subsequent historians. Luddism’s signal political legacy is more readily discovered in the reaction to the machine wrecking than in the wrecking itself. The war waged against the Luddites in industrial England brought us one of the earliest examples of a government corrupting a social movement by force of arms on behalf of private property. For a time, of course, the dance of authority and rebellion remained local in scope. Nottingham’s officials organized a committee to counterpunch the Luddites, funding it with the generous sum of two thousand pounds to buy intelligence and coordinate the defense of vulnerable manufacturers. Luddites got wind of the committee and offered a public riposte on December 23, 1811, under the name “King Lud.” It’s a document charged with contempt—while also indulging a twist of linguistic humor that seems to come straight out of a Monty Python screenplay. You can almost hear Graham Chapman reading it in voiceover: “I do hereby discharge, all manner of Persons, who has been, employ’d by me, in giveing any information of breaking Frames, to the 124 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

g Town Clerk, or to the Corporation Silley Committee—any Person found out, in so doing . . . will be Punish’d with death, or any Constable found out making any enquiries, so has to hurt the Cause of Ned, or any of his army, death.” But the Luddites were quickly victimized by their own successes—in Nottingham and also in Leeds, where croppers began breaking gig mills and shearing frames that were most certainly devised to put them out of work. The number and sheer audacity of the Luddite attacks led the Crown to mobilize thirteen thousand soldiers to police the affronted property and hunt down the breakers. “There were more troops in the troubled areas of the Midlands and north of England than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsular War,” writes Brian Bailey in his 1998 account The Luddite Rebellion. There were midnight raids and arrests of suspected Luddites, energetically conducted by men such as Joseph Radcliffe, a magistrate in Huddersfield (near Leeds) who rounded up dozens of suspects and questioned many of them in his own home. The occupation and interrogations were given additional scope by leaders of Parliament, who passed legislation that made frame breaking a capital offense. George Gordon, aka Lord Byron, spoke against the bill in the House of Lords. Byron knew of the social unrest and crippling poverty around Nottingham, since his estate, Newstead Abbey, abutted Sherwood Forest (the same forest where one Robin Hood had made his home centuries earlier, and a location often invoked by Luddites as their base camp). As Byron wrote in a private letter to a patron, “I have seen the state of these miserable men, & it is a disgrace to a civilized country.—Their excesses may be condemned, but cannot be subject of wonder.” Perhaps sensing the futility of his dissent, Byron tempered his sympathy in a postscript: “I am a little apprehensive that your Lordship will think me too lenient towards these men, & half a framebreaker myself.” The new law took effect amid the shock of the Perceval assassination. (Though this shock, like most everything else in the industrializing Workshop of the World, was relative to one’s socioeconomic standing; crowds of workers greeted the news of Perceval’s murder with tumultuous raptures in Nottingham and elsewhere, including London.) But the mood of moral panic among England’s mill owners and their earnest propagandists such as Robert Southey was more than enough to confirm the Luddites’ standing as all-purpose enemies of the state. In the popular mind, the early and inchoate impression of Luddites as smashers of machines and sowers of sedition rapidly gave way to an official view of the Luddites as agents of terror. This was an image the Luddites eventually did much to confirm, as their use of violence degenerated from disciplined attacks on property to assaults on small factories and attempted murder. In short order—

No waves of oppressed workers of the information industry seem ready to rise up and smash their laptops. Many of them are freelancers and contract workers, after all. They’d be destroying their own property, not the bosses’ machines.

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We’re condemned to an endlessly recursive “point-oh-ing” of repurposed ideas and shabby distractions.

a matter of months, in fact—Luddism transformed itself from a social movement that cited royal charters and cleaved to the image of cooperative commonwealth passed down by the radical Protestant sects of the Civil War into one that aimed to overturn the government and assassinate political figures. Luddite propagandists called for the execution of anyone who collaborated with the hated class of owners and political leaders—even fellow citizens serving on juries. “Come let us follow the Noble Example of the brave Citizens of Paris who in the Sight of 30,000 Tyrant Redcoats brought a Tyrant to the Ground. by doing so you will be best aiming at your own Interest,” went a March 1812 letter from Yorkshire. “Above 40,000 Heroes are ready to break out, to crush the old Government & establish a new one.” Nothing so grandiose came to pass. The Luddites’ shift to largerscale attacks, modeled consciously on military-style rebellion, played into the hands of England’s own campaign of anti-Luddite repression. This embrace of violent terror was nothing short of a godsend to an occupying army and the committees of local businessmen who had been unable to cope with guerrilla tactics in the dead of night. And so the Luddite uprising, marking the historical moment when government power and the labor-saving technology business began to align, moved quickly into a pattern that’s become wearily familiar to social movements ever since. There is, first off, the top-down, business-directed technological revolution imposed in the name of progress, followed by a spontaneous and semiorganized rebellion from below. Then comes talk of a counterrevolution, which is then met by a counter-counterrevolution organized by an alliance of government and business. This crowning offensive—call it the occupation of historical memory—ensures that the rebels are remembered as destructive, primitive, and retrograde. Ned Ludd, whoever he was, surely was present at the creation.

The Machine, Raging One of the most notorious features of Luddism was the movement’s secret oaths. And those vows largely held. No Luddite leader ever wrote a memoir. Nor did any convicted Luddite offer confessions on the gallows. Even those outside the movement in a position to know its secrets rarely, if ever, spoke up. In this sense, Luddism was a genuine shadowy conspiracy not unlike, say, the Communist cabals that excitable red-baiters mythologized at the height of the Cold War. Luddites enjoyed the passive—and, in some instances, active—support of their downward-spinning, machine-afflicted communities, so the Crown’s bounties largely went unclaimed, and the local constabulary and the occupying troops alike never did track down many of the breakers. Now, however, Luddism is almost entirely pathologized and cut off from anything resembling broad-based communal support. Today we speak of Luddism as a perverse tic of individual resistance to a forward 126 1 The Baffler [no.23]

g march of progress that all of us regard as foreordained. (Or at least this is the consensus that’s taken hold among the meme-creating sliver of the global knowledge elite that has appointed itself the arbiter of history’s self-evident telos—and that, apparently, is the same thing as popular consent of the governed in today’s machine age.) So whereas the first flourish of Luddism was dangerous and potentially violent, the neo-Luddite tendencies we see flashing across our own political landscape are miniaturized into the trivial, and faintly embarrassing, quirks of the backward or the reactionary. An air of disengagement, personal virtue, and “opting out” marks neo-Luddism— using a typewriter instead of a computer, for example, or choosing the no-frills simplicity of a Jitterbug phone over the sticky complexity of a smart phone. And conjuring up the violence that the original Luddites wreaked on machines is little more than a wish-fulfillment fantasy. In early December 1811, Nottingham town clerk and Luddite opponent George Coldham put his finger directly on the political implications of Luddism when he wrote: If the People are once taught that they can accomplish the objects of their wishes by a system of Terror I feel assured that they will proceed further than breaking Frames and it is Difficult to say who may be the next Objects of their Vengeance.

At a distance, it’s clear that what gave the first wave of Luddism its power to terrify the capitalists and constables—and what makes the very glimmer of its revival so scary to our present purveyors of technologi-

P. S . M U E L L ER

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Today we speak of Luddism as a perverse tic of individual resistance to a forward march of progress.

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cal utopia—is a long-obsolesced set of communal and political impulses. We can’t keep our labor organized or our organized labor strong. We can’t keep secrets—and the technological sweep of the surveillance state makes it less possible to do so with each passing moment. Campaigns of targeted violence, cloaked in secrecy, have become the more or less exclusive business of our own unending war on terror—and, unlike the early Luddite insurgency, don’t much care who they hit. (Nor, it need hardly be noted, does this extremely high-tech crusade enjoy anything like the broad support that Luddism commanded from its host communities.) The chances of tablets and smart phones getting broken in protest— or even switched to airplane mode for a day—seem minimal. No waves of oppressed workers of the information industry, tired of pressing their intelligence into the shoddy goods of just-in-time (and not a moment more) blogs and other misshapen entities of content production, seem ready to rise up and smash their laptops and take a stand. Many of them are freelancers and contract workers, after all. They’d be destroying their own property, not the bosses’ machines. Meanwhile, we endure the waves of hype and histrionics crafted to herd us into digital pens of eternal disruption. In our intellectual and economic endeavors alike, it seems we’re condemned to an endlessly recursive “point-oh-ing” of repurposed ideas and shabby distractions— all aimed at keeping us from apprehending the class and power dynamics actually propelling our common life. In the face of all this towering yet formless techno-propaganda, it’s dispiriting to think that the useful lessons from Luddism’s history appear to be lost to our popular memory. Yet Ned Ludd’s legacy continues to live on in other ways. Indeed, if one judges by the ferocity of Luddism’s hold on the imagination of the tech class, there may be yet some organizing principle and power in the concept. There’s something revealing in the compulsion among the front rank of our digital apologists to cast the Luddite spirit widely enough to encompass and demonize anyone who stands in the way of the market’s mad, disorganized, and often punitive rush to fulfill its destiny. In this sense, Luddism’s dark appeal hasn’t changed all that much in the two hundred years since the movement first came into being. Much as it convulsed the vindictive political imagination of Robert Southey, Luddism marks for today’s elite guardians of privilege the repressed principles of mass rebellion and economic justice, organized around a set of values they can never afford to acknowledge in full. Still, the anathemas of a threatened elite remain a far cry from a Luddite revival. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that Luddism isn’t really Luddism unless something’s actually breaking; breaking, that is, with a purpose—and with the power of determined people behind it. t

