No.

27

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NO FUTURE IS HERE
Eye-opening and irascible, hopeful but not optimistic,
this collection offers a clear-eyed perspective on post-
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t he ba f f ler.com
No. 27

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

 The journal that blunts the cutting edge
No. 27

E DI T OR I N C H I E F
John Summers
9
F OU N DI N G E DI T OR
Thomas Frank
S E N IOR E DI T OR
Chris Lehmann
9 MARK S . FISHER
DE SIG N A N D A R T DI R E C T OR
The Flynstitute
For applying numerous shadings and not a few
9 fripperies to this issue, all due thanks and howarya
M A N AGI N G E DI T OR go to Aaron Bornstein, Diana Clarke, Ari Ebstein,
Lindsey Gilbert Christian Engley, Sophia Holtz, Sean Janson,
W E B E DI T OR Alex Kelly, Sam Mercer, Liam Meyer, and Carolyn
Lauren Kirchner Oliver. Thanks to Peter Kayafas for sending us
L I T E R A RY E DI T OR O, Write My Name: American PortraitsHarlem
Anna Summers Heroes (The Eakins Press), from which we selected
F IC T ION E DI T OR the photos by Carl Van Vechten on pp. 179183.
Kim Stanley Robinson
R E S E A RC H E R
Emily Carroll
PRODUC T ION A S SI S TA N T PU BLISHER
Joan Flynn Noah McCormack
9 C I RC U L AT ION
C ON T R I B U T I N G E DI T OR S Valerie Corts
Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, OF F IC E M A N AG E R
David Graeber, Evgeny Morozov, Susan Hagner
Rick Perlstein, George Scialabba, FIXER
Astra Taylor, Catherine Tumber, Zachary Davis
Eugenia Williamson PUSHER

9 Aviel Kanter
C ON T R I B U T I N G A R T I S T S 9
Michael Duffy, Lisa Haney, PA S T P U B L I S H E R S
Brad Holland, P.S. Mueller The MIT Press, 20122014
Katherine Streeter Greg Lane, 19932007
9 9
F OU N DE R S
No interns were used in the making of this Baffler. Thomas Frank and Keith White

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA | thebaff ler.com
2015 The Baffler Foundation, Inc.

2 1 The Baffler [no.27]

E x h i bi t A 5 Brad Holland

BR AD HOLL AND

The Baffler [no.27] ! 3

C on t e n t s : The Baffler, no. 27
The High Hat
To the Ninety-Nines 6
John Summers
Splurge and Purge 8
Christina Moon
Keeping Up with the Babadooks 10
Elizabeth Bruenig
Science of Clothes 12
Thomas Carlyle
Consolidated Deviance Inc. 14
From the archive
Bubble Butts 16
Jessica Loudis
Venus in Furs
The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom Jeans 22
Eugenia Williamson
Dickheads 30
The paradox of the necktie resolved
David Gr aeber
Idle Threads 34
The sartorial unconscious
Ann Friedman
Three Strikes! 42
Thoughts after reading Three Guineas
Lucy Ellmann
Kiss the Boot
VCs Take the Media 92
Jacob Silver man
The Taming of Tech Criticism 102
Evgeny Morozov
People Who Influence Influential People
Are the Most Influential People 114
George Scialabba
All Hail the Grumbler! 120
Abiding Karl Kraus
Russell Jacoby
Models
Satirized for Your Consumption 144
Ben Schwartz
Toxically Pure 158
Joe Bageant drops out
John Lingan
Transcendental Rites 173
Edward Mendelson, with John Summers
The Monk Retires 184
Letting go of Philip Roth
J. C. Hallman

4 1 The Baffler [no.27]

 Venus in Furs

Bad Science
Mind Your Own Business 70
Barbar a Ehrenreich
Dollar Debauch
Purple Reign 76
The unmaking of a Yahoo
Chris Lehmann
Runway City
Buffalo Exchange 128
Retrofitting a Rust Belt capital
Catherine Tumber
PhotoGr aphic
Harlem Women 179
Carl Van Vechten
Ancestors
Man Is Not a Rock 196
Joseph Brodsky, with Elizabeth Markstein
Stories
Gustus Dei 60
Monica Byr ne
How Much Women Know 191
Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya
Poems
Re-Make/Re-Model 20
Peter Gizzi
How Long Now Since the Mailmans Gone Missing? 41
Danielle Blau
Why would the Minoans 75
Caroline Knox
I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron 113
Xu Lizhi
Berryman Anecdote 157
William Corbett
Haut Monde 172
Manohar Shetty
Exhibitions
A: Br ad Holland 3
B: Lucia Fainzilber 19
C: A manda Konishi 29
D: Lou Beach 101
E: Michael Duffy 190
F: Hans Eijkelboom 208
Bafflomathy 204

The Baffler [no.27] ! 5

Th e H i g h H a t
To the Ninety-Nines
As we buttoned up The
Baffler no. 27, on fashion and
power, Mercedes-Benz Fash-
ion Week broke out in New
York, and additional extrava-
ganzas of the global leisure
set were hotly anticipated
in London, Milan, Istanbul,
Tokyo, Mumbai, Shenzhen,
and Moscow.
Pretty soon, we knew,
the new spring season of
clothing brands, logos, and
retailers would be impor-
tuning us with unguents
and adornments through an
ever-expanding arsenal of
media accessoriesnot only
magazines and runways,
but blogs, streaming micro-
videos, reality TV program-
ming, and week after week
of luxury-sodden emulation.
No wonder the new prime
minister of austerity-ridden
Greece recently turned up
at official functions without
a tie, a pithy gesture of just
how far down he is with the
99 percent.
Dont expect us to strut
about in neck-rending
formalities either. The work
arrayed under our slightly
furtive label, Venus in Furs,
amounts to nothing like the
cosmetics kits of upmarket,
style-addled journalism.
Were mindful, instead,
that the fashion industrys
main propositionconfus-
ing clothing with personal
6 1 The Baffler [no.27]
worthhas been a long-
standing affront to women,
not to mention a handy insig-
nia for encoding and regulat-
ing the rules of social class.
The general drabness
of American attire is also
something to consider. Here
in New England (nobodys
idea of a capital of fashion),
the aggressive blandness in
dress probably originated,
like everything else, with the
seventeenth-century Puritan
settlers. They wrote their
taste for Sadd colors into
their sumptuary decrees.
Dress like a dead leaf.
In our casual, postmodern
life, we strap into the sadd
uniforms that come with our
corporate cubicles, and on
weekends don our baseball
caps, flannels, sneakers, and
mom jeansthe studied,
casual look that hipsters
have ironically lifted from
the working class and that
fashion pundits are wont to
call Normcore.
Okay then, Venus in Furs
analyzes the half-life of
Normcore, takes the measure
of fast fashion, reviews the
genre of the sartorial mem-
oir, makes a case for female
supremacy, and, among other
provocations aiming to horri-
fy Puritans of all stripes, sug-
gests that the mens formal
necktie is an upside-down
penis in disguise. But to the
alternative clothing outfit-
ting the artisans of American
reinventionlike the crochet
shorts made from recycled
vintage blankets on the op-
posing pagesorry, we have
nothing to add. Like the boy
said (more or less): the empire
has nothing to wear.
A whole set of economic
underpinnings must be
snapped in place before
crochet shorts can seem like
a good idea to someone. The
same creative economy
thats producing expensive
artisanal shorts, it turns out,
is transforming life in Rust
Belt cities like Buffalo, where
white collar and blue
collar havent quite died on
civic tongues.
We have Buffalo covered,
along with certain venture
capitalists of Silicon Valley,
where hooded sweatshirts
and kid gloves have replaced
the dark suits and black ties
of the original robber barons.
Eventually, we checked
into the republic of letters to
take stock of several model
citizens: the grave-faced
novelist Philip Roth; Joe
Bageant, the redneck hippie
author of Deer Hunting with
Jesus; the Viennese satirist
Karl Kraus; and Joseph Brod-
sky, the exiled Russian poet.
No, not exactly fashionistas.
In his first interview after
 SIMON WELLER | Lord von Schmitt on Etsy

arriving in the West in 1972,
published here for the first
time in English, Brodsky
wondered presciently at
the absence of purpose he
discerned in life organized
around changing fashions.
When I look around, he
mused, I dont understand
what people live for. My im-
pression is that they live for
the sake of shopping. That
human life exists for the sake
of shopping.
In order to survive the il-
lusory multitude of choices,
the writer needed heroic
integrity of purpose. Here, the fashion police coming,
Brodsky said of the task that
remains in large part before
us, you need to be able to
look calmly into a void, not
expecting it to be inhabited
by any applause. And, he
might as well have added,
if applause ever does come
out of the void, or if you hear
duck.t
John Summers

The Baffler [no.27] ! 7

Th e H i g h H a t
Splurge
and Purge
Forever 21 stands on the
south side of Union Square
in New York, just around the
corner from my office. I see
teenagers, working women,
families, and dudes shopping
for clothing there at all hours
of the day, buying up floral
maxi dresses, faux leather and
shearling jackets, and skinny
jeans for as little as eight dol-
lars a pair. Inside, clerks romp
about in colorful makeup, big
earrings, and decal-wrapped
nails. Crowds of young women
and men line up to apply for
work on the stores frenetic
retail floorto stock shelves,
fold clothes, mind the cash
registersfor a whole nine
dollars an hour. In the back-
ground, a jamboree of pop
music runs on endless loop.
I never see shoppers walk
out of a Forever 21 without a
giant yellow plastic bag stuffed
full of clothes. If you go on
YouTube, you can gawk at so-
called haul videos, in which
shoppers excitedly narrate their
purchases, showing you not
only how to wear that floral-
print romper, but also how
much of a deal it is. But dont
let the videos fool you; plenty
are the marketing schemes
of todays clothing industry
gimmicks from the imme-
diately gratifying, visually
oriented world of fast fashion.
8 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Above, a worker frays a pair of jeans at Koos Manufacturing
in Los Angeles. At right, a warehouse attached to the San Souci
design studio.
Make no mistake: fast-
fashion companies like
H&M, Zara, Uniqlo, and
Forever 21 (the largest fast-
fashion retailer in the United
States) have dramatically
changed our wardrobes over
the last decade. These com-
panies oversee how much
clothing we buy, how long we
wear it, and how much of it
we discard. Thanks to them,
most fashion today is made
of low-quality synthetic
materials that are produced
quickly and in large volumes.
In style, this clothingour
everyday clothingfollows
quick on the heels of runway
trends; in durability, its
equally disposable.
A decade ago, most shop-
pers were preoccupied with
big brand names and logos
like Abercrombie & Fitch and
Gap. Today, the young con-
sumers I see lining up around
the corner want design trends
fresh off the runway, and say
so on their fashion blogs,
Pinterests, and Instagrams.
Fast-fashion retailers have
collapsed the traditional
three-month design, manu-
facturing, and distribution
cycle to two weeks; new styles
arrive on store floors daily.
The U.S. hub of fast fash-
ion is not New York, but Los
Angeles. More specifically, its
a single L.A. neighborhood
known as the Jobber Mar-
ket. Walking through the
alleyways and small streets
of this thirty-square-block
neighborhood over the past
three summers, I was vari-
ously reminded of a suburban
strip mall, an underground
stall market, and an L.A.

swap meet. At the neigh-
borhoods food court, as I
considered Brazilian churrasco,
a Korean shaved ice dessert
called patbingsu, and tacos, I
heard talk in Korean, Span-
ish, and Portuguese. More
than six thousand fast-fashion
businesses are located here,
in five-hundred-square-foot
showrooms stacked against
the streets. Company names
like Skinny Bunny, Sugarlips,
and Sweet Habit constantly
changethey are place-
holder labels that will soon be
swapped out for the brand-
name labels of retailers.
Most of these Jobber
Market companies are owned
and run by Korean (or Korean
Brazilian) families and staffed
by Mexican employees. They
are mom-and-pop-shops that
are also conglomerates; they
collapse multiple steps of the
apparel cycledesign, pro-
duction, logistics, wholesal-
The U.S. hub
of fast fashion
is not New York,
but Los Angeles.
9 paid her sewing factory in
ing, and marketinginto one.
Customers include Forever 21,
T.J. Maxx, Charlotte Russe,
Urban Outfitters, Macys,
Kohls, and Dillardsthe
majority of American fast-
fashion retailers. Thats right:
the fashions that are thought
to trend directly off the New
York runways in fact begin at
little-known companies run
by immigrant entrepreneurs,
in the showrooms and design
studios of this one Los Ange-
les neighborhood.
In the fast-fashion business,
margins are thin. Consumer
tastes are finicky, trends un-
predictable. One wholesaler
PHOTOGR APHS BY L AUREN L ANCASTER
told me she was stuck with
a whole shipping container
of pleather jackets that had
come off the docks and was
still waiting for her at the
warehouse. She had already
China to manufacture the
jackets. Now she had to figure
out how to sell them. The
fast-fashion retailers demand
floor-ready goods and
charge millions of dollars in
penalties and chargebacks
to wholesalers if hang tags are
improperly attached, incor-
rectly labeled, or hung on the
wrong kind of hangers. They
charge for the stuff if it shows
up one day too soon or one
day too late at the Port of Los
Angeles. If the clothes dont
sell on store floors, retailers
will return the merchandise
without paying. Closeout
bargain hunters make their
rounds in the market, sniffing
out desperation to make deals
The Baffler [no.27] ! 9
Th e H i g h H a t
on the millions of dollars in
losses that happen daily in
the neighborhood.
Its the summer of 2013,
and Im sitting in a pew of
a church in L.A.s Glendale
neighborhood, attending
morning bible service among
Korean congregation mem-
bers who work downtown
in the Jobber Market. This
church is the spiritual home
base of the Chang family,
the owners of Forever 21.
The Changs are born-again
Christians who go on annual
missions abroad. I watch a
young girl in her twenties up
on the podium, eyes closed,
lift her hands to Christ and
sing, He calls out my name.
As we bow our heads, I
think about the shame of
fast fashionhow young and
beautiful the new clothing
can make me feel, and how
easy it is for me to throw it
away. These garments are
made of rayons and nylons,
petroleum-based synthetic
materials and artificial dyes
that will stick around here on
earth, forever. On the bot-
tom of every plastic yellow
Forever 21 shopping bag, I
remember now, is the bible
verse John 3:16. So I think
too about salvationthe de-
liverance from sin and evil
and how hard it will be to
make a sustainable life here
on earth when we believe we
will never perish, but have
eternal life.t
Christina Moon
10 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Keeping Up
with the Babadooks
From Rosemarys Baby to The
Exorcist to Carrie, many of the
finest horror genre standards
fixate on the ways mothers
make monsters of themselves
or their progeny through ne-
glect or abuse, through mis-
take or design, and in their
most chilling incarnations,
through mundane means.
When 2014 Australian indie
horror flick The Babadook hit
American shores in Novem-
ber, most of the attendant
commentary zeroed in on just
such maternal themes. Bitch
Magazine took it as a medita-
tion on post-partum depres-
sion; Slate located its effec-
tiveness in its dark treatment
of common parental miseries.
Both were probably right, but
theres more to the creep-
ing menace of The Babadook
than the regulation Freudian
freakiness of motherhood.
IFC FILMS
Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman
in The Babadook.
The Babadook follows
young widow Amelia and
her troubled tot Sam as they
discover a disturbing book
during a nightly bedtime
reading and unwittingly
unleash its sinister central
figure on their quiet lives. As
it turns out, the key to the
creatures undoing is merely
to recognize it and rebuke
itsomething that Amelia
eventually discovers. But this
revelation comes after a slow-
burning, suspenseful battle of
wills, prolonged by a centrally
important fact about Amelia
that critics have largely over-
looked: she is working class.
Clues to Amelias class
status are scattered through-
out the film, but theyre most
clearly manifested in con-
spicuous articles of fashion.
Minutes into the film, Amelia
sits across from the admin-
istrators of her sons private
school, who are all neatly
outfitted in crisp suits and
slick buns. She is sporting an
unraveling ponytail and the
uniform she wears to work as
an orderly in a nursing home:
a papery pink shift with a
peter-pan collar and opaque
white stockings that taper
into a pair of scuffed Keds.
Amelias clothing is conspicu-
ously genderedthe powerful
actors in this horror story
dont wear pink collars and
Keds. But more than that, her
attire functions as a perma-
nent reminder of the fact of
her work, a kind of stigmata
of the service sector.
All the dramatic action
among the films adult hu-
mans proceeds to flow from
this core disjuncture of class.
The school administrators
condescend to her in icy-
precise professional language,
telling her, in so many words,
that she has failed to correct-
ly parent her son. And in the
next scene, Amelia sits next
to her sister, a smooth-haired
woman in black nylons and
a blazer, and barely listens as
her upwardly mobile sibling
natters on about installation
art pieces. Miffed by this
indifference to her class as-
cent, Amelias sister abruptly
calls off the joint birthday
party they had planned for
their children. This leads to
Mom-shaming is
powerfully distilled
in the unraveling
nightmare of
The Babadook.
9 moms congregate in Amelias
a round of pointedly class-
based recriminations, all
upbraiding Amelia for not
properly celebrating her
sons birthday.
Hounded as she is by
these disciplinary markers of
privilege, Amelia takes mo-
mentary refuge in fantasies
of material bliss. In a brief
dreamy interlude just before
her nieces birthday party,
Amelia eats ice cream in a
glassy, modern shopping mall,
sitting alone on a sofa posi-
tioned in front of windows
full of fashion spreads and
mannequins draped in haute
couture. Unable to shop or
D R AW I N G R O O M
buy, she contents herself with
foodalone.
Back in real life, however,
Amelia continues to face
more quiet but powerful
crucibles of class division.
When the birthday party
arrives, five sleekly outfitted
sisters Crate & Barrel dining
room and gaze accusingly at
Amelia through their chicly
underdone makeup. Pearls
and gems dot their lobes and
throats; our Amelia positively
wilts in their presence, look-
ing dazed and bedraggled
as she listens to patronizing
talk of their volunteer work
with disadvantaged women
and to humblebragging about
their husbands careers. The
pinched scowls only intensify
when Amelias son throws
a tantrum and she sternly
orders him out of the room.
Amelia is overwhelmed: it
is, in part, her exhaustion that
allows the dreadful Babadook
WALTER GURBO
The Baffler [no.27] ! 11
Th e H i g h H a t
to pass into her life. A string
of visual cues reminds viewers
of her inability to keep up: her
clothes, her hair, the putter-
ing station wagon she drives,
the blandly functional flat-
soled shoes on her feet. As the
movie slides into the gothic
terror at its heart, its just as
plain that the totems of her
everyday working-class life
are what feed her primal, and
potentially lethal, state of so-
cial isolation. They differenti-
ate her from her peers, their
pastimes, and most crucially,
their enlightened parenting
practices.
Here is where The Baba-
dook is most painfully
realistic. So many parenting
techniques earn their cachet
from the glamorous elites
who evangelize for them:
think The Big Bang Theorys
Mayim Bialik hawking the
wonders of co-sleeping for
The Today Show, or super-
model Gisele Bndchen as-
serting that international law
should require all mothers
to breastfeed for at least six
months in a luscious Harpers
Bazaar spread. Mothers who
cant pay to play are not only
reviled as bad parents, but
also marginalized as gauche.
Theres an overlooked
irony at the heart of all the
mom-shaming so powerfully
distilled in the unraveling
nightmare of The Babadook.
Amelia and her imperiled son
are ultimately helped onto
the right path out of their
12 1 The Baffler [no.27]
lonely ordeal not by all the
well-appointed power moms
hovering around them, but
rather by the Australian wel-
fare state. As the film closes, a
pair of dogged social workers
checks in with the trauma-
tized pair, and the realization
sets in that these have been
the only characters to evince
real concern for the well-
being of this single working
mom and her deprived child.
Beyond the claustral
terrors of a classic horror-
fantasy, The Babadook leaves
us with a surprisingly far-
reaching epilogue: the film
leads us to imagine the kind
of programs that could make
life as a working-class parent
more leisurely and secure,
like child allowances, paid
maternity leave, and all the
sundry baby benefits that are
commonplace in European
social democracies. Ladies
who lunch seem capable of
providing only bitter cen-
sure, and good politics, with
concrete material assistance,
will have to be in place before
the rest of us can gather the
few pearls of wisdom their
parenting fashions offer. This
is the real horror story of The
Babadook: our culture is at a
loss to make the hopeful epi-
logue to Amelias story match
up with the kind of social
isolation that spurred on her
brief descent into madness
and terror.t
Elizabeth
Bruenig
Science
of Clothes
Whereto does all this
lead; or what use is in it? In
the way of replenishing thy
purse, or otherwise aiding
thy digestive faculty, O
British Reader, it leads to
nothing, and there is no
use in it; but rather, the
reverse, for it costs thee
somewhat. Nevertheless,
if through this unpromis-
ing Horngate, Teufels-
drckh, and we by means
of him, have led thee into
the true Land of Dreams;
and through the Clothes-
Screen, as through a magi-
cal Pierre-Pertuis, thou
lookest, even for moments,
into the region of the
Wonderful, and seest and
feelest that thy daily life
is girt with Wonder, and
based on Wonder, and thy
very blankets and breeches
are Miracles,then art
thou profited beyond
moneys worth, and hast a
thankfulness towards our
Professor; nay, perhaps in
many a literary Tea-circle,
wilt open thy kind lips,
and audibly express that
same.
A ll Symbols are prop-
erly Clothes; . . . all Forms
whereby Spirit manifests
itself to Sense, whether
outwardly or in the
 imagination, are Clothes;
and thus not only the
parchment Magna Charta,
which a tailor was nigh
cutting into measures, but
the Pomp and Authority
of Law, the sacredness of
Majesty, and all inferior
Worships (Worth-ships)
are properly a Vesture and
Raiment; and the Thirty-
nine Articles themselves
are articles of wearing
apparel (for the Religious
Idea). In which case, must
it not also be admitted that
this Science of Clothes is
a high one, and may with
infinitely deeper study on
thy part yield richer fruit:
that it takes scientific rank
behind Codification, and
Political Economy, and
the Theory of the British
Constitution; nay, rather,
from its prophetic height
looks down on all these, as
on so many weaving-shops
and spinning-mills, where
the Vestures which it has
to fashion, and consecrate,
and distribute, are, too
often by haggard hungry
operatives who see no
farther than their nose,
mechanically woven and
spun?t

from Thomas Carlyle, Sartor

PATRICK JB FLYNN Resartus (1834). Dont ask us.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 13

FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Baffler no. 5 (1993)

14 1 The Baffler [no.27]

The Baffler [no.27] ! 15
Th e H i g h H a t
Bubble Butts
In the late 2000s, right about
when the economic bubble
burst in the United States,
Colombias government fi-
nally began making headway
against the narco-crime that
had plagued it for decades.
Homicide rates dropped,
drug production moved to
Venezuela, and negotiations
with the left-wing guerrilla
movement gained traction.
Before long, American and
European newspapers were
reporting that wanton vio-
lence and Escobar-era wealth
in the former cocaine capital
were giving way to a gallery
scene in Cartagena, to eco-
16 1 The Baffler [no.27]
lodges near Barranquilla, and
to Brooklyn-inspired restau-
rants in Bogot.
In Medelln, former home
of drug baron Pablo Escobar,
its considered bad form to
talk about the dark days.
When I visited in Decem-
ber, locals boasted about the
citys graffiti-free metro, its
starchitect-designed libraries
located deep in the favelas,
and the cable car system that
spares the citys poor daily
walks up mountain inclines.
The past is past, and the resi-
dents I met tried not to dwell
on it. But the fingerprints of
narco-crime are all over Me-
delln, and especially when
it comes to one of Escobars
more eye-popping legacies:
the citys ongoing affair with
cosmetic surgery.
On the highway from the
airport to Medelln, bill-
boards advertise affordable
implants, Sofa Vergara-
esque physiques, and boob-
and-butt combo specials.
Should visitors somehow miss
these, theyll certainly notice
silicone on the street. Medel-
ln is famous for its perenni-
ally temperate weather, so
patients (and doctors) have
all year to show off their
work. In 2013 the country
LOU BEACH

generated $216 million from
medical tourism, up from
$134 million the year before,
partly because of the good
reputation of Colombian
doctors, and partly because
of the weakened peso. For
North Americans recovering
from the hangover of decades
of partying, operations are
particularly affordable: one
cosmetic surgery collective
advertises an all-inclusive
package of breast augmen-
tation plus eight nights in
Colombia (including meals,
hotel costs, and an English-
speaking personal assistant
who will pick you up from the
airport) for USD $4,506a
lot less than it would be in
the States, and hey, you get a
vacation thrown in.
Medellns obsession with
cosmetic surgery started in
the seventies, with cartel
members first regular travels
to the United States. Thanks
to mens magazines like Play-
boy and womens magazines
like Vogue, cosmetic surgery
was just beginning to enter
the mainstream of American
culture. Newly flush with
cashat its peak, the Me-
delln cartel was bringing in
up to $60 million a daytraf-
fickers essentially began
buying up local women and
paying surgeons to replicate
the extreme body fashions au
courant in the United States.
Escobar was especially fond
of these operadas and let it be
known to girls growing up in
Medellns barrios that agree-
SOFIA DRESCHER
ing to a nip or a tuck might be
a way out of poverty.
The culture of narco-
esttica was firmly established
by the eighties, and blondes
with big boobs and butts were
presented as the feminine
ideal for everyone outside of
the citys Westernized upper
classes. The back-and-forth
between crime and cosmetic
surgery continues, as sur-
geons now prepare girls for
trade in sex tourism, which
has replaced drug trafficking
as the citys most pressing
criminal justice problem.
When it comes to female
beauty in Colombia, class
dictates culture. In 2011 a
Vice video report on Me-
dellns fashion week began
backstage at a haute couture
The Baffler [no.27] ! 17
Th e H i g h H a t
runway show stocked with
two-dimensional models,
where styles were distinctly
European, and ended at
Moda para el Mundo, a
come-one-come-all show
whose models were notice-
ably curvier and darker
skinned than their coun-
terparts. (Peoples arses
are such a massive distrac-
tion from everything else,
remarked the Vice presenter.)
Bigger and flashier are
deemed dclass, while thin-
ner and whiter are thought
to be more European, and
therefore more refined.
Sweat Shop.
18 1 The Baffler [no.27]
You might think this would
homogenize surgeries, but
in Medelln, theyre impres-
sively diverse. Women tailor
themselves to match aspi-
rations, and doing so is as
much about opportunity as it
is about vanity.
Theres no doubt that
doctored curves attract at-
tention, but what theyre in-
viting us to look at is a larger
question. Its worth keeping
in mind that two decades
ago, Medelln was the most
dangerous city on the planet.
With dozens of people dy-
ing every week as a result
of Colombias decades-long
civil conflict, bodies began
to seem all too dispensable,
and altering them became a
means of exercising control.
Today, this cosmetic culture
is still in place, though dif-
ferent forces drive demand.
The double-D breasts and
artificial asses that are still
ubiquitous in Medelln are
a reminder of the citys
liberation from a bloody
past, but also a sign of a new
regime, one in which tourism
dictates who goes under the
knife.t
Jessica Loudis
SOL ROBBINS
E x h i bi t B 5 Lucia Fainzilber

2015 LUCIA FAINZILBER

Somewhere.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 19

Re-Make/Re-Model
3 Peter Gizzi

The old language I might as well say it.

says the apple This hammering
is the old apple thing, Life, as Ive
and spoke known it, know me,
in categories, is over. The apples
it gave her are scattered
the dance floor on ground.
she needed, all
those vocabularies The earth reclaims
and animal nights its booty right be-
before her. Spotted fur. for the eyes. So
swiftly the letters
Lithe. Taut. replace. The
The syllable in apple letters dearrange
and the ecstasy of and uncompose
naming. Or was it the self in itself.
knowing? Windows
swing open. Am I in danger,
The chest the orchestral side
a hammering thing. is taking away me,
these letters
no longer anchor.

20 1 The Baffler [no.27]

V en us i n F u r s

CHRIS FERRANTELLO

The Baffler [no.27] ! 21

Venus in Furs

The Revolution Will

Probably Wear Mom Jeans
3 Eugenia Williamson

Americas present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not
revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity;
not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence
in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
Warren G. Harding, A Return to Normalcy, May 14, 1920

N ot long ago, a curious fashion trend swept
through New York Citys hipster preserves,
from Bushwick to the Lower East Side. Once,
well-heeled twentysomethings had roamed
these streets in plaid button-downs and floral
playsuits. Now, the reign of the aspiring lum-
berjacks and their mawkish mates was coming
to an end. Windbreakers, baseball caps, and
polar fleece appeared among the flannel. Car-
go shorts and khakis were verboten no longer.
Denim went from dark-rinse to light. Sandals
were worn, and sometimes with socks. It was
a blast of carefully modulated blandnessone
that delighted some fashion types, appalled
others, and ignited the critical passions of life-
style journalists everywhere.
They called it Normcore. Across our Fash-
ion Nation, style sections turned out lengthy
pieces exploring this exotic lurch into the
quotidian, and trend watchers plumbed every
possible meaning in the cool kids new fond-
ness for dressing like middle-aged suburban-
ites. Were hipsters sacrificing their coolness
in a brave act of self-renunciation? Was this
an object lesson in the futility of ritually chas-
ing down, and then repudiating, the coolness
of the passing moment? Or were middle-aged
dorks themselves mysteriously cool all of a
sudden? Was Normcore just an elaborate
prank designed to prove that style writers can
be fooled into believing almost anything is
trendy?
By March 2014, Vogue had declared Norm-
core totally over, but even that lofty fiat
couldnt put a stop to it. Gap adopted the slo-
gan dress normal for its fall ad campaign,
and the donnish Oxford English Diction-
ary nominated normcore for 2014s word
of the year. A full twelve months after Vogue
tried to extinguish it, Normcore continues to
convulse opinion, a half-life long enough (in
fashion-time, anyway) to place it among the
decades most enduring trends.
More than that, elaborate prank or no,
Normcore is a remarkably efficient summa-
ry of hipster posturing at its most baroque.
Never has a trend so perfectly crystallized
the endless, empty layers of fashion-based
rebellion. And never has a trend shown itself
to be so openly contemptuous of the working
class. Like many a fad before it, Normcore
thrives on appropriation. But where privi-
leged hipsters once looked to underground
subculturesbikers, punks, Teddy Boysas
they pursued their downwardly mobile per-
sonal liberation, they now latch onto the face-
less working majority: the Walmart shoppers,
the suburban moms and dads.
Even if it began as something of a self-ref-
erential fashion joke, the medias infatuation

22 1 The Baffler [no.27]


with all things Normcore says a lot. Not least,
it highlights our abiding social need for a san-
itized counterculture, for a youthful rebellion
that can be readily dismissed, for the comfort
of neoliberal melancholy, for what Warren G.
Hardingthe unheralded John the Baptist of
the Normcore Gospelfamously called a re-
turn to normalcy.
The Revolt of
the Mass Indie berelite
The adventure began in 2013, and picked up
steam early last year with Fiona Duncans
Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Re-
alize Theyre One in 7 Billion, a blowout
H O L L I E C H A S TA I N
exploration of the anti-individualist Norm-
core creed for New York magazine. Duncan
remembered feeling the first tremors of the
revolution:
Sometime last summer I realized that,
from behind, I could no longer tell if my
fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or
middle-aged, middle-American tourists.
Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfort-
able sneakers, both types looked like they
mightve just stepped off an R-train after
shopping in Times Square. When I texted my
friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform
consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh
The Baffler [no.27] ! 23
Venus in Furs
shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on
the latest urban camouflage, I got an immedi-
ate reply: lol normcore.
Brad, however eloquent and charming, did
not coin the term himself. He got it from K-
HOLE, a group of trend forecasters. To judge
by K-HOLEs name alonea slang term for
the woozy aftereffects of the animal tran-
quilizer and recreational drug ketaminethe
group was more than happy to claim Norm-
core as its own licensed playground. As com-
pany principals patiently explained to the
New York Times, their appropriation of the
name of a toxic drug hangover was itself a sly
commentary on the cultural logic of the cor-
porate worlds frenetic cooptation of young
peoples edgy habits. At a London art gal-
lery in October 2013, in a paper titled Youth
Mode: A Report on Freedom, team K-HOLE
proposed the Twitter hashtag #Normcore as a
rejoinder to such cooptation:
If the rule is Think Different, being seen as
normal is the scariest thing. (It means being
returned to your boring suburban roots, be-
ing turned back into a pumpkin, exposed as
unexceptional.) Which paradoxically makes
normalcy ripe for the Mass Indie uberelites
to adopt as their own, confirming their status
by showing how disposable the trappings of
uniqueness are.
Jargon aside, the report had a point: lately
Mass Indie uberelitesa group more com- just one franchised rebellious gesture away.
monly known as hipstershave been finding
it increasingly difficult to express their indi-
viduality, the very thing that confers hipster
cred.
Part of the problem derives from the hip-
sters ubiquity. For the past several years, hip-
sterism has been an ide fixe in the popular
presscoy cultural shorthand in the overlap-
ping worlds of fashion, music, art, and litera-
ture for a kind of rebellion that doesnt quite
come off on its own steam. Forward-thinking
24 1 The Baffler [no.27]
middle-class youngsters used to strike fear
in the hearts of the squares by flouting social
normsat least nominally, until they grew up
and settled into their own appointed profes-
sional, middle-class destinies. Now, however,
the hipster is a benign and well-worn figure
of fun: a lumpenbourgeois urbanite perpetu-
ally in search of ways to display her difference
from the masses.
That is not to say that the hipsters of yore
made any great strides in the realm of social
change. The punks of the seventies and eight-
ies, together with their nineties-era grunge
and indie-rocker descendants, idealized the
notion of authenticity. This arch-individual-
ist outlook translated into an ethos of respon-
sible small-business ownership, an interest in
the arcana of the letter-press aesthetic, and
little else. While independent record labels
and artisans built sustainable distribution
networks, they and their clientele were busy
ferreting out poseurs with the same prosecu-
torial vigor with which McCarthyites once
sought Communists.
Still, it might be protested that Tailgunner
Joe and his followers at least advanced a suc-
cessful agenda. Punk fashion theorists, by con-
trast, only paved the way for newer and bigger
revolutions in trend marketing. Starting in
the nineties, the media and advertising worlds
latched onto signifiers of youthful rebellion
as their own preferred brands, telling buying
publics, in essence, that their individuality was
Meanwhile, a new body of lax global trade
regulations helped to accelerate the round-
robin logic of trend endorsement and repudia-
tion. All these converging forces meant that
outward, commoditized displays of insurrec-
tionpiercings, meticulously anachronistic
attire, felted owlsbecame unreliable ways
of judging whether or not the person in front
of you was down. And in equally rapid order,
the Internet came along to propel tongue-in-
cheek micro-trends like healthgoth and sea-
 Woe betide any actual mother, her lower abdomen distended
in pregnancys aftermath, who tries to pull off mom jeans.
9
punk far enough into the mediasphere to reach
even oldsters like me.
The great fashion speed-up has spurred
an epidemic of hipster exhaustion. Now that
Rihanna has dyed her hair gray and youth
trends have cycled through the fashion of ev-
ery decade at least twice,* where can an ironic
counter-gesture take hold?
This is where Normcore comes in. For all
its precious, self-conscious packaging as the
mother of all counter-trends, Normcore pos-
sesses a certain irony-resistant purity. Its a
purely formalist dissident pose with nothing
at stake but the rules of fashion itself.
Consider the most recognizable hallmark
of Normcore attire: mom jeans. Until Norm-
cores advent, mom jeans was a first-order
fashion epithet. It effectively described and
dismissed the bad trouser choices of an entire
generation of unsexy and desexualized moth-
ers. In 2011, Susan Orlean captured the sins
of the mom jean in a dead-on clinical descrip-
tion in The New Yorker: medium wash denim,
buttoned over the slightly-out-of-shape belly,
tasteful stitching, legs neither wide enough to
be subversive nor tight enough to be sexy.
Today, mom jeans are a coveted fashion
item. ASOS, a global, London-based fast-fash-
ion distributor that sells the trendiest clothes
and accessories at a range of price points, pres-
ently offers seventy-five varieties. Although
each pair has slightly different variations
strategically placed rips, acid wash, pleatsall
share a high waist, an ill-fitting crotch, and
back pockets stitched high enough to elongate
and flatten the wearers ass. The overall effect
is to make the wearer look twenty-five years
* In the eighties, it was the fifties. In the nineties, it was the seventies. In the aughts, it was the fifties and the eighties
again, and now everybody either dresses like its the early nineties or looks like a damn lumberjack.
out of datethe early nineties being the last
time that loose-fitting, relaxed-leg, tastefully
stitched jeans were remotely on-trend.
Mothers All!
But woe betide any actual mother, her lower
abdomen distended in pregnancys aftermath,
who tries to pull off mom jeans. On all but
the sveltest frames, they look frumpy, unflat-
tering, and hopelessly out of touch. It takes a
lithe physique and other signifiers of privilege
to put quotation marks around apparel that,
under most circumstances, reads as clueless
or careless. Mom jeans are designed for com-
fort and concealment, while mom jeans
mock the need to cover up the flaws of a non-
catwalk-ready body by emphasizing their ab-
sence, with the added bonus of mocking other
flawless girls whove fallen for the far more pe-
destrian charms of skin-tight low-riders.
Lauren Sherman, writing in Elle, neatly
summarized the dilemma of the Normcore
enthusiast. The Normcore movement, she ar-
gued, will never actually be a phenomenon
because most women do not want to look
normal. They want to look hip or chicide-
ally both. And for most people, normcore
isnt going to help them achieve those two
descriptors. A beautiful stylist in mom jeans
and sneakers does not look the same as a
mom in the Midwest, my editor said. Clearly,
theres a difference between expertly styled,
proportion-conscious fashion normcore and
legitimate strip mall-and-minivan normcore.
While Sherman underestimated the allure
of mom jeans among the fashion forward, she
The Baffler [no.27] ! 25
Venus in Furs
and her editor perfectly elicited the contempt
hidden beneath the pleats.
Then again, so did a lot of other people. In
a discussion of Normcore on Reddits fashion
advice board, the top-rated comment said as
much:
If I dress #normcore in an unfashionable,
tiny, rural, midwestern town, does it still
count? Or am I an asshole for dressing like
the People of Walmart around me? Am I
getting my fashion kicks at their expense and
cruelly poking fun at their lack of dispos-
able income for trendy fashion? . . . If I dress
normcore at the county fair and theres
no one cool enough to get the message Im
sending with my fashion choices, am I still
dressing normcore?
Good questions allbut here again, the
hipsters rebellion is so contorted that its chal-
lenge to the herdlike cultural mainstream
seems poised for total absorption by said
mainstream. While its hard to interpret the
appeal of the n mom jean as anything other
than a fairly aggressive mode of derision, re-
cent turns in the items history complicate
that meaning. Beyond the anonymous hordes
of harried mothers donning shapeless dunga-
rees to run to Target, the mom jean has other,
far more visible followers. During the last
election cycle, Mitt Romneys proclivity for
mom jeans was so pronounced that it became
a full-fledged Internet meme and the subject
of its own Tumblr. In March 2014, The Atlan-
tic Wire published a photo retrospective of
President Obama donning mom jeans at every
available opportunity.
Jeans are the most democratic of pants,
said The Atlantic Wire while tearing Obamas
fashion choices to shreds. Indeed, when con-
summate populist Glenn Beck decided to
start 1791, a retail label whose name kipes the
year of the Bill of Rights signing, he turned
to denim: selvage denim, to be precise, retail-
ing for $190 a pair. The 1791 website launched
26 1 The Baffler [no.27]
three years ago with pinup pictures of man-
ly men in expensive jeans toiling at blue-
collar labor, but its current version features
a medium-build, bearded hipster modeling
slouchy jeans and waxed hunting jackets. The
spirit of the original American Revolution,
like that of all the later and smaller-bore rev-
olutions in American culture, has thus suc-
cumbed to the inexorable entitled preroga-
tives of the leisure class.
When the countrys most powerful men
endeavor to ape ordinary human beings, den-
im seems requisite, a tactic as proven and as
predictable as inserting folks into a stump
speech. As camouflage goes, mom jeans seem
more effective than pricey selvage: mom jeans
ingeniously distract attention from their
mediagenic wearers ability to buy whatever
the hell he wants. The sophisticated fashion
gamine and the presidential hopeful would
seem to have entirely different aims, but when
they embrace Normcores signature item, it
confers on them the same strategic cultural
advantage.
This advantage goes a long way toward ex-
plaining the appeal of mom jeans in yet an-
other unlikely and high-profile fan base: bil-
lionaire tech CEOs. Steve Jobs rarely made
public appearances without them and, with
an insouciant flourish, would add a black tur-
tleneck and a pair of sneakers to round out
the look. Mark Zuckerberg, too, has made
a habit of dressing in bad denim, most fa-
mously when meeting with fellow mom-jean
enthusiast Obama. That meeting, though,
pointed up one important difference: instead
of pandering to Middle America, the mom-
jean-wearing tech CEO flaunts his indiffer-
ence to it.
Hipsters could be aspirationally mimick-
ing Zuckerbergs fuck-it attire, or they could
be struggling to scale the forbidding heights
of hipster resistance as charted on Reddits
fashion boardwho knows, least of all them-
selves? To ironize all is, at last, to forgive all.
Food for Thought
Things get even more complicated when you
consider the Middle American booboisie
on whom Normcore sets its sights. Even as
Normcore jeers at neutral, fashion-backward
attire, it also manages to exalt the clueless ex-
urbanite by turning her into a fetish object:
the Emma Bovary of the strip mall. Its not
clear just how and why hipsters came to fixate
on the People of Walmart, but its not a pass-
ing fancy; one after another, hipsters are el-
evating dreary things to the height of fashion.
Think of the rise of kale. The once-humble
vegetable has ascended to such dizzying
heights that Beyonc wore a sweatshirt em-
blazoned with KALE in one of her recent
videos.
See also pizza, a closer edible analogue to
Normcore. A friend with ties to the advertis-
ing industry informed me of pizzas edginess
sometime last year, directing me to a Tum-
blr called Slice Guyz that collects pictures
of pizza-themed graffiti and the like. For-
mer child star and current hipster Macaulay
Culkin started a joke band called the Pizza
Underground; it performs selections from the
Velvet Underground catalogue repurposed
with pizza-themed lyrics. In September, New
York magazinethe same oracle that an-
nounced the rise of Normcoreanointed piz-
za as the chicest new trend. As incontrovert-
ible evidence that the trend was indeed taking
hold, the magazines fashion brain trust com-
missioned layouts of Katy Perry and Beyonc
(now the avatar of food-themed chicness, it
would seem) in pizza-print outfits.
To take something recognizably bad,
whether pizza or bulky fleece sweatshirts, and
try to pass it off as avant-garde self-expression
is an incredibly defeatist gesture, one both
aware of and happy with its futility. Ceci nest
pas intressant.
Still, pizza, like denim, is accessible to all
Americans and crafted with wildly different
levels of competence, self-awareness, and arti-
sanal intent. Papa Johns or Little Caesars may
deliver glorified tomato-paste-on-cardboard
alongside tubs of dipping butter to a nation of
indifferent proles. But if you ask New Yorks
infinitely more with-it pizza correspondents,
theyll tell you, with numbing precision, that
pizza can be toppings-forward and avant-
garde. This range makes pizza the perfect
hipster quarry: sometimes mundane, some-
times aspirational, and above all, exotic.
There is another futile, melancholy sen-
timent at the heart of Normcore: nostalgia
for childhood. Pizza, for example, is a childs
food. Meanwhile, in the fashion realm, to-
days twentysomethings don the clothes they
grew up with in the early nineties, which was
the heyday of ill-fitting denim and neutral
color palettes. The Midwestern mothers of
some of these hipsterssurely theyre not
all from New Yorklikely wore mom jeans
themselves, and may wear them still. In this
sense, pizza and Normcore play out an es-
sentially conservative outlook: a longing for a
prelapsarian time before the shame and self-
awareness of city living deprived its acolytes
of the simple comfort of Dominos delivery
and loose pants.
Before you can say plain Hanes tee, this
longing can shade again into contempt. When
urban hipsters fetishize the dclass and the
mundane, they rely on their understanding of
middle America as a colony, one filled with
happy proles to be mined for fashion inspi-
ration. This is as true for hipsters as it is for
Glenn Beck, whose bone-deep cynicism about
the heartland is simply an amplified version
of the same infatuated disdain cultivated by a
deliberately dowdy Brooklynite. How else can
one account for the steady migration of Norm-
core into the very corporate world that calls
the shots on what we buy and howa world in
which web designers, programmers, stylists,
advertising executives, and other masters of
the knowledge economy now dress up like call-
center drones headed to the Dollar Store?
The Baffler [no.27] ! 27
 After the streets of New York, the next
stop for Normcore was the dining halls of
wealthy college campuses. In the Novem-
ber issue of the Old Gold and Black, Wake
Forest Universitys student newspaper, an
undergrad noted with evident satisfaction
that Wake Forest is currently at peak norm-
core. A Wake Forest campus fashion Tum-
blr called Forest Folk, she says, is filled with
variation[s] on the normcore theme (denim
jackets, cable-knit sweaters, thick-rimmed
glasses) juxtaposed against the sites mast-
head, which pithily declares: Dare to be
different. Its perhaps no coincidence that
Wake Forest ranks near the bottom of eco-
nomically diverse top colleges and special-
izes in training students for well-paid careers
in medicine and law.
On the Left Coast, Normcore arrived at
UC-Berkeley. In the Daily Californian, one
software-engineer-in-the-making spelled out
his strategic presentation of the self in terms
that would bring a knowing smile to Richard
Floridas lips:
Sean Soave, a junior computer science major,
is quick to emphasize normcores hidden-
in-plain-sight sensibility. Its like . . . being
undercover, Soave explains. Youre putting
your outfit together, and youre going for
the aesthetic of a normal person, but you
arent them. Its stealth mall chic. Its ironic
conformity.
Ironic conformity: Behold the clarion call
of a new generation of programmers, doc-
tors, and lawyers utterly assured of their own
individualismand just as certain that the
playful derision they heap on normal working
slobs exempts them from the petty indignities
of the working life. Soon, they will reap the
benefits of their semi-ironic STEM degrees,
matriculating further into actual jobs in man-
agement. Then it will be abundantly clear that
the social privilege they exert over the 68 per-
cent of adult Americans who havent finished
28 1 The Baffler [no.27]
college isnt quite the fucking joke that our
fashion scribes take it to be. Sit tight, Norm-
core kids. The mall and everything in it will
soon be yours.
The New Normal
In 1920, Republican presidential candidate
Warren G. Harding staked his campaign
on the less-than-stirring call for a return to
normalcy, based on the notion that America,
fresh out of World War I, was overwhelmed
by its recent intervention in European affairs
and longed to embrace a quiet nationalism.
The only real departure from the middle-
American norm Harding proposed was the
word normalcy itself, which was a clumsy
bastardization of normality. Like many of
his modern successors, Harding fractured the
common tongue by executive fiat.
While Normcore broke these last few
years, the Obama administration backed Syr-
ian rebels in an attempt to defeat ISIS and
Assad. In Bangladesh, the Rana Plaza fac-
tory collapsed, killing 1,100 sweatshop work-
ers making clothes for such Normcore name
brands as JCPenney. In the middle-American
town of Ferguson, Missouri, white people in
bad jeans ran for the hills as protesters de-
nounced a grand jurys decision not to indict
a white police officer who shot and killed a
black teenage boy. Bill Cosby, the poster boy
for eighties Normcore, came under fire from
more than two dozen accusers on disturbing
charges of rape and sexual assault. Like Hard-
ings bland postwar call to national recum-
bency, Normcores hold on the culture could
well signal a desperate, uncynical wish for a
sense of isolated tranquility. It seeks to re-
inscribe, through countless layers of adroitly
theorized irony, old-fashioned American val-
ues unperturbed by police brutality and sex-
ual assault. And it wants, finally, to buttress
a social order in which the wealthy can flaunt
their superiority without fear of reproach.
Lol. Normcore.t
E xh i bi t C 5 Amanda Konishi

