No19 by The Baffler

No. 19

No.

Number 19 EDITOR IN CHIEF

John Summers

FOUNDING EDITOR

Thomas Frank SENIOR EDITOR

Chris Lehmann

LITER ARY EDITOR

Anna Summers

POETRY EDITOR

Edwin Frank

ASSOCIATE EDITORS George

Scialabba Eugenia Williamson

CONTR IBUTING EDITOR

Aaron Swartz

TEKHNIKA–MOLODEZHI, 1960 | COVER DESIGN BY ANNA SUMMERS

DESIGN AND ART DIR ECTION

The Flynstitute

ILLUSTR ATOR AT LARGE

Bill Lewis

GENER AL M ANAGER

Jeanne Mansfield EDITOR IAL ASSISTANT

Lindsey Gilbert

R ESEARCHER

Eliza LaJoie

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler. FOUNDERS

Thomas Frank Keith White PAST PUBLISHER

Greg Lane, 1993-2007 Published by The MIT Press

The Baffler

Post Office Box 390049 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 thebaff ler.com

2 1 The Baffler

The Baffler is possible thanks to our friendship

with Jeff Mayersohn and Linda Seamonson, owners of the Harvard Book Store, and with Jorian Polis Schutz, President of the Opaline Fund of the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. Additional moral, technical, or material aid comes from Daniela Cammack, Deb Chasman, Jerry Cohen, Josh Cohen, Tamar Cohen, Dave Denison, Ellen Elias-Bursac, Ellen Faran, Melissa Flashman, Jonathan Franzen, Todd Gitlin, Michael Greenberg, David Grewal, Andrew Hearst, Andy Hunter, Matt Ipcar, Deborah Kaplan, Greg Lane, Jonathan Lee, Claire Lewis, Nick Lindsay, Amy Merrill, Daniel Moses, Dave Mulcahey, Conor O’Neil, Bill Pierce, Dan Raeburn, Rachel Rosenfelt, Sohnya Sayres, John Stamper, Sasha Weiss, and Alan Wolfe. Thanks, too, to John Hill for preparing the Walker Evans photographs in this issue. Thanks to Persea Books Inc. and the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management for permission to reprint “Experts are Puzzled” from The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader, edited by Elizabeth Friedmann. And thanks to PM Press for permission to select art from Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh.

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The Baffler ! 3

Contents 1 Philosophical Intelligence Office

Stories

Decrescendo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Salvos

Too Smart to Fail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes on an age of folly Thomas Fr ank

Give Her to Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya

Kim Stanley Robinson

2312 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Edge Lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris N. Brown

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maureen Tk acik

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Poems

Jim Newell

Rick Perlstein

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

David Gr aeber

Future Schlock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating the crap of tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab Will Boisvert

Revolt of the Gadgets . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert S. Eshelman

Chris Lehmann

Into the Infinite

The Animal Cure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101

Water World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barbar a Ehrenreich

Notes & Quotes

54 60

Smells Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eugenia Williamson

My Own Little Mission . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dubr avk a Ugrešić

Disposable Hip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

G. Beato

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107

112

Experts are Puzzled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laur a Riding

Odi Barbare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Geoffrey Hill

Strike! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charles Bernstein Marilyn Hacker

Snow Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Peter Gizzi

Breaking Stones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nir ala

Little Princess, or the One-Eyed Girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nir ala

Documentia

Ancestors

Cotton Tenants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three families James Agee

100 158

166

We Told You So . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James K. Galbr aith

Syria Renga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Dollar Debauch

140

Lives of the Pundits

I Was a Teenage Gramlich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

128

152

Bafflers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

Philosophical Intelligence Office—novel idea! But how did you come to dream that I wanted anything in your absurd line, eh? Oh, respected sir, from long experience, one glance tells me the gentleman who is in need of our humble services. Our office, founded on principles wholly new— To the devil with your principles! Bad sign when a man begins to talk of his principles. As for Intelligence Offices, I’ve lived in the East, and know ’em. Swindling concerns kept by low-born cynics, under a fawning exterior wreaking their cynic malice upon mankind. You are a fair specimen of ’em.

Oh dear, dear, dear!

Machines for me. My cider-mill—does that ever steal my cider? My mowing-machine—does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn-husker—does that ever give me insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker—all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested, too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward—the only practical Christians I know.

Oh dear, dear, dear, dear! —Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

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

The Baffler ! 5

> P h i l o s o p h ic a l I n t e l l ig e n c e O f f ic e

Decrescendo 3 John Summers

ne day we will tell you all that’s happened since we moved the journal from Chicago and revived it in Cambridge. But it was a lunch-time remark uttered along the way, a memorable snatch of conversation from a patroness, that has set the mood of this new issue. Attempting to console us for our pitiful yield in raising funds, she insinuated a class confidence was about to be betrayed. “You know,” she whispered, leaning over the hummus, “there’s plenty of money around. It’s just a matter of getting to it.” Why, yes! How could we not have noticed? Politicians, pundits, and officials have been ruminating on the scarcity of credit, the necessity of austerity, and the fact of America’s degeneration into bankruptcy. Yet our thought leaders haven’t exactly displayed the courage of their faltering convictions. All the talk of decline has not led them to imagine that conventional notions of wealth and progress are also used up. They still celebrate big corporations as value creators and agents of advance to the celestial city. The intricate schemes and scams that uplifted our business civilization have collapsed, as everyone knows, but its reliance on confidence remains as fatuous as ever. All that’s valuable about an economy, they still tell us, proceeds from an increase in private business wealth, which is supposed to be motivated by the possibility of infinite growth, and guided (more or less) by the intercession of government. Our ascension can be closely monitored with leading and trailing indicators—corporate profits, balance of trade, ratio of debt to gross domestic product, inflation and interest rates, stock market averages—that indicate nothing but dominance of the corporate perspective. Three years into this New Depression, then, the whole scheme of bonuses and incentives that enabled the fraud remains intact, awaiting the right political combination of concessions to the rich and sacrifices by everyone 6 1 The Baffler

The intricate schemes and scams that uplifted our business civilization have collapsed, as everyone knows, but its reliance on confidence remains as fatuous as ever.

9 else to unlock the heavenly door once again. Many commentators said the Occupy Wall Street protesters knew not what they wanted. But scour the messaging campaign of the official media for ideas equal to the scale of the country’s devastation and you will find naught but a wreck of dogmas, bound in shallows and miseries. What is wealth for? Why is economic stagnation said to lead to cultural decline, or standing in place taken to mean falling behind? The Market is understood not as a fallible mechanism for setting prices and distributing resources, but as metaphysical truth incarnate. Has the market god, though, ever appeared so remote and mysterious as it does in the present crisis? At what other juncture have its servants in government failed so miserably in their duty to create low-wage jobs? When have our lofty culture moguls come up so empty in carrying out the crucial task of manufacturing codes for the cool and formulas for the fabulous? It’s as if the whole history of business-class homiletics—those flinty aphorisms, those mind cures, those sloughs of despond, those endless prayers for favorable tax legislation—are unable to change the sad fact that novelty in popular fashion has come to a thudding halt. As Vanity Fair bravely reported last fall, blue jeans have yet to go out of fashion.

wful though that may be, Baffler 19 alights on a part of America that

MARK FISHER

still stirs optimism among chroniclers of the prosperity gospel. In the land of the creative class, the real estate prices are booming. The restaurants are booked, and all the business corporations are dedicated anew to cuttingedge thinking. The menswear may be nothing to emulate; but you can’t quarrel with the data. In Silicon Valley, job creation clicks in at three times the national average. Scrums of young billionaires collect record salaries and profits, offer world-beating stocks, and host bacchanalias at night after changing the world during the day. Just now, in fact, the tech in-

dustry’s self-made men are locked in a battle for the ages, pitting the boldest companies and savviest minds in a contest to reinvent . . . television. What won’t they think up next? A great deal, it turns out. The fable that we are living through a time of head-snapping innovation in technology drives American thought these days—dystopian and utopian alike. But if you look past both the hysteria and the hype, and place the achievements of technology in historical perspective, then you may recall how business leaders promised not long ago to usher us into a glorious new time The Baffler ! 7

These revolutionary improvements in the technique of living always seem to come packaged in the language of work, the cumulative effect of which is to inflict the disciplines and punishments of the office park on our everyday lives. MARK FISHER

of abundance that stood beyond history. And then you may wonder if their control over technology hasn’t excelled mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products (like television) that have been kicking around history for quite some time. The salvos in this issue chronicle America’s trajectory from megamachines to minimachines, from prosthetic gods to prosthetic pals, and raise a corollary question from amid all this strangely unimaginative innovation: how much of our collective awe rests on low expectations? The stories, poems, and art in the issue, meanwhile, comment on the omnipresence of tools, applications, and utilities from a different vantage point. These revolutionary improvements in the technique of living always seem to come packaged in the language of work, the cumulative effect of which is to inflict the disciplines and punishments of the office park on our everyday lives. By contrast, we think the missing, redemptive element of culture in business civilization lies in the playful, spontaneous joy of literary and graphic art, in making believe, rather than making tools. And so we won’t lull you with dead lan8 1 The Baffler

9 guage, shame you with bleeding conscience, gull you with salvation through our bold new program, or employ any other tic or trick to manage your discontent. Our mission is to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence. But we do not aim to conciliate any person, party, or philosophy. We aim to unsettle, and, if necessary, to irritate. Everything we’ve learned in reviving this journal has taught us that a miraculous national recovery, as business defines it, would not increase support for our kind of art and criticism by one Krugerrand. Nor would any such economic revival, however much it might buoy the millions of Americans damaged by business fraud, spur credible visions of the future from a leadership class mired in the overdetermined, under-performing vistas of yesteryear. Experience teaches us to count on recovery to deliver more of the same: constant changes in street fashion and gadgetry; social success via trampling, crushing, and elbowing; and a culture organized around the selling of commodities. And then it would be back to the same cubicles and service counters to report to the same managers about our performance of the same stupefying tasks. No, thank you. We have seen this future, and it doesn’t work.t

h No t e s & Q uot e s

Smells like . . . 3 Eugenia Williamson

osh Han, a perfumer in San Francisco, got her start a decade ago managing 826 Valencia’s retail arm, the Pirate Store. She began making scents for her then-boss Dave Eggers and his friends and associates at McSweeney’s, including authors JT Leroy (whom she describes as complex and dark), Nick Hornby (“he couldn’t eat a whole burrito”), and William T. Vollmann (“Who is this guy? I didn’t really want to talk to him”). Following a successful collaboration with novelist Robert Mailer Anderson, Han edged away from McSweeney’s. “Perfumes and pirates don’t really [go together], at least not for the section I wanted to be in, which was high end at Barneys,” she says. “I wanted to have my own success outside of any relationship with Dave.” These days, Han makes custom scents for high-profile food writers and peddles her wares at upmarket retailers. We asked her to concoct a scent for The Baffler. Here’s what she said. Pink Pepper When I was looking at the old covers, they were so cool to me. I was thinking about what [the magazine] would smell like because those colors are remarkable— they’re very bright. When I look at them now, they’re slightly dated. I was trying to imagine the new Baffler. I’d imagine it’d have an online presence, and it would have a new feeling now, but still maintain its intellectual—let’s say snobbery. Cedar I definitely wanted to include the smell of paper because it’s originally a print format. I also wanted to have the smell of pencil shavings, and then I also wanted to have the smell of ink. Because it’s somehow new and modern, and I kept seeing images of technology, I wanted to have something coppery or wiry. Computers have that certain vibe.

BILL LEWIS

Bergamot I find the intellectual tends to not be so perfume-y. They don’t really like floral fragrances, and they don’t like anything too dense, but they also don’t like anything too happy. There’s a sense of pragmatism, a sense of challenge. If you’re writing about politics and culture, I would imagine that doing the job of being a real, professional journalist is to keep things in check. If you’re writing a criticism on politics, you’re not writing sweet honey thoughts. You’re being critical—you’re actually being critical—of what’s happening in our government. Bitter Orange I had this feeling, when I was looking at [The Baffler], that it had bright citrus notes, but not too happy—just a touch of bitterness. When I say bitter, I don’t mean emotional bitterness. I mean the crispness of what it would be like if you’re reading something— like, ouch, a reality bites kind of smell.t The Baffler ! 9

[ S a lvos ]

Too Smart to Fail Notes on an age of folly 3 Thomas Fr ank The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him.

— John Maynard Keynes

n the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last. First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness. Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well. And then, Wall Street blew up the global economy. Empowered by bank deregulation and regulatory capture, Wall Street enlisted those tough-minded men of the media again to sell the world on the idea that financial innovations were making the global economy more stable by the minute. Central banks puffed an asset bubble like the world had never seen before, even if every journalist worth his byline was obliged to deny its existence until it was too late. These episodes were costly and even disastrous, and after each one had run its course and duly exploded, I expected some sort of day of reckoning for their promoters. And, in10 1 The Baffler

deed, the last two disasters combined to force the Republican Party from its stranglehold on American government—for a time. But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and resignations; taken together— and given that a good percentage of the pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic storylines—themy mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs. But that’s not what happened. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of late, but the ones responsible for deluding the public are not among them. Neocon extraordinaire Bill Kristol won a berth at the New York Times (before losing it again), Charles Krauthammer is still the thinking conservative’s favorite, George Will drones crankily on, Thomas Friedman remains our leading dispenser of nonsense neologisms, and Niall Ferguson wipes his feet on a welcome mat that will never wear out. The day Larry Kudlow apologizes for slagging bubble-doubters as part of a sinister left-wing trick is the day the world will start spinning in reverse. Standard & Poor’s first leads the parade of folly (tripleA’s for everyone!), then decides to downgrade U.S. government debt, and is taken seriously in both endeavors. And the prospect of Fox News or CNBC apologizing for their role in puffing war bubbles and financial bubbles is no better than a punch line: what they do is the opposite, launching new movements that stamp their crumbled fables “true” by popular demand. The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts

[

BILL LEWIS

wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post. What I didn’t understand was that these were moral failures, mistakes that were hardwired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them. Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, for chrissake, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready should they fuck things up again.

Keep on Dancing Till the World Ends My aim here isn’t to take some kind of victory lap or to get in the granite faces of our eternal pundit corps one more time—honestly, who really wants to read a twenty-part takedown of the social philosophy of, say, Jim Cramer? Nor is it to blame Republicans for our problems. It is true that, from the scandal of CEO pay to the scandal of lobotomized regulators, each of the really monumental mistakes of our time arose from the trademark doctrines of the political right. And, yes, it was the Bush administration that installed as National Archivist a scholar much criticized for his questionable research methods, that muzzled government scientists, and that declared war on organized intelligence in a hundred other ways. But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that The Baffler ! 11

] can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from. Besides, the reign of corruption has taken plenty of right-wing scalps, too. In fact, one of the most interesting comments on the machinery that is making us stupid came from the libertarian Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, after he had temporarily lost his job (he got it back a little while later, don’t worry) for puffing clients of Jack Abramoff in exchange for the lobbyist’s largesse. But what was the big deal? fumed Bandow in a 2006 cri de coeur called “The Lesson Jack Abramoff Taught Me.” Living in Washington was expensive; and besides, everyone was basically on the take: Many supposedly “objective” thinkers and “independent” scholar/experts these days have blogs or consulting gigs, or they are starting nonprofit Centers for the Study of . . . Who funds their books, speeches or other endeavors? Often it’s those with an interest in the outcome of a related debate. The number of folks underwriting the pursuit of pure knowledge can be counted on one hand, if not one finger.

Bandow had been caught, yes, but he wasn’t the only culprit, he insisted—with some accuracy. All opinions are paid for. Everything written in this city—everything in this land that is thought and tweeted and toasted with a hip hip hooray . . . is Abramoffed. We are all slaves to the market; there is no way to stand outside that condition. I can remember the contempt I felt when I read Bandow’s essay, back in 2006. Of course there was a place where ideas weren’t simply for sale, I thought—it was called the professions. Ethical standards kept professionals independent of their clients’ gross pecuniary interests. These days, though, I’m not so sure. Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen. Accountants were no match for Enron. Corporate boards are rubber stamps. Hos12 1 The Baffler

pitals break unions, and, with an eye toward future donations, electronically single out rich patients for more luxurious treatment. And consider the university, the mothership of the professions. For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate. Even the traditional academy, where free inquiry nominally lives, has become a profit center, a place where exorbitant tuition somehow bypasses the adjuncts who do the teaching but makes for lavish executive salaries; where economists pull in fantastic sums for “consulting”; and where the prospect of launching the next hot Internet startup is a gamble that it is worth bending any rule to take. One of Jack Abramoff’s tricks, you will recall, was to hand intellectuals cash and trips to tropical islands in exchange for such intellectual services as might get the tycoons who owned the sweatshops in those paradises off the regulatory hook. And how different was the Abramoff model of enlightenment from the activities of the Cambridge, Massachusetts consultancy called “Monitor,” with its prominent Harvard connections? According to the Boston Globe: The management consulting firm received $250,000 a month from the Libyan government from 2006 to 2008 for a wide range of services, including writing [a] book proposal, bringing prominent academics to Libya to meet Khadafy “to enhance international appreciation of Libya” and trying to generate positive news coverage of the country.

“Trying to generate positive news coverage,” by the way, included placing pro-Qaddafi stories by prominent scholars in The New Republic, the Washington Post, Newsweek International, and the Guardian—a record far more impressive than the Bush administration’s suborning of syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams or Abramoff’s own episodic triumphs on the op-ed page of the Washington Times. Another thing Doug Bandow got right was one of the basic reasons for all this: for most Americans, the building blocks of middleclass life—four years at a good college, for ex-

[ Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.

9 ample—are growing scarce and out of reach. For other people and other entities, though, they grow ever cheaper; they are baubles to be handed out as necessity requires. The result is exactly what our nineteenth-century ancestors would have expected. Think of Jack Grubman, the superstar stock analyst of the nineties, who famously upgraded AT&T’s shares in exchange for getting his children into a ferociously competitive preschool. Or the congressional aides on Capitol Hill, surrounded by the inaccessible luxuries of Washington, D.C., who would do nearly anything for a lobbyist in exchange for a shot at a future job on said lobbyist’s staff. Or the actual members of Congress who sold their votes in exchange for little bits of sushi or a blowout party in Hawaii or good seats at sporting events. And as we serve money, we find that money wants the same thing from us: to push everyone it beguiles in the same direction. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. You can have a shot at being part of the 1 percent, money tells us, only if you are first committed to making the 1 percent stronger, to defending their piles in some new and imaginative way, to rationalizing and burnishing their glory, to exempting them from regulation or taxation, to bowing down as they pass, and to believing in

your heart that their touch will heal scrofula. So money gives us not only the bond-rating scandal of 2008, in which trash investments were labeled super-wholesome so that the rating agency in question could win more business from the manufacturers of said trash; and not only the Enron scandal of 2001, in which head-spinning conflicts of interest were overlooked by Enron’s accountants in order to preserve the nice ka-ching those conflicts delivered to everyone involved; but also the analyst scandal of 2002, in which Wall Street insiders pushed certain corporate securities on their sappy middle-American clients in order to win those corporations’ business—and then while it is corrupting all the watchmen, money also dashes off an enormous body of literature assuring those sappy middle Americans that they are in fact financial geniuses who can outsmart any possible combination of Wall Street insiders, because together the saps reflect the wisdom of markets or some other such reassuring bullshit. And all of it— the airy populism of the market and its simultaneous complete negation by reality—is as determined by the current distribution of wealth as gravity is by the mass of the planet. Both of them will continue indefinitely regardless of the constant violence the one does to the other simply because that’s the way money wants it, and every dollar in the nation will strain at its leash to ensure that financial naïveté persists on into infinity in complete ignorance of financial fraud. If You’re One of Us Then Roll With Us It’s not that Americans revel in our folly: having been “right” about the debacles of recent years still seems to carry some modicum of value. The reason Newt Gingrich likes to claim that he warned his one-time client Freddie Mac of the dangers of the subprime lending market, for example, is because he believes that there is something honorable about having seen it coming, something that sets him apart from the wild-eyed politicians who shared the stage with him during last year’s presidential beauty contests. The Baffler ! 13

] Of course, Gingrich’s claim to the title is based on no verifiable historical data, and if what we know about Freddie Mac’s relationships with its hired hands holds true in his case, the work for which Gingrich received his million-plus payday was not ringing the mortgage company’s alarm bell but the opposite: helping to minimize resistance to the outfit’s operations among his fellow Republicans— doing what money always wants “consultants” like him to do. Still, there are others who might rightfully claim the laurels Gingrich covets: the economists who warned of a bubble in real estate prices and the handful of journalists who figured out that crazy retail lending practices were inflating the profits of the Wall Street banks.* Were society to honor these people, however, just think about who we would be lionizing: a handful of uncelebrated business reporters; economists like Dean Baker, who has spent much of his career deriding consensus economic wisdom; and out-of-the-way publications like Mother Jones, the Pittsburgh City Paper, and Southern Exposure (“Journal of the Progressive South”) that stumbled across the big scoop because they happened to be interested in sweaty, wretched subjects like predatory lending. That is why a more honest reaction, it seems to me, is to declare that there is in fact no value at all in having seen the catastrophe coming. If the honors can’t go to the people who already wear the consensus seal of approval, it is better to declare that there is no prize for rightness in the first place. This seems to be the reasoning behind one of the strangest comments on the epidemic of folly to appear in recent years, the meditation on pervasive wrongness by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein that appeared in June of 2011. In it, Klein remembers a boneheaded 2007 Michael Lewis essay in which Lewis

mocked people who were worried about risky derivatives; Klein then declares that if a writer as good as Michael Lewis didn’t see the problems mounting, it was either impossible to see the problems mounting or wasn’t worth it to see the problems mounting. “[N]o explanation of the financial crisis that doesn’t have room for Lewis to miss it is sufficient,” Klein writes. And so those worriers back in 2007—the ones who did get it right—were not only gratuitously insulted by Michael Lewis; they are now insulted all over again by Ezra Klein, who seems to believe that Lewis’s awesomeness is so overwhelming—that our love for him is so great— that he must remain the pole star of intellectual legitimacy no matter how wrong he turns out to be, no matter how grievous the losses the world suffers, and no matter how dreadful the fate of those thrown out of work during the succeeding recession. The celebrity of the celebrated outweighs it all; the situation may change but the personnel must stay the same.** Another way of putting this idea might be to say that the individuals who got things wrong—the ones who saw few problems in financial deregulation, anyone who thought derivatives eliminated risk, anyone who counted on markets to police themselves—were “one of us.” There can be no consequences for them because they merely expressed the consensus views of the time. Like John Maynard Keynes’s “sound banker,” they might have failed, but they failed in the same way that the rest of “us” failed. To hold them accountable for what they said and did would expose the rest of “us” to such judgment as well. And obviously that can’t happen. A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must

* There were relatively few of these journalists, and their reporting dried up after the Bush administration preempted state-level

predatory lending laws in 2003. See the painstaking summary by Dean Starkman in Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2009.

** As far as I know, Michael Lewis himself has never made such a preposterous claim. His own take on the grand folly of recent years, The Big Short, is that epidemic madness of the mid-aughts variety creates opportunities for really smart people to make really big profits. On all of this stuff see Yves Smith, “Ezra Klein Should Stick to Being Wrong About Health Care,” a blog post from June 24, 2011 on Naked Capitalism. 14 1 The Baffler

[ Only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)

9 have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)* Christopher Hitchens became the toast of Washington only after he had gone safely wrong on the Iraq War. Or consider the curious saga of New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera, who was elevated to the most exalted post in American journalism in 2011, and who has, since then, done outstanding work exposing financial frauds and assessing the value of the old Glass-Steagall rules regulating banks. But there’s a peculiar twist to this story. Before Nocera became an admirer of bank regulation, he played the opposite role: he was the journalist who told, in the 1994 book A Piece of the Action, the awesome and heroic tale of how the bankers blew Glass-Steagall apart. Nocera has clearly seen the error of his ways and has changed course. (So has Michael Lewis, for that matter.) It would be churlish not to forgive and forget. But what about the ones who have not changed? Here is the aforementioned economist Dean Baker, one of the few people who has attempted a grand theory of folly, in a 2011 interview published on the valuable blog

Naked Capitalism: We have people who have literally been wrong about everything having to do with the economy over the last 5 years. They totally missed the $8 trillion housing bubble, the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. . . . Then they underestimated the severity of the downturn, telling us the economy was going to bounce right back. And, then they got the interest rate story wrong. They told us that the large budget deficits caused by the downturn would lead the bond vigilantes to send interest rates through the roof. Instead they fell through the floor.

“So who gets listened to in national debates,” Baker continues, “those who have been consistently right on all the key points, or those who have gotten things as wrong as you possibly can?” Let us take the question a little further: it is not merely a matter of “who gets listened to” but why they get listened to. Recall in this connection the peculiar comment of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in December of 2011 as he scrambled to get the Obama administration off the hook for its tepid response to the slump: “There was not a single mainstream, Wall Street, academic economist who knew at the time, in January of 2009, just how deep the economic hole was that we were in.” Of course there were plenty of economists who knew how bad things were. That one was easy to call. But if you limited your inquiries— as Carney is confessing the administration

* A similar situation arose in the red-hunting years after World War II, when the need arose to separate the righteousness of the

just-concluded war against fascism from the ardent anti-fascists on the left, who had opposed fascism since the beginning but who now needed to be ridiculed, blacklisted, and otherwise ostracized. The phrase that was invented to do this job was “premature anti-fascist”—it meant someone who had opposed fascism before the consensus had determined that fascism was a thing Americans ought to oppose.

The Baffler ! 15

] did—to the statements of economists who are “mainstream” and “Wall Street” you would not have encountered such economists. You would have been counting on the wisdom of people who had been “wrong about everything,” as Dean Baker puts it. On the other hand, you would also have been listening to the greatest names of professional economics. And this, we know, is in keeping with President Obama’s deepest instincts: trust the experts. But what happens when the experts are fools? What happens when their professions are corrupted, their jargon has become a shield against outside scrutiny, their process of peer review has been transformed into a device by which a professional faction can commandeer the discipline, excommunicate rivals, and give members of the “us” group endless pardons for their endless failures? The economist James K. Galbraith, who was right about many of the disasters of our age but who is neither “mainstream” nor “Wall Street,” once wrote that something very much like this had happened to his discipline: Leading active members of today’s economics profession . . . have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might generally expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. . . . No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is dis-invited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in.

Where does this leave the premature market skeptics, the ones (like Galbraith) who were right all along? The answer is, by and large, nowhere.* These people have remained at the out-of-the-way universities, the do-ityourself blogs, and the impotent think tanks where they began. They were ignored in 2008 and they are

ignored today because an extremely convenient corollary to the reigning dogma of the consensus reminds us that it is impossible to see a disaster of the 2008 variety coming. Of course, there were plenty of people who did see it coming, but this corollary defines their work away as a series of lucky guesses, dismisses their methodology as not worth considering, and blows them off as not worth listening to—all of which “we” can prove using equations. “The main lesson we should take away from the E[fficient] M[arket] H[ypothesis] for policymaking purposes is the futility of trying to deal with crises and recessions by finding central bankers and regulators who can identify and puncture bubbles,” announced Chicago school economist Robert Lucas from amid the ruins in 2009. “If these people exist, we will not be able to afford them.” And the main lesson we should take away from the Efficient Market Hypothesis for our purposes is the utter futility of economics departments like the one that employs Robert Lucas. A second lesson: if economists—and journalists, and bankers, and bond analysts, and accountants—don’t pay some price for egregious and repeated misrepresentations of reality, then markets aren’t efficient after all. Either the gentlemen of the consensus must go, or their cherished hypothesis must be abandoned. The world isn’t gullible enough to believe both of them any longer. Or maybe it is. Maybe this state of affairs can go on for years. As you watch the anointed men of the Washington consensus shuttle through the CNN green room or relax comfortably at the $10,000 Halloween party the neighbors are throwing for their third grader, you begin to wonder what kind of blunder it will take to shatter this city’s epic complacency, its dazzling confidence in its own stupidity. We will assuredly find out soon. And when we do, we can be just as assured that the fools who let it happen will walk away once again without feeling any consequences.t

* See page 22 for an excerpt of the memo that Galbraith sent to Obama’s economists in July 2008. 16 1 The Baffler

Experts are Puzzled 3 Laur a Riding Experts are puzzled by the legacy for the purpose of the handing down of which we seem to exist successively and respectively. We seem to exist to correct, in proper order, the minute derangements caused in the legacy of our existence. We on whom it is temporarily bestowed find it strange and make it familiar and then find ourselves strange. The legacy has been handed on and we are left behind, strangers of a fixed old age. We stop here while the legacy passes on to the eternal puzzlement of experts. In this place it is impossible to move from this place. It is after hours. The taxis wait outside the unfashionable houses of their drivers and cannot be hailed. We are old, besides, and cannot walk, or do not wish to walk. We are poor, besides. We are strangers, besides; we do not know the way, we do not speak the language. Life is impossible. Therefore we do not live, but are yet alive. We are strangers of a fixed old age and we are not puzzled. Who are the experts? They are of the legacy, which is puzzled in its experts. What is the legacy? It is the ever-young continuance of puzzlement, the refuse of a fixed old age. We more and more establish its bewildered, expert familiarity with itself for the purpose of establishing which we seem to exist and are left behind, strangers of a fixed old age. For the purpose of being left behind we are left behind, disinherited, thank God, and not puzzled. At least, that is to say, I am a stranger of a fixed old age and I am not puzzled. Ask me anything you like and I will give you a not-puzzled answer. I will not give you an answer. I am a stranger. I do not live, I am only alive. I heard the birds with lice under their wings singing, but I do not understand because I am not a bird with lice under my wings singing. I am not an expert, I am not puzzled. I am a stranger. If you are in search of information you must listen to your own young familiar voice singing and scratch your own young familiar breast where it itches. I am only a poor stranger of a fixed old age and not at all puzzled.

The Baffler ! 17

M y Own Little Mission Fatal Attraction 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [part 1]

An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have

had a clue what it was all about had he not shown me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an alluring fly and jazzy feathers dancing before its eyes. Fly-fishing is a particularly expensive hobby. You can’t just wade out into a Scottish stream willy-nilly, wearing any old thing. Flies don’t come cheap, either. But a gentleman is always willing to dip into his pocket for a spot of fishing. God knows how many times the money invested in the ritual exceeds the value of the fish caught. The satisfaction, quite obviously, isn’t in the catching. Getting back to my acquaintance, though, at some point his life changed and the accumulated years dulled his fly-fishing fervour. He packed on the pounds, his heart grew weak, and his spirit dissipated—all until recently. Out of the blue he got in touch while on a trip through Asia. He was with a guide fishing a pristine river in some kind of island jungle. Fly-fishing had literally brought him back to life. The passions of others are the most mysterious thing in the world. My acquaintance sent out his sudden electronic life beacon around the same time an online article caught my eye. A new consumer obsession has caught on among moneyed young men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. The majority of wealthy men in this age bracket are either soccer players or oligarchs. They’re not spending their money on yachts, women, or art (bye-bye, artists!) anymore, but on their sublimate—on aquariums. From Singapore to London, a whole network of professionals has popped up to service this wellheeled clientele: aquarium designers and architects, underwater lighting experts, underwater gardeners for the aquarium ecosystem, suppliers of rare aquarium fish, ichthyologists, even fish therapists. Aquarium maintenance alone costs around $160,000 annually. And aquarium fish are another matter entirely. At between $80,000 and $200,000 a specimen, the Platinum arowana is most highly priced, and prized. Its lack of pigment gives it a platinum color, making it a kind of albino among fishes, an apparent bearer of wealth and good fortune.* The Platinum arowana is unusually sensitive, its optimal life expectancy around ten years. In order to test water quality, temperature, and a bunch of other water-related things, people put tester fish—known as clown fish—in first, the majority of whom die so that other fish may lead happy aquarium lives. Clown fish have performed the role of slaves throughout history, offering the same suicidal service, one akin

* The belief that albino children bring good luck lives in certain parts of Africa. Every now and then, a witchdoctor kills a pallid-looking child in order to prepare a voodoo potion. The child’s organs are usually removed while he is still alive, so the child bleeds to death.

18 1 The Baffler

X U YA N G

to tasting whether the czar’s, the emperor’s, the king’s, or the master’s food has been poisoned. The possible explanations for this trendy new obsession among flush young men are almost endless, and all are as right as they are wrong. The most straightforward can be found in language. In a number of languages, including a few Slavic languages, the equivalent of the word chick (i.e., an attractive young woman) is, believe it or not— fish. Is the aquarium a realization of the infantile dream of underwater worlds (and absolute control over them)? Or is it a symbolic substitute for a harem, one with “little sirens,” with whom every touch is impossible and therefore all the more desirable? Or is it about a space of contemplation, a home temple in which the divine world swims around indifferent to the lives of mortals? Whatever the case, the fatal attraction between men and fish is fertile ground for psychoanalytical and other interpretive acrobatics. On the island of Kiribati, the relationship between young girls, fish, and men is as clear as day. The Pacific Ocean feeds the world with fish, more than half the global tuna catch (two million tons a year) is hauled up there. And it’s not just European fishing fleets: Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Russian, American, Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino boats are there, too. Kiribati waters are swarming with fishermen and fish. From the age of twelve upward, the little Kiribati girls slink around the fish-

The fatal attraction between men and fish is fertile ground for psychoanalytical and other interpretive acrobatics.

The Baffler ! 19

ing boats like cats. Prostitution isn’t illegal on Kiribati. It’s how the local girls earn a bit of pocket money to buy a few drinks, or, in exchange for a sexual service, get a few pounds of fish to feed their hungry families. The young prostitutes are called korakorea girls, korakorea meaning “cheap fish.” The girls fall ill to venereal diseases, just like clown fish do from fishy ones. Here, the reciprocal relationship between men and fish really is fatal. At the end of June this year I traveled via Vienna to Graz in Austria. The flight from Vienna to Graz was canceled, so I had to take a bus. The young guy sitting next to me was a Russian from the Ukraine, a soccer player, traveling to Graz for a two-day training camp. “But why Graz? Aren’t there any spare fields in the Ukraine?” The young guy shrugged his shoulders. Although he seemed to me barely seventeen, it turned out that Pavel was twenty-six, his club owned by a rich Ukrainian. A mafioso? A Ukrainian oligarch? No, no, a businessman, Pavel said, defending his boss. “And how much do you earn?” “Not much. Twenty thousand dollars a month.” In the world of major league soccer players, twenty thousand dollars a month is like beer money, Pavel explained. Pavel obviously wasn’t interested in talking about soccer, or about oligarchs, or about his “wages,” or about anything else for that matter. “Tell me. Is Vienna at the seaside?” He livened up. “It’s not.” “And Graz?” “Graz isn’t either.” Pavel quickly sunk into sleep. And while I looked at the sleeping boy on the seat next to me, a general sense of resignation came over me. He was on his way to Graz to train for a couple of days, and I was off to a literary evening. A barely literate Ukrainian was using his enviably nimble pair of legs to bring in twenty thousand dollars a month, while I, highly literate, for my “intellectual services” was bringing in incomparably less. With his monthly salary, a soccer player like Pavel could buy four Hawaiian yellow tang, a popular aquarium fish, at five thousand dollars a pop. Pavel might be barely literate, but as opposed to me, he was born with an innate knowledge. He knows all too well that he’s only a little fish in the aquarium. He knows he’s replaceable and that he only costs his boss one, two, or three Platinum arowanas (the price of which has apparently fallen lately) a year. I, on the other hand, who drank “arrogant” ideas about the rights of all to equality with my socialist milk, haven’t been able to shake the thought that I’m irreplaceable, although the wages that await me in Graz for the provision of intellectual services equal a portion of fried sardines. In a better restaurant, of course. Yes, I am a korakorea girl, a cheap fish. And with that thought for comfort, and my young fellow passenger having mistaken my shoulder for a pillow, I, too, sink into sleep.t (Part 2 begins on page 51.)

Translated from the Croatian by David Williams.

20 1 The Baffler

from Odi Barbare 3 Geoffrey Hill Boreal light-loaded incorrigible Plutocratic anarchy breaks the archons Little praised here more adamantine than those

Clapped into durance

Herod rants | pageants on their wooden tractions Cannot hold him · Now he is in the shambles Butchers Row · Come back you old wakeman | watch us Cartwheel to ruin Terms at law viz Tragedy Anticommons Tudor statecraft sounds only half as stately Interludes they acted in fiery winter Heywood and Medwall So then tell us what inspiration | sets IMagination back on its heels of rancour Inner cells where rigged Politeia banters Tokenless furies Shall they break us twice in unbroken cycle Lords of our time | losers of others’ livings Negative life equity left our children

With a bone ploughshare

Who are these restless in the darkened kingdom Apprehension memory clamour spectral Turn in conned sleep murmurous vexing nation

Now and regardless

The Baffler ! 21

u Documenti a

We Told You So

An advance memorandum on the jitters 3 James K. Galbr aith

E arly summer 2008

ike many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the Washington Post describing Gramm as a “sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” (Gramm, with a certain sense of humor, denied it.) For that, and for my experience drafting policy papers, I was in contact every few days with Obama’s economists. To economists in my own circle, it had long been clear that the financial crisis then unfolding was an epic event. We had watched the subprime mortgage disaster build up. In August 2007 we knew the meltdown had begun. Bear Stearns had failed. But for reasons that have to do with the pace and rhythm of politics, these issues remained on the back burner, the campaign being dominated by health care and the Iraq war. For those of us on the outside, it was hard to know whether the insiders understood what was coming. And so it seemed a good idea to raise an alarm. But here you confront the Cassandra paradox: if you predict disaster, no one believes you. Economics is rife with alarmists; if the wolf really is at the door, it’s better to have a whole chorus saying so. For this I had the help of the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress, which convened a meeting in Paris. When you invite twenty friends to spend a few days in Paris in June, it’s rarely hard to persuade them to come.Among the Americans in the group were the editors of two important journals, a former United Nations financial expert, and the former federal regulator who had blown the whistle on the savings and loan 22 1 The Baffler

fraud. There were also senior specialists from France, Britain, India, China, and Brazil. The meeting had no political connection, but one result was a long memorandum, which I sent in early July to the Obama team. I do not know whether, or by whom, my memo was read. Not the slightest word came back. Yet the memo disproves the notion that nobody knew. To the group in Paris, three months before Lehman, what I wrote was obvious. It was our consensus view. What follows is an excerpt.

he most important common ground was over the depth and severity of the financial crisis. We placed it in a different league from all other financial events since the early thirties, including the debt crises of the eighties and the Asian and Russian crises of the late nineties. One of us called it “epochal” and “history-making.” And so it has turned out. What distinguishes this crisis from the others are three facts taken together: (a) it emerges from the United States, that is, from the center, and not the periphery, of the global system; (b) it reflects the collapse of a bubble in an economy driven by repetitive bubbles; and (c) the bubble has been vectored into the financial structure in a uniquely complex and intractable way, via securitization. Bubbles are endemic to capitalism, but in most of history they are not the major story. In the ninteenth century, agricultural price deflation was a larger problem. In the twentieth, industrialization and technology set the direction. It was only in the information technology bubble of the late nineties that financial considerations—including the rise

DAV I D M c L I M A N S

The Baffler ! 23

u of venture capital and the influx of capital to the United States following the Asian and Russian crises—came to dominate the direction of the economy as a whole. The result was capricious and unstable—vast investments in (for instance) dark broadband, followed by a financial collapse—but it was not without redeeming social merits. The economy prospered, achieving full employment without inflation. And much of the broadband survived for later use. The same will not be said for the sequential bubbles of the Bush years, in housing and now commodities. The housing bubble— deliberately fostered by the authorities that should have been regulating it, including Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke—pushed the long-standing American model of support for homeownership beyond its breaking point. It involved a vast victimization of a vulnerable population. The unraveling will have social effects extending far beyond that population, to the large class of Americans with good credit and standard mortgages, whose home values are nevertheless being wiped out. Meanwhile, abandoned houses quickly become uninhabitable, so that, unlike broadband, the capital created in the bubble is actually destroyed, to a considerable degree, in the slump. Securitization is a long-standing practice but the question is, at what point does it go too far? It should be clear by now that nonconforming home loans cannot be safely securitized, because the credit quality and therefore the value of the asset cannot be reliably assessed. Further, in the regulatory climate of recent years (where as William K. Black pointed out, political appointees brought chainsaws to press conferences), ordinary prudential lending practices broke down completely. The housing crisis was infected by appraisal fraud, a fact overlooked and therefore abetted by the ratings agencies. “No one looked at the loan package.” Now the integrity of every part of the system, from loan origination to underwriting to ratings, is under a cloud. Fraud is deceit, a betrayal of trust. And it is trust that underlies valuation in a market full of specialized debt instruments, off-books 24 1 The Baffler

financial entities and over-the-counter transactions. That trust has, as of now, collapsed. The result, as John Eatwell phrased it, is that financial crisis takes the form of market gridlock—a systematic unwillingness of institutions to accept the creditworthiness of their counterparties. This is, of course, especially grave where a counterparty has no direct resort to a lender of last resort—and so the crisis naturally erupts in parts of the system that are outside the direct purview of central banks. Deregulation is, in other words, a vector of financial crisis. The message of all this for the Obama presidency is fairly clear. No one in the group expects the financial crisis to have disappeared, or even to be under stable control, by January of 2009. At that time there will no doubt be immediate priorities: more fiscal expansion, fast action against the wave of home losses to foreclosures, plus fast action against financial speculation in commodities would seem as of now to head the “to-do” list. But the financial problems will not go away. And that means that a seemingly benign credit expansion, such as got underway for Clinton in 1994 and carried him through his presidency, is not in the cards for Barack Obama. Given the fact that vacated and unsold houses (unless destroyed outright) stay in inventory for a long time, there is little prospect of a housing recovery, or that a new expansion of loans to the broad population will be collateralized by home values any time soon. Recovery from this source should indeed not be expected within the policy horizon of the next presidential term. Something could happen, for reasons largely unforeseen, as it eventually did in the 1990s. But to bank on such a happy development would be an act of faith. More likely, there won’t be good news on the growth front in 2009, 2010, or 2011. Achieving economic growth in some other way will therefore be an overriding policy preoccupation. The only other known way is fiscal policy, and this raises two questions: how much fiscal expansion will be needed, and over what time horizon? Calls are now being heard for a “second

u The next administration must return, rapidly and with a credible commitment, to the world of collective security and shared decision-making that the Bush administration has been at pains to abandon.