A Monkey Could Do This 3 Si mon e Whit e at the very first moment in Baltimore there was a thud it was my great grandmother coming back to earth (levitate, negro you could do it just breathe) up to my chin in what I do not deserve certainly there is a limit to the utility of Jesus watch how I am to the touch flaming off a rifle barrel wherein I signal inspiration in wound-up sclera and a ferocious cannonball toward the rapt attention of the congregants and raise up in testimony over this here

You and me are not friends, OK? With “barbecue” in one ear and “chips” in the other, that is how a goddess comes with one calf cramped and a finger up her ass; a goddess comes for twenty minutes only when the seventh record has been turned over, convinced that laboring so closely over your face will kill you in a minute, does she relieve herself with a huffled and casual motherfuck. The probity of her pussy satisfies all curiosities. “Whatever, baby—let’s try it.” Doritos might be a distraction but don’t be confused about how they work: you gotta eat. I said this. I did this, without pseudonym, S The

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h Idols Abroad COPPER THIEVES

On Wittgenstein’s Steps A letter from unified Europe 3

Dubr avka Ugrešić

igeons are crazy about public sculptures. For pigeons there’s no greater happiness than perching down on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that, for some reason, people are crazy about public sculptures too. Last year, unidentified vandals attacked a sculpture of Marija Jurić Zagorka, a Croatian journalist and novelist. Zagorka’s literary production never got its due in her lifetime or for many years after her death in 1957. Had it not been for the efforts of the Zagreb Center for Women’s Studies, which, inter alia, had a statue erected in her honor in downtown Zagreb, her work would today be forgotten. The vandals sawed off the bronze umbrella on which the bronzed authoress stood leaning in repose, the Center for Women’s Studies whipped up a media frenzy, and the city fathers promptly committed to appropriating funds for a new umbrella. Appalled by the ugly incident, many Zagreb residents laid old umbrellas at the statue’s feet. There you go, that’s canonization for you! Croats may not be pigeons, but they still suffer a fatal attraction for public monuments. Since Croatian independence in 1991, many monuments to the victims of fascism have suffered damage; those keeping score have tallied up a total of 2,965 attacks. The majority took place in the immediate post-independence years, a time of anti-Yugoslav, anti-Serbian, and anti-Communist hysteria, meaning the new authorities had a fair degree of empathy for vandal passions provoked by collective Croatian traumas. In historical perspective, the Croatian reaction confirmed a paradox: trauma is greatest where there is least cause. Anti-Communist hysteria proved most vehement where Communism itself had been most benign. Twenty years ago many monuments by the well-known sculptor Vojin Bakić were destroyed (his monument on Petrova Gora is a pearl of international monumental architecture), yet the authorities were again benevolent toward the vandals. Vojin Bakić was, after all, a Croatian Serb. In contrast, back then and still today, any “vandal” tempted to burn the Croatian flag would have to reckon with a substantial fine. 130 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

L E W I S KO C H

didn’t pay monuments much mind until I discovered a surprising truth: most people engage in vandalism for the cash, not out of ideological or aesthetic conviction. Everyone in Holland knows who’s most enamored with copper and bronze. Yes, the Poles. In February of last year statues were stolen from atop graves in the Dutch settlements of Norg and Vries. Rheden lost a statue of the writer Simon Carmiggelt, and, wary of new thefts, Dutch officials spirited a statue of Queen Beatrix into storage. A couple of years ago a public sculpture of a mother and child, erected to honor the memory of victims of the Second World War, was stolen from Marienberg. In 2007 a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker was stolen in Laren. The cities of Zwolle and Nijmegen recently resolved to put their public statues in safekeeping, and in Eindhoven the police have fitted public sculptures with GPS units. If sculptures from Eindhoven go walkies, police will know where to find them. The list of Polish sins is long: anything with a glint of copper is a target for Polish thieves. If the trains aren’t running, it’s because the Poles have ripped out the copper cables. If there’s a power outage, it’s because the Poles have pilfered the cables from a few windmills, the pride of the Dutch national landscape. If a remnant from the First World War explodes in the Ypres region, it’s because the Poles (ah, those moles!) have been burrowing in the fields in search of copper.

Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate.

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Wherever Gunnera tinctoria takes root, native flora doesn’t stand a chance.

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The Dutch—for whom the Germans, who thieved Dutch bicycles at the close of the Second World War, had long been the preferred enemy—now blame the Poles for everything. In the settlement of Menaldum, police seized the bicycles of Polish workers living at the Schatzenburg trailer park, convinced they’d been stolen. It turned out the bikes had been given to the Poles by their employer so they’d be able to ride to work. “Poles” (a collective term for all East Europeans, of whom Poles are simply the most numerous) most often live in what the Dutch refer to as “Polish hotels,” which, in reality, means they live in cabins or camp trailers on the peripheries of the burgs where they work. The Dutch rent camp trailers to Poles for between fifty and eighty euros a week. That’s why many Poles prefer to sleep in tents. “Poles like working in Dutch horticulture. How can I best explain it? It’s a matter of chemistry. Dutch growers and Poles are like peas in a pod.” That’s how Johan de Jong, the avuncular general director of Holland Contracting, explained things to the media. He’s just one of the many Dutch who help Poles earn a wage in Holland, the average wage for undocumented labor being about four euros an hour, and it goes without saying that most Polish labor is indeed such. There’s a legend about how a couple of Dutch discovered copper wire fighting over who had dibs on a copper coin they’d spotted in the street. The Poles have now got themselves mixed up in the story. In almost every country the greatest thefts are perpetrated by natives—in Holland, the Dutch; in Croatia, the Croats; in Poland, the Poles—snugly protected by myths of great theft and devastation being the work of others, chiefly foreigners. Sometimes that other is a Gypsy, sometimes a Jew; other times it’s a Pole, Romanian, Serb, or Albanian. There’s no voice of reason that might prevent an embittered Dutchman from accusing a Pole of stealing cabbages from his garden. That’s just how things are for the moment. Poles don’t steal cabbages. Poles steal bronze and copper. Not even Slovaks steal cabbage. Slovaks steal teeth. In a video clip one Slovak filmed and uploaded to the Internet, he admitted that he’d long been burgling the graves of famous people buried at the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s central graveyard. The teeth-stealing Slovak initially made off with the watches of the deceased, but soon figured he might earn better on celebrity teeth. Apart from those of Johann Strauss and Johannes Brahms, whom forensics experts have confirmed are missing teeth, the Slovak claims to be hoarding the teeth of many other famous dead, prompting the Viennese police to open the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Schönberg, and others, just to check if all bones are present and accounted for. Charges are pending against the unusual Slovak with a fetish for disinterring celebrity skeletons’ teeth.

hile some are intent on destruction, others set about healing the damage. Croatian sculptor Ivan Fijolić’s response to the destruction of monuments erected in honor of the Partisan and Yugoslav anti-fascist struggle was to erect monuments to fallen monuments. As a child, Fijolić loved Vanja Radauš’s sculpture The Bomber, that of a youthful soldier hurling a grenade at the hated German enemy. Fijolić thus dreamed up a new “bomber,” this time a bulbous nappy-wearing toddler who instead of holding a grenade in his hand is flipping the bird. When vandals lopped the head off Antun Augustinčić’s famous Tito monument, Fijolić reproduced the sculpture with stunning precision, but replaced the head with that of Tito’s wife Jovanka. In Fijolić’s sculptural imagination, another Partisan legend, teen solider Boško Buha (buha meaning flea in Croatian), is reincarnated as a burly specimen of his insect namesake. Artist Siniša Labrović is also a kind of repairman. Labrović symbolically performed his Bandaging the Wounded project on the public holiday in remembrance of the anti-fascist struggle, tending to a devastated monument the way emergency services might to a wounded human being. Labrović cleaned the monument’s injuries of debris, removing the shrapnel, dousing its abrasions with disinfectant, and rubbing antibiotic cream in its cuts before binding its wounds in real bandages. How does one send an artistic message in a situation that resembles the children’s game Broken Telephone? One thief steals a bronze sculpture for the cash, and does so in a given historical moment and context, safe in the knowledge that his theft will be viewed not as a criminal act, but a political one, and that as such he’ll never face the force of the law. After all, he’s stolen a bronze sculpture of a Partisan, and in the new political circumstances the Partisan is a loathed symbolic figure. Twenty years later—in somewhat changed political circumstances, interpreting a distant criminal act as a political one, because most similar acts were indeed politically inflected—an artist responds to an internal call to arms and protests an act of vandalism with an artistic gesture. For the majority, the gesture will prove incomprehensible (a new time, a lost context); for the minority, it will be a somewhat retrospective polemic between a pair of incompatible combatants: an artist and a small-time thief. This is but a sliver of the story about the spectacularly fraught relationship between art and reality.

went to Ireland last June. A Dublin friend and I set off by car for Doolin, and from there took a small boat to Inisheer, the smallest of the three Aran Islands. Lashed by a stormy silver sea and menaced by a sky of black-gray clouds, Inisheer was a place of dramatic desolation. In a local café—the house of one of the islanders—you could buy hand-knitted scarves and caps, grab a coffee from the vending The