AMANDA KONIISHI
Aerodynamics.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 29

Venus in Furs

Dickheads
The paradox of the necktie resolved
3 David Gr aeber

Some people (me, for instance) put a great

deal of energy into organizing their lives so
that theyll never have to wear a tie. Ive often
wondered why this should be. Why should
ties have such symbolic power? Its not as
if other parts of a formal suitwhite shirts,
tailored slacks, vests, or blazersinspire the
same sort of indignation. Somehow, it feels as
if tying the necktie around your neck marks
a final act of closure. Its the act that trans-
forms all those items into a suit, with all the
suit implies, whether its the power of the
boardroom or the ceremonial formalities of
weddings and funeralsthat whole world of
official business over which men in suits in-
variably preside. No doubt, part of the objec-
tion to the tie is to the pure arbitrariness of
the thing. A tie serves no function. It doesnt
hold your trousers up or keep you warm. But
at the same time, its uncomfortable, so much
so that putting it on does somehow feel like
a gesture of submission, a reluctant pledge of
allegiance to everything the suit is supposed
to represent.
Still, if you think more about it, theres
something peculiar going on herea kind of
paradox. Yes, a tie embodies the message of
the suit, but in many ways its the very oppo-
site. After all, the rest of the suit is almost en-
tirely bereft of decorative elements. Suits tend MARK DANCE Y

to be dark, sober, boring. Ties are supposed

to be the exception. The tie is the one place
where youre allowed to add a little color, to
express yourself a little. Why, then, should the
one thing thats least like the rest of the suit
somehow feel like it embodies the message of
the whole?
Ready, Aim, Attire!
Formal male clothing wasnt always boring.
In Elizabethan times, for instance, menpar-
ticularly rich and powerful oneswere just
as inclined as women to deck themselves out
in flashy jewelry and bright decorative col-

30 1 The Baffler [no.27]

 Couldnt we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacement
of the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not
from ones crotch but from ones head?
9
ors, and even (as in the court of Louis XIV)
to wear wigs, powder, and rouge. All this
changed in the eighteenth century, a period
some historians of dress have referred to as the
age of the Great Masculine Renunciation.
Suddenly, male clothing was expected to be
less ornamental, more generally businesslike
than womens. Eventually, something very
much like the modern business suit began to
emerge: uniform, dark in color (the more seri-
ous the context, the darker it should be) with
little or no patterningits very dullness em-
bodying seriousness of purpose.
The modern business suit appeared
around the time of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, and it embodied the spirit of the emerg-
ing bourgeoisie. Such men scoffed at aristo-
cratic fops as parasites. They saw themselves
instead as men of action, defined by their
ability to direct and transform the world.
They were producers; aristocrats were mere
consumers. And in this new bourgeois order,
consumption was to be the domain of wom-
en, who continued to wear powder, lipstick,
necklaces, and earrings (though usually not
quite so extravagantly), even as their hus-
bands gave them up.
This transformation explains a number of
curious usages surviving in our own formal
clothing: notably, the way a blazer can still
be referred to as sports jacket, even though
you wouldnt want to run a race in one. In fact,
the business suit derives not from aristocratic
formal wear, but from hunting clothesthis is
why fox-hunters, for instance, still wear some-
thing very much like one. Both uniforms are a
kind of active wear, adopted by a class of peo-
ple who wanted to define themselves through
their actions.
Actually, I suspect that the ultimate deri-
vation of the business suit is from a suit of
armor. The suit, after all, encases your body,
covering as much of it as possible; what mini-
mal openings to the world such clothes do
affordat your neck and sleevesare bound
tightly together by ties and cuff links. The
contours of the body are thus obscured, in
striking contrast with womens formal wear,
which, even in covering the body, constantly
hints at revealing it, and particularly at reveal-
ing its most sexualized aspects. Skirts, even
when they cover the lower half of the body
completely, tend to form an open-ended cone
whose apex is between the legs, and except in
the most prudish times, there has been some
gesture toward revealing the cleavage. Its
almost as if the staid uniformity of mens at-
tire is meant to efface individuality just as its
design is meant to make the body itself invis-
ible; womens formal wear, on the other hand,
makes the wearer both an individual and an
object to be seen. Indeed, the conventions of
higher-class fashion ensure that any woman
wearing such an outfit is obliged to devote a
good deal of time and energy to monitoring
herself to make sure too much is not revealed
and, more generally, to constantly thinking
about what she looks like.
And this is still true. Just recall the bifur-
cated fashions at the sexual battleground of
your high school prom. The guys all dressed
identically. They were, in effect, sporting a
uniform. But if two girls wound up wearing
the same dress, then oh, what a scandal.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 31
Venus in Furs
The Frail Gaze
It seems to me that this very effacement of
individuality is itself one way of expressing
power. The French philosopher Michel Fou-
cault argued that the eighteenth century (the
period that saw the emergence of the busi-
ness suit) marked a profound transformation
in how power came to be exercised in Europe
and America. In a feudal order, Foucault sug-
gested, power existed in order to be seen. It
was enshrined in the very bodies of the king
and nobles, which were on continual display
in portraits, pageants, and court ceremonial.
Common folk were faceless spectators. The
modern bureaucratic state reversed all this:
suddenly, it was the powerful who were face-
less, depersonalized abstractions, as it was
they who did the inspecting, examining, and
monitoring of everybody else.
What Foucault was really talking about
were two different modes of exercising power
that always exist, in any society. Sometimes
the general struts about showing off his med-
als, and sometimes hes inspecting the troops,
who are expected to keep eyes fixed firmly
into space. Indeed, the most powerful way to
represent power has always been to refuse to
represent it. Thats why God or spirits in so
many traditions cannot be shown in images;
its also why the way to show that something
is truly powerful is to hide it, to render it invis-
ible, ineffable, unknowable, utterly featureless
and abstract. That which is unknown, Thom-
as Hobbes once remarked, is for that reason
unlimited. It could be anything; therefore,
you have to be prepared to assume it could do
anything as well.
I suggest a simple formula: To express pow-
er through display is to say to those over whom
one exercises it, Behold, see how I have been
treated. I have been treated this way because
of who I am. Now you, too, must treat me this
way. Kings cover themselves with gold as a
way of saying that you must cover them with
gold as well. To refuse any such display, in con-
32 1 The Baffler [no.27]
trast, is to say, You simply have no idea what I
am capable of.
If this formula is true, the generic quality
of formal male clothing, whether donned by
factory owners or functionaries, makes some
sense. These uniforms define powerful men
as active, productive, and potent, and at the
same time define them as glyphs of power
disembodied abstractions. Womens formal
attire, with its flounces and fripperies, sequins
and whatnots, defines its wearer as something
that you look at, as a passive object, but at
the same time makes her bodily, specific, and
even unique. (The word specific is origi-
nally derived from the Latin specere, mean-
ing to look at. Its the same root as gives us
spectacle, inspection, and specimen.)
John Bergers famous analysis of European oil
painting, Ways of Seeing, noticed that the so-
cial presence of a man in such quintessentially
bourgeois settings always turned on what he
was assumed to be able to do (the promise of
power he embodied), while that of a woman
turned on her appearance, which was taken
to indicate how she has treated herselfand
therefore what it is acceptable to do to her.
Robert Graves summed it up even more pre-
cisely; in the world those oil paintings repre-
sent, Man Does; Woman Is. (Only its not
clear that Graves meant this as a criticism!)
Semiotics of the Barn Door, Open
So what does any of this have to do with neck-
ties? Well, at first glance, the paradox has
only deepened. If the message of the suit is
that its wearer is a largely invisible, abstract,
and generic creature to be defined by his abil-
ity to act, then the decorative necktie makes
little sense.
But lets examine other forms of decora-
tion allowed in formal attire and see if a larger
pattern of sartorial power begins to emerge.
Decoration thats specific to women (earrings,
lipstick, eyeshadow, etc.) tends to highlight
the receptive organs. Permissible mens jew-
elryrings, cuff links, fancy watchestends to
accentuate the hands. This is, of course, con-
sistent: it is through the hands that one acts
upon the world. Theres also the tie clip, but
thats not really a problem. The tie and the cuff
links seem to fulfill their functions in parallel,
each adding a little decoration to tighten a spot
where human flesh sticks out, namely the neck
and wrists. They also help seal off the exposed
bits from the remainder of the body, which re-
mains effaced, its contours largely invisible.
This observation, I think, points the way
to the resolution of our paradox. After all, the
male body in a suit does contain a third po-
tentially obtrusive element that is most defi-
nitely not exposed, something that, in fact,
is not indicated in any way, even though one
does have to take it out, periodically, to pee.
Suits have to be tailored to allow for urination,
which also has to be done in such a way that
nobody notices. The fly (which is invisible) is
a bourgeois innovation, much unlike earlier
aristocratic styles, such as the European cod-
piece, that often drew explicit attention to
the genital region. This is the one part of the
male body whose contours are entirely effaced.
If hiding something is a way of declaring it a
form of power, then hiding the male genitals
is a way of declaring masculinity itself a form
of power. Its not just that the tie sits on pre-
cisely the spot that, in womens formal wear,
tends to be the most sexualized (the cleavage).
A tie resembles a penis in shape, and points
directly at it. Couldnt we say that a tie is re-
ally a symbolic displacement of the penis, only
an intellectualized penis, dangling not from
ones crotch but from ones head, chosen from
among an almost infinite variety of other ties
by an act of mental will?
Hey, this would explain a lotwhy men
who wear bow ties are universally taken to be
nerds, for example. True, a bow tie could be
taken for a pair of testicles. But even so, bow
ties are small, and they point in entirely the
wrong direction. Mafiosi wear ties that are
too fat and colorful; dissipated sophisticates
wear thin ties; cowboys wear string ties that
produce the effect you might expect from
wearing a bow tie and a regular tie at the same
timeordinarily, this would be too unsubtle,
but cowboys are mythic he-men who can get
away with it. ( James Bond can also get away
with a bow tie, but then hes basically just a gi-
ant penis anyway.)
Professional women have faced endless
problems over what to wear around their
necks. Wearing a tie is considered sexually
provocative, threatening. Its telling that this
is the only aspect of traditional male attire
women have not been allowed to adopt. In the
1980s and 1990s, there was some effort to de-
velop flouncy bows as an alternative, but that
didnt really work out. The expedient today is
not to put anything at all in the open space re-
vealed by the jacket, and just let the absence
speak for itself.
You can take it from here. But let me end
with a last observation about gender. As an
anthropologist, I am aware that one of the
most common features of patriarchyand this
is true in a surprising number of places, from
Africa to Sweden to New Guineais some
idea that women produce naturally (they bear
children) and that men produce culturally
(they create society). Stated outright, this is an
obvious liepretty much everywhere you go
you can find women doing most of the work of
producing society too. So the message of the
patriarchs has to be communicated obliquely.
And I suspect that traditional formal clothing
is one such statement.
Think of it this way: if none of us wore any
clothes, then it would be the male genitalia
sticking out visibly, while womens would re-
main largely hidden. Maybe the entire point
of formal attire to invert this possibility, to
say, Yes, in nature, it is women who have mys-
terious hidden powers of creation, but once
we get all dressed and civilized, its precisely
the other way around.t
The Baffler [no.27] ! 33
Venus in Furs
Idle Threads
The sartorial unconscious
3 Ann Friedman
In The Devil Wears Prada, the 2006 rom-com
starring Meryl Streep as a cartoonish version
of the notoriously icy Vogue editor Anna Win-
tour, Streep delivers a speech about the impor-
tance of the fashion industry. You think this
has nothing to do with you, Streep says to her
new assistant (Anne Hathaway), who wishes
she were doing hard-hitting investigative
work rather than fetching coffee for an arbiter
of high-end taste. You go to your closet and
you select . . . I dont know . . . that lumpy blue
sweater, for instance, because youre trying to
tell the world that you take yourself too seri-
ously to care about what you put on your back.
And yet, Streep explains, her assistants
sweater is this particular shade of blue because
a designer featured it on the runway a few
years ago, a decision that then trickled down
through the fashion food chain all the way to
the shopping-mall clearance racks. Its sort
of comical, she concludes, how you think
that youve made a choice that exempts you
from the fashion industry when in fact youre
wearing the sweater that was selected for you
by the people in this room. You think you
choose to wear things because you like them,
because theyre special, or maybe because
youre special. But in fact, youre not special,
and neither are your choices. Youre just an
angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel.
The real Anna Wintour would never put it
so bluntly, even behind closed doors. Hers is
an industry that depends on all of us continu-
ing to believe that our choices are special and
that our senses of style are unique. At a White
House event for aspiring fashion designers
this year, Wintour said, Fashion can be a
34 1 The Baffler [no.27]
BOOKS REVIEWED
Women in Clothes,
by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits,
and Leanne Shapton,
Blue Rider Press, $30
Worn Stories,
by Emily Spivack,
Princeton Architectural Press, $24.95
Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss,
Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen,
and the 90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion,
by Maureen Callahan,
Simon and Schuster, $26
powerful instrument for social change. It al-
lows us to think about who we are as individu-
als and as a society. She did not say, A handful
of luxury designers and a few major clothing
brands decide what you will like and, in turn,
buy and wear. Why would she? The modern
fashion industry wants consumers to think
that we are not consumers at all, but curators
instead. If the midcentury mantra was Dress
to impress, and the roaring-80s catchphrase
was Dress for success, the directive now is
Dress to express.
This approach to fashion is at the heart of
Women in Clothes, a thick new book based on a
survey that writers Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits,
and Leanne Shapton circulated to more than
six hundred women asking them what they
wear and how they feel about it. The women
offer hyperspecific thoughts about their every
sartorial choice, but only a few admit that they

Youre just an angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel.
9
are influenced by trends or marketing. They
are much more likely to lay the blame on their
own bodies. A woman is never thin enough,
writes Vedrana Rudan. I have a double chin,
I shove my tits into minimizers that minimize
nothing, I get into Levis designed to flatten
the tummy and lift the ass, but my ass and
ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE
stomach are immune to the intention of the
jeans. I am a cow!
The survey responses are shot through
with the hollow promises of the fashion in-
dustrythat with the right combination of
trousers and shirts and dresses and skirts, cut
in the right way and worn just so, women can
The Baffler [no.27] ! 35
Venus in Furs
be more glamorous, more powerful, more de-
sired, more respected. I dress to withstand
the elements, says one woman. I dress to
be as interesting as the Tate. I dress to in-
sert myself into social strata, to be accepted,
to pass. One five-year-old respondent says,
in an aside designed to break every would-be
earth mothers heart, I am always conscious
of what Im wearing. Another woman offers
a detailed journal of every high-end item she
covets, from a Kenzo silk-crepe shirt to an
amazing Gudrun & Gudrun multi-coloured
dream sweater. Even unattainable fashion
goals start to sound like theyd be great fun to
pursuea repudiation, somehow, of the grim,
dictatorial vision of sexism as an obliging
handmaiden of capitalism. There are, howev-
er, a few brief hints to the contrary: a Muslim
woman who wears a jilbab writes, When I see
what the women on billboards, commercials,
and game shows are wearing, it really aches
my heart. I mean no offense to anyone, but it
hurts me to see the bodies of these innocent
women being used to sell products. And they
are made to believe that this is freedom.
Women, the book implies, are not sheep
who will buy whatever theyre told is on trend
or anything H&M stocks for less than $39.50.
They are thoughtful and careful about what
they wear and why. Fast fashion barely ex-
ists in the world of Women in Clothes; its care-
fully edited accounts of self-declared style
preferences seem, indeed, to be the sartorial
equivalent of the slow food revolution that
Michael Pollan jumpstarted in 2006 with The
Omnivores Dilemma. In response to a survey
question about shopping, women express dis-
comfort, embarrassment, or outright denial
before the suggestion that they, as a group,
buy a lot of new clothes. They describe shop-
ping as an activity for which they must adopt
a battle planor that, at the very least, they
avoid on an empty stomach. To hell with the
whole concept of shopping, says one respon-
dent. Who needs clothes?
36 1 The Baffler [no.27]
This professed aversion to the rigors of ac-
quiring clothing doesnt match up with the
manifest joy that many of the women take in
describing what ends up in their closets. Its
also an awkward fit with the books own ap-
parent marketing strategy. Since it first ap-
peared last fall, Ive seen Women in Clothes on
display in several womens clothing shops, for
sale alongside small leather goods and gold
jewelry. Its safe to assume that the owners of
these boutiques dont see the book as an anti-
dote to the psychological pain endured by fe-
male shoppers, but as yet another fashionable
accessory.
Theres a lot of whimsy in Women in Clothes
an artists rendering of various stains as they
appear on womens clothing, Lena Dunhams
description of her mothers sartorial vibe as
bejeweled ventriloquist dummy, a photo se-
ries cataloging each pair of black underwear
a woman ownsbut its main revelation is
how serious women are about what they wear.
Theyve so thoroughly infused their wardrobes
with their hopes, dreams, and aspirations that
the anthology could just as easily be titled Wom-
en as Clothes. Because I resist the ephemerality
of clothing, I make grandiose demands of it: a
garment must touch on all that I have ever been
and will be, writes Ida Hattemer-Higgins in
an essay about how a secondhand store in Ath-
ens helped her get over a breakup. The irony is
that, for all my grasping at eternity, in the end, I
almost never wear any item for more than a few
months.
Out of context, such grandiose pronounce-
ments seem over the top, but theyre right at
home in a book about fashion and the female
self. While J.Crew and GQ can still get away
with acting as though its utterly modern for
men to care about style, women have long
been culturally saddled with the knowledge
that they are how they look, and that there-
fore they are what they wear. The pursuit of
stylishness is not something they opt into, but
rather something they must opt out of at great
social cost. Hattemer-Higgins tells herself she
is resisting the ephemerality of clothingand
with it the dictates of the fashion industryby
carefully selecting each piece she wears from a
pile of thrifted cast-offs.
But to scour the racks, secondhand or oth-
erwise, for the makings of self-expression
is only to double down on the importance of
fashion. The truly transgressive choiceto
dress purely for utilitynever seems to cross
the minds of the women featured in the book.
I dont blame them. Utility isnt much fun. If
you cant control the fact that youre going to
be judged on your appearance, why not derive
what pleasure you can from conveying to ob-
servers how you wish to be judged? The inad-
equacy of clothestheir inability to express
the depth and complexity of female experienc-
esprobably explains both why women invest
their wardrobes with so much significance and
why their clothes so often fail to satisfy them.
It can be hard to tell why women are over-
burdening their wardrobes with mystic pow-
ers of signification: Is it in spite of the fashion
industry or because of it? If you were to ask
Streeps Wintour-like character, she would
say the answer hardly matters. Whether you
are an avid follower of fashion or studiously ig-
norant of what appears on the runways, youre
still affected by the prevailing style thats set,
in part, by clothing companies. Even second-
hand shoppers are not immune; even the dis-
enchanted cant leave their houses naked.
Garb In, Garb Out
Worn Stories, another new book of sartorial
memoirs, this one collected by Emily Spivack,
is an extended meditation on the notion that
our clothes are full of memory and meaning.
As Spivack writes in the introduction, My
own closet is full of clothes; it is also an evolv-
ing archive of experiences, adventures, and
memories. Despite this lofty preamble, many
of the Worn Stories essays and as-told-tosby
assorted pseudo-celebrities, creative types,
and fashion civiliansfall flat. The lesson
seems to be that just because a shirt is mean-
ingful to you, that doesnt make it interesting
for the rest of us to read about. The stories are
illustrated with photographs of the items on
hangers, unworn as if they are up for auction
a format that makes sense, since Spivack for
years culled quirky apparel listings from eBay
and published them on her blog, Sentimental
Value. In the book, though, this item-centric
approach comes off as strangely bloodless.
Some of the essays succeed in conveying the
emotional connections the authors have forged
with their clothes. But many, such as designer
Cynthia Rowleys description of her Girl Scout
sash and actress Greta Gerwigs feelings about
a mens button-down shirt, are perilously bor-
ing. Where Women in Clothes adopts the narra-
tive strategy of presenting clothes as a stand-in
for women, Worn Stories treats clothes, rather
wanly, as, you know, clothes.
Spivack is right to observe that everyday
items, especially ones kept so close to our bod-
ies, are bound to be vessels for our emotions.
But documenting them tends to produce a
more powerful result when its done with a
specific goal in mind. Anti-rape activists, for
example, have collected descriptions of what
women were wearing when they were sexually
assaulted in order to prove that none of them
was asking for it. Efforts like these remind us
that stories about our clothes neednt be self-
indulgentthey can be politically minded. At
times, Worn Stories nods in this direction, by
virtue of a distinct anticonsumerist under-
current. Against the old adage that theres
nothing more exciting than showing off a
new dress, Spivacks collection insists that a
pair of fifteen-year-old black plastic flip-flops
are thrilling in their own way: we can claim
the power to give objects meaning, rather
than ritually investing them with the power
to give us meaning. The approach to fashion
sketched out in Worn Stories is the antithesis
of the shoppers high.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 37
Venus in Furs
Women in Clothes and Worn Stories both owe
a debt to Ilene Beckermans mid-1990s mem-
oir told through her outfits, Love, Loss, and
What I Wore. And each, appropriately enough,
got its start on the Internet. Spivack has been
collecting eBay narratives on Sentimental Val-
ue since 2007 and accepting submissions for
her Worn Stories blog since 2010, and the sur-
veys that Heti and Julavits and Shapton used
to compile Women in Clothes were first sent out
as chain emails. Even as Americans spend-
ing on clothes has declined, weve found new
ways of digitally communicating the joys of
consumptionlike YouTube videos in which
eager shoppers unbox their new purchases, or
rich kids Instagram photos hashtagged #Gu-
cci. Online, every mundane choice is a vital
part of identity construction.
The books feature a heavy sprinkling of
celebrities and art-fashion types, but even
so, they aim to position themselves as par-
ticipants in the democratization of fashion.
Caring deeply about clothes and the meaning
they telegraph was once the province of high-
fashion designers and magazinesthe Anna
Wintours of the worlduntil blogs made the
street the new runway and fashion bloggers
became the new chaperones of taste.
But as with other online modes of reputa-
tion, the proliferation of fashion blogs hasnt
so much diminished the power of the host
industry as created a new perch on which to
prop it up. In remarkably short order, cloth-
ing brands latched onto upstart style blogs and
digital icons of fashion independence. What
better way, after all, to reinforce the message
that every personal fashion choice is a unique
one than to have it packaged in the wisecrack-
ing argot of a teenager or shown through the
lens of an amateur photographer? Now, nearly
a decade after the advent of fashion blogging,
most independent style bloggers post pho-
tos in exchange for free merchandise, with
courtesy of credits that look much like the
fine print at the bottom of fashion-magazine
38 1 The Baffler [no.27]
editorial spreads. They offer brand-sponsored
giveaways to devoted readers and disclaimers
like This post was written in collaboration
with HP & Intel to explain why their outfits
are now accessorized with electronics. They
sit in the front rows at New York Fashion
Week, which, in what is either its own nod to
the rites of digital cool-hunting or a budget-
minded response to Mercedes-Benz pulling
its sponsorship, has announced that after be-
ing displaced from Lincoln Center, its moving
to an undisclosed downtown location.
The status of the reader, however, remains
unchanged. Blog browsers and magazine buy-
ers are equally secure in the knowledge that
they will never be able to afford the Miu Miu
skirts and Margiela ankle boots they see pic-
tured. Rather than normalizing young girls
and women wearing luxury items, high-end
personal style blogs bring into sharp relief
the difference between the fashion industry
and those who love it, wrote Alice Marwick
in The New Inquiry last year. This frank ac-
knowledgement of budget constraints, espe-
cially when combined with condemnation of
high fashions unrealities, reveals a push-pull
relationship between the exclusivity industry
that is fashion and the sui generis self-expres-
sion fetishized by personal style blogs. Now
that fashion blogs are just as inauthentic as
fashion magazines and runways, weve collec-
tively moved on to everyday people talking
about their everyday clothes. The exclusive
nature of fashion is, increasingly, played out in
the personal stories we tell about clothes and
the meanings that only we can give them.
Bearing a Grunge
This transition actually antedates the In-
ternet, as Maureen Callahan argues in her
new book Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss,
Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the 90s
Renegades Who Remade Fashion. As tastes
shifted away from shellacked and shoulder-
padded 80s perfection, the industry began
 Even secondhand shoppers are not immune;
even the disenchanted cant leave their houses naked.
9
to question traditional measures of power
and popularity. High-fashion brands realized
that even if consumers didnt want an edgy
downtown lifestyle, they wanted edgy down-
town fashion, or at least an approximation of
it. Designers who sold exclusively to the rich
started paying serious attention to subcul-
tures that had never telegraphed wealth or
power. Amazonian supermodels were still the
norm, but John Galliano wanted Moss, then
an unknown who was half a foot shorter than
the industry standard, to walk his runway be-
cause we were looking for new girls, and she
was cast as a wild child. Anna Wintour put a
woman in jeans on the cover of the first issue
of Vogue she edited. The industry started tak-
ing more cues from outsiders like X-Girla
brand designed by Daisy von Furth and Sonic
Youths Kim Gordon and described by its fit
model Chlo Sevigny as too cool for school.
The early 90s, Callahan argues, were
packed with challenges to the tastemak-
ing power of traditional modeling agencies,
magazines, and fashion houses. But outsiders
still needed the imprimatur of the fashion ma-
chine to find success. Moss was represented
by a traditional modeling agency, and Win-
tour favored clothes by known fashion houses
in her editorial spreads. Fashion, Callahan
writes, wasnt just in the throes of a genera-
tional coup dtat: What was happening now
would change everything, and wouldalong
with technologydemocratize the industry,
turning real people into models, reality show
contestants and pop stars into designers, teen-
age bloggers into front-row eminences. Yet
here, too, one should caution that most of
these convulsions represented only the veneer
of democratization. The renegades who an-
chor Callahans book were deeply invested in
the traditional industry, and their digital-era
successors would be too. McQueen, Jacobs,
and Moss may have been insurgents storm-
ing the ramparts in the 90s, but today their
names are synonymous with the moneyed
center of the fashion establishment.
And their career trajectories, as Callahan
traces them, make this point unmistakably
clear. Jacobs was one of the first designers to
fully capitalize on the realization that it was
coolessential, evento adopt the air of a
disaffected outsider. In the first years of his ca-
reer, when he assiduously cultivated the image
of a scrappy upstart with a tiny staff and bud-
get, Jacobs was living in a luxury apartment on
the Upper West Side, already had the worlds
top supermodels walking in his shows, and had
been covered by Womens Wear Daily and the
New York Times ever since he was a student at
the prestigious Parsons School of Design. Al-
exander McQueen had an undeniably rougher
upbringing. Lee McQueenAlexander was
his middle namewas the chubby son of a taxi
driver and was raised in public housing in east
London; after he dropped out of high school,
he managed to talk his way into the fashion
design program at Central Saint Martins.
But even as he was building a self-consciously
high-end brand, with outr runway shows (his
most famous was titled Highland Rape) and
collections that were deliberately noncommer-
cial, he, too, was well inside the power circles
of the London fashion world.
Both designers understood that the ap-
pearance of transgression is a highly market-
able thing. The early adopters of high fash-
ionthe people who find themselves in the
front row at fashion week and who embrace
a certain look years before its repurposed for
lucrative, off-the-rack knock-off deals with
The Baffler [no.27] ! 39
fast-fashion merchandisers like Target and
Forever 21need to be convinced that they are
special and nonconformist. If McQueens ge-
nius was to take the disgusting and unseemly
aspects of life and make them glamorous, Ja-
cobss genius, Callahan writes, was to trans-
mute the lowly into the aspirational. Heres
the way that Jacobs articulated his ethos, as
it applied to nightlife in the metropole: The
ideal girl will just sort of roll out of bed some
night after taking a nap and put on a slip that
looks like this and go out to some club or go
dancing or something. Shed be all dressed,
but shed still be kind of undressed . . . and she
wouldnt have to do anything else.
She, as it turned out, was Kate Mossas
Callahan writes, the first supermodel who
was coming of age with the Internet, the first
one girls looked to off the runway: What Kate
wore, whether on the street or on the red car-
pet, was much cooler to them than what she
modeled. Her paparazzi photos were becom-
ing indistinguishable from her editorials.
Despite Callahans efforts to elevate her
into the full-blown symbol of an age, Moss
comes across as painfully dull. She ran away
from her middle-class, suburban home and
H A L L I E B AT E M A N
40 1 The Baffler [no.27]
dropped out of high school because she was
more interested in the London club scene.
There is no story of pluck, grit, and drive be-
hind her decision to make fashion her career.
In Callahans telling, Moss got famous almost
by chance, after an alternative magazine pho-
tographer fished her headshot out from a bot-
tom drawer at a modeling agency. Even after
she became the face of Calvin Klein and one
of the most recognizable icons of the 90s
fashion scene, Mosss biography is run-of-the-
mill celebrity stuff: she did a lot of drugs and
dated famous actors and drew accolades for
her carefully selected vintage dresses on the
red carpet. Even she seemed bored by herself.
Fashions not satisfying to me at all, Moss
said during her 90s heyday. You cant change
the world through fashion because the aver-
age person doesnt look at fashion pictures.
But, as Streep so artfully argued in The
Devil Wears Prada, that doesnt really matter.
The average person doesnt flip through Vogue
and doesnt follow Garance Dors street-
style blog and will never come near a copy of
Worn Stories. Still, its just as clearly the case
that the same average person doesnt want to
feel like an average person. So long as she has
even a little bit of disposable income to spend
on clothes, and even if shes shopping second-
hand or raiding a friends closet, shes affected
by the notion that what she wears communi-
cates something about who she is.
Fashion brands and clothing retailers un-
derstand this, which is why they remain so
massively influential. No matter how the basic
elements of a trend, a look, or a line get reas-
sembled under the competitive taste and mar-
keting pressures of a new season, the basic so-
cial contract underlying the fashion system re-
mains intact: every consumer in the orbit of the
industry believes that every choice she makes is
an authentic expression of her true self. Thats
even, or perhaps especially, true if what shes
trying to express is that she doesnt really care
about the clothes she puts on her back.t
How Long Now
Since the Mailmans
Gone Missing?

3 Danielle Blau

Its a sad yellow feeling

like walking into someone elses childhood.

A flickering
inside a vast, black egg:

its time to go.

The little shops pass

wall-less and candlelit

by night

and she (who greets you at the door)

her mouth

makes a warm cave.

The tables set

for dinner, dear. Yes.

No one

will unravel this (your home address) again.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 41

Venus in Furs
Three Strikes!1
Thoughts after reading Three Guineas
3 Lucy Ellmann
I made nice.2 It didnt work. Women are still
1In baseball, three strikes and youre out. Out on
your ass. The expression therefore has some bearing
on the trajectory of this article, my pitch being that
men are swinging wild. The original idea for the
piece came from reading Virginia Woolfs 1938 essay
Three Guineas, to which I was alerted by the novelist
Peter Burnett. But I couldnt refer to three letters
as Woolf does, since nobody writes letters anymore;
and I chose strikes to replace her guinea idea, since
nobody knows what a guinea is anymore either. (No-
body knows what a strike is anymore, come to think
of it. Thats why we need one.) Woolf is being ironic
about guineas anyway. With wit and eccentricity, her
essay considers various good causes to which three
guineas could usefully be put: the prevention of war,
rebuilding a womens college in Cambridge, and
finding employment for women in the professions. In
the end she offers each cause a guinea, this being all
an educated mans daughter could afford: Woolfs exploited, manipulated, mocked, blamed, scolded,
three guineas thus become, in their paltriness, an
emblem of womens second-class status (making
the diminished status of women the real subject of
Woolfs essay). It may be hard now to imagine being
patronizing toward Virginia Woolf (arent we all
supposed to be afraid of her?), but she was well aware
of what the intelligentsia and ignorantsia, as she a safe, sensible, efficient, and really rather innocuous
calls them, put most women through. In her essay,
she concludes that women are outsidersbut in the destruction of the environment. And yet hardly
a good way. So are the many footnotes in her essay.
Footnotes are always outsiders within a text, and
therefore make obliging underdogs in an essay on
female subordination. The footnotes here are the
women of this essay, and theyre taking over.
2As George Bernard Shaw said on his second arrival
in America, I told you what to do and you havent
done it. In 2013 I put my solution to male violence
toward women in the most palatable form I could
think up, a rom-com novel called Mimi, about a rich
guy in New York who sees the light and becomes a
champion of women. Mimis solution to the down-
ward spiral of patriarchal insanity and its cata-
42 1 The Baffler [no.27]
strophic effect not only on women, men, and children
but also on the arts, culture, and the environment is:
hand over the money. Transfer all wealth into female
control. Not half of it, not 52 percentALL THE
MONEY. Given the mean little way that late capital-
ism works, a steady and wholehearted redistribution
of wealth seems the simplest method of ensuring that
women get treated with more respect, and get raped
and murdered less (a fad that clearly owes much to
womens low social status). Until we can return to
a matriarchal form of socialism, or commonism
(as the Scottish novelist and political activist John
Aberdein would say), in which money has no place, we
must put women in possession of real, unquestionable
wealth. This pro-female asset-rearrangement, which
Ive dubbed the Odalisque Revolution, constitutes a
peaceful revolutionary act, and can be achieved on an
individual basis, in private, by any right-thinking man
whos tired of hearing about women being deprived,
denied, despised, derided, deluded, ignored, cheated,
threatened, raped, killed, overworked, and ordered
about. (Incidentally, women are automatic members
of the Odalisque Revolution.)
Its not just about guineas, though. The ultimate
aim of the Odalisque Revolution is the start of a new
matriarchal era in human civilization. It seems to me
solution to the problem of male mayhem, war, and
any men to my knowledge have followed my very
clear instructions on how to relinquish the unfair
advantages so many of them claim to abhor. Only one
man (the intrepid English writer and critic Anthony
Rudolf ) has asked to have his Odalisque Revolution
Mea Culpa Declaration stamped. This detachable
certificate can be found at the back of any copy of
Mimi (on page xxv): all the contrite uxorious philogy-
nist has to do is sign it and give all his money (or most
of it: he can keep some petty cash, for pizzas sake) to
a woman or women of his choice.
The Declaration, written in plain English, merely
invites the signatory to make an admission that male