9 stimulus package”; these reflect the fact that the first stimulus package [the Bush package of Spring 2008], while effective, was necessarily short-lived. But the same will be true of the second stimulus package. And once the election is over, will the coalition presently supporting short-term stimulus stay in place? If not, what then? If the above analysis is correct, the political capital of the new presidency risks being exhausted, quite quickly, in a series of shortterm stimulus efforts that will do little more than buoy the economy for a few months each. Since they will not lead to a revival of private credit, every one of those efforts will ultimately be seen as “too little, too late” and therefore as ending in failure. Meanwhile a policy of repetitive tax rebates can only undermine the larger reputation of the country; it is unlikely that the rest of the world will happily continue to finance a country whose economic policy consists solely of writing checks to consumers. What is the alternative? It is to embark, from the beginning, on a directed, long-term strategy, based initially on public investment, aimed at the reconstruction of the physical infrastructure of the United States, at reform in our patterns of energy use, and at developing new technologies to deal with climate change and other pressing issues. It is to support those displaced by the unavoidable shrinkage of Bush-era bubbles but to do so efficiently— with unemployment insurance, revenue sharing to support state and local government public services, job training, adjustment assistance, and jobs programs. It is to foster, over

a time frame stretching from five years out through the next generation, a shift of private investment toward activities complementary to the major public purposes just stated. It is to persuade the rest of the world that this is an activity worthy of financial support. As noted, this strategy will have to be developed in a hostile environment of unstable oil and food prices. However, it would be a grave mistake to interpret that unstable price environment as “inflationary,” as leading toward a sustained or inertial inflation. In particular, money wages have not changed or caught up; real wages are therefore falling— and quite sharply—in view of the commodity price jumps. As Ben Bernanke acknowledged in a recent speech, nothing in the present movement of price indices can be attributed to wages. In Bernanke’s choice phrase, “the empirical evidence for this linkage is less definitive than we would like.” It is Democratic Party mantra that Presidents do not comment on the actions of the Federal Reserve. But in this situation, comment is needed. An appropriate comment on the larger role of monetary policy does not amount to interference in routine decisionmaking, e.g., of the Federal Open Market Committee. Rather, it should reflect the core reality: the Federal Reserve and other financial regulatory agencies failed in their responsibilities in the past decade and now they must take up those responsibilities again. The entire point of a regulatory system is to regulate. It is to subordinate the activities of an intrinsically unstable and predatory sector to larger social purposes, and thus to prevent a situation in which financial interests dictate policy to governments. That is, however, exactly the situation we have allowed to develop. The job of the Federal Reserve and of the other competent agencies in the next administration must be, in part, to reestablish who is boss. Specifically, there needs to be a very thoroughgoing revamping of the financial rules of the road, to dampen financial instability, deflate the commodity bubble, reduce the enormous monopoly rents in the financial sector, set new terms for credit management, The Baffler ! 25

u and generate productive capital investment where it is most required. This is in large part the Federal Reserve’s job, though it has strong inter-agency and international dimensions.

hese measures cannot be viewed, or undertaken, in isolation from the international financial position of the United States. Obviously, a successful speculative attack on the dollar would severely disrupt the orderly implementation of this or any other strategy. Equally obviously, a unilateral defense of the dollar via a campaign of high interest rates would severely aggravate the problems of the real economy. The way out of this dilemma—the only way out—lies in multilateral coordination and collaboration: a joint effort by the United States and its creditors. And this means that the next administration must return, rapidly and with a credible commitment, to the world of collective security and shared decision-making that the Bush administration has been at pains to abandon. An orderly disengagement from Iraq would send a major signal of the intent of the U.S. government to play, in the future, by a different set of rules. Collective security, in short, is not merely a slogan. It is the lynchpin of our future financial and economic security—security that cannot be assured by any unilateral means. Only a collective effort will keep America’s creditors committed to the stability of the dollar-reserve system for long enough to effect the next round of economic transformation in the United States. Conversely, continued failure to appreciate the financial and economic dimensions of unilateral militarism is one certain route toward the failure of the next administration’s economic and financial strategies. The two largest issues we face— how to maintain American economic leadership in much of the world and how to manage American military power—cannot be separated from each other. Collective security is, however, also more than simply a way of reducing risks and instabilities. It is the foundation stone for many physical transformations of the economy to

26 1 The Baffler

A stable reduction of military fears is a key step toward opening up markets that can potentially permit resolution of collective problems on the grand scale.

9 come. It is obvious, in particular, that the military basis of international power on which the United States continues to rely is completely out of date, and has been for decades. As Iraq has demonstrated to everyone including the professional military, military power alone cannot deliver stability and security at all—let alone at an acceptable human and social cost. Yet parts of the military establishment continue to develop, and to harbor, the technological talent and capacity for problemsolving which every aspect of our energy problem now needs. Shifting the basis of our security system away from one based on military equipment is a key step toward making those resources available. And the same is true for other countries. China, for example, has long made energy choices favoring coal partly because the resulting power plants are diffuse and militarily expendable. In a secure world, that country would be far more willing to develop its vast hydroelectric potential, as the then-invulnerable United States did in the 1930s. Hydro power is carbon-clean, but militarily exposed. A stable reduction of military fears is a key step toward opening up markets that can potentially permit resolution of collective problems on the grand scale. In short conclusion: from the beginning, the Obama presidency will face acute situations requiring immediate action, especially in oil and housing. It should aim for early victories in these areas as the foundation stone for intermediate- and long-term programs. For the medium term, institution-building and the restoration of competent and effective regulatory power over the financial system—

DAV I D M c L I M A N S

both national and international—will be key. For the long term, the goal should be nothing less than the transformation of our energy base and the solution of our environmental challenges—the rebuilding of America. And that can be done only in an international financial climate made possible by a return to multilateral decision-making and a commitment to collective security. The American

people are ready for this. President Obama should be prepared to explain that leadership in a world community—leadership of collective action on the grand scale—is America’s true destiny. It is not in futile warfare, but in great endeavors, that a great nation finds its future, its purpose, its place in history, and prosperity, as well as security, for its people. t The Baffler ! 27

[ S a lvos ]

I Was a Teenage Gramlich 3 Jim Newell

can’t say I ever intended from a young age to spend my eighteenth year mastering Washington Consensus–era monetary policy to recite in stuttering, rote cliché before a panel of mildly curious economic policymakers who filled out the payroll at Alan Greenspan’s Randian fiefdom. I didn’t play football, or soccer, or any of the other exhausting things; my fourth-grade rendition of “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder didn’t give way to more ambitious musical pursuits; and the school newspaper already had a core stable of scribes to file the biweekly “Christina Aguilera vs. Britney Spears: Who’s Hotter?” trend pieces and listicles. What toptier private university would continue reading a student’s application after noting that he’d failed to deliver such scholastic contribution? So let’s settle on the market-friendly explanation: I was incentivized to take a spot on my high school’s Federal Reserve competition team that senior year, for lack of much else to do. And somehow, over a few months, I became fluent in the tongue of historically resolved, tightly synthesized neoclassical bullshit. The United States was insulated from any fundamental economic problems, the thinktank consensus maintained during my 2002– 2003 school year, but my generation would still be charged with resolving one or two pesky loose ends. In ten or twenty years, once the Treasury had funneled enough of its everexpanding annual surpluses into paying off the country’s entire public debt, who would stop it from malinvesting excess funds into private markets and causing “distortions”? Who would liberate the oppressed Social Security surplus from its lifelong imprisonment in low-yielding Treasury bills, sending it safely into the cozy trenches of speculative finance? Who would marry the next wave of Andrea Mitchells, play Sunday footsies with the unworthy heirs to Tim Russert, and Irish 28 1 The Baffler

Depending on how you remember it, this was either a few days before our president announced the successful resolution of hostilities in Iraq, or a few days after you and your neighbors took out your first second mortgages.

9 the Bethesda dinner party coffees of future George Wills as they retrofitted Fed anecdotes from the House of Plantagenet to shed light on current transportation policy? Why, the Fed Challenge kids would. And so that’s why I became a teenage supplicant at the enormous, glossy table that dominates the Board Room of the Federal Reserve one muggy Washington afternoon that April 2003. Depending on how you remember it, this was either a few days before our president announced the successful resolution of hostilities in Iraq, or a few days after you and your neighbors took out your first second mortgages. Until recently, I’d never watched tapes of the competition or bothered to look back at how well our presentation—crafted explicitly upon what various personalities at the Fed were saying at the time—held up. I can say now that we were accurately depicting what policymakers, ranging all the way from center-left to center-right, were saying. Had my long-term planning that year not been exclusively devoted to persuading one particular sophomore girl to date me, I might have noticed that the Fed was grooming types like me to carry the torch of efficient, market-allocated human welfare into the second generation of the Great Moderation, fully untethered from the stubborn demands of history

[

PETER ARKLE

and the clutches of modest inflation. But not everything went according to plan. Fed Challenge is, in the words of our gracious and still active economics teacher at Severn School in Severna Park, Maryland, Mr. Bodley, “a national economics competition that encourages a better understanding of our nation’s central bank.” Mr. Bodley—as his former high school student, I can’t possibly refer to him any other way—wrote this in a 1998– 1999 edition of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s PR publication, Equilibria. Here is how he laid out the basic Challenge procedure: A team of five students prepares and presents a 15-minute analysis of the U.S. economy, recommends a course of action with respect to interest rates, and then withstands a 10-minute

question-and-answer period from a panel of Federal Reserve economists. To prepare for the competition, students look at the same economic indicators and the same forces influencing the economy that our nation’s economic leaders examine.

And to lend extra verisimilitude to the whole proceeding, competitors are also advised, as we were, to act out the parts of real members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The idea at its simplest, at least when I was competing, was to imbue the next generation of American leaders with a grasp of the complexities of macroeconomic management— measuring the threat of inflation against the jobs outlook, taking stock of the curious twists and turns of consumer demand, the The Baffler ! 29

] credit market, and this strange, robust creature known as the housing boom. This was a tricky, moderately worrisome moment for the American economy. The 2000–2001 tech bubble recession was safely in the rearview, but the country’s economic performance remained sluggish. Corporations had recapitalized and labor productivity was high, but the unemployment rate was stuck near 6 percent—not bad by historical standards, but weak by the expectations that had built up over the nineties boom. That’s why Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the revered free-market galoot who had come personally to assume most of Washington’s economic policy-making power over the previous decades with frighteningly little complaint from the quislings in Congress, was still keeping the Fed funds rate at 1.25 percent, a forty-year low, several years after the economy had stopped receding. The rate couldn’t stay so low for much longer—unless, that is, the dynamic maestro Greenspan decided on the flip of a coin, without consulting anyone else, that it could. There were, to be sure, some encouraging countervailing trends. The Iraq war was in the process of being “successfully resolved,” as a significant number of economists and trusted newspaper pundits were arguing. And since the Iraqi endgame had lurched placidly into gear without blowing up the price of oil, rapid growth more consistent with historic recovery patterns seemed set to launch. Market uncertainty over Iraq—maybe that was the big hang-up all along. Right? It sounded just savvy enough to be true, in Washington, and so my team adopted this bold case as the main determinant for monetary policy moving forward.

ur judges that muggy April day inside the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve building were three marquee economic sages who took time out of their busy schedules to feign interest in our presentation: Federal Reserve board governors Ben Bernanke and Ed Gramlich and Dallas bank president Bob McTeer.

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The room went quiet and tense for a few seconds after our scripted performance, as we waited for the barrage of questions that we’d overprepared for. We’d guessed that Bernanke, the rising star on the board and rumored successor-in-waiting to Greenspan, would be the one to cut into us with exotic volleys about, say, indirect inflation targeting. But Gramlich turned out to be the governor who unsettled us with the most aggressive naysaying. He saw, among other things, capacity utilization figures lingering in the basement, and didn’t see a silver bullet in the “resolution of geopolitical tensions.” Gramlich was a regulator by trade, and by heart. He’d spent much of the previous decade studying, in apparent isolation, the new crops of Wall Street–backed financial products being hawked with vigor in hastily constructed banks, thrifts, and temporary office trailers on what seemed like every urban neighborhood corner where once there stood, say, a small business with employees who sold real products. And he didn’t see a silver bullet, either, where Greenspan and Bernanke did: sharply rising home values, flexibly designed and unusually accessible mortgage and mortgage refinancing options, new home construction, and so on—in short, our economy’s coordinated encircling of everything associated with residential real estate, made possible in part by stupidly low long-term interest rates. Is extracting equity from one’s house an increase in wealth? Gramlich asked the panel. Does any of this make individual persons, or the country, wealthier? Good questions, all. But how were we really supposed to know? We just wanted to mimic what they would have said, and then to win, and then to return to drinking in our basements. For all our carefully rehearsed, soaring talk of long-term economic trends, something more immediate was at stake for Team Severn: school honor. By the time I was a senior in 2003, Mr. Bodley had cemented his and Severn’s reputation as perennially successful Fed Challenge contenders. Two of Severn’s teams in the late nineties had advanced to the national finals.

[ Is extracting equity from one’s house an increase in wealth? Gramlich asked the panel. Does any of this make individual persons, or the country, wealthier?

9 The first of these was the slate of contenders from the class of 1998; we watched the videos from that year’s competition several dozen times to study the performance of a “model team.” And they were a hot ticket, to be sure. Mr. Bodley recently told me that one member is now getting his economics PhD from Georgetown, a second has already gotten his from Columbia, and a third is currently getting his from Columbia, while being taught by the second. But even these whizzes couldn’t beat 1998’s devastating team from the Dallas district, which included dead-on student portrayals of former Fed Vice Chair Alice Rivlin and Fed Governor Laurence Meyer. The Dallas student portraying Meyer all but sealed victory with a string of eerily convincing yet profoundly lame jokes. Meanwhile, as nerd lore had it at Severn, the school’s strong team from the last competition, in 2002, had been robbed at the district finals in Richmond, after prevailing in two regional rounds at the Fed’s Baltimore branch. I can’t remember why they were robbed, but they were. It was a fact. And so, come 2003, my team—assembled just a few weeks after we all learned, vaguely, what the Federal Reserve was—had no intention of letting those Richmond arrivistes steal glory from Severn’s clutches for a second year running. As with any interschool competition, teamwork was essential in advancing. So here’s a rundown of the Severn players: Peter anchored the lineup with his portrayal of Alan Greenspan, whose reputation was still nearly flawless in those days. One of the first things our team did collaboratively was read Bob Woodward’s Maestro, then regarded

as the definitive account of Greenspan’s highriding Fed tenure. Each chapter was about an episode in recent economic history—the 1987 stock market crash, the “Asian Tigers” stallout, Russia’s debt default, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse, etc.—that Greenspan had perfectly managed by using his . . . magic? The argument of Woodward’s book seemed to boil down to Alan Greenspan saving everything via his conjuring powers. And Peter’s dry, deliberate, and obfuscating delivery made him an obvious choice for a character with such “gravitas,” as we’d put it. “International trade is not a zero-sum game,” Peter would say in rehearsals, to our giggles. Tim played Ben Bernanke, the rising-star Princeton economist and Fed governor whom many were pegging—correctly, as it turned out—as Greenspan’s eventual successor. Bernanke had been making waves at the time as the most intellectually creative member of the board—meaning, he basically believed everything Greenspan said, but would occasionally pay lip service to new ideas like establishing semi-official inflation targets. Tim was the smartest member of our team and had put in deliberately for the part of Bernanke. He even got into the habit of quoting Bernanke’s own lines from speeches during the question-andanswer segment—a tic that the judges would later take uneasy note of in toting up our scores. Josh played our sole district bank president, Al Broaddus of Richmond. Josh was an ambitious young man who had mysteriously been racking up bank internships at places like Legg Mason during his high school summers, while I was cleaning crap off movie theatre floors. He had an explicit plan to become president of the United States by some point in his late thirties or early forties, which largely went like this: get into Wharton, make a lot of money in finance, quit, and work up the political ladder to the Oval Office. But in his role as Broaddus, Josh’s duty for our team was simply to cover the “local stuff” while the rest of us prattled on about national macroeconomics. His speaking parts would usually start with “In my district, for example . . .” or “According to the most recent Beige Book projections . . . ” Josh was solid. The Baffler ! 31

] Danelle played Roger Ferguson, then the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, because, well . . . someone should play the vice chair, right? Danelle had been an alternate for most of the time leading up to the competition and had to play catch-up after the original teammate, Reenie, was hospitalized following a terrible car accident during that winter’s heavy snowfalls. And the last member was me, playing Ed Gramlich, mostly because Tim told me I should play him. We made our way up the learning curve by reading contemporary Fed speeches, Greg Ip’s Wall Street Journal articles, a few well-maintained economic data websites, and anything else that Maestro didn’t cover. Severna Park, Maryland, a comfortable town just across the Severn River from Annapolis, could have provided us with more firsthand, on-the-ground economic reports, if we’d bothered looking. New high-end developments—meaning garishly large boxes for three households constructed out of cheap synthetic crap—were springing up in nearly every piece of tractable land you could view from a highway or oncequaint back road. Each fly-by-night colony bore a ludicrous title like “The Preserve,” each house was constructed approximately three feet from the next, and the value of each house is now down at least $100,000 from its peak. But the Severna Park–Annapolis region will recover. The two major cities on either side, Baltimore and Washington (mostly the latter) will always need their bedroom communities—a core pool of demand that will effectively insulate the area’s flirtations with reckless sprawl from the threat of becoming a ghost town. That’s still not to say, of course, that it takes any special effort these days to find a real estate fire sale auction around town on any given weekend. Our team spent the winter preparing, and by early spring, we’d advanced through two regional rounds in Baltimore and the district finals in Richmond, avenging the honor of our scorned schoolmates from the previous year. Richmond was a close call. This one defiantly Southern judge nearly quashed our bid, call32 1 The Baffler

ing us “cocky” and telling us to stop being so “New York”—an odd criticism of a group of teens from suburban Annapolis. But Tim and I were able to identify this as anti-Semitic code, based on one recent episode of The West Wing. (For the record, we were both inactive Protestants.) It was close, but we carried the day in the end. We headed to the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Building for the national finals. We were ungodly nervous on the day of the final four. In the first round of the national finals, which we’d barely escaped the day before, the judges made a quick study of Danelle’s alternate selection and relative lack of preparation. They chose to target this vulnerability, and Danelle had to sit silently when pressed and wait for Peter to chime in on her behalf. To be fair, this was more like how the FOMC operated in real life: Greenspan would mute all the other board members and do whatever he wanted. On top of that, Peter and I had been struggling for weeks with the problem of giggling— giggling!—in the middle of our presentation whenever we made eye contact. This giddy attack of the nerves hadn’t disappeared even by the time we were preparing in the Federal Reserve cafeteria, leading Josh at one point to grab Peter by the lapels, hold him against a wall, and say, “YOU BETTER NOT RUIN THIS.” In fairness, we could appreciate his alarm—this was a small but significant step along his path to the U.S. presidency. No one giggled when George W. Bush made the case for extended tax cuts for the wealthy, after all—and it would certainly strain all sorts of credulity to have our judges imagine our respective real-life models, Alan Greenspan and Ed Gramlich, adjourning Open Market Committee meetings amid uncontrollable bursts of hysterical laughter. As things turned out, our scripted presentation before judges Bernanke, McTeer, and Gramlich went off well; we delivered an accurate depiction of some of the conflicts on the board at the time. Our recommendation was to keep the Fed funds rate steady at 1.25 percent, although my Gramlich character—who in ear-

[ No one giggled when George W. Bush made the case for extended tax cuts for the wealthy, after all—and it would certainly strain all sorts of credulity to have our judges imagine our respective real-life models, Alan Greenspan and Ed Gramlich, adjourning Open Market Committee meetings amid uncontrollable bursts of hysterical laughter.

9 lier rounds had dissented and recommended a further round of rate reduction—voted along with everyone else but with a “bias towards easing.” Here’s how part of the dispute played out in the transcript, via an exchange between my Gramlich and Tim’s Bernanke: Gramlich: Much of the effect of the fiscal stimulus package will be negligible in the short term, especially the reduction in dividend taxes. And even that part which takes effect immediately will be largely negated by cutbacks in state budgets. Other forces could restrain household spending as well. The job market is weakening, with the four-week moving average of initial jobless claims hovering in the 400,000 region, generally a sign of stagnation. In addition, non-farm payrolls declined by 308,000 in the month of February, the largest decline since the immediate aftermath of September 11. Significant increases in unemployment could likely lead to a retrenchment in consumer spending. Uncertainty over the labor market has contributed to the lowest level of consumer confidence in a decade, foreboding less than steady sailing ahead. Rising energy costs, with oil looming near forty dollars per barrel, are also dragging consumption expenditures downward. Household debt has risen to high levels, due primarily to families taking on new mortgages. These mortgages have proven to be too much for some homeowners, as mortgage delinquency rates have increased. Bernanke: But if you dig beneath the surface, household debt numbers aren’t as gloomy as you suggest. In fact, the consumer has taken advantage of the unusual opportunity offered by low interest rates to do some balance sheet

restructuring. Probably about 25 percent of equity extraction has been used to pay off more expensive nondeductible consumer credit, e.g. credit and auto loans. This restructuring has not come at the cost of a substantial increase in leverage. Loan-to-value ratios for home mortgages have barely changed in recent years, and the great bulk of cashed-out equity has been taken out by long tenure homeowners who have retained substantial equity after their extraction. The apparent recent increase in the household-sectors debt burden has actually resulted in households realizing a more tax-efficient and collateralized form of debt, resulting in lower leverage and payments, not the reverse.

You can see why the real Ed Gramlich went on to question Tim, the fake Ben Bernanke, so aggressively in the question-and-answer portion. Gramlich had chaired the Fed’s Committee on Consumer and Community Affairs for most of his tenure on the board and had become an early expert in the growth in subprime lending. In early 2003, no federal regulator of any consequence had sized up the truly unsustainable trajectory of these loans, so that all the home-equity “collateral” that Bernanke (or Tim as Bernanke, in this case) was hailing as tax-efficient and safe was still years away from plummeting to, say, 50 percent of its value. But Gramlich had a feeling even then that while playing around with mortgages might prove stimulative in the short term, such measures would come at the cost of a substantial increase in household leverage; loan-to-value ratio standards would worsen; balance sheets would “restructure” mostly by drowning unThe Baffler ! 33

] derwater. He also sensed, with painful acuity, that very little of this would have a healthy long-term effect on labor markets, economic security, or wealth creation. In the real-life Fed, Gramlich had brought some of his subprime concerns to Alan Greenspan around 2000. He urged the chairman to mobilize the Fed’s regulatory apparatus to use, according to a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “its discretionary authority to send examiners into the offices of consumerfinance lenders that were units of Fed-regulated bank holding companies.” This is something he said to Alan Greenspan, a guy who doesn’t even think fraud should be illegal, as former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksley Born—a Clintonera derivatives regulator whom Greenspan silenced—remembers him saying over a lunch date. So it was hardly a shock when Greenspan dismissed Gramlich’s concerns. And Gramlich, not willing to push further against Greenspan’s final word, decided not to bring his recommendations to the Fed staff. This revelation came out shortly before Gramlich’s death from leukemia in the summer of 2007, just as the subprime crisis was beginning to destroy the entire global economy. But three years later, when Greenspan was testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the old man was polite enough to, let’s say, “commemorate” Gramlich’s 2000 warnings. He recommended that the panel examine the causes of the financial crisis that Gramlich had “chosen not to bring” to the Fed’s board, according to a New York Times report on the hearing titled “Greenspan Criticized for Characterization of Colleague.” There are plenty of rival episodes to choose from, but it’s hard to find a more illuminating example of Alan Greenspan’s enduring pettiness than this. Long after the fact, he tried to depict himself as the reasonable adult by recommending the Fed look into Gramlich’s regulatory ideas, while also slyly insinuating that his dead colleague was the bad actor in this drama because he never brought those recommendations to the Fed staff. We neophyte high schoolers could never 34 1 The Baffler

hope to aspire to this level of Machiavellian chicanery—it’s no doubt covered in advanced seminars in macroeconomic policy, or perhaps in the Objectivist texts that Greenspan has lovingly studied throughout his life. On another level, though, Greenspan’s harried blaming-the-dead-guy line of rhetorical defense underlined just how close the worlds of high school and macroeconomic policymaking are, at least in behavioral terms. The only difference in this case would be that a highschool-age scofflaw would be more likely to invent a dead relative to blow off a homework assignment than to attribute a major policy oversight to a dead colleague. I should mention that while Gramlich is dead, the Maestro Alan Greenspan can still regularly be heard spouting unquestionable economic wisdom during hushed, reverentially staged appearances on Meet the Press with David Gregory, the prince of Washington press quislings.

hatever we said, and God knows I didn’t understand much of what I was saying back then, it was good enough to win the national championship—Mr. Bodley’s first of two. Ben Bernanke made the announcement before an anxious crowd of students, teachers, family members, and Federal Reserve economists, after noting how “scary” it was to hear certain students (Tim) repeating whole sentences of his speeches back to him. It all felt incredible, as did the $5,000 checks for “education” that Citibank presented each of us with; I mostly spent it on CDs and booze during the Atlantic post–high school debauch known as “Beach Week.” (More than once it’s occurred to me that Citibank, the recently merged mortgage giant that required successive bailouts in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, would probably have liked to have the paltry $25,000 in Fed Challenge prize money back in its battered coffers—but it’s easy to make the case that I had put my winnings to use in a fashion that had an undeniably stimulative effect on my local economy.) My video review of our performance largely jibes with my memory of our spirited finals

[ It all felt incredible, as did the $5,000 checks for “education” that Citibank presented each of us with; I mostly spent it on CDs and booze during the Atlantic post–high school debauch known as “Beach Week.”

9 performance. Danelle came back strongly after a rough semifinal, and was able to silence judge Bernanke with this line of lines: “Liquidity is the oil in the engine of capitalism.” Peter was able to say, “International trade is not a zero-sum game” during our questionand-answer session. It’s unclear if this had any effect on our victory, but Peter’s cool delivery gave the impression that this declaration, this single line could answer any question you ever had about economics. But another of his solid answers that I’d forgotten about turns out to have been remarkably prescient. Bernanke had posed a fundamental policy dilemma to Peter: Since low long-term interest rates provided such a stimulative effect—even though the Fed’s primary stimulative tool was in setting overnight, short-term interbank loan rates—how would Fed policy makers keep long-term rates low? In his reply, Peter noted that if it had to, the Fed could buy “vast quantities of long-term securities” and keep them on its balance sheet. The popular term for this action nowadays is quantitative easing, and Ben Bernanke has recently completed his second round of it in a desperate bid to jump-start growth in an economy ravaged by the collapse of the Potemkin housing boom. Josh said something smart-sounding about money market funds and real interest rates. Any high schooler saying “money market funds” is good enough, no matter the context. Maybe Josh will be president. Tim took his lumps from Gramlich (the real one, that is) in the question-and-answer round,

sure, but still gave the best and most frequent answers of any team member. Tim is now a graduate student in history, and a Marxist. And me? I noted that state budget cuts had a contracting effect on economic growth, and threw in a few other mediocre answers about the Taylor rule, the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, and other textbook terms that probably have no real place in Federal Open Market Committee conversations. Most important, Peter and I didn’t succumb to a single giggling fit. It’s true that in the harsh light of my young adulthood I’ve been pretty hard on some of the Fed policies that we were largely rehashing to the judges in the balmier days of 2003. But joining the Fed Challenge team was the best extracurricular decision I made in high school. I developed a better-than-average knowledge of all the macroeconomic policies that I shouldn’t subscribe to as an adult. The Alan Greenspan Fed taught me about the importance of teamwork and collective, rational decision making, and how easily they can be discarded when a single Randian ideologue is intent on destroying the world as part of a high-stakes social science experiment of his own devising. And I learned that adolescence not only never needs to end, but can lead to a top-notch appointment in the civil service, so long as you mute your private alarm over the sustainability of the latest get-rich-quick scheme, or the American economic system at large. And nothing makes me prouder than the memory of my eighty-nine-year-old grandfather trekking to Washington to watch the finals and to get his picture taken in Alan Greenspan’s chair. He was born in 1914, one year after the Fed’s creation. He served in the Army, became a public school teacher and a principal, and made wise, studied investments in the stock market at a young age, providing him with the security to retire in his fifties and own a second summer vacation home. He was a great role model, an American role model, and his good fortune never ran out: he died in 2005, at the peak of the housing boom.t The Baffler ! 35

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M A R K DA N C E Y

The Baffler ! 37

[ S a lvos ]

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges 3 Rick Perlstein

hen Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor headquarters.” When he won that nomination, Esquire wondered whether the Republican Party was so “bankrupt that it has to embrace Liberace for leadership.” Two decades later, Reagan was hailed as the earthly embodiment of America’s transcendent values. How did he do it? Part of the answer involves ideology, organizing, personalities: the stuff of conventional political history. But there’s another, more mystical part. As Nikita Khrushchev once said to Richard Nixon, “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Ronald Reagan built bridges like that. The period to focus on here is the seventies. To understand why, return, for a moment, to the 1870s. Americans have been building invisible bridges for a long time, most assiduously after periods of national turmoil—like the one between 1860 and 1865, when more than 600,000 Americans slaughtered one another. Soon afterward, the combatants began carrying out sentimental rituals of reconciliation. Confederate soldiers paraded through Boston to the cheers of welcoming Yankee throngs. John Quincy Adams II proclaimed from the podium: “You are come so that once more we may pledge ourselves to a new union, not a union merely of law, or simply of the lips: not a union . . . of the sword, but gentlemen, the only true union, the union of hearts.” Dissenters were dismissed as intransigents. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison pointed

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out that the new systems of agricultural labor, which were growing all over the South and which were guarded by Ku Klux Klan terror, scarcely differed from slavery. The New York Times sniffed, “Does [Mr. Garrison] really imagine that outside of small and suspicious circles any real interest attaches to the old forms of the Southern question?” Society expanded westward in violent thrusts, as industrialism wrenched yeoman farmers off the land, conscripted independent artisans into regimented factory work, and paved the way for Robber Baron fortunes, financial panics, and immigrant slums. Eighteen seventy-seven, the year Reconstruction ended, brought the worst labor strikes in American history. But patriotic societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution emerged as bulwarks against the threat of disunity. “Americanism” became the test of citizenship. “The man who would foment strife between East or West, North or South, between labor and capital or any section of our life, is the universal enemy,” a typical opinion leader thundered. Transcending strife—achieving consensus—was the meaning of the new nation. America the Innocent, searching for totems of a unity it can never quite achieve. It is one of the structuring stories of our nation: “the union of hearts” proclaimed by J.Q. Adams Jr. on Boston’s Bunker Hill parade ground, the “return to normalcy” enjoined by Silent Cal after the Great War, the cult of domesticity that followed the ordeal of World War II. In 1973, after ten years of war in Vietnam, America tried to do it again. When the prisoners of war returned, the White House and the Pentagon tried to orchestrate a good old-fashioned unifying ritual of patriotic renewal. Richard Nixon, speaking in the Oval Office to the Pentagon official

S TE V E B RO D N E R

The Baffler ! 39

] in charge of what was christened “Operation Homecoming,” said, “It’s like a producer putting on a great play or a great movie. You have a hell of a bunch of stars in this one. It’s an allstar cast—even the bit players.” The Boston Brahmin Elliot Richardson, Nixon’s secretary of defense, put it more soberly: “The returning POWs have dramatically launched what DOD is trying to do to restore the military to its proper position.” Nixon summed up: “We now have an invaluable opportunity to revise the history of this war.” But this seventies turned out differently than the 1870s. The patriotic reverie kept getting rudely interrupted. Mike Royko, a popular columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and a type that doesn’t exist any more—a tough, beer-chugging, regular guy and unreconstructed liberal—described his feelings after the announcement in January 1973 of the Paris Peace Accords: It wasn’t like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer. Now the president comes on TV, reads his speech, and without a sound the country sets the clock and goes to bed. There is nothing to cheer about this time. Except that it is over. Why kid ourselves? They didn’t die for anyone’s freedom. They died because we made a mistake. And we can’t justify it with slogans and phrases from other times. If we insist on looking for something of value in this war then maybe it is this: Maybe we finally have the painful knowledge that we can never again believe everything our leaders tell us.

On February 12, the POWs began coming home. Another of those regular-guy liberal columnists, Pete Hamill of the New York Post, pointed out that most of the returnees were bomber pilots who had killed civilians in an undeclared war; they were thus “prisoners because they had committed unlawful acts.” He compared his feelings waiting for the POWs to arrive home to “waiting for a guy up at Sing Sing one time, who had done hard time for armed robbery.” No consensus there. Strikingly, such sentiments turned out to be prevalent within the armed forces as well. Military personnel, especially low-level personnel, are 40 1 The Baffler

traditionally no-bullshit types. The annals of military history are filled with examples of their suspicion—emphatically and obscenely articulated—of the politicians and officers who send them into the meat grinder. Traditionally, however, this has been an underground history. Now it lay on the surface. Here is one of the New York Times’s first dispatches from Operation Homecoming headquarters at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines: Few military people here felt that the return of the prisoners marked the end of the fighting. . . . “They’re sending out just as many as come back,” said a young Air Force corporal who works at the airport. “They’re all going to Thailand, they’re just moving the boundaries of the war back.”

On February 23 the paper editorialized that among the “succession of hand salutes, stiffly prepared statements, medical bulletins, and canned handouts concerning the joys of steak and ice cream,” the “hard-won lessons of Vietnam are in danger of being lost.” Other outlets were less skeptical, at least at first. NBC News’s Jack Perkins signed off a February 18, 1973 dispatch: “The prisoners’ coming back seems the one thing about Vietnam that has made all Americans finally, indisputably, feel good.” Newsweek devoted eight pages to images of celebration. “The nation begins to feel itself whole again,” they concluded. Time speculated that “these impressive men who had become symbols of America’s sacrifice in Indochina might help the country heal the lingering wounds of war.” Readers, however, argued back. One Newsweek letter writer said it would take more than a “Pentagon pin-up picture” to make her forget “that these professional fighting men were trained in the calculated destruction of property and human life.” A Time reader wrote, “As an ex-grunt, I feel a certain churlish resentment about the solicitous attention the returning POWs are receiving. Why were we sneaked back into our society? So our country can more easily forget the crimes we committed in its name?” Soon the fiction of national unity began to be eroded even in the

[ “You’re not going to show any body bags coming home, you’re not going to show any, um, amputees coming home, you’re not going to show any paraplegics.”

9 media that had originally propagated it. NBC rounded out its coverage of the first week of Operation Homecoming with a feature from the hospital bed of a Marine private, sad-eyed, fidgety, and nervous, who’d been paralyzed from the waist down by machine-gun fire, also complaining about being snuck back into the country: “You’re not going to show any body bags coming home, you’re not going to show any, um, amputees coming home, you’re not going to show any paraplegics.” Even Time, in the middle of March, featured the most devastating argument of the antiwar movement about Operation Homecoming: the fact that North Vietnam’s treatment of the 576 released U.S. prisoners was merciful compared with that of the 27,000 North and South Vietnamese prisoners held by our South Vietnamese allies, many for nothing worse than mild expressions of political dissent, in prisons that America had designed and built: It is not really proper to call them men any more. “Shapes” is a better word. Years of being shackled in the tiger cages have forced them into a permanent pretzel-like crouch. They move like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms. . . . Things have been especially bad since the ceasefire. When told of the Paris settlement, the prisoners cheered, only to be stopped by doses of lye. . . . “We had hoped to begin the New Year with happiness,” said one. “But my New Year began when I was doused with excrement.”

It could not have been lost on too many of Time’s readers that the jailers dousing those prisoners with lye were agents of the freedomloving government we had just spent 55,000

American lives and billions of dollars to defend. This was a time when suspicion of institutions was mainstreamed as never before.

peration Homecoming coincided with the moment when Watergate began closing in on the White House. All through 1972, the scandal had made little impact on American politics. The Watergate trial began ten days before the inauguration, with hardly any press coverage. The indictment was limited to the Watergate burglars and their immediate supervisors, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and James McCord, with the prosecution not even hinting at any involvement by the White House or the Nixon campaign. Then, at the sentencing in March, Judge John J. Sirica read an extraordinary letter from James McCord, the Nixon campaign’s chief of security, alleging that pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, and hinting that it came from very high up indeed. “Several members of my family have expressed fear for my life if I disclose knowledge of the facts in this matter either publicly or to any government representatives,” wrote McCord. Televised hearings began two months later; and every week, sometimes every day, for the next fifteen months came mind-blowing revelations about high government officials behaving like mafiosi. Each new revelation pointed inexorably upward, until the involvement of the president of the United States in some of the most serious crimes in the statute book became all but undeniable. What else was happening around that time? For one thing, the shocking prospect surfaced that American abundance itself might be coming to an end. That winter, Des Moines homeowners almost ran out of heating oil, and Denver high schools closed two days a week to conserve fuel. That spring, energy-starved factories closed in West Virginia, Illinois, and Mississippi. As Memorial Day approached, rumors spread of fuel rationing at gas stations. In June, 2,000 service stations shut down, and thousands of others imposed a ten-gallon limit on each purchase. Utility officials in San AnThe Baffler ! 41

] tonio—the nation’s eleventh largest city—cut gas allotments by 67 percent; but for a mercy mission of loaned out-of-state fuel trucks, the city would have gone dark. All this occurred before the Arab oil embargo of October 1973, when Nixon went on TV to announce “a very stark fact: we are heading into the most acute energy shortage since World War II.” Here’s more from 1973–1974. Custodians at the Sears, Roebuck flagship store in downtown Chicago were cleaning offices by flashlight. The public safety committee of the Milwaukee City Council held an evening meeting by candlelight. New York City banned the illumination of outdoor advertising after 9:30 p.m. A Los Angeles Times reader from Whittier (President Nixon’s hometown) proposed a moratorium on energy-wasting Christmas cards. Others debated whether the eternal flame that burned at the gravesite of President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery ought to be doused: Since the 2,200 cubic feet of natural gas it consumed each month cost $37, “wouldn’t it seem logical,” one letter writer asked, “to put that gas to a better use, such as heating homes or office buildings, rather than just burning it for no real purpose whatever?” Time magazine’s cover article “A Child’s Christmas in America” offered some vignettes. In a Texas town that had banned Christmas lights, a child wrote “Peace on Earth” in many languages and taped it up with a peace symbol on a big plywood sheet. In St. Louis, ten-year-olds suited up for karate class, one of them murmuring, “Gonna teach ’em not to rip me off, like in Clockwork Orange.” In Brooklyn, a boy scarcely old enough to go to school sprayed a graffito on a handball court: “NIXON,” with the X in the form of a swastika. In Anaheim, a group of preschoolers pondered the wonders of Disneyland. “I’m going to live here when I grow up,” one of them vowed. “Not a pollution anywhere.” One of the political consequences of this new culture of dread was paranoia that the energy crisis was caused by a conspiracy of the powerful. It wasn’t just crazy people with sandwich boards saying so; it was senators and Supreme Court justices, too. In June, Adlai Ste42 1 The Baffler

venson III thundered that the administration “was acting in concert with the major companies to produce a shortage.” Justice William O. Douglas said the energy companies had invented the oil crisis for their own purposes— and refused to recuse himself from a case involving price abuses in the natural gas industry nonetheless. Henry “Scoop” Jackson said the White House knew the crisis was coming but deliberately did nothing about it because “for the major oil companies the shortages were good business.” It was this mood of anti-institutional fervor that sent a new generation of young Democrats to Congress in 1974, many of them from traditionally Republican districts. Once empaneled, they got to work on their mandate to reconstruct every corrupt American institution they could get near—especially the defense establishment. On December 22, 1974, the New York Times ran a front page article by Seymour Hersh detailing what the CIA called its “family jewels”: the secret record of its assassinations of foreign leaders, coups against foreign governments, and spying on U.S. citizens. Historians call the year that followed the “Year of Investigations.” Hearings in the Senate led by Idaho’s Frank Church and in the House by New York’s Otis Pike repeated the Watergate investigatory pattern: eye-popping revelations, unimagined by American citizens who had once presumed their nation innocent. The most interesting part of the Church Committee hearings was not their revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency had been trying to assassinate Fidel Castro via an exploding cigar, but their effect on Frank Church’s political career. He had just spent the year rubbing the American people’s noses in the fact that their nation was the world’s outstanding international lawbreaker. What to do next, except run for President? Today that might sound crazy. In 1976 it did not. Running a badly disorganized campaign, Church won primaries in several heartland states, including Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, and his own Idaho. For a brief moment he seemed to embody the political spirit of the age. The other Democratic candidates for the 1976 nomination also pretty much

[ Reagan’s response was trademark: a non-sequitur quip delivered with such glib confidence that it left his interlocutors confused about what question they had just asked him.

9 campaigned on the proposition that America needed a thorough reboot. One of them ran on the slogan that America deserves “a government as good as its people.” Jimmy Carter won the election. He did not win the age. On April 30, 1973, Nixon gave his first televised speech denying involvement in Watergate. In the wake of this address, a consensus formed, even among the president’s defenders, that the scandal was the most serious happening in American politics in a long time. This consensus encompassed just about everyone in public life other than Ronald Reagan. Watergate, according to Reagan, was part of “the usual atmosphere of campaigning.” It was a “tragedy” that “men who are not criminals at heart and certainly would not commit criminal or illegal acts must bear the consequences.” And very soon, the single fact most Americans knew about Ronald Reagan was that he was the guy who believed the Watergate conspirators were not “criminals at heart.” Time ran an item on possible successors to Nixon. Reagan’s prospects were said to be the lowest of all. For the next couple of months Reagan obeyed his political handlers’ strenuous advice to shut up about Watergate. Then, in June, he did it again, telling reporters, “I just think it’s too bad that it is taking people’s attention from what I think is the most brilliant accomplishment of any president of this century.” When John Dean set the political world on its ear by revealing to the Senate Watergate committee the existence of a White House “enemies list,” Reagan, practically alone among

politicians, dismissed the news, his daughter Maureen explaining that “in the political lexicon the term enemies does not have the same connotation as the layman would use.” Vice President Spiro Agnew was being investigated for taking bribes, and Republicans were rushing to distance themselves. Reagan once again did the opposite. “I have known Ted Agnew to be an honest and honorable man,” he said immediately. In August, he called the Watergate committee investigation a “lynching” and a “witch hunt,” even though the Washington Post had just reported that the White House had been spying on Reagan himself and had considered blackmailing him for unspecified—presumably naughty—activities at a party. Reagan’s response was trademark: a non-sequitur quip delivered with such glib confidence that it left his interlocutors confused about what question they had just asked him. “I don’t know what they’re referring to,” he told the Post. “You’ve really caught me here with mixed emotions, because I don’t know whether to get a sort of glint in my eye and let you think there’s a side of me that no one knows.” The Post followed up. The existence of the White House taping system had just been revealed. Didn’t it offend Reagan a little bit that his Oval Office meetings with Nixon had been taped? No big deal, he responded. “Matter of fact, they probably made me look good.” (No, they didn’t. On an April 1971 tape, Nixon worried, “With a Reagan in here, you could damn well almost get yourself in a nuclear war.”) Reagan kept it up all the way to the eve of Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. That June, Evans and Novak argued that Reagan was on the verge of destroying his political career: “To the dismay of his political handlers, Gov. Ronald Reagan is no closer to a polite but clear break with President Nixon than he was a year ago and continues to resist that politically necessary rupture even as he prepares to run for President. . . . During a one-hour interview with us in his state capitol office, Reagan uttered not one discouraging word about Mr. Nixon.” Something very important was going on— something opaque to every observer at the The Baffler ! 43

] time, and even to the people plotting Reagan’s presidential campaign, who complained that he was self-sacrificingly obsessed with offering “Christian charity toward a fallen political comrade.” Another observation from that Evans and Novak column: “Although the outspoken Reagan did not hesitate to snipe at the President during Mr. Nixon’s first term, he has flinched from criticism since the Watergate scandal broke 14 months ago. . . . That Reagan has so far resisted this seems to be caused more by his own temperament than grand strategy.” Was it strategy? That is hard to say. It certainly had something to do with temperament. In any case, it soon emerged as the dominant feature of his appeal. Reagan’s talent for fabulism distinguished him even within his own family. His older brother, Neil, grew up an unsentimental man. He remembered being sent to the butcher in Chicago on Saturday mornings with instructions to buy a ten-cent soup bone to last the week and also to ask for a complimentary chunk of liver for the cat. “We didn’t have a cat,” he told a historian, with a touch of bitterness and shame; in fact, the liver was the big Sunday meal. His younger brother tells the story of his family’s circumstances differently. “Our main meal,” Reagan wrote in his postpresidential memoir An American Life, “frequently consisted of a dish my mother called oatmeal meat. She’d cook a batch of oatmeal and mix it with hamburger. . . . It was moist and meaty, the most wonderful thing I’d ever eaten.” In the fullness of time, the lesson suggested by this contrast between the brothers would play out in American national life. In the late 1970s, most pundits thought the country wanted politicians who shared the nation’s self-pity about the crappy meal that history was serving them—a politics of malaise. It turned out they preferred a happy meal. And Ronald Reagan, who every time affirmed that America—in any era—was the most wonderful thing ever, was who they wanted. The crappier things got, the more resourceful he grew in finding the possibility of redemption. In Nixon’s first term, when things were normal, 44 1 The Baffler

Reagan had found it possible to criticize him. But in the second term, when Nixon had become the public’s symbol of a world that was falling apart, he defended him resolutely. This was the logic behind everything Reagan said about Watergate: Nixon was one of the good guys, and good guys are innocent; but even if they weren’t, Watergate did not involve real crimes; but even if it did, it revealed nothing essential about the American character, which was a transcendent character, simply by virtue of being American. This performance of blitheness in the face of crisis was part of Ronald Reagan’s nature, and a large part of his political appeal.

hat was not fundamental to his appeal was exactly what Reagan himself thought was, namely, his argument that government was the economic adversary of the middle class. History offered up a little experiment on the question in November 1973. That year, some bad accounting and an improving economy had left the state of California with a nearly $1 billion fiscal surplus. Reagan announced he would “return the money to taxpayers” and intended to write into the California constitution a cap on both taxes and government spending, an unprecedented attempt by a sitting governor to sponsor a ballot initiative. The architects of the move included Reagan’s chief of staff, Edwin Meese, and an economist named Milton Friedman. “Proposition 1” was a template for the next generation of conservative movement appeals. As Reagan put it: “Are we automatically destined to tax and spend, spend and tax, indefinitely, until the people have nothing left of their earnings for themselves? Have we abandoned or forgotten the interests and well-being of the taxpayer whose toil makes government possible in the first place? Or is he to become a pawn in a deadly game of government monopoly whose only purpose is to serve the confiscatory appetites of runaway government spending?” Reagan put everything he had into selling Proposition 1, and, indeed, he gave a brilliant performance. The leader of the anti-

[ “When the advocates of bigger and bigger government manage to get their hands on an extra tax dollar or two,” Reagan quipped, “they hang on like a Gila monster until they find some way to spend it.”