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h Idols Abroad machine, and try a piece of local apple strudel, all of which we dutifully did. From the tightlipped proprietress, who never set down her knitting needles, we learned there was a doctor on the island, a Croat from Zadar. Making our way down the road to the ferry terminal, we came across a lonely figure, a man pushing two bicycles, wearing a suit splattered in white paint, on his nose a huge pair of glasses with yellowed lenses. The glasses could have been those of a con man, a motorcyclist, or a scuba diver, but who would know. “Excuse me, do you live here?” “Aaaa . . .” An indiscernible sound emerged from the man’s mouth. “And might you know where the local doctor lives?” “Aaaa . . .” He pointed off into the distance. “You’re not Irish?” “Iiii . . . Latvian . . .” he said, his mouth spreading into a toothless grin. Our interlocutor had a dark-red complexion, as islanders in the north seas often do, bloodshot from constant exposure to the assaults of the wind, almost as if permatanned—but inside out. He was, I think, blind drunk. Like our lonely Latvian on Inisheer, at least two hundred thousand Poles and other East European immigrants have made their way to and through Ireland in recent years, and it’s fair to say that the Irish love affair with “Easterners” is over. Unemployment is soaring, and demands that “Poles” be banned from residing in the country for more than two years are increasingly shrill. In Dublin I set off for the National Botanic Gardens, where even die-hard Dubliners are thin on the ground. Home to more than seventeen thousand plant species from around the globe, the gardens were founded at the end of the eighteenth century by the Royal Dublin Society. Biodiversity is the gardens’ ideological plume and pride. My attention was drawn to plaques mounted next to certain plants, emblazoned with the question Why is it a problem in Ireland? and an explanation of said problem in somewhat smaller type. These eye-catching “wanted posters” taught me a lot: for example, that the South American Gunnera tinctoria, which grows to a height of two meters, is particularly invasive. Wherever Gunnera tinctoria takes root, native flora doesn’t stand a chance, and consequently this ambitious plant is soon to be banned. The same applies to the giant rhubarb, and this is entirely understandable; a fleeting glance at its mighty leaves is enough to sow fear. Sasa palmata, a wide-leafed Japanese bamboo that grows to three meters, is likewise a threat to native flora; native sons are strangled dead wherever this Japanese immigrant takes root. The impressively named Rhododendron × superponticum is a hybrid that gladly leaps garden fences, making integration and adjustment an absolute breeze. But wagging tongues say it sabotages the regeneration of native trees, and so it too is threatened 134 1 The Baffler [no.23 ]

g with permanent expulsion from Ireland. The Asian Rosa rugosa, a pretty rose-colored shrub that grows on sand dunes alongside the ocean and speeds the erosion of native sands, is best described as a kind of floral Trojan horse. And so its time has also been called, every further contact with Irish soil to be officially banned. Crassula helmsii, an aquatic invader that launched its invasion of Ireland from far-off New Zealand, is particularly noxious; resistant to frost, once it takes root it’s impossible to uproot. Some species propagate so quickly, they’ve changed the face of the Irish landscape. A worried taxi driver treated me to a passionate tirade against floral immigrants, singling out the cordyline palm, which in New Zealand goes by the rather unromantic name of cabbage tree. “Ireland never looked like this!” he moaned. “It’s all because of those damn palms!” And, it’s true, some parts of Ireland, particularly at dusk, look like suburbs of Los Angeles. Quite parenthetically, in Dublin I was a guest at a literary festival, which had nothing to do with my native soil, with the former Yugoslavia, present day Croatia, or the Balkans. The moderator at my event, an affable fellow, confessed to me that he had no connection with what I was to talk about either, but that the organizers had asked him to be involved when they found out his long-deceased mother was a product of Croatian terroir. Who knows, perhaps the organizers had visited Croatia at some point and it’d seemed to them that Croats could manage only alongside other Croats, or perhaps they’d simply thought I’d feel more at ease with an Irishman whose mother was a Croat than an Irishman whose mother was an Irishwoman, or who knows what. I felt a bit like a cabbage they’d intercepted at the border without a botanical visa, but I certainly didn’t hold it against the fine people of Dublin. Dublin—a city that has named its two imposing bridges after writers, one after Beckett, the other after Joyce—won my heart forever. The Croatian mother thing could’ve happened anywhere, because as far as that thing is concerned, it’s just how most Europeans are. Yes, Europe is organized like the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin; everyone wears a plaque bearing his details around his neck, point of origin, level of invasiveness, and threat posed to native specimens all clearly documented.

The Viennese police opened the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schönberg, just to check if all bones were present and accounted for.

he National Botanic Gardens are also home to a glasshouse full of tropical plants, which you enter down three steps. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the winter months of 1948–49 in Dublin. A bronze plaque mounted on one of the steps claims that Wittgenstein liked to sit on the steps and write. I sat down and let my mind wander. What did I think about? Nothing very scientific. About how Europe in its entirety is irreparably tribal, how practiced it is in the art of world wars, and how this makes a new one a constant possibility. This The

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The thought occurred to me that Wittgenstein might well have been sitting on these steps at the very moment my mother gave birth to me.

time because of a “Pole”; because of that Latvian on Inisheer; because of a Serb or a Croat, both practiced in desecrating each other’s headstones; because of that Slovak who steals teeth from skeletons; or for some other reason—for money, the usual reason. Then the thought occurred to me that Wittgenstein might well have been sitting on these steps at the very moment my mother gave birth to me. And then, having severed the umbilical cord, I asked myself what in my life—a chaotic hold in which a socialist childhood, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, civil war, new passports and fractured identities, betrayals, exile, and a new life in a West European country all mix and mingle—what in my lifetime had actually been realized of all the things promised to us by Communist ideologues, Hollywood films, the dapper ideologues of consumerism, the homespun ideologues of nationalism, the ideologues of European unification, by gurus of every stripe and shade? The question bore into me like a poisonous thorn, my heart began to pound, and I was overcome with fear, a sudden fear of the empty screen, of the absence of future projections . . . So what, said a consoling internal voice, why do we need future projections—in the near future we’re to live much longer, at least on average (who still wants to live longer in a world like ours?!); and we’re sure to live better (no one’s promising that anymore!); and even if we don’t live better, we’re definitely going to live in greater freedom (yeah right!), in a world without borders (pull the other one!); in a world of solidarity and justice (enough already!); in a world of solidarity and justice, we’re going to live like slaves: like s-l-a-v-e-s (hey now, hey now!); don’t get hung up on the details, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one; you’re bleating, Christ, that’s all you know how; I’m not bleating, I just know that a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push . . . And amazingly, just as Wittgenstein said, my terrified thoughts pried open the door, fluttered their way outside, and raced off towards the Asiatic steppes; my thoughts deftly leapt the frothy crests of waves on the Indian Ocean, soaring above the snowy Nepalese peaks: my thoughts skated the slipstream down onto the plains, slinking through the grass like tigers; God, there was almost nothing that my hypermobile thoughts, my sensuous thoughts, my thoughts, seductive like a National Geographic clip, couldn’t manage. There, on Wittgenstein’s steps, I calmed my racing pulse, ssshhh, and renounced the prognosis I’d just offered: bury those fears, forget that nonsense, it’s just these damn gardens. I’d completely forgotten. I was in the stifling heat of the tropics. t Translated from the Croatian by David Williams.

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Where Is It Now 3 Sh a ron O l ds The heart of my life was spent on it— that was my life! And where is it, now, as this train goes down the mountain for an hour, six years after divorce, all that sex, it must be somewhere, maybe among these wild grasses near the tracks, or near plants in the sea which drink salt like milk, as if the scenes of impermanent love could be stored in tidepools’ gardens, where a mountain steps down into the sea, then down into the ocean trench, until it touches the spherical mountain which is the mantle of the globe. Where seeds fly without catching or taking, until they turn to fray—maybe where the children who die before birth live, or the creatures who die before conception. Maybe the love made, within a love that was not lasting, moves in huge discs of dust beyond our solar system, but I think not, I think those kisses, and little gasps, those sighs and long samurai strokes, and breast-tips leapt to hardness like sudden horns on the brow of a milk-fed goat— I feel it is all nearby, in the hair of the woods this train now passes, and it lines roadsides, I can hear the insects singing in the nerves of the meadow, the made love of a life is the inner logic of a life, the home fragrance. The

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hIdols

Abroad POOR PEOPLE

Sacking Berlin How hipsters, expats, yummies, and smartphones ruined a city 3 Quinn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling

Berlin’s whimsy and play have been branded by the SPD, sold to venture capital, and dangled before its residents via the Yummie Net.