property and power are ill-gotten gains, the products
of mens misguided five-thousand-year-long terrorist
campaign aimed at the usurpation and colonization
of women. To give him his due, my copanelist, Alan
Bissett, at a so-called debate on so-called feminism
at the so-called Edinburgh International Book Fes-
tival in 2013, publicly pressed upon me 10. It was a
start, though far from the full relinquishing of funds
I have in mind. In return, I sent him, too, a stamped
copy of the Mea Culpa Declaration. But from other
menapart from my husband, Todd McEwen, who
has already given me all he hasthere have been very
few signs of acquiescence to my demands. No one
has even asked me to defend my position. Men have
relied on their stock tactic in response to female
insurrection: they have tried to starve the idea of
oxygen by not responding to it at all (aside from a
K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R
long, ill-considered review by Christopher Buckley
in the New York Times that, among its other failures
of understanding, wrongly accused my heroine Mimi
of being a nymphomaniacget with it, mister, female
sexuality is legit).
A few female reviewers have surfaced too, voicing
doubts about my pro-female cash-redistribution
plan. Now, wait a minute! Youre telling me you
object to acquiring all the available wealth in the
world, and with it the opportunity to subvert the
murderous course men have taken? Youre using the
examples of Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth I and
Medea and Pandora and Lady Macbeth to justify
never giving women an even break? All because a few
female creeps rose to high office within patriarchy,
and because male writers came up with some violent
female characters? You really believe women would
The Baffler [no.27] ! 43
Venus in Furs
oppressed, men still running the show.
Theyre still running around raping, killing,
and maiming womenraping, killing, and
maiming children too (which is really just an-
other way of attacking women). Theyre still
waging war, spraying every living thing with
pesticide, eating huge pizzas,3 and charging an
awful lot for a cut, highlights, and blow-dry.
And how about this new craze for murder-
suicide, which consists of the maddened liq-
uidation of women (usually ex-girlfriends or
estranged wives) and their children?4 And all
the jihadist outrages.
These people are trying to kill us! I dont
know why were all so nice about it. Nothing
substantial is ever done about the way men
carry on. Instead, its feminism, that most no-
ble of causes, that is forever in retreat. [Pause
to do dishes.] When any outwardly positive step
forward is madetoward equal pay, say, or
maternity/paternity benefits, or restrictions
on the numbers of pink products targeted at
girlssomething even worse always seems to
happen to women on some other level. Pa-
triarchal retribution is swift: for all the mild
protests against Gamergate, or against male
make as big a mess of power as men have? Oh, come
on. Enough of this self-abnegation. Weve run out of
time for ambivalence. What we need more is a radical
redistribution of power.
3 Why do men like pizza so much? I think its
because the boxes look official, like theyve just come
from some important meeting and theyve got some
really important documents in there or something,
not just a big, hot, slippery blop of dough covered
with mini-hamburgers, chicken tikka, and pineapple
chunks.
4Last December, David Crowley, a gun enthusiast,
murdered his wife and daughter (Pat Pheifer, Min-
neapolis Star Tribune, Jan. 22, 2015). Jonathon Walker
shot his two daughters, his wife, and his wifes
motherthough one of the girls survived (Benjamin
Mueller and John Surico, New York Times, Jan. 24,
2015). Because the murderer dies in the fray (of his
own making), these callous acts are often treated
in the same way as domestic disputes: culprit-free
crimes that are merely tragic family incidents.
44 1 The Baffler [no.27]
bias at the Academy Awards, topless photos
on Page 3 of the Sun newspaper in Britain, or
nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence being sto-
len and shared online, we now have a global
rape epidemic, with an accompanying crisis of
female self-hatred and self-harm. Sure, wom-
en are permitted to work (great, thanks a lot),
or deny Brits their Sun fun (though that ex-
hausting effort was only semi-successful), or
sue hackers over invasions of privacy, or join
reclaim the night demos, or even defile the
British ten-pound note with a (prettified) por-
trait of a female novelist,5 but our punishment
for it will be some new, unexpected form of vi-
olence, privation, ostracism, or bomb threat,
along with a lot of malignant jibes from Twit-
ter trolls. As Mary Beard said in 2014 about
mens determination to ignore, for the past
few thousand years, everything women have
had to say, women . . . pay a very high price for
being heard.6
Self-inflicted saturation in porn has pro-
duced a whole generation of young men who
apparently cherish, or at least accept, absurd
ideas about pneumatic female torsos7 and
male rights (and rites) of domination.8 The
5Yes, the Bank of England has bitten the bullet and
plonked Jane Austens face on a ten-pound note. A lot
of good it does her (and she really couldve used 10).
6For the whole lecture, see the London Review of
Books, March 20, 2014. Beard fixes on what its like
never to feel that you and your kind are properly
represented in the culture. America broke away from
England for just such a reason: No taxation without
representation. (Not that the United States has
turned out all that well: founded on the abuse of the
native population, and of slaves, it cannot seem to
get massacre out of its ethos, or its gun laws. On the
Fourth of July, 2014, eighty-two people were shot in
Chicago, and fourteen died.)
7Our increasing absorption with youth and beauty
has disenfranchised whole swaths of the female
population. The bodies of older women are now the
last great expanse of unchartered territory in the
world.
8One of the forms this takes, in an all too literal
 These people are trying to kill us!
I dont know why were all so nice about it.
9
consequences of the recession9 here in the
United Kingdom (I live in Edinburgh) have
been felt most by those already disadvan-
taged, and particularly women, through cuts
to the health care system, rape crisis centers,
womens refuges, legal aid, and other vital ser-
vices. Police mistreatment of female victims
kind of backlash, is the newly fashionable taste
on the part of straight men for anal sex, an avid-
ity touched on in the aptly named movie Damsels
in Distress (directed by Whit Stillman, 2012). Mens
current unwillingness to concern themselves with
the vagina is a new blight on our age, and womens
increasing dissatisfaction with their own genitals has
kept pace with male oversightsIm not just talking
waxing, plucking, and scenting here, but surgery and
the phenomenon of the designer vagina, a term that
begs to be pronounced with an English accent. (See
Marie Myung-Ok Lees article in the Guardian, Oct.
14, 2011.) But the fault is not with female erogenous
tissue; its with the men who malign it. Straight men
have simply become worse lovers than ever before.
(And, given the history of the missionary position,
thats saying something!) They appear to be pitilessly
unaware of their true role: that of pleasing women.
Women are not here for male pleasuremen exist to
give women pleasure. Female prostitution is founded
on a dangerous misinterpretation of sexuality, leading
men to pursue their own delights instead of womens,
in defiance of anatomy, and to the detriment of both
sexes. Biology supports feminism! For an explanation
of the way in which penis construction is oriented to-
ward female pleasure, rather than male, see Catherine
Blackledge, The Story of V (2003).
9Caused by men, but borne by women. Men run the
banks, the building societies, the buying and selling
of property, Parliament, Congress, the stock mar-
kets, the media, the oil wells, the Internet, and all the
other enterprises that allow economic downturns
to keep happening. We are all being crushed beneath
their incessant belief in growth and progress
(male terms for a society doomed to implode) and,
now, their austerity cuts. Men can also withstand
recessions betterbecause theyve got all the dough!
of rape and violence degrades us all.10 Despite
the scandalous gang rape and evisceration in
India last year, quickly followed by a similar
event in South Africa, or the Steubenville case
in Ohio, in which an unconscious sixteen-
year-old girl was carried naked from party
to party to be sexually molested and peed
upon (activities that some of the perpetra-
tors claimed to interpret as consensual sex),
doubt only seems to grow about what con-
stitutes rape or whether it even exists.11 The
worse men behave, the more their crimes get
downgraded into minor misdemeanors. This
perverse transmutation is essential, of course,
for preserving the status quo: the mass hal-
lucination that men are okay and women in
some way, in so many ways, arent.
10Only eight out of forty-three police forces in
England and Wales respond adequately to domestic
violence, according to their own body, Her Majestys
Inspectorate of Constabulary. Their behavior ranges
from unforthcoming to utterly shameful. West
Midlands police officers called one female victim a
fucking slag. (See the Guardian article of March 27,
2014, by Sandra Laville.) Meanwhile, the police did
nothing for years about reports of the rampant pedo-
phile Jimmy Saviles crimes, and it now seems that the
whole of the British establishment has been molest-
ing children with impunity for years: the accusation
of unthinking institutional sexism must be added to
the British polices proven proclivity for racism.
11Whoopi Goldberg perplexingly declared Roman
Polanski not guilty of rape-rape. (See the Guardian
article by Jessica Valenti, April 24, 2014, on the new
rape vs. rape-rape distinction.) For an infographic
analysis of the number of rapes reported and rapists
tried and convicted, including the minute propor-
tion of false accusations, see the Enliven Project (at
theenlivenproject.com), though who is enlivened
by these wretched statistics, I dont know. Argu-
ments about rape are so wearyingespecially when
you need all your strength for fleeing rapists.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 45
Venus in Furs
How about the sex-slave trade? Or the
treatment of women and children in detention
centers?12 Or the way the English family court
system vilifies mothers?13 The aim is always to
12In her superb book on the illegitimacy of U.K.
immigration policies, Open Borders (2004), Teresa
Hayter says all border controls are counterproduc-
tive and unjust: Their object . . . is to exclude poor
people, and especially black people. The denial of
free movement across frontiers gives rise to some of
the worst and most vicious abuses of human rights,
and provides perhaps the most fertile terrain for the
agitation of the far right. Its also obvious that in-
tolerance toward immigrants and foreigners closely
corresponds to the male attitude toward women and
animals: all of these groups are left out of calcula-
tions, except as objects of blame.
13As noted by the UNs special rapporteur, Rashida
Manjoo, in her statement last April on sexism in the
United Kingdoma report that dropped like cool
rain in a desert and affronted the Mail. (Or was it
the Male?) Among many acute observations about
British gender discrimination and the countrys
noncompliance with the Convention on the Elimina-
tion of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
(a great idea, and one to which the U.K. government
had already signed upwho knew?), Manjoo voiced
concerns about the family court system. It ignores
children and womens safety when hearing applica-
tions for contact with estranged parents. . . . Lawyers
and magistrates have limited understanding of the
dynamics of domestic abuse and force children and
their mothers to enter into unsafe and inappropri-
ate contact arrangements. . . . Shared parenting is
increasingly seen as an appropriate, default posi-
tion without the adequate consideration of the best
interests of the child principle and ignoring the history
of family abuse (my italics). A little-known aspect
of Englands despotic family court system (see the
website of the Children and Family Court Advisory
and Support Service: CAFCASS) is that mothers
who seek legal help to protect their children from
abusive, violent, or unpredictable fathers are threat-
ened with having their children taken away if they
dont accept the judges decision: there is no redress.
Women are also gaggedprevented, on pain of losing
their children, from speaking to the press or anyone
outside the courtroom about the treatment they
received. These constraints incapacitate women by
placing them outside the justice system and beyond
the benefits of free speech.
46 1 The Baffler [no.27]
traumatize women and to subdue them. This
is traditionally accomplished through rape
but can now also be inflicted through the jus-
tice system. [Pause to hang up laundry.]
This is a society thats failing women,14 a
14 We think we treat women okay? Then why do
some women feel they need to look like Barbie dolls?
Why do they wear six-inch heels just to get to work?
Why do they feel their only purpose in life is to
shape their eyebrows, give good head, and learn to
lap-dance? Why is the young Irish mezzo-soprano
Tara Erraught described in the English papers as a
dumpy (Independent), unbelievable, unsightly and
unappealing (Times), chubby bundle of puppy fat
(Financial Times)? What about her ability to SING?
Has the relevance of thatin an opera star!been
totally lost? (See Susannah Clapps fiery retort to
the insults, in the Observer, May 25, 2014.) Womens
self-image is in tatters, smothered under a deluge of
photoshopped celebs, the designer-fashion parade,
porn geared to male pleasure and male fantasy,
cosmetically altered styles of female body, the sex
objects beloved of advertising, and all the top-heavy
superwoman types in cartoon animation. As a result,
there are girls on anorexic websites congratulating
one another for dying.
In answer to the whole current hysteria about
plumpitude, see The Obesity Era by David Ber-
reby, which convincingly explains that fatness
relates to global pollution rather than to failings
of self-restrainteven lab rats are getting fatter
(Aeon magazine, June 19, 2013). One defect of Susie
Orbachs book, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, is that in the
end it descends into diet advice: this much decreases
the radicalism of her message. But fatism is a feminist
issue, because all discrimination on the basis of how
you look is (implicitly) directed at women, women
being the most likely candidates to worry about such
things. Women now resort to plastic surgery from an
earlier and earlier age. Its a form of self-mutilation,
self-denial, and self-inflicted punishment, that is
becoming the normif you can afford it, that is, and
you may well be fired, demoted, dumped, maligned,
or shunned if you cantwith every operation per-
formed putting pressure on other women to endure
the same. Yet even if you manage to be or become
whatever is considered beautiful at the time (its al-
ways changing), youll still be stuck in a sexist society
that hates you. As the Nobel-winning novelist Elf-
riede Jelinek wrote in Greed (2006), The slim ones,
who have worked hard for their figure . . . climb up the
society in which women are kept in a perpetu-
al, simmering state of terror.15
Yet how we bustle around, trying to look
good, be good, restrain ourselves in all kinds
of ways, and contort ourselves and our own
needs and beliefs in order to work within a
setup men have molded to suit themselves,
a setup in which women are forever doomed
to be the losers, hangers-on, and the butts of
jokes, floozies all.16 The first suggestions of-
mountains every day or climb the walls at home.
15 No one has so far questioned my use of the term
terrorism in Mimi to describe all the lousy stuff
men do to women, perhaps because its so apt. But
men, the controllers of language, usually get to
define what terrorism is, and therefore never employ
the word to describe their behavior en masse, as a
gender. They trip all over their own feet trying to
define the word (and much, of course, depends on
which government is doing the defining). Heres how
terrorism is described in the U.S. Department of
Defenses Dictionary of Military Terms: The unlawful
use of violence or threat of violence, often motivated
by religious, political, or other ideological beliefs, to
instill fear and coerce governments or societies in
pursuit of goals that are usually political. My first
question would be: Why is any violence lawful?
And next: What is the oppression of women by men,
if not a coercive political campaign that makes use
of propaganda, blackmail, and the calculated use of
(unlawful) violence and physical threat to promote an
ideology (patriarchy)? Just because this form of terror
has gone on for thousands of years doesnt reduce its
criminality. Lets be clear about this: ALL VIO-
LENCE IS TERRORISM AGAINST WOMEN
(unless its committed solely to protect life, i.e., in
self-defense), if only because women produced all
the people being mangled, manhandled, murdered,
or mutilated. (The fact that children are fathered by
men is relevant merely on a molecular level.) Family
annihilationthat euphemism for slaughtering
your whole familyis a misogynistically motivated
hate crime. Misogyny is lethal. As Fritz Feld tells
Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938), The
love impulse in men very frequently reveals itself in
terms of conflict.
16 In The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Tolstoys narrator
Pozdnyshev complains that the whole world is pro-
woman, because women are big shoppers. (We may be
fered to you when you Google the word women
are womens clothing, womens shoes,
and womens dresses. Have we no other
interests?17 We certainly arent supposed to.
[Pause to messin vainwith my hair.] The
harsh treatment of Mary Beard or tennis star
Marion Bartoli by the British media (and the
public), on the grounds of their looks, shows
the high level of hostility directed at women
whose achievements single them out from
the crowd.18 This, after the centuries it took
hopeless at making money, but we sure can spend it!)
This idea of male victimhood is neatly contradicted,
though, when it turns out that Pozdnyshev has mur-
dered his wife. Her days of excessive buying are over.
17 Women have to be kept on their toesworrying,
spending, and consumingto keep late capitalism
afloat. So-called fashion is a way of fashioning wom-
ens psyches into mute, mystified (and impoverished)
acquiescence. In its feverish attempt to undermine
them, fashion exerts daily pressure on women to
throw one set of carefully chosen clothes away in favor
of another, or risk belittlement. Marks and Spencers
2014 Leading Ladies advertising campaign in Brit-
ain displayed well-known, middle-aged women like
actress Emma Thompson and musician Annie Lennox
swanning about distractedly in M & S gear (S & M
gear would be more appropriate, given the submissive
position generally expected of women these days).
Somehow, they all seemed a lot more respectable
before they were roped into dopily modeling these
black-and-white duds. Thus, a vague advance made
by women is twisted into its opposite, on the advice
of commerce. Instead of offering middle-aged women
reason to feel somewhat proud of themselves as people
whove accomplished something (as the ad purported
to do), this M & S campaign implied that whatever
lofty things these high-flying women may have on
their minds, what they really care about is what
theyre wearing. In unambitious obedience to the old
male gaze (a term originally coined by the filmmaker
and critic Laura Mulvey), these public figures become
just more female bodies on which to hang products.
(That word Ladies said it all.)
18BBC sports reporter John Inverdale felt his
estimation of Marion Bartolis feminine allure was
required by the nation when she won Wimbledon
in 2013, saying, Do you think Bartolis dad told her
when she was little, Youre never going to be a looker
The Baffler [no.27] ! 47
Venus in Furs
for women to get the vote!19 This, after people
died to protect abortion rights.20 This, after
(many) governments have finally recognized
the injustice of female circumcision.21 What
. . . so you have to be scrappy and fight? The Boast-
ing Buffoon Club (BBC for short) received seven hun-
dred complaints about Inverdales comments (and
even a reprimand from Maria Miller, then secretary
of state for culture, media, and sport). Inverdale duly
apologized for his obnoxiousnessbut what goods
that? The damage to the mental health and aspira-
tions of women and girls across the country had
already been done. Inverdales message was clear: get
back to your mirrors, ladies, because, however good
you may be at something else, your only real function
in life is to be found attractive by jerks like me. (See
the article by Patrick Sawer and Claire Duffin in
the Telegraph, July 6, 2013.) Inverdale later claimed
that illness had interfered with his judgment. The
last resort of the cornered misogynist is, often,
hypochondria. The MP Michael Fabricant said hed
just been to the dentist in June, 2014, to explain the
following violent tweet about the journalist and
critic Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, presumably issued in a
state of extreme novocaine confusion: I could never
appear on a discussion prog with [Alibhai-Brown.] I
would either end up with a brain hemorrhage or by
punching her in the throat.
19 While American women got suffrage a few years
earlier, British women were fully entitled to vote
(i.e., at age twenty-one) only in 1928, ten years before
Woolfs Three Guineas came out.
20For an example of right-wing efforts to thwart
female freedom, see the report by Susan Saulny and
Monica Davey concerning the murder of Dr. George
Tiller (New York Times, June 2, 2009).
21 Not a single case has been brought to the courts
since specific laws against FGM were introduced
in 1983 and 2002 (Rowena Mason, the Guardian,
March 3, 2014). The West prides itself on its lenience
toward female genitalia, keeping most vulvas largely
intact (apart from those subjected to cosmetic sur-
gery), but a form of virtual female genital mutilation
goes on at American Evangelical purity balls (now
spreading to Europe). These are cheery gatherings at
which girls effectively neuter themselves, if only tem-
porarily. Each girl, dressed all in white, grotesquely
pledges her virginity to her father (in the fathers
capacity as High Priest in the homeIm not kid- 24 Eighty-two percent of the articles published
ding) for safe-keeping, for the sake, they are all led
48 1 The Baffler [no.27]
did all these struggles mean?
Not a goddam thing. The violence contin-
ues, as does the inequality, and the pay gap,22
and the production of a million reactionary
Hollywood movies that fail the Bechdel test.
When we peer up through that glass ceiling
we still see big, dirty mens shoes galumphing
around.23 Even Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of
the London Review of Books, defended the mag-
azines lack of articles by and about women on
the grounds that men make more pitches, and
women have a lot of housework to be getting
on with.24 [Pause to scrub stovetop.]
to believe, of some future husband. Not even kissing
is allowed before marriage. Weirdly borrowing from
abortion lingo, the doting fathers (or High Priests)
claim to be protecting their daughters choice. (See
Katy Winter, the Daily Mail, March 21, 2014.) Any
worship of virginity is a denial of female sexuality
and bad news for women.
22The Equal Pay Act was passed in Britain in 1970,
and yet, recently, a separate European commis-
sion report calculated the pay gap between men and
women at 16.4 percent across the EU, with the UK
still one of the worst offenders despite having nar-
rowed its disparity to 19 percent (Gwyn Topham,
the Guardian, March 2, 2014).
23 Despite the fact that seven women successfully
sued the New York Times in 1974 for sex discrimina-
tion in hiring, pay, and promotion, the paper has
never quite outgrown its male bias. In 2014 the Times
fired its first female executive editor, Jill Abramson,
apparently on the grounds that she was too pushy.
(See Patricia Sullivans triumphant June 8, 2011,
report at womensmediacenter.com on Abramsons
appointment, and Olga Khazans grimmer May 14,
2014, article in The Atlantic on Abramsons dis-
missal.) Coincidentally, Le Monde fired its first female
editor, Natalie Nougayrde, the same week! Female
CEOs, it turns out, are more likely to be fired, and
fired sooner, than male CEOs: studies have shown
that male bosses are generally given more time to set-
tle in (though they hardly need it, since their gender
automatically positions them well), while employers,
colleagues, and junior staff all tend to grow impa-
tient with female bosses more quickly. (See Edward
Helmore, the Observer, May 17, 2014.)
in the LRB since its inception were written by men

(though it did publish Mary Beards lecture on the
silencing of women, mentioned earlier). In Three
Guineas, Woolf warns against any form of gender seg-
regation, citing the enthusiasm Hitler and Mussolini
shared for separating the sexes. Ideally, perhaps, men
should review womens books, and vice versa, as a way
of preventing womens work from being side-stepped
and ghettoized. The LRBs track record seems fairly
progressive, though, compared to the gender ratios
in just about every Saturday newspaper supplement,
in which all women seem able to do is eat noodles
and model clothing, while most of the columnists,
gardening experts, chefs, and other know-it-alls are
men. Women garden too! But the self-aggrandize-
ment of male chefs is particularly irksomewomen
cooked for thousands of years and didnt make a big
fandango about it. (The worst thing about men tak-
K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R
So lets admit it. Weve tried equality and
it doesnt work. Equality within a society con-
cocted by and for fascist dictators? Phooey!
What we needwhat the victims of fas-
cism need, what the victims of war and war
crimes25 need, what the pathetically isolated,
ing over the kitchen is that all the food in fancy res-
taurants now arrives covered in ejaculateall those
genitally boastful drizzles and foams and schmears.)
Just wait until men learn how to make bedsthink
of the prizes, the TV spots, the Olympic bed-making
medals, and CASH theyll hand themselves!
25War and war crimes are actually the same thing;
theres nothing to be gained by distinguishing the
two. The WWI veteran Harry Patch said war is
The Baffler [no.27] ! 49
Venus in Furs
frequently annihilated nuclear family needs,
what neglected, hunted, infected, injected,
vivisected, near-extinct, factory-farmed, in
fact all, animals need, what every living thing
threatened by disease, disrespect, dishearten-
ment, detainment, and pizza, needsis fe-
male supremacy.
We can do this the easy way or the hard
way.26
People apparently had it good for a couple
hundred thousand years: stable matriarchal
societies resulted in a three-hour working
day and plenty of leisure time. Veneration of
women is a natural impulse in mammals with
a high level of cognition, and the results were
colossally beneficial to everyone. Free to think
and move about outdoors without constraint,
women invented agriculture, pottery, weav-
ing, music, metallurgy, medicine, painting,
sculpture, and astronomy. Then men, driven
by fear and envy (of women), and a strong de-
sire for pizza, loused everything up.27 [Pause to
darn cheap sock.] Vengefully appropriating (or
reversing) the progress women had made, men
instituted their anti-nature religions, their
anti-female taboos, their hatred of the body,
their paternalistic approach to medicine, and
all their favorite games of imperialism, rape,
slavery, witch hunts, war, drug cartels, vam-
nothing better than legalized mass murder (The
Last Fighting Tommy, 2008). And the novelist Thomas
Bernhard wrote, War is the poetry of men, by which
they seek to gain attention and relief throughout
their lives. . . . They [flee] from one misery to another,
one misfortune to another, each one deeper and
more inescapable than the last, and they always
[make] sure of taking someone else with them
(Gathering Evidence, 1985).
26 See Valerie Solanass S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967)
for examples of the hard way (S.C.U.M. stands for
Society for Cutting Up Men). But I advocate only
peaceful methods of revolution. Violence is a male
delight, after allto hell with it.
27 See Marija Gimbutass remarkable Language of the
Goddess (1989), on the matriarchal cultures of Old
Europe.
50 1 The Baffler [no.27]
pires, football, darts, and Monopoly. The
Industrial Revolution was no picnic either:
in just a few centuries, men have managed
to ruin the environment for everyone, leav-
ing us with toxic waste, climate havoc, smog,
sweatshops, suicidal workers, tormented pigs
and chickens, foreclosures, destitution, and a
zillion T-shirts that say things. But who gave
men permission to mess this way with the air,
the water, the land, and life itself?
Men are so messy, always wrecking things.
The plan in Glasgow to demolish buildings
in celebration of last years Commonwealth
Games28 was much in tune with the male urge
to desecrate land and sea for fun: mayhem
for mayhems sake. Obliterating beavers so
they can build their own damn dams! Shoot-
ing dead the first gray wolf seen in Iowa for
almost a hundred years, despite its being a
protected species (protected from what
exactly?).29 Denuding the land. Burning fossil
fuel. Men insist on killing everything, and us-
ing up every natural resource.30 Do we really
need cars and planes and air conditioning and
so many throwaway pens you can never find
one when you need one? Does every last thing
28Games organizers planned to kick off Glasgow
2014 in July by blowing up the flats ( Joe McGuire,
Daily Record, April 17, 2014). After a public outcry,
they shelved this idea, but their tastelessness stands,
uneraseable.
29 See the article by Ben Romans in Field & Stream,
May 14, 2014.
30 Warmongering is a male trait (noisily echoed by
the ridiculous male absorption in team sports). As
Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas, Obviously
there is for you some glory, some necessity, some
satisfaction in fighting which [women] have never
felt or enjoyed. Wilfred Owen, she admits, did not
share this penchant. And then theres Harry Patch.
And Thomas Bernhard. And all the men who refused
to fight in the Vietnam War. And the Veterans for
Peace, who declare, We, having dutifully served our
nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to
serve the cause of world peace (veteransforpeace.
org.ukemphasis mine). So, clearly, the taste for war
can be resisted.
 I advocate only peaceful methods of revolution.
Violence is a male delight, after allto hell with it.
9
have to be made out of plastic? Must the world
be so UGLY? Those devilish inventions, TV,
computers, and the Internet, will eventually
destroy us all. And how about the psychotic
male allegiance to nuclear power, waterboard-
ing, fracking, police sirens, reversing-vehicle
beeps, and all the devious lies they tell about
WMDs and government surveillance? Why
should we let George Bush (Sr. and Jr.) and
Tony Blair get away with it? Whyd we let Hit-
ler get away with it? Why should we let Jimmy
Savile and Rolf Harris and Mel Gibson and
Charlie Sheen and Ike Turner get away with it,
or Charles Manson (recently engaged!), Fred
West, Peter Sutcliffe, Thomas Hamilton,
John Worboys, and Adam Lanza? And Ron-
ald Lee Haskell, who executed four children
and their parents in Texas last July, because he
was in a bad mood about something or other.
Not to mention ISIS and Boko Haram. Why
should we let ANY of them get away with it?
We cant. Basta!31 And yes, I know, I know,
women sometimes go along with some of this
stuff.32 But that is no excuse for indulging men
31 I do (sort of ) realize that most men are not
personally responsible for most male atrocities,
nor do women have a monopoly on humanity and
compassionbut thats no reason for men to be let
off the hook here. The endgame we currently face
was inflicted on us by men as a class (Woolfs term),
so men should act en masse to redress the situation:
they have bungled things and should set them aright.
32 Rosemary Goring, literary editor of the Glasgow
Herald, wrote in despair about women crime writers
and their hordes of bloodthirsty female fans. (See the
Herald, May 24, 2014.) This predilection does let the
feminist side down, as it suggests women, too, love
violence and gore. But I think its an ironic bloodlust,
stemming from the self-hatred that inevitably results
from five thousand years of oppression, disenfran-
chisement, mockery, and violence. Its a kind of
further. Never mind what women doit is
time for men to behave like mensches.33
Virginia Woolf talks tentatively in Three
Guineas about the possibility that patriarchy
is based on unconscious sex-taboos, but I
think, if were going to get fancy about it, what
were dealing with is mirage-making. Men are
intoxicated with self-delusion (among their
many forms of intoxication), and, merely by
dint of superior upper-body strength, they
have forced women to engage with all sorts
of surreal male ideas about how life should be
lived, how sports, business, agriculture, and sex
should be conducted, and even how omelettes
should be made! [Word to the wise: very hot pan.]
We are left with a whole lot of Dali paintings,
the theater of the absurd, an extensive and ad-
mittedly inventive literature of alienation, nu-
clear warhead gaps, and cowboy movies. When
do women get to dream? What about allowing
us a few hallucinations too? Like that we look
okay, or that were okay mothers and daugh-
ters, or that we have okay things to say or do
or read or make? Or that were better at om-
elettes. Women need time and peace in which
to develop our own insouciance, our own hob-
bies, our own play, our own (pro-female) phi-
losophies, our own sexuality,34 our own pizza
Stockholm syndrome, and it needs repair work, not
censure. Give women a nurturing environment in
which to recover some self-respect, and they prob-
ably wont savor tales of female torment much longer.
33 A reference to The Apartment (directed by Billy
Wilder, 1960), in which C. C. Baxter is urged by his
doctor neighbor to give up his presumed playboy
lifestyle (that has supposedly led to Fran Kubeliks
suicide attempt) and behave like a mensch . . . a hu-
man being. Baxter takes his advice.
34 To quote Jessica Valenti, Were so accustomed
to a male vision of female sexuality [via porn, pop
The Baffler [no.27] ! 51
Venus in Furs
flavors! [Pause to contemplate handkerchief tree in
Edinburghs Botanical Gardens.]
So heres my new solution, since men
wouldnt play the game and just hand over
their money to women like I told them to.
Once again, its up to women to sort this out,
Im afraid. We shouldnt have to, weve all
worked hard enough already for little recom-
pense, but it looks like well have to exert our-
selves further.35 My advice is for women to go
on strike, on a private, public, local, national,
and international level.36 Women make up
half of the worlds population, and so, united,
we cannot fail to have an effect. And there will
be jolly times later as we begin to enjoy the re-
sults of proving of our worth.
There are three forms of strike I recom-
mend: a housework strike, a labor strike, and
a sex strike. I cant wait (for the first two).
While the ultimate object of all three is fe-
male supremacy, each strike has its own par-
ticular focus: (1) animal rights; (2) nuclear
music and advertisements], its hard to imagine what
authentic and organic female pleasure would look
like (Guardian, May 13, 2014). A woman-centered
society would find out pretty quick. The multiple
orgasm is, after all, one of natures triumphs. Why
waste it?
35 Why not get things off to a merry start by spray-
painting, or knitting, matriarchal corrections for
street names: Hepburn Road, Solanas Street, Woll-
stonecraft Mews, Lorde Boulevard, (Andrea) Dworkin
Avenue, and so on (along the lines of the artist Jacki
Parrys feminized map of Glasgow, Women in the
City [2012], which used the names of real women
who have made contributions to Scottish culture
except that hers was not an act of civil disobedience)?
The patrilineal aspect of such names, though, is
depressing.
36 Barcelona has led the way on this. Last October
22, the city held the underreported Vaga de Totes
feminist general strike, and a bigger one is planned
for 2015. Thats the kind of striking we need now,
globallywhether theyre spontaneous events or care-
fully stage-managed international shindigs like Eve
Enslers One Billion Rising demos (Valentines Day) chickens on a factory farm: his discomfiture is nicely
and the International Day of Peace (September 21).
52 1 The Baffler [no.27]
disarmament; and (3) you guessed it, female
appropriation of wealth, property, and pow-
er.37 These issues are all bound together in a
struggle to preserve nature, civilization, and
the best aspects of human culture. [Pause to
help husband find his man-bag.]
Strike One: Nurture Nature
Attitudes toward animals and the natural
world are closely linked to male attitudes to-
ward women. They spring from the same
anti-nature, anti-life, anti-female assumption
that the world is there to be shaped, ravaged,
and ruined (by men), and that animals can
be exploited, experimented on, and forced
to yield their every atom in service to mens
needs, whims, and financial greed. Ever since
Christianity declared the superiority of hu-
mans over animals,38 and scientists started
up with their loose talk of tool-users and
higher and lower mammals, and philoso-
phers chimed in with their notions of instinct
vs. individuality and creative thinking, animals
have been looked on as a commercial resource
rather than as living beings (though men, too,
can of course be shocked by this narcissistic
approach).39 Prehistoric matriarchal cultures
never conceived of working against nature in
this waythey left it all intact for us to destroy.
So, Strike One is a housework strike, to
protest against the destruction of the envi-
37 Anyone wishing to help organize these protests,
protest against them, or hone the strike-settlement
bargaining requirements, is very welcome to contact
me at odalisquerevolution@gmail.com.
38With all that let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over
the cattle and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creeps on the earth (Genesis
1:26, King James, Cambridge Edition) jazz, and other
maniacal androcentricities. Boy, its men whove
fouled the air!
39 See the scene in Napoleon Dynamite (directed by
Jared Hess, 2004), in which Napoleon is faced with
done.
ronment and the ways in which animals are
misused and misunderstood, from concentra-
tion-camp-style farming40 and zoos to whal-
ing, fishing, 41 and habitat assimilation and
40 According to Philip Lymbery and Isabel
Oakeshotts Farmageddon (2014), factory farming is
not only cruel to animals but dangerous to humans,
too, due to the pollution and superbugs its caused.
We will probably end up with a global flu epidemic
leading to millions of deaths, just so that for a mere
fifty years or so farmers were able to grow meat in
record time. Bird flu, swine flu, and variant CJD were
all generated by intensive farming, a euphemism
for mens incorrigible assault on the natural order
in favor of profits. (Its now accepted that vCJD was
caused by feeding scrapie-infected sheep to cows for
the sake of faster growth.) See the Meat Atlas (Hein-
rich Bll Foundation/Friends of the Earth Europe,
2014), for further evidence of the destructiveness and
cruelty of industrial livestock farming. Farm animal
welfare in the United States is not protected by law:
see the 2015 in-depth expos, by Michael Moss, of
the insanely arrogant and negligent attempts to
retool animals to produce multiple births and ten-
derer meat, carried out by the government-financed
U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, essentially a
state-approved school for sadists (New York Times,
January 19, 2015). And as discussed in Farmageddon,
grain and vegetable growing is beset with screwball
ideas too. Having drained the land of nutrients and
beneficial insect life (in some parts of California, the
soil is now like Styrofoam), farmers have to make up
for the resultant lack of bees, birds, and soil quality
by drenching everything in more pesticides, herbi-
cides, and chemical fertilizers. (See also the food
facts documentary film, Our Daily Bread, directed
by Nikolaus Gehrhalter, 2006.) Bees are now so
overworked, even by bee standardstransported by
car and plane to pollinate cropsthat theyre like
an insect version of the sharecroppers in The Grapes
of Wrath (1939). Rescue bees from slave labor! The
whole way we now interact with nature is fraught
with self-defeating artifice. For the most lucid treat-
ment of the subject, read Rachel Carsons beautifully
vehement Silent Spring (1962).
41 Fishing is now run on an intensive basis too, and
relies on cruelty, collateral death and damage, deple-
tion of stocks, and waste. Whales, dolphins, and
sharks are being caught accidentally in fishing nets,
leading to repeated trauma and often death, even if
attempts are made to free them. Seals are mutilated
destruction. To demand a stop to all this, for
the sake not just of the natural world, but of
human civilization too (which depends on the
preservation of a habitable planet), women
should withhold their home- and family-ori-
ented labor: stop mothering, 42 stop daughter-
ing, stop wifeing. Stop cooking, stop cleaning,
stop taking out the trash, stop making the
beds and ordering the pizzas, stop shopping,
stop lugging home bottles of booze for men to
glug, stop gardening, stop ironing, stop wash-
ing your hair, stop putting on makeup (in fact
stop the whole beauty cult).43 Stop vacuuming
in the rudders of boats. Carl Zimmer recently re-
ported that, as a result of climate change, pollution,
and acidification, the oceans are on track for mass
extinctions this century. (See the New York Times,
January 15, 2015.) What is wrong with us? Are we all
too busy getting laid to get MAD?
42But this strike is not meant as an attack on
motherhood. (We can leave that game to men!)
Carry on shielding your children from danger and
providing them with food, clothing, and shelter.
Take them to school and help them with their
homework. Life, health, education, and freedom of
movement are all fundamental principles that need
protection. Denigrating mothers is the oldest trick
in the book, and a great way of repressing women.
It is very important, for patriarchy, to downgrade
womens major role in procreation and parenting
starting with patrilineal naming. (What an idea that
was!) Childcare, maternity services, family planning,
schools, and parental access arrangements (after
divorce) are all areas in which womens power is
diminished, cuts are threatened or enacted, and the
gender battle is waged. Laura Mulveys film Riddles
of the Sphinx (1977) movingly pinpoints the political
implications of childcare provision. If you mess with
motherhood, you are attacking women. Its matrism
(a term coined by me): discrimination against moth-
ers. When women have all the power and the money,
maternal matters will be better handled.
43We are now OBSESSED with looks in the West.
Sure, some people are attractive. So what?! Why
is that big news? Why so endlessly enthralling (to
some)? The meager delights we may find in notic-
ing beauty come at the cost of so much misery: the
deceitful and mercenary diet industry, the plastic
surgery industry, anorexia, bulimia, OCD, suicide,
The Baffler [no.27] ! 53
Venus in Furs
and sterilizing the cat litter tray and alpha-
betizing the books and paying the bills; stop
making all those pots of tea and coffee and
smelling the milk to see if its gone bad. Stop
doing all the things you do to try to make a
nice home for your family. This wont be easy
for most women to carry out, since women
originally created the home: they needed to
establish domestic tranquility, comfort, and
security in order to raise children. Women
invented coziness.44 [Pause to buy artichokes at
neighborhood grocery.] But you can put it all on
hold for a little while, in aid of animals and
the natural world, cant you? And what a lot of
thinking time youll gain.
DESTRUCTION OF NATURE IS AN
ATTACK ON WOMEN. The strike will be
called off only when governments agree to end
animal cruelty, factory farming, the intensive
use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fer-
tilizers, chemical pollution, CO2 emissions,
marsh-draining, rainforest encroachment, and
all their other dopey, criminal, and crazy ideas
(such as filling the world with nanoparticles).
ankle injuries from tumbling over in high heels, mel-
anomas from tanning salons, and all that unaesthetic
Lycra gear worn by joggers. Im so corrupted myself
by all this beauty nonsense that I now have body
dysmorphia about other peoples bodies: I see only the
bits that trouble me. Its distracting and depressing,
and all so unnecessary: there is no need to consider
or discuss peoples appearances all the time. Its rude.
Supreme beauty is actually so rare that it should be
regarded as an oddity, perhaps to be pitied. I hereby
call for a one-year moratorium, starting from the date
of publication of this essay in The Baffler, on any
mention of peoples appearances. We can chat about
other topics for a change instead. The beauteous
would survive a slight lessening of acclaim, and the
rest of us could relax. After a year of such abstinence
I expect we will find ourselves cured of the fixation,
and much better conversationalists.
44For further elucidation of coziness, see Mimi,
pp. 24, 3233, 37, 64, 66, 72, 82, 171, 194, 195, 198199,
207, 223, 226, 230231, 234, 273, 294, xii, xiii. (Cour-
tesy of the 2014 Mimi index kindly compiled by the
writer and translator Suzy Romer.)
54 1 The Baffler [no.27]
The money saved from these enterprises is to
be spent on childcare provisions. Six-pack plas-
tic rings in which turtles get tangled are also
to be banned (men will just have to carry their
beers some other way). And every man must
make a contribution of 10 percent of his after-
tax income to Compassion in World Farm-
ing, the World Wildlife Fund, or Greenpeace,
must agree to clean the toilet weekly without
being asked, and must from now on confine
the foaming, the schmearing, the drizzling,
and the fracking to the boudoir.
Strike Two: No More War Work
Forget all the romanticized notions of wom-
ens contributions to war efforts that weve
been asked to stomach lately in celebration
of World War Iall those TV shows about
selfless, bitchy, or homicidal WWI nurses, as
well as all the photographs of women slaving
away in munitions factories. War is no place
for women. It wasnt womens idea (war was
invented by Bronze Age patriarchal societies,
following the invention of superior weaponry),
and its not in womens interests: war promotes
and entertains men, but it severely curtails
womens freedoms. It is designed to subdue
women and deprive them of what they need.
Women, therefore, shouldnt have to help with
this.45 They shouldnt have to proudly or tear-
fully or bravely welcome home the dead. They
shouldnt have to provide the world with young
men and women to be killed, raped, tortured,
maddened. War devalues the power of giving
birth. That is its primary purpose. War serves
as a means of rejecting and destroying women.
Strike Two, a peace strike, involves with-
holding womens labor in the workforce.46
45 Marching doesnt suit women either: female
soldiers have been injured by standardized march-
ing requirements oriented to the length of the male
leg. For further glimpses into the world of military
marching, including a chicken whos pretty good at
it, see marchright.com.
46Of the three strikes I propose, a labor strike

should be the easiest to pull offafter all, who wants
to WORK? If womens value to the labor force must
be proven in such an elementary way, lets get started.
Even a strike of one day by all women everywhere
would bring things to a complete standstill. (While
demonstrating, we can sing Union Maid by Woody
Guthrie, which speaks of the almost bygone days
when workers were defended by unions.) Employ-
ers would soon have to come to the table (a nice
domestic phrase) and meet our terms. And think of
the delicious sensation meanwhile of a day/week/
month/year off! Why should women (or bees) partici-
pate in the Protestant work ethic devised by men?
Overwork silences dissent and original thought and
destroys physical, emotional, and community health.
WoHeLo, short for Work-Health-Love, the motto
(and greeting!) of the Campfire Girls, may be more
K AT H E R I N E S T R E E T E R
[Pause to check net for poorly paid part-time jobs.]
The intention behind it is to organize not
just against war, but also against the threats
to all life on earth posed by nuclear energy
and nuclear bombs, and against the suffering
they have caused and will continue to cause.47
legitimate than the exhortation to eat-pray-love,
but it makes no real sense, because work is anathema
to health and love. Women have already worked hard
enough in the most menial jobs for centuries anyway.
Its time they took things easy. This is why the Odal-
isque Revolution will entail much relaxation in cozy
surroundings, and the wearing of harem pants.
47 See Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946). No less dev-
astatingly, Stanley Kubricks film Dr Strangelove (1964)
The Baffler [no.27] ! 55
Venus in Furs
Men insist that these forces are manageable
and economically necessary. They are not.
We dont need them, we cant handle them,
and we cant afford them. Some of the guys
involved in creating the atom bomb have had
the grace to apologize, but such apologies are
of no value. Who in hell cares about Robert
Oppenheimers conscience, one of the tiniest
things in the universe? Nuclear bombs should
never have been invented. Women could have
told men this, and probably did, but war is a
convenient excuse to override what women
have to say.48 It has always served as a means
of suppressing womenthrough rape, trauma,
injury, exile, poverty, deracination, disease,
starvation, bereavement, sexual frustration,
voicelessness, grief, and male punditry. In the
twentieth century, warfare was redirected
specifically toward the obliteration of women
and children.49 Whatever noble motives mili-
tarists may claim for themselves, if women are
the main victims of war, warfare is just anoth-
er outlet for misogyny.
One aim of the strike is to ensure that any-
one who feels his or her life has been blighted
offers a clever, artistic, and horrifying take on nuclear
bomb folly. In one scene, U.S. forces fight each other,
beneath a billboard asserting the official ethos of the
Strategic Air Command: PEACE IS OUR PROFES-
SION. Peace is the favorite word of hypocrites.
48 See the documentary film If You Love This Planet
(directed by Terre Nash, 1982), in which the great
antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott challenges
the official (male) acceptance of nuclear energy and
weaponry.
49 Sven Lindqvists A History of Bombing (1999)
charts mens love of the bomb and adoption of civil-
ians as its primary targets. Drone strikes are one of
the latest variations on this sport. And now we have
Boko Harams massacre of two thousand civilians in
Baga, Nigeria, in January 2015, as well as their new
use of girls as suicide bombers and their abduction of
hundreds of schoolgirls last year, to be raped, mar-
ried by force, and sold as slaves. (See the article by
Abdulwahab Abdulah and Uduma Kalu in the Van-
guard, Nigeria, May 5, 2014.) More than two hundred
of those girls are still missing.
56 1 The Baffler [no.27]
by war in any way gets a years paid vacation, in
order to reflect and recuperate. (People provid-
ing essential services, by the way, such as farm-
ing and medical care, will have to take turns
having a year off.) This traumatized bunch will
inevitably include all military personnel and
their families, and anyone who has paid taxes,
since successive Western governments have
put a vast proportion of tax revenues into so-
called defensei.e., into grand-scale, institu-
tionalized aggression. [Pause to sort receipts for
tax purposes.] Even after a million or so people
protested across Britain against the Iraq War,
Tony Blair went ahead with it. He and all war-
mongers must be tried by the Russell Inter-
national War Crimes Tribunal, and the only
legitimate military outfit from now on will be
the United Nations peace force.
It is also essential to end non-military uses
of nuclear energy. When exploiting atomic en-
ergy for supposedly peaceful purposes in the
nuclear power industry, men are prepared to
take such incredible risks with our lives and
the lives of all future entities on earth that this
alone is proof that they are unfit, as a sex, to
rule. Nuclear waste and nuclear disaster mess
cannot be adequately containedthe means
of doing so have not yet been found and may
never be.50 The ease, also, with which crimi-
50 Were depending on men to safely dispose of nu-
clear waste? What, are we CRAZY? These are peo-
ple who use every pot in the house to cook anything
and then leave them all lying around the kitchen
after. They dont cover anything when they put it in
the fridge, as short-order cook Harriet disgustedly
remarks in Sleepless in Seattle (directed by Nora Eph-
ron, 1993). Thus, Hot Particles and bucky balls
(?) from the meltdown at Fukushima will now drift
around the planet to the end of time. The Fukushima
plant can no longer contain its contaminated water,
so the facilitys officials pour it into the sea. Tuna on
the west coast of America have significantly higher
levels of radioactive contamination than ever before.
(See fukushimupdate.com, April 5, 20, and 30, 2014.)
For the latest thinking on containment strategies
for nuclear wastestrategies that probably wont
worksee the devastating documentary film about
 Of the three strikes I propose, a labor strike should be
the easiest to pull offafter all, who wants to WORK?
9
nals could sneak into nuclear power stations
at any moment and make off with plutonium
is never mentioned by politicians when theyre
foisting another bunch of reactors on us, bom-
bastically claiming that nuclear energy is safe,
efficient, and cheap. Its only cheap if life is.
BOMBS, DRONES, WAR, NUCLEAR
WAR, AND NUCLEAR REACTORS ARE
ALL ATTACKS ON WOMEN. This strike
will end only when men hand in all their guns
and quit their jobs in the military sector (fe-
male soldiers can remain, if they must, but only
to work for the United Nations peace force),
and when governments agree to an immediate
end to all peaceful and military uses of nuclear
power. Men must contribute means-tested
contributions (10 percent of annual income
after tax) to Womens Action for New Di-
rections (WAND), Campaign Against Arms
Trade (CAAT), Global Zero, Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth, The Ribbon Interna-
tional, or the World Disarmament Campaign.
Strike Three: Money for Sex
As Woolf points out in Three Guineas, women
have labored in the home unpaid for thousands
of years, watching all the family money go to
mens education, mens leisure pursuits, mens
beer, mens cigars, and pizzas.51 This money
must now be reallocated to women, and until
that is done, heterosexual women should with-
Finlands radioactive waste repository, Into Eternity
(directed by Michael Madsen, 2010). But no level of
radiation is safe.
51 The daughters of educated men received an
unpaid-for education at the hands of poverty,
chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties
. . . an unpaid-for education . . . that fitted them . . . for
the unpaid-for professions (Virginia Woolf, Three
Guineas).
hold themselves sexually from men.52 Men go
on sex strike all the time, to keep women doc-
ilenow its our turn! Women mustnt be vin-
dictive, though. The pure-minded aim of our
sex strike is merely to gain the assets and privi-
leges to which women are entitled: Im talking
about THE MONEY. Since men wouldnt give
up their dough voluntarily, they must be forced
to hand it over in return for sex. Theyre always
accusing us of being sluts anyway, so this is a
simple equation they should be able to grasp:
no money, no sex.53
This type of sexual blackmail has similari-
ties with the fictional sex strike employed by
Aristophaness Lysistrata.54 In an effort to
bring the Peloponnesian War to an end, Ly-
sistrata enlists the help of enemy women, on
the grounds that war is bad for all women, and
it works! They hole up in the Acropolis togeth-
er, and its quite a successful sit-in, until some
of the sexually frustrated participants start
trying to tiptoe off, on the feeblest pretexts:
the moths will be eating my sheepskin, or I
turn out to be pregnant and have to go home
to have the babybe back tomorrow, or the
owls [fellow inhabitants of the Acropolis] are
keeping me up at night. (I paraphrase.) But in
the end, the plan works like a charm: the pri-
apic men-folk quickly agree to a peace deal, so
52 It will be important to enlist the support of prosti-
tutes in this endeavor, since men (currently) have the
means to buy their way out of sexual abstinence.
53Women who have sex with women need not par-
ticipate in the sex strike. Its purpose is male sexual
privation, not female. Gay sex in both genders will
either be unaffected by the strike, or enjoy a surge in
popularity.
54 Lysistrata, by Aristophanes (411 BCE)see
Lysistrata and Other Plays (translated by Alan H. Som-
merstein, 2002).
The Baffler [no.27] ! 57
Venus in Furs
that they can rush the women off to bed.
Even with the availability of porn mags and
sex slaves, a sex strike still seems an excellent
ploy in the twenty-first century.55 [Pause to put
on lipstick.] Its not a bad method of confront-
ing men about their increasing disregard for
female sexuality either. For greater effect, we
might usefully employ the show-stopping pow-
er of vaginal display.56 Such a strike would of
course have to be carefully policed because of
male dependence on violence as a form of com-
ment and coercionnot everyone is as sane and
easy-going as Aristophaness male characters.
Now, no shirking, sisters. No lame ex-
cuses and secret assignations!57 Remember,
there will be plenty of sex, and sex maybe of
a higher quality, once men have recognized
their responsibilities. [Pause to push through
hordes of mamas and babies in caf.] We might
hope for some collateral fall in the population
too, while were at it. Over-population is one
55Its worked in Colombia (2006/2011), Liberia
(2003), Naples (2008), Ukraine (2010), the Philip-
pines (2011), Belgium (2011), and Togo (2012), and was
used as a form of protest against the Russian pres-
ence in Ukraine (2014).
56 The vulvas mythic significance as the basis and
origin of all human life makes vaginal display the
perfect antidote to death-lust. In ancient history,
women resorted to vaginal display as a fertility
rite and as a form of antiwar protest. According to
Catherine Blackledge, in Greek mythology women
used this method to quell Bellerophon, who was
threatening to flood the Xanthian plain. And mak-
ing derogatory remarks about female genitalia is
punishable by vaginal display en masse . . . in [parts
of] Africa (The Story of V ). Sheela-na-gigs, exagger-
ated Mediaeval depictions in stone of women pulling
their vulvas wide open (a remnant of prehistoric
mother-goddess cult symbols), which were added
to buildings to ward off evil or to promote fertility,
remain one of the few public acknowledgments of
female sexuality in the West. Similarly, Ukrainian
feminist FEMEN activists use nudity to shame men,
and have recently moved from going topless to going
bottomless as well.
57 Of the heterosexual variety, that is.
58 1 The Baffler [no.27]
of the biggest threats to peace, climate stabili-
zation, the natural world, and getting close to
paintings in museums. Its essential that we all
stop multiplying. Forget in vitro fertilization!
Forget the expense and tedium and thankless-
ness of parenthood itself. With a moratorium
on childbirth for a year, just to start with, we
might see women adopting a new identity
based on the freedom, leisure, and originality
of childlessness.58
POVERTY IS AN ATTACK ON WOM-
EN. The sex strike will be called off only once
men have transferred over half of their finan-
cial assets (on a permanent basis) to one or
more women of their choice or contributed
the same to a womens charity or nonprofit
banking organization formed to issue women
loans, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangla-
desh. Governments must make all violence a
crime, tax men twice as much as women, and
earmark the resulting revenues for the en-
hancement of womens lives. Men must spend
at least one day a week listening to, or read-
ing, what women have to say. And children
must study prehistory in order to get an un-
derstanding of the matriarchal cultures that
predated patriarchy. So as to reinstate mens
natural duty to serve female pleasure, biology
courses in school will revise our approach to
sex, with particular emphasis on the female
orgasm. Men might as well sign my Mea Culpa
Declaration, too.59 And I wish theyd smile
58 While not wishing to devalue motherhood in
any way, I dont think women have fully explored
the advantages of contraception yet. Arent we all a
little tired of registering every advance in diaper and
stroller technology? No one dares mention popula-
tion control for fear of sounding pro-eugenics, and
anti-growth. But just cutting off the governments
supply of cannon fodder seems reason enough
to remain childless (a motive mentioned in two
womens letters to the Telegraph in 1937, quoted by
Woolf in Three Guineas). The missing tax revenue and
pension contributions could be supplied by allowing
free movement of immigrants. (See noborder.org.)
59 I, the undersigned, confess to having, conscious-
moremens default facial expressions are far [Pause to caress husbands cheek.]61
too gruff. They frighten me.60 If all else fails, we can always mobilize a
pizza strike. Thats got to work.
ly or not, overtly or not, been part of a worldwide Would we settle for less, to end our strikes?
conspiracy that has constrained womens lives But we have, for thousands of years, and it
through centuries of violence, repression, distress, pains me that Virginia Woolf had to settle for
and discouragement. I recognize that this treatment
less.t
of women has been a ploy in a power gamethe result
of male cowardice, stupidity, perversity, and corrup-
tionand that the status of men has been artificially women were smiling and trying to be genial. This
exalted by it. I acknowledge that vast numbers of wasnt because the men were having a lousy time (the
women have been unfairly treated throughout the Guinness was flowing freely); theyre just LAZY.
period of male rule. I therefore apologize for any (What would Joyce have made of it?!) Men should
tyrannical behavior of my own, and that of other realize how threatening the male scowl is. Just as
men, and pledge to do my utmost to prevent such they must learn not to walk menacingly down a dark
injuries, insults, and injustices from occurring ever street behind a lone woman, or interrupt women,
again. I apologize for stubborn male resistance over or scold women for interrupting them, or complain
the centuries to womens ideas, thoughts, decisions, about everything women do, they should adjust their
and remarksin the home, at work, in business, in facial expressions into more frequent displays of be-
the arts, in education, and in government. In light of neficence. Its not fair that women do all the giggling
this loss of female input over centuries, I now agree and buttering-up, forever trying to make people feel
to abide by the decisions women make, without comfortable. Why should we, after what weve been
resorting to mindless criticisms or meaningless reflex through? Its MEN who make everybody uncomfort-
contradictions and derision, no matter how wacko or able, and men who should make more of an effort
whimsical the ideas expressed by women may seem to be convivial. Sheesh, do we have to explain every
to me to be. I renounce male power and privilege, on little thing?
the grounds that they were unsportingly won. I wish
to relinquish all remaining economic, social, and 61 Husband remarks encouragingly that, when the
political advantages I may have obtained, either as aims of all three strikes have been realized, capital-
a mere consequence of being male, or because of my ism will be finished.
active participation (now regretted) in misogynist
acts of terror, either overt or underground. In aid
of this, I have transferred and/or will transfer, and
will continue to transfer, my financial resources to
a woman or women, no strings attached. By such
means, I hope to foster a more humane environ-
ment, in which women are less likely to be mistreated
and maligned. It is my hope that the hand-over of
power and property to women will ultimately lead
to a transformation of society, benefiting people,
animals, and the natural world, as well as ensuring a
future for human culture, and the preservation and
continuation of artistic endeavors. I believe in the
pleasure principle, and therefore renounce the male
work ethic as an indecency imposed by men who
wished to profit from enslavement and subjugation. I
hereby attest the inalienable right of all creatures to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (See Mimi
for further details on stuff men ought to do.)
60 At a small Bloomsday celebration at the Irish
consulate in Edinburgh last June, I noticed that all
the men were standing around scowling, while the HALLIE BATEMAN