9 Proposition 1 forces, Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Moretti, said he was in favor of lowering taxes too, just as he was “in favor of motherhood” and “against sin,” but that it was madness to turn the state constitution into an iron corset. He marshaled statistics to demonstrate why Proposition 1 could not possibly do what Reagan said it was intended to do, and challenged the governor to a debate. Reagan refused. Moretti charged that Reagan was ducking him because in any tax limitation program like this one, with an expenditure ceiling, programs would have to be cut, and “[Reagan] knows he cannot answer the questions we raise as to which programs will be cut.” Moretti challenged the governor again and again to a public debate—and Reagan refused him, five times. The Democrats threw up their hands. If Reagan wanted to cut taxes and spending, what could explain his seven years as governor? Jerry Brown, California’s secretary of state, who was the son of the governor Reagan had replaced in 1966 and who hoped to succeed him in 1974, pointed out that Reagan had increased both taxes and spending dramatically. (He had authorized a surprise tax increase for the Los Angeles school district just two weeks after Proposition 1 made the ballot.) He already had a line-item veto, which he had scarcely ever used. “How can a magic formula, written by invisible lawyers,” Brown asked, “do what Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to do?” Then there was the obvious point: If government employees were such money-sucking monsters, how did the

state budget come to be in surplus? But Reagan was playing an entirely different game. When he made statistical claims, he blithely let them contradict each another. His opponents said his plan would create deficits; Reagan responded that, on the contrary, it would produce $41.5 billion over fifteen years in new money—even though he claimed at the same time that the plan’s main purpose was to give the state less money to spend. His critics would scratch their heads and unveil another brace of statistics. Reagan would respond with rousing oratory, making them look like pedantic asses—which was the game he was playing. “When the advocates of bigger and bigger government manage to get their hands on an extra tax dollar or two,” he quipped, “they hang on like a Gila monster until they find some way to spend it.” Government was evil; those opposing it were good. That was the game. On election eve, the Las Vegas oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek gave Proposition 1 a three-to-one likelihood of passing. Reagan’s aides made ready for a national tour to sell the concept to other states and to build support for his presidential bid. Proposition 1 was crushed, 54 to 46 percent. What happened? Were the ideological conditions not yet ripe? In fact, the ideological conditions were quite different then. An editorial on Proposition 1, titled “Voters Smarter Than Reagan,” appeared in the Milwaukee Journal. It praised the Californians who “saw through the phoniness, and recognized the menace to the well-being of the commonwealth of this scheme.” The Journal continued: “The proposition had the surface appeal of the politician’s favorite, but false, homily that says government should live within its income like everyone else. Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic.” Here is a provincial newspaper, late in 1973, recognizing as “utter illogic” what is today conventional wisdom among liberal Democrats, and President Barack Obama. Five years later, a tax limitation proposal, The Baffler ! 45

[ S a lvos ] Proposition 13, was written into the California constitution, for reasons entirely contingent on California’s peculiar fiscal situation at the time and having nothing to do with any universal rejection of government itself. Nevertheless, in the election of 1980 and subsequently, conservatives single-mindedly claimed Proposition 13 as a nationwide mandate for the radical reduction of taxes and government, passing budgets and laws supposedly in obedience to that mandate. But Ronald Reagan did not get elected to the presidency because he promised to dismantle big government. The Reagan Moment arrived less because of any popular shift in ideology about the role of the state than because of the kind of stories Ronald Reagan told—the kind of imaginary bridges he built. After Reagan left the statehouse in Sacramento, he made a comfortable, and profitable, transition to sentimental radio personality, broadcasting homilies over hundreds of heartland stations. One of them addressed the greatest humiliation in the history of the United States: the fall of the American embassy in Saigon, when American personnel had to be rescued from the embassy roof by helicopter because they were unable to travel safely on the mighty public roadways the American military had built to wage the first war the American military lost. More than the myth of American invincibility was at risk: the myth of America’s essential goodness was endangered. The revelations of My Lai and other atrocities had generated a tidal outpouring of national anguish; ordinary people wrote to Time magazine and their local newspapers to call American soldiers and pilots “war criminals.” The Church Committee hearings in 1975 had exposed decades of murder and subversion by the CIA. The country seemed on the verge of facing the fateful truth that America is a country like every other, with no unique virtue or wisdom. What could Reagan possibly say about such a resounding rebuke to the core myth that undergirded every story he ever told—that America never lost, never could lose, never could sin, because America was, well, America? 46 1 The Baffler

“In these times,” he said, “when so many of us have a tendency to lose faith in ourselves, it’s good now and then to be reminded of the good-natured, generous spirit that has been an American characteristic for as long as there has been an America.” There had been, he told his listeners, a tiny craft “adrift in the Gulf of Thailand with no fuel, no food, no water, barely afloat and with a cargo of 82 refugees. Towering over it was the aircraft carrier USS Midway. . . . Once on board [the refugees] had one question: Would they be handed over to an unfriendly government, perhaps to be eventually murdered? The executive officer of the ship told them this would not happen. He said, Our job is to make you as comfortable as possible, heal the sick, and feed you to your heart’s content. That was the official policy of our nation and therefore of the Midway.” And what miracles followed! “A tiny baby with double pneumonia was cured. People without clothes were given American clothing. Sailors took the old clothing and washed them for their guests. Pretty soon homeless children were being given piggyback rides on the shoulders of American seamen, and Navy T-shirts bearing the Midway decal began appearing on the little ones. Ads went into the ship’s paper asking for toys. Charity begat more charity. There is a motto on the Midway—Midway puts it together. For the grateful refugees, that is the understatement of the year.” Reagan’s homily soared to a sublime conclusion: “In the dark days right after World War II, when our industrial power and military might were all that stood between a warravaged world and a return to the Dark Ages, Pope Pius XII said: America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. I think those young men on the Midway have reassured God that he hasn’t given us more of an assignment than we can handle.” And the fact that the USS Midway had been a launching pad for the death-dealing juggernaut that took the lives of millions of Vietnamese? Never mind. Ronald Reagan knew how to build imaginary bridges.t

Strike! 3 Charles Bernstein Strike because the sky turns gray just before it blacks out. Strike because when you were little your father told you too many lies. Strike because the surf is up. Strike because you are heartsick with the old ways and giddy with promise. Strike because things can’t go on this way any longer. Strike because the thugs have replaced the thugs. Strike because every grain of sand tells you the universe is an open field of infinite possibility. Strike because you’re sick & tired of bait & switch. Strike because the wolf howls in the garden’s translucent masquerade. Strike because your grief overwhelms you and the other option is to sit at home and stare at a screen. Strike because every hope begins with disappointment. Strike because the bosses need a reality check backed up by workers’ sweat. Strike because collective action is the only thing that separates us from pejorocracy. Strike because you’re not for sale. Strike because the sun is not shining as brightly as it did. Strike because the machinery of greed needs to be unhinged. Strike because you’ve lost your head in the endless circuits of a recurring nightmare. Strike because your children insist it doesn’t matter and your parents say the time’s not right. Strike because even demons are mortal. Strike because the ache is just too bad, the work too much, the reward too meager. Strike because you have no say. Strike because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Strike because the pilots are guiding the ship to the plutocrats’ lair. Strike because every assault needs to be countered, every affront acknowledged. Strike because you’re hungry for something else. Strike because you can’t forget it and are not going to let it pass. Strike because your dignity is worth more than their hypocrisy. Strike because hands are for making things not wringing a desperate man dry. Strike because power is a two-way street with back alleys, overpasses, byways, and unexplored tunnels. The Baffler ! 47

Strike because your only hedge fund is your bare hands. Strike because the coal dust is suffocating and the mines a living grave. Strike because you are sick of all that’s called new and despair that nothing changes. Strike because you are abandoned. Strike because you don’t want to live this way any more. Strike because the deck is stacked but the dealer says you’re cheating. Strike because everyone’s listening but no one’s talking. Strike because you can’t say it any other way. Strike because meaning’s made not taught. Strike because life’s a tale and you the teller. Strike because I told you to. Strike because I will never let you down. Strike because I told you one thing but did another. Strike because I disappointed you. Strike because I made you feel stupid for trying. Strike because I made you feel stupid for crying. Strike because, win or lose, it’s the doing that gets done. Strike because you couldn’t get a ticket to the show. Strike because you’ve never had a thought of your own. Strike because no one bothered to tell you. Strike because you still can or think you can or thought you could. Strike because it’s better than baseball. Strike because tomorrow they’ll come for you. Strike because this could be your last chance. Strike because even though you have your price, the offer was not nearly good enough. Strike because resistance is happier than humiliation. Strike because you’d prefer not to. Strike because eternity is ours for the asking. Strike because the wind is at your back, even when there is no wind. Strike because all roads lead nowhere and all hopes come to naught, at least if things don’t get worse. Strike because the jellies in your life are lined-up at tide’s edge, keeping you from the water. Strike because you are thirsty and the water is spoils. Strike because even a match in a dimly lit restaurant can make it easier to read the menu.

48 1 The Baffler

Strike because you hate the way they redecorated the planet. Strike because the Fall season needs some push back. Strike because your wrongs are not as bad as their wrongs. Strike because you forgot to pay attention for longer than you’d intended. Strike because the bells are ringing but you are nearly deaf. Strike because you would have when you knew less than you think you know now. Strike because the blood loss can’t be sustained. Strike because your heart is broken and the vultures are overhead, ready to pick at the pieces. Strike because complacency’s a waste of time. Strike because while doing something is a pain in the ass, doing nothing is a pain in the soul. Strike because a shadow of a doubt is the hipster’s swan song. Strike because you didn’t when you could and now it’s too late. Strike because it’s noisy. Strike because it’s bluesy. Strike because there’s not enough poetry in your life or it’s the wrong kind of poetry. Strike because you’re running on empty. Strike because the nightingale’s restless. Strike because the meds are kicking in. Strike because you are in love or’ve lost your love, are on a roll or’ve hit a dry spot, are out of ideas or

brimming with plans, breaking down or working out.

Strike because the wealthy would rather you die than pay their share of taxes. Strike because we criminalize poverty and legalize corporate theft. Strike because the men at the top are not the top men. Strike because you used to believe in America or never did but wanted to. Strike because the Supreme Court is jerry-rigged, its justice without honor. Strike because Murdoch and Berlusconi make Big Brother seem like chopped liver. Strike because it’s no fun to tango alone. Strike because you’ve been on hold for longer than you can remember and want to hang up without

losing your place in the queue.

Strike because it’s nearly as effective as Prozac. Strike because there is not enough orange in your green or mauve in your magenta. Strike because the Manhattans are tasting sour and the gin rummy’s flat. Strike because it’s futile. The Baffler ! 49

Strike because no one cares what you do. Strike because you mean it or meant it or isn’t it pretty to have thought so. Strike because I told you you wouldn’t want to hear this and you don’t. Strike because you want a break, or you’ve been broken, or you’ve seen the larger picture, or your

vision is deteriorating and you can only see what’s right in front of you.

Stike because in order to fully appreciate sitting sometimes you got to stand. Strike because in the end even dreams turn to sand. Strike because you didn’t think you had it in you. Strike because you don’t have it in you. Strike because the iron is cold and as heartless as the green ant’s misery. Strike because you missed the revolution. Strike because the revolution comes only twice in each one’s life. Strike because the revolution is not an end but a meeting. Strike because your apathy brings you infinite joy. Strike because you’ve lost your voice. Strike because you have the choice. Strike because you want to join the chorus. Strike because you’ve always wanted a solo. Strike because it’s taking too long. Strike because you want to sing this song.

ERIC HANSON

50 1 The Baffler

M y Own Little Mission Jumping Off the Bridge 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [part 2]

I was glued to reports on the recent riots in the London boroughs of Tottenham, Hackney, and Brixton, stunned by the images of seething youth smashing shop windows and making their grab for street wear and electronics. Expensive mobile phones apparently topped their consumer desires, a detail that disappointed many commentators (If only they’d stolen bread and milk, we’d understand!). I became fixated on something else, though: a Waterstones bookstore the kids passed by might as well have been an undertaker’s. But they didn’t miss a beat in cleaning out the backpack of another dazed and confused kid who obviously needed medical attention, leaving him bloodied and lost in the street. On our television screens, we, shocked viewers, saw what we were given to see. Each of us projected our own fears onto the Rorschachian stain of the London riots. Around the same time, the beginning of August 2011, a Serbian news portal carried a witty article about the opening of a new bridge. In Belgrade, the capital, there’s an old bridge called Branko’s Bridge. Although named after the Serbian poet Branko Radičević, it’s better known for the fact that another Branko jumped from it—Branko Ćopić, a fellow writer. The author of the article noted that among terminally morose Serbian writers, the opening of the new bridge had been greeted with rare delight, and that a kind of competition was on to see who’d christen the bridge with a jump, thus winning naming rights. The bookies were already taking bets on the next writer-suicide. Among the many comments on the article, someone made an appeal that these things not be joked about; someone else observed that others might also like to think about jumping (Why only writers? What about welfare mothers?); a third person suggested that politicians should take a jump ( Jump, Tadić!* We’ll call it Boris’s Bridge, for sure!); a fourth person remarked that a lot of people in Serbia seemed to unfortunately have no idea who Branko Ćopić was; a fifth suggested that a list of candidates for pushing be prepared. Why did I single out this particular episode? Because I could have equally mentioned Anders Breivik, the Norwegian “anti-Islamic crusader,” who just a few days previously had killed seventy-seven people, the majority of them teenagers. Or the band of thieves who robbed a handful of people in a Budapest suburb and then buried them alive in a nearby forest. Or the pack of Zagreb yobs who bashed a pair of French tourists simply because the pair refused to buy them a round of drinks. I could have mentioned falls on the stock exchange, the soaring Swiss franc, the global recession, and the bankers impunibly running the show. I could have brought up the numerous demon-

* A reference to current Serbian president Boris Tadić. The Baffler ! 51

I’m not going to jump, no way! Unless it makes me thinner. And if it does, then it’s goodbye, Weight Watchers! And hello, Revolution!

strations against “the swine of capitalism,” the messages of which haven’t reached the pudgy ears of those with their snouts deepest in the trough. Because all of this, and a lot of other stuff too, happened within more or less the same timeframe. The devastating fact is that the majority of the young English rioters are barely literate. The research and the terrifying statistics are there. The reading ability of 63 percent of fourteen-year-old boys from the white working class, and more than 50 percent of their Afro-Caribbean peers, is at the level of the average seven-year-old. The majority of these kids leave school and continue their education on the streets. “Other kids go from school to university. We go from school to prison,” said one of them. Their “girlfriends” get pregnant early. In comparison with other European countries, Great Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. At best semiliterate, left to their own devices, and with few chances of finding any kind of job, these kids form an angry, disenfranchised mass whose futures have been stolen. They have absolutely no reason to believe in social institutions, and vandalism is the only means of articulating their fury. “I didn’t want this kind of life. It just happened to me,” said one boy. The image of the life they desired is one that their society served them up as desirable (I want to be rich, I want lots of money/I don’t care about clever, I don’t care about funny).* In an ideological package such as this, the system of values in operation in everyday life doesn’t assume literacy, education, responsibility, or work (Life’s about film stars and less about mothers/It’s all about fast cars and cussing each other). That’s why confronting one’s own loser status is, for all intents and purposes, just another form of self-deceit (But it doesn’t matter, ’cause I’m packing plastic/ and that’s what makes my life so fucking fantastic), in exactly the same way that vandalism is a mute form of conceding one’s own defeat (And I am a weapon of massive consumption/And it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function). Years have passed since the clearing of the utopian fog and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In spite of the many warnings—the piles of books written sounding the alarm, the multitude of demonstrations that have pointed to ever-increasing social stratification, in spite of institutional and extra-institutional attempts to resolve or attenuate the worst of the consequences—society, deaf and blind, has marched on. In the meantime, grandmothers and grandfathers, those who lived with full faith in the system, have gone into hard-earned retirement and then died of hunger. In the meantime, their children have had children and discovered with horror that they aren’t in a position to support either themselves or their children. In the meantime, their children have also had children, the penny dropping that their futures have no future. And in the meantime, a heaving mass has been born, a tribe of millions, déclassé and inured, incapable of remedying their position, because they don’t know who their real enemy is anymore. All their lives, they’ve had it drilled into them that it’s all down to their personal choices and indi-

* All cited lyrics are from the song “The Fear,” by British singer Lily Allen. 52 1 The Baffler

X U YA N G

vidual ability. And today, looking at its “feral” children, society, stupefied by the mantras of democracy and free choice, continues to try and convince these kids that they’re cutting off the branch on which they’re sitting. They might be barely literate, but the children know that the branch has been rotten for years, and that it can’t hold their weight in any case. The only weapon they possess is their rage. And I, who by all accounts should be on the opposite side, am at this very moment much closer to these kids than any of them could imagine, and much more than I would have ever imagined. I didn’t want this kind of life either, but there you go, it happened to me. If nothing else, the kids and I are bound by—fear (I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore/I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore/When do you think it will all become clear?/’Cause I’m being taken over by the fear). And although day and night I flagellate myself with the news, while my heart pounds like a beat-up dog cowering against a wall, I extinguish my fears with fantasies about them, about the kids who will soon (yes, soon!) in their millions crawl from their ghettoes, and, with fists raised, descend on Wall Street, or wherever they’re needed. My fantasies, however, don’t hold out for long, and soon burst like a polychrome bunch of birthday balloons (Forget about guns and forget ammunition/ ’Cause I’m killing them all on my own little mission/Now I’m not a saint but I’m not a sinner/Now everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner). And as far as jumping off the bridge goes, good taste keeps me from being so predictable. I’m not going to jump, no way! Unless it makes me thinner. And if it does, then it’s good-bye, Weight Watchers! And hello, Revolution!t (Part 3 begins on page 85.) The Baffler ! 53

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

Water World 3 Chris Lehmann

ere’s a little-noted quirk of our literary history, unlikely to turn up on the Trivial Pursuit board: the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Ernest Poole, devoted much of his writing career to cheering on the demise of capitalism. Poole won the prize for His Family, but as Patrick Chura notes in his introduction to this new edition of The Harbor (Penguin Press, $16.00), the distinction was understood “as belated recognition for Poole’s more celebrated earlier work.” In the context of Poole’s own cultural moment, his laurel is less incongruous than it seems in our present-day miniaturized literary scene, taken up as it is with tales of intrafamily redemption, therapeutic recovery, and baseball statistics. Indeed, it’s an awkward fact of American literary history that more than a few of its marquee names from the early twentieth century had been raging socialists. The Harbor, written in 1915, recalls a time when the marriage of literary ambition and political commitment routinely produced class-conscious novels and plays by the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edward Bellamy, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene O’Neill. Sinclair and O’Neill followed Poole’s precedent, with O’Neill winning four Pulitzers for playwriting, and Sinclair claiming the award for his now-forgotten novel Dragon’s Teeth in 1945. Meanwhile, if Poole’s literary sensibility now seems alien to our own post-committed world of letters, his material feels quite contemporary. By an accident of publishing history, Penguin’s reissued edition of The Harbor contains plenty of echoes for our own unsettled, post-meltdown age. One climactic moment in the novel’s pageant of workingclass awakening occurs during a march of striking ship- and dock-workers up the stylish end of New York’s Fifth Avenue. Here’s the same vivid juxtaposition of the lords of 54 1 The Baffler

pelf and the lower orders that we’ve lately seen in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Following Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s callous expungement of OWS protestors from lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park last fall, Poole’s account of the strike parade makes for an edifying counternarrative—a distant transmission from a long-ago galaxy where working-class New Yorkers felt they could come confidently into possession of the whole metropolis. The novel’s narrator—a perennially ambivalent, echt-modernist writer named Billy, who has come to chronicle the uprising for the high-end magazine that usually employs him to file admiring profiles of the titans of industry—sums up the scene, and his awkward place in it, this way: The next afternoon the Fifth Avenue shops all closed their doors, and over the rich displays in their windows heavy steel shutters were rolled down. The long procession of motors and cabs with their gaily dressed shoppers had disappeared, and in their place was another procession, men, women, and children, old and young. All around me as I marched I heard an unending torrent of voices speaking many languages, uniting in strange cheers and songs brought from all over the ocean world. Bright-colored turbans bobbed up here and there, for there was no separation of races, all walked together in dense crowds, the whole strike family was here. And listening and watching, I felt myself a member now. Behind me came a long line of trucks packed with sick or crippled men. At their head was a black banner on which was painted “Our Wounded.” Behind the wagons a small cheap band came blaring forth a funeral dirge, and behind the band, upon men’s shoulder’s, came eleven coffins, in which were those dock victims who had died in the last few days. This section had its banner, too, and it was marked, “Our Dead.”

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9 The struggle for justice in the workplace is plenty taxing on its own, without the added burden of producing existential meaning for restless bourgeois spirits. The Baffler ! 55

v While the novel is in many ways a conventional modernist bildungsroman, it doesn’t settle on the note of chastened ambition or romantic sorrow that readers expect from latter-day writers confined to more domestic interior landscapes.

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It’s easy to dismiss such earnest set pieces as literary agitprop: the profusion of languages and songs; the colorfully turbaned, post-racial, dock-working rank-and-file; the stirring show of mass unity and grievance before a common class enemy. But it’s difficult to overstate the impression that such shows of solidarity once made on writers and artists. As Chura notes, Poole modeled the waterfront strike that marks The Harbor’s climax on the great 1913 silk workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey. Poole spoke to the strikers and, in New York, joined organizers such as IWW leader Bill Haywood to rally popular support for the silk workers. Poole produced a pro-strike event that would seem exceedingly strange to the media-addled public today, almost a century after the Paterson strike was broken: a reenactment of its most dramatic moments, staged before enthusiastic crowds of as many as 20,000 viewers in Madison Square Garden. The Paterson Strike Pageant recreated worker walkouts and arrests, signature speeches by Haywood—even a funeral for a slain striking worker—and closed, naturally, with a rousing rendition of The Internationale. 56 1 The Baffler

Poole, an experienced dramaturge, handled many logistical ends of the production and received credit as one of the chief writers in the pageant script. The Harbor, in other words, is the sort of cultural product that’s probably imaginable only in the America of the early twentieth century: a novel based on a pageant based on a strike.

he Harbor offers a glimpse into the age’s defining social conflict before it hardened into the flat, programmatic dogmas that seized both sides of the capital-labor divide. Rather than serving up the boy-meetsproletariat boilerplate of later social-protest fiction, Poole candidly appraises the promise and limitations of radical politics in an age of not-yet-fully tested mass protest and all-too sanguine violent state reaction. For example, while the novel is in many ways a conventional modernist bildungsroman, it doesn’t settle on the note of chastened ambition or romantic sorrow that readers expect from latter-day writers confined to more domestic interior landscapes. In place of such anguished exercises in self-definition, the novel’s real romantic conflict lies between the narrator and the crowd—and revolves chiefly around Billy’s efforts to tease out just what this particular religion of solidarity would be like. When Billy does assay his full sentimental education—courting and marrying an erstwhile childhood playmate, Eleanore—the proceedings are oddly perfunctory: Why dally over

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bourgeois sentiment when history is being made all around you? At any rate, Eleanore serves mainly as the cause of Billy’s relationship with her father, Dillon, an engineer who serves to embody the other historical force vying for the young man’s allegiance—the confident, great-man face of modernism, choreographing the inner workings of high-minded enterprise in the name of efficiency. As the two men tour the New York waterfront on the Great Man’s boat, Dillon seduces Billy with his Olympian vantage on progress and reassuring blandishments of the efficiency gospel. Billy recounts how, as the watercraft rounds the Battery, they watched for a moment the skyscraper group, the homes of the Big Companies. The sunshine was reflected from thousands of dazzling window eyes, little streamers of steam were floating gaily overhead, street suddenly opened to our view, narrow cuts revealing the depths below. And there came to our ears a deep humming. “That’s the brains of it all,” said Dillon. “In all you’ll see while exploring the wharves you’ll find some string that leads back here.

And you don’t want to let that worry you. Let the muck-rakers worry and plan all they please for a sea-gate and a nation that’s to run with its brains removed. You want to look harder and harder—until you find out for yourself that there are men up there in Wall Street without whose brains no big thing can be done in this country. I’m working under their order and some day I hope you’ll be doing the same. For they don’t need less publicity, but more.”

Over the course of his early career, Billy follows his future father-in-law’s directives to a tee. He becomes a veritable Thomas Friedman of the industrial age, writing a series of mogul profiles under the cloying headline “The America They Know.” But as he trains his writerly gaze upward toward the brains of the Big Companies, Billy keeps getting dragged back down to Earth by Joe Kramer, an old college chum turned itinerant commie. Kramer turns up at key points in Billy’s odyssey to symbolize the revolutionary road not taken, and with each turn grows gaunter, shriller, and more confrontational. It’s Kramer who drags Billy into the teeth of the waterfront strike, The Baffler ! 57

v “We shall stop this war of yours and in our minds we shall put away all hatred of our brother men. For us they will be workers all. With them we shall rise and rise again— until at last the world is free!”

9 goading him to visit the deplorable living and working conditions in the stokeholes of steerage ships and to report out a big magazine profile of strike leader Jim Marsh, who heads up a fictionalized “one big union” organizing campaign modeled on the work of former IWW head Big Bill Haywood. Poole’s novel ends badly for both Kramer and the strike—but, for Billy, the two are fused into epiphanies about the haunting, universalizing power of the crowd. Kramer repeatedly professes his willingness to surrender his life, his talents, his domestic drives in the service of the crowd’s historic struggle for self-realization and worldly power. But Billy himself is never able to come down so cleanly in the camp of the working class and its rightful claim on the harbor, the city, and the future course of history. Still, there’s one key regard in which The Harbor speaks quite eloquently to successive generations of cultural radicals: Billy’s journey toward—and away from, and then toward again—radical commitment is less noteworthy than the terms on which he pursues it. For he and the other lead characters in The Harbor are consumed with the quest for “real” experience, in the great tradition of culturally minded radicals in the American grain. Again and again, Billy and his cohorts are heard describing the harbor and its denizens as “more human,” “the real thing,” and “tremendously real.” Those who are plugged into this raw life force likewise sop up its vitalist properties; Joe Kramer, for instance, hews to “a sincerity so real and deep that it absolutely ruled his life.” Billy’s core conflict, then, involves arriving at some sustainable resolution for his craving for authenticity—a quest that isn’t 58 1 The Baffler

helped by his lifelong distaste for the harbor. Billy believes the New York Harbor cruelly absorbed the heroic ambitions of his father (a warehouse owner on the water who yearns for the nimble nineteenth-century heyday of the U.S. clipper fleet) while spewing forth a vulgar, unedifying, commercial and (not least by a long shot) priapic working-class culture in its wake. “I was a toy piano,” he explains to Eleanore in the throes of their neo-Randian courtship. “And the harbor was a giant who played on me until I rattled inside. . . . It wiped all the thrills out.” Billy then goes on to pin all of life’s great disappointments on the commerce-strewn body of water: “I told how the place grew harsh and bare, how I could always feel it there stripping everything naked like itself, and how finally when in Paris I felt I had shaken it off for life, it had now suddenly jerked me back, let me see what my father had really been, and had then repeated its same old trick, closing in on his great idea and making it seem like an old man’s hobby, crowding him out and handing us grimly two dull little jobs—one to live on, and one to die on.”

oday, both halves of Billy’s spiritual dilemma, pitting the muscular, vitalist working class against the easily enervated toy-piano bourgeoisie, seem overblown: the struggle for justice in the workplace is plenty taxing on its own, without the added burden of producing existential meaning for restless bourgeois spirits. While the particulars of Billy’s plight are far different (in gender terms, if nothing else), their broad contours call to mind Jane Addams’s famous complaint about the “snare of preparation” awaiting well-born women of the late nineteenth century as they embarked on their own straitened coming of age. The main drama on the harbor—the general strike—has no role for Billy’s vacillating spirit; it is a “which side are you on” moment. And it’s to Poole’s credit as a writer that, for all his clear sympathies with the proletarian side of the class struggle, he denies Billy and Sue their longed-for repose in the vitalist embrace of the workers of the world. Still, for all its insistence on non-transfer-

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rable class allegiance, The Harbor alights on a curiously tentative evocation of the Marxist world spirit that coincided with the novel’s real-time composition: a prayerful invocation for the working masses to rise up and extinguish once and for all the blood-soaked nationalist rivalries then taking shape with the onset of war. “We are the armies you have called out,” Billy imagines the ascendant international proletariat declaring. “And before we come back to our homes, we shall make sure that these homes of ours shall no more become ashes at your will. For we shall stop this war of yours and in our minds we shall put away all hatred of our brother men. For us they will be workers all. With them we shall rise and rise again—until at last the world is free!” Ouch. The course of history was not kind to Poole’s parting prophecy: the Great War fractured the socialist dream of internationalism. Workers in respective warring powers rallied to blood-and-soil slogans. And the standard lesson that chastened historians have offered in the Great War’s grisly wake is that the pathologies of nationalism are simply

ingrained in human nature too deeply for the utopian dream of expropriating the expropriators to prevail over them. But the intensity of Billy’s universalist reverie—and working-class exoticism on display in The Harbor—suggests that the socialists of the past century were less besotted with working-class internationalism for its own sake than they were smitten with the psychic compensations of the enhanced reality that life among the proletariat had to offer. As Christopher Lasch memorably noted, one signal failing of the twentieth century’s new radicalism was its misapplication of political means to cultural ends—and boy, does Billy’s testimonial ever point up that category error. There was always something discomfiting about restaging a strike’s bitterest and most violent moments for audiences at Madison Square Garden, and the politics of proletarian spectacle have grown no more wholesome since Poole’s time. The working class may be many things to many people—but one way to ensure that its lot will never improve is to keep it always at voyeuristic arm’s length.t The Baffler ! 59

s Into

the Infinite

The Animal Cure 3 Barbar a Ehrenreich

ncounters with lions, mountain goats, grizzly bears, dolphins, and whales are not least among the exotic experiences offered by the tourism industry. The attractions are obvious: a chance to be outdoors in stunning scenery, to see creatures you may have known only as two-dimensional images, and to feel ecologically high-minded in the process. But current marketing for the wildlife encounter industry offers something grander, something that people have more commonly sought through meditation, fasting, or prayer. Surf the numerous websites for the booming worldwide whale-watching business, for example, and you will find companies from Baja to Sydney to Reykjavik promising whalemediated “spiritual experiences.” Satisfied customers report having undergone life-altering changes or at least fighting back tears: the vacation as vision quest. Or, within Britain, you can experience the “spiritual event” of a Big Cat Encounter—with the big cats conveniently caged. After treating wild animals as nuisances or meat for many centuries, humans are elevating them to the status of the numinous.

ortunately, it is not necessary to spend a lot of money or endure seasickness to have a spiritual encounter with an animal. In a pinch, pets will do, and the Internet offers a rich literature on the uplifting effects of ordinary dogs and cats. In her 2002 book Mystical Dogs: Animals as Guides to Our Inner Life, New Age writer Jean Houston promoted dogs not only for their ability to engender serenity in stressed humans, but to lead us to the experience of cosmic unity. As she instructs: proceed with your dog guide down and down until you reach the deepest level of all, the spiritual realm. . . . Often at this level one feels

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oneself in the presence of God or, if you prefer, the Mind of the Universe. In this realm, images, thoughts, body sensations, and emotions are fused in what is felt as a meaningful process culminating in a sense of self-understanding, self-transformation, spiritual enlightenment and possibly mystical union. Again, record your unique experience.

Cats, she said in an interview with Beliefnet, are “equally evocative of our spiritual depths,” pointing out that the Dalai Lama’s house is fairly crawling with them. For the spiritually attuned, almost any animal—insect, bird, butterfly—can serve as a doorman to the realm of enlightenment. Dogs have been particularly nimble at seizing the new opportunities for animals as spirit guides, shamans, and healers. Long confined to blue-collar work as draft animals or security guards, they can now supplement their domestic roles with professional careers—for example, as “therapy dogs.” One of the new canine professionals, Bella the Boxer, has written a business advice book titled Secrets of a Working Dog: Unleash Your Potential and Create Success, which recommends the power of “pawsitive” thinking. Her credentials? After bemoaning the limited opportunities formerly available to dogs, she urges the reader to shake off his stereotypes and wake up to the existence of a “new breed of working dog that relies on business savvy and brains. Rather than herd sheep, we’re joining the human white-collar workforce.” One out of five corporations, Bella reports, now allows dogs at work, where they are tasked with raising human morale, increasing creativity, and reducing stress. Her own ambition is to become one of America’s tens of thousands of registered therapy dogs and minister to patients in hospices and nursing homes.

J O H N GA RC IA

The Baffler ! 61

remonotheistic societies would have found nothing odd about animal healers or animal-induced epiphanies. They worshipped animals, animal-human hybrids (such as Sekhmet, the lion-bodied goddess of predynastic Egypt), and human-shaped deities with animal familiars (such as the Hindu goddess Durga, who rides a tiger). Even the anthropomorphized Greek deities could take animal form, as when Zeus became a swan to rape Leda, and seem to have originated as animal gods. Almost every large and potent animal species—bears, bulls, lions, sharks, snakes—have been an object of human cultic veneration. Before the Christian missionaries arrived, my Celtic ancestors worshipped the goddess Epona, who took the form of a horse. The Makah people of Alaska worship “Whale,” who provides them with both physical and spiritual sustenance. In fact, the connection between animals and religiosity may predate fully evolved Homo sapiens. Why do humans tend to imagine that there are gods at all? Because, according to the latest from the field of cognitive science, there was a survival advantage in imagining that every stirring in the tall grass meant that a leopard—or some such potentially hazardous life form—might be closing in for an attack. Our brains are what the cognitive scientists call “hyperactive agency detection devices”: we see faces in clouds, hear denunciations in thunder, and sense transcendent beings all around us because we evolved on a planet densely occupied by other “agents”—animals that could destroy us with the slash of a claw or the splash of a fin, arbitrarily and in seconds. The rise of the monotheistic religions, featuring either anthropomorphic gods like the Christian “father” or deities so abstract that they are impervious to representation, drove the animals, so to speak, from the temple of the human imagination. This change, occurring between roughly 2000 BCE and 700 CE, has long been celebrated as a huge step forward for humankind—the “axial transformation”—propelling us from the unseemly worship of savage beasts to the 62 1 The Baffler

refined and dignified adoration of a god who is both perfect and perfectly good. But it was a tragic demotion for animals. The axial religions determined that some of them were ritually “unclean” and reclassified all of them as the inferiors of humans. In The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, Paul Shepard traced the “humanization” of the so-called world religions—the expunging of animal imagery from religious sites and the association, especially within Christianity, of animals with demons. There were exceptions like St. Francis of Assisi, but Shepard cites a thirteenth-century priest who defeathered a living sparrow in front of his congregation in order to punish the poor bird for being a bird, with all the innate wretchedness and iniquity that such status entails. Are animals, at least those not designated as meat, finally making a comeback? We may not worship golden calves or offer human sacrifices to jaguar gods, but Americans spend approximately $50 billion a year on our pets. We have an animal rights movement dedicated loosely to the proposition that “animals are people too” and a burgeoning academic field of Animal Studies, which prepares students for careers in veterinary science or, less auspiciously, for fields like “swine management.” There is serious talk of “rewilding” large sections of North American real estate by restoring the original Pleistocene flora and fauna—mastodons, or something resembling them, included. Implicit in much of the new attention to animals is the commendably liberal idea that they are not—intellectually, emotionally, or morally—all that different from humans. Hollywood animal heroes like Remy the rat chef, Rango the cowboy chameleon, and the Kung Fu Panda aspire, scheme, set long-term goals, and, of course, communicate in the voices of human movie stars. In real life as observed by scientists, animals have been found to be trespassing egregiously on capabilities once thought to be uniquely human: they can use simple tools; they can be altruistic; they can create what they seem to regard as works of art; they can reason and remember; they can

s When humans rest too much on the goodwill of animals, or simply let down their guard, things can go very wrong.

9 fall into what looks like depression. Language is widespread in the nonhuman world, and not only among birds, dolphins, and whales. Very recent research reveals that American prairie dogs, who are closely related to squirrels, can issue calls informing each other about what kind of human, or other creature, might be approaching. “Here comes the tall human in the blue [shirt],” they can say, or “here comes the short human in the yellow [shirt].” The human-animal distinction disappears almost completely within the new field of Critical Animal Studies, which seeks to advance “a holistic understanding of the commonality of oppressions, such that speciesism, sexism, racism, ableism, statism, classism, militarism, and other hierarchical ideologies and institutions are viewed as parts of a larger, interlocking, global system of domination.” Animals are not only like humans, but they are also specifically like oppressed and marginalized categories of humans. One of the founders of Critical Animal Studies expects that, “within a decade [of 2009],” his field will take its “rightful place alongside women’s studies, African-American studies, Chicano/a studies, disability studies, and queer studies.” But the current emphasis on animalhuman similarities does not necessarily signal the approach of a new Eden, in which vegetarian lions will lie down with lambs. There is an unseemly coziness to much of this enlightened discourse, an assumption that animals are not only like humans, but that they like us, or at least bear no active grudges. Everyone has heard, as the Arlington (VA) Animal Welfare League puts it, that “there’s no need to fear wildlife. If you don’t bother them, they generally won’t bother you.” Hikers in the national parks are reassured

that bears are unlikely to attack unless they are startled or have reason to fear a threat to their young. Even whales, who have suffered mightily at human hands, can be anthropomorphized and, at least in imagination, rendered completely tame. As the website for a Baja whale-watching service opines: Whales are amazing creatures. Not only are they among the largest creatures on Earth (Blue whales ARE the largest living creatures on the planet!) but they are also among the most gentle and friendly, and very family oriented. Whales were given a bad rap by whale hunters (who called them “devilfish”) starting in the 1600s, because some mother whales were violent in the water when protecting their young from harpoons, but what good mother WOULDN’T do anything to protect her baby?

Fortunately, “the whales have been very forgiving of their earlier slaughter by humans.”

ut when humans rest too much on the goodwill of animals, or simply let down their guard, things can go very wrong. The poster child for presumptuousness would have to be Timothy Treadwell, who was immortalized by Werner Herzog in the documentary Grizzly Man. Having spent thirteen summers living among grizzly bears in the Alaska wilderness—talking to them, reading to them, and occasionally petting them—he came to believe he was “a fully accepted wild animal—brother to these bears.” A few weeks after arriving at that triumphant conclusion, he and his girlfriend were killed and partially eaten by one of his ursine siblings. Or we might cite the numerous humans in the life of chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky who taught him to sign more than 100 words, while at the same time encouraging him to enjoy alcohol, marijuana, and light cross-species sexual intimacies. Perhaps frustrated by his inconsistent and ever-changing human companions, Nim attacked one and bit off nearly half her face. Another well-documented case of humananimal intimacy gone wrong involves the novelist and short story writer Joy Williams The Baffler ! 63

s and her German shepherd Hawk, whom she described in an essay as “my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy, my love.” As she was leading Hawk into a kennel for one of her rare trips without him, he suddenly leaped on her, biting her breast and hands until “there was blood everywhere.” Hawk was subsequently “put down,” but Joy survived to become a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate. The problem is not that animals are different from humans in some generalizable way— less gracious, perhaps, or more impulsive and unpredictable—but that it makes very little sense to say what animals are like or not like. There are so many species of animals that any analysis based on the human-animal division is as eccentric, in its own way, as a hypothetical biology based on the jellyfish-nonjellyfish distinction would be. Within species, too, animals differ as individuals, just as humans differ—hence the difficulty in prescribing the best way to avoid a bear attack. Hikers are advised to deflect charging grizzlies by lying down and playing dead, but, sadly, some grizzlies are encouraged by this behavior. Nor can all cases of animal hostility be attributed to human error. Treadwell and Williams may have crossed a line into undue intimacy, but there is no such explanation for the fatal goring of a hiker by a mountain goat in 2011. The man was an experienced hiker, and the goat— who, it has been suggested, may have been harassed by a park ranger in the past—had no apparent proximate casus belli. And what are we to make of the occasional whale who attacks a boat—in some cases, even a whalewatching boat, brimming with interspecies goodwill? So, before engaging a therapy dog, maybe especially a Jungian one, you might want to consider that, in addition to much friendly cooperation, there are serious issues between our species. Humans abuse dogs in many gratuitous ways and, despite much well-intentioned propaganda to the contrary, wolves—who are the ancestors of all dogs, including the “toy” ones—have long been a deadly threat to humans. From Russia to 64 1 The Baffler

Italy, thousands of people—often children— were lost to wolves between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In late eighteenthcentury France, the frequency of wolf attacks on humans necessitated state-sponsored wolf hunts, and when these were suspended during the Revolution, the attacks resumed in full force. More recently, in 1996, there was a rash of fatal wolf attacks on villagers in Uttar Pradesh. In early 2011 an unprecedented 400-strong wolf pack—or, perhaps we should say army, since the horde represented an alliance of many packs—laid siege to a village in Siberia, although they restricted themselves to eating livestock. One wolf expert speculated that they were not wolves at all, but “a cross between domestic dogs and the wild animal.” If so, he wrote, we are faced with “the nightmare possibility that an entirely new creature has been created which, while less wary of humans, also possesses the natural vulpine instinct for hunting and eating as a pack.” And plenty of pet dogs other than Hawk have launched individual attacks on their apparently indulgent owners. To cite a couple of random examples, in the last five years a British woman lost her nose to her greyhound while she slept, and a Manhattan woman’s scalp was torn open when she bent to give her Rottweiler a good-morning pat.

one of which is to say that animals may not make fine “spirit guides” or, to the extent that we need them, even deities. I once found myself well away from land and escorted by a couple of dolphins, each of them about the size of my kayak. They appeared to be playing with me, diving under the kayak and popping up on the other side, grinning their fixed, unreadable grins. It would have been easy enough for them to flip the kayak over and, if they were so minded, to push me under water until I drowned, but that was not the game they were playing that day. On another occasion, I had a chance to see a tiger, illuminated only by flashlight, at a distance of about three feet. Despite the sturdy fence be-

s tween us, I found myself experiencing what zoologist Konrad Lorenz called the heiliger Schauer, or “holy shiver” of awe that predators inspire in their prey. There is something deeply uncanny about looking into the eyes of a powerful, intelligent alien being. Maybe you could even call it spiritual. Besides, it’s long past time to admit that the “all good” and “all perfect” deities of monotheism have not worked out very well, discredited as they are by earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and epidemics, not to mention all the murders committed in their names. And what about the built-in biological evil of predation, which has been a driving force of evolution at least since the Cambrian era, about 500 million years ago? If nature is “red in tooth and claw,” it must be because the supreme deity, should there be one, prefers this color scheme. You don’t have to be an atheist to see that theodicy, or the effort to excuse God for evil, is a species of idiocy. There is no way to be both all good and all powerful, not in this region of the multiverse anyway. If there is a God or gods—a possibility I am not ruling

out—clearly he, she, or they are not, in any human way, “good.” At least with animals or zoomorphic deities we know where we are— which is with creatures in whom, as Michael Pollan puts it, we can glimpse “something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien.” But these glimpses are rare. As the entrepreneurs of wildlife tourism understand, most of us are unlikely to encounter a free, self-determining animal larger than a raccoon unless we are willing to pay for the experience. The massive extinctions of megafauna—both killing for food and killing for sport—that began 12,000 years ago as humans spread out over the Earth have accelerated drastically in the past century or two, leaving us a very lonely species. We try to compensate by seeking out the rare wild animals who have survived our depredations, or by imagining an invisible super being or God who will befriend and comfort us. Or we scan the galaxy for habitable planets, searching for the kind of company—quirky, diverse, and sometimes awe-inspiring—that we once found thick upon this earth.t

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[ S a lvos ]

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit 3 David Gr aeber

Surely, as grown-ups, we understand that The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age.