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t’s easy to talk about lost Golden Ages in Berlin. Everyone has their own romanticized era: louche Weimar Berlin before the Nazis, Iggy and Bowie’s seventies Berlin before the Wall fell, or maybe the squatter’s Berlin of the good old nineties. So when people start complaining that something has changed in the city, it’s tempting to dismiss it as insider one-upmanship, the old game of “I was here when.” And yet something has felt different in recent years. Berlin has always hosted poverty better than other European capitals, but this time around, Berlin has embraced an economic model that makes poverty pay. The idea is to cash in on Berlin’s cachet by branding it as a “Creative City”—but it is also, to judge by what has happened, to gut public services, to sell off public housing, and to strategize about new ways of turning taste into profit. This new Berlin is a city where imaginative expression supports, directly or indirectly, a grand scheme for making a small number of people rich. One of these days, some lucky Berliners and expats will finally attract venture capital from London, Palo Alto, and Boston. But the others—the scenic poor and the clever unemployeds who make the city so attractive—will find it ever more difficult to make ends meet. There is nothing novel about this story. Berlin’s dream is the same fantasy that is embraced by out-of-the-way metro areas all across the United States. But the stakes in Berlin are higher than in most places. For one thing, when our story begins, Berlin was broker than almost any other Western European city, living on the life support of government transfers. In 2005, unemployment peaked at a Depressionesque 19 percent, and the city’s debt had doubled. In the mid-aughts, Berlin was not bailing out Athens. Berlin was Athens. It was here, in this economically stagnant metropolis, that mayor Klaus Wowereit, affectionately known as “Wowi,” stood at City Hall and laid out a ten-year plan for the city. He began by denouncing striking transit workers for “attempting to cripple public life,” but went on to dream big for the city he called “poor but sexy.” He imagined a future when a hipper working class would thrive unburdened by unions: “I imagine one thousand women and men of all ages gathering for a World Congress of Creatives. The designers who live here will deliver

JA KO B H I N R I C H S

their ideas to the world’s biggest corporations,” and “Berlin will be the mecca for the creative class.” A theme song for the city’s new ten-million-euro marketing campaign was available for download: an eightsecond ringtone designed by a techno DJ with a vaguely Turkish trill and an echoing call to “be Berlin, be Berlin, be Berlin.” Less than a mile away, one of the city’s most recognizable icons was being demolished. The enormous steel-and-glass Palace of the Republic, built by East Germany in the mid-seventies, had been a uniquely socialist megaplex, containing the hall of the national legislature alongside a theater, a bowling alley, and an ice cream parlor. The city rejected various appeals to restore and reuse the building, and the last concrete columns fell at the end of 2008. As demolition concluded, a blue-andwhite cube arose facing the empty site—a “Temporary Art Hall” that The

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Welcome, creative class, the ads implied; we value your clicking, swiping, and staring.

hosted installations made of old doors and detritus, talks by art critics, and, on one occasion, a performance by a Canadian expat band who shredded on guitars while cutting their way out of a giant plastic bag filled with smoke. The financial supporters of the Temporary Art Hall were more staid than one would expect from such daring interventions: a textile manufacturer, an advertising agency, a pharmaceutical company, and an American law firm. The latter, which claimed to be “positioned at strategic intersections in the global economy,” had evidently determined that a gathering place for artists, hipsters, and expats was such an intersection. Here was the New Berlin: a city where a faintly daring cube built by companies replaced a palace for the people built by government. The spectacle must have made Wowi proud. Since the number of people employed in “creative” pursuits like design, music, media, and fashion had finally surpassed those in manufacturing in 2005, he had gone all in on a strategy of catalyzing growth and investment with art exhibits and noise bands. Berlin became part of the UNESCO “Creative Cities Network” the same year, making it officially one of the world’s “breeding grounds for creative clusters” where people “create synergies that optimize their potential.” Meanwhile, double-digit unemployment and cheap real estate made Berlin both an employers’ and a buyers’ market. But the question remained: How could the city remain “poor but sexy” if Wowi’s intention was to become rich?

The Red Mohawks of the New Working Class Enter the hipster. In the aughts, Berlin’s package deal of pilsner, falafel, Airbnb, and bleary nights at the famed Berghain (described by one inflight magazine as “the best club in the world”) was a big success. The number of nights that tourists spent in the city doubled between 2003 and 2011—from eleven to twenty-two million. Beginning around the contested Bush victory of 2000, and accelerating after the recession of 2008, the face of the typical visitor to Berlin changed: from German to non-German, from the oversize sweaters of the academics to the zigzag haircuts and fluorescent sweatshirts of the artists or, at least, the arty. As rents peaked in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Vancouver, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and London, Berlin beckoned. Streams of young people with postsecondary degrees in literature, art, and theory arrived in the city seeking rooms in shared apartments. Craigslist became a clearinghouse for stolen cruiser bikes and homogeneous Ikea-furnished rooms where savvy landlords added one hundred euros to their usual asking price and promised proximity to the “current hipster district BerlinNeukölln, with lots of bars, galleries, international artists.” The feedback loop began as people from distant scenes were sold on the city by its similarity to the places they had left. Tattoos, formerly the exclusive province of the white German working class, began to ap-

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g pear at the sidewalk tables of the cafés; shorts began to appear on men. By 2010, Californians were serving eight-euro huevos rancheros to Parisians wearing Aztec-printed pants, while Danes dressed in shapeless black sacks sipped lychee Bionade. Spaniards cooked enormous paellas at the streetside markets, and enterprising Brits did vintage arbitrage, buying eighties silk jumpers in the flea markets of the Turkish and Arab neighborhoods in the south, then selling them at a premium in the hipster and tourist neighborhoods in the north. Last November, the New York Times Magazine published an account of an Australian in Berlin who had to leave because he was just having too much fun to get anything done. Those who did stay had to find work, and some expats found jobs as art installers in the galleries in Mitte, while others created their own jobs as freelance cupcake bakers, yoga instructors, bicycle mechanics, show promoters, and iPod DJs. Many subsisted on one-euro trays of salami and Brötchen, and all felt grateful that German grocery stores are so heavily subsidized. On certain streets, it became increasingly rare to hear the local language. People searched for English-speaking doctors and tips on dealing with immigration on the expat website Toytown Germany, a name that captured the liberating atmosphere of eternal youth and play. Many thought they had found a bohemian paradise. Mayor Wowi returned to the wellspring of hip in his 2011 reelection bid. A billboard campaign across the city featured his new Berliners in their natural state of interface with liquid crystal displays. One featured a young father in a cowboy shirt checking his text messages while holding his skull-and-crossbones-clad baby in a light clutch. Another showed two women, one in Sally Jessy Raphael glasses, leaning toward a screen, rasterizing intently. A third was of Wowi himself, photographed through the lens of a smartphone. You, the viewer, were taking the picture, capturing the celebrity mayor. Welcome, creative class, the ads implied; we value your clicking, swiping, and staring. And it wasn’t just Wowi anymore: now the entire Social Democratic Party (SPD) had decided to bet its fortunes on the new, wired working class. The symbol of the change was the party’s Internet guru, Sascha Lobo, known for his fuchsia Mohawk, his Fu Manchu mustache, and the wireless headset he frequently wears in photographs. In his 2006 book, We Call it Work, Lobo had celebrated what he called the “digital Bohème” and described himself as “online for most of my waking life.” In the course of the 2009 campaign, Lobo appeared on stage at numerous public events for the SPD, the red of their logo (a nod to their origins as a Marxist working-class party) coordinating perfectly with his Mohawk. At the same time, Lobo was the face of commercials for Vodafone that featured house music, time-lapse footage of Berlin streets, and clips of Lobo texting and photographing himself on a city bus. The ads provided the spiritual template for Wowi’s 2011 advertising campaign. The digital bohemian had arrived; he was the new constituency for the old SPD.

The new, creative Berlin is also a privatized Berlin, where companies like Wall Inc. provide the necessary infrastructure in exchange for a chance to win euros and brand loyalty.

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h How could the city remain “poor but sexy” if Wowi’s intention was to become rich?

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But who would stay poor and who would cash in on sexy in this brave new Berlin? The New York Times reported in 2010 on the “wave of international creative types” populating the Kreuzberg-Neukölln neighborhoods with “cafes, wine bars, the odd organic grocery and . . . an unusually hip monthly flea market.” Two years later, another Times scribe rhapsodized (this time in the Real Estate section) about the rise in property values that had resulted, quoting both a property broker on the “dance and yoga studios” springing up in the inner courtyards of formerly working-class neighborhoods and an Austrian transplant who holds “art lectures and concerts” in her apartment saying “confidently” that the value of her apartment had doubled in five years. The article also described the anti-gentrification protests of June 2010 as “light-hearted”; activists, even those who got arrested, were presumably just part of the “cosmopolitan crowd” “enlivening” the area. In fact, the grievances of the protesters were not purely aesthetic. The share of Berliners on some form of social assistance had come close to 20 percent by the time the Times article appeared last year; Wowi’s policies were undeniably pro-sexy—Fashion Week was given prime locations, and even permitted to erect a tent on top of a memorial to the Nazi book burnings—but they were hardly pro-poor. Der Spiegel reported that, as tourism boomed, the mayor sold off 110,000 units of city-owned housing and ended subsidies for 28,000 units more. Rents in subsidized buildings rose more than 20 percent. Housing costs also rose 20 percent in the same period, considerably more than did the overall cost of living. The contradictions were especially stark in the neighborhoods where tourists and hipsters were thickest on the ground. In Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, where the city’s website promised “urban buzz, vibrancy and diversity at every turn,” both unemployment and rent were above the city average, with joblessness at 16 percent and rents in many parts running as high as 50 percent above the city mean. Neukölln, with a city-high unemployment rate of nearly one in five, nevertheless experienced a jump of 17 percent in rent in certain places in just a couple of years. It was a good time to be a landlord in Berlin. Workers? Not so great. As the gap between wages and rents expanded, artists and expats became the scapegoats. Last summer, “Berlin doesn’t love you” stickers were plastered in English everywhere, and reports of expats barred entry to bars and galleries multiplied. The owners of one bar received international exposure when they denounced their own clientele in a home-edited web video as “all these fucking students, artists, layabouts, the complete mob called ‘creative class.’” Other signs appeared. On the door of a gallery scrawled in felt-tip marker: “No entry for hipsters from the U.S.” and “Other people imitating American hipsters are also not welcome. The capacity of Spanish hipsters and tourists is almost overdosed.” The term EU-Ausländer appeared with increasing

g frequency, especially as Spaniards and Greeks took refuge from the economic abyss of their own home countries and the tabloids demanded “no German money for Athens.” In 2012, Zitty magazine put a man in a purple plaid shirt, chunky spectacles, and a mustache on its cover and declared the Neukölln hipster the city’s “favorite hate object.” Tensions spilled over into violence in an area that had resisted gentrification when three new chic eateries, including a cocktail bar, opened simultaneously on a street otherwise populated by a taxi-driving school, a Thai massage parlor, and a slot machine casino. One morning, shortly after the grand opening last summer, customers found the windows smashed and red paint splashed onto the sidewalk. The bar received the brunt of the attack and looked like the end of an art performance, both edgy and creepy in the violence of dripping red paint on the building’s cream exterior. An anonymous letter was posted on Indymedia claiming responsibility: A scenester yuppie cocktail bar for rich West German students is going to open where a corner bakery sold fresh rolls to neighborhood residents a few months ago. We’re not interested in neighborhood upgrading schemes like these. The residents will have to follow the bakers soon when they can’t afford their apartments anymore, and the cocktail bar will bring hipsters too! The rents will rise sky-high and we won’t be able to afford anything that’s left.