The Baffler [no.27] ! 59

wS T O R Y
Gustus Dei
3 Monica Byrne
T he convent sat on a waterless plain.
Sister Theresa rested on a bench at the edge
of the convent garden. She looked up at
the clouds. She imagined them thickening,
curdling, manifesting. Manna would drop
slowly and drift to the ground like snow-
flakes. She and her sisters would gather them
up in the folds of their skirts and place them
into their mouths and then feed them to
each other.
She saw Father Dykstra lurch into view.
He was coming up the rise from his cot-
tage, kicking up dust from the dry earth. In
response, Sister Joan, the garden mistress,
roused herself from the cabbage bed.
Having seen her, Father Dykstra halted.
He waited, head down, his mouth pursing
and unpursing. He was small and wiry, with
a red leather face. His hands were clasped
behind his back. One held the other at the
wrist, and the free hand flapped like an in-
jured bird wing.
Sister Joan stopped a stones throw away
from him. She had a face like a benthic fish,
with a boxy jaw and beady eyes. She looked
beyond him. The nun and priest were like
two crows, perched askance, biding time.
They had a ritual.
Winds from the west!
Yep, squash is late.
Silence followed. Sister Theresa watched
them from the corner of her eye. The two still
gazed past each other, like tango partners
removed.
Hear about them Indians? he said.
Cant say I did.
We gotta keep em out S ister Theresa came to stand in the door-
Do we.
keep our eyes peeled.
60 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Father Dykstra was paranoid about the In-
dians. He was a grandson of westward-bound
pioneers, a child of ambushes. Sister Theresa
had once been in his cottage and seen maps
all over his desk: Wyoming, North Dakota,
Minnesota. Indian territories were marked
up in red.
Be an early winter!
Dont I know it.
Father Dykstra seemed satisfied by this
last exchange. Sister Joan lingered a moment
longer for his sake, looking hard out over
the plains, as if spotting for gophers. Then
she turned around. Sister Theresa looked
away, trying to be unseen, to melt into the
dust.
But Sister Joan had caught sight of her.
In a few steps, her shadow lay across Sister
Theresas lap.
Dont feel like workin!
It was a statement, with a tinge of sympa-
thy Sister Theresa did not expect.
No, she said softly. She didnt look up. I
feel a little tired.
Mmmm. Sister Joan looked up at the sky,
heavy as a blanket. Been feelin tired a lot
lately, havent you.
Sister Theresa said nothing. Her hands lay
limp in her lap.
Why dont you go see Mother, eh?
Sister Theresa nodded. Yes, Sister Joan.
She swung quickly off the bench and marched
towards the convent, head down.
Sister Joan watched her go, fists balled on
her hips. Then she turned back to her work.
way of Mother Annes study. The abbess
seemed startled, but then cleared her throat,

fussed for her glasses, and folded her hands
neatly.
Yes, child, hello.
Sister Theresa looked at the floor.
What brings you to my office, child?
Sister Joan told me to come here.
Instead of working in the garden?
I felt tired, Mother.
Oh. Tired again. Mother Anne sighed.
Come sit down, child. What kind of malaise
is this?
Sister Theresa sat down. She said noth-
ing, even though she could feel Mother Anne
waiting.
I have noticed, Mother Anne continued,
that you have not taken Communion for
several weeks now.
Sister Theresa swallowed and studied
the crucifix on the wall. It was a gift from
the founding home of their order in France.
HAZEL LEE SANTINO
The wounds gleamed with tiny bloodstones,
beaded along the cuts.
You do understand that Communion is
essential to our community? That God is the
bread of life, and to share it means Mother
Anne took a breath. You do understand,
daughter?
Sister Theresa nodded into her lap. I
understand, but
Mother Anne nodded, urging her to con-
tinue.
The last time I took Communion, the
wafer tasted like . . . nothing. Like dust. Its
supposed to be some kind of transcendent
experience, but its not, for me. It hasnt ever
been. I know it should be and I dont know
what Im doing wrong.
Mother Anne looked at her in surprise. I
dont know how you think its supposed to
taste, she said. Its just wheat. It is pure so
The Baffler [no.27] ! 61
w
that it can be a vessel for God.
Sister Theresas shoulders slumped. I
dont understand why the vessel has to be so
bland if its God, she said. God created the
universe! He must like colors and flavors.
And its not just that. Everything is the same
here every day. I miss home . . . at dinnertime,
when Mama would make c-c-custard Her
voice became thick and she stopped speak-
ing. Tears ran down her face.
Mother Anne leaned forward, her voice
trembling both with compassion and zeal.
But Daughter, that is how life is supposed to
be here: pure! uncorrupted! We live in purity
because God is purebecause thats how we
can come to know him.
Sister Theresa only heaved and hic-
coughed.
Mother Anne leaned back in her chair.
There was a girl I knew here, long before
your time, she said. She came to Our Savior
of the Plains when she was only sixteen. Not
much younger than you are now, child. I liked
her very much. But she was very restless.
Sister Theresa looked up, finally meeting
Mother Annes eyes.
She thought life here was so dull. Noth-
ing could please her. She wanted a convent in
the city. In Sioux Falls, or even St. Paul. She
would say, oh, Im going to do this and Im
going to do that. She even ran away once.
Sister Theresas eyebrows rose. She what?
What happened?
Well, after two days on these plains, with
no food, she came back. And, shed had a vi-
sion.
What vision?
Bright yellow sunlight broke through the
clouds and sprayed through the windows,
lighting every dust mote.
Jesus. In the flesh. He told her to come
back to the convent.
Sister Theresas eyes went wide.
Thats it? And she came back?
She did. You can ask her about it, too.
62 1 The Baffler [no.27]
I can?
Of course. She is our beloved Sister Gen-
evieve.
It was late afternoon, a little before sup-
pertime. Sister Theresa walked through the
living quarters. The last room belonged to
Sister Genevieve, and faced west. Zinnia-red
sunlight poured through her open door.
Sister Theresa knocked on the doorframe.
Sister Genevieve looked up from her
kneeler, a rosary dripping from her hand.
Im sorry, said Sister Theresa. Ill come
back another time.
Oh no! Little Sister Theresa! Sister
Genevieves face had cracked into an ecstatic
smile. Come in, child.
Sister Genevieve coaxed Sister Theresa
from the doorframe to a small table by the
window, which had two seats, one for her and
one for a visitor. In her very old age, Sister
Genevieve bent to the right like a stalk of
willow. It suited her; she had a great capac-
ity for pleasure, and her body seemed to be
always in mid-swoon. She bent in pleasure to
sip hot soup, to welcome a visitor, to see an
autumn bouquet at the altar. In the face of
such sweetness, Sister Theresa always felt shy,
even embarrassed around her.
I was just praying for you, said Sister
Genevieve, winking.
For me? said Sister Theresa.
Yes, child, said Sister Genevieve, fussing
in a drawer of her bedside table. I always
think of you. I think how hard it must be, be-
ing so young! And youre so pretty! And all of
us are such old birds. Out here on the plains
like a bunch of Jane-the-Baptists. Were used
to it. But you have such soft hands!
Sister Theresa blushed, and put her hands
away, smiling.
Sister Genevieve straightened up. She had
an apple-red ceramic jar in one hand, and
two spoons in the other. Sister Theresa knew
what it was. More than anything, Sister Gen-
 Manna would drop
slowly and drift
to the ground.
9 glad youre here, said Sister Genevieve. As
evieve loved honey, and loved to share it.
She sat down and lifted the cover. Now
come, take this spoon, child. This is from a
harvest early last spring. Its reddish, see? See
that red color? Thats because of the Indian
paintbrush growing wild on those hills in the
north. Theyre everywhere. told me that when you were my age, you want-
Sister Theresa dipped into the jar, and
drew up a spoonful of honey. Her other hand
came out to cup the air beneath it as she
leaned forward to guide the spoon into her
mouth.
Sister Genevieve watched her, eagerly ask-
ing, Isnt that good?
Sister Theresa closed her eyes, now, and
tasted the honey. It was sweet beyond hope.
She tasted longer, rolling the honey in her
mouth. Her whole mind was wrapped in it.
She felt suspended in midair. In her mind
came a vision of the South Dakota sky, wide
and cloudless: here in this honey was the
wind, the sun, the earth. She could even
taste the particular redness of the Indian
paintbrush: the flower, the petal, the pollen.
Warmth flooded her skin, filled her stomach,
and sank to her toes. Her heart was beating
faster. When she opened her eyes at last, she
did not see the same world as when she had
closed them.
Yes, she said in answer.
Sister Genevieves face relaxed into a
smile. Sister Marie gave it to me as a gift
from the hives, because we had too much.
How could we use all this honey? she said.
And I said, Well, Sister Marie! I can put it to
use for sure. For sure!
Sister Theresa smiled, mostly to herself.
Many of the sisters knew that Sister Gen-
evieve loved honey, so they made any excuse
to supply it to her.
Sister Genevieve put a hand on hers. Her
fingers were long and thin, and translucent
skin coated a lattice of blue veins. I am so
soon as I saw you, I thought, Now that girl.
That girl is a warrior for the Lord!
Sister Theresa laughed out loud. What?
she said.
You remind me of myself at your age,
child, said Sister Genevieve, suddenly grave.
Yes, said Sister Theresa. Mother Anne
ed to leave.
Sister Genevieve nodded.
Did you really see Our Lord?
Clear as day, said Sister Genevieve. Clear
as day. Id been lost. I was so cold and hungry.
I was walking over a little rise when, there he
was, sitting on a branch of a lone sweet gum
tree. Little sister, he had on a beautiful scarlet
robe, the brightest red youve ever seen, with
every other kind of color in it. Oh, I wish you
could have seen it! And he said, Dear heart,
where are you going? And I said, My Lord,
I wanted to get out of that place and get out
into the world. But Ive gotten lost. He said,
What will you find out in the world? I felt a
little silly, but I said, Lord, I want to stop all
this purity nonsense; what is so bad about rich
things? or wearing ribbons in my hair, or city
lights? He said, Every valley shall be filled
in, every mountain and hill shall be made
low; the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley. Of course
I knew that was straight from the Book of
Isaiah, but I didnt know what he meant. I was
feeling impatient, so I said, What on earth
do you mean? Then his face collapsed a little,
like he wanted so badly to explain something
to me, but couldnt. Then he said . . . Sister
Genevieve seemed to lose her train of
thought, and stared out the window towards
the setting sun.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 63
w
Sister Theresa searched her face. He said
what?
Sister Genevieve was silent for so long that
Sister Theresa thought she hadnt heard her.
Then she pulled her gaze away from the sun,
and looked Sister Theresa directly in the eyes.
He said, Everything is corrupted, always. as possible. She says this work will help me
She said it with a laugh in her voice, as if she
were telling a joke she didnt understand.
Sister Theresa frowned. What a terrible
thing, she said. What do you suppose he
meant?
I dont know, child. Ive asked him again
and again in prayer but I never seem to get
anywhere.
Maybe he means that the world is corrupt
and we have to be pure. Thats what Mother
Anne says?
Sister Genevieve smiled and swirled her
spoon in the honey jar. Perhaps, child.
Sister Theresa ascended the wooden steps
into the confessional and sat down. She heard
Father Dykstra clear his throat on the other
side of the partition.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It
has been seven days since my last confession.
Mmm.
Sister Theresa could picture him leaning
towards the screen, straining his old ears. She
tried to clear the image from her mind: across
the screen was not a dark confessional, but a
royal hearing room. God was a king, a majes-
tic copper-skinned man with a flowing white
beard. His brow was decked with rubies. He
leaned forward from his throne and his eyes
sparkled, inviting her to speak.
Father, I have not been joyful of late. I
have been sitting out my work in the garden.
She swallowed. This hurts the commu-
nity. nuns were there. They kneaded dough with
Mmm. An acknowledgment.
Also, I stopped taking Communion. It
tasted wrong. Im sorry.
There was a silence. She heard Father
64 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Dykstras feet scrape the floor.
I talked to Mother Anne, and she recom-
mended that I come confess myself. And also
that I begin working in the kitchen, not just
to help with the meals, but to make the wa-
fers for Communion. To make them as pure
understand the need for purity in our lives.
There was another silence. She was about
to launch into the final prayer when Father
Dykstra spoke.
Dont keep it in your mouth.
Sister Theresa made a face, then was grate-
ful for the darkness. Pardon?
Communion.
Oh?
Dont want to spoil it.
It . . . spoils it if you keep it in your
mouth?
Got to swallow right away. Dont taste it.
Dont chew it.
Thats what Ive been taught. But . . . why?
Gets corrupted.
Sister Theresa wished she had Sister Joans
patience. Why does it get corrupted?
Father Dykstra heaved a long sigh, stirring
in his seat. God is God. Youre human. Keep
Gods flesh on your tongue and God will leave
you.
Oh! Sister Theresa had finally gotten
more than a few words, but felt no less con-
fused. I wont, then. Thank you, Father.
Mmph. He was finished.
She said her final prayer. Father Dykstra
muttered an absolution. She stepped back
into the echoing silence of the sanctuary.
Sister Theresa opened the door to the
kitchen. She smelled earthy potato, tangy
onion, and the pale odor of milk. Two other
muscular hands and grabbed handfuls of
flour that hung like incense, cascading down
the air. Sister Theresa unhooked an apron
from the brass hanger on the wall, and pulled
 Her body seemed to be
always in mid-swoon.
9 jar off the shelf and spooned in the rich red
it on hurriedly, like a little girl pulling on a
new Sunday dress.
At dinner tonight, Sister Genevieve had
said to the table, rather loudly, that Sister
Theresa had a gift. At this, Sister Theresa
swallowed and looked to Mother Anne. Nuns
were not supposed to be special or, even if
they were, be recognized for it. Nevertheless,
she was happy in her new work.
One night, she served the potato soup
with starbursts of dill. Another night, she
made chicken legs in a white wine sauce. And
tonight, the bread had arrived with a modest
strawberry compote, for dipping. Sister The-
resa had watched the sisters out of the corner
of her eye. Sister Genevieve drew attention
to the compote, nudging the nun next to her
to recruit her into her sense of admiration.
Mother Anne acknowledged it with a small
smile, but did not comment on it. Sister Joan
stuck her finger in it first. Father Dykstra just
stared at it.
After dinner, Sister Theresa cleared the
table, and began work on the Communion
wafers. They had to be baked fresh every
night. The ingredients were simple, but the
process was laborious. She had to ensure
purity. It was her daily devotion.
She ground the flour and salt three times,
picking through for foreign particles. She
carried up fresh cold water from the well. She
dropped tiny dollops onto a tray and marked
each of them with a cross, using a small knife
she sharpened every night, and saved only for
this purpose. The oven door swallowed them
up in the final purification of heat. She imag-
ined them puffing up, their crosses deepening.
One night, when the wafers had been
made and put away, Sister Theresa stood
surveying the kitchen. She was alone. Near
the tables edge, there was a bowl of leftover
strawberry compote. Her mouth watered at
the memory of its taste. She pulled a small
sauce. She could keep it in her room for a
special treat, just like Sister Genevieve kept
honey. Tucking it under the folds of her
cloak, she then damped the lamp and left the
kitchen in darkness.
E very morning, Father Dykstra celebrated
Mass for the nuns. The little community only
took up two rows of the old stone sanctuary.
Father Dykstra moved slowly from one end
of the altar platform to the other, muttering
the Mass. He held the wafer aloft, his Latin
reaching stentorian pitch.
Hoc est enim corpus meum!
The wafer was now transformed into
God Himself. Father Dykstra descended
the steps, crabwise, to the little congrega-
tion. Sister Theresa stood in line to receive.
Father Dykstra fumbled for a wafer. She held
out her hands, one cupped inside the other.
Father Dykstra muttered Corpus Domini nostri
Jesu Christi and pressed it into her palm. She
could not help but think: This is the work of my
hands.
Sister Theresa slipped the wafer into her
mouth. She began to swallow.
But then, she stopped herself. She could
not say why.
She sat back down, glancing back at Father
Dykstra to make sure he wasnt looking, and
sucked at the wafer. It collapsed. It began to
break apart. She kept her head down.
As soon as Mass was over, Sister Theresa
strode out the door in the back of the sanctu-
ary. Her steps fell heavy on the flagstones.
She reached her room, whirled, and shut the
door. She sat on her bed. Having kept her
tongue still for so many minutes, she released
it. Saliva flooded in. The wafer tasted sugary;
it had begun to break down.
Sister Theresa leaned over, reached
The Baffler [no.27] ! 65
w
beneath her bed, and drew up the little jar
of strawberry compote. She opened it. She
scooped up the glaze and kissed it off.
She leaned back on her bed and closed her
eyes and listened for flavors. First, the taste of
the compote: fresh strawberries, brown sugar
syrup, and a trace of the ancient rum shed
found hidden on a back shelf. Then the more
humble, earthen notes of the bread itself:
flour, salt, and well water.
Sister Theresa squeezed her eyes shut
even more, and a new darkness washed in.
She saw herself drawing the tray out of the
oven, and setting it down on the table to
cool. She felt such pride. She admired the
wafers, sighing back to a flat shape. Their
heat made the air ripple. Holding the tray
in her hands, Sister Theresa swept open
the door to the refectory. There, seated at
the long table, were all the people of her
convent. They sat up smiling. A thousand
candles were lit around them. Everyone
was talking, touching each other, hands
upon head and shoulder and cheek. In their
midst was a great turkey, hot-crispy-golden,
stuffed with sweet potato bread. Then Sister
Theresa could see that each of them had
a supper dish piled high, each with differ-
ent foods on her plate. On Mother Annes
plate there was a great shank of lamb next
to a bowl of thick, creamy soup. Sister Joan
presided over a plate laden with steak and
potatoes. Sister Genevieve talked excitedly
over a huge slice of meat pie and a pot of
honey all her own. She was talking to Father
Dykstra, who may or may not have been lis-
tening to her, because he sat with an expres-
sion of speechless joy at his enormous plate
of macaroni and cheese.
Ahhh, little Sister! Sister Genevieve had
seen her. She rose from her chair and ap-
proached her, heralding her, with arms wide
open. Everyone was glowing, expectanta
hush had fallen. You have brought us the
bread of life!
66 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Once Sister Theresa knew how to procure
these visions, she could not stop.
Merely holding the wafer on her tongue
was no longer enough. She took to stealing
the consecrated wafer from Mass altogether.
She found a way to tuck the wafer into a fold
of her wimple. After Mass, then, she did not
have to rush. She merely found a quiet mo-
ment to slip away to her room. Sitting on her
bed, she withdrew the wafer and stared at it
in her hands. This is God Himself. God incarnate
in a little piece of bread. Flesh straight from the
Cross on Calvary, and its sitting here in my palm.
And then she would reach under her bed
to select a jar, one of five or six she now kept
under her bed.
Her visions had become more extrava-
gant. Yesterday, Sister Theresa had dipped
the wafer in maple syrup before eating it.
Then she leaned back and watched the vision
unfold behind her eyelids. She always began
in the kitchen, and then entered the refec-
tory through the swinging doors, bearing
a golden dish of warm Communion wafers.
Now, at this table of her dreams, the sisters
no longer wore habits of black, but great
gowns in autumnal colors: vermillion, mus-
tard, soil-black. Of course Sister Genevieve
wore a regal gown of deep honey velvet, and
amber earrings dripped from her ancient
ears. They stood together, clasped hands and
raised them together. They took the wafers
and distributed them amongst themselves.
There were no plates of food now. There were
only bowls covering the long table, dozens of
bowls, holding every color and consistency of
sauce, puree, glaze, dressing, compote. With
great reverence they dipped their wafers into
the sauces and fed them to each other, and
each one tipped her face to the ceiling with
eyes closed. They were having their own
visions, now. Behind their closed lids, they
sat down at their own communal tables. The
people at those tables fed each other too, and
their heads tipped back, and then they were

seeing even further tables, and so on, until all
of humanity was attending the feast, dipping
the bread and feeding each other.
One day Sister Theresa came back with
the wafer as usual. She reached under her bed
and withdrew a jar of leftover deviled egg fill-
ing, rich and creamy and folded with bright
red paprika. She unscrewed the squeaky
metal lid and plunged her finger down into it.
Then, balancing the wafer in one palm and
the filling on her finger, she moved awkward-
ly to position her head on the pillow.
There was a knock at the door. Sister
Theresa froze. She had left it unlocked; ajar,
evenhow could she have been so careless?
She heard Mother Annes voice coming to
her as if in a dream. Daughter Theresa? she
called. Are you
Mother Anne opened the door and looked
in. Sister Theresa was half-lying on her bed,
HAZEL LEE SANTINO
the Holy Eucharist in one hand, and egg
paste in the other.
Mother Anne stood in the doorway. Sister
Theresa remained silent and frozen. There
was no way to explain anything. Her face
drained of blood.
Daughter. What is the meaning of this?
Sister Theresa grasped for words. This isI
just
What is this? Mother Annes voice
trembled.
Sister Theresa was aware of her finger still
hanging in the air, the egg puree still sitting
on her fingertip. She said nothing.
What is that? What are you doing?
Mother Annes lips had turned white. Please
tell me. Please tell me the meaning of this.
Sister Theresa lowered her hands until
they rested on the bed. Tears filled her eyes.
Im sorry, she said.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 67
w
Father Dykstras head popped above the
horizon. Sister Joan got up and ambled in his
direction. He stopped. She stopped. They
waited.
Father Dykstra made the first gambit. See
them clouds?
Looks like rain again.
Silence followed. The wind blew between
them, creamy and cold against their faces.
Father Dykstras one hand flapped in the
grasp of the other.
Saw an Indian fellow in my apple tree.
Did you now.
Just sittin in a branch. Mother Anne. She kept her forehead pressed
Sister Joan lifted her head to sniff the
wind, looking beyond Father Dykstras
bowed head towards the west, where the sun
was falling towards the horizon.
That girl. Locked up?
Sister Joan lowered her head to regard him
coolly, with cornflower-blue eyes, the one
lovely feature in her primordial face. Nope.
In seclusion.
Father Dykstra cleared his throat. Aint
come to Mass.
She will again. Might tomorrow, even.
Another silence followed. Then, at the
same moment, each of them began moving
again. Sister Joan turned back to the garden:
four long bars of brown dirt. Nuns bent over,
digging with canvas gloves. Father Dykstra
took his daily tour. He walked the rows to see
what had been sown.
Sister Theresa stepped into the sanctu-
ary and looked up. Shafts of morning light
interlaced like fingers in the open air. Dust
hung and sparkled. She looked down again,
quickly. She focused on the cement between
the flagstones. She took a seat in the second
row, near the outer aisle. She would have cho-
sen the farthest position, the most humble,
but Sister Genevieve was sitting there. Sister
Theresa sat down next to her. Sister Gen-
evieve whispered, So good to have you back,
68 1 The Baffler [no.27]
young one, squeezing her hand and holding
it hard.
Sister Theresa nodded and looked away,
quickly enough not to let Sister Genevieve
see her eyes fill with tears.
For the whole Mass, she could not focus.
She could only replay Mother Annes discov-
ery of her. Caught, shamed. Now she only
wondered whether her punishment had been
enough. Whether she had stayed in seclu-
sion long enough. Whether her confession
to Father Dykstra had been genuine enough.
She dared not even look in the direction of
to her folded thumbs.
When the time came for Communion, the
nuns got to their feet. Sister Theresa did not
budge. She was not pure; it would be inappro-
priate for her to even approach the altar. She
must wait until her own corruption had faded
away. She stayed within the dark cave of her
folded arms. She closed her eyes.
A cry echoed with in the sanctuary.
Startled, Sister Theresa looked up.
It was Sister Joan.
Sister Theresa blinked. She could not be-
lieve what she was seeing. That big old pillar
of a nun was jumping up and down, her habit
billowing around her with every little hop.
Her arms were spread to her sides, her hands
scraping the air.
But Sister Joan was not the only one. Fa-
ther Dykstra was rocking back and forth on
his heels, palm holding his own skull, almost
tenderly; the golden dish of wafers swayed
precariously in his other hand. Sister Gen-
evieve had swept one hand across her heart,
clutching at the railing with the other. Oh
God! Oh God! she cried as she collapsed.
Sister Theresa got to her feet, heart
pounding, and shoved herself out of the pew.
She began to hear words.
Bon-bons! I only got em once! My broth-
er stole em for us and we ate em behind the
general store! exclaimed Sister Joan, string-
 Sister Theresa was half-lying
on her bed, the Holy Eucharist
in one hand, and egg paste
in the other.
9 her hips, staring upriver, where the valleys
ing more words together than Sister Theresa
had ever heard her utter in a day.
Pine nut bread! called Father Dykstra.
The Shoshone woman made it for me! Id
forgotten, Id forgotten! Tears were stream-
ing down his cheeks.
Honey! I taste honey! Oh my sweet Lord!
moaned Sister Genevieve, collapsing onto the
floor.
Sister Theresa hurried to her, dodging out
of the way of all her sisters who were sway-
ing about, as if in a dance. Goat cheese from
Millie! Real Belgian chocolate! Peaches,
summer peaches, from the tree in my gar-
den! They staggered towards each other,
holding out their hands, beseeching.
Sister Theresa dropped to the floor where
Sister Genevieve lay, now still and panting.
Her eyes fell upon Sister Theresa, and her
face softened. Her frail body relaxed against
the flagstones.
I taste honey, she said.
Sister Theresa nodded. I know, Sister
Genevieve. I can hear you.
Sister Genevieve took her hand for the
second time, and said, God corrupts every-
thing.
She laid her head down.
F ather Dykstra picked his way down the
grassy hill from his cottage above. Sister Joan
strode to meet him at its foot. The river thun-
dered at her back.
As they came within a stones throw, as
if by silent agreement, they stopped at the
same time. Grasses of green and gold flowed
around their legs. The verdant mountains
rose up all around them, violet, ale, and sage
in the rising sun.
Magnolias blooming.
Yep, out by the barn.
Father Dykstra shifted from one foot to
the other. Sister Joan had her fists planted on
green mouth opened eastward.
I got something.
Do you now.
Father Dykstra swung his arm around
front. He was holding a burlap sack full of
round objects. He held it out at arms length,
like a fishermans catch.
Apples, he explained.
For what?
For the girl.
The girl?
The one who cooks. She can use em.
Mmm.
The Indian feller gave em to me.
Did he now. Sister Joan tucked the sack
under one broad arm.
Just sittin there in a tree. Wearin green.
Mmm.
He was all in green, he pressed.
Green?
Green like Father Dykstra waved his
arm, gesturing at the earth.
Grass, said Sister Joan.
Grass! Father Dykstra chortled. If its
grass its like no grass I ever seen.
There was silence between them. The
river flowed on behind them. Its thundering
had thrown water into the air, and the vapor
cast rainbows, crossing and interlacing in the
light.
Grass with every kind of other thing in
it, said Sister Joan.
Yes, said Father Dykstra, nodding vio-
lently. Yes.
They both stood, heads bowed, contem-
plating the grass for a long while. Then, as if a
train had passed and the crossbar lifted, they
turned and went their ways.t
The Baffler [no.27] ! 69
Ba d Sci e n c e
Mind Your Own Business
3 Barbar a Ehrenreich
A t about the beginning of this decade, mass-
market mindfulness rolled out of the Bay Area
like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in
fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous self-
improvement trends had been transmitted
via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs;
now, mindfulness could be carried around on
a smartphone. There are hundreds of them,
these mindfulness apps, bearing names like
Smiling Mind and Buddhify. A typical exam-
ple features timed stretches of meditation, as
brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing
voices, soporific music, and images of forests
and waterfalls.
This is Buddhism sliced up and commodi-
fied, and, in case the connection to the tech
industry is unclear, a Silicon Valley venture
capitalist blurbed a seminal mindfulness
manual by calling it the instruction man-
ual that should come with our iPhones and
BlackBerries. Its enough to make you think
that the actual Buddha devoted all his time
under the Bodhi Tree to product testing. In
the mindfulness lexicon, the word enlighten-
ment doesnt have a place.
In California, at least, mindfulness
and other conveniently accessible deriva-
tives of Buddhism flourished well before
BlackBerries. I first heard the word in 1998
from a wealthy landlady in Berkeley, advising
me to be mindful of the suffocating Mar-
tha Stewart-ish decor of the apartment I was
renting from her, which of course I was doing
everything possible to un-see. A possible con-
nection between her mindfulness and Bud-
dhism emerged only when I had to turn to a
tenants rights group to collect my security
deposit. She countered with a letter accusing
people like meleftists, I suppose, or rent-
70 1 The Baffler [no.27]
ersof oppressing Tibetans and disrespecting
the Dalai Lama.
During the same stint in the Bay Area, I
learned that rich locals liked to unwind at
Buddhist monasteries in the hills, where, for
a few thousand dollars, they could spend a
weekend doing manual labor for the monks.
Buddhism, or some adaptation thereof, was
becoming a class signifier, among a subset of
Caucasians anyway, and nowhere was it more
ostentatious than in Silicon Valley, where
star player Steve Jobs had been a Buddhist or
perhaps a Hinduhe seems not to have made
much of a distinctioneven before it was
fashionable for CEOs to claim a spiritual life.
Mindfulness guru and promoter Soren Gord-
hamer noticed in 2013 that tech leaders from
Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other major
tech companies seemed to be tapped into an
inner dimension that guides their work. He
called it wisdom and named his annual con-
ferences Wisdom 2.0helpful shorthand, as
it happens, for describing the inner smugness
of the Bay Area elite.
T oday, mindfulness has far outgrown Silicon
Valley and its signature industry, becoming
another numbingly ubiquitous feature of the
verbal landscape, as positive thinking once
was. While an earlier, more arduous, version
of Buddhism attracted few celebrities other
than Richard Gere, mindfulness boasts a host
of prominent practitionersArianna Huffing-
ton, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anderson Cooper
among them. Mindful leadership debuted at
Davos in 2013 to an overflow crowd, and Wis-
dom 2.0 conferences have taken place in New
York and Dublin as well as San Francisco, with
attendees fanning out to become missionaries

This is Buddhism sliced up and commodified.
9
for the new mind-set. This years event in San
Francisco advertises not only familiar faces
from Google and Facebook, but also speeches
by corporate representatives of Starbucks and
Eileen Fisher. Aetna, a Fortune 100 health in-
surance company, offers its 34,000 employees
a twelve-week meditation class, and its CEO
dreams of expanding the program to include
all its customers, who will presumably be
LISA HANE Y
made healthier by clearing their minds. Even
General Mills, which dates back to the nine-
teenth century, has added meditation rooms
to its buildings, finding that a seven-week
course produces striking results. According to
the Financial Times,
83 percent of participants said they were tak-
ing time each day to optimize my personal
The Baffler [no.27] ! 71
Ba d Sci e n c e
productivityup from 23 percent before the
course. Eighty-two percent said they now
make time to eliminate tasks with limited
productivity valueup from 32 percent be-
fore the course.
Productivity is only one objective of the
new miniaturized meditation; there are also
the more profound-sounding goals of wis-
dom and compassion, which are not nor-
mally associated with Silicon Valley or Ameri-
can business in general. Just a few years ago,
say in 2005, the tech industry exemplified a
very different kind of corporate ideology, fea-
turing multitasking and perpetually divided
attentionthink an incoming call conducted
while scanning a new product design, check-
ing email, and deflecting the interruptions of
subalterns. It was madness, but the business
self-help literature encouraged people to surf
the chaos, nourishing themselves on caffeine
and adrenaline. If we needed to unclutter our
minds, we were directed to the gym and an
hour or so of intense physical activity. A trim
muscular body, combined with an ever-flick-
ering gaze, signified executive status.
The backlash against chaos surfing came
on quickly, as if The Wolf of Wall Street had
been forced to drink a soothing bowl of
milk. Studies were piling up to suggest that
a lifestyle dependent on multiple devices and
double-shot espressos might be toxic to the
human mind, impeding concentration and
undermining human connectedness. There
was wild talk of unplugging and fleeing of-
fline. In Northern California in 2013, a group
called Digital Detox began offering Camp
Grounded, a well-publicized summer camp
for adults, at which all devices (and alcohol
and children and real names) were prohibited,
the better to encourage play and conversa-
tion. We had once imagined that human at-
tention was infinitely divisible, with each par-
ticle of it potentially available to advertisers,
entertainers, and employers. But it was turn-
72 1 The Baffler [no.27]
ing out to be fragile, even endangered, and in
need of constant repair.
Where brilliance and creativity had for-
merly reigned, there were, by the turn of the
millennium, suspicions of pathology. Child
psychiatrists began to drop bipolarity as
a default diagnosis and turn their attention
to attention itself. Too many children were
deficient in it, just as their plugged-in par-
ents were often guilty of distracted parent-
ing. The switch from bipolarity to attention
deficit disorder is hard to date exactly, in part
because these conditions are now said to be
frequently comorbid, or overlapping. But as
we began to spend more and more of our time
interacting with mood-less programs and de-
vices, psychiatry seems to have turned from
emotional concerns like bipolarity, which is
a mood disorder, to cognitive problems like
ADD and ADHD.
At the same time, diagnoses of autism and
Aspergers syndrome were skyrocketinges-
pecially, as a 2001 article in Wired pointed
out, in Santa Clara County, home of Silicon
Valley. Among the adult population, surely
something was wrong with Steve Jobs, who
alternated between obsessive attention to
details and complete withdrawal into him-
self, between a spiritual aloofness and un-
controlled temper tantrums. Some observers
thought they detected a hint of autism in the
unblinking, almost affect-free Bill Gates, and
the characters in HBOs Silicon Valley are por-
trayed as well within the spectrum.
So Silicon Valley embraced mindfulness
with a twinge of contrition. Not only did its
corporate culture encourage something called
geek syndrome, but its products seemed to
spread that same derangement to everyone
else. The devices that were supposed to make
us smarter and more connected to other hu-
mans were actually messing with our minds,
causing net brain and monkey mind, as
well as physical disorders associated with long
hours of sitting. As we click between Twitter
 The backlash came on quickly, as if The Wolf of Wall Street
had been forced to drink a soothing bowl of milk.
9
and Facebook, text and hypertext, one link
and another, synapses are being formed and
then broken with febrile inconstancyor so
a growing number of experts, such as MITs
Sherry Turkle, warn usleaving the neuronal
scaffolding too fragile to house large thoughts.
A less arrogant industry might have settled
for warning labels on its phones and pads, but
Silicon Valley wanted an instant cure, pref-
erably one that was hi-tech and marketable.
The great advantage of mindfulness was that
it seemed to be based firmly on science; no
hippie bullshit or other woo woo was in- laxation, medication, or psychotherapy. There
volved. A neuroscientist reported that Bud-
dhist monks with about ten thousand hours of
meditation under their belts had altered brain
functions; shorter bouts of meditation seemed
to work at least temporary changes in novices.
The field of contemplative neuroscience
was born, and Silicon Valley seized on it for a
much-needed neural hack. Through medi-
tation, monastic or app-guided, anyone could
reach directly into their own moist brain tis-
sue and resculpt it in a calmer, more atten-
tive direction. Mindfulness, as its promoters
put it, fosters neuroplasticity.
No one questions that the brain changes
with the experiences the mind undergoes. If
thought has a physical basis, as scientists as-
sume, then it produces physical alterations
in the brain. Trauma and addiction can lead
to lasting problems; even fleeting events may
leave the chemical changes in the brain that
we experience as memory. In fact, plasticity
is a pallid descriptor for the constant, ongoing
transformation of brain tissue. Neurons reach
out to each other through tiny membranous
protusions, often forming new synapses. Syn-
apses that fire frequently grow stronger, while
the inactive ones wither. Well-connected neu-
rons thrive, while neglected ones die. There is
even some evidence that neurons in mature
animals can reproduce.
What there is no evidence for, however, is
any particularly salubrious effect of medita-
tion, especially in byte-sized doses. This was
established through a mammoth, federally
sponsored meta-analysis of existing studies,
published last year, which found that medi-
tation programs can help treat stress-related
symptoms but are no more effective in doing
so than other interventions, such as muscle re-
is no excuse for ignoring this study, which
achieved worldwide attention. So maybe
meditation does have a calming, centering
effect, but so does an hour of concentration on
a math problem or a glass of wine with friends.
As for Silicon Valleys unique contribution,
mindfulness apps, a recent study concluded
that there is
an almost complete lack of evidence support-
ing the usefulness of those applications. We
found no randomized clinical trials evaluat-
ing the impact of these applications on mind-
fulness training or health indicators, and the
potential for mobile mindfulness applications
remains largely unexplored.
For an industry based on empirical science
and employing large numbers of engineers,
Silicon Valley has been remarkably incuri-
ous about the scientific basis of mindfulness,
probably because the neuroplasticity con-
cept is just too alluring. If the brain can be res-
culpted through conscious effort, then mind-
fulness is as imperative as physical exercise;
the brain is a muscle and, like any muscle,
in need of training. Googles chief motivator
The Baffler [no.27] ! 73
Ba d Sci e n c e
Chade-Meng Tan was an early adopter, set-
ting up the companys mindfulness training
program, Search Inside Yourself, in 2007, and
later telling the Guardian:
If you are a company leader who says em-
ployees should be encouraged to exercise,
nobody looks at you funny. . . . The same thing
is happening to meditation and mindfulness,
because now that its become scientific, it
has been demystified. Its going to be seen as
fitness for the mind.
One popular and highly rated mindfulness
app, Get Some Headspace, advertises itself as
a gym membership for the mind. Only its
easier than working out, of course, or even
yoga. As one enthusiastic software entrepre-
neur said of the Headspace app, You dont
have to sit in a lotus position. You just press
play and chill out.
Outside of meditation, which can take just
a few minutes a day, the daily practice of mind-
fulness can be summarized as pay attention, or
better yet, pay attention to one thing at a time.
Take out the earphones when the children are
trying to talk to you. Listen carefully to col-
leagues, look them in the eyes, and attempt to
comprehend things from their point of view.
Do not multitask; just sink yourself into the
moment, one task at a time. What could be
simpler?
P. S . MUELLER
74 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Left unanswered in all of this is the ques-
tion of what to be mindful of. Yes, the chil-
dren. But what do you do when one of them
is trying to confide in you and the other one
is screaming from the bedroom? Or say youre
at a business lunch. You have to be mindful
of your companion while simultaneously at-
tempting to eat without spilling or choking
and I say you would be remiss if you failed to
notice the sad-eyed busboy who is refilling the
water glasses. Divided attention far predates
the advent of smartphones and is intrinsic to
many human activities, such as child-raising,
cooking a large meal, and waiting on tables.
Or take one of the most ancient human oc-
cupationswarwhich is relevant because
the mindfulness promoters are beginning to
market their product to the U.S. military. In-
coming fire can come from any direction, at
unexpected times and speeds. Morale must be
considered, as well as changing instructions
from the strategists in command. There is no
danger of soldiers distractedly checking their
Facebook pages; the issue is whether they
have the mental bandwidth demanded by the
exigencies of battle.
Silicon Valley got its own tiny taste of com-
bat at the 2014 Wisdom 2.0 conference in
San Francisco. The panel on 3 Steps to Build
Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way had
just begun when a small group of protesters
walked on stage and unfurled a banner saying
Eviction-Free San Francisco, a reference to
the savage gentrification that Google, among
others, has inflicted on the city. After security
pushed the protesters offstage and started a
tug-of-war for the banner, a Google mindful-
ness representative intoned, We can use this
as a moment of practice. Check in with your
body and see whats happening, what its like
to be around conflict and people with heart-
felt ideas that may be different than what
were thinking. Zen-like, the panel rolled on,
undistracted by the brief glimpse of mass evic-
tions and homelessness.t
Why would the Minoans
3 Caroline Knox

Why would the Minoans fire the

clay tablets which they recorded their
everyday transactions on? They
wouldnt and didnt, so when the

rotted thatched roof of the rented

house of Arthur Evans fell in during a
prodigious downpour, all the unfired
gray clay tablets unreadable as yet and ever

cut out by me in one piece with their

earthly matrix, wrote the discoverer,
had already been reduced to a pulpy mass.
To even get started, Evans had to

buy some of Knossos. To deal with

language barriers, he spoke Latin
with priests. Klutzy, Evans said the only
sport he was good at was

jumping to conclusions,
although right out of Oxford, he and
his brother Lewis hiked and hiked in the Balkans
armed with Bologna sandwiches and Turkish delight.