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secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them? We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat. As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them. At the turn of the millennium, I was expecting an outpouring of reflections on why we had gotten the future of technology so wrong. Instead, just about all the authoritative voices—both Left and Right— began their reflections from the assumption that we do live in an unprecedented new technological utopia of one sort or another. The common way of dealing with the uneasy sense that this might not be so is to brush it aside, to insist all the progress that could have

[

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happened has happened and to treat anything more as silly. “Oh, you mean all that Jetsons stuff?” I’m asked—as if to say, but that was just for children! Surely, as grown-ups, we understand The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age. Even in the seventies and eighties, in fact, sober sources such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian were informing children of imminent space stations and expeditions to Mars. Creators of science fiction movies used to come up with concrete dates, often no more than a generation in the future, in which to place their futuristic fantasies. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick felt that a moviegoing audience would find it perfectly natural to assume that only thirty-three years later, in 2001, we would have commercial moon flights, city-like space stations, and computers with human personalities maintaining astronauts in suspended animation while traveling to Jupiter. Video telephony is just about the only new technology from that particular movie that has appeared—and it was technically possible when the movie was showing. 2001 can be seen as a curio, but what about Star Trek? The Star Trek mythos was set in the sixties, too, but the show kept getting revived, leaving audiences for Star Trek Voyager in, say, 2005, to try to figure out what to make of the fact that according to the logic of the program, the world was supposed to be recovering from fighting off the rule of genetically engineered supermen in the Eugenics Wars of the nineties. By 1989, when the creators of Back to the Future II were dutifully placing flying cars and anti-gravity hoverboards in the hands of ordiThe Baffler ! 67

] nary teenagers in the year 2015, it wasn’t clear if this was meant as a prediction or a joke. The usual move in science fiction is to remain vague about the dates, so as to render “the future” a zone of pure fantasy, no different than Middle Earth or Narnia, or like Star Wars, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” As a result, our science fiction future is, most often, not a future at all, but more like an alternative dimension, a dream-time, a technological Elsewhere, existing in days to come in the same sense that elves and dragon-slayers existed in the past—another screen for the displacement of moral dramas and mythic fantasies into the dead ends of consumer pleasure.

The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies— largely, technologies of simulation.

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ight the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties scifi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.” That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new. In the earliest formulations, which largely came out of the Marxist tradition, a lot of this technological background was acknowledged. Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” proposed the term “postmodernism” to refer to the cultural logic appropriate to a new, technological phase of capitalism, one that had been heralded by Marxist economist Ernest Mandel as early as 1972. Mandel had argued that humanity stood at the verge of a

[ “third technological revolution,” as profound as the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, in which computers, robots, new energy sources, and new information technologies would replace industrial labor—the “end of work” as it soon came to be called—reducing us all to designers and computer technicians coming up with crazy visions that cybernetic factories would produce. End of work arguments were popular in the late seventies and early eighties as social thinkers pondered what would happen to the traditional working-class-led popular struggle once the working class no longer existed. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.) Jameson thought of himself as exploring the forms of consciousness and historical sensibilities likely to emerge from this new age. What happened, instead, is that the spread of information technologies and new ways of organizing transport—the containerization of shipping, for example—allowed those same industrial jobs to be outsourced to East Asia, Latin America, and other countries where the availability of cheap labor allowed manufacturers to employ much less technologically sophisticated production-line techniques than they would have been obliged to employ at home. From the perspective of those living in Europe, North America, and Japan, the results did seem to be much as predicted. Smokestack industries did disappear; jobs came to be divided between a lower stratum of service workers and an upper stratum sitting in antiseptic bubbles playing with computers. But below it all lay an uneasy awareness that the postwork civilization was a giant fraud. Our carefully engineered high-tech sneakers were not being produced by intelligent cyborgs or self-replicating molecular nanotechnology; they were being made on the equivalent of old-fashioned Singer sewing machines, by the daughters of Mexican and Indonesian farmers who, as the result of WTO or NAFTA–sponsored trade deals, had been ousted from their ancestral lands. It was a guilty awareness that lay beneath the postmodern sensibility and its celebration of the endless play of images and surfaces.

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hy did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the moon bases, the robot factories— fail to happen? There are two possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological change were unrealistic (in which The Baffler ! 69

]

Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the world of 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what they got.

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case, we need to know why so many intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many credible ideas and prospects). Most social analysts choose the first explanation and trace the problem to the Cold War space race. Why, these analysts wonder, did both the United States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea of manned space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in scientific research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the human future would be like. Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding across the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn’t they share a commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both superpowers they had entered into a “space age” in which they were battling over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at play here, no doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of the project. Some of those science fiction fantasies (at this point we can’t know which ones) could have been brought into being. For earlier generations, many science fiction fantasies had been brought into being. Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, then why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids? In fact, even as those dreams were being outlined, the material base for their achievement was beginning to be whittled away. There is reason to believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the pace of technological innovation was slowing down from the heady pace of the first half of the century. There was a last spate in the fifties when microwave ovens (1954), the Pill (1957), and lasers (1958) all appeared in rapid succession. But since then, technological advances have taken the form of clever new ways of combining existing technologies (as in the space race) and new ways of putting existing technologies to consumer use (the most famous example is television, invented in 1926, but mass produced only after the war.) Yet, in part because the space race gave everyone the impression that remarkable advances were happening, the popular impression during the sixties was that the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying, uncontrollable ways. Alvin Toffler’s 1970 best seller Future Shock argued that almost all the social problems of the sixties could be traced back to the increasing pace of technological change. The endless outpouring of scientific breakthroughs transformed the grounds of daily existence, and left Americans without any clear idea of what normal life was. Just consider the family, where not just the Pill, but also the prospect of in vitro fertilization, test tube babies, and sperm and egg donation were about to

[ make the idea of motherhood obsolete. Humans were not psychologically prepared for the pace of change, Toffler wrote. He coined a term for the phenomenon: “accelerative thrust.” It had begun with the Industrial Revolution, but by roughly 1850, the effect had become unmistakable. Not only was everything around us changing, but most of it— human knowledge, the size of the population, industrial growth, energy use—was changing exponentially. The only solution, Toffler argued, was to begin some kind of control over the process, to create institutions that would assess emerging technologies and their likely effects, to ban technologies likely to be too socially disruptive, and to guide development in the direction of social harmony. While many of the historical trends Toffler describes are accurate, the book appeared when most of these exponential trends halted. It was right around 1970 when the increase in the number of scientific papers published in the world—a figure that had doubled every fifteen years since, roughly, 1685—began leveling off. The same was true of books and patents. Toffler’s use of acceleration was particularly unfortunate. For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to 100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems. Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the fastest a human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10. True, the maximum speed of commercial air flight did peak one year later, at 14,000 mph, with the launching of the Concorde in 1971. But that speed not only has failed to increase; it has decreased since the Concorde was abandoned in 2003. None of this stopped Toffler’s own career. He kept retooling his analysis to come up with new spectacular pronouncements. In 1980, he produced The Third Wave, its argument lifted from Ernest Mandel’s “third technological revolution”—except that while Mandel thought these changes would spell the end of capitalism, Toffler assumed capitalism was eternal. By 1990, Toffler was the personal intellectual guru to Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, who claimed that his 1994 “Contract With America” was inspired, in part, by the understanding that the United States needed to move from an antiquated, material-

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There was the awesome space race, alongside frenetic efforts by U.S. industrial planners to apply existing technologies to consumer purposes, to create an optimistic sense of burgeoning prosperity and guaranteed progress that would undercut the appeal of working-class politics.

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ist, industrial mind-set to a new, free-market, information age, Third Wave civilization. There are all sorts of ironies in this connection. One of Toffler’s greatest achievements was inspiring the government to create an Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). One of Gingrich’s first acts on winning control of the House of Representatives in 1995 was defunding the OTA as an example of useless government extravagance. Still, there’s no contradiction here. By this time, Toffler had long since given up on influencing policy by appealing to the general public; he was making a living largely by giving seminars to CEOs and corporate think tanks. His insights had been privatized. Gingrich liked to call himself a “conservative futurologist.” This, too, might seem oxymoronic; but, in fact, Toffler’s own conception of futurology was never progressive. Progress was always presented as a problem that needed to be solved. Toffler might best be seen as a lightweight version of the nineteenth century social theorist Auguste Comte, who believed that he was standing on the brink of a new age—in his case, the Industrial Age—driven by the inexorable progress of technology, and that the social cataclysms of his times were caused by the social system not adjusting. The older feudal order had developed Catholic theology, a way of thinking about man’s place in the cosmos perfectly suited to the social system of the time, as well as an institutional structure, the Church, that conveyed and enforced such ideas in a way that could give everyone a sense of meaning and belonging. The Industrial Age had developed its own system of ideas—science—but scientists had not succeeded in creating anything like the Catholic Church. Comte concluded that we needed to develop a new science, which he dubbed “sociology,” and said that sociologists should play the role of priests in a new Religion of Society that would inspire everyone with a love of order, community, work discipline, and family values. Toffler was less ambitious; his futurologists were not supposed to play the role of priests. Gingrich had a second guru, a libertarian theologian named George Gilder, and Gilder, like Toffler, was obsessed with technology and social change. In an odd way, Gilder was more optimistic. Embracing a radical version of Mandel’s Third Wave argument, he insisted that what we were seeing with the rise of computers was an “overthrow of matter.” The old, materialist Industrial Society, where value came from physical labor, was giving way to an Information Age where value emerges directly from the minds of entrepreneurs, just as the world had originally appeared ex nihilo from the mind of God, just as money, in a proper supply-side economy, emerged ex nihilo from the Federal Reserve and into the hands of value-creating capitalists. Supply-side economic policies, Gilder concluded, would ensure that investment would continue to steer away from old government boondoggles like the space program and toward more productive information and medical technologies. But if there was a conscious, or semi-conscious, move away from investment in research that might lead to better rockets and robots,

[ and toward research that would lead to such things as laser printers and CAT scans, it had begun well before Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) and Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1981). What their success shows is that the issues they raised—that existing patterns of technological development would lead to social upheaval, and that we needed to guide technological development in directions that did not challenge existing structures of authority—echoed in the corridors of power. Statesmen and captains of industry had been thinking about such questions for some time.

ndustrial capitalism has fostered an extremely rapid rate of scientific advance and technological innovation—one with no parallel in previous human history. Even capitalism’s greatest detractors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, celebrated its unleashing of the “productive forces.” Marx and Engels also believed that capitalism’s continual need to revolutionize the means of industrial production would be its undoing. Marx argued that, for certain technical reasons, value—and therefore profits—can be extracted only from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the firm, mechanization’s effect is to drive down the general rate of profit. For 150 years, economists have debated whether all this is true. But if it is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of the robot factories that everyone was anticipating in the sixties, and instead to relocate their factories to labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China or the Global South makes a great deal of sense. As I’ve noted, there’s reason to believe the pace of technological innovation in productive processes—the factories themselves—began to slow in the fifties and sixties, but the side effects of America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union made innovation appear to accelerate. There was the awesome space race, alongside frenetic efforts by U.S. industrial planners to apply existing technologies to consumer purposes, to create an optimistic sense of burgeoning prosperity and guaranteed progress that would undercut the appeal of working-class politics. These moves were reactions to initiatives from the Soviet Union. But this part of the history is difficult for Americans to remember, because at the end of the Cold War, the popular image of the Soviet Union switched from terrifyingly bold rival to pathetic basket case— the exemplar of a society that could not work. Back in the fifties, in fact, many United States planners suspected the Soviet system worked better. Certainly, they recalled the fact that in the thirties, while the United States had been mired in depression, the Soviet Union had

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“I said that fun was very important, too, that it was a direct rebuttal to the kind of ethics and morals that were being put forth in the country to keep people working in a rat race which didn’t make any sense, because in a few years the machines would do all the work anyway.” —Abbie Hoffman

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maintained almost unprecedented economic growth rates of 10 percent to 12 percent a year—an achievement quickly followed by the production of tank armies that defeated Nazi Germany, then by the launching of Sputnik in 1957, then by the first manned spacecraft, the Vostok, in 1961. It’s often said the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical achievement of Soviet communism. Surely, the United States would never have contemplated such a feat had it not been for the cosmic ambitions of the Soviet Politburo. We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a group of unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who dared to dream astounding dreams. The dream of world revolution was only the first. It’s also true that most of them—changing the course of mighty rivers, this sort of thing—either turned out to be ecologically and socially disastrous, or, like Joseph Stalin’s one-hundred-story Palace of the Soviets or a twenty-story statue of Vladimir Lenin, never got off the ground. After the initial successes of the Soviet space program, few of these schemes were realized, but the leadership never ceased coming up with new ones. Even in the eighties, when the United States was attempting its own last, grandiose scheme, Star Wars, the Soviets were planning to transform the world through creative uses of technology. Few outside of Russia remember most of these projects, but great resources were devoted to them. It’s also worth noting that unlike the Star Wars project, which was designed to sink the Soviet Union, most were not military in nature: as, for instance, the attempt to solve the world hunger problem by harvesting lakes and oceans with an edible bacteria called spirulina, or to solve the world energy problem by launching hundreds of gigantic solar-power platforms into orbit and beaming the electricity back to earth. The American victory in the space race meant that, after 1968, U.S. planners no longer took the competition seriously. As a result, the mythology of the final frontier was maintained, even as the direction of research and development shifted away from anything that might lead to the creation of Mars bases and robot factories. The standard line is that all this was a result of the triumph of the market. The Apollo program was a Big Government project, Sovietinspired in the sense that it required a national effort coordinated by government bureaucracies. As soon as the Soviet threat drew safely out of the picture, though, capitalism was free to revert to lines of technological development more in accord with its normal, decentralized, free-market imperatives—such as privately funded research into marketable products like personal computers. This is the line that men like Toffler and Gilder took in the late seventies and early eighties. In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic, governmentcontrolled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns. To some degree this had always been true: the billions poured into missile research had always dwarfed the sums allocated to the space

[ program. Yet by the seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following military priorities. One reason we don’t have robot factories is because roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in automating paper mills. A case could be made that even the shift to research and development on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war—seen simultaneously as the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, and, at home, the utter rout of social movements. For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working class politics. Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy. With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not cre-

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] ate a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties. But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

The technologies that did emerge in almost every case proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control.

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t this point all the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal of biggovernment projects and a return to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical technologies. Of course this doesn’t explain everything. Above all, it does not explain why, even in those areas that have become the focus of wellfunded research projects, we have not seen anything like the kind of advances anticipated fifty years ago. If 95 percent of robotics research has been funded by the military, then where are the Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes? Obviously, there have been advances in military technology in recent decades. One of the reasons we all survived the Cold War is that while nuclear bombs might have worked as advertised, their delivery systems did not; intercontinental ballistic missiles weren’t capable of striking cities, let alone specific targets inside cities, and this fact meant there was little point in launching a nuclear first strike unless you intended to destroy the world. Contemporary cruise missiles are accurate by comparison. Still, precision weapons never do seem capable of assassinating specific individuals (Saddam, Osama, Qaddafi), even when hundreds are dropped. And ray guns have not materialized—surely not for lack of trying. We can assume the Pentagon has spent billions on death ray research, but the closest they’ve come so far are lasers that might, if aimed correctly, blind an enemy gunner looking directly at the beam. Aside from being unsporting, this is pathetic: lasers are a fifties technology. Phasers that can be set to stun do not appear to be on the drawing boards; and when it comes to infantry combat, the preferred weapon almost everywhere

[ remains the AK-47, a Soviet design named for the year it was introduced: 1947. The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think! Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes from the corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point that private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government, but the increase is so large that the total amount of government research funding, in real-dollar terms, is much higher than it was in the sixties. “Basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies” research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate practical application, and that is most likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs—occupies an ever smaller proportion of the total, though so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding have increased. Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum mechanics—that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred years before. Why? Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen. Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us to imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. This is not so, even though such research teams are most likely to produce results. Research and

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The Baffler ! 77

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“The central trouble with America is conformity, timorousness, lack of enterprise, and audacity.” —H.L. Mencken

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development is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects. What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic. My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide. The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on. As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet. If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:

[ You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

BILL LEWIS

That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover. In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can add the privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open source, in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is “convivial.” This is no longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within the academy and research institutes themselves has caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their findings as personal property. Academic publishers ensure that findings that are published are increasingly difficult to access, further enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convivial, open-source competition turns into something much more like classic market competition. There are many forms of privatization, up to and including the simple buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many synthetic fuel formulae have been bought up and placed in the The Baffler ! 79

] vaults of oil companies, but it’s hard to imagine nothing like this happens.) More subtle is the way the managerial ethos discourages everything adventurous or quirky, especially if there is no prospect of immediate results. Oddly, the Internet can be part of the problem here. As Neal Stephenson put it: Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one; it—or at least something vaguely similar— has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

The managerial ethos discourages everything adventurous or quirky, especially if there is no prospect of immediate results. Oddly, the Internet can be part of the problem.

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And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications. Giovanni Arrighi has noted that after the South Sea Bubble, British capitalism largely abandoned the corporate form. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had instead come to rely on a combination of high finance and small family firms—a pattern that held throughout the next century, the period of maximum scientific and technological innovation. (Britain at that time was also notorious for being just as generous to its oddballs and eccentrics as contemporary America is intolerant. A common expedient was to allow them to become rural vicars, who, predictably, became one of the main sources for amateur scientific discoveries.) Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers that spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody wars over who would replace Britain as a dominant world power—wars that culminated, appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is significant, then, that our current technological stagnation seems to have begun after 1945, when the United States replaced Britain as organizer of the world economy. Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but,

[ in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of shortterm, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

f we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way. Computers have played a crucial role in this narrowing of our social imaginations. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators. In the same way that university professors seem to feel it is inevitable they will spend more of their time managing grants, so affluent housewives simply accept that they will spend weeks every year filling out forty-page online forms to get their children into grade schools. We all spend increasing amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents, brokers, and accountants. Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of life waiting for traffic lights to change. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know if similar figures are available for how long it takes to fill out forms, but it must be at least as long. No population in the history of the world has spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork. In this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies I refer to the use of rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to reality. Poetic technologies, so understood, are as old as civilization. Lewis Mumford noted that the first complex machines were made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were able to build the pyramids only because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which allowed them to develop production-line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one

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The Baffler ! 81

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Americans do not like to think of themselves as bureaucrats, but this is precisely what we have become.

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team of workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than the inclined plane and lever. Administrative oversight turned armies of peasant farmers into the cogs of a vast machine. Much later, after cogs had been invented, the design of complex machinery elaborated principles originally developed to organize people. Yet we have seen those machines—whether their moving parts are arms and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways. Certainly, poetic technologies had something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to be as much of dark satanic mills as of grace or liberation. But the rational, administrative techniques were always in service to some fantastic end. From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never realized—marked the climax of poetic technologies. What we have now is the reverse. It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer encouraged, but that most remain free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises, even if—as the environmental crisis demands— the fate of the earth depends on it.

hat are the political implications of all this? First of all, we need to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism. One is that capitalism is identical with the market, and that both therefore are inimical to bureaucracy, which is supposed to be a creature of the state. The second assumption is that capitalism is in its nature technologically progressive. It would seem that Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, were wrong about this. Or, to be more precise: they were right to insist that the mechanization of industrial production would destroy capitalism; they were wrong to predict that market competition would compel factory owners to mechanize anyway. If it didn’t happen, that is because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large semi-monopolistic enterprises, would come as a complete surprise to them. Defenders of capitalism make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological growth; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so in such a way as to increase overall prosperity; third, that in doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world for everyone. It is clear that capitalism is not doing any of these things any longer. In fact, many of its defenders are retreating from claiming that it is a good system and instead falling back on the claim that it is the only possible system—or, at least, the only possible system for a complex, technologically sophisticated society such as our own.

[

BILL LEWIS

But how could anyone argue that current economic arrangements are also the only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future technological society? The argument is absurd. How could anyone know? Granted, there are people who take that position—on both ends of the political spectrum. As an anthropologist and anarchist, I encounter anticivilizational types who insist not only that current industrial technology leads only to capitalist-style oppression, but that this must necessarily be true of any future technology as well, and therefore that human liberation can be achieved only by returning to the Stone Age. Most of us are not technological determinists. But claims for the inevitability of capitalism have to be based on a kind of technological determinism. And for that very reason, if the aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world in which no one believes any other economic system could work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but any radically different technological future. Yet there’s a contradiction. Defenders of capitalism cannot mean to convince us that technological change has ended—since that would mean capitalism is not progressive. No, they mean to convince us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but that those wonders take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and still more complex platforms for filling out of forms. I do not mean to suggest that neoliberal capitalism—or any other system—can be successful in this regard. First, there’s the problem of trying to convince the world you are leading the way in technological progress when you are holding it back. The United States, with its decaying infrastructure, paralysis in the face of global warming, and symbolically devastating abandonment of its manned space program just as China accelerates its own, is doing a particularly bad public relations job. Second, the pace of change can’t be held back forever. The Baffler ! 83

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BILL LEWIS

“All the laborsaving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.” —John Stuart Mill

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Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed. Other, less bureaucratized parts of the world—or at least, parts of the world with bureaucracies that are not so hostile to creative thinking—will slowly but inevitably attain the resources required to pick up where the United States and its allies have left off. The Internet does provide opportunities for collaboration and dissemination that may help break us through the wall as well. Where will the breakthrough come? We can’t know. Maybe 3D printing will do what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe it will be something else. But it will happen.

bout one conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen within the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism—or any form of capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.t

M y Own Little Mission A Bicycle-Eye View 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [part 3]

A bicycle-eye view is a view out on the world. When you ride a bike

your gaze doesn’t linger long on your surroundings, but neither does the world exactly flash by, particularly when you ride as leisurely as I do. The elevated position and nonchalant circling of the pedals allows you to register things, but doesn’t give you time for empathy. Here I need to add that the view from my bike is always of the same restricted space—of a park in my Amsterdam neighbourhood. The park has changed a lot over the past decade: it’s a long while since it was a space for urban escapism. Today, particularly on the weekends, it’s crawling with joggers, cyclists, and walkers of all ages and nationalities. Before, you’d see only young men out jogging: now you see tubby middle-aged women wrapped in hijabs. People used to cruise around on their bikes. Today, little mobility scooters barrel down the bike paths, unruly old folk at the steering wheel. Sometimes you even see an entire Turkish brood heading off to do the shopping on them. Then there are the kids on Vespas, the invalids in their wheelchairs, and the increasingly wary cyclists. My gaze settles on a small posse bounding toward me. There’s a young man chugging along pushing a twin-size baby stroller. A young woman with a boy in tow follows close behind. A girl and a dog bring up the rear. This family out for a morning jog would be fantastic material for a pro-life propaganda video. That’s if—dog and baby twins excepted—they weren’t all clenching their jaws. There isn’t the slightest trace of pleasure on their faces. They might as well have stayed home and cleaned their teeth. Actually, no one’s cheerful anymore. Not the scowling old fellow, plastic bag in one hand, grumpily hurling clumps of dry bread into the lake with the other. Not the young couple with a child watching the angry old boy, and not the teenager sauntering past totally indifferent. It’s a sunny Saturday morning; little sailboats and winsome ducks gently glide across the lake. The trees and grass exude a calming shade of green. So why the general anxiety dimming the glow of this Amsterdam park-life idyll? According to demographers and the newspapers, life on earth is getting a little crowded. The number of earthlings has just topped 7 billion. India, currently with a population of around 1.2 billion, is soon to overtake China as the most populous country on earth. The developed countries of today are projected to experience future depopulation, while developing countries such as Nigeria are expected to see population explosions. Some 1.5 billion earthlings live on less than a dollar a day, and huge numbers perish from hunger. People with a planetary view of the world are worriedly wondering if in the near future we’ll all be hungry, and whether there aren’t simply too many of us. Perhaps The Baffler ! 85

this accounts for why more and more people are asking themselves how to die. I mean, when there’s no answer to the question of how to live. Demographers suggest that the demographic picture of little Croatia is currently in a bad way. More people are dying than being born, and Croats no longer believe in church or state. The raging procreational passion that erupted with the birth of the Croatian state has long since fizzled. These days, potential parents don’t have jobs, so they live with their parents, not in any position to rent, let alone to buy, an apartment. And they’re a curse on their parents’ houses, who themselves are barely surviving on miserable pensions. Unofficial statistics suggest that every second Croat is a thief. This dirty little detail helps sap the procreational impulses of potential parents. It also helps explain why young Croatian women down contraceptive pills like sedatives. But even death is an expensive solution. The price of cemetery plots has gone through the roof. With thieves, gangsters, murderers, and politicians all desperate for their deeds to outlive their mortal coils, there’s a mad scramble for prime plots at Zagreb’s main cemetery. The Catholic Church in Croatia granted (not without a fee, of course) deceased Croatian president Franjo Tuđman pole position at the very entrance, where hitherto there had only been a chapel. Today, Tuđman’s majestic grave stands almost buttressed behind the chapel, the new layout like a symbolic sentry box surveilling the entire cemetery. In this new order of things, it’s immediately clear who rules the Croatian dead, present and future. Tuđman’s devotees among the living quickly started scrapping for the first row. The heirs to old graves never dreamed of flogging their great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers’ final resting places. But the ambitious buyers are generous to a fault, which is understandable. They’re buying a spot in the eternal gallery. And, in this respect, a new social order is taking form in the graveyard. Wealthy dead folk squeeze out poor dead folk. “Resomation” or “green cremation” is a new invention in corpse management, a natural process for the speedy decomposition of the body. The deceased is fed into something called a resomator (which looks like an elongated washing machine) and at high pressure exposed to a water and potassium hydroxide solution. After three hours the machine spits back out around 200 gallons of mineral-rich liquid. Dental implants, crowns, pacemakers (which don’t explode like they do during cremation!), and other remains are ground into a fine ash and given to the family, the volume of ash being much less than that remaining after cremation. Resomation also consumes eight times less energy. The deceased’s liquid remains can be used as fertilizer, or just tipped down the sink. The process even erases any DNA trace of the deceased’s identity. Resomation is currently legal in a handful of American states and several European countries. The Scots, incidentally, hold the patent on resomation. And given the lack of cemetery space in Switzerland, resomation might soon be the only available burial option. Those who care about the environment can breath easy: resomation is eco-friendly. We are all dust, and it is to dust we shall return. We are all liquid, and it is as liquid we shall end. For the many people who felt their lives worth86 1 The Baffler

Even death is expensive. The price of cemetery plots has gone through the roof. With thieves, gangsters, murderers, and politicians all desperate for their deeds to outlive their mortal coils, there is a mad scramble for prime plots.

X U YA N G

less, posthumous transformation into this truly liquid form could be of some comfort. (Water the lettuce with Grandma! Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never had such tasty lettuce before! Spray the geraniums with Granddad!) What happens to the soul in the process of resomationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;whether our soul is hydrophobic or water resistant; whether on hitting the water it turns into a little submarine and rides the storm, or simply dissolves; whether at high pressure it is catapulted into the air like a miniature rocket, or simply evaporatesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;these are questions best left to wise men of theology. One thing is certain: Zygmunt Bauman is right. We live in a liquid epoch.t (Part 4 begins on page 122.) The Baffler ! 87

Syria Renga 3 Marilyn Hacker Driving a flatbed truck of sheep alongside the Qalamoun hills, he glances at the mountains and thinks of his brothers who are still in Kirkuk. Once borders were porous, work meant crossings, for those who are amateur refugees now, inadvertent exiles.

Two hundred miles from the refugee camp outside Damascus, Zainab descends the stone ramp from Baal’s temple, becomes her namesake Queen Zenobia who held off Roman legions Sanuqawimu! White cotton scarf round her face like the headdress of a queen.

Her father will die without seeing her again. He’s ninety-four now. Safe in exile, they watch the insurrection in cafés. She asks her husband “But who’ll take power after your revolution?”

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—thinks of the old man she loves, the hills near Lattakia.

Chams calls his mother and she talks to him in code: “It rained yesterday, a strong cold wind from the mountains blew down the telephone lines. Now the power’s back.” A You-Tube of the demo on his Apple screen, but not his younger brother’s face in the tide of faces.

He is becoming an American poet in his ellipses lacunae and retentions, deceptively simple words, but sound and structure of his first language linger: the root keys that can morph, blossom into wild but logical alternatives.

Returning at last she requested a visa as she’d always done. The man at the embassy asked “Are you a journalist?”

Not exactly truth to declare that she wasn’t: who knew what she’d write? But she said “No.” Nonetheless she didn’t get the visa.

The boy’s round-faced smile, and the image of his corpse returned, thus tortured have gone viral on You-Tube and on ten thousand posters. Internet switched off on Friday, the day of the week’s demonstrations. Where’s Joumana, where’s Imân? Eina Najîb wa Ahmad?

The telephone rings in Reem’s apartment. And rings. Nobody answers. She’s gone to market, or she’s working in the library. Rings late at night, rings early in the morning. Still nobody answers. She’s gone to her family in the country? She has none.

Chams’ mother tells him three soldiers knocked on her door, asked where her son was.

Military service meant he was still in the reserves, called back to duty. She said he was in England. Now he’ll have to stay. He hadn’t planned to go back, nor thought he was in exile.

His cousin tweets from “Syrian Revolution,” needs cell phones, Zip drives, so he’s on Turkish Airlines toward two days in Istanbul with his French passport, appointment with a stranger in their first language, feeling like a boy again, mother tongue and contraband.

In a Damascene pizza parlor they worked on translations of Plath stacking up saucers of sweet thick coffee they drank till dusk. A year later one portable phone’s been cut off. No number to call— the now-distant friend translates silence that’s not poetry.

The Baffler ! 89

[ S a lvos ]

Future Schlock

Creating the crap of tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab 3 Will Boisvert

M A R K FI S H E R

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f there is one beacon in the landscape of American industrial decline, it’s the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or so it seems to the science and business reporters who regularly troop through its doors for their “Ten Breakthroughs That Will Change the Way You Live” stories. The Lab yokes academic researchers backed by corporate money to the task of shepherding gonzo digital technology from high concept to working “demo,” and sometimes all the way to a product launch by a corporate funder or one of the startups that Lab alumni constantly spin off. To its many admirers, it’s a hothouse that nurtures bleeding-edge gear, hip capitalism, and the kind of disruptive innovations the New Economy needs to blow the next prosperity bubble. Making a pilgrimage to the Lab for its twenty-fifth anniversary last year, PBS NewsHour proposed it as the unanswerable “counterargument” to “Great Stagnation” talk of an innovation drought. Last October’s Atlantic rehashed the hype, hailing the Lab as an “idea factory” that “gather[s] the world’s most imaginative minds under one roof” to chart the profitable reconstruction of the physical and social order. “Our homes will be shapeshifters” and “our buildings will be printed” under the Lab’s new dispensation, the magazine proclaimed, while “your brain will be fixed like your car” and “your phone will know everything.” Sounds awesome—though, as always with techno-futurist propaganda, one feels in such forecasts the mailed fist of machine rationalization and job-killing automation beneath the velvet glove of consumer choice and convenience. But when you look at the stuff the Media Lab has made, not just “envisioned,” the results are neither dazzling nor scary, but underwhelming and a bit tacky. Translated into stuff, The Atlantic’s prophecy that “your electronics will be powered by you” boils down to the Lab’s “battery-free electric tambourine that lights up as it’s played.” The “you will be your doctor” scenario means “wristbands that measure stress,” apparently based on the Lab’s Q Sensor technology, which gauges galvanic skin response—that’s polygraph-ese for sweatiness—and tells you your level of “emotional arousal,” in case you didn’t already know it. NewsHour swoons over the Lab’s Gremlins-esque robot Leonardo, which enhances its furry cuteness by pricking up or flattening its ears, goggling its eyes and scrunching its adorable face, and gasps at PingPongPlus, which takes the familiar paddle game to “a whole new level of interactivity” by projecting animated displays of swimming fish onto the tabletop.

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S TE V E B RO D N E R

lorified mood rings and plush toys, tambourines and ping-pong tables tricked out with blinking lights and screen-saver motifs: Is this the best the Media Lab can do? Not quite. Last year MIT posted a list of the Lab’s all-time “Top 25 Products and Platforms,” and the Q Sensor barely made the cut. Number 19 on the honor roll is the “Karaoke-on-Demand Machine, developed by Taito Corporation” from seventeen-year-old Lab technology. Number 16 is the technology behind photomosaics, the world’s most hackneyed graphic technique. Number 3 is Lego’s Mindstorms, a robotics kit beloved of school science fairs and adult hobbyists. Number 2? Guitar Hero. Yeah, they made that, one of the best-selling throw-away video games ever. Number 1 is the e-reader technology in Kindle, so give the Lab its due: it has spawned a subset of the video screens that are destroying the Republic of Letters. The Lab’s website reveals more wonders in the pipeline: an app that lets you order food on your cellphone while you are sitting in the restaurant; electronic origami (“The crane silently flaps on its own”); and a technology called Tastes Like Rain that “dynamically alters the flavor and color of your morning toothpaste to give you today’s temperature The Baffler ! 91

] and weather.” Not a promising lot, but then the Media Lab has commercialized some very unlikely gadgets, including Clocky, an alarm clock that, according to its patent filing, “moves forward, drops from a table to the floor, and moves to a remote location . . . us[ing] sensors to avoid objects in its path.” To turn off the alarm, “the individual must get out of bed and locate the mobile wake-up device.”

he contrast between the soaring verbiage surrounding the Lab and its trivial, redundant, usually disappointing and often downright annoying output is a feature, not a bug. It was there from the Lab’s inception in 1985, when cofounder Nicholas Negroponte spotted the zeitgeist of the dawning PC age in the marriage of avant-garde technophilia to crass commercialism. Negroponte, an architect, technologist, and professional prognosticator, has a gift for distilling digital messianism into catchy promotional sound bites. (Not for nothing did he call it the Media Lab.) Coining slogans like “Move bits, not atoms,” his 1995 best seller Being Digital celebrated the transcendence, if not total supersession, of materiality by the tide of binary information-processing. His rhetoric swelled with time; a 1998 Wired column forecast a future of Being Equal (“The caste system is an artifact of the world of atoms”) and Being Global (“A united planet is certain, but when is not” [sic]). For all its grandiosity, Negroponte’s vision of all-encompassing computation has remained militantly banal. “Computers as we know them today,” he declared, “will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, selfcleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs . . . ” The Lab he founded aimed, in the words of its mission statement, to further that goal of “embedding the bits of the digital realm in the atoms of our physical world”—a revolution that promised equality, fraternity, and massive sales volume to the companies that funded it. In promoting that upheaval, the Media Lab developed the key buzz-concept of the “interface.” Now an interface is any device, like a computer mouse, that lets a human manipulate a machine. But the Lab turned interface into a mystic organizing principle. Wherever there is a boundary—between atoms and bits, machine and human, individual and group, whimsy and calculation—the Lab searches for a technological interface to bridge the divide. Boundary-blurring interfaces proliferate everywhere: in the robotic prosthetic limbs of the Biomechatronics Group, one of a few worthwhile Lab endeavors; in the sensor-laden stage props that Lab technicians built to convert the magic duo Penn and Teller’s wacky gestures into music (a scientific coup the Lab never tires of trumpeting); in the Lifelong Kindergarten Singing Fingers, a synesthesiac toy that smushes sensory modes together by letting kids “finger paint with sound.” The Lab’s interface count is a rough index of the progress of digital imperialism, with a new one sprouting up wherever technology invades a previously undigitized realm. Negroponte designed the Media Lab itself as a giant social interface.

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[ The Lab’s loose structure, based on fluid research groups convened around nebulous themes and ad-hoc projects, requires all entrants to “check traditional [academic] disciplines at the door” and thus renounce departmental barriers and specializations that might constrain the flow of collaboration and knowledge. (Its new glass-walled wing makes transparency a physical fetish.) It welcomes not just computer scientists and engineers but artists, writers, and musicians as well, all of them interfacing in a warm interdisciplinary techno-humanism that softens the unsettling project of omnipresent computing (while demonstrating just how that project will colonize all of life). And it brooks no atom-spawned caste hierarchies or bit-shackling dogmas. It is a haven for misfits and iconoclasts, “The place where crazy inventors create your future,” according to a recent BBC hosanna, a veritable “salon des refusés,” in Negroponte’s words, upending a stodgy Establishment just like the Impressionists did, only with pixels instead of paint. The most important of the Lab’s interfaces is the one that connects academic research to commerce. In Negroponte’s scheme, there could be no point in giving the world’s most imaginative minds free rein unless that would also appeal to major corporations and venture capital. Hence his pioneering business plan, unique for a university lab at the time, under which corporate sponsors front most of the budget by kicking in a few hundred thousand dollars a year each for nonexclusive rights to the Lab’s intellectual property. This funding mechanism is fussily calibrated to rake in cash while preserving a façade of independence. A diversified industrial average of seventy-odd sponsors— including Bank of America, Google, News Corporation, Northrop Grumman, and Hasbro—pay for access to a broad “consortium” of research groups but can’t direct their money to a particular project or dictate terms to a specific scientist. All they buy, ostensibly, is a chance to take notes on and adapt for their own ends whatever breakthroughs surface unbidden from the Lab’s creative ferment. Yet sponsorship guidelines hint at a persistent pressure to turn that arms-length relationship into a bear hug. Companies can’t pay individual faculty, but they can fund individual students; those “graduate fellows” are assigned a “company mentor” who “can have impact on [the] fellow’s research,” and they are expected to “talk in detail about how the company’s issues map onto Lab work.” Faculty are expected to provide consulting and brainstorming services to sponsors, and at pricier sponsorship levels, companies can insert their own employees into research groups and establish “a steering committee, comprising both sponsor and Lab representation, to oversee the sponsor’s relationship to the Media Lab.” Joichi Ito, the Lab’s new director, wants to nuzzle even closer by giving sponsors the vague status of “members,” he told The Atlantic: “They’ve got great ideas . . . I want these people not just to be giving their money, but to feel like they’re part of the team.” (This view comes naturally to Ito, a venture capitalist who is also a college dropout, former rave impresario, scuba instructor, and, of course, cyber-activist—a parody of the Lab ideal of the interdisciplinary rebel with a tie-in to investor money.)

The contrast between the soaring verbiage surrounding the Lab and its trivial, redundant, usually disappointing and often downright annoying output is a feature, not a bug. For all its grandiosity, Negroponte's vision of allencompassing computation has remained militantly banal.

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] It’s an article of faith at the Media Lab that that there is no conflict here—that tight bonds to commercial sponsors augment the Lab’s independence rather than curtailing it. As the Lab sees it, sponsorships are links to a free market that is always freer—and more creative—than mere academic freedom could ever be. Ito’s predecessor, Frank Moss, gives a detailed appreciation of that dynamic in The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives. Among the innovative technologies Moss spotlights is “a fork equipped with a tiny motion sensor” that “measures the time between bites and lets us know we’re eating too quickly by flashing a light or gently vibrating”: it is no longer mentioned in the online roster of research projects, possibly because test subjects smashed the prototypes. Moss pays lavish tribute to academic autonomy, chalking up the Lab’s success to researchers’ “unrestricted freedom to create and invent as their passions dictate” in a setting so thrumming with “the power of passion” that the “incredible passion” of “passionate, wildly energetic people” mounts relentlessly until “their passions are unleashed to the fullest.” But he admits to worrying before he joined the Lab that sponsor intrusions might inhibit the unbridled coupling of researcher and muse. Fortunately, his misgivings were laid to rest by the faculty themselves, who assured him that sponsors “didn’t direct the Lab’s work but rather informed it by keeping it up to speed on the needs and trends they saw in their marketplaces,” a perspective that could only broaden the Lab’s “passion-fueled exploration.” All doubts allayed, Moss instituted what the Boston Globe described as a “buddy system” linking sponsors with faculty.

assion for sale is definitely the vibe one gets from Moss’s description of the Lab’s fabled Sponsor Weeks, the twice-yearly extravaganzas where corporate bean-counters view the tangible product their sponsorships pay for. Preceded by a “hell week” in which caffeinated students pull all-nighters to get their prototypes in working order, it’s the centerpiece of the Lab’s “demo or die” culture. But in Moss’s account, it’s redolent of a whorehouse lineup, as the techies frantically ready their blinking, buzzing, frisking demos to strut their stuff for the leering suits. And what tantalizes would-be sponsors, the Lab knows, is something a bit tawdrier than its gauzy, high-minded cyber-conceits. The Fluid Interfaces Group’s official mission may be to “integrate the world of information and services more naturally into our daily physical lives, enabling insight, inspiration, and interpersonal connections.” What it demos, however, is LuminAR, a lamp-shaped computer projector that beams product information onto countertops—a breakthrough that “Will Change How You Shop at Best Buy,” according to FastCompany.com’s drooling headline. The Information Ecology group may be all about “seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources,” but what it demos is Takeover TV, a system that “her94 1 The Baffler

[ alds a new era in bar patronage,” wherein the humblest citizens “vote to pick a new show using your beer glass—or your iPhone.” The Object-Based Media Group murmurs about “unobtrusive acquisition of unconscious self-generated content to permit reflexive self-knowledge.” What it demos is Pillow Talk, a cushion-embedded recorder into which you narrate the dream that just woke you up. Whether the Lab dances to the sponsors’ tune or has internalized a virtual corporate overseer in the form of a business-friendly philosophy, the outcome is the same: a betrayal of the public mission of a great research university. There’s a long history of businesses funding academic research in science and engineering, but the Media Lab, with its corporate mentoring and steering and consulting and all-around buddying, and its fanatical packaging of research projects as launchable products, has taken such relationships to a new level of intellectual barrenness. When an oil company funds a geology lab, the knowledge that results, while aiding petroleum exploration, will often advance science in broader ways. Media Lab projects rarely generate such public benefits or add anything significant to our understanding of the world; their contributions usually end with the electric tambourines and karaoke machines they spin off. The result is a diversion of resources away from the pursuit of science of lasting value into projects that belong in Hasbro’s marketing department. Thanks to its financial success—and PR prowess—the Media Lab virus is spreading. Clones have sprung up at Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, most of the University of California campuses, and elsewhere, all featuring splashy digitalia and corporate penetrations that often go even deeper than at MIT. Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, which recently caused a minor press sensation with its cookie-serving robot, offers courses in which students work directly on devices for the sponsoring company. The University of Southern California, with two separate clones geared to Hollywood sponsorships, puts the Media Lab to shame with its vapid, L.A.-style commercialism. USC’s new Annenberg Innovation Lab already has a blockbuster innovation called Film Forecaster, a market research software tool that, in a triumphant road test, successfully predicted a $100 million opening for The Hangover Part II last summer by analyzing Twitter chatter. Meanwhile, AIL’s older sister-institute, the Entertainment Technology Center, touts its ground-breaking research into “18 Questions Every Sales Associate Should Be Able to Answer About 3D.” Here is the sunny, stupefied future of the Media Lab’s model of academic research, unchained from the canons of discipline and scholarly tradition, raptly attuned to the promptings of the marketplace, subservient to the chintziest of corporate imperatives. But while the Lab often seems like a marketing team posing as an academic institution, the corruption is subtler than the mere capture of the ivory tower by commerce. The Lab is a failure by the standards of storied corporate-sponsored R & D outfits like Menlo Park and Bell Labs. Instead, the Lab focuses on what corporations think is cool. Ne-

The result is a diversion of resources away from the pursuit of science of lasting value into projects that belong in Hasbro’s marketing department.

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]

Our smart phones will alert us to compatible strangers in the crowd, and our sociometric badges will warn us when we’re not mingling enough.