Still, the hipster proliferation persisted, and it climaxed with last year’s “Berlin Hipster Olympics.” Over six thousand people cheered each other on in skinny jeans tugs-of-war, vinyl record spinning competitions, and tote-bag-hopping races. Most news publications took easy jabs at the self-consciously ironic nature of the Olympics, posting mocking photos of skinny young men and women wearing horn-rimmed glasses while tossing horn-rimmed glasses into the air. But few publications asked what the commingling of six-thousand-plus members of the loosely defined creative class meant for Berlin. Had Wowi’s vision been fulfilled? Was this a dress rehearsal for the 2019 World Congress?

The Toilet King’s Yummies While the papers took potshots at the anti-athleticism of Berlin’s hipsters, it was an advertising agency, Wall Inc., that provided the sharpest analysis of what was happening. The company was a long-standing presence in Berlin, having established its foothold in 1984 after it won a contract to build and maintain a thousand bus shelters in exchange for the right to sell advertising on the shelters’ walls. The year after the fall of the (other) wall, Wall Inc. built eight hundred more bus shelters in the East and brought the West’s ads to the once-Communist streets. Then, in the nineties, Wall Inc. took over the provision of public toilets for the city, securing the rights to eleven advertising surfaces for

The monuments of East Germany have been demolished. Social services have been sold off, and with them have gone the memory of the city as a place of shared public goods.

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h every toilet they built and maintained for twenty-five years. While the old toilets had been free, these new ones cost fifty pfennig. So, for every service the company sold—services that the city used to offer for free— Wall also received a concession of public space, an exchange that has led to a virtual monopoly on outdoor advertising and an informal title, the “Toilet King,” for company owner Hans Wall. Playing on the German word for toilet (Klo), Wall has referred slyly to his model as Klobalization, an apt term for his alchemy of public good into ad-revenueproducing private service. Last November, the Toilet Kings rolled out a campaign proudly naming the company’s “new target demographic”: the Yummie. This personage was Young, was Urban, and was Mobile, and the company limned her glory with a composite character it called “Jessica,” a thirtyfour-year-old woman with an English name, tousled blond hair, and red lipstick who lives in Berlin. Jessica looked the part of shabby chic, and had the retro blue sunglasses to prove it, but her occupation as a “real estate broker” demonstrated her professional savvy. On the company’s website, “Jessica” told the world how she liked to go out with friends, and “when we do, it’s especially important that we experience something cool!” Jessica’s hunger for the Cool and her casual hipness suggest the real appeal of the Yummie: they are the tastemakers, the consumer connoisseurs who discover and establish what the next trend will be. This was the Berlin hipster, brutally reduced to her commercial essence. Click on “Was ist ein Yummie?” and you find that Yummies like to consume. The target group tends to spend more than planned and to make spontaneous purchases. They are curious and open to inspiration. They are always up to date, follow trends and become trendsetters themselves. They never miss anything, thanks to their digital companion, the smartphone.

It wasn’t the hipsters who sacked Berlin; it was the man with the smartphone smile.

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But how was an advertiser supposed to access a target demo that avoids the usual conduits of print, television, and radio advertising? Wall tried one strategy by offering free wireless access in twenty of its Berlin bus shelters along with outdoor outlets for charging electronic devices. Of course, it wasn’t really free: people had to download Wall Inc.’s app in order to access the internet, and forty thousand of them did, capturing the eyes of Yummies as they moved through the city. The longer-term solution that Wall unveiled late last year was the “Yummie Net”: a network of “points of interest” across the city that positions ads where Wall’s research showed that Yummies “gather spontaneously.” Ads are to be installed on Wall’s “street furniture”—bus shelters, benches, and so on—near cinemas, bars, cafés, and museums. While Yummies drink beer and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes at the folding wooden tables that ring every bar and café in Berlin, the Yummie Net will close in, stalking its tasty prey.

g This is because the new, creative Berlin is also a privatized Berlin, where companies like Wall Inc. provide the necessary infrastructure in exchange for a chance to win the euros and brand loyalty of the Yummies. The Yummie Net also circles a fact even more unsettling: the public places where Berliners hang out are not really spaces for leisure or culture, but lucrative targets on a map. The sense of liberation that draws so many to Berlin only comes in the shadow of a new Wall.

Monetizing Toytown That sense of liberation must be made to pay, must shed its traces of political activism. Toytown must be monetized. Consider the city’s tech sector. A writer for Forbes reported in January 2013 on the “thriving start-up scene” in Berlin and compared the town’s tech innovations to—of course—the collapse of Communism: “Last time I was in Berlin [in 1989], there was a revolution going on. Now another has started, only this time it has nothing to do with politics.” This was the kind of creativity that Wowi liked. In January, he paid a visit to the neighborhood that labels itself “Silicon Allee,” making his final stop at its most recent success story: Wooga, a company whose nearly three hundred employees are spread across two floors of a former bread factory in Prenzlauer Berg. The outfit develops video games for social networks, and is the largest such concern in Europe; over one hundred million people have played its hit game, “Diamond Dash,” and millions more have played Wooga’s other offerings, like the one where you can “build the kingdom of your dreams with your friends in Magic Land.” By creating worlds of perpetual play, Wooga attracted $32 million in venture capital by the end of 2012. Wowi’s “poor but sexy” message has certainly found traction in Silicon Allee. For example, Wooga’s recruitment page invites you to come and work in “the coolest city in Europe,” a kingdom of your dreams where you can attend “parties held deep underground in bunkers, old breweries, and abandoned factories” and savor an atmosphere “like New York was in the 1980s.” Twitter announced they would establish their German headquarters in this coolest of cities, stating they were attracted to its “edge,” and Google has committed more than one million euros to an industrial complex close to the Berlin Wall Memorial. The name of the building—“the Factory”—takes a run at the legacy of Warhol while also cleverly acknowledging the city’s transition from the shop floor to the screen. So maybe this time the Golden Age really has ended. Back when Berliners hung swings in window frames, painted houses in neon colors, and planted gardens on their rooftops, none of it was supposed to pay off. In the officially Creative city, though, everything is different. The town’s whimsy and play have been branded by the SPD, sold to venture capital, and dangled before its residents via the Yummie Net.

On the door of a gallery, scrawled in felt-tip marker: “No entry for hipsters from the U.S.”

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hIdols

Abroad As Wowi left Wooga’s loft office in the Berlin winter, he wore a scarf with a quote from French New Wave actress Jeanne Moreau knit into it: “The most beautiful memories are those yet to come.” The quote was fitting for someone who has presided over a period when so many old memories were erased. The monuments of East Germany have been demolished. Social services have been sold off, and with them have gone the memory of the city as a place of shared public goods. With the departure of manufacturing, the memory of the city as a place of manual labor is history too. The Creative reforms have worked to enrich a few, including a smattering of new arrivals, but they have done little for the rest of the city’s inhabitants. To this day, every fifth Berliner lives under the poverty line, and the number grows every year. Those looking to blame someone for what has happened—for a development scheme in which the most expensive places to live also have the highest unemployment, and in which the city known as the “capital of poverty” within Germany is sold for its gritty charm abroad—should forget about the expats and hipsters, no matter what easy targets they make. It wasn’t the hipsters who sacked Berlin; it was the man with the smartphone smile. t