Older than Oxford by a long chalk,

Bologna is the first continuous
university: 1188 CE. How
terrific that Bologna sandwiches fed

and feed millions of students! Did the

the eponymous Earl of Sandwich go
to Oxford? Trinity Cambridge.
Bologna is home to Luigi

Galvani, inventor of
galvanism. Lokum is
the real name for Turkish delight.
No confection is more beautiful.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 75

The Dol lar Deb auch
Purple Reign
The unmaking of a Yahoo
3 Chris Lehmann
When the great granddaddy of opinion
journals, The New Republic, abruptly van-
ished in a sad, squalid burst of pixel dust and
management theory last winter, establish-
ment journalists rent their garments and
gnashed their teeth in horror. The promise
of American life has been dealt a lamentable
blow, a group of former writers and editors
associated with the magazine pronounced in
a public statement. The New Republic, they
said, formerly a kind of public trust, had
now suffered its destruction in all but name.
In-house disputes over how the august
policy organ should adapt to the digital age
had claimed the jobs of editor Franklin Foer
and literary editor Leon Wieseltier. A mass
walkout ensued, with more than thirty writ-
ers, editors, and contributing editors forsak-
ing the shop even before Foers designated
successor, onetime Gawker editor Gabriel
Snyder, could fire up his company email ac-
count. Chris Hughes, the thirty-one-year-old
former Facebook mogul who acquired The
New Republic in 2012 amid a round of adula-
tory press reports hailing the marriage of
Silicon Valley largesse and Beltway savvy,
now stood contemplating his handiwork in
an all but vacant New Republic office, not long
after hed presided over the magazines one-
hundred-year gala. Happy Anniversary.
The extraordinaryand largely porten-
tousburst of commentary that followed
suggested something more was at stake
than the bust-up of a magazine long past its
prime. A month earlier, similar convulsions
had upended the management team at an-
other journalistic concern, one whose digital
76 1 The Baffler [no.27]
identity had been settled from the first: First
Look Media, the pet project of eBay bil-
lionaire Pierre Omidyar. There, Rolling Stone
muckraker Matt Taibbi and John Cookan-
other former Gawker editorhad bailed out
of their plum positions editing Racket and The
Intercept, two much-ballyhooed First Look
startups with a roster of top-drawer writ-
ing and editing talent. (Racket, indeed, was
permanently mothballed after Taibbi fled.)
For a few months there at the end of 2014,
it was as if the crown princes of digital inno-
vation had become Midases in reverse, repel-
ling experienced journalists in droves, even in
the face of one of the most depressed markets
for journalism work in modern history.
Those thousand think pieces bloomed,
all seeking to shed new light on the strange
mores of tech-industry moguldom, and on
how the inventors of the future had failed to
match up to the tough-minded folkways of
magazine-style journalism and the notori-
ously capital-and-labor-intensive work of
reporting and analyzing the news.
To me, though, the overlapping sagas of
First Look and The New Republic were less a
dramatic climax of the zeitgeist than a slow-
motion train wreck that had already ejected
me through the windows and into the woods.
Even as the press notices greeting these en-
terprises had first unspooled, I couldnt help
but hear the low moan of a gathering nemesis
in the distance. Orto switch up my enter-
tainment metaphorsI felt increasingly like
a seasoned horror movie fan, espying all the
telltale signs of a disaster waiting to happen:
the callow corporate rhetoric of disruptive

genius, the witless embrace of a nonsensical
array of platforms and formats in a sequence
seemingly adapted from a Mad Libs game
book, the airy dismissal of content-produc-
tion as though it were simply a species of
hireling grunt work.
All this had come rushing back because
once upon a time, I had lived through it too,
in my late, unlamented career as an online
MICHAEL DUFF Y
news executive in that labyrinth of high-
octane managerial passive-aggression known
as Yahoo News.
Into the Purple Valley
Yahoo News, it so happens, occupied center
stage in the New Republic fiasco. In October
2014, a month before the whole operation
went to hell, Hughes brought on Guy Vidra,
The Baffler [no.27] ! 77
The Dol lar Deb auch
a former Yahoo News higher-up, to serve as
CEO of The New Republica position above
editor Frank Foers in the corporate chain of
command. Vidra wasted little time remind-
ing any and all New Republic employees
within earshot just what he intended to do
with his power. At an all-hands gathering to
divine the companys digital future, Vidra
declared that the magazines staff should feel
empowered to break shita classic Valley
exhortation that means little more than be
prepared to do whatever I say, no matter how
many times I change my mind. Fast forward
a few weeks, and Vidra was pronouncing, in
one of the new management teams inef-
fectual, quasi-literate efforts to justify the
carnage before the bar of public opinion, his
dedication to informing society and impact-
ing the world through analysis and insight.
As he gamely tried to specify just how all this
informing and impacting would transpire,
Vidra appealed to the profitable precedents
set by a fistful of brave new media companies
in the process of subduing the Internet:
The most exciting part of the successes has
been that theyve been achieved through an
array of different strategiesall of which use
technology in the service of journalismlead-
ing to more distribution and creative ways
of telling stories made possible only through
digital means. These publishers are growing
and finding new audiences, and, while The
New Republic is a very unique place, we can
learn from them.
When my eyes alit on Vidras pronuncia-
miento, I recognized all the elements of a
boilerplate Yahoo corporate memo: the
lumbering passive voice, peculiarly unsuited
to generating the boardroom-grade excite-
ment that Yahoo memo-ists sought to convey
to the working masses; the cumbersome,
noun-heavy diction (somehow successes, or
perhaps strategies, are telling stories, while
also kicking up more distribution, a phrase
78 1 The Baffler [no.27]
that, on its own, says precisely nothing); the
prophetic intonement of the inane as though
it is, in fact, revolutionary (nothing, strictly
speaking, is made possible only through
digital means, least of all narrative journal-
ism, which is nothing more than thinking,
listening, reading, andmost ploddingly
and least radically of allwriting); the effort
to highlight the thuddingly obvious in the
breathless rhetoric of epiphany (of course
online media companies will use technology
in the service of journalism because they are,
ahem, media companies). And when the poor
reader pans back from all this gibberish, she
realizes that Vidras mangled subordinate
clauses are really just expressing a tautology:
digital media companies succeed . . . because
they are digital media companies. The
only measurably distinctive element of this
outburst is the ungrammatical assertion that
The New Republic is a very unique place.
The Yahoo affinities here run far deeper
than the mere verbal tics of corporate group-
think. Before Hughes and Vidra had offered
Foers job to Gabriel Snyder, they had tried
to give it to Vidras former Yahoo colleague,
Hillary Frey, the executive who presided
over the constructive termination of my own
perch in the Yahoo news empire. When The
New Republic was on the block back in 2011,
prior to the Hughes deal, there were rumors
that Yahoo itself, then on one of its distress-
ingly frequent serial media-acquisition
binges, was thinking of acquiring the maga-
zine. In a way, that outcome would have been
the more merciful one: rather than going up
in a fractious exchange of outraged statement
and counterstatement, the old order would
have been swiftly dispatched by scores of en-
terprising Guy Vidras. The restive spirits of
past New Republic editors and contributors
Edmund Wilson, Henry Wallace, Walter
Lippmann, Murray Kempton, W. H. Auden
would have been quietly chloroformed by an
endless procession of PowerPoint presenta-
tions, New Economy platitudes, and buzz-
word-intoning conference calls.
Lost Illusions; or, Shit, Broken
But lets back up. How, exactly, did a Baffler
editor, of all people, come to serve as a Yahoo
news executive in the first place?
The broad outlines would doubtless ring a
bell with Chris Hughes, whos fond of advertis-
ing his penchant for reading Balzac in French.
In 2009, a year into the most crippling depres-
sion of the past seven decades, my once-stable
post in the dying trade of print journalism was
snatched out from under me. The venerable
Hill publication Congressional Quarterlya
wildly profitable operation owned, weirdly
enough, by the nonprofit Poynter Institute
was sold to a takeover team at the Economist
Group. My job as senior editor for the CQ
weekly magazine was among the first casual-
ties of the austerity campaign. Our British
overlords had declared that CQs already size-
able profit margins needed to be much wider,
and so my salary, benefits, and retirement plan
were all consigned to the sacred cause of pad-
ding the bottom line.
Its an understatement to say that my
professional prospects were grim. My then-
wifes employer, the liberal radio network
Air America, duly went up in flames a month
later. I landed a couple of interviews at some
newspaper officesplaces already so deci-
mated from their own downsizing campaigns
that it seemed like tumbleweeds would start
blowing down the corridors of cubicles even
as I anxiously tried to impress managers with
my can-do spirit of innovation. As I inter-
viewed at one of these shops, a onetime col-
league of mine took me aside and advised, in
a burst of hard-won gallows humor, Listen,
if you get an offer from a company thats not
bankrupt, you should probably take that.
I took his advice. On Twitter, of all places,
I came across a listing for an editing job at
Yahoo, the infamous failed search engine
that was now both a shuddering storehouse
of legacy webmail accounts and a surprisingly
potent aggregator of news content. It was
unclear whether anything resembling a long-
term business strategy could ever take hold
at the company, but without really mean-
ing to, Yahoo had become the most heavily
trafficked news site on the web. And since
the company had been fortunate enough to
go public in the delirious belle epoque of the
nineties tech bubble, it was overcapitalized
on a truly mammoth scale. By simply selling
off a software patent or two as it went, Yahoo
could keep pumping cash through its great
purple maw as its senior managers tried to
figure out what the company was there for.
Yahoo might never again revolution-
ize any product or platform in the crowded
digital sector, but what did it matter? In
an age of rapidly vanishing audiences for
traditional media outlets, it had more readers
than it knew what to do with. It could, like
the Chicago Cubs (my longtime, and tragic,
baseball fixation), continue to blow through
daft management schemes and staggering
market failures, and even so, through some
mystic compact with its fan base, customers
would stream through the turnstiles.
The Cubs analogy is especially apt in this
case. Yahoo had launched a successful ring
of sports blogs in the early aughtsrapidly
harvesting eyeballs in this most obsessive of
online communities, and drawing big-name
talent away from web-averse print media
competitors. The idea, I was told in a series
of interviews in New York, Washington, and
the editorial home office of the Yahoo news
division in Santa Monica, was to replicate the
sports blogs success in the news sphere.
Behind all this ambitious talk was a less
flattering truth: Yahoo, too, was keen to curb
its costs. It had partnership contracts with
several high-profile media companies, all
of which were delighted to see their prod-
uct dragged in front of millions of Yahoo-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 79
The Dol lar Deb auch
branded eyeballs. But as their print clientele
abandoned them, these companies also
sought to pad their own sagging bottom lines
by hiking up their licensing fees and charging
Yahoo more. Emboldened by the success of
the sports blog network, Yahoo executives
figured they could produce news product far
more cheaply in house. After all, they already
had, in spades, the main asset that the rest
of the mediasphere was starved for: readers.
All they needed now was a team of enterpris-
ing reporters and editors to keep daily, and
hourly, content buzzing through the com-
panys outsized distribution system.
Thats where I came in. I was hired in an
overheated blur of Silicon Valley hype. My
formal job offer came packaged in a FedEx
box that had been rigged up to deliver the
companys irksome trademark soprano
Yahoo each time you opened it. Even after
I rushed it into my kitchen trash can, it would
start in on its infernal yodeling loop whenev-
er Id discard a used yogurt carton or wadded-
up paper towel on top. It was the branding
mechanism that would not die.
A related ominous portent, as I discov-
ered upon opening my big purple yodeling
box, was that the companys HR team had
adopted the cutesy-to-them tic of referring
to employees simply as Yahoosmaking us copy), the tabloid sensibility that drove the
seem either like backwoods rubes or (to more
literary-minded hires) the ravenous creatures
in Gullivers Travels who manage to com-
bine both elitism and boorishness, digging
through the muck to retrieve jealously hoard-
ed precious stones. Here, too, was a parable in
miniature: Yahoo, the company, clearly was
keen to have me adopt the classic Swiftian
version of the Yahoo identity. Meanwhile,
the career path unfolding before me would
soon transform me into the considerably less
distinguished, and infinitely more gullible,
variety of (decidedly lowercase) yahoo.
But all that was to come. The task ahead
was to hire and put to work a new crew of
80 1 The Baffler [no.27]
news bloggers, covering everything from
media and foreign policy to finance and
national politics. My immediate boss had the
title of managing editor for the fledgling blog
network, but had never previously worked as
an editor. (He was and is, let the record show,
a very accomplished publisher and news man-
ager.) So the day-to-day hiring and supervi-
sion of the news blog team fell largely to me.
The numbers alone were staggering.
Anytime one of my teams posts landed on
the Yahoo homepage, it could easily rack up
several million unique pageviews, sometimes
in a matter of hours. Also-ran posts, such as
daily news roundups or procedural updates on
the then-burning issue of health care reform,
would usually plateau in the low six figures.
CQ , New York magazine, the Washington
Postany of the media name brands Id previ-
ously worked for, or could ever reasonably
hope to work forwould have killed to attract
the volume of readers earned by a post that
the Yahoo news team would see as a failure.
There were other attractions to the job,
too, beyond the obvious inducements of a sal-
ary and a health plan. After a long tour in the
ultra-earnest word factory of CQ (which had
deemed the word reform itself too contro-
versial and loaded a term to mar our bloodless
high-performing content at Yahoo was oddly
liberating. We were ensured seven-figure
viewerships for reports on any and all subjects
calculated to tickle a web users idle curiosity,
from cheeky music videos put together by U.S.
troops stationed in Afghanistan to a global
competition to identify the hottest new strain
of chili pepper. Anything bearing the imprint
of culture-war controversy or celebrity gossip
rapidly shot up the pageview boards. One
of the all-time traffic leaders was a post on a
lesbian high school student denied admission
to her senior prom when she turned up with
a same-sex date; that entry netted more than
sixty thousand reader comments.
 Yahoo could keep pumping cash through its purple maw as its
senior managers tried to figure out what the company was there for.
9
On one early morning conference call,
I blearily pitched an oddball story Id seen
about Today Show host Ann Curry; while
delivering a college commencement address,
she had clumsily referenced the history of
another college of the same name through-
out. The ensuing post dislodged the Alabama
prom drama in the annals of high-volume
traffic and drew so many pageviews that the
editorial team took to using an Ann Curry
post as shorthand for a big win for the site.
By randomly stumbling across the tale of a
minor TV personalitys public embarrass-
ment, I had sealed my reputation for online
news savvy. (Welcome to American journal-
ism in the twenty-first century.)
In the space between the front-page tab-
loid fare and the back-end site filler, though,
we were given a surprising amount of leeway.
The ultimate motives of Yahoos news man-
agers may have been baselike those of news
managers everywhere in our blighted age
but the company also seemed to be genuinely
committed to the sustained, reasonably
adventurous promulgation of useful informa-
tion on the web.
Whats more, the middle managers who
moved copy on and off the front-page portal
fought to ensure that Yahoo stories were
both topical and accurate. I was able to
publish in-depth explainers on the Dodd-
Frank financial reform initiative, the tangled
course of the Affordable Care Act, and the
wigged-out antigovernment delusions of
Gabby Giffordss would-be assassin Jared
Loughner. My reporting team did important
and groundbreaking work on everything
from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill
our reporter moved down to New Orleans
from New York, on his own dime, to cover
itto the impact of Arizonas draconian new
immigration law to the Tea Partys dramatic
rise in the 2010 election cycle.
To my great surprise, some of the most
demanding, information-rich features we
assembled earned us major traffic on the
homepage. A post on widespread public oppo-
sition to the Supreme Courts Citizens United
rulinga ruling that effectively repealed
most reasonable restraints on money in poli-
ticsdrew pageviews in the millions, as did a
similarly grim set of charts driving home the
ensuing boom of dark money in national poli-
tics (thanks in part to the editors of Mother
Jones, who graciously let us adapt them). Ya-
hoo readers clearly loved to be titillated, but
they also didnt mind sobering updates on the
rickety state of our formal democracy.
One especially ambitious project was
a multipart, crowdsourced account of the
rigors of long-term unemployment in the job-
starved recovery from the 2008 meltdown.
Not knowing what to do with all the material
wed transcribed from tens of thousands of
contributors to the series, we created a Tum-
blr devoted to the project, which we updated
independently of the daily pull-and-push of
the Yahoo News homepage. I still recall be-
ing on a conference call with a gaggle of with-
it digital news managers trying to explain to
them just what Tumblr was, as I fought to
tamp down a growing suspicion that some-
thing was very, very wrong. Two years later, of
course, Yahoo added Tumblr to its long, and
largely inert, roster of media acquisitions, for
a cool $1.1 billion.
Dumb Money
That bracing little set piece sums up a great
deal about what ailed Yahoo in the inner
The Baffler [no.27] ! 81
The Dol lar Deb auch
reaches of its corporate being: a perennially
addled (and ever-shifting) team of managers
with far too much money to burn and virtu-
ally no restraints on how they might choose,
at a moments notice, to radically reconfigure
the business rationales animating Yahoo
News. As our hardy band of news bloggers
plowed through the challenges of daily re-
porting, we found ourselves pushing farther
into the treacherous, bottomless deeps of
corporate groupthink, much like the doomed
Jedi pilots barreling into the canyons of the
Death Star in the final reel of the first Star
Wars movie.
First, there was the rotating cast of execu-
tives. Yahoo being a company of nineteen
thousand employees (in the spring of 2010,
when I was hired) across the globe, there
were many, many bosses, strewn across many
recondite corporate divisions, all of whom
could mysteriously be summoned onto the
same conference call within minutes.
Then there was the companys strange
aversion to the most basic canons of news-
making. Soon after I landed at Yahoo, I
realized that my central job duties didnt fit
into the tech-centric template that the com-
pany favored. The Yahoo hierarchs shared
something of a company-wide allergy to the
inoffensive editor descriptor. Our main
news authorities in Santa Monica were called
producers instead; their tasks were tethered
mainly to the portal they served, as opposed
to the readily transferable old-media work of
reporting, writing, editing, and proofread-
ing. You could be a front-page producer, or a
facilitator of partnered content, or a spon-
sorship wrangler, but plain old editors and
writers were almost nowhere to be found.
One of the lead producers in Santa Monica
was exclusively tasked with running down the
rights and proper web formatting for video
footage. (Lest that sound like a make-work
gig, akin to the character in Galaxy Quest who
does nothing but convey the crew leaders in-
82 1 The Baffler [no.27]
structions to the ships computer, rest assured
that videos were among the most heavily
trafficked, and jealously guarded, features
on the site; this producer was also among the
handful of Santa Monica senior brass whod
logged time as a working journalist.)
And then there were the algorithms. Like
all tech leviathans, Yahoo believed it could
reduce almost anythingnews consumption
not excludedto a data set. The companys
army of software engineers had designed a
customization feature on the Yahoo homep-
age called CORE: the content optimization
and relevance engine, for you connoisseurs
of tech industry agitprop. The idea behind
CORE was to take the data Yahoo had col-
lected from its registered users and develop
algorithms that would accurately predict
what stories would provoke site visitors to
click, linger, and read, as a steady barrage of
revenue-generating ads nudged themselves
into the margins of their experiences. In its
first year of operation, CORE proved to be
a phenomenal success, netting a 270 percent
increase in pageviews.
The big problem with a project like
CORE, of course, was that it was pretty much
antithetical to journalism as a civic activ-
ity. The always more-than-a-little mythical
image of American news readers as informed
citizens rests precisely upon the news being
unfamiliar to themand indeed, on all too
many occasions, shocking, scandalous, and
enraging. To lovingly curateas the IT
term of art goesa version of current events
to mirror readers hobbies, taste preferences,
and browsing histories is to downgrade jour-
nalism into the stuff of Pinterest posting
strangely pleasing in many cases, like a warm
bath for an infant, but serving no larger civic
good. In another telling turn of phrase, front-
page producers would talk of forcing stories
that defied the counsel of the CORE algo-
rithmsusually breaking news in the world
of politics, policy, and global affairsinto
placement on the front page. In other words,
the independent exercise of news judgment,
in this code-happy universe, was regarded as
a willful lurch into manual-override mode.
And even when a story was forced, if the
click-count didnt spike, it was quickly ban-
ished to the nether regions of the site, so the
algorithms could resume their seamless work
of optimized news sorting and placement.
Small wonder, in this strategically clois-
tered news environment, that the director of
the news divisions main tasks were to negoti-
ate contracts with partner companies and to
consult with us on any news coverage that
might involve potential conflicts of interest
for the company. He was an entertainment
lawyer, and had come to Yahoo from the
even more distressed and revenue-challenged
confines of the music industry.
The fussy terminological diffidence that
turned editing into a dirty word betrayed
a deeper unease atop the Yahoo hierarchy.
Company executives would get unnerved by
the unpredictable character of the news itself,
should it stray too far beyond the familiar
canons of optimal CORE placement. The
independent conduct of journalism was often
greeted with faux market-savvy suspicion;
how could a giant news aggregator assess
material that hadnt been pre-vetted by a duly
contracted content partner?
One of the first pieces I reported for the
site concerned the tactic, favored among
some militia groups, of committing crimes
in order to ambush law enforcement person-
nel. Before the post went live, I fielded an
anxious phone call from a senior manager in
Santa Monica. He was alarmed that we were
reporting on this practice for a simple reason:
I havent heard of this before. I struggled to
find a diplomatic way to explain that publish-
ing things that readers hadnt heard before
was something that a news organization
should be doing a whole lot more of: it was, in
fact, the definition of news.
But news and its safekeeping were con-
cepts that the Yahoo management corps
would find difficult to digest throughout my
tenure, and it showed in the operations basic
infrastructure. A separate Yahoo bureau in
Washington, D.C., where I was based, was
initially focused on financial coveragea beat
that made little sense some 250 miles south of
Wall Street, and even less sense if you consid-
ered that the recently designated D.C. bureau
chief still maintained a principal residence in
New York.
Stranger still, the D.C. bureau was initially
housed in the companys lobbying offices, in
a famous high-rise office building devoted to
influence-peddling directly across from the
U.S. Capitol. The notorious, insanely pricey
Charlie Palmer steakhouse, where industry
flacks romance lawmakers just beyond the
ambit of federal lobbying strictures, was on
the ground floor. If you happened into the
wrong office space while visiting the D.C.
bureau (as I usually did, since I worked from
homethis was long before Marissa Mayer
took control of the company and deemed
telecommuting a hazardous drain on Yahoos
resources and general morale), youd stumble
across a cache of Yahoo-branded coffee mugs
or mousepads intended to fill out gift bags at
this or that tech-industry reception.
It was hard, amid such glaring reminders
of the companys true corporate mission, to
feel like you were anything more than glori-
fied party swag yourself. What we were doing
in the news division added value to Yahoos
brand, to be sure. But we understood all too
well that just as easily as we had sprung into
being to forestall continual fee increases from
partner companies, we could be stripped
down and sold for spare partsor worse,
left to languish in the backwaters of Yahoos
sprawling global bureaucracy.
Thats Entertainment!
This latter fate in particular preyed on our
The Baffler [no.27] ! 83
The Dol lar Deb auch
minds, since it was already overtaking another
of the companys blog startup projects. Yahoo
was planning to debut a ring of arts and
entertainment blogs, and had hired a dozen
or so well-established digital journalists to
cover movies, TV, digital culture, and publish-
ing. But as it turned out, the site would never
get off the groundinstead, it stalled in beta
development for more than a year.
While high-stakes corporate intrigue over
the entertainment project raged out West, the
propertys entertainment bloggers became
steadily more restive, bored, and angry. They
suffered all the small-bore indignities of daily
blog workcovering dubiously newsworthy
developments in their field and manufactur-
ing click-baity takes on this or that meaning-
less popcult trend or product in order to drive
trafficbut in a complete vacuum.
It was like an especially cruel lab experi-
ment, depriving rats of sustenance and social
recognition until they started tearing at their
own flesh. Everyone was being paid reason-
ably well, but each day they generated a full
menu of content for a site that didnt exist,
setting out to titillate, engage, and inform
readers who never showed up. A friend who
was hired into this Beckett-like simulacrum
of a journalism shop told me that he staved
off the ennui of the job by knocking off early
most afternoons to go swim at the Y for
hours on end. It felt like a small blow for self-
respect to get healthy, if nothing else, on the
companys dime.
Soon, it all came crashing down for the
entertainment blogs in typical Yahoo fashion.
Without any notice, a division chief in Santa
Monica pulled the plug; word had it that she
had never liked the project, and felt that it ran
at cross purposes with Yahoos weirdly essen-
tialist womens interest portal, whose lack- directly to the deal-cutting news director out
luster editorial mission was neatly summed up
by its blindingly chipper name, Shine.
Company veterans readily grasped the real
problem here: Because the entertainment site
84 1 The Baffler [no.27]
would, like its news counterpart, traffic in
its own reporting and criticism, it would fit
awkwardly alongside the boosterish product
featured on Shine. And in the worst-case
scenario, should it succeed on anything like
the scale that our news sites had, it would
make Shine look even more like the obliging
waystation for repurposed PR copy that it
was rapidly becoming. Shine would, there-
fore, gleam on, while the entertainment blogs
went abruptly dark (or more precisely, their
chronic darkness became a permanent condi-
tion), right around the Christmas holidays.
My counterpart whod been editing and
supervising the launch was preparing to have
a baby and go on maternity leave at the time;
she at least won a fairly generous buyout,
albeit one that came with the hidden cost of a
nondisparagement clause.
Over at the news blogs, meanwhile, we
kept nervously piling up the pageviews. Our
2010 election coverage netted huge traffic,
as did our treatment of big breaking news
stories, like the Japanese tsunami and the
killing of Osama bin Laden. On the sites first
anniversary, I wrote a post marking our one-
billionthyes, thats billion, with a bpa-
geview, and surveyed our achievements with
not-unreasonable pride.
Still, we began to experience our own
issues with the Santa Monica brain trust.
At first, Yahoos executive-suite dysfunc-
tion looked as though it might work to our
advantage. Within the space of a month,
my immediate supervisor fled for another
job in television; I got promoted to replace
him, which meant, on paper at least, that the
blog and I would be sitting securely, if not
exactly pretty, within the managerial maw of
the purple behemoth. I would be reporting
West, who greatly appreciated the ways in
which our native content had simplified his
hardball negotiations with content providers.
I wouldagain, on paperbe able to hire on
 I wrote a post marking our one-billionthyes,
thats billion, with a bpageview.
9
a political team to begin covering the fast-
approaching 2012 presidential election cycle.
This balmy sense of provisional well-being
proved short lived: the glorified snakes-and-
ladders game that would soon establish itself
as the all but perpetual status quo in the
C-suites of Santa Monica was only just getting
under way. First, my brand-new editorial pro-
tector in Santa Monica suddenly hit the bricks,
taking a more congenial deal-making post at
Disney. Big company players likewise checked
out at several layers of management above
him; at one point, on a phone call with a senior
manager on the East Coast, we did the math
and realized that the closest thing to a clearly
defined superior we had was the companys
interim CEO, off in Yahoos hulking corporate
mothership in downtown Sunnyvale.
Not that Sunnyvale was looking all that
more secure. The companys maximum
leader, a gratifyingly foul-mouthed woman
named Carol Bartz, had been given the
heave-ho via phone (you stay classy, Yahoo!)
after the company board decided that their
stock was underperforming, even by Yahoo
standards. No one yet knew who would suc-
ceed her, and I had to jury-rig a set of tem-
porary fixes as I went down my list of urgent
needs, from bringing on new correspondents
to cover the 2012 election to getting full-
time benefits for our blog team, who had all
initially come on, Walmart style, as just-shy-
of-fulltime contract workers, strategically
ineligible for health care. (All together now:
You stay classy, Yahoo!) At the end of one
especially anguished call with the aforemen-
tioned, infinitely patient East Coast man-
ager, I told him that I was going to hire at
least one new political reporter, to cover the
burgeoning GOP primary field, unless he did
something to stop me. He didnt, and I did.
So, with tremulously mounting confidence, I
could say I was overseeing an actual election
teami.e., three reporters, as opposed to a
harried and overworked duo.
America: Dont Ask
Unfortunately, Santa Monica, too, was slowly
realizing that a major election cycle was
on the way. An enterprising soul in senior
management there had me draw up a long
series of memos outlining our election game
plan. I also got dragooned into advising him
on a half-hearted bid to launch still another
informal blog franchise, this one devoted to
opinion journalism around the election. It
was here that things started to get truly un-
nerving. Conference call after conference call
ate into my workday, and so far as I could see,
this projectwhich bore the vaguely Shine-
like sobriquet Voiceswas on track to join
the entertainment startup on Yahoos island
of lost blog toys.
The moment of reckoning appeared nigh
when the Santa Monica schemer presented
me with an elaborate PowerPoint laying out
his, uh, vision for Voices. The first slide of-
fered the familiar toy-soldier pairing of left
pundit and right pundit; the arrangement was
made to look vaguely dynamic only by virtue
of being formatted as a flow chart. But some-
thing more than just the hackneyed muscle
memory of cable news production was amiss
here. In the right quadrant of the flow chart,
in excitable all caps, was the name of the Belt-
way rights self-styled prince of darkness,
Robert Novak. The problem was that by this
time, Novak had been dead for two years. In
the same measured tones in which I was ear-
lier obliged to parse out the concept of news,
The Baffler [no.27] ! 85
The Dol lar Deb auch
I now explained that, while it would indeed
be a major coup to land Bob Novak for this
project, the move would not result inhow
shall I put this?very lively prose.
It got worse. The consensus pet election
project back West turned out to be some-
thing called Remake America. This was
essentially an updated video-based version of
Ask America, a failed Yahoo gimmick from
2010. The idea back then had been to harness
Yahoos central assetits gargantuan online
readershipas a reporting tool. We were
to be tasked with converting our enormous
online following into policy advisers without
portfolio. We would petition them with ques-
tions about their political priorities, and they
would, one diligent web user at a time, help
the American republic stir out of its forbid-
ding post-2008 slough of despond.
There were a few problems with this
notion. First off, Yahoo readers, like online
readers everywhere, were prone to erecting
enormous, vituperative flame threads out of
nothing at all. Putting this group of choleric
and self-dramatizing personalities in charge
of the countrys policy priorities was a bit like
entrusting negotiations for a global carbon-
emissions treaty to the Koch brothers.
Second, by far the most vocal Yahoo com-
menters were the most dogmatically racist;
wed joke grimly that a Yahoo commenter
certificate had to be a complimentary gift to
every newly enrolled member of the Klan.
Seasoned front-page programmers knew that
anytime we published anything touching
on race relations in America, the first order
of business was to disable comments on the
post before it went live. Likewise, the mood
among front-page programmers never got
more frantic than on the occasions when we
managed to push out a post that even mildly
challenged the Confederate mindset with the
comments still enabled.
To make matters worse, since topical
reasoning was not the strong suit of this
86 1 The Baffler [no.27]
energized commentariat, its members would
occasionally descend on a completely unrelat-
ed post en masse and smear it with thousands
of imbecilic racist outbursts. On one unfor-
tunate occasion, this happened to one of our
posts, and before we could reverse engineer
our way out of the hate-fest, the CMS system
seized up; we couldnt shut off the comments,
and we couldnt delete the post. For weeks on
end, it just sat there, oozing ugly misspelled
racist obscenities and brutally mocking the
high-flown civic conceits of lets-put-on-a-
show digital interactivity.
Ask America, in short, was to tank well
before we could get America to cough out
a coherent reply. In the blog trenches, we
coined a new name for the project: America:
Dont Ask.
Remake/Remodel
But the dream of interactivity dies hard at a
company with a gargantuan readership and
no clear business plan. Even as it became
obvious that Ask America would gain zero
traction among our readers, the companys
PR team chugged aimlessly along, dispatch-
ing a clutch of Ask Americabranded trucks,
stuffed no doubt with yet more purple-hued
Yahoo swag, to college campuses and hipster
neighborhoods across the country. When
that didnt work, they would try again, two
years later.
Hence Remake America, which sought
to recast its America-probing antecedent as
a high-concept, and closely micromanaged,
Frank Luntzstyle focus group. Since it was
clear that we couldnt just throw open the
floor to the more, well, yahoo elements of the
Yahoo nation, the overlords of Santa Monica
elected to retain maximum filtering power
over just who would represent America, and
how. The idea now was to recruit a group
of ordinary Americans to supply running
commentary on the election in a series of
video diaries. It would be a walking, talk-
ing cross-section of the American public: a
struggling small-business owner in the upper
South, a Missouri veteran trying to support
his family while recovering from war injuries,
and so on. In reality, of course, this was a
fantasy projectionwhat the give-and-take
of a presidential campaign would look like if a
clutch of Yahoo executives were charged with
casting and scripting it.
It was also, of course, anything but jour-
nalism. The voters and families taking part
in Remake America were carefully screened
and coached by roving teams of producers
and videographers, so that their responses
to political events were just about as real and
spontaneous as the drunken hookups on
Jersey Shore. The eyeball barons in California
may have been diffident about editing, but
they sure could stunt-cast.
In a series of conference calls and face-
to-face meetings, I made it clear that my
crew of news bloggers would have nothing to
do with the projectand that I viewed it as
self-promotional news-branding gone off the
rails. I suggested that the producers choreo-
graphing the effort might do well to consult
Albert Brookss prescient seventies takedown
of the documentary-verite style, Real Life, or
the great James L. Brooks journalism moral-
ity play, Broadcast News. Yahoos top brass
honored my plea to quarantine the news blog
team from the overheated doings at Remake
Americabut it was becoming increasingly
clear that I was regarded as a doomsaying,
old-media scold at the great digital cross-
branding banquet.
As part of a new partnership with ABC
News, Remake America was briefly plastered
across daytime television. But it, too, inglo-
riously expired after election day. America
declined to be remade in much the same way
it had shunned being asked: interrogate it or
prod it as we may, the country just sat there.
(Taking a somewhat more cynical view of
things, one could hardly blame it. America
was initially asked, and when it didnt yield
satisfactory replies, it was to be remade;
Yahoos relationship with its host nation, like
that with its workforce, followed the queasy
script of battered spouse syndrome.) Today,
any search for the projects content on Yahoo
just directs you back to the news homepage;
even in death, Remake America is desperately
trying to get you to mistake it for news.
In the meantime, other changes were
afoot. The long-vacant management slots
separating me from the CEO empyrean were
at last getting filled, with executives from TV,
business journalism, and successful Internet
startups. Synergy abounded. TV studios
sprouted under the aegis of the New York
office, and we teamed up with ABCs politi-
cal division to host liveblogs and webcasts for
presidential debates and primary nights.
This was all well and good, but it lacked a
certain visionary lan. If Yahoo was going to
become a true digital news brand, it would
have to go on a major innovation bingeitd
have to start breaking shit, in other words.
One senior news executive exulted that Ya-
hoo News was in the most enviable position
that any media company could beit was a
startup, hed intone, that already had the larg-
est readership on the web. This, too, was clas-
sic Yahoo corporate boilerplate: it sounded
vaguely pulse-pounding when shouted above
a PowerPoint stream, but on closer examina-
tion, it made no sense whatsoever. Precisely
because it already commanded the larg-
est readership, Yahoo couldnt be a startup.
Startups thrive on investor bets made on the
promise of future profitability and, over the
course of their initial runs, are case studies
in capital destruction; far from ascending
to Yahoo-scale market dominance, theyre
expected to rapidly burn through their initial
investment stakes en route to attracting
more and bigger investors. For Yahoo to be a
genuine startup, it would have to utterly fail
at being Yahoo.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 87
The Dol lar Deb auch
Very much by contrast, Yahoo was a
lead investor in digital enterprises. It didnt
develop bold new tech propertiesit merely
acquired them. The companys main claim to
profitability has been the mountain of shares
it was able to flip when the Chinese online
shopping giant Alibaba went public. (True to
form, Yahoo declined to float its enormous
Alibaba winnings to fund a bold or entrepre-
neurial bid to revolutionize the web; instead,
it spun them off into the guardianship of a
dummy corporation, so as to save the compa-
ny billions in tax liabilities from the Alibaba
IPO.) To goad its lead executives into startup
mode would be like expecting the lead actors
in The Sopranos to run a marathon without no-
tice. Far from offering the best of all possible
worlds, as its chief Santa Monica cheerleader
insisted, this managerial conception of the
news divisions pseudo-startup mission of-
fered the worst. It wouldnt add anything to
our already strained reporting and editing
capacity. The news sites had laid off their only
two fulltime copyeditors in an earlier round
of staff cuts, and never bothered to replace
them; why copyedit, after all, when you
can break shit? That lustily intoned startup
mantra, I knew, was certain to continue
sanctioning colossal wastes of resources and
effort like Remake America. Let a thousand
videographers bloom!
As I took in all the way-new management-
speak sprouting up around me, my own
corporate redundancy was mercifully taking
shape behind the scenes. In the waning days
of 2011, an energetic Santa Monica kingpin
requested that I sit in on a conference call;
the subject line of his email request simply
read 2012, which led me to assume that wed departure, the company went on a celebrity
be discussing election-coverage plans.
Instead, I was informed that my job had
been completely overhauledand stripped
of most of its critical responsibilities. Our
new director of politics coverage was to be
my deputy, working out of New York, while
88 1 The Baffler [no.27]
down in D.C., I would, absurdly, be expected
to ignore national politics and the Washing-
ton bureau I had hired and supervised. In-
stead, I would be captaining coverage of na-
tional and global affairs. Poor Yahoo; even
in its bid to banish me from its election-year
lovefest of media platforms, the company
was betraying yet again its cursory attention
to the basic spadework of beat delineation:
to supervise coverage of national and global
affairs was to be in charge of everything.
Or nothing, as the case may be. There was
no mistaking that this redefinition of my job
duties, however lamely the new management
team tried to dress it up, amounted to the
constructive termination of someone who
was turning out to be less and less of a team
player. I told them Id consider the reconfig-
ured post, and after I had, a few days later, I
wrote in to submit my resignation. During
the long fortnight during which I served out
my notice, similarly dispirited colleagues told
me that the mastermind of my corporate re-
purposingthe same jaunty soul who longed
to conjure Bob Novak back from the dead
was crowing that he had blown up Yahoo
News. Shit, once again, was broken.
Conflicts Without Interest
The smarmy Silicon Valley vacuity of the
phrase aside, the notion that I and my blog
team had been blown up always struck me
as more than a little melodramatic. Nothing
ever blows up at Yahoounless its a lurid
tabloid listicle or a racist comment thread.
Absorption, not combustion, is always the
order of the day.
It thus came as no surprise that, after my
hiring spree, snapping up industry personages
to be nominal editorial leaders of its most
ad-friendly verticals. Cosmetics mogul Bobbi
Brown took over as editor in chief of Yahoos
beauty site last spring. (Yes, even though Ya-
hoo is now getting comfortable with the term
 I was regarded as a doomsaying, old-media scold
at the great digital cross-branding banquet.
9
editor, the company clearly still doesnt have
a clue what it means.) David Pogue, a former
New York Times digital-gadget correspondent
so thoroughly in the tank for his industry
that he actually married one of its PR execu-
tives, was welcomed with open arms in 2013;
Yahoos maximum leaders lauded him as a
perfect specimen of synergistic tech coverage.
Leading this revolting charge is Marissa
Mayer, the former Google executive brought
on to captain the company in 2012, after its
previous Silicon Valley CEO recruit, former
PayPal honcho Scott Thompson, was found
to have faked his college credentials on his
rsum. Mayer is now banking on an overtly
corrupt model of digital journalism to help
stanch Yahoos steady hemorrhage of ad rev-
enue. Significantly, one of her right-hand men
in consolidating this market-prostrate vision
was the jargon-barking mogul-in-waiting
Guy Vidra, who rose from captaining the
companys vague news strategy efforts to
overseeing all of Yahoos news operations.
Mayers new synergistic vision yielded
quick dividends. What Mayer is pleased to
call the sites stable of digital magazines is,
in reality, the barest of fig leaves for an orgy
of sponsored contenti.e., copy commis-
sioned, inspected, and (increasingly) edited
by advertisers, and misleadingly packaged as
reliable, independent journalism in order to
win eyeballs and reader trust. (A collateral
casualty of this campaign, oddly enough, was
the womens site Shine, which was deemed
insufficiently innovative, even though it
remained one of the few revenue-earning
stalwarts of the Yahoo media empire.) Under
Mayers leadership, the company has brought
this ugly art form to sophisticated new
heightsand in the process blown through
all the basic rudiments of journalistic eth-
ics. Behold New York Times reporter Vindu
Goels account of the unsightly new effort to
repackage a craven old-media sin:
Built using technology acquired last year as
part of the companys $1.1 billion purchase
of Tumblr, the new publications combine
original articles and material licensed from
other sites, as well as big photos and videos,
into an endless page of titles aimed at entic-
ing people to linger. Mixed into that stream
is a different kind of advertisingso-called
native ads or sponsored postswhich look
almost exactly like all the other articles
and videos on the page except that they are
sponsored by brands like Knorr, Best Buy,
and Ford Motor. These ads, Yahoo hopes,
will attract the attention of more readers and
make more money for the company. In some
cases, Yahoo editors even help to write that
advertisinga blurring of the traditional
lines between journalists and the moneymak-
ing side of the business.
Indeed, Goels dispatch features Yahoo
digital magazine editors trying to one-up each
other in formulating ad-friendly content strat-
egies and tying themselves up into incoherent
knots as they desperately try to rationalize
their permanent state of market prostration.
I think that our involvement elevates the
advertising, Sarah McColl, the erstwhile
editor in chief of Yahoo Food, told the Times.
Our ability to bring editorial knowledge
and finesse to advertising content makes it
better and gives it a point of view. No, actu-
ally: when editorial knowledge is deployed to
elevate advertising, it stops being either edito-
rial, or knowledge; its hackery, sold out to the
highest, or just the bare middling, bidder.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 89
The Dol lar Deb auch
For an edifying look at how this editorial
outlook affects hitherto uncompromised and
independent journalism, ponder the grue-
some tale of Yahoo-enabled corporate prior
restraint recently reported by Deadspins Kev-
in Draper. Mayers editorial deputy, Kathy
Savitt, went into heads-must-roll conniptions
when she learned that Yahoo Sports NBA
blogger Kelly Dwyer made passing reference
to Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilberts
career as a predatory lending baron as CEO
of Quicken Loans. Just days before, Yahoo
had entered into a lucrative partnership
with Gilberts company to produce an inane
NCAA March Madness bracket competi-
tion. Yahoo sources told Draper that Savitt
began loudly demanding that Dwyer be fired
for his revenue-threatening thought crime;
and while she was evidently talked down
from that ludicrous demand, she did proceed,
at Gilberts vainglorious urging, to scrub
Dwyers modest blog post from both the site
and Yahoos searching functionalities. This
obsequious brand of synergy speaks volumes
about Yahoos recent devolution. Not only
does it involve the once-respected sports
blog network that was meant to serve as the
model for the companys news division, but
much more to the point, Savitt had precisely
zero background and training in journalism,
apart from a stint thirty years before at her
college newspaper. Mayer, in her infinite
market-prostrate wisdom, merely added all of
Yahoos editorial operations to Savitts baili-
wick as marketing directorbecause, you see,
thats just how Yahoo rolls.
Yahoos present, blinding moment of
self-devouring synergy is but the logical
culmination of all the counter-journalistic
practices that so transfixed company man-
agement during my tenure there. And what
this process portends is only too clear. For all
the clumsy rhetorical lip service Guy Vidra
pays to The New Republics hallowed intel-
lectual traditions, this is what his vision of a
90 1 The Baffler [no.27]
nimble digital news product finally translates
into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategi-
cally designed to conceal a rancid interior of
elevated advertising. This, among count-
less other reasons, was why one could never
make the case for sustaining a stable culture
of reporting and editing at Yahoo News. At
one bygone conclave of the Yahoo managerial
elite, a colleague of mine tried to stress the
need to redouble our commitment to our ex-
isting model of independent newsgathering,
and his plea only earned him this spiteful
rejoinder from a fast-talking Santa Monica
power broker: Past is prologue.
Perhaps, but when all present trends
are converging toward the thoughtless
downscaling of editorial work into a bonus
accessory in a clients advertising account, the
past had better make a deeper impression.
The scrupulous separation of business and
reporting mandates, and the pride of jour-
nalistic craft necessary to effectively police
that separation, are no doubt old-media tradi-
tions, but they became old for a reason.
Mixology
And not surprisingly, when you contemptu-
ously muscle these traditions aside, you get
a media company that only plunges more
deeply into its own self-inflicted identity
crisis. Where Yahoo executives might be
rewarding grown-up journalists for grown-up
journalistic work, they instead corral them
together to play-act bit parts for Yahoo-
branded spectacles-on-demand. So it came to
pass that, amid the blizzard of horrific news
otherwise known as the 2014 election cycle,
I came across an invitation to a Yahoo event
called the Midterm Mixer, to be convened at
the Capitol Lounge, a D.C. nightspot.
The events jaunty moniker perfectly
captured the careless, slapdash worldview of
the producers who confected it. Hosted by
network news also-ran Katie Couric (who
has recently signed on as Yahoos global
anchor), the mixer promised little enough in social-media hype, and probably more than
the way of furtive ruling-class mating rituals; its share of pageviews. But none of the activ-
instead, it was a veritable Grand Guignol ity chronicled on the page was memorable,
of misguided synergy. David Gregory, the insightful, or remotely informative.
recently deposed host of NBCs Meet the Press, And yet, like the clumsily interred
was to be on hand, presumably to make Cou- remains of Remake America, the vacant
rics descent into election night matre d duty spectacle has soldiered bravely on. As I type
appear dignified, at least by comparison. these words, in mid-November, the Yahoo
There was to be, of course, the cable-man- homepage features Katie Courics breathless
dated presentation of matched major-party video promo trailer for the mixer eventfea-
mouthpieces: Leslie Sanchez for Team R and turing a Twitter-sponsored photo booth and
Jamal Simmons for Team D. For depth and a performance by the Georgetown Chimes,
context, there was a similarly yoked pair of an a cappella combo of painfully white
institutional apparatchiks: longtime antitax undergrads clad in power suitssandwiched
and antigovernment activist Grover Norquist, between two other messy, though eloquent,
the leader of Americans for Tax Reform, on specimens of content synergy in our time:
the right; and on the left, think tank honcho David Pogue, informing us that Microsofts
Neera Tanden, of the White Houseosculat- Taylorite new fitness band is simply beau-
ing Center for American Progress. Politico tiful . . . on the inside, and Bobbi Brown,
White House correspondent Mike Allenthe divulging the secret behind Smoky Eyes for
hacks hack of D.C.s bloated and braindead Glasses. The legend above reads Only on
journalism scenewould also be in atten- Yahoo. Thanks to the likes of Guy Vidra
dance, evidently to serve as a kind of Cheshire and Chris Hughes, we can no longer console
Cat mascot at this most Washington sort of ourselves with the hope that it shall remain
(lowercase) tea party. ever thus.t
The 2014 midterms were in many ways
a landmark ballot, forcing sustained and
wrenching reappraisals of reigning assump-
tions about how our major parties approach
the basic work of attracting (and, all too
often, repelling) key blocs of voters. But none
of this was deemed suitable fodder for the
Yahoo barroom display. Indeed, all that the
event managed to conjure in the way of actual
journalism was the totemic whiff of hard
liquor itselfand even that felt cheap and
unearned. The real-time election-night cov-
erage on Yahoo resembled nothing so much
as a directionless piece of performance art
in which the self-conscious players gradually
succumb to their most disabling fearthat
they are performing before a cavernously va-
cant civic house. Like much Yahoo-branded
activity toward the end of my tenure there,
the Midterm Mixer generated a great deal of R ANDALL ENOS