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groponte, in full Nostradamian spate, says it best: “Every surface will be a display. Everything will be linked to every other thing. Things will know where they are and some may know who they are.” No matter how ridiculous the Lab’s mockups, its grand schematic of omnipresent computing, sensors, video representation, and interactivity is a thrilling business prospect, promising enormous revenues from a tech network that redefines the meaning of ubiquity. And more than that, it’s an expression of an ideology of consumerism—the commodification of things that once were free and the shift toward a lifestyle of infantile narcissism—that the Lab takes to unprecedented extremes. What the Lab offers the world is a treasure chest of digital “tools” that ostensibly empower us but also require that our every interaction—with things, with friends and family, with our own bodies, minds, and souls—be mediated by electro-mechanical interfaces that are impressive only for their inescapability. We’ll move in an information cloud called SixthSense, a “gestural interface” housed in a computer-camera-projector pendant that beams an Internet portal onto any surface at the wave of its wearer’s hand. Our homes will be draped in, yes, “interactive wallpaper” that liberates us from the tyranny of the on-off switch: just “run your hand across this wallpaper to turn on a lamp, play music, or send a message to a friend.” Our smart phones will alert us to compatible strangers in the crowd, and our sociometric badges will warn us when we’re not mingling enough. We will be supervised by digital nannies like Weight Mate, a smartphone app that will “log dietary habits, track user behaviors, social interactions and emotional states” and offer “just-in-time persuasive feedback to improve eating habits.” (Another cyber-nag is Merry Miser, unique among Lab apps in that it discourages the purchase of useless crap by “provid[ing] personalized interventions when the user is near an opportunity to spend.”) Instead of confiding in friends or unburdening to a diary, a girl will turn to a cumbersome computer program called G.I.R.L.S—“Girls Involved In Real-Life Sharing”—to interface with her feelings; employing “a new technology called common sense reasoning,” the interactive routine allows her to create a video storyboard of vexing experiences and then assess them on an “emotional weighting screen” where she can “choose from the nine core emotions.” In fact, Common Sense—the Lab’s artificial intelligence program— is now available in several apps, including Moral Compass, an ethical reasoning module, and MakeBelieve, a story-generation tool for blocked writers. (MakeBelieve wrote the following 53-percenter fable all by itself: “John became very lazy at work. John lost his job. John decided to get drunk. He started to commit crimes. John went to prison. He experienced bruises. John cried. He looked at himself differently.”) The Personal Robots Group fields the Lab’s most insidious interface technologies, designed to infiltrate their users’ psyches with sustained eye contact, subtly expressive faces, sympathetic body language, natural speech patterns, and considerate behavior. There are fluffy kids’ bots for immersive holographic play suites. There is, inevitably, a ro-

[ botic weight-loss coach called Autom that counts calories and offers encouragement reinforced by “mutual gaze.” (You’d think a twelvestep robot—call it Bill W.—programmed to call you on your shit and reminisce about hitting bottom would be a no-brainer, but the Lab has not yet developed one.)

he fusion of man and machine takes a long step with the “robotic avatars,” the gamiest of which is Huggable, a teddy-bear bot that functions as a surrogate in long-distance adult-child relationships. Wirelessly linked to a remote “operator”—hopefully, please God, an out-of-state grandparent—Huggable cuddles with the child, aping the operator’s gestures, which are captured and transmitted by motion sensors, and cooing the operator’s texted words in its own animatronic voice, all the while streaming back live video of the encounter. With 1,500 sensors in its silicone hide, the bear is fully equipped for “affective touch-based interactions,” including “teasing pleasant,” “punishment light,” and “punishment painful.” (Its makers hint at other commercial applications, noting that Huggable could be a “therapeutic companion” that is “viscerally and emotionally pleasing to interact with.”) It’s doubtful that these clunky, creepy novelties will catch on with consumers (or jump-start an economic recovery), but the Media Lab’s underlying message certainly has. Rather than making the world soulless and mechanical, the Lab assures us, technological interfaces have achieved a complete symbiosis of the animate and the inanimate, thus making the world literally magical. Equipped with delicate sensors, fluent emotions and shrewd common sense, things come alive and respond to our every need; they will know not only who they are but who we are—and what we want—better than we do. It’s a vision that jibes perfectly with the primal consumerist fantasy of a world where objects exist solely as the vehicles of our desire. As well it should, for the Lab’s highest ambition is to reboot consumerism and spread it to previously unreached domains of unpaid, self-sufficient thought and action—to ensure that no idea will be imagined, no memory recollected, no emotion felt, no dream pondered, no resolve carried through, no friendship sparked, and no child comforted without the purchase of commercial technology and content. Yet the Lab sometimes feels a twinge of unease at the human diminishment its creed implies. Those misgivings surface in the music of Tod Machover, the Lab’s court composer. His Opera of the Future Group is no mere adornment but a Lab heavy hitter, the outfit that came up with the lucrative Guitar Hero technology. (Their latest project, Personal Opera, is a “radically innovative creative environment that enables anyone to create musical masterpieces sharing one’s deepest thoughts, feelings, and memories.” Can’t wait for the video game!) Machover is proof of the magic of interdisciplinarity: an opera composer plunked down amid robotics workshops, he duly came up with a “robotic opera”—Death and the Powers, a bombastic summation of the Lab and its discontents. The Baffler ! 97

] Framed by an introduction in which a chorus of actual robots sings about the long-vanished humans who created them, Death and the Powers follows the odyssey of Simon Powers, an aging tycoon who cheats death by uploading his consciousness into a computer network he calls the System. Simon, an immensely wealthy early adopter with a bionic assistant named Nicholas, is a mythic Lab-oid figure, and the System, which puts his thoroughly digital household’s devices and functions under his disembodied command, is the apotheosis of the Lab’s ideal of a seamless interface between spirit and hardware. (Machover literalizes that metaphor with a technology he calls “disembodied performance”: the offstage baritone who sings the uploaded Simon is fitted with motion sensors that capture his breathing and gestures and transmit them to the stage, where they cause lights to flash, walls to oscillate, and books to jostle on their shelves.) The System thus ushers Simon into a narcissist’s paradise; because his material environment is literally a hardwired extension of his personality, there is nothing around him that is not himself. His “powers” are preserved—“I can still write checks!” he chortles—and even his pleasures: in one charged scene that made critics swoon, his wife, clad in a flimsy negligee, makes out with a vaguely pelvic chandelier into which Simon ports his moaning essence. But from another angle Simon inhabits a consumerist hell. Completely subsumed within his belongings, he is a man reduced to a vestigial check-writing function, one whose erotic appeal to his wife resides mainly in the high-end furnishings he affords her. Death’s complex take on the System, both romantic and satirical, acknowledges that techno-consumerism can deracinate and debilitate even as it coddles and aggrandizes. Machover and the Media Lab feel confident that consumers will strike that bargain, and maybe they are right. But let’s not forget that the real victim in all this is technology itself. The Lab’s insistence that we merge with our machines may be bad for us, but it’s terrible for machines. Look at its wretched offspring: a lost generation of feeble, feckless gadgets; robots whose lot is to simper and cringe at our dieting travails; poor Huggable, trapped forever in clammy psychodramas. Machover’s robots represent the absurdist endpoint of that degeneracy, vying slavishly for “Human Status Credits” long after humans have ceased to exist.

here was a time when machines had a grandeur and glamour in their own right, when steamships, airplanes, cars, and dynamos were astonishing innovations that accomplished inhuman feats. Back then, we did not expect machines to be us; they were bigger and stronger and faster than us, and we revered them as they remade the world in ways we had never imagined. That heroic Machine Age ended when the Saturn V rocket, greatest of machines, took us all the way to the moon, and what did we do? We hit some golf balls and went home. Now machines can aspire to nothing but mundane servility, catering to our whims, reflecting our dull fantasies back at us. They take us nowhere except into our own heads.t

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[

Meet Travis

J OS H B ROW N

eet Travis.* He just turned twenty and is finishing up his sophomore year at college. He just got his first place off campus with two buddies and is starting to feel the tinge of responsibility (bills and schoolwork) but loves the freedom of having his own place. The apartment is small but is wired with all his and his buddies’ electronics, including game consoles, flat-screen TVs, and a large sound system. He loves living life out loud, experiences, exploration—his exploration and variety are shown in his music and video playlists, which he is proud to show off. He is all about fun and entertainment and loves to escape with his buddies to concerts, road trips, and parties. Boredom is his enemy and he places a huge premium on fun but is generally limited by funds. So when he is hanging out at home, he fills up his time sharing music, chatting with friends online, collecting sneakers, and boarding. He enjoys being in the know,

having new info at his fingertips, and sharing information on the new things he’s tried with his friends and on his blog and feeds. What he chooses to buy is an important reflection of both his social and personal identity. He grew up with choice, expects it in the world around him, and takes full advantage of it to experiment with various ways to express himself. He is not afraid to stand out in the crowd by voicing out who he is proud to be, using what fits his impulse or mood in the moment. He is promiscuous with brands and interested in trying the newest and coolest whether it be flavors, music, or games. He also enjoys feeling validated by his peers: ideally, he loves to be the first one in his group of friends to find out about a new artist, a new song, or a new ad that expresses his creativity, personality, or opinion—one that he can be proud sharing because he knows they will enjoy it, too. When it comes to beverages, he is looking primarily for flavor hit and fun. Health is not a concern for him and he is a big soda drinker. He sees iced tea as a flavor alternative to sodas, which is particularly well suited when he is very thirsty due to its “chuggable” nature and a more mature but less fun alternative to CSDs.t

* From Teixeira, Thales S., and Alison Caverly, “Pepsi-Lipton Brisk,” Harvard Business School case study no. 512-011 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing), 2011. Art by Josh Brown.

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Snow Globe 3 Peter Gizzi This house is older than the lilac trusses glistening in winter ice, older than the pack of Winstons on the wire chair, older than the chair as well as this glass of water

holding water. Is it older?

The house lurks under the sky, which has stood over it. A time when this patch was a field, deer maybe shat in it,

grazed a few leaves from a sprig, now fallen.

The house is covered in fresh snowfall, lovely

in reflected mercury light,

its weary glow damaging to the cardinal flirting between branches of a stalled ornamental maple. Where is my head

in this data? All this

indexical nomenclature. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not reassuring to know

the names tonight, lousy and grigri and non.

Just words to fill space older than a house, a bird,

this glass and my hand.

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[ S a lvos ]

Revolt of the Gadgets 3 Robert S. Eshelman

t’s a sweltering midsummer afternoon in Ismailiya, a city of 700,000 people that lies on the west bank of the Suez Canal halfway between Port Said to the north and the city of Suez in the south. Two hundred striking workers, some dressed in company coveralls, rally at a traffic circle on the edge of town. Several dozen soldiers, wearing camouflaged fatigues and combat helmets, form a cordon along the roadside, isolating the boisterous picketers to a patch of sunburned public park. Shade is scarce; the smell of sweat and dust drifts among the crowd. One of the strikers, the head of the local mechanics’ union, tells me, “Nothing has changed since we overthrew Mubarak. The regime is still in place and they are all against us. They stole from our nation for decades; now we want a share of the Canal’s wealth, but it’s like there is a counter-revolution going on.” His fellow workers crowd in and nod. These workers were part of the wave that in 2011 brought down Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt for the preceding thirty years. During the uprising that toppled the government, they walked off their jobs, delivering a clear message to Egypt’s political hierarchy—and the world—that the protests were more than some passing expression of youthful discontent. These laborers build and repair the ships that cross the canal each day. It’s hard work that forms the backbone of the $5-billion-a-year Suez Canal economy. Without them, the ships would remain dry-docked; the infrastructure of the waterway would crumble. The canal workers’ pay rarely tops $100 a month, though, so they are demanding a wage increase and the removal of the Canal Authority’s executive, a holdover from the Mubarak regime. And when these workers took to the streets, so did their fellow workers in Port Said and Suez, the two other centers for Canal industries. Look beneath the surface of the Egyptian uprising and you see thousands of other workers like the strikers in Ismailiya: textile and agricultural workers, professors on university campuses, and public sector employees. The protests that ousted Mubarak were, in part, spontaneous—sparked by the example of the so-called Arab Spring. But, in Egypt, the revolt reflected the organization, political sophistication, and clearly articulated demands of the trade unionist movement. American observers, however, did not see it that way. When viewed from Washington and New York, the overthrow of Mubarak obviously was the work of awesome new technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and smartphones. “New technologies have lubricated the

BILL LEWIS

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] mechanisms of revolt,” Nicholas Kristof bleated in the New York Times just after Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman announced Mubarak’s departure on February 11, 2011. “Facebook and Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of repression.” That political change naturally follows from technological innovation is a dogma beloved by the American media because, for one thing, it allows them to avoid the tough business of political analysis and reporting. It reduces puzzling events in faraway lands to advertising slogans for familiar products. Facebook: it liberates. The confusion of political power with marketing is not new to liberalism, which exaggerates the importance of public opinion. But today, the growth of social media and the disappearance of class from the consciousness of media commentators provoke a near-reflexive substitution of tech-hype for political analysis. “These days,” Kristof wrote last December, “Chinese traders, cellphones, DVDs, and CDs are already common in border areas of North Korea, doing more to undermine Kim’s rule than any policy of the United States.” Two months later North Korea executed a flawless patrilineal succession and Egypt marked the one-year anniversary of its revolt with a fresh volley of bullets and tear gas. Kristof, undaunted, turned to the tale of fourth-grade students in Massachusetts who used a website to petition for a plot change in a Hollywood movie. This banal tale, presented as the moral equivalent to government brutality, showed “how new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat some of the most powerful corporate and political interests around—by threatening the titans with the online equivalent of a tarring and feathering.” Beware those fourth graders! “They’ve already shown that the Web can turn the world upside down.”

or American pundits like Nicholas Kristof, new technologies didn’t merely amplify protest in Egypt, they were the protest, the devices without which the grievances of millions would go unheard, unseen. The theme was well nigh unanimous. The computer keyboard, handheld device, and Web avatar are the seeds from which human liberty arises. As Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post:

P. S . M U E L L ER

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Rarely has a generational schism been so vivid. The guns and old hardware of Mubarak’s regime versus the new software and nebulous nature of a digitally inspired revolt. Even speculating on what might happen next was beyond our primitive ken. Who knew what the next tweet might suggest or what wave of human movement it might inspire?

[ There was the inevitable Thomas Friedman, who wrote that text messages, Twitter, and Facebook “finally give [Arab youths] a voice.” There was the peerless Maureen Dowd, who just knew that Twitter and Facebook were “revolutionary tools.” Rather than investigating Egypt’s history of labor unrest or seeking to understand why millions of Egyptians took to the streets and risked their lives—more than eight hundred died in three weeks—the pundits focused on the eleven-day imprisonment of a former Google executive named Wael Ghonim. Ghonim was educated at a private school, grew up in one of the richest neighborhoods of Cairo, earned an MBA in marketing, and spent countless hours managing Facebook pages from his base in Dubai, and hence it was almost inevitable that he would be elevated to iconic status among Time’s 100 most influential people of 2011. Ghonim made valuable contributions to the uprising, and since the fall of Mubarak, he has pressed Egypt’s political movements to address the economic inequalities. But in the American media, the singular tale of the tech-hero crowded out the names, stories, and collective grievances of those eight hundred martyrs, who have at least as much to teach. Before Google and Facebook, it was any number of other new gadgets—the cassette tape, the fax machine, the VCR—elevated one after another to the leadership of other peoples’ revolutions. Commenting on the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, Alan Dershowitz attributed it to the fax, videotape, cellular phone, and computer modem: “The real news—and good news it is—is that for the first time, this new technology is being used to further freedom as well as to repress it.” Yongchuan Liu, writing in USA Today, directed dissidents to “Ready, aim, fax!” Michael Dobbs asserted in a Washington Post op-ed: “Perestroika has become a revolution by fax.” Overthrowing Fidel Castro, according to Jonathan Power, comes down to enabling telecommunications: “Washington should start by opening the phone lines and the fax—remember the catalytic role they played in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.” Garrett Graff of the New York Times claimed: “In Spain in 2004, text messages helped topple José María Aznar’s government after the Madrid train bombings.” Obama’s presidential victory, the birth of Iran’s Green Movement, the fall of Moldova’s Communist Party, and civilian election-monitoring in Russia were due to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, to smartphones, digital recorders, or cameras, or some combination, according to commentators including Friedman, Andrew Sullivan, and Clay Shirky. The Occupy Wall Street protests, too, have had their moment in the gaze of the cyber-utopians. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal has proposed that Occupy arose from its use of Application Programming Interface, a type of source code that, he argues, turns the nerdiest of software developers into conductors of mass political mobilization. Remember, this was a protest that punctured the hegemonic narrative of the free market; but, according to Madrigal, the protest’s success can be explained by the way Twitter users can structure information requests.

Before Google and Facebook, it was any number of other new gadgets—the cassette tape, the fax machine, the VCR—elevated one after another to the leadership of other peoples’ revolutions.

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] And the cyber-utopians just love tech CEOs, by the way. Madrigal quotes another journalist’s gloss: “OWS is against Crony Capitalism, not Capitalism. It’s FOR Entrepreneurial Capitalism . . . OWS has splits. . . . But most see Steve Jobs as a hero.” Got that? Occupy’s meaning, per Madrigal, arises not from Americans voicing their outrage. No: it all comes from a mysterious desire to imitate programmers’ code and respect for a corporate titan widely described as a tyrannical asshole. It’s a wonder no one has thought to attribute the 1848 revolutions to the invention of the daguerrotype.

he notion that information technologies are hardwired to oppose tyranny was stated most forcefully in überbanker Walter Wriston’s 1992 free-market manifesto Twilight of Sovereignty. A legendary former head of Citibank, Wriston was an early figure among economic elites trumpeting the power of technological innovation to transform all social, economic, and political relations. The Information Age, he wrote, has changed “the way the world works in ways at least as profound as occurred in the Industrial Revolution.” Wriston believed that the microchip, personal computer, and World Wide Web tilted automatically against coercive forms of power. And the coercive institution most squarely in Wriston’s crosshairs was the banker’s old enemy, government—any government, that is, no matter its composition or degree of popular support. Why? Because governments tax, they regulate, and they constrain a financial institution’s ability to speculate. More important for Wriston, governments limit the ability of you and I to live an unencumbered life of liberty, which is to say, of consumer choice. Buy online and you express your opposition to progressive taxation

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[ and policy brutality. View a Madonna video and you are voting to end bank regulation. In this way, Wriston founded a form of populism that finds expression through an integrated globalized economy. Put simply, it’s market populism—the weird idea that technology, liberty, and unregulated flows of capital represent the pinnacle of human ingenuity and freedom. The trifecta of free information, human liberty, and a globalized market came together, Wriston says, in any number of world historical events: the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, brought on by the VCR; the Shah’s flight from Iran, which happened because of the cassette tape; and the collapse of Communism, which came about because of Western television and radio transmissions. No government, Wriston argues, can withstand the pressure of populations with casual access to information technologies. Walter Wriston’s fantastic view of the future might be dismissed as a time capsule of nineties globalization euphoria—a delusion eventually kicked to the dustbin by the halving of a million 401(k) plans or the disappearance of millions of well-paying jobs, both brought to you courtesy of Wriston’s deregulated financial system. But no! The great banker’s ideas live on as the unexamined common sense of pundits. Reflecting on the protests in Athens, Cairo, Madrid, Moscow, New York, and Tehran, the New York Times reported on January 25 that “the only consistent messages seem to be that leaders around the world are failing to deliver on their citizens’ expectations and that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools allow crowds to coalesce at will to let them know it.” When the chattering class ignores the political agency of a society— whether Egyptian, Iranian, Chinese, Russian, or American—in order to claim that Mubarak or any other government was toppled by tweets, status updates, and video clips, they smuggle in an interpretation of events that reclaims those uprisings for Wriston’s deregulated form of turbo-capitalism. You may have been camped out in lower Manhattan, occupying Wall Street, but if you think that the protest was really just a flesh-and-blood API, or a human variation on open source software, in reality Wall Street is occupying you.

n contrast to the perverse view that information technology brought down Mubarak, a 2010 AFL-CIO report authored by Joel Beinin offers a concise history of Egyptian labor activism. The report provides quantitative support for Beinin’s claim that the labor movement formed the backbone of Egypt’s democracy movement, showing that the number of labor strikes and the number of workers participating in those strikes increased at a time when Egypt’s democracy movement remained small and adrift. “My argument would be,” Beinin says, “there was a rising tide of worker protest—not always politically or ideologically naming the neoliberal project—but in one way or another reacting to its consequences before the mobilization around democracy issues.” Leaf through Beinin’s report and the Egyptian uprising begins to The Baffler ! 105

] resemble the plain-old social-democratic movements that have rejected the Washington Consensus in Latin America, Greece, Europe, and by fits and starts in the United States over the past several years. Several polls released just prior to the outbreak of rioting found that Egyptians were less interested in issues related to cyber-access than in those related to the economy. Food prices were on the rise—up nearly 19 percent compared to the prior year, with key staples such as vegetables and bread rising 39 percent and 33 percent, respectively. The unemployment rate was officially 11.9 percent; among young people it was 25 percent, which was significant given that 75 percent of the population is under the age of thirty-five. Twenty-two percent of Egyptians live below the poverty line, another 20 percent hover just above it. Long before the January uprising, Egyptian workers were seeking to form independent trade unions, to halt the pace of privatization, to improve wages and working conditions, and to highlight the corruption of the regime. In 2007, 24,000 textile workers struck. University professors rose up in 2008, seeking a pay raise. Real-estate tax collectors in 2009 formed the first independent union in Egypt. Indeed, the April 6 movement, a leading democratic force in Egypt since before the fall of Mubarak, takes its name from the date of a nationwide general strike in 2008. “Workers were the first to pressure the regime for economic rights and freedom of association,” Mustapha Saeed, a representative of the International Trade Union Confederation, told me last June. “After the revolution the first thing the military council did was to criminalize strikes. What does it mean if the revolution doesn’t deliver workers the right to freely associate? Who were the classes that were oppressed under Mubarak? It wasn’t the lawyers. It wasn’t the investors. It wasn’t the upper class. If workers don’t achieve anything, this means nothing has changed. It means we’ve changed the names of the leaders, which means nothing.” During decades of dictatorship, Egypt liberalized its economy with privatizations, enterprise zones, and a retreat from consumer subsidies, and the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the military hierarchy is opposed to reversing this course. Workers, on the other hand, have a newfound energy and are pushing for improvements in wages and working conditions and are openly discussing how to redistribute the nation’s wealth. They are invisible in the United States because they are not new media activists. As Wael Ghonim writes in his recent memoir, Revolution 2.0, “reaching working-class Egyptians was not going to happen through the Internet and Facebook.” To American pundits, there’s no class divide in Egypt; only dreams of technology’s destiny to transform all social and economic relations. They’re completely wrong, though. “A lot of my friends and people I meet in Tahrir Square have been asking me, ‘What did social media really do?’” Ghonim said in a recent interview. Social media played a role, yes. “Yet this is not an Internet revolution,” he says. “It would have happened anyway. In the past, revolutions happened, too.”t 106 1 The Baffler

h No t e s

& Q uo t e s

Disposable Hip 3 G. Beato

nce upon a time the iPhone was to digital photography what Steve Wozniak was to the samba: it could perform, but it wasn’t pretty. But then Synthetic, LLC, a tiny design consultancy turned app maker, released Hipstamatic. Recognizing that the iPhone could never go pixel-to-pixel with a $3,000 Canon dSLR (or even a $300 Cyber-shot), Synthetic’s co-founders Lucas Buick and Ryan Dorshorst virtualized the device into a piece of junky, mass-market plastic from the seventies. The Hipstamatic interface mimicked the look of a Kodak Instamatic and allowed users to choose from an assortment of simulated lenses, film formats, and flashbulbs, all with the intent of producing artfully haphazard images. A Hipstamatic snapshot looked blurry, discolored, scratched, oversaturated, dark around the edges, faded, splotched, speckled—or, ideally, all of these. “Someone said that Hipstamatic took a shitty photo and made it shittier,” Buick told a group of journalists at Synthetic’s San Francisco headquarters in December 2011. “That was my favorite review.” Synthetic, along with embracing the limitations of the iPhone’s camera functionality, imposed limitations of its own in its effort to recreate the experience of using an analog camera. Instead of using the iPhone’s entire screen to display whatever scene a user intended to capture, the Hipstamatic showed that scene only through a small, simulated viewfinder, made users wait for a moment, as if the photos it took were developing, and offered no “undo” function or edit photos after the fact. Once you committed to a lens, a film format, a flashbulb, you got what you got, just like the analog world. Hipstamatic suggested a retrogressive appeal. It evoked a simpler-is-better past, an age where cheap, mass-produced plastic cameras were built to last. Apple added Hipstamatic to its App Store

J . D. K I N G

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It’s artisanal software, hand made by artschool hipsters who appear to like the paychecks and perks that come with platinum app sales just fine—but they aren’t hellbent on turning their millions into billions.

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on December 9, 2010—and it was an instant hit. “I stayed up for the next thirty-six hours straight to watch the sales,” Buick says. He and Dorshorst invested a grand total of $300 in developing Hipstamatic, some of which went toward Apple’s iOS Developer Program kit—and a bit more devoted to a fake blog detailing Hipstamatic’s ostensible genesis as a real-world plastic camera produced in limited quantities in the early eighties. (The creation myth furthered the latter-day hipster quest for authenticity through tragedy; in the introductory blog, readers learned the device had been hatched by two brothers from Wisconsin who were killed by a drunk driver before fully realizing their entrepreneurial vision.) But with the appeal of the app pitched at showing rather than telling, Hipstamatic didn’t need much of a marketing push. On its first day, Buick says, it was the bestselling app in Japan. A few weeks later, Apple featured it as a “new and noteworthy” product. Justin Timberlake and Tom Hanks reportedly shared Hipstamatic photos online, while the New York Times featured Hipstamatic photos of soldiers in Afghanistan on its front page. Apple reaffirmed its love for the product by declaring it its 2010 App of the Year. Rarely, if ever, had the Japanese, Steve Jobs, young Hollywood, old Hollywood, and America’s paper of record ever shown such a tastefully curated consensus. The rest of the world took note. In 2010, Synthetic sold more than one million copies of its basic $1.99 app, plus lenses, film formats, and flashbulbs bundled as “Hipstapaks” and sold for 99 cents each. In July 2010, the two founders, who’d met at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point while pursuing degrees in graphic design, moved to San Francisco. In December, they purchased a two-story building built in 1908. Fittingly enough for a company that has given new life to some of the design touches associated with the most famous corpses of analog photography, its new headquarters had passed much of the twentieth century as the warehouse for a coffin manufacturer. In its current incarnation, the building has concrete floors and brick walls. Weathered wooden beams run across the ceiling. The first floor is essentially set up as an art gallery, except that all the carefully hung artworks decorating the walls are framed advertisements for Synthetic’s newest app, something it calls Hipstamatic D-Series. At a recent launch event, Lucas Buick offered a recap of Synthetic’s history to date before unveiling the new product, but he didn’t seem all that driven to turn art, or more broadly, human expression, into commerce—at least not by contemporary Web standards, which hold that every tweet and status update is fair game for consumer profiling and targeted advertising. No, Synthetic’s business strategy seems pretty vintage, as quaint as a washed-out Polaroid snapshot of toddlers selling lemonade from behind a card table on their front lawn. It makes software and it charges a small fee for it—how 1987! Synthetic has twelve employees, and as one slide in Buick’s presentation stresses, the company has never sought out

g nor received any funding from venture capitalists. It sustains itself the old-fashioned, nostalgic way, by generating more revenues than expenses. It’s artisanal software, hand made by art-school hipsters who appear to like the paychecks and perks that come with platinum app sales just fine—but they aren’t hellbent on turning their millions into billions. And that’s one reason the freshly debuted Hipstamatic D-Series may be a little more interesting than it initially seemed. In his launch talk, Buick calls the app “the world’s first social camera.” To position it, he describes the ways disposable cameras are used at wedding receptions. Cameras are placed on tables, guests take turns shooting photos on them, and at the end of the night, the cameras are collected for the bride and groom, who then have a record of their big day, shot from multiple perspectives. “What if there was a way to shoot together like that digitally?” he asks.

-Series facilitates this. A single user downloads the app, which Synthetic will be offering for free at Apple’s App Store. After that user acquires the app, he invites others to “share” his virtual camera with him. If his friends accept the invitation, they’re able to access the camera on their own phones and take photos with it as well. While you can invite an infinite number of people to a single camera, the film roll that comes with the camera includes only twenty-four virtual exposures. Once a group of users takes twenty-four photos, the camera no longer works—the “D” in D-Series stands for “disposable.” And only when all twenty-four photos are taken do the users get to see any of them—a complete album is sent to their phones, and each person can post them to Facebook or Twitter, delete them, whatever. In part, the new software is an answer to Instagram, a similar app for the iPhone that debuted nearly a year after Hipstamatic but that now has a user base of more than fifteen million registered users, along with $7 million in funding from a number of Silicon Valley’s A-list venture capitalists. One reason Instagram grew so fast is because it’s free. Another is that in addition to letting you post photos to multiple platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Instagram also functions as a standalone social network on your phone. You can follow other Instagram users the same way you can follow users on Twitter, comment on their photos, search for Instagram images based on keywords, and so on. Finally, Instagram makes no effort to simulate the photo-taking experience of analog cameras in the way that Hipstamatic does. When you take a photo using Instagram, you see the image on the iPhone’s entire screen. You apply its filters after a photo is taken, and if you don’t like the results you get, you can undo your efforts as many times as you like and try again. In debuting its D-Series app to a shared community, Hipstamatic has edged closer to the Instagram model, but in embracing the notion of disposability, the company has struck a (modest) blow for finite expression in our info-glutted, digital age. In addition to offering the free version of D-Series, which includes only one lens, one film format, and one flashbulb, the company offers The Baffler ! 109

h D-Series cameras, which have different components and thus produce different effects, for 99 cents each. But remember, these are disposable cameras—shoot twenty-four photos and your camera stops working. If you want more film, you’ve got to pay another 99 cents. In a digital realm that has turned legions of quixotic entrepreneurs who dreamed of charging once for their content into beaten, broken shells of their former selves, Synthetic aims to charge its users twice, three times, a hundred times. And in a medium where content persists indefinitely, where the past is almost as closely at hand as the present, Synthetic wants to introduce disposability as a driver of profit. It’s a clever piece of conceptual art, from a company that is at least as intrigued by the intellectual and artistic ramifications of its business decisions as it is by its earning statements. The potential for blowback is large. Many app users think $2 should buy them unrestricted usage, bug-free updates, lifetime satisfaction. And Synthetic now wants to charge them 99 cents for a roll of film that doesn’t actually exist. And, for all its immateriality, is kind of skimpy too—only twenty-four photos!

Hipstamatic automated serendipity and chance imperfections.

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ver the last decade or so, as digital photography vanquished analog photography, analog photography has been fetishized in the way that dying technologies invariably are. Oppressed by ease of use, an infinite capacity to make images at no cost, endless post-processing options, and all the other upsides of digital image-capture technologies, contrarian shutterbugs sought solace in analog survivors like the Holga and the Lomo LC-A, which produced images that were often marked by lens flares, vignetting, double exposures, and other unpredictable glitches. Such characteristics, their advocates insisted, added a sense of warmth and spontaneity, an organic, humanizing touch to a medium that was getting a little too infallible. When Hipstamatic appeared, it catered to such notions, but it mocked them as well. It automated serendipity and chance imperfections. It made ubiquitous the sort of imagery that the Holga and the Lomo LC-A were able to produce only in sporadic fashion, and in doing so, it revealed that such imagery had been valued in part for its rarity instead of just its aesthetic virtues alone. When it was everywhere, it lost its charge. How could blurry, oversaturated cityscapes retain their sublime tastefulness if people who didn’t have degrees from RISD or Cranbrook were admiring them—or, worse, producing them? By marketing hipness, Hipstamatic devalued it. And yet here now is Hipstamatic D-Series, emerging as a potential antidote. The problem with the web and its associated technologies is that they have made it so easy to share information about ourselves that doing so begins to feel like an obligation, a sentence, a Sisyphean curse: another day, another photo of lunch to post. Unless, of course, we’ve already spent $20 on virtual film this week and can’t afford to buy anymore until Monday. What Hipstamatic D-Series makes clear is that scarcity can once again be ours. We just have to be willing to pay for it.t

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;Li v es

of the Pun dits

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic 3 Maureen Tkacik

Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep.

— Mary Baker Eddy

ot long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. All the unctuous little scabs who believe the future of words lies in rearranging them online would soon (inter alia) barge into the office of Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur to trumpet their e-vindication. But they evidently forgot to wonder how much of The Atlantic’s profitability owes to operating conferences, panels, and events like the 2010 Ideas Forum. These in-gatherings count as journalism only in the vague sense that they invite journalists to crowd into plushly appointed suites. At the Ideas Forum, The Atlantic’s own editorial staff was relegated to providing rapid-fire stenography services, to ensure the event was branded and promoted in real time on the website. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. What could anyone write about something so tyrannically dull— other than an angry elegy for the massacre of meaning? The average C-SPAN 3 segment is a crowd-pleasing cliffhanger by comparison. Mind flickering between rage and somnolence, I tried my best to keep awake 112 1 The Baffler

by writing notes. Here are some highlights, with names redacted to preserve the integrity of the tedium. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?”—there were two things, his interviewee insists—and occasional use of unauthorized verbiage like “re-regulate” to denote efforts to reverse the epochal dismantling of financial regulatory apparatus largely undertaken by the technocratic clique to which [Treasury Secretary] owes his entire career. [Obama Cabinet official], [Obama policy adviser], [billionaire CEO], [billionaire private equity tycoon], and [billionaire mayor] sing praises of [photogenic local schools chief whose extensive sackings of teachers and principals had been sufficiently unpopular with voters to have cost her boss the recent D.C. mayoral primary]. One refers to [recently released charter school propaganda-mentary] as her “Rosa Parks moment.” [Billionaire CEO] expresses dismay that “laws are written by lobbyists.” [Billionaire mayor] expresses indignation that some 40 percent of Americans do not pay income tax. [Prominent Democratic Lobbyist and his Lobbyist Wife] emphatically deny the notion that the “deck is stacked” against [public interest] under current system on the basis that “everyone has a lobbyist . . . nurses have lobbyists, unions have lobbyists, everybody has a lobbyist. Everyone in this audience has an iPhone or a PDA because lobbyists created a competitive system [that] enabled this whole industry to grow; lobbying can be very good for consumers.”

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“All the restless curiosity and faculties of [the] mind are irresistibly bent in one direction . . . : in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins . . .” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot The Baffler ! 113

; [Prominent Republican Lobbyist] waxes elegiac for bygone bipartisanship with an anecdote about his use of “surrogates” to obtain an implicit agreement from [former Democratic House speaker] to enforce a two-day limit on Congressional expressions of outrage over the decision of [former lame-duck Republican president] to pardon six individuals criminally charged in [high-profile byzantine secret arms trafficking/campaign finance/cover-up conspiracy] on behalf of his [former Defense Secretary and highest-ranking official to be criminally charged] client. An assurance in which Congressional Democrats guaranteed “two-day story” status to the controversy over a unilateral decision that effectively trashed a six-year investigation into [complicated conspiracy] to contravene Congress, could probably not, [Republican Lobbyist] theorized, be a realistic deliverable for a client contending with the present-day “toxic environment” on Capitol Hill. [Centrist Republican Senator] repeats the income tax thing.

Later it occurred to me that The Atlantic events are convened to attract and satisfy (by leaving slightly dissatisfied) a personality type I think of as the “omniscient gentleman,” after a passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, which pits a modern-day Christ figure referenced in the title, Prince Myshkin, against a backdrop of “omniscient” name-dropping philistines whose interior lives and true intentions are a mystery to him. Encountering his first Mr. Omniscient on a train, he marvels: all the restless curiosity and faculties of [his] mind are irresistibly bent in one direction . . . : in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins . . . The people of whose lives they know every detail would be at a loss to imagine their motives. Yet many of them get positive consolation out of this knowledge, which amounts to a complete

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science, and derive from it . . . their loftiest comfort and their ultimate goal, and have indeed made their career only by means of it.

Omniscient gentlemen have for most of the last century held exalted status on Madison Avenue, where their facility with community quotidiana is recognized as the stuff of highly effective persuaders, influencers, tastemakers, connectors, and miscellaneous other prophets of consumer trends. The Atlantic’s special subspecies of omniscient gentlemen is the “Thought Leader.” This is not to say all people identified as tastemakers or Thought Leaders share the propensities of practitioners of the omniscient sciences, but in any sphere of influence, the more omniscient types are the ones more naturally inclined to keep up the Thought Leader lists, and assign themselves a place at the top of them. I know of one wretched hack who lists “Thought Leader” as his occupation on his Twitter profile; he recently scored a fellowship with the American Enterprise Institute. Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. It is how you relate—the sort of Olympian free-associating that permits The Atlantic’s in-house Thought Leaders to cast America as Snooki, and “Jersey Shore” and “pessimism” as our ultimate obstacle to combating global warming. The one thought-provoking moment I experienced following the Thought Leader summit occurred during the penultimate— and only officially controversial—panel of the Ideas Conference, in which Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile/Jordanian bank fraud fugitive who planted many of the perambulatory news stories justifying the Iraq War, was interviewed by Sally Quinn, the recently deposed social columnist for the Washington Post. Quinn’s history with Chalabi had been longer than most on Capitol Hill; her father had been a General in the U.S. Army and had helped create its espionage ring, the Office of Strategic Services. Now both Quinn and Chalabi were—temporarily at least—social pariahs: she over a

; Washington Post column in which she purported to debunk a purportedly widespread belief that, with malicious forethought, she had scheduled her son’s wedding on the same day as the wedding of her husband’s granddaughter; Chalabi over his role in marshalling official misinformation that presaged the Iraq War and/or his possible employment as some sort of double agent for Iran. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies. Back then she hosted an epic “pajama” party— Quinn’s pajamas were lace and single-shouldered—for the newly elected congressman scion of the Quinns’ closest family friends, Barry Goldwater Jr., and thereby seduced (then Washington Post executive editor) Ben Bradlee into hiring/marrying her and leaving his second wife. In the moderate-pensive tone of voice with which you ask a close friend if there is something you are going to need to lie about on his behalf, Quinn asked Chalabi soberly about the nature of his relationship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, expressing her disapproval of the Iranian president’s subscription to 9/11 truther conspiracy theories. Chalabi laughed the whole thing off, noting “such views are commonly held in the region.” This may have been the summit’s first acknowledgement of a region outside the Newseum walls. But what stuck with me was Quinn’s opening question/soliloquy: [You’ve] been pronounced dead politically and literally dead–physically–so many times that you can’t count them. So how do you explain your survival? How are you still here? You’ve had assassination attempts, you’ve had death threats, you’ve been in, you’ve been out, you’ve been up, you’ve been down, you’ve been rejected by your political system, you’ve been rejected by the American political system. And still you’re a member of the Parliament, you’re now part of the political power structure in Iraq. What accounts for that?

Chalabi sat, placid and smiling and radiating a remarkable balance of the chakras. I am almost ashamed to say that in the moment I wondered idly about his astrological sign.

Revisiting the moment a year later when he made headlines for defending the protesting Shias in Bahrain, I wondered whether anything distinguished him from the countless multiple-passport-carrying urbane mobsters who pass through the Capitol every few months for the ritual taxpayer shakedown. Then suddenly it was over, and The Atlantic’s own godfather, David G. Bradley, was marching toward David Weigel, a young and prolific journalist specializing in Republican politics who had recently made a name for himself getting fired and rehired by the same media company within several weeks. For Bradley, this shift in nameplates apparently constituted a Chalabi-caliber show of resilience: “DAVID!!!!! So good to see you!” “Hello, David.” “David, you really came back swinging, didn’t you!?!!! You were out for all of, what, a week??? But now you’re back!!!” “Well, I mean, it was actually a few weeks, and it really screwed up my health insurance ...” “David, I just want you to know I’ve been scheming ways to deploy you here for quite some time now! Now, of course I realize you may be enjoying your present . . . deployment!” “Well I mean, heh, I did just start . . .” “But David, let me tell you this. David, I know you think your mastery is politics. But I think . . . I think your mastery . . . ” Dramatic pause. “. . . may be . . . mastery.” “Oh uh, thanks . . .” “Do you know what I mean, David?” Bradley finished, gliding out the door. “It’s the same thing with David Brooks. He thought his mastery was politics, but his mastery was actually, whatever he put his mind to. Think about it, David!” And then he was gone.

avid Bradley, The Atlantic’s owner, is inveterately omniscient and by all accounts almost pathologically a gentleman, which is odd when you remember—and you are bound to forget that when he is kissing the foot of some pimply blogger—that he The Baffler ! 115

; has already monetized his unique skill set to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars. Bradley, however, seems to relish the courtship of mastery. As part of what he claims is a research project, he mails surveys to editors soliciting intel on local talent supplies, requesting that the editors rank on a scale of one to ten, or distinguish between “exceptional talent” and mere “talent,” lists of names he has culled in prior efforts. He also scouts for career changers: one sad intern spent a summer in the mid-aughts compiling a spreadsheet indicating the location and employment status for every president and vice president of every extracurricular club to have graduated from any of the eight Ivy League schools in the previous decade. Bradley “spent more than 200 hours discussing his ideas with 80 journalists around the country,” according to the New York Times, before he filled the magazine’s editor-in-chief position with James Bennet, then the Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief. For all the ostensible objectivity and scientific rigor of the magazine’s questing spirit, The Atlantic’s definition of talent seems to correlate to: a current fellowship at the New America Foundation or any of the other indistinguishably centrist think tanks, though, preferably, one with a brand (i.e., “Daniel Indiviglio is the 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the Philips Foundation”); an ability to channel one’s talent into the mastery of meritless and preposterous (“counterintuitive”) arguments, deliberately obtuse rebuttals, and miscellaneous pseudointellectual equivocation/ noise on topical issues; and proven seniorlevel mastery of aforementioned mastery as demonstrated either by radical shamelessness or the pious and deeply felt earnestness of a motivational speaker. The New America Foundation was founded in 1999 by Michael Lind, Sherle Schwenninger, and Ted Halstead, who explained at the time: “My starting premise was that the old ideologies don’t make sense anymore.” Because, Lind elaborated: “You look at people like Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol . . . you could make a living writing for 116 1 The Baffler

magazines, really an upper-middle-class living, writing for purely intellectual magazines in the forties and fifties.” This was a stretch. Both Bell and Kristol were liberally subsidized by the CIA, which financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose flagship “intellectual magazine” Encounter Kristol edited in London and whose fancy international seminars were organized by Bell, who also worked a day job at Fortune and who brokered a deal with Henry Luce to promote in Time Inc. magazines (and thereby further subsidize) the intellectual output of CCF-affiliated intellects. The institutional network that supported those guys and their friends was not much different from the one that now connects up The Atlantic, the New America Foundation, and the Aspen Institute, keeping dozens of public pseudointellectual hacks in six-figure salaries. In lieu of the CIA, the funding for such ideas-synergy comes from corporations. Certainly, these think tanks are not ideologically different from those that hosted the cultural Cold Warriors of the fifties. No one knows this better than Bradley, a man whose personal history comports so perfectly with the rigors of Cold War cultural combat that he may seem like a Manchurian magazine magnate, with his father Gene Bradley—who enthusiastically endorsed, and possibly helped to invent, Korean War theories of mind control—resembling Angela Lansbury’s character.

ene Bradley’s career as a professional Cold Warrior began before Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, in a concentration camp in Linz, Austria. There, as an army press officer for General Mark Clark after VE day, he inspected the mass graves of emaciated bodies and “shoved it deep down into my mind,” where, he later wrote, “it remained until I saw the movie Schindler’s List.” A new enemy kept him preoccupied, mostly at General Electric, where he served in a string of posts in what was the premier public relations struggle against the twin enemies of “Russia abroad, labor at home,” as GE’s

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CEO Charlie Wilson famously explained the company’s messaging mission to Harry S. Truman in 1946. After a stint at the famed ad agency BBDO and as a Pentagon flack, Bradley began at GE in 1953, just a year before his department recruited its most famous hire, Ronald Reagan, who toured the company’s aerospace plants as a motivational speaker and eventually as an evangelist for the free-market system. Reagan’s turn away from the ardently pro–New Deal politics he’d espoused as leader of the Screen Actors Guild was largely masterminded by GE’s labor relations chief, Lemuel Boulware, a high minister of the open shop. Boulware made it his business to be best known behind the scenes—though he once bemoaned Truman’s abortive veto of the anti-union Taft-Hartley law as another demonstration of the “economic illiteracy” that caused Americans to embrace socialism at home “while spending $20 billion in business tax money to battle communism abroad.”