BRAD HOLLAND

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Americana

Sartre for Sartre’s Sake 3 Seth Colter Walls

ean-Paul Sartre’s chief political fidelity was not pledged to Communism, or Marxism, or even the amorphous spirit of May ’68 (with which he was sometimes associated)—but rather to a program of constant self-revision. In a 1969 interview, Sartre provided a cheerful example of his propensity for containing disputatious multitudes. Taking stock of some of his earlier outbursts on behalf of revolutionary purism, the philosopher-novelist-playwright exclaimed: “When I read this, I said to myself: ‘It’s incredible, I actually believed that!’” In other words, Sartre demanded the freedom to be crazily wrong, and then to notice this reality according to his own timetable. Ronald Aronson, the coeditor of We Have Only This Life to Live, a new collection of Sartre’s nonfiction, writes in his introduction that Sartre was fond of “over-the-top analyses” and was continually at pains to remind the world that “situations and people can change.” They do, and one can, of course—but even fans of Sartre must grapple with the obvious flights from accuracy that crop up in his writing. So the surprise of this new collection is that its most impressive writing is Sartre’s reported journalism—specifically from his journey to the United States in the first half of 1945 for Combat, the French Resistance journal edited by Albert Camus. The costs were shared by Le Figaro, for which Sartre also filed some dispatches, though his chief challenge was to explain to Combat’s revolutionary readership just what he was seeing in newly ascendant America. Here now, for the first time in any English collection of Sartre’s nonfiction, we have seven of those Combat dispatches, grouped under the heading “On the American Working Class.” Happily, some of the accounts that Sartre gathered during his six-month, winter-into-summer stay on American soil read well. His instruments of detection are not faultless, but when they’re locked in, they resonate strongly, even from beyond the grave. None of them approach the fact-filled, clickable slideshows that now pour forth from the public-intellectual regions of digital journalism—which is, of course, what makes them all the more memorable. His assessment of the bleak condition of American health care, for instance, is surprisingly topical, at least for those of us eager to figure out not just how much we might save under a government-regulated private insurance system, but also what we might soon expect, in a collective-national-unconscious sense, from the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975 New York Review Books, $24.95, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

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Americana And beyond mere questions of accuracy or contemporary relevance, the pieces collected here are simply a lot more fun to read than marketstrained contemporary journalism. Sartre clearly enjoyed being in the States (even if he says he “learned” how to love New York, in the essay “New York, Colonial City”). In at least one respect, he did foreshadow the all-out battle for the reader’s precious eyeball-time we know so well in the age of digital reporting: his dispatches from America always came packaged with material suitable for repurposing in headlines. See, for example, the all-caps line atop a report published in Combat on June 10, 1945, about an “apparent equality” between the working and bourgeois classes: “hello, jim!” says chicago’s bishop to the school’s janitor. “hello, bishop!” answers the janitor. Yet Sartre can see all the sides of this peculiarly American display of the leveling spirit: both the optimistic striver’s honesty and the mutually agreed upon falsehoods of garden-variety bullshit. And, instead of being reflexively dogmatic or cynical by virtue of his Marxist training, Sartre reports on the good faith he can see resting underneath the probable false consciousness: “Maybe they are more easily fooled than others,” he writes of all these Americans distributed among various economic strata (all of whom are obliged to contribute to the class-neutral culture of easy-breezy chattiness). “But this truly human kindness that pervades class relationships is surely one of the most charming and spontaneous characteristics of the United States.” Sartre attributes this tic to a culture of “professional individualism” that breeds an abiding personal optimism about self-improvement—and that also has the effect of blunting class identification among American workers. (A look at the number of student loan debt holders who labor today under the same illusions keeps this diagnosis feeling all too fresh.) Sartre tends to be most critical of social democrats who wind up downplaying their political rooting interests out of deference to the demands of American business civilization. In a June 1945 report for Combat, Sartre examines the proto-HMO system of health care instituted at one of the hospitals built—in part from workers’ garnished wages—by shipyard magnate Henry J. Kaiser. He discovers that the Kaiser workforce were unaware of their own stake in the operation; when he asks a shipyard worker, “Who is paying for all this?” the man replies, thoroughly persuaded: “But, Mr. Kaiser!” In reality, Kaiser had recouped his initial out-of-pocket investment within six months— while each worker in the Kaiser network continued to be assessed hospital fees out of their weekly paychecks. In the body of the dispatch, Sartre profiles a “left-wing militant” doctor desperately trying to convince himself that he’s working on the vanguard of true health care reform. The physician told Sartre that “all European visitors are equally amazed and indignant” that the workers in America should have no ownership 148 1 The Baffler [no. 23]

Sartre demanded the freedom to be crazily wrong, and then to notice this reality according to his own timetable.

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Americana share of the hospital they helped to finance. “But that’s absurd,” the doctor hastens to explain. “What can we do? Kaiser would have never accepted worker participation in the hospital’s administration. Therefore, should we have sabotaged the undertaking? . . . As you know, health in America is ‘big business.’” Swap out “congressional Republicans and Max Baucus” for “Kaiser” and here you have the story of Team Obama’s abandonment of the public option. Meanwhile, back in 1945, after noting that a “something” for the workers (that they can’t own) is preferable to a fully vested holding in nothing at all, the doctor goes on to assure Sartre that Kaiser’s proto-HMO system is the cat’s paw for an eventual public takeover of the health care system: “It represents a terrible blow to private medicine. . . . That’s how [Kaiser] will have contributed to the growth of socialized medicine.” Nearly seventy years later, the profit margins among American physicians, insurers, and pharmaceuticals show that they weathered the threatened socialist takeover of their industry pretty well. Sartre predicted as much at the beginning of his next paragraph: “What to answer him? That health care that is in the service of the big capitalists is not exactly socialized medicine? What would have been the use?”

artre, shooting consistently from the hip, gets some things wrong and, like many another European sojourner to the New World, can generalize wildly about the American scene with scant evidence. He identifies (and then laments) a lack of revolutionary ardor among American workers on the basis of a few too-conservative souls in the labor movement—just months before what turned out to be an unusually active summer of labor demonstrations in New York and Detroit, and before a four-day sit-down strike in August 1945 by fourteen thousand shipyard workers in Camden, New Jersey (some of whom, presumably, had a few ideas of their own about worker control). But in sizing up the American mood on the issue of health care— and specifically in recognizing that a fixation on preserving the profit motive in medicine would likely prove an inoperable cancer within the body politic—Sartre’s reported work in America holds up. Compared to his more pedestrian cultural observations about New York (it’s different from European cities!) and his outright laughable opinions on jazz—a subject on which, like Theodor Adorno and some other continental philosophers, he’s wildly, hilariously wrong—the class and health care reporting feel both accurate and important. Today, a blunt and chuckling track record of self-reversal such as Sartre’s is just not the done thing among our public intellectuals. For today’s commentariat to admit basic errors of fact or interpretation is to invite charges of flip-flopping and (worst of all) outsiderly un-savvi-

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ness. The hidden cost of this posture, howevSartre recognized that er, is a deeply conservative lack of interpretive a fixation on preserving ambition, tailor-made for the ideas festivals and corporate junkets that protect our enthe profit motive in medicine lightened betters from contact with militants would likely prove an inoperable of any kind. Those who make a sport of predicting election outcomes are routinely provcancer within the body politic. en wrong, as are those who guide the public on war, peace, and health care—and they have no defense other than to wave away their botching of the tea leaves with a fatalistic variation of “What can you do?” Or if you are Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and your triumphant Newsweek article bashing Obamacare instantly collapsed last year in a mile-high pile of misrepresentation, you just say (in so many words), “Piss off.” The first order of business for most of our pundits is to stay on guard against any external threat to the continuity of their own data streams and the integrity of their social media personas. The marketplace encourages our collective trust in the consistency of this news product— the understanding that, like it or not, Fox News will be Fox News today and tomorrow, and MSNBC will remain MSNBC just the same. So if navigating political and intellectual life by such fixed-spectrum points of consistency seems a depressingly petty prospect, Sartre’s reported dispatches—and not just the indisputably correct ones—offer something else of interest. He is not, as many website and aggregation experts proudly assert of their own work, here to save you time. By alerting the reader to the possibility that the writer might be wrong, or that the essayist reserves the right to change a stance in the next essay, Sartre keeps his audience alert—and wary of ceding too much credulity on the basis of familiarity or political allegiance.

happen to be the fairly proud owner of the late novelist David Markson’s personal copy of Sartre’s weird, short tract Anti-Semite and Jew. Toward the close of one particularly obtuse passage, Markson (quite correctly) wrote in the margin: “Dear Jean-Paul: How can you be sometimes so smart and sometimes so stupid?” But Markson didn’t stop reading at that point, either. The satisfying end of this bargain comes when a moment of true feeling hits, complete with the added force of an insight that has been arrived at with somewhat less ease than the average “smart take.” Sartre probably would have done horribly on Twitter; his frequent factual missteps would be called out like clockwork—or at least frequently enough to sour his good humor and clench up his writerly rhythms. But for all their flaws, many of the essays in this six-hundred-page collection still tower over the strategically miniaturized, score-keeping mindset that now defines the permissible bounds of both journalistic activity and political debate. t The

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Smile, Buster! 3 Farr an Nehme The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection Kino, Blu-ray box set, fourteen discs, $299.95

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arly in 1917 Buster Keaton left the vaudeville act he’d been performing with his parents since he was a toddler. Joseph Keaton would toss his acrobatic young son over furniture, into backdrops, and on at least one memorable occasion, right into a group of hecklers. Buster had enjoyed himself for years, but his father’s drinking steadily worsened; keeping a straight face while being thrown around by an unpredictable alcoholic was no way to earn a living. Keaton was twenty-one and a star on the circuit, but canny enough to see his future in the flickers. Already in 1917, motion pictures were an industry, with studios like Paramount and Fox up and running; already great artists were at work in the United States, including D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. So when he was asked years later about this momentous decision, Keaton never touted his own foresight or described the movies as a chance for vaster stardom. He maintained that the possibilities of film itself had been inducement enough. “The making of a motion picture started to fascinate me immediately,” he told film historian Kevin Brownlow, “so I stuck with them.” Keaton often said one of his first acts was to take a camera apart. With Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Keaton made two-reel comedies, taking steadily more responsibility until World War I intervened. After army service in France that was mostly behind the lines, and probably not as dangerous as his vaudeville act, he returned to work with Arbuckle. The apprenticeship lasted less than three years—all the prep Keaton needed to grow into one of the most dazzling comic filmmakers of all time. In 1919, producing mogul Joe Schenck (who later became Keaton’s brother-in-law) gave the comic his own studio. The nineteen shorts and eight features that Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in from 1920 to 1928 are included in Kino Lorber’s new fourteen-disc Blu-ray set, The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection. Also included are The Saphead (1920), Keaton’s first lead in a feature, and Lost Keaton, sixteen talkie shorts that Buster made at the cut-rate Educational Pictures in the mid-1930s. In addition to the lustrous detail of Blu-ray transfers, there’s a feast of extras: audio commentaries; still galleries and location tours; part of Man’s Genesis, a D. W. Griffith misfire sent up by Keaton’s Three Ages (1923); a shot-by-shot deconstruction of the waterfall finale in Our Hospitality (1923) that nearly drowned Keaton; so-called enhanced digital versions; and on and on. But look, it only seems overwhelming. I can happily report that with early rising and a family willing to order takeout, the whole thing can be devoured in a matter of days.