The Baffler [no.27] ! 91

K iss t h e B o o t
VCs Take the Media
3 Jacob Silverman
Alex Blumberg wanted to start a business.
The veteran radio producer had established
himself with such prestige radio programs as
This American Life and Planet Money. But in
2014 he decided he was ready to strike out on
his ownto build a podcasting network fea-
turing several narrative journalism projects in
the TAL style. He began by starting a podcast
about starting his podcasting business. He
called it StartUp. Meta, I know, he says in
the first episode.
Its certainly that, but its also a clever
proof of concept, illuminating the anything-
but-intuitive connection between startup
economics and real-world business planning.
Whereas most startups fuss obsessively over
unreleased beta versions of a new platform
or iPhone app, or reconfigure sheaves of
worked-over PowerPoint stacks, Blumberg
had something to show people. But there was
a hitch. Unlike a conventional documentary
or reality show, StartUp wasnt a retrospective
chroniclethough it wasnt quite a real-time
narrative either. Blumberg was still building
the company and talking to investors when
the show aired its first episode on August
29, 2014. More installments followed, one
every two weeks. The result was that anyone
Blumberg talked to while creating his start-
uphis wife, potential investors, business
partners and their spouses, would-be adver-
tisersknew they were becoming characters
in a piece of narrative journalism. They were
facing all the struggles that typically beset a
startup projectfrom disputes over equity to
philosophical arguments over how to describe
the companys missionwith the added com-
plication of playing for the audio recorder
the role of themselves. The effect was less
92 1 The Baffler [no.27]
meta than slightly vertiginous: Where does
the media object end and Blumbergs startup
begin? Was this a daring new brand of docu-
mentary journalism or a venture-capital road
show? Was Blumberg turning the spotlight
on himself to chronicle his efforts or to pro-
mote them? The answer in all these cases, as
one might guess, is both. But more impor-
tant, StartUp serves as a strange but useful
case study in deconstructing startup culture,
where the future is anything a rich person
promises it to be and a companys value is a
matter of shared hallucination.
Given its public-radio pedigree, StartUp is
what you might expect: confessional, insis-
tently self-effacing, and chatty. Blumberg is
smart, good-humored, and wears his feelings
on his sleeve. He gets choked up, for instance,
when he asks a new friend to become his busi-
ness partner. The podcast milks awkward
moments for dramatic effect, and there are
more than a few. Blumberg has some excru-
ciating verbal stumbles when first pitching
his business to a prominent venture capital-
ist, and again when his soon-to-be business
partner asks for 47 percent equitya great
deal more than the 10 percent stake Blumberg
had in mind. In episode 4, he rises at 5:30 a.m.,
his voice hushed so that he wont disturb his
sleeping family, and spends several minutes
solemnly reminiscing about The Giving Tree
Shel Silversteins famed childrens fable about
unrewarded generositywhich had made him
cry the previous day.
Before sending out a term sheet to poten-
tial investors, Blumberg has to decide how
much his company is worth. The number his
team comes up with is $10 millionan essen-
tially arbitrary figure, as hes quick to admit.

The valuation, like everything in this startup
world, is a story youre telling, Blumberg says.
Its a promise of future growth. The value
isnt, in any familiar sense, real. But all this is
typical for a startup, especially in the midst of
the present tech bubble. Even some of Blum-
bergs investors admit that his valuation is
S P E N C E R WA LT S
bubble-inflated, but that doesnt seem to mat-
ter. For one thing, many people in Silicon Val-
ley werent around when the last bubble burst.
They havent been chastened by experience;
meanwhile, theres so much easy money slosh-
ing through the system that its entirely plau-
sible for a fortune to be coaxed out of it with
The Baffler [no.27] ! 93
K iss t h e B o o t
little more than a good story and a fistful of
podcast destinations.
The Taking Tree
Chris Sacca, the founder of Lowercase Capi-
tal, one of Blumbergs principal investors,
acknowledges that Blumbergs inchoate com-
pany is overvalued, but he doesnt care, in part
because his $100,000 commitment is com-
paratively small by his firms standards.
There are tens of thousands of people
who consider themselves to be angel inves-
tors, Sacca says. There are hundreds, if not
thousands, of these seed funds. And so all this
money needs to get put somewhere. So there
is a lot of wishful thinking, and even some fan-
tasy, baked into this company, which, after an
extensively chronicled search, settles on the
name Gimlet Media. (Blumberg features a
naming firm that specializes in these matters
on his show, and it proceeds to offer its services
to him pro bono.) Still, even with its new name
and mounting investor interest, Blumbergs
company is a notional, if not strictly fiction-
al, creation. It doesnt quite exist yetit was
even preceded by its first product, the podcast
devoted to the protracted story of its future
founding. Blumberg doesnt find an office and
begin hiring people until several episodes in,
and its never clear exactly how or when Gim-
let Media is incorporated as a business.
But this is precisely whats valuable about
Blumbergs show as a document: all this vague
talk and even vaguer follow-through is entire-
ly representative of how startups work. They
are as much media phenomena as material
concerns. Hype is part of the package, cer-
tainly when they are in pre-launch or stealth
mode. Tellingly, most of the early metrics of
startup success are reputational, rather than
measurably concrete: a spot in a prized incu-
bator; write-ups on TechCrunch, PandoDaily,
Hacker News, or Re/code; mentions on social
media; appearances in festival startup com-
petitions; parties thrown. In the tech-bubble
94 1 The Baffler [no.27]
redux, these ingredients help to drive irratio-
nal valuations as much as new technologies,
patents, engineering talent, or bulletproof
business plans do.
Its thus no great surprise that, after sev-
eral episodes, StartUp the media phenomenon
begins to eclipse Gimlet Media the startup.
The podcast has ascended to the top tier of
the influential iTunes rankings. Investors,
some of whom had ignored Blumbergs ear-
lier entreaties, take notice and begin contact-
ing him. Perhaps its because, for all his pro-
fessed lack of business knowledge and studied
displays of on-air humility, Blumberg actu-
ally knows how to produce compelling audio.
Still, the strangeness of the situation, a kind
of quantum entanglement between StartUp-
as-podcast and StartUp-as-startup, leaves him
surprised. Somehow a podcast about me fail-
ing to generate FOMOa.k.a the fear of
missing outin potential investors, he says,
generated a lot of FOMO in potential inves-
tors. Hes already raised $1.5 million, hitting
his initial target.
Blumbergs efforts also benefited from
felicitous timing. The debut of StartUp co-
incided with Serial, a narrative nonfiction
podcast that has become a pop-culture sensa-
tionperhaps the most popular, and most av-
idly parsed, podcast of all time. Serial goes un-
mentioned in StartUp until episode 10, but it,
too, is made by TAL alums and staffers, some
of them former colleagues of Blumberg, and
you cant help but think that its spectacular
success expedites Blumbergs elevator pitches.
Suddenly, the flannel-and-jeans world of
journalistic podcasts has acquired that most
evanescent and valuable quantity in both the
media and tech worlds: buzz. But with this
excitement comes an air of unreality, andfor
those of us on the outside of the bubblesus-
picion. How much of the interest in StartUp
flows directly from the meta-level conceit of
the show? Whatever one might think of TALs
twee liberalism, can a similarly styled venture
be more than a succs destime? Since when
are venture capitalists interested in fund-
ing high-quality journalism? Can Blumbergs
project really make the kind of money that
gets VCs up in the morning?
This latter quandary is what worries Sacca.
Hes searching for the big payout, and its not
clear if Blumberg can become a 10x compa-
ny, a breakout venture that realizes ten times
its original investment. Yet whats rare about
Blumbergs startup is that its already generat-
ing revenue. He has advertisers, and he uses
the commercial interludes in each episode
(which, he says, go for $6,000 per spot) to
chat up his sponsors, allowing him to simul-
taneously learn from and advertise them. But
this nascent revenue stream presents a funny,
if unacknowledged, problem. Startups arent
supposed to make money; theyre supposed to
spend it. A companys burn ratehow much
cash it spends each monthis a recognized
metric, a signal of an aggressive growth strat-
egy and investor confidence. With a burgeon-
ing audience, a Rolodex of experienced jour-
nalists, and advertising, merchandise, special
events, and other amenities planned, Gimlet
Media shows potential for growth and even
sustainabilityyet these arent especially val-
ued assets in the startup world.
And thats why, at least in part, Sacca and
his investing partner, Matt Mazzeo, fear that
Gimlet doesnt have the potential for global
domination that they seek. Its not a venture-
scale company, Mazzeo says. It doesnt have
proprietary technology; it doesnt intend to
be a platform of potentially enormous reach.
Why arent they trying to create the Insta-
gram of audio? The lack of VC approval is
disappointing. Im describing something
that feels like the biggest thing Ive ever done,
and it seems small to him, a diminished
Blumberg tells his wife.
To civilian eyes, that may not be a problem.
Before its even established, the company is al-
ready making money and putting out a popu-
lar product. What could be wrong with that?
But the truth is that most people surround-
ing a startup dont want it to become a viable
business. They may not even want it to make
moneypie-in-the-sky valuations are easier to
justify when theres no revenue stream, rather
than when theres a modest one, which might
put a damper on growth projections. Valu-
ations, ultimately, reflect that great Silicon
Valley religion: total faith in the future. They
have to remain fantastical so that VCs, com-
pany founders, and startup employees paid in
equity can get their 10x payout.
And it works. Instagram didnt make a cent
before it was sold to Facebook for about $1 bil-
lion, and industry figures now say that it was
undervalued. Facebook later spent $19 billion
on WhatsApp, which generated only $10.2
million in revenue in 2013. Oculus, a startup
developing virtual reality goggles, rode the
hype train to one of the biggest crowdfunding
appeals of all time before it, too, sold itself to
Facebook for $2 billion.
In this environment, what increasingly
matters is either building up a user base of
millions of consumers (and all the personal
data that comes with it) or generating the
kind of irrational exuberance that sells inves-
tors on the fever dream of future success. This
is what drives valuations and attracts ten-fig-
ure acquisitions. For all their talk of building
great companies, tech startups arent seek-
ing to create enduring institutions that will
produce reasonable profits and middle-class
jobs for decades to come. They operate with
shorter time horizons, exercising a particular
form of creative destruction. By using cheap
cash to subsidize products and services, and
then making them available for free or well
below market value, successful startups are
able to wipe out incumbents and would-be
rivals. This, in turn, allows them to concen-
trate capital and profit potential by achieving
great economies of scale. These are the basic
steps in the playbook that enabled Amazon
The Baffler [no.27] ! 95
K iss t h e B o o t
to corner the book and online retail markets
and Uber to present a mortal threat to the
taxi system.
Failures Just Another Word
This monopsonistic tendency is just one re-
spect in which Silicon Valley deviates from
commonly held notions of what makes for a
good business or sensible economics. Whats
valuable to a startup and investors in the short-
term may not be in the best longer-term inter-
ests of customers or the overall economy. The
leaders of the tech elite want different things
from you and I. Bubbles burst, but until this
one does, capital is so cheap and abundant,
and potential payouts so enormous, that from
inside the bubble, it seems irresponsible not to
join the dance. Many bankers similarly knew
that the housing bubble was inflated, or that
they were selling toxic securities, but they felt
they had an obligation to try to extract some
value while the going was still good. Someone
was going to get rich (and, it turned out, those
who failed would simply be bailed out by the
rest of us).
In recent months, a number of prominent
venture capitalists have sounded warnings
about companies burn rates and inflated valu-
ations. At the 2014 edition of Techweek New
York, an industry conference, I watched as a
panel of four VCs reckoned with a simple ques-
tion from the crowd: Are some companies now
overvalued? They each conceded that we are in
a bubble and that the prices and reputations of
some startups are grossly inflated. But none of
them was willing to name an example of such a
company. They seemed reluctant to offend any
powerful players or miss out on future oppor-
tunities. Its not in their self-interest to speak
up; after all, once you start poking around, you
might end up popping the whole bubble.
This attitude inevitably influences both
how work is done and what kind of culture
is created. Startups are about entrepreneur-
shiphustle, networking, and salesmanship
96 1 The Baffler [no.27]
not business development. As Noam Scheiber
wrote last year in a New Republic article about
a doomed startup and its deceitful founder,
Every successful startup is in some sense a
confidence game.
Startups, then, are a perfect corporate
structure for a lottery economy in which suc-
cess has been decoupled from merit, crisis is
the norm, and income inequality is at record
highs. That they tend to waste money and
that most of them fail never registers as an in-
dictment of the system; on the contrary, their
excesses are regarded as a rationale for mak-
ing larger bets on fewer companies. Tales of
missed opportunity and others making it big
only encourage those with means to keep play-
ing the game. If you believe that this world is
not random and capricious, that it is essen-
tially a meritocracy, then your number should
soon come up. The industrys fetishization
of failure stems from its broader talismanic
faith that major setbacks are simply rewards
deferred. Failing just means you havent won
yetand even if you do fail on a permanent
basis, youre likely doing it with someones else
moneysomeone who can afford to lose it.
In his recent book Zero to One: Notes on
Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter
ThielPayPal cofounder, Facebook investor,
billionaire VCthrows some cold water on
free-market capitalism. Its an unexpected
move from a noted libertarian. Competitive
markets, Thiel argues, reduce profits to es-
sentially zero. When everyone is competing
against everyone, particularly in crowded in-
dustries, advantages get worn down and no
one makes any money. Just look at airlines,
he says, which generate billion of dollars in
value but make pennies in profits from each
customer. Google, on the other hand, has a
profit margin around 20 percent. In Thiels
eyes, Google achieves this success by being a
monopoly, relatively unchallenged in online
advertising and several associated businesses,
like search and email. Any good startup, he
 Old medias traditional Ivy League power base
has simply been updated with bullshit titles
like director of digital innovation.

9
says, should find an undercapitalized market
it can exploit and work to monopolize it.
Thiel chooses his examples carefullyand
not especially responsibly. The airline in-
dustry in this country has been notoriously
unstable since its deregulation, and many air-
lines have only recently kept themselves afloat
by declaring bankruptcy, merging with other
carriers, or soaking passengers for fees. When
Thiel says that markets eliminate profits, he
proposes an abstract principle, one that ap-
plies to perfectly competitive markets, which
never have existed, and likely never will. Led
by the finance industry (which in turn was
aided by Treasury-blessed mergers during the
financial crisis), consolidation is certainly in
vogue. But it seems disingenuous to say that
monopolies are the only route to a valuable
business. In this climate of prostrate, indus-
try-captured regulators, seeking to build a
monopoly may be smart, even reasonable. But
it is by no means standard. Still, Thiel is will-
ing to go even further.
Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or
an exception, he writes. Monopoly is the con-
dition of every successful business. (Emphasis in
original.)
In the face of such confident assertions
from an industry leader, do we bother to de-
bate the economics or political implications
of monopoly-as-usual? Or do we simply con-
cede that, for our purposes, bigger questions
involving the public good simply dont matter
much? Thiel has a singularly compelling start-
up story, after all, and theres little doubt that
he speaks for his class of venture capitalists,
who provide the industrys ideological and
financial grounding. Call it 10x or monopoly
capitalismregardless of the nomenclature,
under its dispensation, VCs and the compa-
nies they steer all seek the same thing: to turn
a few big bets into gigantic payouts. In the case
of Thiel, whose funds tend to invest in five to
seven companies at a time, the chief task at
hand is to identify companies that might be
acquiredand yield those enormous gainsin
less than a decade.
Where the Boys Are
Many VCs share this philosophy because they
live in a monoculture that has changed little
in the forty years its been around. Venture
capitalists nearly all look the same and claim
similar life experiences, and they hold up the
same few companies and prominent moguls as
models. According to a recent study by Bab-
son College researchers, women are in charge
of only 2.7 percent of VC-backed companies.
Ninety-four percent of partners at VC firms
are mena four percent increase since the
last bubble.* The number of women in college
computer science programs continues to de-
cline, while the tech industry has acquired the
reputation of a boys club, a pipeline for mostly
white and Asian American graduates of Stan-
ford, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, and the Ivy
League. At Google, Facebook, and Yahoo,
African Americans hold 1 percent of techni-

* In Something Ventured, a celebratory tour through the history of venture capital, the lone woman featured is Sandra
Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco Systems. Cisco fired Lerner in 1990, with one board member telling the thirty-
five-year-old that she should retire. The documentary uses Lerners story as a prompt that allows the all-white male
cast to explain how hard, but necessary, it is to fire people sometimes.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 97

K iss t h e B o o t
cal jobs; the numbers hardly budge when the
pool is expanded to include nontechnical
personnel at these companies. Although the
practice has acquired a whiff of controversy,
many tech companies still tout the virtues of
culture fita nebulous designation that, if
youre honest, means hiring people who are
just like you.
In Zero to One, Thiel says that the best
startups might be considered slightly less ex-
treme kinds of cults. Because they are sup-
posed to be fanatically dedicated and made
up of small teamslean, in the industry
parlancestartup employees should be of a
similar mind. Everyone at PayPal, he says,
was the same kind of nerd.* Thiel is dubious
about people who look different. At Thiels
Founders Fund, he writes, his team institut-
ed a blanket rule: pass on any company whose
founders dressed up for pitch meetings.
This kind of willful myopia may explain
why Silicon Valley has been terribly uncre-
ative in its business models. Most new start-
ups either seek to monetize user data (through
ads or selling personal information) or are part
of whats been called the 1099 economy
platforms that farm out precarious contract
workers to clean houses, drive cars, assemble
furniture, cook meals, and perform other ba-
sic chores for a high-end clientele. In neither
case do startup employees create revenue for
the company; instead, they create a vehicle
through which to extract value from users and
independent contractors. Labor and revenue
remain elastic things, which the rentiers pre-
siding over the pertinent servers are able to
summon on demand and scale up as needed.
To engineers, entrepreneurs, and other
tech elites, this makes a lot of sense. They
generally have the right combination of in-
demand skills, contacts, and cultural back-
* To illustrate this, Thiel later notes that four of the six PayPal founders built bombs in high school. When the compa-
ny became locked in competition with X.com, a rival firm led by Elon Musk, a PayPal engineer (one of the founders,
perhaps) designed a bomb and presented it at a team meeting with the idea of blowing up their rival. Calmer heads
prevailed, Thiel says, and the proposal was attributed to extreme sleep deprivation.
98 1 The Baffler [no.27]
grounds to move seamlessly from one job to
anotherhence the embrace of failure and
serial entrepreneurship. Being a contingent
worker doesnt worry an experienced pro-
grammer. True, he (and it is almost always a
he in this instance) might find that his salary
has shrunk slightly thanks to the wage-fixing
scheme undertaken by Google, Apple, and
other industry giantsthe subject of a class-
action suit currently wending its way through
the courtsbut hes still getting six figures.
Yet when managers reproduce this attitude
further down the income chain, it creates a
frightening form of precarity. This applies
equally to the seventy members of the Intel
cafeteria staff laid off just before Thanks-
giving (the company switched to a different
catering vendor who declined to keep these
workers on) and to the long-term unemployed
twenty-eight-year-old doing microwork un-
der the direction of Amazons Mechanical
Turk.
Some industry executives must be calculat-
ing in their decision to pamper engineers and
managers while squeezing practically everyone
else. But one wonders if they have also insulat-
ed themselves from seeing the consequences
of their model. For these peoplethe found-
ers mythologized by Thiel, even in the name
of his VC fundthe boom-and-bust startup
cycle is nonthreatening because they are gen-
erally well paid, some of them end up very rich,
and risk is pooled mostly in the hands of major
investors. The precariousness of employment,
in which one is bouncing from job to job and
might be involved with several early-stage
companies at once, is a kind of art project. Its
all a lark. This is what Nathan Heller, writing
in The New Yorker, called the new mode of
American success, where people appear to
float above the exigencies of career.
 Blumbergs Gimlet Media partakes in these
same labor relations and in this same vision
of the startup as a kind of Platonic formthe
ultimate proving ground of individual ambi-
tion. His company deviates slightly in that it
doesnt have the potential to become a mo-
nopoly. That also means theres less opportu-
nity to extract value from unwitting customers
or contingent workersthank goodness for
that. Hes hiring journalists, audio engineers,
salespeople, and the like. But one gets the
sense that Blumberg himself is also not risking
muchthat, aside from his cultural bona fides
and lack of ego, he is only one degree removed
from a conventional Silicon Valley founder.
He has a family to support and indicates that
he has gone into modest debtfactors that no
doubt heighten his anxieties about seeing his
business through. But such concerns also loom
larger by virtue of their on-air dramatization;
with his fundraising goal achieved, the stakes
arent material so much as emotional. Theres
little doubt that should Gimlet Media col-
lapse, Blumberg would have a soft landing at
This American Life, or find his way to some new
media startup. Venture capitalists have de-
cided that theres money to be made in media,
or at least in starting media companiesa fact
that should concern us all.
The Journalism App
Indeed, Gimlet Media is not merely following
in the wake of Serial. Todays VC landscape
is studded with journalism startups like Vox,
The Intercept, Vice, BuzzFeed, Mic, Fusion, Me-
dium, and Business Insider. Some of these out-
fits do fine work, but they havent been able to
make up for the industrys decade-long attri-
tion, and journalisms stubborn dependence
on advertising gives prospective funders
ample reason to doubt their long-term vi-
ability. Online advertising can support a busi-
ness only at scale, and to scale journalism,
you have to publish a lot of material, and do
it cheaply (this is where journalism becomes
content). The attendant collapse of free-
lance rates favors those who have money or
who can treat journalism as a hobby, and so
the barrier to entry remains high. In practical
terms, this means that old medias traditional
Ivy League power base has simply been up-
dated with a few new moguls, technologists,
and those blessed with bullshit titles like di-
rector of digital innovation or entrepreneur-
in-residence. Meanwhile, new-media ventures
tend to poach from a familiar cohort of es-
tablished talent, generating excitement and
demonstrating the new companys supposed
ambition. As a consequence, like in the tech
industry, a small group of people rotate among
jobs, often failing upward, while earning good
salaries and a reputation of being au courant.
When the next venture fund or billionaire
with a conscience decides to start a website for
digital storytelling, they naturally go back to
the same well. If you find yourself in this priv-
ileged population and have good networking
skills, you can play this game for some time.
But it is not a way to create enduring institu-
tions capable of both generating profits and
fulfilling a civic function.
As the startup model migrates beyond tech
and media, it loses its charmed aura, especially
as risk devolves from bankers to more impor-
tant entities like the University of California,
which has a $250 million venture fund, or the
state of New York, where Governor Cuomos
START-UP NY program has created tax-free
zones for new businesses around the state,
leading to a projected loss of $323 million in
tax revenue through 2017. But startups contin-
ue to be seen as an innovative cure-all for our
countrys economic malaise, especially when
they can be combined with the false popu-
lism of crowdsourcing. It didnt take long for
President Obama and Congress to take note
of this. The JOBS Act, signed into law April
2012, called for looser restrictions on indi-
viduals investing in emerging growth compa-
nies. After signing the bill, President Obama
The Baffler [no.27] ! 99
K iss t h e B o o t
announced, Startups and small business will
now have access to a big pool of potential in-
vestors, namely the American people. Yes,
now you can plunk down up to $10,000 in a
company without needing to be informed of
risks or filing paperwork with the SEC.
This possibility excited Alex Blumberg
and his listeners alike. He began fielding
interest from all over. In the podcasts sev-
enth episodethe last before Gimlet Media
unveiled its first real program, Reply All, a
show about the Internethe announced,
Today on the show, we want to bring in our
last group of investors: you, our listeners. He
continued, sounding like a cross between an
egg-slicer infomercial and an NPR fundrais-
ing drive: Thats right. We want to cut you in
on this action.
To Blumbergs credit, he went on to sur-
vey some of the risks involved in investing
in startups. He also explained that the SEC
still hadnt finalized the rules surrounding
the JOBS Act, meaning that ordinary people
were not yet allowed to put their cash in start-
100 1 The Baffler [no.27]
ups. Aspiring shareholders had to be accred-
ited investorsessentially, those who make
$200,000 or more per year or are worth at least
$1 million. Barbara Roper, director of investor
protection for the Consumer Federation of
America, told one of Blumbergs colleagues,
A market that brings together inexperienced
issuers with unsophisticated investors and
harnesses the power of the Internet for hype
is one that is likely to experience a very high
volume of problems. The show then duly re-
corded one of its trademark moments of styl-
ized awkwardness, with Blumberg forced to
acknowledge that he was the inexperienced
issuer, his listeners the untutored lenders, and
the hype machine the very audio product we
were consuming. Oops.
The warnings didnt seem to matter. With-
in hours of the episodes release, Blumberg
made an announcement: Gimlet had already
raised $275,000 through Alphaworks, an eq-
uity crowdfunding platform. The window, at
least for now, was closed. But inside the bub-
ble, the next opportunity, or the next failure,
is never far away.t
P. S . MUELLER
E
Exxh
h ii bi
bi t
tD 5 Lou
D5 Lou Beach
Beach

2015 LOU BEACH

Gran Flor Sin Pantalones.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 101

The Baffler [no.27] ! 101
K iss t h e B o o t

The Taming
of Tech
Criticism
3 Evgeny Morozov

BOOK REVIEWED
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us,
by Nicholas Carr, W. W. Norton, $26.95

W hat does it mean to be a technology critic

in todays America? And what can technol-
ogy criticism accomplish? The first question
seems easy: to be a technology critic in Amer-
ica now is to oppose that bastion of vulgar dis-
ruption, Silicon Valley. By itself, however, this
opposition says nothing about the critics poli-
ticsan omission that makes it all the more
difficult to answer the second question.
Why all the political diffidence? A critical
or oppositional attitude toward Silicon Val-
ley is no guarantee of the critics progressive
agenda; modern technology criticism, going
back to its roots in Germany at the turn of
the twentieth century, has often embraced
conservative causes. It also doesnt help that
technology critics, for the most part, make a
point of shunning political categories. Instead ed technologists; the humans, in turn, are
of the usual left/right distinction, they are treated as abstract, ahistorical migrs to the
more comfortable with the humanist/anti- global village, rather than citizen-subjects of
humanist one. What if the cost of machines the neoliberal empire.
that think is people who dont?a clever Most contemporary American critics of
rhetorical question posed by the technology technologyfrom Jaron Lanier to Andrew
author George Dyson a few years agonicely Keen to Sherry Turklefall into the cultural-
captures these sorts of concerns. The ma- romantic or conservative camps. They be-
chines in question are typically reduced to moan the arrogant thrust of technological
mere embodiments of absurd, dehumanizing thinking as it clashes with human traditions
ideas that hijack the minds of poorly educat- and fret over what an ethos of permanent dis-

102 1 The Baffler [no.27]