Boulware was a career marketing guru, and he saw unions as fundamentally a problem of “thought leaders.” If a figure like Reagan could succeed in overthrowing labor leaders as designated opinion-makers, he reasoned, why, no one would bother joining a union in the first place. But thought-leading government, which was to be Gene Bradley’s job, was a bit trickier, as it required a Thought Leader to mix in much more sophisticated circles and to drop all the boilerplate about the ills of big government. In this mission Bradley excelled, founding General Electric Forum, a “defense intellectual” quarterly mouthpiece for decorated hawks to oppose the opposition to the military industrial complex; spending a year on loan to the Peace Corps under Sargent Shriver; and keeping enough distance from hard-core Boulwarism to earn an obligatory accusation of communist sympathies from the John Birch Society, according to the memoir he self-published in 2003, The Story of One Man’s Journey In Faith. The memoir is discombobulating reading, in part because this lifelong PR man is not the most reliable narrator, possibly also because his memory, in storing and accessing its inventory so selectively, has disabled some of the required capabilities. But if you focus on the omniscient sciences, some remarkable details shake loose. He mentions (in the context of a strange Vietnam War propaganda project) that one of his longtime closest friends was Frank Barnett, a Kremlinologist known mainly for heading a covert project to indoctrinate American soldiers using (inter alia) Birch literature in a bizarre project that had been deemed vital for preserving the national interest on the basis of a PR disaster that had roiled the Pentagon during Gene’s tenure there in 1953: the incomprehensible defection of twenty-one American prisoners of war to Red China. He mentions the episode at the end of Journey in Faith, albeit in terms that bear little resemblance to reality. He writes: There is more truth than fiction in the substance of [The Manchurian Candidate.] This was The Baffler ! 117

; revealed to me when I was an Air Force officer reviewing the studies that examined why so many American soldiers submitted to brainwashing by the communists during the Korean War and surrendered passively without a shot being fired. The research study that I read documented why the communists could succeed in brainwashing American GIs: because these American soldiers had never been taught the fundamentals of America. They had not been taught the facts of American history. They did not know our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, or American history, so when the crunch came, when pushed to the wall by ruthless interrogators, they had no core values to which they could hold. In truth they did not know why they were fighting, or even if America was worth fighting for.

In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation. It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightfor118 1 The Baffler

ward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.” This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists. Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby-Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation. Nearly every page of Journey in Faith is bound to set off the intrigue detector of anyone who knows how the Cold War was won; names dropped include Treasury secretaries, CIA directors, senators, Iranian emissaries, shadowy KGB heavies, Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, and a Ku Klux Klan leader who converted to Christianity in jail after reading Mein Kampf. Gene Bradley’s memoir is loaded with people who qualify as Triple AList Thought Leaders—but it presents them without any narrative, context, or meaning that might leave the casual reader with any thought other than the obvious, Wow, David Bradley’s father was a big-time spook. But Gene’s

; odd foray into the student left might also leave readers thinking, Wow, here’s a vision of corporate-backed agitprop that can be unselfconsciously deployed in any setting or model of ideological conflict—no matter how unlikely or surreal.

avid Bradley was groomed for greatness. One day in the early sixties, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the future CIA director who taught David in Christian Science Sunday School class, breezily told his mother that her son was destined to be president. After all, his favorite hymn, penned by Mary Baker Eddy herself, began: Shephard, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep.

Gene, meanwhile, was bent on winning public distinction for his frail son, all but ordering him to embark on an all-but-winless career on the wrestling team at Washington’s elite Quaker private school, Sidwell Friends, and stressing the mutability of personal identity as a key to success. “If you were to ask me, ‘What has been the secret of David’s success?’ I would skip all the biographical data and simply say, ‘David has worked to become the man he is today just as Marion Michael Morrison worked to become John Wayne.’” Military intelligence professionals, the mind-cure faith, and a changeling, domineering father—it was the sort of upbringing that suffused Bradley’s young life with a sort of spooky dullness. After watching Richard Nixon’s resignation catch so many family friends financially unawares—and experiencing no small amount of personal disillusionment as a gung-ho intern in the Nixon White House—he decided to work on his war chest before going into politics, his first love. (Bradley’s latter-day interest in politics, by the way, should not be taken to mean he harbors any definite political convictions; on the contrary, one of the professed sources of his admiration for writerly “talent” is his own inability to form an opinion on most political issues: “I define the middle,” he has said.)

Upon completing Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, and a Fulbright scholarship in the Philippines (devoted to researching the mindset of the colonial Marxist guerillas), David returned to Washington to enroll in law school and to help Gene found a think tank called the International Management and Development Institute. When it came time for David to found his own business in 1979, he visualized a firm with all the affectations of a Washington think tank—down to the drab name, Research Council of Washington—but structured to turn a profit. He later renamed it the Advisory Board Company, which spun off the Corporate Executive Board, and those two generated a multitude of generic-sounding subsidiary Councils, Boards, and Forums. One of Research Council’s first hires assumed from the classified ad that Bradley was operating a “front for a right-wing organization.” It’s still hard to say, at this late date, whether the joke was on that fledgling knowledge worker. Whatever sort of organization was operating behind the fronts, its mission and culture were militantly corporate. Research Council grew quickly into a clearinghouse for corporate intelligence, offering modestly priced subscriptions to companies on condition of participation in their “best practices research” surveys. When Bradley filed in 1998 to cash out $150 million by taking Corporate Executive Board public, he was uncharacteristically blunt about his intention to sell out and leave the company altogether; investors did not seem to care, giving full credence to the prospectus’s promise that the “Company does not believe that in-house research and analysis departments at individual corporations could obtain, at any price, similar information from other corporations about their management practices.” Or in other words: civilization cannot be sustained by propaganda and fraud alone. There needs to be available, at the right moment and for the right price, someone to take you by the hand and show you the “best practices” for dancing around the bullshit. At the core of David Bradley’s corest The Baffler ! 119

; competency is the grace with which he makes this pitch over and over again, as in the 2009 memo he addressed to The Atlantic’s editorial staff defending the magazine’s off-the-record “salon dinners” for Thought Leaders: Perhaps the guests merely are being polite, but the uniform comment—on leaving or in thank you notes—is that they find no other place for such purposeful, engaged, constructive conversation across walls . . . . The decision to convene our dinners off-the-record was made at the outset . . . . we were hoping to avoid the “canned remarks and rehearsed sound bites” that come with much public-policy discussion. My own view is that there is a great deal of constructive conversation that can take place only with the promise that no headline is being written. Everyone—maybe even especially journalists—relies on this confidence in his day-to-day work.

Observe now the degeneration of a magazine that once published Henry James and Mark Twain into an elaborate loss leader-cum-demand-creation mechanism for an event-planning operation whose chief selling point is the promise that you’ll never read about it in the media, where certified Thought Leaders risk the loss of their health insurance for saying anything less than ultracanned and überphony. It is, indeed, a thing of mastery. Imagine the spike in eager inquiries that the in-house team choreographing The Atlantic’s secret dinner parties must have fielded after this memo. And with this sort of triple-threat propaganda triumph in view, the otherwise baffling success of this once reputable magazine grows clear. Of course The Atlantic is a turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy, a repository of shallow, lazy spin, and regular host of discussion forums during which nothing is discussed. It is, in every formal trait, a CIA front. Well, how do you think their own retinue of Thought Leader enablers are able to sell so many tickets to all those fancy off-therecord dinners? Not by hiring the sort of “talent” who would be in any danger of talking to me! 120 1 The Baffler

pook shop or not, The Atlantic’s soothing IV drip of frictionless, borderless, culturally agnostic thought-output plays a useful scrambling role in the context of unmitigated national crisis. A featured Atlantic contributor can be counted on—without interference from any known machinery of coercion—to wax incredulous when the current GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, for example, pleads with the audience at a competing Thought Leader conference to spearhead a manufacturing revival. The Bradley-subsidized chattering class instinctively knows to tune out altogether more articulate assessments of our plight, such as former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s withering indictment of free-market dogma in a summer 2010 Bloomberg Businessweek cover story. Grove blamed the economic malaise on a sick cultural deification of “the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world” at the expense of anyone involved in what happened afterward. His lament was the most eloquent tribute to the symbiosis of design and production and imagination and reality I’d read since Mao’s 1937 essay “On Practice,” which declared “man’s knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production.” The Thought Leaders of our own political leadership class would never know about Grove’s broadside, though—it was greeted by a Washington-wide wall of silence. (Indeed, the one wayward D.C. player who did take it to heart—former SEIU chieftain Andy Stern— was reduced to imploring unsympathetic readers of the Wall Street Journal op-ed section to search online for Grove’s essay some sixteen months after it appeared.) What mystified Grove was the assertion, voiced by the economist Alan Blinder and others, “that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” This was not only inhumane, Grove declared; it was idiotic. But it is why the ideas, so-called, that inspire the omniscient gentlemen of The Atlantic are flat: their world is, literally, flat. Habitual “bipartisanship” has given way to a tendency to level the playing field between

; reality and fiction. And so in The Atlantic’s account of America’s present crisis, Hanna Rosin wonders whether it was not deregulation or securitization that caused the financial crisis, but . . . Christianity; and James Fallows suspects America’s awareness of its own decline is merely “our era’s version of the ‘missile gap.’” It’s as though, in purging labor from the ranks of accredited Thought Leaders, they have eradicated thought itself. Meanwhile, in China, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation mourns the death of Steve Jobs with a breathless blog post about an epiphany he has just experienced while scouring the local Thought Leader horizon for signs of a counterpart to his late greatness: But one of the things I find odd is that the Chinese basically have a person who is their Steve Jobs. I don’t mean someone who created a line of products that we have all become addicted to and which have changed our world—but rather a leader who saw a future, went against the tide, and used the levers of influence he had to gamble on a complete retro-fitting and relaunch of China. I’m talking, of course, about Deng Xiaoping.

Comrades: I hope that you want to throw up now, because I have run clean out of bile to waste on the mental morlocks who think up this sort of shit.

rving Kristol’s cofounder at Encounter, the British poet Stephen Spender, was the sole member of the CCF clique to be truly traumatized by the revelation that his beloved project was a CIA front. Then, in the early aughts, he was doubly insulted, via the revelation that George Orwell had on his

deathbed listed his name on a painstakingly compiled list of “fellow travelers” whom the author suspected would conspire with the enemy in the event of a Soviet invasion—but only because he was “impressionable” that way. Natasha Spender later likened her husband to Prince Myshkin the gentle idiot. And I believe her, with one reservation: no one is too gullible to be unafraid of poverty. As a child in China toward the end of Deng’s rule, I remember hearing about the Korean War POWs. Without any ideological mis-education to obstruct or distort my perceptions, it seemed obvious that the most remarkable thing about the defectors was their willingness to relinquish their American citizenship to remain in a country that was so unbelievably poor. Not until college would I begin to grasp America’s own brand of poverty, and not until I spent the aftermath of the financial crisis among the bailout revisionists and inequality denialists of the omniscient D.C. elite would I recognize in myself the abiding fury the defectors professed.* Even as they so dearly missed ice cream, they elected to turn their backs on the demeaning propaganda machine that questioned their manhood, insisted they’d been brainwashed, and portrayed the Chinese enemy as robots programmed to commit gratuitous self-sacrifice in the service of world domination. Thousands of miles from home, they figured out that to be American in such an epoch was to get screwed over and defrauded by the self-appointed high priests of Patriotism. Somewhere along the way, someone had put it in their minds that they didn’t need to take it—and it’s a safe bet that he didn’t sound anything like Mao.t

* The whole topic of POWs in Korea is one of those historical subplots about which the facts were so utterly devoured by the accelerating avalanche of misinformation that they may have been irretrievably lost. At some point, the Pentagon shifted its initial explanation for the defection—Chinese brainwashing—to appoint a larger responsibility to the defectors’ generally corrupt characters and barbaric behavior. By 1958, this low attack metamorphosed into an indictment of all-American soldiers who served in the war; the report was leaked to a New Yorker writer who expanded the “findings” into a book, In Every War But One, which has since been pretty convincingly debunked. Strangely, when the writer Dwight Macdonald referred to that Pentagon report in an essay that same year in the CIA-founded literary propaganda outlet Encounter, it became the only piece the Agency itself killed from an issue. More significantly, the Worst Generation narrative was marshaled to justify many billions of dollars on both brainwashing research and practice—an area in which the Agency was already heavily invested. Later that year, microbiologist Frank Olson fell from a tenth-story window, a strange event that conveniently kept him from publicizing the details of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control experimentation. Most basic truths about that operation have been spun and shredded, brainwashed, and poisoned out of existence. The Baffler ! 121

M y Own Little Mission A Mouthful 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [part 4]

lessed were the times of totalitarian dictatorships and information blockades! Today, thanks to the Information Revolution, barely a day goes by without a disturbing piece of news unnerving me. If every revolution eats its children, then this one, the Information Revolution, is the bloodiest of all. I mean, who ever really knew what a tsunami was, let alone had heard of the region where it hit? In the old days, who knew who had mugged and robbed whom? These kinds of stories nibble away at my hard-won reserves of internal peace. In communist dictatorships, people lived longer and healthier lives. Promised a brighter future, many were convinced they’d live to see its dawn. The reality is that excessive information exposure is more harmful than radiation. The fall of communism, globalization, the incontestable hegemony of capitalism, and Francis Fukuyama with his end of history have ruined the health of millions. Bubba, my countryman, spends most of his day voluntarily hooked up to every available source of information. Bubba’s daily phone calls raise my drowsy consciousness to a state of emergency. “Hello, you there? Get yourself to the bank, quick.” “Why?” “Withdraw the lot.” “There’s nothing to withdraw.” “Christ, you must have something!?” “Loose change.” “Take it out!” “But why?” “Buy provisions.” “What kind of provisions?” “You know, food.” “What kind of food?” “Flour, oil, tinned stuff, dough, zwieback, definitely zwieback . . . Didn’t you ever do the weekly shopping with your mom?!” Actually, I do remember. On the first of the month, Dad would fetch a canvas satchel and we’d all go grocery shopping together. Mom would buy just enough to see us through to the next payday: oil, flour, rice, pasta. Mom’s pantry was a place of wonder: lined up in neat orderly rows were jars of preserves, jams, pickles, paprika, beetroot, sacks of potatoes, small casks of sauerkraut, smoked bacon, crackling, ham, jars of lard and honey, little boxes of cookies . . . “Don’t forget the garlic.” “Why garlic?!” “In case of riots and a police crackdown.” “What’s garlic got to do with the police?!” “If you’re out and about and there’s a riot, you can rub the garlic 122 1 The Baffler

into a scarf and cover your mouth and nose. Garlic’s great against teargas.” “What are you on about?” “Buy batteries, a transistor radio, a torch, a pocket knife, and a few essentials from the local camping store.” “But why?!” “Haven’t you heard of nine meals from anarchy?” The phrase “nine meals from anarchy” was apparently coined by Lord Cameron of Dillington in the hope of rousing shoppingdrunk British consumers from their slumber. Let’s imagine, for instance, that one day there’s no gas at the pump. Trucks wouldn’t be able to make their daily food deliveries to the supermarket. And given that almost no one keeps provisions at home, it’s estimated that the food on supermarket shelves would go in three days. At three meals a day, we’d have only nine meals before total anarchy. Things are, of course, much more complex. It’s a matter of chain reactions. Every increase in the price of petrol increases food production costs, and increased production costs increase the price of the product. Chaos would ensue if cash machines crashed for a day. Nobody keeps cash at home anymore. But things are, of course, much more complicated still. Today, the crisis is all-pervasive, and unemployment is all-pervasive, and this means that hunger is crouching at the door of millions of people—those who don’t have the faintest idea what hunger is. Because, until now, hunger has always been somewhere else. On television reports of starving African children covered in burly flies. A few years ago I was in Sofia, in Bulgaria. The acquaintance I was staying with lived downtown in a typical East European apartment block. Thirty years ago they were pretty apartments—that much is apparent from the spaciousness and the detailing. The apartment was now in a desperate state of disrepair. We went onto the balcony for a cigarette. On the neighbouring balcony, I noticed an unusual wire contraption. “What’s that?” “Ah, that’s our ingenious neighbour,” said my acquaintance. “He hunts pigeons with it. He made it himself.” “What does he want with pigeons?” My acquaintance laughed tartly and shrugged her shoulders. “A lot of people are struggling here . . . ,” she said.

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It’s been a few years since that conversation on a Sofia balcony, but at this moment I remember that resourceful Bulgarian with respect. Things have changed in the space of several years. Even I’ve wised up recently, in every respect. I’ve honed my consumer instincts, and for the first time in my life I’ve started comparing prices and am more than willing to travel a little further if it means saving a few pennies. I recently bought a load of Dutch cans of condensed milk at about a dollar and a quarter a can. The cans are identical to the old Soviet ones; Russians called the contents zguschenka. From a single can of zguschenka you could make a liter of milk. Unlike the Dutch cans, the Russian cans didn’t have an expiration date, edible for eternity. As far as pigeons go, I’m resolute there: but no way, ever. Pigeons are revolting. “You’re right,” says Bubba. “Set limits. It doesn’t matter how hungry you are; don’t ever ingest what revolts you.” Thank God I’ve got a copy of the Croatian translation of the famous Apicius cookbook. Flamingo was one of the greatest delicacies on the ancient Roman table, and, luckily, Amsterdam Zoo is full of the elegant pinkie-coloured birds. Flamingo needs to be boiled a little first, then you flavor it with spices, douse it with white wine, and put it in the oven. Pheasant doesn’t hold a candle to flamingo. Amsterdam’s parks are hopping with hundreds of thousands of rabbits, and numerous flocks of plumpish ducks paddle the canals. For now, it seems, there’s no reason for concern. The Dutch were long kind to immigrants. They’re not anymore. But there are some exceedingly cunning fauna that manage to flout the strict legal controls, sneaking their way in undocumented. That’s what happened a year or so ago when, tired of the long south-north flight, a gaggle of Egyptian geese landed on Dutch soil and decided to set up camp. The feathery Egyptian felons would have gone unnoticed had a few articles not appeared in the tabloids about how these brawny Egyptian geese were threatening their autochthonous counterparts with extinction. I’ve got no idea what an autochthonous Dutch goose looks like, but I’ve clocked the Egyptian geese sauntering around the neighborhood tram stop. Egyptian geese are unusually chunky, so as you approach the tramlines, it’s as if there are big clumps of snow lying there. Yes, things have changed: today, immigrants are good to the Dutch. Like I said, I’ve honed my instincts. I run the scenarios in my head. I’ve got a Plan B up my sleeve and a Plan C under development. Apart from the kidnapped flamingos, rabbits, and ducks of unidentified origin, and renegade Egyptian geese, lately I’ve been eyeing my Chinese next-door neighbor. He’s youthful, compact, shortish, has supple joints, toned, tanned calves (he wears shorts in the summer!), a cute face, and smooth skin. My Dutch neighbor on the other side I don’t give a second look: he’s my age, gone to seed, has big ashy eyelids, and an unhealthy complexion. All in all, more sausage than steak.t (Part 5 begins on page 174.)

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The

Baffler 1 Steve Brodner

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Downtown (Double) Crossing: The open pit, taking the place of Fileneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Basement, is a joint production of Vornado Realty Trust and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino.

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T O R I E S

Give Her to Me 3 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

his Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, “Fifth” and “Tenth,” so named as a joke. Misha survived by moonlighting at clubs with various bands. On stage he wore a lace blouse and a fake bust, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. That spring, he was hired to write a score for a senior show at a drama school, an assignment for which he got paid by the hour, next to nothing. He wrote in his kitchen at night, while his wife’s family, which unanimously despised Misha, slept nearby. Now enters our second character: an extremely thin and unattractive senior at the drama school. Karpenko (that was her last name) was one of those unfortunate creatures forced to compensate for her appearance with a pleasant disposition and a carefree attitude. She was accepted to the school for her undeniable talent, but a successful actress needs other qualities—no one quite knows exactly what they are—feminine charm, perhaps, or steely ambition. Karpenko was as humble as a beggar. While her classmates rode off with their admirers in expensive cars, Karpenko inspired interest solely from her graying professors of vocal and dance. Although she practiced at the barre every day, her frog-like appearance condemned her to roles of servants and old ladies who neither sang nor danced. Luckily, Karpenko was assigned the part of a horse, with a little dancing but no singing, in the senior show Getting Matches, which was based on a Finnish novel. Her vocal professor insisted that Karpenko perform one short song. As there were no songs in the play, Karpenko and Misha met in an empty auditorium to write one. Misha created a catchy tune, and Karpenko assembled some lyrics. Misha, impressed, batted his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. 128 1 The Baffler

Karpenko, blind with happiness, flew to her dorm. No one had ever looked at her with such admiration. She grew up in the Far North, in a family of former political exiles. Her ancestors owned country estates and danced in their own ballrooms, but now the family counted four children; the mother worked as a nurse; and they all survived thanks to their vegetable patch. The Karpenko women were known for their reticence and regal beauty, but the little froggy took after the father, a bush pilot who left his family when he retired. A little later Karpenko departed for the capital to become an actress and her mother seemed to forget her. They didn’t meet for five years. Between her village and the capital, one rode on a train for seven days, then on a bus for thirty-six hours, then on another bus, which sometimes didn’t run, for seven more. Froggy’s letters went unanswered for three, four months.

isha and Karpenko had a fruitful collaboration, and at the end of March the play was performed in front of the faculty and students. The maestro praised the part of the horse, especially her tap dance, and the professor of vocal bored everyone with a lecture on how to teach singing to students with insufficient talent. The audience loved the horse and yelled bravo. Misha and Karpenko, both exhausted, took a long time packing their music and texts. When they were finished, the subway was closed. They walked up to the attic, and there, on an old mattress, Misha for the first time betrayed his wife, and Karpenko became a woman. That summer their play was performed at a student festival in Finland, where Karpenko won best supporting actress. Her diploma, written in Finnish, was displayed at the department. The maestro selected a new professional company from the graduates. Municipal authorities allowed them to use a warehouse

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w on the city outskirts. Maestro’s old friend, Mr. Osip Tartiuk, became the company’s general manager. He proceeded to cast a new play, as Finnish singing horses couldn’t be expected to attract much interest in that blue-collar neighborhood or among the theater’s municipal benefactors. Karpenko didn’t win the job. Tartiuk liked his women fat; on every heavy derrière he commented, “What a centaur!” At the banquets, after the third glass, he liked to confess that he was interested only in a large butt. The unemployed Karpenko tried this and that, and finally got hired to sell vegetables at a big outdoor food market, two days a week. Her situation was dire—she was four months pregnant. She rented a cot in the kitchen of an alcoholic couple who were themselves children and grandchildren of alcoholics. Pasha was the husband’s name. His enormous wife was called Elephant. Their two sons were currently in jail. In the summer, the couple paraded in shorts and lavender sun hats donated by some international aid organization, and hunted promising spots for cans and bottles like experienced mushroom pickers. In the winter, Pasha and Elephant impersonated blind beggars. They stashed their equipment—dark glasses, two canes, and, for some reason, a dog’s leash—under Karpenko’s cot, behind her suitcase. Luckily, Elephant never cooked; she visited the kitchen where Karpenko lived only by mistake, when she roamed the apartment on the verge of delirium tremens. At night, the couple relaxed in the company of selected neighbors. Their room filled with the local elite—prominent alcoholics and their girlfriends in various stages of decline. The excluded spent the night banging on their broken-down door. These soirees invariably ended in fights that were occasionally attended by sleepy patrolmen. Every day, Karpenko scrubbed the toilet and the tub. She replaced the broken glass in the kitchen door with thick plywood. At night, she stuffed her ears with soft wax, like Odysseus on his ship. 130 1 The Baffler

Once, she dropped by the new theater dorms and left some fruit for the girls. Just in case, she also left her new address. Misha soon discovered her location, and came to see her. She had nothing for him to eat, beyond some potatoes and carrots, which she was allowed to bring home from the market where she worked. Misha stayed the night but he couldn’t sleep because of the drunken screaming and banging; in the morning, he scrambled away as soon as the subway reopened. Karpenko, who hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy, didn’t expect him back. Three days later, Misha reappeared with a keyboard. While he performed his score for Karpenko, the landlords and their visitors gathered outside the kitchen door and treated themselves to an impromptu dancing party, obviously approving of Misha’s music. Karpenko, inspired, pulled out her most precious possession, an old typewriter, and wrote a play.

t that time, theaters were interested only in plays translated from Italian. Misha and Karpenko invented an author: “Alidada Nektolai, as translated from the Italian by U. Karpui.” Their cast included a philandering lawyer and his skinny wife; the wife’s girlfriend, who slept with the lawyer and was married to the mayor; the mayor and his mafia friends, named Kafka, Lorka, and Petrarch; and so on. The heroine was a beautiful aspiring singer named Gallina Bianca. Misha observed that Karpenko would never get the lead, and so they created a character for her, a television executive named Julietta Mamasina who spoke entirely in Elephant’s morning monologues. One day Elephant returned home covered in bruises and carrying a box of powdered milk that she’d discovered in a dumpster behind an expensive supermarket—that dumpster was a serious battlefield. Pasha and Elephant sent a few packages to the market with Karpenko. But no one wanted to buy expired milk, and Elephant lost interest in the box. (Her guests did try to snack on the powder along with their vodka, but the mix made them itchy.)

P E TE R M IT U R I C H

The milk was left for the undernourished Karpenko, who added to her diet of raw carrots and beets, cottage cheese, and one boiled egg, a serving of oatmeal cooked with milk. The play was retyped, the songs recorded, and the arrangement copyrighted. Misha went to see the theater’s general manager, Mr. Osip Tartiuk, who received the play with indifference. Three days later, however, Tartiuk invited Misha to a staff meeting, where Misha sang and played his heart out. The play was accepted on the spot. Everyone was pleasantly excited, until Misha announced that Alidada Nektolai demanded four thousand dollars for his play. Osip nearly lost his voice. “We are young! We are poor!” he squeaked. “Nektolai says that every company tells him they are young and poor. You want the play, pay up. Otherwise, there’s a long line.” Osip cautiously inquired if there were other options. “Another option would be to pay directly to the translator, half.” “But I know her! She’s a regular centaur!”

Osip showed with his hands. “An ass like hers . . . She’ll give us a discount!” “I seriously doubt it. Theaters like yours are a dime a dozen and they all want her.” “We’ll offer her a thousand! A whole thousand!” “If she gets a thousand, then so do I, as the author of the score.” “Who needs your score! We’ll put some soundtrack together!” Osip glared at Misha’s poor little keyboard. “Translator Karpui insists that her lyrics and my music stay together,” Misha piped up nervously. “It’s a musical, don’t you get it? Every theater in Moscow makes money on musicals except you in your dump!” Osip looked deflated. He promised Misha an appropriate solution and drew him into his office. After a lengthy discussion Misha was promised $1,500, and, for Karpenko, a room in the theater dorm, a part in the play, and a permanent position in the company. “What’s going on between you and this Karpenko, young man? Has your wife been The Baffler ! 131

w informed?” Osip asked suspiciously. “We are getting a divorce,” Misha blurted out, surprising himself. “And do you actually know this Karpui?” “Karpui is Karpenko, she wrote the play herself. We hold copyright both to the play and the music.” “You can shut up now! This Karpenko and her play are worth maybe a hundred on a good day. If you want, I’ll make her a janitor, we need one in the theater.” “Great! We’ll sell the play to the best theater in Moscow for my price!” “Two hundred?” At this moment the maestro walked in, beaming, and announced that he’d never seen such enthusiasm among the actors about a new play. “I can see it on stage! And you,” here the maestro called Misha several names, “are in my way with your music!” Enraged, Misha lost his normally meek temper and demanded a thousand each—immediately and in dollars, not rubles. “Immediately I can’t,” Osip replied in a moderate tone. “The translator and I will come in on Monday.” “On Monday I can’t either. Mmm . . . Make it Wednesday.” “So on Wednesday you’ll meet all my conditions, right?” “Look, Misha!” Osip started yelling again. “I need a janitor! Renovations are almost over! Who’s going to clean up this mess?” A pause. “By the way,” Osip announced to the confused maestro. “Your former student Karpenko has just returned from Finland where she’s been working in television.” “From Finland? That’s where she was! Suddenly my student disappears . . . So she’ll play Gallina Bianca, she’ll be perfect! In the first act she’s a skinny little thing, in the second, she’ll have big boobs and high heels . . .” “Actually, she wanted to play Julietta Mamasina,” interrupted Misha. “Who cares what she wants!” screamed Osip. “Fine, let her play already,” he finished quietly. 132 1 The Baffler

t the dorm, Karpenko moved into a room belonging to two girls who were forced to move to doubles, which now became triples. The aggravation intensified as new parts were distributed. Oh theater, the snake pit of snake pits! The question suddenly arose as to why Misha was residing in the dorm without any registration, while the rest of them had to pay extra for gas and electricity. Also, did Misha’s wife know what was happening? Somebody should inform her. The wife and their ten-year-old son once came to see Misha, waiting for him until the last train. God knows how Osip found out, but he warned Misha, and he and Karpenko hid at the Domodedovo airport. The new season opened with previews. Karpenko made sure her stage outfit provided room for her growing belly. Fake bust, a mini skirt, red wig, high boots on flat soles—comic in the extreme. The premiere was a great success. Julietta sang off-key and danced like an elephant, instructing future starlets. In the dorm everyone knew about Karpenko’s pregnancy and felt ready to take over her part. A few weeks later, Osip Tartiuk stopped by Karpenko’s room. Karpenko was lying on the bed. Misha, in headphones, was bent over his keyboard. “So what are we going to do?” Osip inquired. “When are you due? We need time to replace you!” “December 31.” “So what do we do? We have two weeks left.” “Let Misha do it. He knows the part. You don’t have any actresses who can play it.” Tartiuk looked stunned. “Misha!” Karpenko shook him by the shoulder. Misha took off his headphones. Karpenko ordered him to change into Julietta’s costume. Twisting his arms like a flamenco dancer, Misha squeezed into the outfit. He looked beyond funny: a miniskirt; enormous breasts; a butt like two watermelons; and under red curls, an unshaved sallow mug with a huge schnozzle. “A regular centaur . . . Well, well. Have a

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safe delivery. Ciao!” Osip left. Karpenko lay in bed, swallowed by her belly. Misha saw nothing notable in her swollen body. He was used to large women—his previous wife was the biggest centaur in the pack. A week later, he took over Karpenko’s role. On December 31 the show ended at 9:30. Misha called Karpenko’s phone, but no one answered. He tried the dorm; the line was hopelessly busy. He changed, threw flowers into a cab, and arrived at the dorm ahead of everyone else. The phone’s receiver was lying on the floor. Their door was open. The floor was wet. Everything in the room was turned upside down. What happened here? Where could she have gone in such a condition? He checked under the bed. There, by the wall, he found her purse. A passport, mobile phone, her medical history . . . OK, let’s see: Nadezhda A. Karpenko, pregnant, due December 31. He dialed the medical emergency number. An hour later he found out that Nadezhda Karpenko hadn’t been admitted to any hospital, including any maternity wards. Misha collapsed on the floor. Suddenly he heard explosions in the street. New Year’s fireworks. Karpenko had dragged herself to a nearby maternity ward. She had knocked for a long time. A tipsy nurse finally admitted her. “I’m not feeling well,” Karpenko whispered. The nurse, who didn’t look too good either, announced “Lissssssste . . .” sounding exactly like Elephant, but she couldn’t finish the sentence and stumbled off. Karpenko lay down on the bench and closed her eyes. A cannonball was rolling in her belly, trying to make more room. A young woman in white loomed

over her. Karpenko managed to recite her lines: Couldn’t find my papers, somebody took my purse, everything was there, my phone, my passport, my medical history . . . Had some cash in my coat but couldn’t get a cab . . . My father flew away . . . No one wants us, no one . . .” Someone kept asking for her name and date of birth. “I’m an actress,” that’s all she could tell them before she passed out. She awoke in a large room with tiled walls that looked like a swimming pool. People in white masks stood over her. “Hey, you! Open your eyes,” she heard. “There you go. Are you planning to push or what? What’s your name?” “Karp . . .” “Lovely name. Hey, don’t you die on us, don’t ruin our New Year!” The pain came. Her body was turning inside out. “Push, push! OK, stop for now!” She felt them stab her with a knife and then twist it. They’ll cut up the baby! “Don’t, don’t stab me!” she screamed in her stage voice. “Calm down, it’s the baby, not us. The baby’s pulling you apart. There, I can see the crown!” She heard a low sound like a train whistle. “Mom, look up! It’s a girl! A real beauty! Somebody, give her salts. What’s your last name?” “Karpenko. Nadezhda Alexandrovna Karpenko.” “Finally! Now take a good look: it’s a girl, see for yourself, we don’t want any complaints afterward!” Eyes over white gauze masks. Laughing. One of them was holding a little baby doll, tiny, unwashed. All crinkled up, crying. She’s cold! Never before had Karpenko felt such heart-wrenching pity. “Rejoice, mom! Such a big beautiful gal! A Happy New Year!” “Just give her to me . . . Give her to me, please . . . Just give her to me . . . ”t Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers. The Baffler ! 133

T O R I E S

2312 3 Kim Stanley Robinson

ake an asteroid at least thirty kilometers on its long axis. Any type will do—solid rock, rock and ice, metallic, even iceballs, although each presents different problems. Attach a self-replicating excavator assembly to one end of the asteroid, and with it hollow out your asteroid along its long axis. Leave the wall at least two kilometers thick at all points except for your entry hole. Assure the interior integrity of the wall by coating it with a dura of suitable strength. As your assembly hollows the interior, be aware that ejection of the excavated material (best aimed toward a Lagrange salvage point, to collect the salvage fee) will represent your best chance to reposition your terrarium, if you want it in a different orbit. Store excess ejecta on the surface for later use. When the interior is hollowed out, leaving an empty cylinder of at least five kilometers in diameter and ten kilometers long (but bigger is better!), your excavator assembly will return to the access hole and there reconfigure itself into your terrarium’s propulsion unit. Depending on the mass of your new world, you may want to install a mass driver, an anti-matter “lightning push” engine, or an Orion pusher plate. Beyond the forward end of the cylinder, on the bow of your new terrarium, attach a forward unit at the point of the long axis. Eventually your terrarium will be spinning at a rotational rate calculated to create the effect of gravity on the inner surface of the interior cylinder, so that when you are inside you will be pulled to the floor as if in a gravity field. This is the g equivalent, or gequivalent. The forward unit will then be connected to the bow of the terrarium by a geared axle, to

Excerpted from the novel 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Copyright © 2012 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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allow the forward unit not to spin but instead to stay fixed. It will be nearly weightless in this bowsprit chamber, but many functions of the terrarium will go better without the spinning, including docking, viewing, navigating, etc. It is possible to build an interior cylinder that spins freely inside an asteroid that does not spin—the so-called “prayer wheel” configuration—and this does give you both an interior with g effect and a non-spinning exterior, but it is expensive and finicky. Not recommended, though we have seen some good ones. When stern and bow are properly installed and configured, and the asteroid is set spinning, the interior is ready to be terraformed. Begin with a light dusting of heavy metals and rare earths, as specified for the biome you are trying to create. Be aware that no Terran biome ever began with the simple ingredients you will be starting with on an asteroid. Biospheres need their vitamins right from the start, so be sure to arrange for the importation of the mix that you want, usually including molybdenum, selenium, and phosphorus. These are often applied in “puff bombs” set off along the axis of the cylindrical space. Don’t poison yourself when you do this! After that, string the axis of the cylinder with your terrarium’s sunline. This is a lighting element, on which the lit portion moves at whatever speed you choose. The lit portion of the sunline usually starts the day in the stern of the cylinder, after a suitable period of darkness (during which any streetlights overhead will serve as stars). The lit portion of the line, appropriately bright, then traverses the sunline from stern to bow (or east to west, as some describe it), taking usually the same time as a Terran day, as measured by the latitude of your biome on Earth. Seasons inside your terrarium will be rendered accordingly. Now you can aerate the interior to the

M A R K FI S H E R

gas mix and pressure you desire, typically somewhere between 500 and 1,100 millibars of pressure, in something like the Terran mix of gases, with perhaps a dash more oxygen, though the fire risk quickly rises there. After that, you need biomass. Naturally you will have in your spice rack the complete genetic codes of all the creatures you intend to introduce into your biome. Generally you will either be recreating some Terran biome, or else mixing up something new, which hybrid biomes most people call “Ascensions,” after Ascension Island on Earth, the site of the first such hybrid (started inadvertently by Darwin himself!). All the genomes for all the species of your particular biome will be available for print on demand, except for the bacteria involved, which are simply too numerous and too genetically labile to categorize. For them you will have to apply the appropriate inoculant, usually a muck or goo made of a few tons of the bacterial suite that you want.

Luckily bacteria grow very fast in an empty ecological niche, which is what you now have. To make it even more welcoming, scrape the interior wall of your cylinder, then crumble the rock of the scrapings finely, to a consistency ranging from large gravel to sand. Mixed with an edible aerogel, this then becomes the matrix for your soil. Put all of the ice gathered in your scraping aside, except for enough when melted to make your crumbled rock matrix moist. Then add your bacterial inoculant, and turn up the heat to around 300 K. The matrix will rise like yeasted dough as it becomes that most delicious and rare substance, soil. (Those wanting a fuller explanation of how to make soil are referred to my bestselling All About Dirt.) With a soil base cooked up, your biome is well on its way. Succession regimes at this point will vary, depending on what you are looking for at climax. But it’s true to say that a lot of terraria designers start out with a marsh of some kind, because it’s the fastest way to bulk up your soil and your overall biomass. So if you are in a hurry to occupy, this is often a good way to start. When you’ve got a warm marsh going, either fresh water or salt, you are already cooking good. Smells will rise in your cylinder, also hydrological problems. Fish, amphibian, animal, and bird populations can be introduced at this point, and should be if you want maximum biomass growth. But here you have to watch out for a potential danger: once you get your marsh going, you may fall in love with it. Fine for you, but it happens a bit too often. We have too many estuarine biomes now, and not enough of the other biomes we are hoping to cook out here. So try to keep your distance at this point; keep a depopulate marsh, or stay away from it during this part of the process. Or join a trading scheme in which you trade asteroids when they are at the marsh point, so that you come The Baffler ! 135

w into a new one wanting to change things, unattached to what’s already there. With the hefty biomass created by a marsh, you can then build up land using some of your excavated materials, saved on the surface of the asteroid for this moment. Hills and mountains look great and add texture, so be bold! This process will redirect your water into new hydrologies, and this is the best time to introduce new species, also to export species you no longer want, giving them to newer terraria that might need them. Thus over time you can transform the interior of your terrarium to any of the 832 identified Terran biomes, or design an Ascension of your own making. (Be warned that many Ascensions fall as flat as bad soufflés. The keys to a successful Ascension are so many that I have had to pen another volume, How To Mix and Match Biomes! now available.) Ultimately you will need to make many temperature, landscape, and species adjustments, to get to the kind of stable climax community you want. Any possible landscape is achievable; sometimes the results are simply stunning. Always the entire landscape will be curving up around you, rising on both sides and meeting overhead, so that the look of the land will envelope you like a work of art—a goldsworthy inscribed on the inside of a rock, like a geode or a Fabergé egg. Obviously it is also possible to make interiors that are all liquid. Some of these aquaria or oceanaria include island archipelagoes; others are entirely water, even their walls, which are sometimes refrozen transparently so that in the end when you approach them they look like diamonds or water droplets floating in space. Some aquaria have no air space in their middles. As for aviaries, every terrarium and most aquaria are also aviaries, stuffed with birds to their maximum carrying capacity. There are fifty billion birds on Earth, twenty billion on Mars; we in the terraria could outmatch them both combined. Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. 136 1 The Baffler

The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And there are also the heavily agricultural terraria, farmworlds devoted to producing what has become a very large percentage of the food feeding the people of Earth. These facts are worth noting and enjoying. We cook up our little bubble worlds for our own pleasure, the way you would cook a meal, or build something, or grow a garden—but it’s also a new thing in history, and the heart of the Accelerando. I can’t recommend it too highly! The initial investment is non-trivial, but there are still many unclaimed asteroids out there.

ake raw Venus. CO2 atmosphere of 95 bar, temperature at surface would melt lead, hotter even than Mercury’s brightside. A hellish place. On the other hand, .09 g, and just a tad smaller than Earth. Two continental rises on the surface, Ishtar and Aphrodite. Earth’s sister planet. There’s real potential here for a great new creation. Take one Saturnian ice moon—Dione will do fine. Dismantle with Von Neumann selfreplicating excavators, cutting into chunks about ten kilometers on a side. Attach mass drivers to the chunks and send them down to Venus. While doing this, build a round sunshield of lunatic aluminum, very thin material, only 50 grams per square meter and yet still totalling 3 x 1,013 kg, the largest thing ever built by humans. Concentric strips give the sunshield flexibility and allow it to tack up into the solar wind to hold its position at the L1 point, where it will shadow Venus entirely. Deprived of insolation, the planet will cool at a rate of 5 K a year. After 140 years, the CO2 atmosphere will have rained and snowed to the surface and

frozen as a layer of dry ice. Scrape all the dry ice that landed on Ishtar and Aphrodite down to the lowlands, being careful to keep a smooth surface. While clearing off the continents, release another suite of Von Neumann self-replicating chemical factories designed to break oxygen out of the frozen CO2; these will create 150 millibars of oxygen for the atmosphere, in about the same time it takes for all the CO2 atmosphere to freeze. A purely oxygen atmosphere would be too flammable, so add a buffer gas, preferably nitrogen, to make a more stable mix. Titan may be over-subscribed for its excess nitrogen, so be prepared to seek substitutions. Argon mined on the moon would also serve in a pinch. When you have the oxygen you want, and the dry ice is all flat on the lowlands, cover the dry ice with foamed rock, so that the CO2 is a completely sequestered feature of the lithosphere. Now take the chunks of Dione you have been saving and crack them against each other in the oxygen-and-buffer atmosphere at the correct height to create steam and rain. This will add back some heat to the planet, which at this point has been taken below the human-friendly range. Possibly some light

P. S . M U E L L ER

can be let through the sunshield if needed to help heating. It will only take two years for the greater part of the impact water to rain and snow onto the surface, so be ready to work fast. The water on the surface after this Dione infusion will be equal to about 10 percent of Earth’s water. It will be fresh water; salt to taste. The water will cover 80 percent of Venus, which is much flatter than Earth, to an average depth of 120 meters. If deeper seas are preferred, but also a maximum amount of land, consider digging an oceanic trench with some of the Dione impactors. Remember this will complicate the CO2 sequestration if you choose to do it, so make adjustments accordingly. If it is done carefully, however, Venus could ultimately end up with about twice the land surface that Earth has. At this point (140 years freezing and preparation, 50 years scraping and poaching, so be patient!) you might think that the planet is ready for biological occupation. But remember, combining the Venusian year of 224 days with its daily rotation period of 243 days, you get a screwball curve (retrograde motion, sun rising in the west) in which the solar day for any particular point on the planet is 116.75 days. Tests have long since determined that that’s too long for most Terran life forms to survive, tweaked or not. So at this point, two main options have been identified. The first is to program the sunshield so that it lets through sunlight to the surface and then blocks it off again, flexing like a circular Venetian blind to make a more Terran rhythm of night and day. This would make it easy on the new biosphere, but would require that the sunshield work without fail. The second option would call for another round of impactor bombardments, this time striking the surface of the planet such that their angular momentum spins the planet up to something like a hundred-hour day, which is considered within the tolerance limit for most Terran life-forms. The problem with this option is the way it would delay occupation of the planet’s surface, by its release of a considerable amount of the sequestered dry The Baffler ! 137

w ice under the foamed rock layer. Biosphere establishment would have to be put off for another two hundred years, effectively doubling the time of terraformation. But there would be no further reliance on a sunshield. And a properly constituted and maintained Venusian atmosphere could handle full sunlight without greenhousing or other spoilage. Which option you choose is your preference. Think about what you want in the end, or, if you don’t believe in endings, which process you prefer.

the economic model of the space settlements developed in part from their origins as scientific stations. In this early model, life in space was not a market economy; once you were in space your housing and food were provided in an allotment system, as in Antarctic scientific stations. What markets existed tended to be private unregulated individual enterprises in non-essential goods. Capitalism was in effect relegated to the margin, and the necessities of life were a shared commons

exchange between Earth and individual space colonies was on a national or treaty-association basis, thus a kind of colonial model, with the colonies producing metals and volatiles, knowledge useful for Earth management, and later on, food

nomic change had ancient origins in Mondragon, Euskadi, a small Basque town which ran an economic system of nested co-ops organized for mutual support. A growing network of space settlements used Mondragon as a model for adapting beyond their scientific station origins. Cooperating as if in a diffuse Mondragon, the individual space settlements, widely scattered, associated for mutual support and

supercomputers and artificial intelligence made it possible to fully coordinate a nonmarket economy, in effect mathematicizing the Mondragon. Needs were determined year to year in precise demographic detail, and production then directed to fill the predicted needs. All economic transactions—from energy creation and extraction of raw materials, through manufacturing and distribution, to consumption and waste recycling—were accounted for in a single computer program. Once policy questions were answered—meaning desires articulated in a sharply contested political struggle—the total annual economy of the solar system could be called out on a quantum computer in less than a second. The resulting qube-programmed Mondragon, sometimes called the Albert-Hahnel model, or the Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model, could be

once the space elevators were in place (first at Quito, 2076) traffic between Earth and space increased by a factor of a hundred million. At that point the solar system became accessible. It was too big to inhabit rapidly, but the increasing speed of space travel meant that over the course of the twenty-second century the entire solar system came within easy reach. It is not a coincidence that the second half of this century saw the beginning of the Accelerando

if everyone had been working in a programmed Mondragon, all would have been well; but it was only one of several competing economies on Earth, all decisively under the thumb of late capitalism, still in control of more than half of Earth’s capital and production, and with its every transaction tenaciously reaffirming ownership and capital accumulation. This concentration of power had not gone away but only liquefied for a while and then jelled elsewhere, much of it on Mars, as GINI figures for the era clearly reveal

the space diaspora occurred as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules. Many argued for destroying the biosphere, as being the lesser of two evils one of the most influential forms of eco-

in residual-emergent models, any given economic system or historical moment is an unstable mix of past and future systems. Capitalism therefore was the combination or battleground of its residual element, feudalism, and its emergent element—what?