In a film era heavily dependent on eyes, Buster had the best: dark, widespaced, heavylidded.

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Americana Admittedly, watching the movies in big indulgent sessions is exactly what one Keaton expert advised against back in 1995, when Kino put out the shorts and features on VHS. David Shepard, who supervised that set, told viewers to take their time: “If you see three in a row, the third seems ho-hum, even though it may be the best of the bunch.” I kept waiting for a movie to seem ho-hum, but no such moment occurred. Somewhere in the middle of the two-reel shorts that make up the first three discs—perhaps between Buster in The Paleface (1922), being burned at the stake and mournfully puffing at the fire as you would a match, and Buster running from all the uniforms and nightsticks in the world in Cops (1922)—I knew I was going to ignore Shepard’s advice. I suppose I lack self-discipline.

hat makes Keaton so absorbing to watch after all these years? For starters, he may well have been the most athletic comic of all time. He did his own stunts; he even did other actors’ stunts. Only action stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (or, in our own day, Tom Cruise dangling off the Burj Khalifa) come to mind as daredevil peers. Keaton’s pratfalls are spectacular—spins, somersaults, dives that would look painful going into a swimming pool, never mind solid ground. But it was the face that enraptured me. Keaton was “one of the most beautiful people that was ever photographed,” says Orson Welles in a PBS intro to The General that’s also included as an extra. In a film era heavily dependent on eyes, Buster had the best: dark, wide-spaced, heavy-lidded. And no, he doesn’t smile, a fact that by 1925 becomes the best gag in Go West, when a menacing cowboy snarls out (via intertitle), “Smile when you say that.” Buster gives the command a couple of seconds of mildly panicked consideration, and then responds by pushing two fingers on the corners of his mouth. Neither romance nor worldly triumph brings a smile, and no amount of disaster causes a frown. Yet it’s soon apparent that the Great Stone Face isn’t nearly as immobile as alleged. That flat hat stays smushed on his head as often as perpetual calamity will permit, but under it is a kaleidoscope of expressions, executed in tiny shifts. The whole head moves when he’s trying to explain a predicament to an indifferent world, as in the 1921 short The Goat. The eyes glide left and right when he’s noticing or elaborately Not Noticing a pretty girl, or at any time subterfuge is needed. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), he presents Kathryn McGuire with a box of candy on which, with two pencil strokes, he’s marked up the price to $4 instead of $1. As he sits on the sofa with her, that superb side-eye gets a big workout until, still facing forward, he reaches one arm to flip the box so the price shows. The eyes widen and the bottom jaw moves slightly lower when, in Battling Butler (1926), Buster’s pampered rich kid realizes the country gal he adores thinks he’s a fearsome prizefighter. The eyelids descend and the cheeks suck in a mere fraction with Buster’s quickened breath

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when, in the 1921 short The Haunted House, a Keaton’s pratfalls are lovely young woman leans in to ask a favor. In spectacular—spins, somersaults, 1928’s Steamboat Bill Jr. the face gets even softer and dreamier as he takes a big whiff of his dives that would look painful dream girl’s hair. No “doughnut hole” (a rough going into a swimming pool, translation of his French nickname) ever held such romance. never mind solid ground. The most iconic Keaton stance, according to Walter Kerr in The Silent Clowns, shows Buster in thought: body tilted straight forward about forty-five degrees, one hand acting as a visor while he scopes out what’s ahead. True indeed, but there’s another essential posture, the head-scratch, also deployed when data must be assessed and decisions made. That gesture reaches apotheosis in Seven Chances (1925), which has Buster as a financial hotshot whose firm’s in hot water. He discovers that if he marries by 7 p.m. that very day, he’ll inherit $7 million that will keep him out of prison. (Wall Street denizens who fear prison also appear in The Saphead. This plot point has dated more than anything else in the set.) Buster’s overhelpful friend has put an ad in the paper, resulting in hundreds of women in improvised veils showing up at the chapel. When Buster leaves in a panic, they gallop after him, their flying veils making them look uncannily like extras from DeMille’s silent version of The Ten Commandments. This vengeful Biblical horde chases Buster down a hill, where he dislodges some rocks, and then some more. And so, faced with an army of would-be brides charging at him from one direction and a quarry’s worth of giant rocks rolling downhill from another, Buster stops for a moment, and his hand starts scratching his scalp. This sort of lady-or-the-boulder choice cannot be made on the fly.

uster would rather pause and take a beat to make a decision, but life seldom permits that because Buster is always on the run: from Neighbors (1920), from The Haunted House, from a girl’s father in The Scarecrow (1920), from Cops, from a girl’s father who’s a cop in The Goat. At least in Seven Chances the humans chasing him have an authentic personal grievance. How much more often is Buster being chased due to a misunderstanding—merciless authority answering “Why me?” with “Why not?” In Cops, Buster’s attempts to coax the horse pulling his overloaded wagon land him in the middle of a policemen’s parade, where he’s mistaken for a bomb-tossing anarchist. By the hundreds, they chase Buster. (“Get some cops to protect our policemen,” reads the intertitle—that one hasn’t dated at all.) When he clambers up a ladder to get over a fence, the ladder tilts off the ground and is caught by one set of pursuing cops. Before he can make it off the ladder, the opposite end is also grasped by cops, and as the ladder see-saws back and forth, for a moThe

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The most iconic Keaton stance

ment Buster rests in the middle, perfectly balanced between two equally lousy alternatives. shows Buster in thought: No wonder Buster had to think so hard; events besieging him were so often out of his body tilted straight forward sight, and remained there. The Navigator (1924) about forty-five degrees, one finds Buster as an heir trapped on an empty ocean liner with Kathryn McGuire, the girl hand acting as a visor while who just rejected him. One sequence, almost he scopes out what’s ahead. as exquisite as The General, has the couple fumbling around the ship in the dead of night, like children playing in a deserted house. They survive for weeks and eventually run aground off a cannibal island—but they never discover that the ship had been abandoned and set adrift by a foreign government’s spooks, to gain an advantage in a Great Game that’s never shown. Even objects conspired against Keaton; an escalator becomes a slide, a car disintegrates when it hits a ditch. In The General (1926), at last he gets some mechanical cooperation, as his racing legs are largely replaced by the trains. Here the dispassionate force assailing Buster becomes much larger: war. The General is regarded as his masterpiece not because it’s Keaton’s funniest film—it isn’t—but because of the supremely gorgeous Civil War visuals, “within hailing distance of Mathew Brady,” wrote James Agee, and sometimes a good deal closer than that. Buster’s Confederate engineer engages in a protracted race with the Union men who have stolen his engine and want to torch supply lines. As he gives chase, he chops wood to feed the engine with such fierce attention that first one army and then the other passes behind him unobserved. It’s a moment that combines wit, pictorial magnificence, and melancholy—the essence of what made later viewers embrace The General though its own era did not. Steamboat Bill Jr., the final feature in the set, sets Buster against the most implacable force of all, nature, with an enormous windstorm as its finale. It is this film that has the most famous and perilous shot in all of Keaton, where the front of a house falls and fails to crush him only because he’s standing in the hole made by one tiny window. When the wall drops, he is, of course, standing there scratching his head. So what does Buster do upon finding himself surrounded by a housefront where no housefront should be? He very sensibly runs like hell. Moments before, confined to a hospital bed for various reasons of plot, he’d reacted with equal good judgment to the wind pulling the hospital off its foundations. Buster springs up, perceives that somehow the entire building has taken a powder, jumps back into bed, and pulls the covers over his head. It’s a reaction entrancing in the purity of its logic, the sense beyond common sense that underpins Buster World.

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ike The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. failed to turn a profit. In 1928 Joe Schenck persuaded Keaton to accept the sale of his contract to MGM. A less propitious match could hardly be imagined, unless it was Keaton’s marriage to Natalie Talmadge, which was already disintegrating with spectacular acrimony. At MGM he made two more silents, not part of the Kino set. One, The Cameraman (1928), is his last masterpiece; the other, Spite Marriage (1929), is good. But as far as MGM was concerned, they’d bought themselves another comic, not a filmmaker. And now that talkies were here, comics had better adapt to the yappy house style, but quick. He adapted to MGM and divorce by drinking, often to the point of blackout. Keaton drifted downward—through a handful of films with Jimmy Durante that are not to be viewed without a shudder, to two films in Europe, and then to fast-and-cheap Educational Pictures, where he made his own films for almost the last time. The Educational shorts, collected by Kino as Lost Keaton, have charms; most are funny, and Keaton’s twangy Midwestern baritone suited him, at least once he was past forty. Something like Grand Slam Opera from 1936 (with One Run Elmer, reportedly almost the only Educa-

Buster Keaton in The General, 1926

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As the ladder see-saws back and forth, for a moment Buster rests in the middle, perfectly balanced between two equally lousy alternatives.