Silicon Valleys bullshit empire
is impervious to critique.
9 nology. They dont shy away from attacking
ruption means for the configuration of the
liberal self or the survival of its landmark in-
stitutions, from universities to newspapers.
So do occasional fellow travelers who write
literary essays or works of fiction attacking
Silicon ValleyJonathan Franzen, Dave Egg-
V I C TO R J U H A S Z
ers, Zadie Smith, and Leon Wieseltier have all
penned passionate tracts that seek to defend
humanistic values from the assault of tech-
Internet companies, but their attacks mostly
focus on the values and beliefs of the compa-
nies founders, as if the tech entrepreneurs
could simply be talked out of the disruption
that they are wreaking on the world. If Mark
Zuckerberg would just miraculously choose
a tome by Isaiah Berlin or Karl Kraus for his
The Baffler [no.27] ! 103
K iss t h e B o o t
ongoing reading marathon, everything could
still go back to normal.
Meanwhile, a more radical strand of tech
criticism, confined mostly to university pro-
fessors, barely registers on the public radar.
Thoselike Robert McChesney or Dan Schil-
ler or Vincent Moscowho work on tech-
nology, media, and communications within
Marxist analytical frameworks, hardly get any
attention at all. The last radical critics to en-
rich the broader public debate on technology
were probably Murray Bookchin and Lewis
Mumford; for both, technology was a key site
for struggle, but their struggles, whether for
social ecology or against hierarchical bureau-
cracy, were not about technology as such.
That radical critique of technology in
America has come to a halt is in no way sur-
prising: it could only be as strong as the eman-
cipatory political vision to which it is attached.
No vision, no critique. Lacking any idea of
how sensors, algorithms, and databanks could
be deployed to serve a non-neoliberal agenda,
radical technology critics face an unenviable
choice: they can either stick with the empiri-
cal project of documenting various sides of
American decay (e.g., revealing the power of
telecom lobbyists or the data addiction of the
NSA) or they can show how the rosy rheto-
ric of Silicon Valley does not match up with
reality (thus continuing to debunk the New
Economy bubble). Much of this is helpful, but
the practice quickly encounters diminishing
returns. After all, the decay is well known, and
Silicon Valleys bullshit empire is impervious
to critique.
Why, then, aspire to practice any kind of
technology criticism at all? I am afraid I do
not have a convincing answer. If history has,
in fact, ended in Americawith venture capi-
tal (represented by Silicon Valley) and the neo-
liberal militaristic state (represented by the
NSA) guarding the sole entrance to its crypt
then the only real task facing the radical tech-
nology critic should be to resuscitate that
104 1 The Baffler [no.27]
history. But this surely cant be done within
the discourse of technology, and given the
steep price of admission, the technology critic
might begin most logically by acknowledg-
ing defeat. Changing public attitudes toward
technologyat a time when radical political
projects that technology could abet are miss-
ingis pointless. While radical thought about
technology is certainly possible, the true radi-
cals are better off theorizingand spearhead-
ingother, more consequential struggles, and
jotting down some reflections on technology
along the way.
The Self-Driving Critic
Nicholas Carr, one of Americas foremost
technology critics, is far from acknowledg-
ing defeat of any sortin fact, he betrays no
doubts whatsoever about the relevance and
utility of his trade. In his latest book, The
Glass Cage, Carr argues that we have failed to
consider the hidden costs of automation, that
our penchant for delegating mundane tasks
to technology is misguided, and that we must
redesign our favorite technologies in such a
way that humans take on more responsibil-
ityboth of the moral and perceptual variet-
iesfor operating in the world.
Carr makes this case using his trademark
style of analysis, honed in his previous book,
The Shallows. Drawing on the latest findings
in neuroscience and timeless meditations
from various philosophers (Martin Heidegger
stands next to John Dewey), he seeks to diag-
nose rather than prescribe. The juxtaposition
of hard science and humanities is occasion-
ally jarring: a deeply poetic section, which
quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Robert
Frost, is abruptly interrupted to inform us
that a study of rodents, published in Science in
2013, indicated that the brains place cells are
much less active when animals make their way
through computer-generated landscapes than
when they navigate the real world.
The Glass Cage is subtitled Automation and
 Technology criticism is just an elaborate
but affirmative footnote to the status quo.
9
Us, and Carr tries hard to direct his critique
toward the process of automation rather than
technology as such. His material, however, re-
peatedly refuses such framing. Consider just
three of the many examples that appear under
automation: the automation of driving via
self-driving cars, the automation of facial rec-
ognition via biometric technologies, and the
automation of song recognition via apps like
Shazam, which identify a song after just a few
seconds of listening. They do look somewhat
similar, but differences abound as well. In the
first example, the driver is made unnecessary;
in the second example, technology augments
human capacity to recognize faces; in the
third example, we create a genuinely new abil-
ity, since humans cant recognize unknown
songs. Given such diversity, its not obvious
why automationrather than, say, augmen-
tationis the right framework to understand
these changes. What are we automating with
the song identification app?
Carrs basic premise is sound: a little bit of
technology and automation can go a long way
in enabling human emancipation but, once
used excessively, they might result in an ero-
sion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a
slowing of reactions. Not only would we lose
the ability to perform certain tasksCarr ded-
icates a whole chapter to studying how the in-
troduction of near-complete automation to the
flight deck has affected how pilots respond to
emergenciesbut we might also lose the abil-
ity to experience certain features of the world
around us. GPS is no friend to flaneurs. Spell
checkers once served as tutors, he laments.
Now all we get is dumb autocorrect. Here is the
true poet laureate of First World problems.
Carr doesnt try very hard to engage his op-
ponents. Its all very well to complain about
the inauthenticity of digital technology and
the erosion of our cognitive and aesthetic
skills, but it doesnt take much effort to dis-
cover that the very same technologies are also
widely celebrated for producing new forms of
authenticity (hence the excitement around
3-D printers and the Internet of Things: fi-
nally, we are moving from the virtual to the
tangible) and even new forms of aesthetic
appreciation (the art world is buzzing about
the emergence of The New Aestheticthe
intrusion of imagery inspired by computer
culture into art and the built environment).
Why is repairing a motorcycle deemed more
pleasurable or authentic than repairing a 3-D
printer?
Carr quickly runs into a problem faced by
most other contemporary technology critics
(the present author included): since our brand
of criticism is, by its very nature, reactivewe
are all prisoners of the silly press releases is-
sued by Silicon Valleywe have few incentives
to exit the technological debate and say
anything of substance that does not already
presuppose that all communications services
are to be provided by the market. Its as if, in
articulating a program, Silicon Valley had also
articulated all the possible counter-programs,
defining a horizon of thought that even its op-
ponents could never transcend.
As a result, Carr prefers to criticize those
technologies that he finds troubling instead of
imagining what an alternative arrangement
which may or may not feature the technology
in questionmight be like. His treatment of
self-driving cars is a case in point. Carr opens
the first chapter with rumination on what it
was like to drive a Subaru with manual trans-
mission in his youth. He notices, with his usu-
al nostalgic flair, how the automation of driv-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 105
K iss t h e B o o t
ing might eventually deprive us of important
but underappreciated cognitive skills that are
crucial to leading a fulfilling life.
This argument would make sense if the
choice were between a normal car and a self-
driving car. But are those really our only op-
tions? Is there any evidence that countries
with excellent public transportation systems
swarm with unhappy, mentally deskilled au-
tomatons who feel that their brains are under-
used as they get inside the fully automated
metro trains? One wonders if Nicholas Carr
has heard of Denmark.
Note what Carrs strand of technology crit-
icism has accomplished here: instead of debat-
ing the politics of public transportationa
debate that should include alternative concep-
tions of what transportation is and how to pay
for itwe are confronted with the need to
compare the cognitive and emotional costs of
automating the existing system (i.e., embrac-
ing the self-driving cars that Carr doesnt like)
with leaving it as it is (i.e., sticking with nor-
mal cars). Disconnected from actual politi-
cal struggles and social criticism, technology
criticism is just an elaborate but affirmative
footnote to the status quo.
The inherent latent conservatism of
Carrs approach is even more palpable when
he writes about the automation of work. He
starts from the depressing premise that we
are all, somehow, born alienated, and the best
way for us to overcome this alienation is by ...
working. Carr draws on research in psychol-
ogyMihaly Csikszentmihalyis notion of
flow is crucial to his argumentto posit that
challenging, engaged work does make us hap-
pier than we realize. Its absence, on the other
hand, makes us depressed:
More often than not . . . our discipline flags
and our mind wanders when were not on
the job. We may yearn for the workday to be
over so we can start spending our pay and
having some fun, but most of us fritter away
106 1 The Baffler [no.27]
our leisure hours. We shun hard work and
only rarely engage in challenging hobbies.
Instead, we watch TV or go to the mall or log
on to Facebook. We get lazy. And then we get
bored and fretful. Disengaged from any out-
ward focus, our attention turns inward, and
we end up locked in what Emerson called the
jail of self-consciousness. Jobs, even crummy
ones, are actually easier to enjoy than free
time, says Csikszentmihalyi, because they
have the built-in goals and challenges that
encourage one to become involved in ones
work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.
Thus, as our work gets automated away, we
are likely to get stuck with far too many unre-
deemed alienation coupons! Carrs argument
is spectacular in its boldness: work distracts
us from our deeply alienated condition, so we
have to work more and harder not to discover
our deep alienation. For Carr, the true Stakh-
anovite, work is a much better drug than the
soma of Huxleys Brave New World.
As with the transportation example, some-
thing doesnt quite add up here. Why should
we take the status quo for granted and en-
courage citizens to develop a new ethic to deal
with the problem? In the case of work, isnt
it plausible to assume that wed get as much
flow and happiness from doing other chal-
lenging thingslearning a foreign language or
playing chessif only we had more free time,
away from all that work?
Were he not a technology critic, Carr could
have more easily accepted this premise. This
might also have prompted him to join the
long-running debate on alternative organiza-
tions of work, production, and life itself. Carr,
however, expresses little interest in advancing
this debate, retreating to the status quo again:
work is there to be done, because under cur-
rent conditions nothing else would deliver
us as much spiritual satisfaction. To be for
or against capitalism is not his game: he just
comments on technological trends, as they
pop outin a seemingly automated fashion
of the global void known as history.
And since the march of that history is in-
creasingly described with the depoliticized
lingo of technologyprecariousness turns
into sharing economy and scarcity turns litical imagination. It also reveals the limita-
into smartnesstechnology criticism comes
to replace political and social criticism. The
usual analytical categories, from class to ex-
ploitation, are dropped in favor of fuzzier and
less precise concepts. Carrs angle on automat-
ed trading is concerned with what algorithms
do to tradersand not what traders and algo-
rithms do to the rest of us. A reliance on auto-
mation is eroding the skills and knowledge of
financial professionals, he notes dryly. Only
a technology criticwith no awareness of the
actual role that financial professionals play
todaywould fail to ask a basic follow-up
question: How is this not good news?
Nicholas Carr finds himself at home in
the world of psychology and neuroscience,
and the only philosophy he treats seriously is
phenomenology; he makes only a cursory ef-
fort to think in terms of institutions, social
movements, and new forms of representa-
tionhardly a surprise given where he starts.
Occasionally, Carr does tap into quasi-Marx-
ist explanations, as when he writes, repeat-
edly, that technology companies are driven
by money and thus are unlikely to engage in
the kind of humanistic thought exercises that
Carr expects of them.
But its hard to understand how he can
square this realistic stance with his only con-
crete practical suggestion for human-centered
automation: to push the designers of our tech-
nologies to embrace a different paradigm of
ergonomic design, so that, instead of building
services that would automate everything, they
would build services that put some minor cog-
nitive or creative burden on us, the users, thus
extending rather than shrinking our intel-
lectual and sensory experiences. Good news
for you office drones: your boring automated
work will be made somewhat less boring by
the fact that youll have to save the file manu-
ally by pressing a buttonas opposed to hav-
ing it backed up for you automatically.
This user-producer axis exhausts Carrs po-
tions of his techno-idealism, for his proposed
intervention assumes, first, that todays users
prefer fully automated technologies because
they do not know whats in their best inter-
est and, second, that these users can convince
technology companies that redesigning their
existing products along Carrs suggestions
would be profitable. For if Carr is sincere in
his belief that technology companies are driv-
en by profit, theres no other way around it: he
is either a cynic for advocating a solution that
he knows wouldnt work, or he really thinks
that consumers can renounce their love of
automation and demand something else from
technology companies.
Carr firmly believes that our embrace of
automation comes from confusion, infatua-
tion, or lazinessrather than, say, necessity.
The trouble with automation, he explains,
is that it often gives us what we dont need at
the cost of what we do. In theory, then, we
can all live without relying on the wonders of
modern technology: we can cultivate our cog-
nitive and aesthetic skills by ditching our GPS
units, by cooking our own elaborate dishes, by
making our own clothes, by watching our kids
instead of relying on apps (au pairs are so last
century). What Carr fails to mention is that
all of these things are much easier to do if you
are rich and have no need to work. Automa-
tionof cognition, emotion, and intellectis
the intolerable price we have to pay for the
growing corporatization of everyday life.
Thus, theres a very sinister and disturbing
implication to be drawn from Carrs work
namely, that only the rich will be able to cul-
tivate their skills and enjoy their life to the
fullest while the poor will be confined to me-
diocre virtual substitutesbut Carr doesnt
The Baffler [no.27] ! 107
K iss t h e B o o t
draw it. Here again we see what happens once
technology criticism is decoupled from so-
cial criticism. All Carr can do is moralize and
blame those who have opted for some form of
automation for not being able to see where it
ultimately leads us. How did we fail to grasp
just how fun and stimulating it would be to
read a book a week and speak fluent Manda-
rin? If Mark Zuckerberg can do it, what ex-
cuses do we have?
By offering to reduce the amount of work
we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives
with greater ease, comfort, and convenience,
computers and other labor-saving technolo-
gies appeal to our eager but misguided desire
for release from what we perceive as toil,
notes Carr in an unashamedly elitist tone.
Workers of the world, relaxyour toil is just
a perception! However, once we accept that
there might exist another, more banal reason
why people embrace automation, then its
not clear why automation la Carr, with all
its interruptions and new avenues for cogni-
tive stimulation, would be of much interest
to them: a less intelligent microwave oven is
a poor solution for those who want to cook
their own dinners but simply have no time for
it. But problems faced by millions of people
are of only passing interest to Carr, who is
more preoccupied by the non-problems that
fascinate pedantic academics; he ruminates
at length, for example, on the morality of
Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner.
Carrs oeuvre is representative of con-
temporary technology criticism both in the
questions that it asks and the issues it avoids.
Thus, theres the trademark preoccupation
with design problems, and their usually easy
solutions, but hardly a word on just why it is
that startups founded on the most ridicu-
lous ideas have such an easy time attracting
venture capital. That this might have some-
thing to do with profound structural trans-
formations in the American economye.g.,
its ever-expanding financializationis not a
108 1 The Baffler [no.27]
conclusion that todays technology criticism
could ever reach.
From There and Thou
to Here and Now
A personal note is in order, since in surveying
the shortcomings of thinkers such as Nicholas
Carr, Im also all too mindful of how many of
them Ive shared. For a long time, Ive consid-
ered myself a technology critic. Thus, I must
acknowledge defeat as well: contemporary
technology criticism in America is an empty,
vain, and inevitably conservative undertak-
ing. At best, we are just making careers; at
worst, we are just useful idiots.
Since truly radical technology criticism is a
no-go zone for anyone seeking a popular au-
dience, all we are left with is debilitating faux
radicalism. Some critics do place their focus
squarely on technology companies, which
gives their work the air of anti-corporate pop-
ulism and, perhaps, even tacit opposition to
the market. This, however, does not magically
turn these thinkers into radicals.
In fact, what distinguishes radical critics
from their faux-radical counterparts is the
lens they use for understanding Silicon Valley:
the former group sees such firms as economic
actors and situates them in the historical and
economic context, while the latter sees them
as a cultural force, an aggregation of bad ideas
about society and politics. Thus, while the
radical critic quickly grasps that reasoning
with these companiesas if they were just an-
other reasonable participant in the Haberma-
sian public sphereis pointless, the faux-rad-
ical critic shows no such awareness, penning
essay after essay bemoaning their shallowness
and hoping that they can eventually become
ethical and responsible.
In a sense, its just a continuation of the old
battle between materialism and idealism. At
the very start of my career as a technology crit-
ic, I fell into the idealistic trap, thinking that,
with time, good ideas could crowd out bad
 The rallying cry of the technology critic
and I confess to shouting it more than onceis:
If only consumers and companies knew better!
9
ones. As Silicon Valley was extending its reach
into domains that were only lightly touched
by information technologythink of trans-
portation, health, educationthese fields
were suddenly overflowing with half-baked,
stupid, and occasionally dangerous ideas.
Those ideas could and should be documented,
studied, and opposed. This, I thought, was
the true calling of the technology critic.
Serious technology criticism, I thought,
could tie the tongues of our digital gurus, re-
vealing their simplistic sloganeering for the
cheap dross that it is. All that hankering for
frictionlessness and eternal bliss, the cult
of convenience and total transparency, the
thoughtless celebration of self-reliance and
immediacy: so much in Silicon Valleys mas-
ter plan smacked of teenage naivet. Instead
of waxing lyrical about the utility of appsthe
bailiwick of conventional technology criti-
cismthe technology critic could reveal the
political and economic programs that they
helped to enact. Thus, I thought, it was pos-
sible to be neither romantic nor conservative
while keeping politics and economics front
and center.
To pick an example from my own work: A
smart trashcan that uploads snapshots of its
contents to Facebookyes, it existsmight
be read as an experiment in getting our online
friends to police our behavior. Or it might be
read as an extension of political consumerism
to the most banal domestic chores. Placed un-
der the right theoretical lens, even mundane
objects could help illuminate the contempo-
rary condition. Moving between such objects
and ideologies, the technology critic could
reveal how important, critical questions are
not being asked and how certain marginal in-
terests are being sidelined. To recover these
lost perspectives and continue a debate that
would otherwise be closed prematurely: this
is what the best kind of technology criticism
could accomplish.
Well, goodbye to all that. Today, its obvious
to me that technology criticism, uncoupled
from any radical project of social transforma-
tion, simply doesnt have the goods. By slic-
ing the world into two distinct spheresthe
technological and the non-technologicalit
quickly regresses into the worst kind of solip-
sistic idealism, paying far more attention to
drummed-up, theoretical ideas about technol-
ogy than to real struggles in the here and now.
In a nutshell, the problem is this: given
enough time, a skilled technology critic could
explain virtually anything, simply by assum-
ing that somebody, somewhere, has confused
ideas about technology. That people have
confused ideas about technology might occa-
sionally be the case, but its a case that ought
to be made, never taken for granted. The ex-
istence of Facebook-enabled trashcans does
not necessarily mean that the people building
and using them suffer from a severe form of
technological false consciousness. Either way,
why assume that their problems can be solved
by poring over the texts of some ponderous
French or German philosopher?
Alas, the false consciousness explanation is
the kind of low-hanging fruit that no technol-
ogy critic wants to pass up, as it can magically
transport us from the risky fields of politics
and economics to the safer terrain of psychol-
ogy and philosophy. Its so much easier to
assume that those trashcans exist due to hu-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 109
K iss t h e B o o t
manitys inability to peruse Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty than to investigate whether
the inventors in question simply tapped into
available subsidies from, say, the European
Commission.
Such investigations are messy and might
eventually prompt uncomfortable questions
about capital, war, the role of the statethat
are better left unasked, at least if one doesnt
want to risk becoming that dreadful other
type of critic, the radical. Its much safer to
interpret every act or product as if it stemmed
from some erroneous individual or collective
belief, some flawed intellectual outlook on
technology.
Take our supposed overreliance on apps, the
favorite subject of many contemporary critics,
Carr included. How, the critics ask, could we
be so blind to the deeply alienating effects of
modern technology? Their tentative answer
that we are simply lazy suckers for technologi-
cally mediated conveniencereveals many of
them to be insufferable, pompous moralizers.
The more plausible thesisthat the growing
demands on our time probably have some-
thing to do with the uptake of apps and the
substitution of the real (say, parenting) with
the virtual (say, the many apps that allow us to
monitor kids remotely)is not even broached.
For to speak of our shrinking free time would
also mean speaking of capital and labor, and
this would take the technology critic too far
away from technology proper.
Its the existence of this technology
proper that most technology critics take for
granted. In fact, the very edifice of contempo-
rary technology criticism rests on the critics
reluctance to acknowledge that every gadget
or app is simply the end point of a much broad-
er matrix of social, cultural, and economic re-
lations. And while its true that our attitudes
toward these gadgets and apps are profoundly
shaped by our technophobia or technophilia,
why should we focus on only the end points
and the behaviors that they stimulate? Here
110 1 The Baffler [no.27]
is one reason: whatever attack emerges from
such framing of the problem is bound to be
toothlesswhich explains why it is also so at-
tractive to many.
If technology criticism were solely about
aesthetic considerationsIs this gadget well
made? Is this app beautiful?such theoreti-
cal narrowness would be tenable. But most
technology critics find themselves in a double
bind. They must go beyond the aesthetic di-
mensionthey are decidedly not mere asses-
sors of designbut they cannot afford to re-
veal the existence of the rest of the matrix, for
that, too, risks turning them into something
else entirely.
Their solution is to operate with real tech-
nological objectsthese are the gadgets and
apps we see in the newsbut to treat the users
and manufacturers of those objects as imagi-
nary, theoretical constructs. They are imagi-
nary and theoretical inasmuch as their
rationale is imposed on them by the explana-
tory limitations of technology criticism rather
than grasped ethnographically or analytically.
In the hands of technology critics, history
becomes just a succession of wise and foolish
ideas about technology; there are usually no
structuressocial or economic onesthat get
in the way.
Unsurprisingly, if one starts by assuming
that every problem stems from the domi-
nance of bad ideas about technology rather
than from unjust, flawed, and exploitative
modes of social organization, then every
proposed solution will feature a heavy dose
of better ideas. They might be embodied in
better, more humane gadgets and apps, but
the mode of intervention is still primarily
ideational. The rallying cry of the technol-
ogy criticand I confess to shouting it more
than onceis: If only consumers and com-
panies knew better! One can tinker with
consumers and companies, but the market
itself is holy and not to be contested. This is
the unstated assumption behind most popu-
lar technology criticism written today.
Well, suppose consumers and companies
did know better. This would mean, presum-
ably, that consumers would change their be-
havior and companies would change their
products. The latter does not look very prom-
ising. At best, we might get the technological
equivalent of fair-trade lattes on sale at Star-
bucks, a modern-day indulgence for the rich
and the doubtful.
The first optiongetting consumers to
change their behavioris much more plau-
sible. But if the problem in question wasnt a
technology problem to begin with, why ad-
dress it at the level of consumers and not, say,
politically at the level of citizens and institu-
tions? The lines demarcating the technologi-
cal and the political cannot be drawn by those
forever confined to think within the techno-
logical paradigm; one needs to exit the para-
digm to get a glimpse of both alternative ex-
planations and the political costs of framing
the issue through the lens of technology.
Thus, technology critics of the romantic
and conservative strands can certainly tell us
how to design a more humane smart energy
meter. But to decide whether smart energy
meters are an appropriate response to climate
change is not in their remit. Why design them
humanely if we shouldnt design them at all?
That question can be answered only by those
critics who havent yet lost the ability to think
in non-market and non-statist terms. Tech-
nological expertise, in other words, is mostly
peripheral to answering this question.
But most of our technology critics are not
really interested in answering such questions
anyway. Liberated from any radical inclina-
tions, they take the institutional and political
reality as it is, but, sensing that something is
amiss, they come up with an ingenious solu-
tion: Why not ask citizens to internalize the
costs of all the horror around them, for that
horror probably stems from their lack of self-
TIM LANE
The Baffler [no.27] ! 111
control or their poor taste in gadgets? It is in
this relegation of social and political problems
solely to the level of the individual (there is no
society, there are only individuals and their
gadgets) that technology criticism is the theo-
retical vanguard of the neoliberal project.
Even if Nicholas Carrs project succeeds
i.e., even if he does convince users that all
that growing alienation is the result of their
false beliefs in automation and even if users,
in turn, convince technology companies to
produce new types of productsits not obvi-
ous why this should be counted as a success.
Its certainly not going to be a victory for pro-
gressive politics (Carr is extremely murky on
his own). Information technology has indeed
become the primary means for generating
the kind of free time that, in the not so dis-
tant past, was at the heart of many political
battles and was eventually enshrined in laws
(think of limits on daily work hours, guaran-
teed time off, the free weekend). Such politi-
112 1 The Baffler [no.27]
cal battles are long gone.
In the past, it was political institutions
trade unions and leftist partiesthat workers
had to thank for the limited breaks they got
from work. Today, these tasks fall squarely
on technology companies: the more Google
knows about you, the more time you will
save every day, as it personalizes everything
and even completes some tasks (like retriev-
ing boarding passes) on your behalf. At best,
Carrs project might succeed in producing
a different Google. But its lack of ambition
is itself a testament to the sad state of poli-
tics today. Its primarily in the marketplace
of technology providersnot in the political
realmthat we seek solutions to our prob-
lems. A more humane Google is not neces-
sarily a good thingat least, not as long as
the project of humanizing it distracts us from
the more fundamental political tasks at hand.
Technology critics, however, do not care.
Their job is to write about Google.t
TIM LANE
I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron
3 Xu Lizhi

I swallowed a moon made of iron

They refer to it as a nail

I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment

documents

Youth stooped at machines die before their time

I swallowed the hustle and the destitution

Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust

I cant swallow any more

All that Ive swallowed is now gushing out of my throat

Unfurling on the land of my ancestors

Into a disgraceful poem.

Translated from the Chinese by friends of the Nao project.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 113

K iss t h e B o o t
People Who Influence
Influential People Are the Most
Influential People in the World
3 George Scialabba
Twentieth-century liberalism has won.
So ran the first sentence of The New Republics
eightieth-anniversary anthology back in 1994.
Liberalism inspired democratic revolutions
from the Soviet Union to South Africa, ac-
cording to the anthologys editor, Dorothy
Wickenden, and finally disabused this coun-
try of its prolonged infatuation with conser-
vatism. Occupying the White House were
two men with intellectual edge and moral
intuition, the magazines editors enthused,
who offered the best chance in a generation
to bring reform and renewal to a country that
desperately needs both.
How accurate you think this judgment is
depends on what you understand by that pe-
rennially disputed word, liberalism. Origi-
nally it meant the opposite of mercantilism,
the close government regulation of commer-
cial policy to benefit domestic merchants by
means of tariffs and restrictions on the move-
ment of capital and technology. Mercantilism,
protectionism, and industrial policy all name
various aspects of the impulse to limit compe-
tition from abroad. As Britain and the United
States became the worlds leading economic
powers in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, respectively, each decided that other
countries efforts to favor the home team were
no longer cricket and that unregulated (i.e.,
free) competitionwhich, by the merest co-
incidence, they were most likely to winwas
in everyones best interest. Liberalism, from
the Latin word for free, is the name of this
ideology. Even now, European political parties
114 1 The Baffler [no.27]
BOOK REVIEWED
Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics
and Culture in America, edited by Franklin Foer,
Harper Perennial, $17.99
that call themselves liberal mean by it pro-
business. The leading voice of nineteenth-
century liberalism was The Economist, which
famously argued that to provide famine aid to
Ireland would be to interfere with the neces-
sarily benign workings of the free market.
In English (as in Latin), free has more than
one meaning. Besides unconstrained, it also
means generous, as in Give freely to those
in need or Though a Nobel Prize winner,
shes pretty free with her time when students
ask. So in the United States, liberal also
came to denote redistributive, welfare-state
policies that aim to extend to the nonaffluent
a modicum of economic security, equality of
opportunity, and civil rights. This sense of
liberalism, the bte noire of the right from
Nixon to the Tea Party, might seem to have
swept the terminological field, but now there
is also neoliberalism, which, since the Clin-
ton administration, has described the biparti-
san consensus on free trade, privatization, fi-
nancial deregulation, and all other dictates of
the sovereign Market. No wonder books with
titles like What Is Liberalism? appear regularly.
Whatever liberalism is, The New Repub-
lic is generally considered to be its American
avatar. The magazine was founded in 1914
by Herbert Croly, a sometime architectural

critic who had written a book five years ear-
lier, The Promise of American Life, that greatly
impressed a wealthy philanthropic couple.
Crolys book argued that Hamiltons federal-
ism had eclipsed Jeffersons localism, and that
Americas destiny was to be a national, indeed
global, commercial power, with its activist ex-
ecutive branch coordinating policy with busi-
ness, financial, and cultural elites. The whole
point, Croly wrote to Willard Straight, the
magazines first owner, is that we are trying
to impose views on blind or reluctant people.
This self-conscious elitismthe conviction
that an inert, ignorant populace needs to be
mobilized from above by executive power,
public and private, which in turn requires
the guidance of enlightened, responsible in-
tellectualshas remained at the core of the
journals self-conception throughout its varie-
gated history. Populism, class conflict, radical
DAVID SUTER
democracy, mass movementsall these were
for outsiders. The New Republic, from the be-
ginning, was for insiders.
Croly himself, though well off and well con-
nected, was not exactly an insider, but his fel-
low TNR editor Walter Lippmann certainly
was. Like generations of his successors at the
magazine, Lippmann was a bright young Har-
vard graduate who quickly plugged himself
into political Washington and literary New
York. Soon he and Croly were dining regularly
with President Wilsons senior adviser, urging
him to let us know whether or not we are mis-
interpreting what the President is trying to
do, lest the magazine unintentionally con-
flict with the purposes of the government.
Intelligence at the elbow of powerthis has
always been The New Republics ideal. No-
where is this ideal more lovingly commemo-
rated than in The New Republics latest anthol-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 115
K iss t h e B o o t
ogy, Insurrections of the Mind, published last
year to mark the magazines one-hundredth
anniversary. Respectful Suggestions of the Mind
would have been, on the whole, a more accu-
rate title.
The marriage of welfare statism and civil
liberties, Franklin Foer writes in his intro-
duction to Insurrections, is essentially the
definition of American liberalism. That mar-
riage came under strain in the 1980s and 90s,
when the New Rights largely bogus critique
of big government conquered official Wash-
ington and the media. Faced with a choice of
righteous irrelevance or glamorous relevance,
The New Republic chose relevance. The edi-
tors supported cuts in taxes and social spend-
ing, criticized affirmative action, published a
notorious cover article opposing Hillarycare,
and hired a slew of conservative writers. Offi-
cial Washington loved it; the Reagan White
House even sent a courier over every week to
pick up twenty copies. But though this right-
ward shift was opportunistic, it wasnt unprin-
cipled opportunism. Opportunism, after all,
was the bedrock principle of The New Republic.
Not the uncomplicated, self-serving kind, but
the well-meaning, deluded kind that believes
above all in maintaining credibility with the
powerful, since how else can anything be ac-
complished except by whispering in their ear?
Not all the results were entirely bad: Mick-
ey Kauss civic liberalism, for one, was an assurances, looked foolish. TNR enthusiasti-
earnest if problematic effort to craft a humane
alternative to the welfare state, and TNR was
an early and consistent supporter of gay mar-
riage. But mostly the magazine spent these
two decades distancing itself from grassroots
liberalism, following Clinton, Gore, Schumer,
and other centrist Democrats in embracing
the business-friendly neoliberalism of the
Democratic Leadership Council and support-
ing such ultimately disastrous initiatives as
NAFTA, financial deregulation, and welfare
reform, which helped kill the New Deal. Al
Gores candidacy was the magazines last gasp.
116 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Since 2000, New Republic writers have seemed
demoralized, rousing themselves only for oc-
casional spiteful attacks on the left (Nader,
Occupy, Snowden), for fervent warnings
about the dangers of Islamic radicalism, and
for frequent admonitions to presidents to use
American military power wherever possible.
Foers definition of American liberalism is
incomplete: the marriage he describes has
actually been a love triangle. From the out-
set, American liberalisms preference for gov-
ernment activism at home has been matched
by its internationalism; it has advocated for
a unilateral, interventionist foreign policy.
Here is where liberalismand TNRhave
gone most egregiously and damagingly wrong.
Liberalism cherishes skepticism more than
any [other] ideology, Foer writes in Insurrec-
tions, with a touch of self-congratulationand
self-deception. On the contrary, it is The New
Republics credulousness, its uncritical accep-
tance of the premises of official policy, that is
most apparent whenever the use of force is in
question.
The magazine supported Americas entry
into World War I, accepting Wilsons argu-
ment that only American participation could
give us the moral authority to ensure a fair
and democratic peace settlement. The actual
peace settlement was nothing of the sort, and
The New Republic, having trusted Wilsons
cally endorsed the Truman doctrine, blamed
the Soviet Union for the ensuing Cold War,
and ignored inciting actions on the part of
the United States, including its insistence
on rearming Germany, maintaining nuclear
superiority, and keeping leftists, even demo-
cratic ones, out of power everywhere in the
postwar world. The Indochina war was a co-
lossal blunder, which should lead us, the edi-
tors admonished, to reflect on the contrast
between our idealism and our crimes. That
it was blundering idealism rather than a
strategy of global economic integration re-
 Faced with a choice of righteous irrelevance or glamorous
relevance, The New Republic chose relevance.
9
quiring the suppression of independent na-
tionalism that led to Americas intervention
in Vietnam and dozens of other places in the
twentieth century has always been an article
of faith.
That faith was on display when, endorsing
the Reagan administrations Central America
policy in 1986, the magazine pleaded that it is
. . . certain that our aims are different than they
were sixty, even twenty, years ago, argued
that the United States only aim was to aid
in the restoration of democracy, and asked
tough-mindedly whether anyone believes the
Sandinistas will ever peacefully transfer pow-
er by election. (For the record, the Sandini-
stas did, four years later.) Twenty years later,
this same fighting faiththe title of a 2004
manifesto by editor Peter Beinart included
in Insurrectionscaused TNR to welcome the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The war
against Islamic totalitarianism is, like the
former war on Communism, the defining
moral challenge of our time, Beinart wrote,
the arena in which [liberal] values find their
deepest expression. Those who urged skepti-
cism in response to government claims or who
proposed abiding by international law were
softs.
Credulousness toward another favored
stateIsraelhas led The New Republic to
support still other futile and bloody military
interventions. The magazine has continually
harangued its anxiously pro-Israel readership
about the existential dangers the plucky little
nuclear-armed, American-backed regional
superpower faces from the revanchism and
irredentism of the prostrate Palestinians;
implied that Palestinian rather than Israeli
intransigence is primarily responsible for the
failure of peace negotiations; and scolded the
left for maliciously exaggerating Israels faults
and indulging Palestinian terrorism. But al-
though thousands of Palestinian noncomba-
tants have been killed by Israeli forces in Leb-
anon, Gaza, and the West Bankat least an
order of magnitude more than Israeli civilian
victims of Palestinian violenceno one at The
New Republic has entertained, even to reject,
the idea that these old-fashioned war crimes
and law-enforcement excesses also deserve
to be called terrorism. Notwithstanding
Israels frequent assurances that it was eager
to trade land for peace, by now it is clear that
no Israeli government, Labor or Likud, has
been willing since 1967 to halt the gradual an-
nexation of the West Bank and its resources.
But occasional meekly expressed misgivings
from the magazines dovesIrving Howe, Mi-
chael Walzer, Leon Wieseltierhave always
been drowned out by an unceasing barrage
of pro-Israel apologetics from Martin Peretz,
Charles Krauthammer, Michael Oren, and
The New Republics other resident hasbarists.
Why has the magazines vaunted liberal
intelligence lined up so often in support of
brute force? Part of the answer has been sup-
plied by Christopher Hitchens, who knew
what to think of contrarianism before he suc-
cumbed to it:
In the charmed circle of neoliberal and neo-
conservative journalism, unpredictability
is the special emblem and certificate of self-
congratulation. To be able to bray that as
a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them is
to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile
marketability that is so beloved of editors and
talk-show hosts.
But the serious intellectuals who founded
The New Republic were no less eager to ratio-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 117
K iss t h e B o o t
nalize state violence than their lightweight
present-day successors, and with similar mo-
tives. In a masterly essay on The New Republic
and the War (i.e., World War I), Christopher
Lasch retraced the tortuous arguments by
which Lippmann, Dewey, and the rest of the
original cohort convinced themselves to fol-
low Wilson to war, and concluded:
Logic may have dictated non-intervention,
but something deeper than logic dictated
war. The thirst for action, the craving for in-
volvement, the longing to commit themselves
to the onward march of eventsthese things
dictated war. The realists feared isolation
not only for America but for themselves. Ac-
cordingly, they went to war and invented the
reasons for it afterward.
Skepticism? Not when the war drums are
beating.
(A minor continuity: the old New Republic
and the new were about equally ungracious to
those who got it right, from forcing Randolph
Bourne off the magazine in 1917 because he
opposed intervention to setting up an Idiocy
Watch in 2004 to ridicule those who doubted
the wisdom of invading Iraq.)
What The New Republics long history
teaches above all is that power goes its own
way. Those who control investment and em-
ployment, opinion-formation and electoral
finance, are the ones who set the states pri-
orities and constrain its initiatives. These
leaders dont care about good new ideas; they
have their own ideas. Intellectuals can help
those in power to market their strategies, or
to refine them. But they cant change them.
Youve convinced me, FDR is said to have
told a group of left-leaning visitors. Now go
out and force me. But thatmobilizing popu-
lar pressure to counterbalance the power of
businessis just what The New Republic has
never shown any interest in doing. At its most
daring, the magazine has fancied itself speak-
ing truth to power, and sometimes it has. But
118 1 The Baffler [no.27]
the real responsibility of intellectuals is to
speak truth, patiently and perseveringly, to
the powerless. Of this, The New Republic has
never had a clue.
The cover or masthead of The New Repub-
lic has, for most of its life, sported the subtitle
A Journal of Politics and the Arts. If it had
been only a journal of politics, there would be
very little reason to regret its recent frontal
lobotomy at the hands of its new owner. Like
liberalism itself, the magazine had already
definitively surrendered to technocratic
managerialism long before Chris Hughes and
company came along in 2012. But there was
always the back of the book. The New Republic
has been lucky in its literary editors: Edmund
Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Doris Grumbach,
Jack Beatty, and, yes, Leon Wieseltier. Per-
etz and Wieseltier each spent around three
decades at the magazine, and each launched
more than a few young writers. While
Peretzs recruits are a mixed legacy, Wi-
eseltiersJames Wood, Sven Birkerts, Ann
Hulbert, Ruth Franklin, Jed Perl, William
Deresiewicz, Adam Kirsch, and, when com-
pos mentis, Lee Siegelare a gift to criticism.
So were Wieseltiers own all too infrequent
reviews. (His all too frequent Washington
Diarist entries, on the other hand, were a ca-
lamity. Rarely has so much verbal ingenuity
been expended to so little point, except per-
haps in fulfillment of some imagined moral
obligation to sound intelligent. And the di-
ary entries bear a heavy responsibility for the
plague of pseudo-clever putdowns that even-
tually infested the magazine.)
The richness of the magazines arts cover-
age was bound to be underrepresented in any
anthology, but even so, there is far too little of
it in Insurrections of the Mind. There are a few
distinguished pieces of criticism, above all W.
H. Audens Freud and Irving Howes The
Value of the Canon. But not nearly enough.
Even Wieseltiers finest essay, Matthew Ar-
nold and the Cold War, is left out. If Wiesel-

tier were to employ his forced retirement in
compiling a selection of TNRs best criticism,
it would be a real service to the culture, and
keep him out of political mischief besides.
The last item in Insurrections is a short af-
terword by Chris Hughes, the Facebook bil-
lionaire who rode to the magazines rescue
three years ago and who in December oversaw
TNRs transition to a vertically integrated
digital media company. Apart from a pass-
ing phrase or two promising adaptation
a cloud no bigger than a mans handit is
largely boilerplate, offering no hint of the
digital media clusterfuck waiting just around
DAVID SUTER
the corner. Mostly, it makes the right noises,
genuflecting toward quality writing and
putting politics, culture, and ideas side by
side and on an equal plane. Hughes even gets
whats wrong about the magazine right, albeit
inadvertently: the mission, he writes, is to
offer deep, thought-provoking analysis that
encourages critical dialogue between influ-
ential people in our country and world. Too
true. The magazines editors have always be-
haved as if influential people were not the
problem but the solution. But of course, any-
one who understood that would have come to
bury The New Republic, not to save it.t
The Baffler [no.27] ! 119
K iss t h e B o o t
All Hail the Grumbler!
Abiding Karl Kraus
3 Russell Jacoby
Drop the names of Hannah Arendt, Walter
Benjamin, or Leo Strauss at a highbrow din-
ner party, and everyone will nod, and feel a bit
smarter. Like many twentieth-century central
European Jewish intellectuals, Arendt, Benja-
min, and Strauss have played outsized roles in
American letters. The same cannot be said of
Karl Kraus, whom few remember. For thirty-
seven years, Kraus, a satirist and critic who
died in 1936, was a one-man show in Vienna,
publishing his own periodical, Die Fackel,
until shortly before his death. He owned the
journal, he edited it, and after the first years,
he wrote all of its 922 issues.
Kraus, who had a cult following in Vi-
enna, has had virtually no readership in the
American world. In Anglo scholarship one
bumps into Walter Benjamin oftenprobably
too often. He is endlessly cited, studied, and
translated. One database shows more than
five hundred articles in the last fourteen years
with Benjamins name in the title, compared
to just seventy-seven for Kraus. Other writ-
ers from his generation have also been surfac-
ing of late in English: Joseph Roth and Stefan
Zweig, for instance, who inspired Wes Ander-
sons movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. Kraus
has not joined this company.
The reason for this scant attention is clear.
Kraus was drenched in Viennese culture. He
was obsessed with the German language and
its misuse by the Viennese press. He wrote
scathing attacks on Viennese newspapers.
His own writing not only was meticulously
* The few editions of Krauss work in English have been put out by refugee or immigrant scholars, most notably the
late Harry Zohn, a Viennese-born professor at Brandeis University, and they have largely consisted of excerpts.
120 1 The Baffler [no.27]
BOOK REVIEWED
The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus,
translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen,
with assistance and additional notes from
Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27
wrought, but also tended to be aphoristic, if
not gnomic. All this has limited his export-
ability.* He does not travel well.
But now Jonathan Franzen, the bestselling
novelist from Western Springs, Illinois, has
assembled The Kraus Project (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2013), an annotated and bilingual
edition of two essays by the Viennese satirist.
The first essay concerns Heinrich Heine, after
Goethe perhaps the best-known nineteenth-
century German writer, and the second, Jo-
hann Nestroy, a nineteenth-century Vien-
nese playwright. While both essays might
seem distant from twenty-first-century soci-
ety and its ills, for Franzen they hit on an issue
that is as contemporary as ever: the yawning
divide between technological and cultural
progress. According to Franzen and Kraus,
advances in science cannot be doubted, but
the larger culture remains backward. We
are complicated enough to build machines,
wrote Kraus in 1908, and too primitive to
make them serve us.
You dont have to be a satirist to see that
the enterprise of a bestselling American au-
thor translating and annotating an Austrian
 DAV I D H U G H E S

The Baffler [no.27] ! 121

K iss t h e B o o t
satirist has comic possibilities. If an ordinary
writer or scholar proposed to a commercial
publishereven to a university pressa bilin-
gual edition of two Kraus essays, one of which
marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of
a Viennese playwright no one has ever heard
of (Nestroy), he would be laughed out of the
officeor deleted. The project flies by virtue
of Franzens star power.
What would Kraus himself make of this?
In an early issue of Die Fackel, he took swipes
at the attention paid to a famous American
author gallivanting around Vienna, Mark
Twain, who was showing up at multiple
events. The hoopla of a famous writer mak-
ing headlines simply by being present at pub-
lic functions irritated Kraus. Before now,
Kraus wrote in 1899, we have been unable
to boast a sufficient number of personalities
who, if incapable of contributing anything
else to the age, were constantly prepared to
be present among others, and so to fill this
pressing need, Mark Twain hastened to Vi-
enna and courageously threw himself into
the forefront.
Lets give Franzen his due. Hes a serious
student of German and German literature;
he studied for several years in Germany, and
has said he feels a deep affinity with the Vien-
nese critic. Krauss savage criticism of popu-
lar newspapers, suspicion of technology, and
defense of art all appeal to Franzen, whose
nonfiction essays strike similar notes. For
instance, in the spirit of Kraus, Franzen has
attacked the intrusiveness of cellphones and
the loss of private space as people bark out the
dreck of their lives. Much links these writers
from Austria and Illinois.
Franzen cannot be blamed if the system
fawns over stars like him. And we should be
glad that he uses his spotlight to bring figures
like Kraus out of the shade. But while Franzen
champions Kraus, he seems reluctant to cede
the stage to the Viennese critic. The numer-
ous annotations by Franzen overwhelm the
122 1 The Baffler [no.27]
text by Kraus. On some pages Kraus does not
appear at all; it is just Footnote Franzen. On
others, the footnotes squeeze Kraus to a few
lines at the top of the page.
In fact, the book sometimes feels like a
three-ring circus, since Franzen has enlisted
Paul Reitter, an American professor who has
written a book on Kraus, and Daniel Kehl-
mann, a German novelist and Kraus aficio-
nado, to help. Not only do they contribute
to the footnotes, but sometimes they argue
among themselves over how to interpret a
Kraus passage. The first essay of The Kraus
Project is about Heines impact on German
literature, which Kraus considered disas-
trous. Kraus thought Heine, a Paris-based
German-Jewish writer, had dumbed down
journalism in Germany by introducing the
feuilleton, a culture column that appeared
(and still appears) in many European news-
papers. In a footnote, Reitter challenges
Krauss genealogy of the feuilleton, Franzen
challenges Reitter, Reitter answers back, and
so it goes for page after page.
Well, you could do worse than to listen to
several smart fellows argue about Karl Kraus.
But the footnotes take on a life of their own,
and Kraus is pushed aside. That is the irony of
this edition. Franzen is more eager to tell us
about his own life or give us his ruminations
than to let us hear from Kraus. In one example
of this, Kraus avers that Heine brought about
a literary decline that was interrupted in the
nineteenth century only onceby Ludwig
Speidel. Who? Reitter fills us in and questions
the validity of Krauss interpretation. Franzen
chips in:
Point taken. But, again, Kraus isnt even
pretending to write a conventional history.
I confess I havent read Speidel, but I like to
imagine that his writing was striking for the
same kind of freshness, humor, and authen-
ticity that Russell Bakers old columns in the
Times had.
 What would Kraus,
who revealed almost nothing
about his personal life in print,
make of his all-American editor,
who lets it all hang out?
9 life. For Franzen, Vienna in 1910 equals
What is this? A late-night bull session in foot-
notes? Franzen, who prizes Krauss acidity,
sounds off about authors hes never read. Of
course Reitter replies, and the footnotes con-
tinue.
Franzen fills the footnotes with thoughts
about Apple ads, Amazon, tweets, the AOL
homepageall of which he hates. What has
this century achieved? High-resolution
smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos
into liter bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting
Whoa! while they geyser. But what Franzen
turns to the most is his own past and how, like
Kraus, the child of a comfortable family, he
became a Great Hater. He traces his hatred
back to an afternoon in April 1982 in the Han-
nover railway station. He keeps returning to
the story and adding details. More than eighty
footnotes and a hundred pages later, we learn
that during his troubled engagement to V.,
Franzen stumbled upon a breathtakingly
beautiful lady working as an au pair for a year
in Germany. He had known her in college. I
was wildly attracted to her. Thirty-six hours
later he was in bed with her, but she would not
make love with him unless he broke it off with
V., which he could not do. In the morning at
the Hannover railway station, he cursed his
and mankinds fate. He became a Great Hater,
headed back to Berlin, and enrolled in a class
on Karl Kraus. (Later he married and divorced
V.) One wonders what Kraus, who revealed al-
most nothing about his personal life in print,
would make of his all-American editor, who
lets it all hang out.
Linguistic Tickling
Amid his meanderings and mullings, Franzen
has done us the service of translating two key
essays that have not been previously available
in English. For that alone we should tip our
hats to him. Franzen has done this because
he believes that Kraus speaks directly to the
present and to the cultural decay of modern
American in 2013. This proposition, how-
ever, seems doubtful. Kraus is a figure of such
complexity that he resists simple lessons. Yes,
he was a trenchant critic of lax journalism, but
he also got a lot wrong.
For starters, Kraus dabbled in anti-Semi-
tism. He was Jewish himselfor rather he was
born Jewish but joined the Catholic Church in
1911 and left it in 1923. Many of the leading Vi-
ennese figures of his time, including journal-
ists and newspaper patrons, were also Jewish,
and Kraus easily and often referred to them as
the Jewish press. Most of his polemical tar-
gets were Jews, which he made plain. Scholars
and followers of Kraus regularly comment on
his Judaism or flight from it. Gershom Scho-
lem, the German-Jewish savant (who changed
his first name from Gerhard and emigrated
to Palestine in the 1920s), remarked that any-
thing one could say about Krauss relation-
ship to Jewish issues would be wrong. This
seems accurate.
Kraus died on the eve of the Nazi annexa-
tion of Austria, which for a left-leaning Jew-
ish-born intellectual would have spelled ei-
ther a concentration camp or exile. And while
Franzenor rather his second collaborator,
Daniel Kehlmannaddresses Krauss sup-
posed silence confronting Nazism, the truth
is that the satirists idiom has not worn well
in light of what happened. It is not so much
Krauss attack on Jewish this or that, but his
repeated eulogies to German national tradi-
tion and the German mind. These appeals
might have seemed acceptable when his essay
on Heine was published in 1910, but not later
The Baffler [no.27] ! 123
K iss t h e B o o t
in the century. Kraus attacked Heine for his
Frenchified, romantic, and feminine prose
and his rootlessness. Against all this, Kraus
celebrated German culture and masculinity.
The German mind, he opined, will rise
again only when the intellectual flood of filth
in Germany has run its course: when people
again begin to appreciate the mental labor of
linguistically creative manliness and to dis-
tinguish it from the learnable manual labor
of linguistic ticklings. Such talk of filth and
German manliness seems a half step toward
Nazi rhetoric.
But only a half step. Kraus also attacked
anti-Semitism, albeit sometimes indirectly.
In April 1933, some months after Hitler be-
came chancellor and anti-Semitic measures
had been enacted, a German radio station
wrote to Kraus asking for permission to use
his Shakespeare translation in a broadcast.
Kraus declined to provide a free copy and said
he felt obliged to prevent a mistake that discreetly veiled, while in Heine it was visible
would bring the station into conflict with
the current German regulations on cultural
criticism. The mistake? He pointed out that
his translation of Shakespeares sonnets ap-
peared without an essential notice: It was
actually a translation from the Hebrew. This
was, of course, a joke or, more precisely, a dig
at anti-Semitic Nazi edicts.
It wasnt just Heines prose that drove
Kraus to denounce him. It was the failure of
Jewish emancipation that, in his mind, Heine
representedan observation T. W. Adorno
makes in his 1956 essay on Heine. Europes
Jews remained vulnerable, since they were
largely middlemen and professionals such
as lawyers, doctors, and journalists with no
land or property. In the bourgeois era, art-
ists have to earn their livelihoods without pa-
trons, notes Adorno, and that meant attend-
ing to the imperatives of the market. But at
the same time, they had to uphold the fiction
of the pure and autonomous artist. For Jew-
ish writers such as Heine and Kraus, this bal-
124 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Leftists give a pass
to technology. The hoary
term progressives,
still used by some leftists,
captures this affinity.
9
ancing act proved especially fraught. Heine,
however, the advocate of enlightenment,
punctured the illusion of artistic autonomy
and brought to the fore the character of art
as commodity. He has not been forgiven for
that, remarks Adorno; he elicited the rage
of the person who sees the secret of his own
degradation in the confessed degradation
of someone else. This allusive formulation
probably refers to Kraus. Both were Jewish
artists, but in Kraus the cash nexus remained
for all. This was Heines affront.
The offense can be formulated more
concretelyor biographically. Kraus rarely
referred to his economic situation. In eco-
nomic terms, writes his biographer, he was
a rentier, because he derived a significant part
of his income from capital inherited after the
death of his father. Kraus lived very well as
a rentier artist. He occupied the best part of
Vienna, took long vacations, and stayed at
the best hotels. In 1914, when automobiles
were rare, Kraus purchased one and hired a
chauffeur. Money was never an issue for him.
Heines life was the opposite. He grubbed for
jobs, loans, lines of credit, book contracts.
Money was always an issue. This may have
discomfited Kraus. Even their respective con-
versions to Christianity reflect differences of
style and sensibility. Krauss was done secretly
and remains to this day unexplained. Heines
was overtly practical or cynical, to improve his
career prospects, and he did not hide that real-
ity. He gave his conversion no religious signifi-
cance. In fact, he considered it a disgrace and
stain upon my honor that in order to obtain a
position in Prussia, I had to allow myself to be
baptized.
Franzen is more interested in Kraus as a
cultural critic than he is in Krauss relation-
ship to Heine. Nevertheless, that relationship
remains important, in part because it high-
lights the dilemma of the cultural critic, who,
in railing against modernity, risks becoming a
reactionary. Heine exemplified a liberal cos-
mopolitanism that Kraus both shared and
detested. In his flight from this urbane liber-
alism, Kraus often sounds likeand perhaps
becomesa backward-looking traditional-
ist. In following Kraus, Franzen faces the
same issue: At what point does the critique
of what Franzen calls the infernal machine
of techno-consumerism become retrograde?
At what point does the denunciation of mass
media turn into a lament for a past Austria or
America? What politics emerges from this
cultural criticism?
After World War I, in a partial correc-
tion to his Heine piece, which Franzen also
translates, Kraus retracted some of his more
reactionary formulations and altered his poli-
tics, inching toward the political left. Kraus
initially greeted the war with qualified sup-
port; he liked the rectitude of soldiers and
generals, and he preferred straightforward
military bulletins to the phoniness of the ci-
vilian press. He even praised the proclamation
of war by the emperor and in his journal visu-
ally contrasted the imperial announcement
with cheap advertisements for restaurants and
shoes. For a moment, conservatives praised
Kraus as a defender of Austrian honor. But
the slaughter, fake nationalism, and corrup-
tion soon repelled him.
In this afterword to the Heine essay, Kraus
admitted that an explanation was needed for
his change of heart. In so many words, he said
that he oversimplified the situation in his He-
ine essay; that his hatred for cheap sentimen-
tality and facile prose, which to him Heine
exemplified, led him to prize honest power,
which turned out to be worse. In my despera-
tion to escape the machine, he wrote, I said
I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone
to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the
relentless progress with the leftover wreckage
of humankind. But he discovered that Mind
and God and poison, referring to poison
gas of the trenches, went together and that
a pure aestheticism is no longer possible. He
now knew that a beauty-smitten world that
defends its wreckage is the best choice: In
my flight from it, I was compelled to commit
an injustice. Ive never rejected the party of
human values, and now, when, oh, the stand-
point has been reached where Im able to side
with it, I owe the world Spirit an apology. For
Kraus, who never admitted a mistake, this af-
terword was a major step.
But what is the party of human values?
For Edward Timms, Krauss meticulous bi-
ographer, the party of human values meant
the Austrian socialists, and the piece marks a
shift in Krauss politics from right to left. For
much of the 1920s, Kraus drew close to the
Austrian socialists. It was a partial shiftand
toward the end of the Austrian Republic in the
early 1930s, Kraus broke with the socialists
and supported the Austrian fascist Engelbert
Dollfuss as the best alternative to Nazism.
Grumbling to the End of Time
Krauss politics never showed much consis-
tency. Or if he was consistent, it was in his
loathing of the shabbiness of contemporary
life, its newspapers and its technologyand
this, it seems, is what draws Franzen to Kraus,
who was apt to quote verbatim from the news-
paper, like so: Yesterdays competition at
the Dumb Fellow saw the first prize go to
Frulein Luis Kemtner . . . for the smallest foot
and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald
spot. Prizes will be awarded today for the nar-
rowest ladys waist and the biggest nose. Of
The Baffler [no.27] ! 125
K iss t h e B o o t
this Kraus commented, This is what Vienna
looks like in 1912, before offering a typically
aphoristic remark: Reality is a meaning-
less exaggeration of all the details that satire
left behind fifty years ago. The irrepressible
Franzen pops in: I love this line just as it is,
but its also tempting to update it to begin,
Reality TV shows are . . . In a previous foot-
note, Franzen, citing a newspaper article that
gushes over the games available on smart-
phones, decries the ideology of Progress. He
adds, Arent we lucky that our phones are so
smart now!
Krauss attack on progress was hardly con-
fined to swipes at silly contests; he also de-
nounced the technological mind and its role
in violence. Why should it not be possible for
technology, he wrote during World War I,
which makes todays miracle into tomorrows
commodity, to invent an apparatus which by
means of some button, lever, or handle would
enable a person unfit for military service sit-
ting at a desk in Berlin to blow London to
pieces or vice versa? In the Vienna of 1908 he
foresaw the Auschwitz of 1944. Progress will
make wallets out of human skin.
Denouncing capitalist technology has
rarely flourished on the left, which, in gener-
al, believes in progress. Leftists give a pass to
technology, which, they say, can be misused
or squanderedand often isbut basically
moves in the proper direction. The hoary
term progressives, still used by some left-
ists to designate themselves, captures their
affinity with technological improvements.
Lenin famously defined Communism as So-
viet power plus electrification. This needs
little elaboration; ordinary Leninism and or-
dinary leftism saw the future as democratiz-
ing technology, not refashioning it. We just
have to make it cheaper or more available.
We need to expand and improve Internet
connections.
It takes a reactionary sensibilityrare
on the leftto damn the whole enterprise
126 1 The Baffler [no.27]
or much of it. It requires an almost visceral
revulsion to technology to perceive its ad-
vances as hostile to life and letters, and this
reaction undermines sympathy for the critic
from progressives of most stripes. This
is why the politics of the best recent critics
of technology, such as Jacques Ellul or the
almost forgotten Ivan Illich (himself a Vi-
ennese), stood in an uncertain relationship
to the leftand the left to them. Kraus be-
longs in this company of independents. They
damned technology with few qualifications.
The rub is this: politically, this stance usually
leads nowhere. In a time when everyone asks,
Whats your positive proposal? the inde-
pendents have few answersexcept to flee
into the past.
In comparing the authoritarianism of the
early nineteenth century with the democ-
racy of the later part, Kraus did not hesitate
to choose the earlier period. Newspapers may
have become free, but one decade of phra-
seological enslavement has supplied peoples
imagination with more stage-prop rubbish
than a century of absolutist tyranny. Or this:
In the age of absolutism, passion for the the-
ater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling
aroused by political suppression. In times of
universal suffrage, theater gossip is the resi-
due of a culture impoverished by political
freedom.
Such pronouncements smack of elitism and
aestheticism. Once upon a time, Kraus sug-
gests, we enjoyed culture. And thento use
the title of Ortega y Gassetts classic bookthe
masses revolted. Now, their babble pollutes
the air. Krauss megalomania probably fed
his stance. According to a census, he wrote,
Vienna has 2,030,834 inhabitantsthat is,
2,030,833 souls and me. But numbers have al-
ways been used to silence the critic. Presum-
ably, if enough people like SUVs, reality TV,
and over-priced athletic footwear, little more
may be said. The majority has spoken.
Franzen is anxious to rebut charges that he
himself is a technophobe. He tells us that he a permanent provocation to the ideology of
is enchanted with his new Lenovo ultrabook progress, technology, and cheeriness. The
computerexcept for its name, Ideapad. Grumbler was the name he gave to the char-
But he rants often enough about smartphones, acter based on himself in his antiwar play The
tweets, selfies, and consumerism to leave one Last Days of Mankind. The Grumbler calls
in doubt. And why shouldnt he, or we, have for a new religion based on the idea that
doubts? To challenge progress is to challenge
God created man not as a consumer or pro-
its impact; it is to suggest that society not only
ducer but rather as a human being. That the
progresses but regresses. Things not only get
means of life should not be the goal of life.
better, they also get worse. Compared to the
That the stomach should not outgrow the
era of the concentration camp, Adorno once
head. That life is not exclusively based on the
remarked, prisons were the good old days.
profit motive. That a human being is allotted
I was born in 1959, writes Franzen, when
time in order to have time and not to arrive
TV was something you watched only dur-
somewhere faster with his legs than with his
ing prime time and on weekends, and people
heart.
wrote letters and put them in the mail, and
every magazine and newspaper had a robust This is Kraus at his best. Franzens edition
Books section, and venerable publishers made may not succeed in gaining Kraus the place in
long-term investments in young writers. That Anglo-American letters that he deserves, but
world is gone, but is the newer in all respects it is a small step in the right directionprog-
better? ress amid regression.t
I was born before Franzen and attended
university in the sixties, and like students
always are, we were sometimes bored in lec-
tures. We yawned, daydreamed, and napped.
I remember filling pages of my spiral note-
book with intricate doodles. Sometimes we
surreptitiously read the newspaper. On more
than one occasion, our very German profes-
sor, George L. Mosse, would suddenly stop
the lecture and cry out, You! In the back row!
Put down your newspaper! I think of this
interjection now when I lecture in a Wi-Fi
enabled lecture hall. Three quarters of the
students are plugged inor out. Their eyes
and concentration are on screens. They are
looking at their computers or cellphones; and
they are not taking notes, but playing games,
updating their Facebook pages, shopping on-
line, or texting. I give seminars in which stu-
dents have cellphones nestled into their laps,
texting. Is this progress in education or in dis-
traction?
Krauss work sparks such thoughts. With
all his flaws and contradictions, he stands as P. S . MUELLER