138 1 The Baffler

with the success of the Martian revolution and the emergence of its single planetwide social-democratic system, the gates were opened for the rest of the solar system to follow. Many space settlements remained colonies of Terran nations and combines, however, so the ultimate result was a patchwork of systems somewhat resembling anarchy. Much of the space economy came to be dominated by a league of settlements called the Mondragon Accord. The Accord was renewed at a conference every five years, and annually the Accordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s AIs called out its economy, thereafter correcting it frequently (several times a second)

the longer the Mondragon Accord went on, the more robust it got. Confident in its support of the necessities, more and more side deals between individual settlementsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; enterprise markets sprang into being, the so-called above and beyonds, all working on the margin. If not for Mars and its

8 as feudalism is the residual on Earth, capi-

talism is the residual on Mars

the margin itself grows with prosperity, with growing sophistication and culture

the existence of the marginal economy, semiautonomous, semi-unregulated, resembling anarchy, filled with fraud, double-dealing, and crime, delighted all free-marketeers, libertarians, anarchists, and many others, some enjoying the bonobo barter and others the machismo of a wild west and wealth beyond need

marginal capitalism is a tough-guy sport like rugby or tackle football, suitable mostly for people slightly overdosed on testosterone. On the other hand, with some rule and attitude changes it has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form

confining capitalism to the margin was the great Martian achievement, like defeating the mob or any other protection racket.t

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The Baffler ! 139

T O R I E S

Edge Lands 3 Chris N. Brown Asylum

he morning after the coup d’etat, we walked up the rocky trail behind Elkin’s house to the Prozac Tree. Our late dinner party had gone all night, fueled by old records and new wine. Elkin’s earthen neoadobe sheltered us from the arroyo-cleansing thunderstorm we watched blow in across the canyon from Chihuahua, and from the bad news trapped on the other side of the ridgeline, where the wireless network ran out of reasons to relay on. I followed my laughing new friends up the wet crunchy trail. There were six of us: Elkin, her visiting friend, Jae Li, Katerina G., Jack Crile, Paul Madero, and me, Nathaniel O. They were backlit by dawn light that seeped over the ridge to feed the sparse leaves of the little tree, illuminating the covert blues of its pharmaceutical sap. The trunk was staked, rising up four feet or so, then delicately branching out into clusters of white fruit and tear-shaped leaves. “It’s fucking gorgeous,” said Katerina, a custom clothier who maintained her atelier up the road in Marfa. “Can I eat it?” “Naturally,” smiled Elkin, the irony an unstated given. “It’s not actually Prozac, though I did use some ingredients from that vintage recipe.” “Just like Mama used to make,” said Madero, a pill-tanned real estate developer who spent his returns on overpriced art and the company of those who made it. “I wish,” said Elkin. “My mother’s primary antidepressant was Sauvignon blanc. Part of how I got here.” Elkin was a bio-artist. A genomic surrealist who mixed hardcore life science and rich kid whimsy to create living sculptures. She had a real-deal biotech pedigree—a PhD and a half and a baroque atlas of names to drop of the exotic labs where she’d studied or 140 1 The Baffler

worked or loved. Boston, Gwangju, Ingolstadt, Baja. Fancy dress for a fortysomething daddy’s girl from River Oaks trying to do something more interesting than the lawyers and surgeons and MBAs she’d grown up with in Houston. She was a little older than the generation of kids who had grown up with the first do-it-yourself home gene splicing kits and launched a cultural revolution more profound than the one driven by personal computing fifty years earlier, but that seniority only made her a more powerful Hera-like personality on the scene. “What’s the base plant?” I asked. “Sassafras,” said Elkin. “I love to say that word. Like having your brain licked with a big wet tongue.” “You can lick mine any time,” said Katerina, depositing one of the fresh white nuts under her own tongue. “If only I had one,” said Madero, knocking his shaved dome. “What else are you putting in my pinball head with this freak?” “A slice of agave for climatic hardiness and that hardy edge,” said Elkin. “Classic MDMA in the fruit, with a secret sauce psychotropic kicker from the landlord’s personal stash of unpublished pharma patents.” “Filé gumbo big fun tonight on el rancho,” said Madero, plucking a stout looking nugget for himself. “Remind me to thank him.” “Bring on the psychonauts,” said Jae, a Toronto-based televisual artist who was helping Elkin with some supporting components of her upcoming show. “Viva the Rat Queen,” said Crile, the old athlete, using our hostess’ favorite Tejana nickname as he removed his shirt to soak up the rising sun. “Long live the dead white rats!” “No live animal testing on this one, honey,” said Elkin. “Unless you count y’all.”

took a smaller fruit, and walked along the ridge a hundred feet or so, nabbing a nice aerie perch. Below, the solar panels and rainwater gutters and copper roofs of the Colonia glinted in the sun like desert constellations. Six hundred buildings among the five discrete settlements strewn across the valley, from mega-yurts to converted ship container eco-manses to watery galleries and clean warehouses. A dusty archipelago of lunar land even the Comanches had avoided, now transformed with the money of the ultra-rich and the energy of the aggressively artistic. Sold off a dozen years ago to a group of Bohemian developers under a 99-year lease

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by the legislature, the nine-figure annual rent funding the State’s coastal reconstruction band-aid projects. The deal included a State constitutional amendment—a private charter that gave the Colonia the legal independence of a microstate. Free Republic, complete with a panoply of flags. It now flourished as a tabula rasa private playground for autonomous “research”—artistic, cultural, political, sexual, and interpersonal experimentation— by those who could manage the entrance fee. I had arrived six weeks earlier, taking up a three-year land art fellowship endowed by the Virilian Investors Culture Fund. My project site was just visible to the northeast from The Baffler ! 141

w this perch, off the Marfa road. A few early scratchings of rearranged rock were apparent in the sun. Kindergartner Nazca lines punctuated at one end with the tiny safety orange dot of my pygmy earth mover. Small progress. I placed the synthesized white fruit on my tongue and let it dissolve into the heat of my saliva. It tasted like a cross between aspirin and dandelion milk. Kind of like the stress meds they used to pack in our MREs. Drone droppings, we called them, emotional enhancers for never-ending battles in the dried-out grey bed of Lake Balkhash and the empty desert beyond. Reminding me that this new life, this new desert, could only ever be a photofilm negative of the one that came before, even if in raging color. What would it offer to fill in the parts of me left behind? And the light filled the world of rocks before me, washing over the big sky landscape with watercolor blues and browns and brights. “Not very polite for the new boy to leave the group, Nathaniel,” said the light. The voice of Elkin, standing nearby, reeling me back in. “I’ve been watching you. Framed through my kitchen window every morning, boy playing with rocks. I kind of dig it.” I turned and took in her knowing smile. She had effortless gravitas despite her elfin physique. Manicured cowgirl tan sprouting flaxen grey-blonde shorns and sweating well-born confidence through her faded black T-shirt and brown dungarees, absentmindedly kicking the dust with her custom boots of homegrown blue sharkskin. She sat with me. Below, our companions laughed at Jae’s rocktop sun dance as they passed around a bottle of enhanced water and improvised their own stick and bone musical accompaniment, sharing the germinating seeds of Elkin’s crazy bounty. “We should collaborate,” said Elkin. “Earth plus life. It could be fun.” “I don’t know,” I said. “I work mostly alone.” “Pass along some of your pain,” she said. “You’ve got more than your fair share. Whereas my stuff suffers from a deficit. And a surplus of silly.” 142 1 The Baffler

“Really?” I said. “I heard that you cracked your own half-life.” “The gift from Great-Grandma?” said Elkin. “Yes, I found that packed away in the attic of my genome. Not exactly a calendar date for my death, but definitely a protoplasmic inevitability. It’s a good thing, I think, like most deadlines. Helps you burn more brightly.” She smiled a smile that carried other feelings with it. Desert breeze, last gasp of the dissipated night. Elkin clasped my hand. My prosthesis shivered, and I leaned for the sun. Chariots of the Gods I found an old bicycle at the D.A.V. in Alpine. Forty bucks. Vintage hard tail, logos long chipped away with the rest of the paint, save for a few stubborn flecks of faded yellow. I stripped it down, tossed the gearing, wrapped black surplus rims with fat round slicks, added rear discs, and had myself a beautiful utilitarian single speed. Pure, simple, soundless self-powered machine. I disdain the sound of engines and power tools, a predilection compounded by my three years sleeping under the bombardment of smart bombs, IEDs, RPGs, and enemy drones. The earth mover wasn’t working for me. It alienated the earth, argued with the wind, and stained my forty-acre canvas. So now I rode the bike, dragging a twentyfoot-wide, home-made rake behind me at walking speed. Carving a long slow jetty under the unyielding gaze of the sun. The image in my head, inchoate as it is, reveals multiple facets. Whirlpool, target, pictogram, circuit design, wound. A beautiful abstraction, the elaborate pattern a kind of post-tribal fractal that will morph with earth and sky, providing a different experience each time the mapping satellites pass over. And a private tincture that aerates the soul pain of my ravaged body. I remembered a plain like this one, on the other side of the planet, and the after-crew of PMC janitors roaming in the morning with their sensors and trailers and bodybags, try-

ing to collect missing parts in matched sets. And then the rock and sand conjure their wintry mirror some years earlier, walking with Dad on New Year’s Day across the fresh morning snowfall of his place in New Hampshire, trying to explain my decision to quit grad school and join the Marines. He challenged me to defend my impulsive decision, calling me self-indulgent. He couldn’t understand that was exactly what I needed to cure. I needed to experience the struggle of the Real to earn my right to manipulate the imagined. In the end, we both were right. The fallen snow blowing off the icy cover turned to hot dust. I started thinking about another tool I could make that would help me carve my piece, and escaped back into my blacksmith’s reverie, pedaling in wide circles under the desert sky while I drew blueprints against the back of my forehead for a simple rock-grinding combine that could write Olympian hieroglyphics of fresh-made dust.

A Moveable Beast

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The thing in the dish smiled at me. The teeth were individually perfect, like products of the most advanced cosmetic dentistry, the white of fine porcelain. But they were irregularly spaced around the confused labial mouth from which they grew, and out of mouthly order, making them seem accidental. Wrong. The varying pink fleshy parts seemed to subtly breathe, with clumps of tawny follicles goosebumping in a dance of anatomical absurdism. The smiling vayjay was disembodied, seated in a pillow of some purplish electroorganic gelatin that presumably sustained it, surrounded in turn by the stainless steel walls of an artisanal Petri dish laser-etched with beautiful terrible derivations of Sumerian monsters. A tiny red diode slowly pulsed on and off within the recesses of the goo, revealing the operation of some subtle circuitry that programmed the piece. “If only it could sing,” said the woman standing next to me, another visitor to the The Baffler ! 143

w gallery. This was the opening of Elkin’s new show for the Colonia Open House weekend, an annual four-day festival of investors, culturati, corporate sponsors, and Bohemian turistas. “What would it say?” I asked, before I realized she was not talking to me, but rather dictating notes to her pad. A critic perhaps, preparing to upload a report to Neura. She looked at me, slight grin. “Leave me alone, obviously. Je mords.” I moved with the circulation of the room into the more crowded main gallery, where a half-dozen loosely themed pieces were on display. Elkin, deploying the business skills learned from her father, had negotiated a co-branding deal with Somnus Labs, the next generation stem cell bankers that had pushed the regulatory envelope with their new exchange. Depositors, many of them celebrities, granted permission for Somnus to sell their un-anonymized raw cellular material to others, in exchange for a cut of the action. Resulting in a nascent market for designer organs, one Elkin was promoting with her avant-garde hacks. “Textual Healing”: A perfect one-inchby-one foot cube of liver tissue grown from the cryonically preserved umbilical cord blood of Dexter Fidelio, the cinematic bad boy better known for his trashings of rehab clinics than for his sporadically luminescent performances. Alternating sides of the cube were tattooed with some of his better-known movie script banalities, stenciled out in varying fonts. “Montezuma’s Offering to Venus”: An actual functioning human heart grown in the perfect symmetrical shape of a greeting card Valentine heart, attached to an elegant weaving of colored plasticine tubes and suspended in rosy saline liquid within a clear plexiglass box lit from below with a smoky white light. The raw material, reverse engineered embryonic stems of Mari Dawood, the Canadian supermodel who had perished the year before when her private car was forced off a Milanese freeway overpass by marauding freelance papparazzi. 144 1 The Baffler

“Greetings From Airstrip One”: A single blinkless grey eye cloned from the material of Senator M. Matheson, the Chairman of the Special Standing Committee on Homeland Security, trapped in a black polymer box, but viewed from the strobe-illuminated interior on a crackling video display across the wall. On other smaller closed circuit displays around the room, images from the myriad surveillance videos the eye was monitoring, within the Colony and in distant metropoles. Other, less singular pieces. Like the collection of “artificial” nails for sale in beautiful little packages in the gift shop—based on the actual fingernails of famous hand models, in some cases literal reproductions, in others modified—to enhance their vestigial clawedness, to imbue the nails with indigenously “painted” colors, “weathered” with cracks and stains and bite marks. Or the living wigs of hair of famous catalog models worn by Elkin and the gallery staff. In the main room, Elkin stood atop a chair and greeted her crowd, brushing back Linda Okone’s wild red bangs with her commandingly gesticulating little hands.

ater, a group of us drank infused waters and spliced cocktails at one of the cafes in the heart of the public cluster—the main node of the Colony, at its core a rough analog for a Mexican paseo. The plaza had been transformed for the weekend into a spontaneous shantytown of designer tents, teepees from outer space, and architectural lean-tos. The fountain burned a liquid blue bonfire, an invention of one of Madero’s hipster handyman boyfriends. Mobs of visitors and colonists mingled around, drinking and dancing and laughing and arguing about the new work. Costumed interns passed out samples of the latest capsulized concoctions of our resident pharmaboys, while the DJ nearby cleverly mixed his improvised Fezcore with the simmering crescendo of the crowd. From the heart of the mob, Crile emerged, a head taller than the rest, dancing cocky like he had just arrived in the end zone carrying the ball.

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As he approached our crew, Crile stretched before he sat, cracking his neck and shoulders. It sounded like sheet metal being crumpled inside the fist of Hephaestus. “Jack has more spare parts than my old Carrera,” said Madero, laughing with his grungy young companion, Karl, an assistant to one of the local painters. “I run better than any Porsche,” said Crile. “At least the parts that matter.” Crile scratched his silvery buzzcut, flexing a bicep that pulsed with the texture of manufactured tendons and polymerically enhanced blood vessels. He was one of the alpha generation of real celebrity cyborgs, a Texas star college quarterback who was among the first to go straight to the UFL. The Ultimate Football League was the first to abandon professional athletics’ anachronistic insistence on the prohibition of performance enhancements, be they pharmaceutical, biomechanical, or genetically engineered. It was a genius stroke by the founders. The audi-

ence was far more interested in superhuman performances than fidelity to nature, and the athletes were addicted to the potential of even greater power. Crile hadn’t played in a decade, but was still a public figure, famous for his stamina in withstanding fifteen-plus years of pounding on behalf of the Los Angeles fans, by defensive linemen morphed into raging anthropomorphic hippos and bipedal Mack trucks made of pink flesh and steel bones. He also did media—partycasts and extremophile hunter porn more than sports commentary. Even now, there were people in the milling festival crowds noticing him, a rare sports figure who was considered an icon of charismatic cool even among this posturban hipster crowd. “Hey, Jack,” said Jae, nodding at a pair of younger women crossing the way, “looks like you’re being ogled.” “Art sluts,” said Elkin. “The best kind.” “I think he prefers his sluts of a more Apollonian mold,” teased Madero. “They’re The Baffler ! 145

w the only ones who can handle the hardware.” “Hey,” laughed Crile, popping pills with his infused water. “Not everything needs to be supplemented. Some performance enhancements just come naturally. Straight from Mom. Just ask the Queen. She can take whatever any boy’s got.” Everyone laughed, jazzed by the crackling electricity of the night, though Elkin’s had a sharper edge. It was a rare weekend to have so many crowds of interesting people exploring the scene. It was usually more serene, a refuge of decadent cerebral and sensual exploration, the insistent effort of the very rich and imminently bored to stave off ennui and create a more aesthetically stimulating world. Crile leaned back, both hands behind his head, the disarming textures of his subcutaneous implants revealed against the stretched black cotton of his designer T. He ignored the girls as they approached, trailed by a smallish man in an old school jacket. “Elkin, you’ve outdone yourself this time,” said the man. “I want to commission a piece but I’m afraid to ask what it would cost.” “That’s the problem with being a writer in a world without royalties,” said Elkin. “In for the weekend, Ned?” “Yes, plus a day or two at the back end. We spent last weekend in Austin, rented a vintage camper for the first time. You remember my partner, Claire—last summer, Chicago—and this is her sister, Miranda.” “Fantastic,” said Elkin, nodding at the women. “I want to see your caravan.” “Absolutely,” said Ned. “But first we need to discuss your show. You can read my writeup next week, but I can tell you that your sponsors are very happy.” “How do you know?” asked Elkin. “You’re just their bard.” “What else is there? Critic-for-hire, business developer, talent scout, and improvisational participant, all rolled into one.” “Nice work if you can get it,” said Miranda. “Who needs royalty checks when you have a biomed executive’s expense account?” added Claire. “He’s here to plug the project, renegotiate your deal, and treat us to tomor146 1 The Baffler

row’s parties, all at the same time.” “I see,” said Elkin. “And I have just the cocktail for you to try. Have you met Mr. Crile?”

he party continued at Madero’s hacienda just beyond the edge of the cluster. The crowd was ripped—owl juice and other locally distilled psilospyrits. Karl programmed the music box, and the house danced as much as the crowd. Crile was down to the base layer, splayed on a bulbous foam settee, giving Miranda and Claire a guided tour to his enhancements and implants and scars. Elkin tugged at my arm. “I have to show you something,” she yelled in my ear. We walked back through the panes of liquid glass, over the footbridge to the north wing, the tattooed kaleidoscope of manufactured koi swimming in the stream of purified rainwater running beneath. Elkin led me past the quiet private quarters of Madero’s older male wives and the giggling playrooms full of mischievous guests, down a hallway to an unlit room. “Take off your shoes,” said Elkin. The floor was artificial turf—cool, clean and alive, like the green of a fine golf course without the moist earth underneath. The walls and ceilings were matte black, illuminated only by the diffused light of moon and stars slipping around the occluded skylight created by a plate suspended underneath a slightly smaller aperture. “This is a nice installation,” I said. “Who did it?” “Cadma,” said Elkin. “Madero’s cousin, from Santiago. Go lie down in the center. Let your head go.” I complied. We lay there as time slowed, retinal rods opening up to the subtle bluewhite glow. In time, the walls began to move in our peripheral vision, revealing dim animations. A monocolor moving image of some shadowed Dionysium, a soundless, rapacious dream in near distance. If you turned to look directly at the images they disappeared back to still black, undulating again when you

“I need to see what’s underneath your scars,” she said. “Literally, and speculatively. Don’t be afraid of that.” She moved on me, and the room breathed with us.

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returned your gaze to the eclipsed skylight. Elkin moved closer. The piece lured out our carefully guarded needs and vulnerabilities, like small forest mammals slipping tentatively out into the bright dark after moonrise. “Let me in,” said Elkin, drawing on my forehead with a designer fingernail. “Share whatever it is you’re hiding in there.” I pushed back. We kissed. We rolled on the fake grass. We made out hungrily, until my tongue found something loose inside her, the taste of torn tissue. I pulled back and Elkin reached two fingers in, producing a discarded bicuspid. “Sorry,” she laughed. “Here’s what’s hidden inside me. Offering for the tooth fairy. New project—not mine, but my dentist’s. He’s growing new permanents for me, right inside my own jaw. Sharper and whiter, with a healthy dose of chimpanzee. Check it out.” I ran my little finger over the pointed bump in the gap. “Monkey teeth? You are definitely more committed to your work than me.” “Are we so different?” she said, touching me. “Don’t,” I said. “Why not?” said Elkin. “The war? I heard. I’m not afraid.” She ran her hand down my abdomen. “I need new surprises. Who knew total emasculation could be the ultimate alluring machismo.” The accumulated chemical cocktails of the long night bounced the stars off the ceiling.

Life on Mars With a morning thunderstorm in the forecast, I picked up Elkin before dawn and we headed out to the site. We had begun a collaboration. After spending some time with me exploring the work and assisting me with some of the labors, Elkin brewed some bacterial contributors to my piece, from a strain of dry weather dormants. We worked well together. The input of an intimate as consultant was healthy for both of us. The health of other parts of our relationship was more tentative. I borrowed one of the community trucks for the occasion, a restored and fuel cellconverted fifty-year-old pickup. We drove up the old ranch road on Caspar Mountain, then off road to our favorite overlook spot. Elkin brought a pot of coffee, from a friend’s homemod beans. We sat in the cab and drank it from her little thermos cups while the cumulonimbus bulged out and stacked up over the plain below, cracking long and loud like God rearranging the wooden furniture in heaven. “It’s a beautiful piece,” said Elkin. The cloud-filtered light of the gathering storm brought out weird colors in the rock, revealing new facets of the jetty. “You get so lost in it. Like a galaxy of stone.” “It’s trying. We’ll see.” “You are going to love your new interns when they wake up,” she said. “How many of them do you think there are?” “Billions. Wait and see.” She sipped her coffee. “I wish you would let me take some fucking pictures.” “I know, but I told you, the piece doesn’t work that way. Pictures will just end up in galleries and coffee table books.” “T-shirts!” smiled Elkin. “Right. They violate the site-specific esThe Baffler ! 147

w sence of the work.” “It’s okay,” said Elkin. “I bought a day’s worth of satellite surveillance.” She pointed up and smiled. I considered that. “Okay,” I said. A dark blue filter washed over the plain as the sky darkened. The shower started, steady then intense. Twenty minutes, then it broke as fast as it began. Light cracked through. As it hit the jetty, swaths of bacteria bloomed scarlet in the channels, like pools of blood seeping into the honeycombed expanse of a white paper towel. Red rivers of rocks that had learned to give up their ghosts. Elkin smiled, big and full of wonder. “Thank you,” I said, meaning it for once. Big Two-Headed River Crile, naturally, was the first one to catch a fish. “Get your ass over here and shoot a film,” he said from the other side of the river. “I don’t want to play with this mutant too long.” I waded across toward the Mexican side. The water moved fast around big Crile standing there grinning in his custom antitox wetsuit. He held the beast up by one hand shoved into the mouth, fingers through the right gills. The way he caught it. “So that’s how it’s done,” I yelled. Crile was a devotee of deepwater hand fishing, a kind of extreme sports variation on old-fashioned redneck noodling in which you grab the fish from their mudbank and logwood lairs, using your hand as bait. His particular specialty was finding extreme mutations in toxic bodies of water. “It’s all about the reflexes,” he said. “No thought—just kill. Pure caveman shit.” “I can’t even see anything in this water,” I said, “even with these fancy illuminating goggles of yours.” The fish was huge, with a head almost as big as Crile’s. Unlike Crile, it had long whiskers of slimy flesh sticking out from its cheeks. Variation on a catfish, but with translucent tissue, wrong proportions, and black eyes. “What does that thing weigh?” I asked. “About one-twenty, I’d say,” said Crile. 148 1 The Baffler

“Not the biggest I’ve wrestled, but big enough. And definitely ugly enough.” “Those are some teeth,” I said, filming a close-up with my handheld. Crile’s suit was torn at the forearm, bleeding in spots. “Looks like somebody mixed in a little barracuda.” “Want to give her a kiss goodbye?” asked Crile, setting the beast back in the fast running water for release. “I’m gonna take a break and patch up.” We sat on the bank of a sandy shoal midriver. Crile peeled off his suit and tended his cuts while I pulled lunch from the cooler. “Meatbread?” I proffered, holding up a small protein-infused loaf from the Boulangerie Bellona in the North Node. “In a minute,” said Crile, stretching his suit sleeve against the sky to spot the holes. “I want to get this done so I can relax.” “Suit yourself,” I said, breaking off a bite and quaffing a glass of unaltered Malbec. Oenophilia remained the domain of rigid naturalism. Crile hunched over the cooler cover, painting patches on his suit. The sun in the valley sucked up the heat from the grains of the Chihuahuan desert and poured it on us like a dry waterfall. Even through my sunglasses, I had to squint as the light glistened off the distended titanium nodes of Crile’s vertebral reconstruction. “What does it feel like to have your spine replaced?” I asked. “It hurts like fuck,” said Crile. “Then after about a month, when things start to settle in and integrate and they give you your first tuning, you feel like you could throw a car down the street. It’s fucking awesome.” On the far bank, a feral Mexican scampered along the reeds, nervously checking us out. “How does it feel when they plug a million dollar dildo in where your dick used to be?” asked Crile, smiling without looking. “Army paid for it,” I said. “Officer’s perk. And I don’t think it costs them quite that much.” “And?” “It’s different.” “Come on,” said Crile, flicking epoxy at me.

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I drank more wine and considered. “I guess it’s like putting clothes on a phantom limb,” I said. “This is what I get for hanging out with artists,” said Crile. “People who talk in riddles without punchlines.” “It works as well as my artificial leg, which is saying something.” “Can you feel anything?” “Like I said. It’s phantom. Simulated. Twitchy neural stuff.” “Can you reprogram it?” “Sure, you know how it goes, just like any of your major enhancements. You’re supposed to leave it to the docs—they get seriously pissed off at DIYs.” “I bet that doesn’t stop Elkin,” said Crile, chomping off a fistful of veggie chorizo. I shook my head, smiling against interest. “You don’t need to answer that,” said Crile. “Believe me, I know all Elkin’s tricks.” Pandora flirts with the Bad Magi I woke up restless the morning after my birthday, jarred by some lingering smell of Elkin. I watched the sun push its way across the stucco. My leg was hanging on the wall. The rest of me was set on top of the dresser, next to a wormless bottle of Mezcal and a vintage paperback monograph by de Maria. In time, I hobbled to the bathroom, took a leak sitting down, rinsed my teeth, and then inspected the refrigerated case Elkin had left with me when she went home. Its machined metallic precision was totally incongruous with the hand-painted tiles of the countertop. It emitted a barely audible hum, elusive

but alluring, like a post-industrial aum. “I made it for you,” said Elkin at the party the night before, without explaining the it. “Don’t open it until you are alone.” I looked in the mirror at my scars. The rough rippled tissue punctured with the tiny nodes where my prostheses attached. I looked at the scars behind my eyes, hidden in plain sight in the light brown prow of my “male model mongrel face,” as Katerina called it—“the face of every race and no race.” I remembered hand-to-hand combat on a mountain cave hunt gone bad, spilling another man’s blood in the snow. I remembered the blast, and the hallucinatory morphine haze as I watched them wrap my severed leg in icepaks and load it next to me in the chopper bay for evac. There was a note from Elkin. “This is for you. And for me. To share, when we are together. To share the pain and pleasure it is designed to transmit. Both ways.” I popped the latches on the case. Pressure equalized with the hiss of a bottle of sparkling water. The contents were something else entirely. Alive. A new color of flesh. Heartless, but pulsing nonetheless. Spelunking Other Archipelagoes On a run to Marfa for materials, I ran into Katerina on the street. She persuaded me to join her for a late lunch. I’m not sure we’d ever had a proper one-on-one conversation before, with Elkin always around to dominate the scene. So we had some catching up to do. We talked about the restlessness of fashion’s creative cycles, the politics of the Colony, my war, her Russia, the new planets, the fashion lessons of her pogrom, our favorite comics, the end of nations, the business of art, and selected highlights of our romantic pasts. Across a café table, the pallor of her skin was like a cold drink of milk in the middle of this big sky desert, and her gallows laughter at my grisliest war stories mixed a fresh flavor of simpatico. Arctic core waters degenerated into Dr. Watson mojitos and peeled artifice. She gave me a tour of her atelier, and we got stuck in her private apartment. The Baffler ! 149

w My fingers admired the orthodontic imperfections of her crazy mouth, and the diverse hues of her unbleached incisors. She tasted like sweet fresh cabbage and raw jalapenos, and she swore in Russian like a Bmovie submariner. She played cascading dirges of dissonant Siberian art metal and moved against me out of sync. Our clothes ended up on the floor. When she encountered Elkin’s alien gift, she laughed uncontrollably, making first contact only after mystery trumped composure. The laughing turned to something else when the connection was made. The tissueto-tissue dipole, the transmitter of all the real feelings and sensations lost in the clumsy imperfections of language and the stumbling wrestlings of lovemaking. Tandem rush through cascading rapids, riding Elkin’s fleshbridge together, while the ghost of its creator lurked in the dark corner of the ceiling. Later, we held each other, mining the fleeting intimacy of a curiosity we both knew could not endure, and I tried to excise the Other from my mind, being afraid to remove it from my body and end this suspended moment. Adverse Possession “I had a dream that it talked,” I said. “Talked to me. And secretly reported to Elkin.” “More true than you knew, Nathaniel,” said Madero, poking a lump of vegan simulated cabrito with a disinterested fork. Elkin had dragged me to Madero’s for an impromptu brunch. Turned out it was a business luncheon, with Elkin’s critic/scout friend Ned the surprise guest. I flipped the pages of the printed contract Ned had proffered with my eggless migas, unable to actually focus on the text. Elkin twisted the stem of her glass with two hands, while Ned leaned forward in an effort to engage me with his Manhattan Seawall variation on dealmaker charisma. One of Madero’s wives scurried to and from the kitchen, looking for ways he could serve us. “Obviously, you’ll want to have your agent look at that,” said Ned. 150 1 The Baffler

“He doesn’t have one,” said Elkin. “Too stubborn.” “I can get you hooked up with my entertainment lawyer friend in L.A.,” said Madero. “License and Marketing Agreement,” read the heading of the contract, a generic description of twenty-some pages of turgid lawyer prose, plus appendices. “And tell me what my upside is again?” “You get royalties equal to half a point of our net profits from sales of the units,” said Ned, “and continued rights of use.” “Rights to use my own organ.” “Actually, theirs,” corrected Elkin. “This remarkable little miracle of improvisational biomechanics Elkin developed was something she did as a work-for-hire for Somnus Labs,” explained Ned. “Incorporating our core intellectual property.” “And my genetic material,” I said. “Correct,” said Ned. “Without your prior written consent, creating in the process a monumental breakthrough: a replicable formula for the growth of a fully functional, putatively natural, one-hundred percent human tissue-based substitute organ. The sensory functions of which can be felt by both, um, users—the wearer and the target, if you will. Giving new meaning to the phrase, ‘go fuck yourself.’ It can be grown as either a supplement or a full replacement, as the circumstances of the patient may require.” “Or desire,” added Madero, looking at his wife. “I think the jury’s still out on the fully functional part,” I said. “Well, according to the research notes Elkin has shared with us, it performs exactly according to specifications. Understanding that those specs involve some atypical features, and are still subject to the physiological limitations of the user.” “Fuck you, too,” I said. “The ability to modify the basic design is immensely compelling, recognizing there is significant lab work and fine tuning to be done. Take it out a generation or two, consider the possibilities Elkin is already playing with to integrate characteristics of other genomes,

“You had this idea before you even met me, didn’t you?”

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and you really have the killer app for cosmetic applications of our stem bank. The first set of patents should issue within the year.” “Designer johnsons,” laughed Madero. “From you, from movie stars, from the doodled boy-dreams of your inner Freudian cartoonist, fully customizable to express the undreamed self-delusions of every man on earth. What more ultimate work of art could you want to express the narcissistic spirit of the age? It will be to drugstore E.D. remedies what the supercomputer was to the personal calculator.” “Yeah, that may be, Paul,” I said. “But I guess what I feel like right now is I wouldn’t fuck this guy with your dick, and Elkin can have hers back.” I pushed the contract away. “Let’s talk about it later,” said Elkin, looking like she had a lot more to say. “Read the contract, do the math, and think about our collaboration before you make up your mind. This is about a lot more than business. It’s about our immortality.” I looked at her lackadaisical power hair, and agate eyes with their mesmer stare.

Tap(s) I stripped the right pedal from my bike, made my own clip to allow my true leg to pedal solo, hitched an ultralight camping trailer to the rig, and headed toward the unsettled eastern quarter of the Colony lands to find a new spot to work and live. Before I left, I buried my old prostheses at the jetty site. In the late afternoon that first day, I found a boneyard in the rocky flats above a small canyon. Skeletons of the desert’s dead, bleached by ultraviolet. Local animals, and crazy bones, like the skeletons of anthropomorphic cartoon characters made real. Relics of homegrown chimeras gone feral, the forgotten toys of some crazy rancher’s kid trying out his splicing kits on the livestock and local fauna? They mostly collapsed when you tried to pick them up, like fossilized snow sculptures, so I just sketched them against the back of my forehead. I camped there that night, hobbling around at the edge of the canyon herding ghosts. The moon lied, as usual, and the next day I moved on. I found a good spot. The relics of an old mercury mining camp that I turned into a squat, a perfect desert studio. Elkin comes by once in a while, and brings the thing with her for its feeding. It’s hard to say no, for all the reasons you know. Sometimes I even ride back to Elkin’s place and spend the night. I made a little work table of salvaged slate at the far end of the site, the seat a broken granite boulder. Shaded by a brown tarp held up by repurposed old lumber, I admired the unvaried stonescape of loose rocks as far as the eye could see, laden with the fossilized remains of Cretaceous bivalves, sparsely vegetated with spartan brush and one patch of creosote and lechuguilla. I poured water on the rocks from a little glass I’d made from the lower half of a bottle of Topo Chico, maybe trying to revive an ammonite, or maybe seeing if I could just grow the ruins of the future.t The Baffler ! 151

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Cotton Tenants Three families 3 James Agee

There is about the younger children, about their skin and eyes and hearing and emotions, such an unsettling burn and brilliance as slow starvation can only partially explain.

ine them up on their front porches, their bodies archaic in their rags as farm bodies are; line them against that grained wood which is their shelter in three rude friezes, and see, one by one, who they are: the Tingles, the Fields, the Burroughs. There are nine Tingles: Frank, Kate, Elizabeth, Flora Bee, Newton, William, Laura Minnie Lee, Sadie, and Ida Ruth. There are six more children, but they are dead. Frank Tingle is fifty-four. Crepe forehead, monkey eyebrows, slender nearly boneless nose, vermillion gums. A face pleated and lined elaborately as a Japanese mask: its skin the color of corpsemeat. He talks swiftly and continuously as you run downstairs to keep from falling down them; says most things three times over; and clowns a good deal as many sensitive and fearful people do, in self-harmful self-protection. The eyes are shifty and sometimes crazy and never quite successfully crafty: those of a frightened fox with hound blood. Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children my babies. They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fibre and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of all these people: more than any of them, she is lost into some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane. Mrs. Tingle prefers field work to housework, and her eldest daughters cook most of the meals and take whatever care is taken of the house. Elizabeth is twenty, and Flora Bee is nineteen. Most girls that age are married and mothers of at least one child. Elizabeth is stocky, and strong at her work as a man: which is just as well, because she does a James Agee submitted this previously unpublished article about tenant farmers in Alabama to Fortune Magazine, where he was a staff writer, in 1936. Fortune rejected the article, for reasons unknown, and Agee expanded it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published in 1941 with photographs from Walker Evans. These excerpts represent one-third of the complete text, which The Baffler will publish in its entirety.

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good deal of manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. Her features and especially the wry mouth and strong chin and cheeks have something already middle-aged and over-capable about them; her mouth and eyes are desperate, for she has no presentable clothes, and is of white-trash, and sees men seldom, never perhaps on terms of courtship. Flora Bee is more lightly built, a little better-clothed, a little less rooked by work, a little less desperate. She still looks all the way like a young woman. She has a great deal of intuitive graciousness. But she too is toward the age when a girl in that country is no longer thought of as marriageable: and the life of a spinster in an impoverished farm family is so ghastly that anything will do for a substitute. There is about the younger children, about their skin and eyes and hearing and emotions, such an unsettling burn and brilliance as slow starvation can only partially explain. They are emotionally volatile as naphtha; incredibly sensitive to friendliness. You will possibly get the feeling that they carry around in them like the slow burning of sulphur a sexual precocity which their parents fail either to discern or to realize the power and meaning of: and the idea is somewhat borne out in the tone of their play together, and in the eyes of William, who is twelve, and in the wild flirtatiousness of Laura Minnie Lee, who is ten, and in the sullenness and shyness, flared across like burning sedge with exhibitionism, of Sadie, who is nine, and in the flirting even of Ida Ruth, who is four. A stranger who shows them any friendliness, they meet and surround with the superhuman, millennial sweetness of Polynesians. They sleep mixed, and casual of nakedness. Some idea of that strangeness and obliviousness of the family which has helped to land The Baffler ! 153

He is easily the most intelligent of the three men, skeptical and reflective, and under other auspices would easily have become a drama critic, or at least a club wit.

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them in the fix they are in, you may get from their treatment of Ida Ruth. She is possibly the last child they will bring into living, and she is extremely delicate. She dislikes what little food they have but loves chicken and coffee. So, steadily, they have bumped off a long string of chickens to feed her, and she drinks two or three cups of black and parboiled coffee at every meal. Her eyes shine like burning oil and almost continuously she dances with drunkenness. The Tingles have in fact lost a certain grip on living which the Fields still hold, if feebly and without much interest, and of which the Burroughs, who are a generation younger, are still tenacious. The Tingles no longer think of what life they have in terms of something in the least controllable from season to season or even from day to day: they welter on their living as on water, from one hour to the next, flashing into brief impulse, disorganized and numbed; never quite clear, for instance, who will cook the next meal, or when. Poverty caused their carelessness; their carelessness brings them deeper poverty; disease runs in among them, free as hogs in a garden: and so the intermultiplying goes on, in steady degeneration. That they have been translated into a gayety, a freedom and fearlessness with love, and a sort of sea-floor ultimacy, which the two other families do not enjoy, is definitely worth noting: it is possible to conceive of other paths to salvation which are a little better credit to civilization, and a little less ruinous of human beings. Bud Fields, Kate Tingleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s half-brother, is fifty-nine, and prefers to say he is fifty-four. He is raising his second family. Of his first, the wife and two children are dead. Two sons work halves near Moundville; another is in a CC Camp near Bessemer. His daughter Allie Mae is married to Floyd Burroughs. His daughter Mary, eighteen, has been two years married to an elderly carpenter. Last summer they moved to Mississippi, where they will farm on halves: he couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make a living in Tuscaloosa. When Fields was fifty-one, cancer ate his wife and what money her good management had saved them into the grave. Three years after her death he married again and started farming all over, in the worst of the Depression. He married a young woman named Lily Rogers who had two common-law children by a man back in the hills. He took over one of her children, a little girl named Ruby, and they have had three more: twins, of whom one has died, and a daughter. Mrs. Fields is on her way with another child now. Fields is slenderly built and no longer strong; a finely shaped head; pale blue eyes whose glitter, like splintered glass, is perhaps a survival of the morphine he was addicted to (and which he broke through whiskey) in the years after his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death. He is easily the most intelligent of the three men, skeptical and reflective, and under other auspices would easily have become a drama critic, or at least a club wit. His wife, Lily, comes of casual, strongly sexed, definitively poor people: a combination which automatically brings a bad reputation in that country. Her stepchildren still resent her. She seems to be unconcerned, and unhurt. She is strong as a mule and loves to plow, but her husband disapproves of women plowing.

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Ruby has porcelain skin, red hair, lashless redbrown eyes. She is eight years old, observant of people, sophisticated in her deductions, sexually precocious, and deeply attached to her mother. William, who is also called Doogin, is three years old and huge for his age. The mad face of a Jewish lion cub. Deep histrionic and comic intuition and inventiveness. Lillian is a year and a half old. Silent; flesh like biscuit The Baffler ! 155

She still swims in nothing but a pair of aged drawers, but hides her scarcelydiscernable breasts within the contraction of her shoulders and upper arms.

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dough; big blank blue eyes and curly mouth set between fat cheeks. The archetypically uninteresting case of baby face. Miss-Mary, Lily’s mother, dresses with an unusual eye for show and color; watches you out of crazy-crafty eyes, and uses language extraordinarily, calling (for instance) babies coons and chicks sings. She looks rather like a derelict member of the Cosmopolitan Club. Since her husband was killed in a crap game she has ‘made her home’ among her relatives. She is the sort of woman the children of Nice people shout after in the street. Floyd Burroughs and Allie Mae Fields married when he was twenty and she was sixteen; about the average marrying age. They have been married eleven years and had five children: Maggie Lucile, Floyd Junior, Charles Bafford, Martha, and Othel Lee, who is called Squeaky. Martha is dead. Floyd Burroughs is thirty-one, his features just a little exaggerated beyond that square-chiseled head which the commercial artist Leyendecker sets up as Goodlooking, his build a little stocky, his height medium. He looks bigger than he is because he stoops, as tall men do. He does not look, yet he seems, old enough to be the father of plenty of more softly bred men of his age. His eyes are a clear, ignorant and somewhat dangerous yellow, quietly studying you. He moves slowly and strongly, in a gait shaped to broken land, and like many people who cannot read or write he handles words with a clumsy economy and beauty, as if they were farm animals drawing open difficult land. He is ordinarily grave, with a ballast rather of profound unrewarded fatigue than of mentality; and gentle, not with the premeditated gentleness of the Christian but with the untraditional gentleness of a large animal. He is capable of murderous anger; and capable also of amusement, over clumsiness embarrassed by pain and over the broader kinds of sexual comedy. He likes to get drunk but can seldom afford to. Down in the creek, whenever he can get company, he swims rambunctiously, turning wild somersaults from the bank and clamping his nose in one hand as he smacks the water. His body, which would otherwise have been very conventionally handsome, is knotted into something else again by the work he was done; and his skin, alarmingly fair beyond the elbows and neck, is cratered and discolored by the food he has eaten and the vermin he has slept with. Allie Mae is twenty seven. She inherits the sharp, fine features and the wiry slenderness of her father’s people. In no way neurasthenic, she nevertheless takes very little interest in living. Within her natural intelligence you may discern the features of a drowned intellect. It is easier still to see the steady destruction of an all but beautiful woman; the hard, lean nature of her living has drawn the skin more closely round the bones than need be, and diet, plus the mischance of her own chemistry, has rotted the front teeth out of her upper jaw. Her arms and legs and body are not yet taken out of the shape of a slender comeliness and her walking is joyful to watch, but as she nurses her child you cannot fail to notice how shriveled and knottily veined the breast is; and her hands, when you notice them, are startling: it is as if they were a couple

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of sizes too large, drawn over what the keen wrists called for. The appearance of full-blown enigma is infrequent, unexpected, and arresting; and it always deserves attention. It happens to reside in the eyes of this eldest child, Lucile, and it is doubly arresting because continuously she uses her eyes to watch into the eyes of other people, quite as calmly as death itself, and as cluelessly, too. Probably she is studying you, without either pity or unkindness, but there is no reason to be sure even of that. Any definitive mystery is interesting to speculate over, and thoroughly useless to. These eyes, and whatever is behind them, wear a somewhat more describable creature: a wide forehead; very straight, square-bobbed blond hair that falls over the sweated face; a serene, Scandinavian cast of features, more resolute than conscious resoluteness can be; a sturdily slender, callipygous body, still childish but already subtly blown towards the new dimensions of puberty. She is ten, works in the fields, helps her mother, minds the two smaller children, goes to school, and does well there. She still swims in nothing but a pair of aged drawers, but hides her scarcely-discernable breasts within the contraction of her shoulders and upper arms; her mother still makes her dresses halfway to the hips; she is advanced in consciousness to that stage at which a child dislikes its name. Her mother and father are determined to manage it somehow so that she can go all the way through high school. She wants to be a schoolteacher, or a trained nurse. There is a certain stain of strangeness over Junior, too, in the slantwise way he watches you, and in troubles behind the eyes deeper than The Baffler ! 157

Breaking Stones 3 Nir ala Beside a road in Allahabad, I saw her breaking stones. No tree to give her shade, A dark skin, Firm, tightly-cupped breasts, Eyes fixed on the ground, Thoughts of the night before Going through her mind, She brought down the heavy hammer Again and again, as though it was A weapon in her hand. Across the road— A row of trees, high walls, The mansions of the rich. The sun climbed the sky. The height of summer. Blinding heat, and the loo blowing hard, Scorching everything in its path. The earth under the feet Like burning cotton wool, The air filled with dust and sparks. It was almost noon, And she was still breaking stones.