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tional short that Keaton had a good word for) still shows genius. Lodged in a rooming house while he attempts to win a talent contest, Keaton tries out steps in imitation of “Fred Alstare.” The room is so tiny that he must do this on the desk and the mantel, in a routine that foreshadows Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding by fifteen years. Still, it hurts to see Keaton, who scant years before had a vast oceangoing boat to roam over, railroads to run, and buildings to blow down, with such skimpy resources. The three-walled sets are as flimsy as flats from a high school musical, and Buster now destroys props that seem made of plywood and moustache wax. Even his name—“Elmer,” a bright idea from MGM that unfortunately stuck—diminishes him. He was almost always namelessly understood to be “Buster,” with a handful of glorious exceptions like “Johnnie Gray” in The General. Keaton dried out after 1935 and married Eleanor Norris in 1940. If moving to MGM was, as he often remarked, the worst decision he ever made, his union with the former MGM dancer was the best. MGM seemed to haunt him; eventually Keaton wound up back there as a $100-a-week gag man. By 1950 he was landing occasional roles and not doing too badly. Still, Gloria Swanson claimed that Keaton came on set for Sunset Boulevard, looked at fellow silent veterans assembled for the ghoulish bridge scene, and cracked, “Waxworks is right.” Like many fallen stars, he internalized Hollywood’s injustice. But revival was stirring as early as 1949, when James Agee published “Comedy’s Greatest Era” in Life magazine and included eight of the best paragraphs ever written on Keaton. He did television work, sometimes echoing old routines and sometimes launching new ones. The 1957 film The Buster Keaton Story with Donald O’Connor was nothing of the sort, but it did give Keaton the means to buy a house. A 1962 retrospective played to packed houses in Paris, and afterward Keaton toured through West Germany with The General. At the Venice Film Festival, five months before his death in 1966, Keaton attended a tribute. The acquisitive, litigious film collector Raymond Rohauer had earned his idol’s friendship and everyone else’s eternal gratitude by preserving every scrap of Keaton film he could find. Rohauer persuaded the diffident Buster to attend by telling him they had a routine meeting. When the doors swung open, hundreds stood and cheered, the longest ovation in the festival’s history. Keaton the director would have hooted down the scene as sappy; the Great Stone Face would have scratched his head. Keaton the man stood with tears in his eyes, “the only time,” said Rohauer, “I ever saw his emotion.” “At least he died in a blaze of glory,” wrote Kevin Brownlow, the film historian. The life’s bittersweet arc feels familiar. Keaton told Brownlow that his films required a good start, but “we never paid any attention to the middle. We immediately went to the finish. . . . For some reason, the middle always took care of itself.” t

r Graphic Art |

Michael Duffy

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6Bafflomathy [no. 23] Daniel Aaron (“Daniel’s Dictionary,” p. 8) is Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University and a 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal. James Agee (“Landowners,” p. 10) was an American poet, novelist, film critic, screenwriter, and magazine journalist who died in 1955. Agee’s Cotton Tenants was published this June by The Baffler and Melville House. Chris Bray (“Street Legal,” p. 84) is a sometime history professor and is writing a book about the history of American military justice. Richard Byrne (“A Nod to Ned Ludd,” p. 120) is a playwright and editor. He blogs at Balkans via Bohemia. Alex Dimitrov (“American Nothing,” p. 63) is the author of Begging for It and American Boys; the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York; content editor at the Academy of American Poets; and a teacher in the creative writing program at Rutgers University. Thomas Sayers Ellis (“Once Upon a Town,” p. 1) is poetry editor of The Baffler and author of Skin, Inc., The Maverick Room, and The Genuine Negro Hero. Susan Faludi (“Facebook Feminism, Like it or Not,” p. 34) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and, most recently, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. Dana Frank (“Vocabulary Lessons,” p. 114) is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Bananeras, Buy American, and Local Girl Makes History. Thomas Frank (“Academy Fight Song,” p. 22) is founding editor of The Baffler and the Easy Chair columnist at Harper’s. Jim Frederick (“Internment Camp,” p. 14) was a reporter at Money magazine at the time he wrote “Internment Camp.” He’s now a contributing editor at Time and the author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death. Ann Friedman (“All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go,” p. 66) is a columnist for New York magazine’s website. She lives in Los Angeles. David Graeber (“Buncombe,” p. 7) is a

160 1 The Baffler [no.23]

contributing editor of The Baffler and the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and The Democracy Project. He teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. Dmitry Gorchev (“Bizness,” p. 76) was an illustrator, educator, and author who died at age forty-six in a village outside St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2010. Adam Haslett (“The Act,” p. 79) is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novel Union Atlantic. Genine Lentine (“Jelly Donut, NYC,” p. 75) is the author of Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model and Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes. Farid Matuk (“My Daughter Night Terrors the State,” p. 92) is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood and three chapbooks including, most recently, My Daughter La Chola. Matuk lives with the poet Susan Briante and their daughter in Dallas. Farran Nehme (“Smile, Buster!” p. 152) writes about classic Hollywood film at her blog, Self-Styled Siren. Jim Newell (“Good Enough for Government Work,” p. 94) has covered politics as a staff writer at Gawker, an editor at Wonkette, and a contributor to the Guardian. Sharon Olds (“Where Is It Now,” p. 137) teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at NYU. Hey, she won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry this year. Kiki Petrosino (“Story Problem,” p. 73) is the author of Fort Red Border and Hymn for the Black Terrific. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville. Ed Roberson (“Here We Name Them ‘Way,’” p. 78) was born and raised in Pittsburgh and was once a tankman in an Aquazoo. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Atmosphere Conditions, City Eclogue, and To See the Earth Before the End of the World. He lives in Chicago. Anis Shivani (“Without Which He Would Not Have Written His Greatest Poems,” p. 64) is the author of My Tranquil War and Other Poems, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, and the forthcoming novel Karachi Raj. His poem is composed entirely of alternating excerpts from The Good Sex Bible: How to Make Love and The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 3: 1926–

BRAD HOLLAND

1927. Jacob Silverman (“Networking into the Abyss,” p. 52) is writing a book about social media and digital culture. Ken Silverstein (“They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen,” p. 104) is a contributing editor of Harper’s and a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Quinn Slobodian (“Sacking Berlin,” p. 138) teaches history at Wellesley College and is the author of Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany. Michelle Sterling (“Sacking Berlin,” p. 138) teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the Boston Conservatory. John Summers (“Magic Brain,” p. 6) is editor in chief of The Baffler. Dubravka Ugrešić (“On Wittgenstein’s Steps,” p. 130) is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands. Seth Colter Walls (“Sartre for Sartre’s Sake,” p. 147) has written for Slate, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. Yes, he lives in Brooklyn. Simone White (“A Monkey Could Do This” and “You and me are not friends, OK?”

p. 129) is the author of Unrest, House Envy of all the World, and Dolly.

Translators

Anna Summers, David Williams

Graphic Artists

Lou Beach, Philip Burke, Mark Dancey, Eleanor Davis, Henrik Drescher, Michael Duffy, Randall Enos, Walker Evans, Mark S. Fisher, Patrick JB Flynn, Stuart Goldenberg, Jakob Hinrichs, Brad Holland, David Johnson, J. D. King, Lewis Koch, Stephen Kroninger, Peter Kuper, David McLimans, P. S. Mueller, Paula Searing, Paul Shambroom, Brian Stauffer, Ralph Steadman, and Spencer Walts The front and back covers are illustrated by Lou Beach. The typeface employed throughout the pages of The Baffler is Hoefler Text, available through Hoefler & Frere-Jones, New York. The

Baffler [no.23] ! 161

An examination of the contradictions within a form of expression that is both public and private, specific and abstract, conventional and countercultural.

CRITICAL LABORATORY The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn Thomas Hirschhorn edited by Lisa Lee and Hal Foster Writings by Thomas Hirschhorn, collected for the first time, trace the development of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideas and artistic strategies.

DARK TONGUES The Art of Rogues and Riddlers Daniel Heller-Roazen An exploration of secret languages, moving among hermetic artificial tongues as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech.

An October Book

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GHOSTLY APPARITIONS German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media Stefan Andriopoulos A media archaeology that traces connections between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, considering topics that range from Kantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s philosophy to somnambulist clairvoyants. Distributed for Zone Books

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HEATHER HAVRILESKY: THE PROBLEM WITH RAISING PERFECT CHILDREN

JUNE/JULY/AUG 2013

VOLUME 20, ISSUE 2

Is It Still Possible to Go off the Grid? BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

The Photographs of Train Hopper Mike Brodie BY GEOFF DYER

James Agee’s Great Southern Odyssey BY JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

DISPATCHES ANTARCTICA: VICTOR LAVALLE BANGKOK: KERRY HOWLEY BEIRUT: KAELEN WILSON-GOLDIE LONDON: MICHELLE ORANGE SANTIAGO: ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA VENICE: LINDA YABLONSKY AND MORE . . .

INTERNATIONAL FICTION REVIEWS OF JAVIER MARÍAS, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, MA JIAN, AND GEORGES PEREC

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