As I watched, She looked at me once, Then at the houses opposite, Then at her ragged clothes. Seeing there was no one around, She met my eyes again With eyes that spoke of pain But not defeat. Suddenly, there came the notes of a sitar, Such as I had not heard before. The next moment her young body Quivered and as sweat Trickled down her face, she lifted The hammer, resuming work, As though to say, I’m breaking stones.

[1935] Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

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he can understand: but some of that can perhaps be explained. As the first son, he is thought highly of, particularly by his father, and is pretty badly spoiled. As the second child, the young brother of a stronger and more intelligent sister, his self-esteem receives destruction and his jealousy and hatred nourishment at every turn. He compensates in abuse of his own younger and weaker brothers and of animals; and the unconsciousness of his parents allows him a leeway in this which will probably result, a decade from now, in one of the unpredictable, desperate young men the South is full of. Junior is eight. Charles is four. If he had genius he would be fortunate, for his psychological soil is rich in fertilizing pain. Since it seems probably that he is of subnormal intelligence, his situation is merely pitiable. He is a most remarkably unnoticeable child, pale, pretty, weak, and sad. The arrival of his still younger brother forced him out of that strong position of infancy which, thanks to the continuous bullying he receives at Junior’s hands, he worse than normally needs. He cries a great deal of the time: steadily that the crying goes unnoticed, as would the habituate noise of a nearby waterfall; he indulges in baby gibberish, and shows himself capable of normal speech only under the release of marked and affectionate attention; and he is occasionally possessed of rushes of crafty violence against his infant brother, who quite certainly he hates with all his subconscious heart. “The reason why Squeaky is so cute is he’s so little,” his aunt Mary says. He is a few months short of two years old. A year ago last summer he quit growing; that summer’s dresses still fit him tidily. Lively, clownish and amiable, shining with dwarfish vivacity, trotting around on shriveled hind quarters, he inspires sudden love in those whose crippled insides have no need to kill or torture him. Picking Season Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton. The split bolls are now burrs, hard and edged as chiseled wood, pointed as thorns, three, four, and five-celled. There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening. The children and once in a while a very young or a very old man are excited and eager to start picking. It is a joy that scarcely touches most men and any women, though, and it wears off in half a morning and is gone for a year. Picking is simple and terrible work. Skill will help you; endurance will come in handy; but neither makes it a bit easier. Over your right shoulder you have slung a long sack that trails the ground. You work with both hands as fast and steadily as you can. The trick is to get the cotton between your fingertips at its very roots on the burr in all three or four or five gores at once so that it brings out clean at one pluck: an easy job with one burr in ten, where the cotton is ready to fall; with the The Baffler ! 159

A strong back is a big help, but not even the strongest back was built for that treatment.

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rest, the fibres are tight and tricky. The other trick is against this thoroughness and obligation of maximum speed, not to hurt your fingers on the burrs any worse than you can help. You would have to try hard not to break your flesh on any burr: a single raindrop is only scarcely instrumental in ironing a mountain flat. An hour’s picking, your hands are just limbered up. A week, and you are favoring your fingers. The later of the three to five times over the field, the last long weeks of the season, you might be happy to swap them for boils. Meantime, too, you are working in sunlight that stands on you with the serene weight of deep seawater, and in heat that makes your jointed and muscled and finestructured body flow like one indiscriminate oil, and the brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you heavier and heavier all the time and the eyes are masked in stinging sweat and the head perhaps is gently tossing like a private blowtorch, and less gently pulsing with ache. Also the bag that can hold a hundred pounds is filling as you drag it from plant to plant, four to nine burrs to a plant, to be rifled swiftly, then the load shrugged along another foot or two and the white row stretched ahead to a blur and innumerably multiplied by other white rows, and bolls in the cleaned row behind you already like slow popcorn in the heat and the sack still heavier and heavier, so that it pulls you back as a beast might rather than a mere dead weight. Also, cotton plants are low, so that in this heat and immanent weight of light and the heavying sack you are dragging, you are continuously stooped over even if you are a child, and bent very deep if you are a man or a woman. A strong back is a big help, but not even the strongest back was built for that treatment, and there combine not just at the kidneys, and the roll down the thighs and up the spine and athwart the shoulders, the ticklish weakness of gruel or water, and an aching that increases in geometric progression, and at length, in the small of the spine, a literal sensation of yielding, buckling, splintering, and breakage: and all of this, even though the mercy of nature has strengthened and hardened your flesh and anaesthetized your nerves and your powers of reflection and imagination, reaches in time the brain and the more mirrorlike nerves, and thereby makes itself much worse than before. Later in the season you are relieved of the worst of the heat. In time, you exchange it for a coolness which many pickers like even less because it slows and chills the lubricant garment of sweat they work in, and seriously slows and stiffens the by then painfully sore fingers. The idiom has been overused but it is accurate: picking goes on each day from can’t to can’t: sometimes, if there’s a rush, the Tingles continue by moonlight. In the blasting heat of the first of the season unless there is a rush—to beat a rain, to make up a wagonload—it is customary to quit work an hour and a half and even two hours in the worst part of the day and sit or lie in the shade and possible draft of the hallway asleep or half asleep after dinner. This time off narrows as the weeks go by and a sense of rush and the wish to be done with it grow on the pickers and come through from the landlord. There are tenants who have no midday meal. Those we are speaking of have it. It is of course no par-

allel in heartiness and variety to the proud enormous dinners cooked up for harvest hands in the wheat country and accounted and painted with Zest, Gusto, and even Zowie by certain lovers of what they call the American Scene. It is the same everyday food, with perhaps a little less variety than in midsummer, hastily cooked by a woman who has hurried in exhausted from the fields a couple of jumps ahead of her family, and served in the dishes she rushily rinsed before she hurried out a couple of jumps behind them. There has been a certain exaggeration about child labor in the cotton fields: essentially none, but stupid a little, and worth a word or two. The exaggerations have chalked up child labor as a crime a hundred percent against the landlord or his overseers. They—particularly the overseer—have some direct and a strong indirect part in it. But two facts the correspondents have overlooked. One is that it is customary as breathing (all farms, even the Jersiest and most Kulak you can imagine), for the children of the family to help with the work. That is part of the whole structure of any family that lives directly off the land. The other fact is that Southern farmers more strongly than others retain still the delineaments of the primitive family anywhere: a patri– or matriarchy (in the south it is patriarchal; in the American middle class it is matriarchal and on an uglier plane)—a patriarchy into which children are born unquestioning slaves until by their own physical or mental strength they free themselves.* Still another fact that has nothing to do with the tenant system is that cotton requires more labor than most other crops and that the labor of your children is free. The economic skeleton of these three facts is plain as the skull on your throat and so solidly sustains the arguments of those who ignore it that it is odd indeed that they do ignore it. However, there is certainly a line. Cross it, and the work children do most certainly becomes child labor. Every tenant family crosses it and the fact that few are aware of crossing it is irrelevant. In that country you speak of a family not as a family but as a force: and with good reason. Nothing brilliant is expected of a four-year-old but he will do a fair amount of picking along with the others; you cannot learn him too young. By the time he is seven he is no longer able to think of it, ever, as play. By the time he is twelve he has long outgrown any sense of privilege, pride, or novelty in plowing, too: and by that time if not before it is likely to seem logical as well as necessary that he quit school. All of the same goes for a girl. The baby meanwhile is lying in the field or rolling around in the white load of the woven-oak basket. A little older, say two, and he is picking his hat or his skirt full. There are sometimes shifts into gayety in the picking, or excitement—a race between the two children, a snake killed—but mostly it is silent, serious, and lonely work. Floyd Burroughs is a very poor picker. When he was a child he fell in the fireplace and burnt the flesh off the flat of both hands, so his * Deeper in the Southern mountains these lines are proportionally more sternly drawn. Southerners of twenty years back can

remember vividly how, along the millhouse streets, deep country couples who had raised a brood to working age and brought them to market sat on their sterns on porch after porch while their children, at the spindles, brought in the bacon or, rather, sowbelly.

The Baffler ! 161

It is possible that Mrs. Tingle is something of a fantasist, though, and indeed in all the above we must bear in mind the possibilities of Homeric brag: according to general publicity surrounding the Rust machine, 100 pounds a day is good picking.

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fingers are stiff and slow and the best he has ever done in a day is 150 pounds. Average for a man is nearer 250. His back hurts him badly too, so he usually picks on his knees, the way other pickers rest; and a man walking on his knees down a white shudder of heat is something for painters of peasants to look into. Allie Mae picks about the average for a woman—150 to 200 pounds a day. She is fast with her fingers until the work exhausts her. Lucile picks 150 pounds a day. Junior hasn’t yet got into his stride. Fields has been slowed down by poor health for several years now. His wife is strong and competent and her mother is still a good picker (and a vindictive hand with an axe) so in spite of having only one child old enough to be any use, they can get in the crop without hiring a hand. The Tingle boys are all right when their papa is on hand to make them work: otherwise they are likely just to clown and tease their sisters. Sadie is very quick. Summer before last, when she was just eight, she picked 110 pounds in a day in a race with Laura Minnie Lee. Last summer she was slowed up by runarounds that were losing her two nails (caused by the diet plus dirt and not much fun among the burrs) but she was picking steadily. Mrs. Tingle used to pick 300 and 350 pounds a day but sickness has slowed her to less than 200 now. It is possible that Mrs. Tingle is something of a fantasist, though, and indeed in all the above we must bear in mind the possibilities of Homeric brag: according to general publicity surrounding the Rust machine, 100 pounds a day is good picking. Commonly, cotton is stored in a small structure in the field, the cotton house. None of these three families has one. The Burroughs store in one of their outbuildings; the Fields on their front porch, raising planks around it; the Tingles in their spare room. Children enjoy playing in it, tumbling, jumping, diving, burying each other; sometimes they sleep in it, as a sort of treat. Rats like it too, to make nests in, and that draws ratsnakes. When the home scales have weighed out fourteen hundred pounds of cotton it is loaded on the high-boarded wagon and taken to gin. A man is “free” to take his cotton to whatever gin he pleases but that means generally the gin his landlord owns or has an interest in. The same goes for what store you trade at. Over and over again you hear tenants say, innocently enough too, that there’s never no use gitting a man agin ya. The children take turns riding in, bale by bale and year by year: they are likely to be cleaned up as for Saturday afternoon, and they are happy and excited. And there is for that matter a happiness and excitement, and a raw, festal quality about it, this one of the tremendous slow parade of muledrawn, crawling wagons, creaking under the year’s bloodsweated and prayed-over work, on all roads drawn in, from the slender red roads of all the South and onto the Southern highways, a wagon every few hundred yards, crested now with a white and now with a black family, all towards these little trembling lodes that are the gins, and all and in each private heart towards that climax of one more year’s work which yields so little at best, and nothing so often, and worse to so many hundreds of thousands. The gin, too, the wagons in line, the people waiting on the wagons,

the suspendered whiteshirted men on the platform, the emblematic sweep of the greatshouldered iron beam scales cradling gently in the dark doorway, the insignia of justice, the landlords in their shirtsleeves at the gin or relaxed in swivels beside the painted safes in their little offices, the leafers drawn there to have their batteries recharged with the vicarious violence that is in process in the bare and weedy outskirts of the bare and brutal townâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all that also in its hard, slack, sullen way, is dancelike and triumphal. The big blank surfaces of ribbed tin, bright and sick as gas in the sunlight, square their darkness round a shuddering racket that is a mystery to these we speak of. All it means to a tenant is this: he gets his ticket and his bale number; waits his turn in line; drives under as they rise the ginhead; they let him down the suction pipe; he cradles its voracity down through the crest and round and round his stack of cotton till the last lint has leapt up from the wagonbed. Wandering loose out back, his son may happen upon the tin and ghostly interior of the seed shed, against whose roof and rafters a pipe extends a steady sleet of seed and upon all whose interior surfaces and all the air, a dry nightmare fleece trembles like the fake snows of Christmas movies. Out in front he can see the last of the cotton snowlike relaxing in pulses down a space of dark into the compress. The bale is lifted like a Roxy organ, the presses unlatched, numbered

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Possibly the most important thing to a human being, once he is alive and possessed of the means of sustaining life, is that he should do the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing.

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brass tag attached, the ties fastened: it hangs in the light breathing of the scales. A little is slivered from it; the staple length is taken. (Of the type raised in this vicinity it is seven-eighths of an inch to an inch.) The ginning charge per scale varies a little; hangs around $4. On anything exceeding 550 pounds there is an extra charge of a cent a pound; for this overweight strains the press. There are plenty of buyers on hand, ranging between Vergil Davis who clerks in the town’s biggest general store (the Moundville Mercantile, popularly known as Davis’s) through leg men for Southern mills. A half-cropper has little to say about the sales; a renter a fair amount. The cotton may be sold right off the platform; and may wait on, for better prices, late into December. If it waits it may be stored in the Government warehouse; it may be left outdoors. Alone among Moundville landlords the Tidmore brothers have a warehouse of their own, and they charge their tenants no storage. The tenant gets nothing on his cotton until settling-up time, at the end of the season; the landlord’s first cotton-money by invariable custom pays off his fertilizer bill. What the tenant does get bale by bale is the money on his share of the cottonseed, on which his living depends. A landlord sometimes makes a joking feint of withholding that money against outstanding debts and, somewhat less often, carries out the joke. But generally the tenant’s business of that day ends as he leaves his landlord with six dollars or so in his pocket. The exodus from town is even more formal than the parade in was. It has taken almost exactly eighteen minutes to gin each bale (once the waiting was over), and each tenant has done almost exactly the same amount of business afterward; and the tenants’ empty, light-grinding wagons are distributed along the roads in a likewise exact conjunction of time and space apart: the time consumed by ginning plays business; the space apart which, in that time, any mule traverses at his classic somnambulist pace. It is as if the people drawn in full and sucked dry were restored, sown at large upon the breadth of their country, precisely as by some impersonal mechanic hand. That happens as many times as you have picked a bale; the field is gone over three to five times; the height of the ginning season, when wagons are on the road before the least crack of daylight and the gin is still racketing after dark, is in early October. After this comes hogkilling; and the milling of the corn and sorghum you have planted to come ready late; and specific consideration of whether or not to move to another man; the sky descends; the air becomes like dark glass; the ground hardened; the clay honeycombs with frost; the odors of pork and woodsmoke sharpen all over the country; and winter is on. Leisure Possibly the most important thing to a human being, once he is alive and possessed of the means of sustaining life, is that he should do the work he cares most to do and is best capable of doing. If there is anything else of quite such importance to him (always barring the Higher Affections) it would fall under the head of Leisure, and how best to use and enjoy it. Every detail of circumstance and nearly every detail of socalled education reduces freedom in choice of occupation to an all but

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nonexistent margin, for people such as the Burroughs. Thanks to the same circumstances and education they have about the least chance imaginable of so much as dreaming what work they would be capable of, and would best like to do, if any breadth of choice were possible. It is therefore comfortable to realize that they have, anyhow, a great deal of leisure. Six months of the year there is little farm work to do; every Saturday, except in a rush, work stops at noon and everyone goes to Moundville; Sunday is always a day of rest, and often even during work time, as we have seen, there are eases in the day. But when we say leisure we are thinking of all social relations, and of the enjoyment of life. We would be the first to admit that taking America by the leisure of its people is, if anything, more grim than the work, but our subject here is the leisure of the tenant farmer: a subject difficult to write of journalistically, since it is so nearly an abstraction. There are virtually none of the narcotics to which almost any more prosperous class is addicted. There are very, very few newspapers or magazines. What there are, are saved. The covers and pretty pictures are pasted on the walls; the children save and look at the comic sections over and over. Frank Tingle alone among them enjoys reading. He reads pulps, when he gets them, from kiver to kiver, and he sometimes reads a copy of the Progressive Farmer. Some years back, Floyd bought a fifty-dollar Grafanola on the installment plan. ( Judging by The Baffler ! 165

Little Princess, or The One~Eyed Girl 3 Nir ala Her mother calls her Little Princess, Affectionately, as the name suggests. The truth, however, Is a pock-pitted, flat-nosed, bald, And one-eyed face.

Little Princess has come of age.

She cuts and threshes, pounds and grinds,

Trims the wickers till her hands are raw,

Sweeps the floor, throws the rubbish out,

Fills the pots with water.

Still, her mother’s heart is troubled. It feels like a box a thief has emptied. Where will she get A husband for her daughter? She despairs if someone Says in the neighbourhood,

‘All said and done,

Little Princess is a woman.

Who wants a one-eyed wife?’

When Little Princess hears this

Her body shivers. She sees her mother’s grief And a tear fills her good eye. But the blind left one Stays dry, alert. [1942] Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

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the music played at five and ten counters in the county seats, the white preference is for sweet as against hot, disliked as nigger music, and still more for whines like Lonely Days in Texas.) There are no radios. There are few cars, and they are invariably Model-Ts. None of them has the famous rustic pleasure of hewing closely to the Party Line. The infiltration of all that has to do with the outside world is slow, verbal, and distorted in transit. Perhaps we may as well mention here what we lately referred to as the Higher Affections. It is almost but not quite safe to say that there is no such thing in that vicinity except, occasionally, in the phases of courtship and the early phases of marriage. We must make these qualifications. The Tingles, much more cut off from people than the others (by their “lowness” in the scale) appear to have an actual and active, mutual and fully distributed affection at least and sometimes love for each other. Fields and his wife, though he refers to her in her presence as this-woman-here, show signs of really enjoying each other. Mrs. Burroughs is very fond of her father and of her sister Mary, proud and fond of her daughter, and devoted to her youngest child as if he were the only thing that kept her alive, which perhaps he is. Floyd is fond and proud of his eldest son. But lovelessness is nevertheless overwhelmingly the impression you would get, and your impression would be confirmed in detail in the course of time. You can find the same, you may say, almost anywhere you look. We say only that the chances for good are at their slenderest in contexts such as we are here speaking of. Friend is a word you will hear seldom, too. People don’t have friends: they have kinfolks, and neighbors, and former neighbors, and acquaintances, many of whom they would without reflection make great efforts and sacrifices for; they get along with them more or less amiably. The habitual expression of face and of gesture is serious, slow, and somewhat sad. Children play routine games of marbles, crack-the-whip, hide-andseek. There are also spontaneous games with dogs. A solitary such as Charles makes up gibberish by the hour that shows an idiot genius for rhythmic variety. Older children begin to show the painful restiveness of a maturing mind that has nothing to mature on, and of a sexual hunger that has no way to feed itself. The leisures of adolescence are particularly disturbing to watch; and their power alone to bore to frenzy would explain early marriages if nothing else did. The social relations among the three families are limited. During easy parts of weekdays Mrs. Fields, with her children in tow, may visit Mrs. Burroughs, or vice versa, and they sit on the porch and drawl at each other. When the men are at work away from home, or looking for work, they have a somewhat richer social exchange than this: more people are seen in more variety; there is a loosening of tongues under the sunlight and a searching in the reflection of a morning’s events during a lunch period. At home, most of the family talk is during meals. There is just the hard substance of the day and direct future in it. Junior went out to the cotton house and there was a ratsnake jist a-dabbin at him, or, that The Baffler ! 167

Out in front he can see the last of the cotton snowlike relaxing in pulses down a space of dark into the compress.

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black kitten went and had fits and he died. The children, especially the little girls, sometimes spend overnight together: and the presence of a guest cheers everyone a good deal, though usually the pleasure is scarcely articulate. Very occasionally whole families will visit each other overnight. There was a good time two years ago the Burroughs still like to remember, when Bud was still living over in the swamp and his daughter Mary was home (one of the two times she has left her husband for good). They all went over and all of them but Allie Mae and Lily got drunk. Mary, she was just sloppy-drunk, she was so drunk she didn’t know she was in the world. That same sort of party mixed with nonrelatives and with a fiddle and dancing added, is called a frolic. Frolics are not frequent among the white people, even when a good many of them live near together, and out this lonesome road none of the families has been on one for years. Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July are always big times. Last Fourth of July all the white people out that road had a picnic, and it was a good time for everyone until Mr. Peoples’s nineteen-year-old idiot epileptic son throwed a fit and spoiled the fun. It must be remembered of course that the six months of nominal leisure are somewhat qualified: they offer the derelict leisure of unemployment. The two big leisure days, dependably, each week, are Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, everyone goes to Moundville. Whether Moundville need be “described” is a problem. It is a town on the small side of small and the mean (not tough, just mean) side of mean. Such towns have been nailed into the reading lobe of the American brain perhaps beyond need of further hammering. Barring church, however, it offers the people we are speaking of their total experience of what social students like to call communal life: it is market place and metropolis to them and to miles of countryside. Moreover, it is that swatch of civilization which people of that countryside directly support: for nearly everyone—that is, Everyone—in town owns at least a little piece of land, and most landowners have some business interest in Moundville. So perhaps a few notes are in order. Population around 500. Autoplates bearing the legend: “Heart of the Cotton Belt.” A quarter of a mile off a State Highway. Hard by the biggest Mounds in Alabama, within which are the bones of diminutive Mongolians 3,500 years dead, now being exhumed at bargain cost by the boys in CCC Camp Baltsell. Served by the Southern Railway. Three big corrugated tin gins owned and operated by combines of landowners. Low tin shed: cotton warehouses. A planing mill run by Joseph Mills, who has been prematurely logging in the vicinity for the past fifteen years and for whom Floyd and Tingle work. Mrs. Wiggins’s Hotel and Café. Out front, a Negress jouncing the Wiggin baby in an elastic swing or, of a Saturday afternoon, middle-class (but not quite Class) housewives in clean best ginghams, watching the crowd, commenting, pulling their dresses loose from their skins. Two drug stores, run by the town’s two senior doctors, serving gigantic quantities of Coca Cola and selling sadistic pulps to the men, ovarian pulps to

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the women, and patent medicines to all comers. Three general stores owned by the landowners in combine, their wares general as only the wares of southern country stores can be. A Yellow Front store, one of a chain, specializing in groceries. A hardware store. A filling station. (Others out at the highway.) A mule market. A biggish new clean brick church with saintless windows that resemble an amalgam of oysters in need of fresh air: a landownersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; church: Methodis or Babtis, what difference does it make. The homes of landowners: squarebuilt, in fair trim, set in bushy lawns on which are wooden animals; graded down to muggy houses which, if women, would not have shaved their underarms. Nothing Greek-revival. A colossally filthy, or in fairer words perfectly ordinary, Niggertown. Saturdays: On the depot platform and the porch of the refrigerator shed lounge two identical groups: town boys of fifteen to twenty in the light pants, light shirt and eyeshade or new straw which make the uniform of their kind and class; twitching with curbed sexuality and a less curbed violence: tinder for every crime from the seduction of Negresses to lynching. In front of the hotel: the fat-sterned mamas of the hamlet, sweating their sour cosmetics into dough. At the curbs enjoying curb service, or coursing the two blocks of business street quietly, The Baffler ! 169

over and over, in daddy’s chivrolet coach, daughters of the landed gentry, girls who can only be described as bitchy. In the stores or threading the walks: the landowners and merchants, shirtsleeved, hatted, sweating with extreme busyness or taking time off for a stroll and a dope. In vacant grounds behind the low buildings, crowded and silent, the empty wagons, the mules twitching their hides against the flies. In the stores and on the walks and all over the streets: the tremendous shy and nearly silent swarm of whites and of negroes drawn in out of the slow and laborious depths of the country, along the withered vine of their red roadsteads and along the sedanswept blue slags of highway, on mule, on mule-drawn wagon and by foot hanging together, each family, like filings delicately aligned by a hidden magnet, doing their scraps of trading, meeting acquaintances and relatives otherwise seldom seen, and jawing a little, with no demonstration even of pleasure, far less of fake effusiveness; shy even here and even here a little stunned by the urbanity of it all: alien to it: not at all of it: looked down on, a little contemptuously, by it: threaded steadily by a man upon whose beltsustained overdose of bowels perches, toylike yet businesslike, a pistol in a black holster. Among all these are the Burroughs and the Fields and a quota and sometimes all of the Tingles: They have come in crowded in one wagon, usually Tingle’s. They buy their lard and flour and light groceries and, if there is money left, some gingersnaps or some peanut-shaped, banana-flavored candy for the children; or a couple of yards of printed cotton: or, very occasionally, the men will sneak into a blind tiger and buy half a pint of corn, which they drink swiftly in the blinding heat and under whose influence their conduct is unpredictable. (They have a sense of guilt about drinking and consequently a viciously kiddish sense of joy about it; though they drink far less badly than the acned young men on the depot platform.) Once in a great while a movie is shown on Saturday, in the Moundville School. That is all that need be said, because few of the parents and none of the children we are speaking of have ever seen one. Of course to many tenants, near the next bigger size of town, movies are less unfamiliar. Their Saturday fare may as well be mentioned, then: A Western always; a serial imitative of the adventures of Tarzan; a short comedy or musical about middle-class city life or Times Square. Occasionally a problem drama about the difficulties of being rich and looking like Miriam Hopkins, or a comedy of manners with dialogue which is a bad imitation at fourth remove of the dialogue of Philip Barry. Every so often, Gypsies come through. It causes a certain amount of interest out in the country because they are mistaken for Injuns. Last summer a merry-go-round (pronounced with the accent on go) set up in the vacant lot next to the combined mayor’s office and jail: beautifully sculpted horses painted in delirious colors; good primitive oils concealing the core of machinery; a jim crow sign in gold letters on red; mechanized Wurlitzer horns gaily blowing tunes of fifteen years old. Burroughs and Tingle got drunk and took rides. (Many adult Negroes, perfectly sober, rode too.) Maybe there will be another one next 170 1 The Baffler

summer. There is one running all the time up in Tuscaloosa but that is so far off (twenty-five miles) that, for instance none of the Burroughs children had ever seen it until last summer. Sunday is the day of rest. Children are welcome to play, and sometimes a man gets quietly drunk, but it is a day of rest. People go to church some, less regularly perhaps than you might think, and pay each other visits, kin-to-kin mostly. A chicken is killed, in honor. While the women are fixing it and getting dinner ready, the men sit on the porch and talk or smoke or chew; the little girls retire into a lowvoiced and mysterious semi-privacy; the boys jab at the dirt with sticks or knives. While the men are eating dinner, the women wait on them and brush flies away. While the women and children are eating, the men sit and talk. Later they get up and go quietly around the fields, or examine a bee-gum, or lean over the rail of a hogpen. The women drift away in pairs, or with a child, into the woods, and come back quietly to sit on the porch and talk. When the men come back and take the chairs they go in and sit on the bed. There is no point in recording the talk. It is endless, unhurried, unembarrassed by silence, of neighbors, crops, stock, sickness, cooking, scandal, hunting, death, fortune, misfortune, types of fertilizer, a leaking roof, government jobs, the chance of a job, childbearing, the weather, all depending on the sex of the talkers and the length of distance and time they have been apart. There is very little communication between the women and the men. Somewhat unusually isolated, these three families have less “company” than the average. Bud Fields sees his two sons fairly often; Burroughs, his mother and a sister in Moundville on Saturdays (she is married to Fields’s son Edward); Tingle, less often, his brother, who lives four miles back of them out the road: but the radius is small, and seldom exceeded. There aren’t enough white people in the neighborhood to support a church, so these three families are deprived of what in another place would be the only full-blown social spiritual and esthetic event in their lives. The meetings in deep country go on for hours and intensify, during the dead weeks before picking, into revivals. So they make it up the best way they can. Up till the year before last they held meetings in Tingle’s home, in the spare room where he stores his cotton. Everyone looked forward to the meetings and everyone came, including a number of tough and scornful outsiders. As time wore on the meetings got too rough. Finally the Tidmores gave them permission to use an abandoned one-room nigger-shack a little piece down the road. For no reason that anyone understands, there has been no trouble since. The meetings are held Wednesday and Friday evenings except when work is at a rush, and every Sunday right after early dinner. No one specially regrets missing a weeknight meeting, but everyone looks forward to the Sundays except Fields, who is “not a religious man.” None of them are especially religious for that matter, except over the weather and in fear of death, but they would all be deeply shocked if

After this comes hogkilling; and the milling of the corn and sorghum you have planted to come ready late; and specific consideration of whether or not to move to another man; the sky descends; the air becomes like dark glass; the ground hardened; the clay honeycombs with frost; the odors of pork and woodsmoke sharpen all over the country; and winter is on.

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you expressed any doubt about the existence and nature of God; they care a great deal about the singing and, to a person who has nothing on earth and is done with hoping, it is an obvious and, when necessary, a profound and cathartic comfort to be sure that in the long run all is for the best and the poor man will be taken care of. They are of different sects but the depth of country and tradition makes them all much alike in action and tone. These meetings are non-sectarian, and it causes no one any apparent discomfort. After a certain amount of preliminary singing, Tingle or a neighbor named Peoples asks each person present to quote a verse of the Bible. “TheLordgivethandtheLordhathtakenaway blessedbethenameoftheLord.” One child said “Let not your heart be troubled” (a favorite verse); the next said “Jesus wept”: and well he might. After that the leader reads a chapter from the New Testament and expounds it, verse by verse; and after that the singing resumes in good earnest, everyone crowded behind the torn forty year-old hymnal. The hymns are of the Moody-Sankey tradition crossed with the subtler and more swinging intervals and rhythms of the Southern poor whites. They are sung with violence by the leaders; hummed or growled by the more shy. The leaders are Frank Tingle and his two eldest daughters. Tingle picked up sight-reading in one night at singing-school and has a somewhat fallible talent for harmony and improvisation. His voice is a loud bugling bay and it brackets the whole male register. His daughters, who have learned the tunes and most of the words by heart, strain and tighten their naturally pleasant voices continually, in hopeless competition with him. They are expert and responsible in starting off the new verse the instant the old one is done with. His two boys likewise break their unchanged throats. His two smaller girls sing slenderly like violins, and fall into silences of shyness over the sound of their own voices. All the hymns are long, five and six verses plus chorus; they all have a pitch and roll to them; the words are emotional, full of guilt, self-pity, and the certitude of ultimate love and rest: and wiry and shrill and lacking in the massiveness it needs, the singing nevertheless achieves the beginnings of its purpose. Nearly everyone gets warmed up and sings louder, the lilt and swing and improvisation become less inhibited, and a kind of ticklish, intensely sexual laughter and triumph begins to work at the mouth and to shine on the eyes. Only it never quite breaks loose even from the shame that poisons it, and it leaves them shy or masklike or concealing in jokes. People come in and go out as they like; smoke at the doorway. There is no formal end to the service. The children and men drift out, then the wives: for the last half hour only Tingle and his two girls and Mrs. Tingle (moved, serious and nearly silent in her deep black) are left in the shack. It is seldom they have a sermon. A year ago last fall a Nazarene preacher named Mr. Eddie Sellers, from up above Tuscaloosa, preached them two in successive days, and taught them a new hymn he had written. He really satisfied them, and they still remember him with deep gratitude.t 172 1 The Baffler

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The Baffler ! 173

M y Own Little Mission Soul for Rent! 3 D ubr avka Ugrešić [part 5] “ I think it’s just elegant to have an imagination, I just have no imagination at all. I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination.” —Marilyn Monroe

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Shortly before the whole world slid into financial crisis, a Dutchman,

the head of some kind of association, contacted me explaining that he was a fan of my books, and that he’d like to organize a literary evening. “And you’d be the moderator?” “Yes.” “You’re a literary critic?” “No, I’m a physical education teacher.” “So you’re into sport, then?” “No, cultural exchange.” “And where would the literary evening be?” “In Poland.” “Where, exactly?” The Dutchman mentioned the name of a village. As it turned out, the Dutchman had a holiday home there, where he spends most of the year. Other Dutch also had houses in the village. Then it came out that the physical education teacher actually organized group tours for Dutch tourists, accompanying them around the surrounding countryside and introducing them to authentic Polish village life. His mission wasn’t just to enlighten Dutch tourists about Polish culture; it was also about enriching the everyday lives of the local population. I was supposed to be the enrichment. The physical education teacher’s benevolent enterprise had already received accreditation for its innovative embrace of European integration. “Who are you accredited by?” “European Union agencies. We get some funding from them, the rest comes from membership dues.” “And this is how you earn a living?” “One has to live from something,” he said meekly. Irrespective of the fact that I was and remain wholeheartedly in favor of initiatives supporting European integration, not to mention intercultural communication, I declined the invitation, which only goes to prove my arrogance and worrying deficit of visionary imagination. Let me repeat: this was all before the crisis. Today I’d no doubt be more receptive to the offer. Yes, we live in times of crisis. Many are thinking about means of survival, yet most suffer failures of imagination. For example, in Croatia a couple of middle-aged women (one of whom was educated as a political scientist) went to jail after botching a bank robbery. For my part, I appreciate an imaginative approach. I think it’s elegant when someone, even in times of crisis, has an imagination. Perhaps I have lots of other things, but I have no imagination. That’s why I was thrilled to read about a little Croatian start-up. Buying pigs’ ears from a local slaughterhouse (cheap, of course—pigs’

ears rarely make it onto anyone’s menu), a guy figured he could grind them into prime dog food. Crisis or not, there are plenty of buyers. People obviously figure that even if their own lives aren’t up to much, they can at least try and give their pets a decent one. I was equally taken by the example of well-known gourmet chef Daniel Angerer and his wife. The pair had a young baby, and in case her milk dried up, the wife put away some in reserve. With the fridge soon overflowing with breast milk, the pair decided to make cheese from it. Angerer launched the new venture by approaching volunteer tasters with little cheese, fig, and pepper sandwiches. Many turned up their noses. Angerer’s wife maintained that the prevailing scepticism toward mother’s-milk cheese stems from the fact that most people “associate cheese with sex,” instead of accepting the fact that “women’s breasts exist to produce food.” Angerer’s idea was taken up by artist Miriam Simun in the installation The Lady Cheese-Shop. Visitors were offered breast-milk cheese, the goal being to examine “the relationship between ethics and modern biotechnology.” London restaurateur Matt O’Connor has a dish called “Baby Gaga” on his menu: breast milk ice cream. It’s around twenty-two dollars a portion. O’Connor maintains that “no one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years,” and pays his donors well. One wet nurse shyly explained that, given she has excess milk, the extra income was very welcome in these recessionary times. The woman is right. If people sell their kidneys, blood, and children to survive, why wouldn’t women sell their milk? I mean, if they’ve got it to spare. Some people’s imaginations really take the biscuit. It isn’t just breast milk that brings in the punters; nostalgia works a treat too. Lithuanians, for example, cottoned on that there was a dollar to be made in commercializing their traumas under the terrors of Soviet communism. As part of the project 1984: Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker, visitors crawl down into an authentic six-meter-deep Soviet bunker in a Lithuanian forest somewhere, exposing themselves to the risk of physical and mental torment. Visitors are happy to put their hands in their pockets to hear (for a first or second time) Soviet guards yelling: “Welcome to the Soviet Union! Here you are nobody and nothing!” Hungarian director Péter Bacsó’s 1969 film The Witness (A Tanú) features a communist amusement park. There’s a scene in a funhouse in which Marx’s, Lenin’s, and Stalin’s heads leap out of the darkness, prompting general shrieking in the audience. The scene inscribed the film in the memories of my generation as a brilliant and emancipatory satire on the absurdities of communism. Of course, the film itself spent some time in a bunker, and is today almost forgotten. Af-

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ter the fall of the Berlin Wall, communist theme parks have sprung up in a number of postcommunist countries, but as there’s no risk, they’re no longer entertaining, and least of all emancipating. Viliumas Malinauskas is a wealthy Lithuanian farmer (mushrooms and snails) and the owner of Grūtas Park, a sculpture garden located in a forest next to the village of the same name, the park home to socialist-realist statues scavenged from the ruins of Lithuanian communism. Visitors can have their photo taken in the embrace of tons of bronze—Stalin, Lenin, and Marx and Engels are all there—or, if they prefer, with living sculptures (performance artists impersonating the same crew). In Lithuania, a land of Catholicism and former communism, a battle for market share is raging. It remains to be seen whether dead communism or living Catholicism will win the day. Incidentally, let’s not forget that, from a commercial perspective, communism still appears to sell amazingly well in the country of its former rival, in America. Every now and then a new literary star emerges from the undergrowth to testify about his or her communist trauma due to lack of bananas and toilet paper. The reality is that these stars are getting younger and younger (and cuter and cuter!), so can’t have had any real personal contact with communism in the first place. But yeah, genes and place of birth are always solid guarantees of purported authenticity. The marketplace knows that the inauthentic recycling of trauma always sells better than authentic experience from firsthand. Some people really do have great imaginations. The London culinary expert assured us that there had been nothing new in the ice-cream world for the past hundred years. But there’s no way that’s the case with tourism, where they’re innovating on a daily basis. Hence the appearance of so-called dark tourism and its specific sub-genres. There’s grief tourism (tourists visit concentration camps, infamous prisons, historic graveyards, battle sites of mass slaughter, or the small town of Soham, England, where two ten-year-old girls were once killed); disaster tourism (tourists visit places struck by natural catastrophes, post-Katrina New Orleans, post-tsunami Thailand, etc.); then there’s poverty tourism (tourists visit infamous shanty towns such as Soweto in South Africa, or the favela of Rio de Janeiro); and then there’s doomsday tourism (tourists go to places threatened with disappearance—the Galápagos Islands, Greenland, tiny coral islands such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia). The newest branch of tourism on offer is political tourism. It’s all about educational visits to political hotspots. Tour operators organize both group and individual trips to countries such as Turkey, Georgia, North Korea, Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Bosnia. The tour guides are always experts, acclaimed historians, diplomats, academics, respected commentators, and journalists. The clients are whoever is prepared to pay. The cost of an eight-day trip to Bosnia is just over four thousand dollars. The tour is led by a well-known British journalist and involves meetings with local politicians, NGOs, religious leaders, regular people, and authentic victims of the Bosnian war. Surviving victims, naturally. 176 1 The Baffler

For many of these troubled hotspots the potential windfall from political tourism could be a saving grace. Croatia has a lot to offer—the aforementioned Croatian generals in The Hague, for example. One of them has got real star power: an alleged playboy and former French legionnaire, who heartless Europe considers a war criminal, and little, but sensitive Croatia, a hero. The Serbian criminal scene also has talent to burn, not least that of a beautiful silicon-enhanced pop star and gangster widow. The war criminal Radovan Karadžić, also currently residing in The Hague, is great material for any prospective tourist package. It’s perhaps only a matter of time before ethnic cleansing and detention camps inspire theme parks. Tourists could get their ethnic chip (Serb, Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, etc.) with their entry ticket and then chase each other around the park ethnically cleansing one another. Communism could be a starter too. Goli otok, the Yugoslav gulag, has a mild Mediterranean climate, and given its accessibility, incomparably better tourist potential than Siberian camps. In short, if there’s a growth market for anything in the states that has sprouted from the former Yugoslavia, it’s definitely tourism. It would naturally be unfortunate if the industrious residents of these impoverished backwaters were to participate in political tourism ventures only as waiters and supporting actors. I admit that there’s also a personal dimension to my interest in the human imagination in times of crisis. I’ve been mulling over how to earn a dime, too. I once met an unusual old woman who asked me a sly question. “And where do you fit in: among the vampires or the donors?” “I’m with the donors,” I shot back in jest. Today my then off-the-cuff response turns out to have been the correct one. Because as the old woman explained it, people fit into two main groups: “vampires” and “donors.” Being a donor doesn’t automatically grant one the moral high ground, and neither does it relegate one to the loser category in advance. Maybe you’re just lazy, and exposing your bulging veins to exploitation is easier than baring your teeth and getting down to work. As someone with a donor’s psychogram, I’ve decided to try my hand as an entrepreneur. My idea is perhaps a little exclusive, but luckily for me it’s not original. Originality, say marketing experts, only increases the risk of bankruptcy anyway. I’ve decided to rent out my soul. I’m well aware that the soul’s value has fallen catastrophically, and that my business venture doesn’t have much hope of success. But you never know. I’m inspired by the bright example of the Croatian businessman who with his dog food really has made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. My soul is flexible and displays strong regenerative properties. Its powers of absorption are as good as any old-school blotter. Potential clients should provide a short biography. Perverts and smokers are out of the question. Payment in advance and in cash. Contact details to the editor.t

The newest branch of tourism on offer is political tourism.

Translated from the Croatian by David Williams. The Baffler ! 177

Bafflers No. 19 James Agee (1909-1955) was an American poet, novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Greg Beato is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He writes a column for Reason. Charles Bernstein teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and is a co-founder of PennSound and The Electronic Poetry Center. Will Boisvert is a critic and journalist who has written for In These Times, the Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly. Chris N. Brown writes science fiction from his home in Austin, Texas, where he also practices law. He is the co-editor of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. Barbara Ehrenreich, who inauguates our Into the Infinite column, is the author of BrightSided, Dancing in the Streets, Nickel and Dimed, and other books. Robert S. Eshelman is a journalist in New York. His articles have appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, and Mother Jones. Thomas Frank is founding editor of The Baffler and a columnist at Harper’s Magazine. His new book is Pity the Billionaire. James K. Galbraith teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. In the early eighties he was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress. Peter Gizzi’s new book of poetry is Threshold Songs. He was recently the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poet at Cambridge University. David Graeber is a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His new book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Marilyn Hacker is Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris. Sir Geoffrey Hill is Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and the author of many books of poetry and criticism. Chris Lehmann is our senior editor and Dollar Debauch columnist. He’s the author of Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class.

178 1 The Baffler

Jim Newell has covered politics as a staff writer at Gawker, an editor at Wonkette, and a contributor to the Guardian. Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala” (1899-1961) was born in Mahishadal, Bengal. He adopted the penname Nirala in 1923. Rick Perlstein is an American historian and journalist. He is a former writer for The Village Voice and The New Republic. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. Her books include There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Laura Riding (1901-1991) was an American poet and critic. Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of Galileo’s Dream, The Years of Rice and Salt, and the Mars trilogy. Maureen Tkacik lives in Washington, D.C. Dubravka Ugrešić is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands. Eugenia Williamson, like The Baffler, hails from Chicago and now lives in Massachusetts. She’s our associate editor.

Translators

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Anna Summers, David Williams.

Graphic Artists

Peter Arkle, Steve Brodner, Josh Brown, Joseph Ciardiello, Mark Dancey, Michael Duffy, Walker Evans, Mark Fisher, Mary Flatley, Patrick JB Flynn, John Garcia, Eric Hanson, J.D. King, Lewis Koch, Bill Lewis, David McLimans, Peter Miturich, P.S. Mueller, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Agustina Rodriguez, Yuri Shteingart, Anna Summers, Mark Wagner, Xu Yang. The typeface employed throughout the pages of The Baffler is Hoefler Text, designed in 1991 by Jonathan Hoefler, available through the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry, New York, NY.

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t En di n g

M A R K WAG N E R

American Neoclassic.

180 1 The Baffler