The Baffler [no.27] ! 127

Runway City
Buffalo Exchange
Retrofitting a Rust Belt capital
3 Catherine Tumber
During the winter of 2014, at roughly the
same time, two projects laying claim to the fu-
ture were unveiled in Buffalo, New York. One
was Buffalo State Colleges proposal to offer
the worlds first PhD program in Creativity
Studies. The other was a state plan to build fa-
cilities for two green manufacturers of LED
lights and solar panels on the former site of
Republic Steel.
As with so many things American, the arc
of these endeavors had been opened in 1967.
Buffalo States International Center for Stud-
ies in Creativity, founded in that peak year of
hippie bliss, has steadily ascended, enjoying
an especially fertile period of growth and
development during the Reagan-Bush era.
That fateful year was also the one in which
Republic Steel suffered its first lashing blow:
the Adirondack iron ore mine that had fatted
its furnaces for three decades stripped out and
closed. By the early 1980s, the U.S. steel indus-
try had collapsed.
While the Creativity Studies program
blossomed and flourished, eventually seeding
academic leadership centers throughout the
country (nay, the world), Buffalo itself fell into
catastrophic, and sadly uncreative, decline.
Between 1950, when the population stood at
580,000, and 2000, the city lost about half its
residents, hollowing out entire neighborhoods
and large parts of downtown. (Locals rejoiced
when the estimated 2012 census showed that
the exodus had slowed to a trickle.) Deindus-
trialization and outsourcing account for much
of the disaster. But so does metro Buffalos
ever-widening loop of suburban sprawl, set in
motion by mid-twentieth-century subsidized
128 1 The Baffler [no.27]
housing and commercial property policies
that amounted to de facto affirmative action
for second-generation white immigrants. By
2000, Buffalos metro footprint had expanded
to three times its 1950 size, but the popula-
tion remained relatively constant. This meant
(among other things) that the same number of
people supported three times the infrastruc-
tureincluding schools, roads, sewer and wa-
ter lines, and police and fire protectionin a
fiscally reckless, politically divisive, agricul-
turally improvident pattern known as sprawl
without growth.
It was feckless enough to underwrite
sprawling, car-dependent development in
metro regions with growing populations
say, Houston. But subsidizing sprawl in older
industrial cities whose urban cores and tax
coffers were fast emptyingwhile encroach-
ing on prime working farmland, no lesswas
unconscionable. And the insidious, self-can-
nibalizing development pattern in Buffalo,
according to sprawl expert David Rusk, was
about the worst.
Buffalo was superlative in another way: it
fell so far and so hard. In 1901 it reportedly
had more millionaires per capita than any oth-
er city in the land, with sufficient prosperity to
host a grand Pan-American Expositionone
of the first such spectacles to be illuminated
by electric light. Unlike most of the other cit-
ies strewn along the Rust Belt, which mainly
grew with the rise of railroads, steel, and the
auto industry, Buffalo had a diversified econ-
omy that buffered it from shocks suffered by
any one industry. Whats more, the citys reli-
able supply of cheap hydroelectric power har-

Elmwood Village, in Buffalo, New York, has reemerged as a walkable neighborhood.
vested from Niagara Falls made it unusually
attractive to big manufacturing firms. The
local grid was a central reason that Republic
Steel, and the unionized high-wage work force
that came along with it, found Buffalo such an
accommodating placethat, and the citys
unique status as a gateway port linking the
robust markets along the eastern half of the
United States to the booming export trade of
the Midwest.
In the 1820s, Buffalo shot into the indus-
trial era as the western terminus of the Erie
Canal, when Detroit and Chicago were still
fur-trapping military outposts. For 140 years,
it was a crucial transfer point for Midwest
grain shipments to New York and beyond,
conducted with whipping speed by the worlds
first grain elevators, which were constructed
in 1842. By 1931, thirty-eight steel-reinforced
concrete grain silos rose over the Buffalo Riv-
er skyline, and their austere, functional design
captured the fancy of architects seeking to de-
DAVID TORKE
fine the modern urban aesthetic, from Louis
Sullivan to Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Er-
ich Mendelsohn, and Eliel Saarinen.
Other industries soon sprouted up along-
side the citys grain colossus: furniture mak-
ing, breweries, iron, rubber, chemical pro-
cessing, automotive manufacture, aircraft
production, and above all, steel. But just as the
first signs of automobile-fueled development
appeared beyond the streetcar suburbs, a wave
of corporate consolidations and buyouts of lo-
cally owned firms in the 1920s put the city at
the mercy of high-flying Wall Street traders.
After the bubble burst, the Queen Citys ur-
ban fabric began to fray. Unemployment in
the Depression years was more than 30 per-
cent, and absentee corporate barons began
selling off older buildings to make way for off-
street parking and street widening.
As with other industrial cities, World War
II was exceptionally kind to Buffalo, which
received $5 billion in federal contracts for
The Baffler [no.27] ! 129
 Buffalo fell so far and so hard.
9
armaments, artillery, tanks and armed vehi-
cles, rations, andmost lucrativelyfighter
planes. The city weathered the postwar re-
cession unusually well too. In 1951, Fortune
ran a glowing cover story called Made in
Buffalo devoted to the industrial diversity
of a great city.
The Luceian hype proved to be short-lived,
however. As the citys postindustrial decline
took hold, the troubles besetting Buffalo fol-
lowed a glumly familiar postwar script. First,
enormous infusions of federal dollars for
highway building leached jobs and revenue
away from the heart of Buffalo. At the same
time, the citys second-generation popula-
tion of white immigrants decamped for the
suburban fringes, marooning newly arrived
Southern blacks in the revenue-starved ur-
ban center, which was already being called by
the euphemistic code phrase the inner city.
Finally, under the open-shop economic geog-
raphy created by the antiunion Taft-Hartley
law, many of Buffalos established industries
began to relocate to right to work states in
the South and West.
Compounding all this slow-rolling dev-
astationshared by cities throughout the
industrial Northeast and Midwestwas a
far more immediate calamity very specific
to Buffalo, one that effectively flattened
the citys status as the transport gateway
to Americas inland grain empire. The con-
struction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in
the late 1950s did an end run around the city,
sending grain traffic through Canada and
eventually enriching the Port of Montreal.
Simultaneously, regional grain processors fell
under the thrall of now-familiar corporate
brands such as ADM, Cargill, Kellogg, Gen-
eral Mills, and Pillsbury. These grain moguls
had zero loyalty to the citys fate and no rea-
130 1 The Baffler [no.27]
son to fight either the Saint Lawrence Seaway
or the new federal freight rate changes that
favored shipping by rail.
Binged and Purged
Disinvestment has a clinical and abstract
ring, as do its component parts: the flight
of capital and policy support, the decline of
public services, and the falling tax base. But
the careworn face of central Buffalo shows
us what disinvestment looks like: blocks of
abandoned factory and commercial buildings;
acres of urban prairie punctuated by the occa-
sional house in ramshackle disrepair; the ex-
hausted mien of the urban poor; and oceans of
parking lots, parking structures, and highway
rights-of-way that have supplanted magnifi-
cent hotels, churches, theaters, and depart-
ment stores, not to mention the fin de sicle
Romanesque Erie County Savings Bank and a
signature Frank Lloyd Wright building.
Viewed through another prism, though,
Buffalos blasted American vistas also have
the look of consumer cultureof disposabili-
ty on a grand and tragic scale. Lay this imagery
side by side with the kaleidoscopic pastiche
of postwar commercial abundancea Barbie
doll here, a Levittown there, a Hostess Ho Ho
or shag rug over thereor with the unvarying
office-park-housing-and-retail-plex that has
for decades consumed the agricultural land-
scape, and you have a dystopian vision of an
inert culture of convenience chasing its own
tail into the void. Its a slapdash homage to a
rapidly vanishing era: a time when the federal
subsidies were rich, the land was cheap, and
the cost of diapers, kitchen clocks, and other
gewgaws for the working poor plummeted,
thanks to the same financial interests who
shipped their jobs overseas. The hollowing
out of Buffalo stands as testament to the binge

The next focus of the Buffalo Billion is the Belt Line, an industrial rail corridor
that includes Northland Avenue.
mentality of American consumerism every bit
as much as the new super Walmarts dotting
the exurban frontier.
And in a place like Buffalo, the careless
ransacking of the physical world is all the
more heartbreaking in view of the citys abun-
dance of gifts from the past, in the words of
historian Mark Goldman. As Frederick Law
Olmsted put it, Buffalo was the best planned
city in America, if not the world. Twenty
years ago, while living sixty miles down the
Thruway in Rochester, I paid a visit to Buffalo
with two friendsan artist and a writer, both
from Manhattanwho were eager to take
in the citys aesthetic treasures: an exquisite
terracotta-adorned Louis Sullivan skyscraper,
a pair of graceful Frank Lloyd Wright prairie
houses, an abandoned, spooky H. H. Richard-
son insane asylum, the world-class Albright-
DAVID TORKE
Knox Art Gallery, and the Art Deco City Hall
building, a phallic triumph that redoubtable
New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise
Huxtable hailed as one of the countrys larg-
est and finest Style Moderne public buildings
(and whose architect described it as express-
ing the masculinity, power, and purposeful
energy of an industrial community). These
and other treasures are traversed by a system
of parks and parkways, designed by Olmsted
to extend Joseph Ellicotts elegant 1804 radial-
and-grid street plan. The term Rust Belt had
only recently entered common parlance, and
smaller, declining cities like Buffalo were just
starting to go dark on the urban-cultural map
as the newly revived and fashionable stars of
New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.,
began to ascend.
That more than a few of these gifts remain
The Baffler [no.27] ! 131
Runway City
is testament to the stubborn work of Buffalos
preservationist movement. The Preservation
Coalition of Erie County took shape in 1981,
after a downtown demolition spree in the
1970s almost felled Sullivans Guaranty Build-
ing, a masterpiece of modern architecture.
Among other projects, the group arranged to
have nineteen downtown blocks designated a
historic district.
Theres also the Campaign for Greater
Buffalo History, Architecture, and Culture,
which as its name suggests, takes a far more ca-
pacious approach to preservation. Where the
Preservation Coalition focused on individual
buildings, homes, and parkland and worked
closely with local elites, the Campaign for
Greater Buffalo included the citys industrial
heritage and a broader swath of the citizenry
in its crusades. In 1990 the groups cofounder,
Tim Tielman, published a guide to Buffalos
industrial waterfront, and more recently he
has organized bus tours of the citys legacy
manufacturing sites. Tielman, who proud-
ly owns the obstructionist label so often
hurled at him, has led successful fights against
yet another $300 million downtown conven-
tion center (which he called the Urban Death
Star) and a waterfront Bass Pro hunting-and-
fishing retail emporium funded with taxpayer
subsidies arranged through the cunning of
the governmental-development complex, as
he told the alt-weekly Artvoice. Blocking the
self-serving schemes of the local kakistocracy
is simply coincidental to a democratic process
of building a better city, which is positively
constructionist. Constructive change for the
public benefit is our goal. . . . In short, we have
to preserve and rebuild the urban ecosystems
that made Buffalo a successful, useful place
to manufacture things and ideas and nurture
citizens.
Note that Tielman does not once pander to
the present vogue in urban-revival theory by
using the word creativeeven though Buf-
falo is an internationally recognized center
132 1 The Baffler [no.27]
of modern art, poetry, and historical archi-
tecture. The city is still home to remnants of
its steel, automaking, chemical, aeronautics,
and flour milling industries. And its citizens
have retained a strong productive ethos, re-
flected not only in the citys beleaguered in-
dustrial core, but also in the sensibilities of
its preservation and urban-planning activists.
As manufacturing began to show signs of re-
turning to American shores in 2012, Richard
Floridathe countrys great bard of the cre-
ative class, which he sees as the panacea for
all our urban illsleapt at the chance to show
that his hackneyed ideas were still relevant to
post-meltdown America. In the face of rein-
dustrialization, he declared, we need to bring
about a full-blown creative culture that em-
braces the talent and creativity of workers.
Well, no. What we need is a culture of
production of the sort sustained in Buffalo,
one which is based on making and exporting
substantial material goods, and which values
competence, applied knowledge, an ethic of
repair, and basic fair play. Part and parcel of
this ethos is a recognition of limitsto sprawl,
to consumption, and (yes) to the shiny dream
of untrammeled creativity as a just-add-water
fix to our structural woes. A key part of pro-
ductive culture, after all, is the stoic recogni-
tion that you dont always get to do what you
love and that talent and creativity, con-
sumption and innovation, should be suborned
to some higher constructivist civic purpose.
Unseating the Kakistocracy
This is illegal, City of Buffalo urban planner
Chris Hawley is telling a crowd of some fifty
people while pointing to a PowerPoint image
of sidewalk caf patrons innocently sipping
coffee with friends. And so are the corner
tavern and the corner store, which are staples
of Buffalo. What is legal, he explains, is the
cookie-cutter suburban template for develop-
ment: single-use buildings, minimum parking
requirements and building setbacks, big-box

Some East Side census tracts have lost as much as 89 percent of their populations since 1950.
stores, residential turf grass instead of garden-
style landscaping.
It is March 2013, and I have just met Haw-
ley while serving on a speaking panel togeth-
er. The black-bespectacled, buzz-cropped
thirty-one-year-olds crisp, rapid manner of
speaking lends urgency to his subject: Buf-
falos new zoning ordinance, a.k.a. the Green
Code. Its what I work on all day, all night,
and all weekend, he says cheerfully. By this
point, five thousand Buffalo residents had al-
ready weighed in on the drafts evolution over
the three years since the project, funded by a
HUD Sustainable Communities grant, had
been announced.
The Green Code will wash away the sins
of the citys original zoning ordinance, passed
in 1953 on the eve of the great overlapping
binges of urban renewal and highway build-
ing. The postwar code, built on the principle
of separate land uses (or Euclid zoning, after
the 1926 Supreme Court case authorizing the
DAVID TORKE
practice), hastened the demolition of small
storefronts to make way for large, single-use
structurestowers, stadiums, convention
centers, and, of course, parking garages. And
with ones daily roundswork, home, school,
shopping, entertainmentnow separated, it
became virtually impossible to get around by
foot. Euclid zoning was a most splendid wel-
come-to-the-world gift to the automotive age.
The new code is form-based, meaning
that it restores the arrangement and inte-
grated uses of various building types, scales,
and heights to allow for lively, walkable,
nonalienating streets of the sort that worked
just fine in cities across the world for time im-
memorial. Form-based planning is one of the
central tenets of the New Urbanist planning
movement, which designs for compact good
urbanism in place of disaggregated, car-
centric sprawl. Buffalos form-based code is
dubbed green in part because it would free
people from car servility and, in a particularly
The Baffler [no.27] ! 133
 Buffalos blasted American vistas also have
the look of consumer cultureof disposability
on a grand and tragic scale.
9
bold move, proposes to eliminate minimum
parking requirements for new building. But
its also green because it promotes multi-use
recycling of Buffalos urban core. Under the
new code, people will be able to use historic
buildings for a variety of purposeson the
principle that the greenest building is the
one that already exists. The code also pro-
vides direction on energy-efficiency retrofits,
rain gardens and wetlands, renewable energy
installations, brownfields reuse, and tree
canopy restoration. Taking its cues from what
remains of Ellicotts well-designed grid-and-
radial pattern, the new code connects down-
town and city neighborhoods to single-use
districts, such as college campuses and medi-
cal centers, via pedestrian, bicycle, and transit
corridors.
Just as important to its sustainable aims,
the Green Code seeks to wrest control from
what Tielman calls the kakistocracythe
elites battalions of legal, finance, and real
estate professionalsby making itself intel-
ligible to the masses. Where the 1953 code is
a 1,500-page document of mystifying, text-
heavy legalese, the Green Code has slimmed
down to 350 pages of accessible, plainspoken
language matched by simple diagrams and il-
lustrations. It also streamlines the permitting
process, that great bogey of the enterprising
soul. In his 2013 talk, Hawley described the
gantlet of horrors a restaurant owner has to
run under the current code to place a simple
sandwich-board chalk sign on the sidewalk.
After paying a $75 application fee, she needs
permission from the commissioners of inspec-
tion services and public works, and then must
post a $5,000 performance bond to the city
134 1 The Baffler [no.27]
controller, protecting the city from liability.
At this point, the sign display requires ap-
proval from the Common Council. And then,
after you go through all that, the permit lasts
for thirty days and you have to go through the
process all over again, Hawley said. So re-
moving barriers and making things easier is
an important part of what were doing.
Re-Centering the City
The New Urbanism, which came together
as the Congress for the New Urbanism in
the early 1990s, could just as aptly have been
called restorational urbanism, for it sought
to repair the damage inflicted on urban form
by suburbanization, with its modernist archi-
tectural conceits, auto-based transportation
planning, and biased financing incentives, and
to restore the urban-rural divide. At the time,
postmodern discourse was ascendant, with
its calls for boundary transgression, non-lin-
ear epistemes, and radical subjectivity. The
subversive novelty of it all might have played
well in university humanities programsat
least for a whilebut in the built environment
of actual places, postmodern disruption of-
fered little to the critical imagination but dis-
location and a mood of ironic detachment. By
contrast, it still focuses the mind when New
Urbanist James Howard Kunstler proclaims
that if our grandparents could see what we
did to our cities, they would think it was im-
moral and insane.
Although rarely credited for it, the New
Urbanists stood athwart this baleful intel-
lectual legacy of the disoriented 1980s. The
movements impassioned defense of the pub-
lic realm articulated the concept in concrete

Aaron Bartley cofounded People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in 2005,
and has since helped coordinate a Green Development Zone on Buffalos West Side.
terms, rescuing it from the theoretical ab-
stractions, however persuasive, explored by
Hannah Arendt, Jrgen Habermas, J.G.A.
Pocock, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Richard
Sennett. From the movements inception, the
New Urbanists argued for the public realm as
a historically layered place, a palpable locale,
spatially defined by streets and building types,
where the common life unfolds independently
of the commercial market or the state. Cham-
pions of New Urbanism unabashedly called
for the restoration of public-private boundar-
ies and the reclamation of the urban edge,
along with all the old-fashioned virtues that
went with it: beauty, character, and economi-
cally diverse development patterns. The
movements meticulous attention to pedes-
trian-level detail also unobtrusively advanced
elusive public goods such as contemplation
and sociability, thus winning back time lost to
automobile commuting and the relentless ef-
DAVID TORKE
ficiencies of economic privatization.
New Urbanism has had plenty of critics
over the years. It has been attacked, fairly,
for building suburban subdivisions on green-
fields (i.e., open land) without public tran-
sit access, and for turning out cookie-cutter
neotraditional designs in the name of resur-
recting local vernacular architecture. It also
can adopt the architecture professions lazy
argot of market conquest with discomfiting
ease, bandying loose and beguiling visions of
a frictionless postindustrial future. In con-
crete terms, such unexamined shibboleths
have graced us with the movements flagship
community of Celebration, Floridaa placid
and bland Disney-owned paean to walkabil-
ity thats designed more to be admired in the
pages of planning-porn journals than to be
put to use by engaged communities of citizens
and workers.
Less fairly, landscape urbanists who
The Baffler [no.27] ! 135
Runway City
prize ecological horizonality charge that
the movements vision of well-ordered, walk-
able streetscapes is nostalgic, bourgeois, hi-
erarchical in its design aesthetic, and way too
attached to the urban-rural binary. More
recently, neoliberal advocates of the market-
driven global metropolis have campaigned
vigorously against place-based federal invest-
ment policies, such as the Obama administra-
tions Partnership for Sustainable Commu-
nities. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser,
whose aptly named 2011 book Triumph of the
City set the terms for contemporary debate
about urban growth in the global economy,
argued in an influential 2007 piece published
in the conservative Manhattan Institutes
policy quarterly City Journal that previous
spending aimed at resurrecting Buffalo as a
place . . . was destined to fail. It is more hu-
mane, he claimed, to pursue people-based
policies that subsidize the disadvantaged
and equip them with the education needed to
take up residence in warmer, more pleasant,
more productive cities. In a spectacularly ill-
timed pre-crash reverie, Glaeser went on to
laud the market-based urban pulse of innova-
tion following innovation of the sort devised
by New York Citys financial sector, with
its mortgage-backed securities and hedge
funds. Why, Glaeser asks, should smart en-
trepreneurs in cities like New York be taxed
to support place-making in failing cities like
Buffalo?
But now that the financial wizards of Wall
Street arent looking all that smart, its long
past time to take a fresh look at New Urban-
ist place-making in Buffalo, since it relies nei-
ther on the paper machinations of the finance
world nor the vacuous rhetoric of the creative
class and its courtiers. At the very least, New
Urbanisms admirably concrete and embed-
ded approach to place-making has captured
the loyalty of Buffalos urbanist insurgents.
Armed with the simple and practical ethos of
New Urbanist planning, they are slowly bring-
136 1 The Baffler [no.27]
ing their fellow Buffalonians around to the
view that sixty years of modernist, suburbia-
promoting planning was a historical aberra-
tion; and as a corollary, they are now fighting
to restore good urban form as part of a larger
low-carbon economic development strategy.
Particularly striking is the critical mass
formed by young, post-boomer Buffalo activ-
ists committed to embedding good urban-
ism in a sustainable green economy. I met
Chris Hawley through Bernice Radle, an up-
beat yet deadly serious twenty-nine-year-old
who helms Buffalos Young Preservationists
and who has racked up an impressive track
record of restoring old houses in the shadow
of the wrecking ball. Active in the Northeast
Sustainable Energy Association, Radle aspires
to be Buffalos mayor one day, and married her
beau last July at the feet of the citys remain-
ing grain elevatorsnow dubbed Silo City.
Thirty-nine-year-old Aaron Bartley, a
graduate of Harvard Law School (where he
worked with janitors to organize the suc-
cessful Harvard Living Wage Campaign)
returned to his hometown in 2004 to join an
urban farming project. The following year,
he cofounded People United for Sustainable
Housing (PUSH Buffalo). PUSH organizes,
Saul Alinsky style, in the low-income West
Side; its mission is to rehab the neighbor-
hoods historic houses while safeguarding
their affordability. Along the way, Bartleys
group also shows residents how to repair and
weatherize their homes, helps find financ-
ing for small businesses, and coordinates an
award-winning Green Development Zone
committed to renewable energy and urban
agriculture. Thirty-one-year-old Franchelle
Hart, of SEIU 1199 and the Coalition of Black
Trade Unionists, was hired in June to head
Open Buffalo, a new economic justice outfit
jointly brokered by PUSH, Partnership for
the Public Good, and other equity-minded
groups and funded by George Soross Open
Society Foundations. Nearly all have a flair

On Main Street, cars will soon share the right-of-way with transit, cyclists, and pedestrians.
for plugging Buffalos rehabilitationand set-
backsin real time, notably the New Millen-
nium Groups Chuck Banas, who has blogged
as Joe the Planner; David Torke, who runs the
preservation and photography blog fixBuffalo,
focusing on the citys devastated, predomi-
nantly African American East Side; Iraq war
Army veteran and urban planner Nate Neu-
man, who maintains an active presence on
social media; and Newell Nussbaumer, who
edits the ten-year-old BuffaloRising.com, a
site that covers the citys rebirth, focusing
on locally owned businesses and grassroots
projects. Its like living in Sim City. You can
really see the changes, and the rewards that
come along with hard work, he said in a re-
cent interview. We have the ability to create
our own city . . . how often does that happen?
Of course, all this unbridled civic optimism
still hinges on ratification of the Green Code.
In honor of the citys painstaking restoration
effortsand in a none-too-subtle nod to the
DAVID TORKE
previous months release of the long-debated
Green Code for public commentthe Con-
gress for the New Urbanism held its annual
convention, themed The Resilient Commu-
nity, in Buffalo in early June.
Cracking the Code
For all these public shows of good will, Buf-
falos emerging New Urbanist revival will still
have to clear a major hurdle: the taming of
the citys sprawl-addicted business establish-
ment. After all, the systemic hollowing out of
Buffalo wasnt simply a Borg-like convergence
of world-historic trends such as the flight of
manufacturing overseas and of white people
to the suburbs; it was also the result of unusu-
ally retrograde political leadership.
The first round of federally funded urban
renewal disasters in the late 1950s through the
1960s sent a circumferential highway through
the citys outer neighborhoods, displaced two
thousand African Americans in one neigh-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 137
 The hollowing out of Buffalo wasnt simply a Borg-like
convergence of world-historic trends; it was also
the result of retrograde political leadership.
9
borhood alone, and mowed down hundreds
of large and small downtown buildings that
harbored at least as many independent busi-
nesses. This orgy of annihilation made way
for, among other enormities, a superblock
complex called Main Place Tower and Mall;
the generic designation perfectly captured the
bland, placeless affect of the compound.
But many worse things were lying in wait.
The second round of urban devastation,
which ran roughly from the late 1970s through
the end of the 1990s, made Main Place Tower
and Mall seem like a Jane Jacobs poster proj-
ect. Over this two-decade stretch, Buffalo lost
proportionately more manufacturing jobs (31
percent) and suffered greater wage drops than
any other city in the country. This was also
the heyday of that great Reagan-era experi-
ment in hardy bootstrapping entrepreneur-
ship known as the new federalism, which re-
configured federal funding mechanisms into
state block grants and public-private partner-
ships. The idea was to leverage federal financ-
ing as a come-on to private-sector investors,
who now seized on every available incentive
to build cheaply constructed high-margin-
and-low-density boondoggles masquerading
as market-savvy urban renewal.
Presiding over it all in Buffalo were two
multi-term Democratic machine politicians,
mayors endorsed by the Conservative and
Right to Life Parties, who handed out patron-
age like lollipops and hired hacks in the plan-
ning department who knew nothing about ur-
ban design or economic development and gave
away the store to favored beneficiaries. There
was Buffalos largest real estate developer and
parking lot baron, 2010 Tea Party Republican
138 1 The Baffler [no.27]
gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. Like
so many other heroic foes of the public sec-
tor, Paladino got good and rich in the husk of
postindustrial Buffalo at taxpayers expense,
building 160 Rite Aids out on the heavily sub-
sidized suburban frontiers of New York and
Pennsylvania and drawing liberally from state
Empire Zone economic development funding
to renovate his downtown office buildings
producing little to no new business develop-
ment. There was Ralph C. Wilson, owner of
the already profitable Buffalo Bills, who like
nearly every other sports mogul in the land
got himself a new stadium and high corporate
skybox ticket prices, despite the teams dim
record of playing in four Super Bowls in a row
and losing every time. There was Seneca Na-
tion CEO Skip Harper, who got himself a
pair of casinos, also lavishly subsidized by gov-
ernment grants. The civic troughs were out,
and the regions boodlers were feeding heart-
ily. By 2003 the city, and later Erie County,
were so deeply in the red that the state placed
them under the authority of fiscal control
boards.
When I asked Chris Hawley how on earth
the Green Codea document steeped in civic
participation and the principles of long-range,
low-carbon planningemerged from this
sludge, he pointed improbably to one man:
Robert Shibley. The dean of SUNY Buffalos
School of Architecture and Planning, Shibley
established the schools Urban Design Project
in 1990 and spent the next sixteen years work-
ing to usher through a Comprehensive Plan
for Buffalos development priorities. By the
time the plan had been formally approved in
2006, hed gradually enlisted the old-school

Buffalos population declined by more than one hundred thousand people in the 1970s,
when Chippewa Street was called the Street of Broken Dreams.
mayors support, together with a growing seg-
ment of the local business community. Aside
from the watchwords fix the basics, build
on assets, three of the plans features stand
out: its full-throated anticipation of climate
change, its commitment to sprawl-curbing
smart growth (the regional land-use corol-
lary to New Urbanism), and its intention to
keep industrial properties zoned for indus-
trial use as part of a mixed economy.
The Green Code legally implements this
vision, and Hawley was hired to pound it out.
Far and away the most influential business
ally of the Shibley plan was Russer Foods heir
Howard Zemsky, whose father founded the
business (Zee-Best) in Brooklyn and later
expanded into Buffalo. Zemsky sold the busi-
ness and, in a dramatic vote of confidence for
Shibleys planning approach, invested in the
2002 purchase and renovation of the aban-
doned Larkin Soap Factory and mail-order
PHOTOGR APH COURTESY OF DAVID TORKE
house. The Larkin plant was an enormous 1912
manufacturing-and-warehouse complex with
ties to Frank Lloyd Wright and Roycrofts El-
bert Hubbard, located on the East Sidethe
most devastated, emptied neighborhood in
the city. It still has a long way to go, but the
neighborhood is now home to a thriving com-
mercial center, dubbed Larkinville, that is at-
tracting further residential investment, retail,
and small businesses.
Zemsky also made shrewd use of his many
business and philanthropic connections, as
well as his substantial political contributions
to both parties. Having served on the regional
transportation authority since 2003, appoint-
ed by governor Elliot Spitzer, he became An-
drew Cuomos chief consultant on Western
New York revitalization in 2011, and has since
risen to the states top position in economic
development. Thanks in part to Zemskys
counsel and Cuomos political maneuver-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 139
Runway City
ing, the state has put through two programs
to rein in runaway private development. The
Smart Growth Public Infrastructure Policy
Act of 2010 (PIPA)requires state agencies to
run local requests for infrastructure support
through a checklist that includes consider-
ations such as whether development is locat-
ed wholly or partly in an existing municipal
center, preserve[s] and enhance[s] the states
agricultural land, and reduce[s] automobile
dependency. And in 2011, Cuomo created ten
Regional Economic Development Councils
that wisely seek to shape competition for sub-
sidy dollars by forcing municipalities to work
in concert as unified metropolitan regions
when seeking state economic development
funds.
Our Ally the State
Here its worth pausing to note the impor-
tance of state-level intervention in the fate
of small-to-midsize older industrial cities
like Buffalo. Richard Longworth, author of
Caught in the Middle: Americas Heartland in
the Age of Globalism, argues that in the age of
private-market-based, neoliberal globaliza-
tion, the role of the states is to get out of the
way. But that viewshared by Florida, Glae-
ser, and the likeassumes that great metrop-
olises like Chicago and New York, with their
soaring real estate values, can thrive without
the productive, energy-generating, and agri-
cultural capacities of their smaller regional
metros. Strengthening smaller cities would
help to slow the much-resented transfer of
wealth from the downstate financial sector to
the fiscally weakened municipalities scattered
throughout the state. It would be both more
sensible and more equitablemore greento
ground Buffalos economic strategy and future
tax contributions in a template different from
those of New York City and other fast-grow-
ing global cities.
Back in 2012, when the state ran a com-
petitive bidding process for economic devel-
140 1 The Baffler [no.27]
opment funds among its ten Regional Eco-
nomic Development Councils, promising a
$1 billion jackpot to the proposal reflecting
the most fully realized Smart Growth plans,
the Western New York REDC won. This
should come as no surprise; Howard Zemsky,
favored by Cuomo, was running the Western
REDC at the time. Thus was born the so-
called Buffalo Billion, much to the disgrun-
tlement of neighboring cities like Rochester
and Syracuse.
Political cronyism? Yes. But it also makes
a world of sense to establish a beachhead for
upstate economic revitalization in Buffalo to
match the successful nanotechnology indus-
try emerging in the eastern end of the Thru-
way, in the Albany area. By early 2014, Cuomo
announced to great fanfare that $225 million
of the booty would be used to subsidize the
Riverbend green advanced-manufacturing
complex on the former site of Republic Steel
in South Buffalo, not far from Larkinville.
(In June, Tesla and SpaceXs Elon Musk an-
nounced plans to build the worlds largest
advanced solar panel factory on the site.) In a
novel arrangement designed to safeguard tax-
payers capital investment, the facility will be
owned by the state.
The hefty investment in low-carbon
manufacturing nicely complements another
of Hawleys pet projectsreviving the citys
still extant Belt Line rail system and its
nearby industrial properties. Built in 1883,
the circular rail line once bordered the citys
agricultural greenbelt, and snakes over trel-
lises and then below grade through Buffalos
old neighborhoods. The major employment
center during the period of Buffalos indus-
trial prime, it hosted a commuter rail service
(along with freight), moving Buffalos work-
force throughout the city until after World
War I. Most of these factory buildings and
warehouses still stand, having escaped the
mid-twentieth-century downtown wreck-
ing ball: Pierce Arrow, Ford Motor Co., Bell
 Now that the financial wizards of Wall Street
arent looking all that smart, its time
to take a fresh look at New Urbanist place-making.
9
Aircraft, Wonder Bread, Otis Elevator Co.,
Curtiss-Wright, Northland Rubber, Niagara
Machine and Tool Works, and bicycle-mak-
ers Buffalo Wheel Co. It still hosts two daily
freight runs for several manufacturing firms,
including Del Monte Foods, which produces
all the Milk-Bones for Americas doggies,
and General Mills, which pumps out the na-
tions Cheerios. Hawley sees the Belt Line as
the third strand in the citys development yet another revenue-sapping, sprawl-feeding
DNA, along with Ellicotts street plan and
Olmsteds parkway and park system. The
Green Code proposes to restore the circular
corridor for mixed useresidential, commer-
cial, and light industrialand eventually to
resurrect the commuter rail. Zemskys Lark-
inville, located on one of the lines nineteen
former commuter stops, is part of that vision
too, as are two other, more recent adaptive-
reuse residential projects.
Even though the mega-world built on fos-
sil fuel and Big Wealth is facing contraction,
Buffalo and the State of New York are betting
that we will still need big substantial (if also
greener) thingsthings like renewable-ener-
gy and mass-transit infrastructure, large bat-
tery storage, freight ships, and carbon-neutral
vehicles. And they are wise to rebuild the city,
putting an end to sprawl and preserving their
precious regional farmland in the process.
Between Zemksys leading investment and
Shibleys planning vision, the Green Codes
playbook for a more flexible and vernacular
approach to development, and the states at-
traction of a major low-carbon manufacturing
and research complex, Buffalo, it seems, is on
course to establish the productive green econ-
omy of its dreams.
The Looming Silicon STAMP
What one hand giveth, however, the other
can taketh away. All of Buffalos long-term,
hard-fought efforts to jump-start its battered
city and regional economy are now directly
threatened by the selfsame Cuomo adminis-
tration that just lavished $1 billion on those
efforts. With funding extracted from the Buf-
falo Billion, Cuomo has greenlighted plans for
development compound to be plonked down
in a 1,340-acre tractone and a half times the
size of New Yorks Central Parkmidway be-
tween Buffalo and Rochester.
In March, the Cuomo administration qui-
etly announced that it was directing $33 mil-
lion in state funds to build a mega complex
called the Science and Technology Manufac-
turing Park (STAMP) on working farmland in
Alabama, New York, a tiny hamlet in Genesee
County. The aim, according to the Genesee
County Economic Development Center, is
to attract an as yet unsecured semiconductor
manufacturer (or chip fab in the industrys
irritating shorthand) in a bid to create Silicon
Valley stretching along the Thruway.
STAMP has been in the works for some
nine years, led by local politicians and private
and county Industrial Development Agen-
cies. The project both antedated and deftly
sidestepped the consolidation of the states
smart growth initiative and Cuomos metro-
regional economic development program. It
flew under the radar, as these things do, with
occasional state subsidy support for studies
and the likeincluding a 2012 Smart Growth
Impact study whose disapproval was waived
by the Empire State Development Corpora-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 141
Runway City
tion. Cuomo gave the project only tepid sup-
port, claiming he couldnt get the funding,
and Buffalos legislative delegation opposed
it. But somehow, a deal was cut, and funding
was procured from the Buffalo Billion. If the
dilapidated face of Buffalo is what puts bones
and flesh on the idea of disinvestment, then
the STAMP project is what the future holds
if the traditional forces of sprawl development
continue to operate on auto-pilot.
Long after the low-key March announce-
ment, it caught activist leaders in Buffalo
completely by surprise. I had heard rumors
about this a few years ago, one of them told
me in June, but I had been reassured that it
would come to nothing. Local alt-weekly
columnist and professor of urban and re-
gional planning Bruce Fisher, who special-
izes in economic-development governance,
responded with similar shock in a May phone
interview. Zemsky himself said by email, In
my opinion STAMPs a compromise between
two regions, WNY and Finger Lakes. It fits
the WNY focus on next generation jobs and
companies, and it falls outside of our focus on
smart growth/existing infrastructure/sustain-
ability/and job access for all.
The basic idea behind the STAMP initia-
tive isnt objectionable. Turning upstate New
York into a center of advanced manufacturing
makes all sorts of practical sense. The area has
an abundance of excellent research universi-
ties, underused industrial infrastructure, and
an existing corps of skilled workers. To attract
a firm that would directly employ ten thou-
sand people, as claimed, and then spin off tens
of thousands more jobs in services and suppli-
ers, would be to boost flailing upstate cities
and the entire state economy.
But locating it in Alabamafive miles off
the New York State Thruway and fifteen
miles from the nearest city (Batavia, pop.
15,000) is a terrible idea. The area already has
a growing $31 million farming and food-pro-
cessing economy. And it would put those chip
142 1 The Baffler [no.27]
fab jobs at a long, automobile-dependent
commuting distance from Rochester and Buf-
falo, which both have an abundance of fallow
industrial properties to spare.
STAMP supporters defend the location on
three main grounds: the delicate nanotechnol-
ogy required for chip fabrication is sensitive to
seismic urban vibrations; the projects large
size will require access to both cities labor
markets; and in any case, it will need the par-
ticipation of new supply-chain businesses that
can be located in both cities, boosting their
economies. But none of these claims stands up
to even casual scrutiny. Chip fab requires a
high degree of cleanliness, but an entire indus-
try is devoted to stabilizing vibrations. And
Rochester and Buffalo are only sixty miles
apartmeaning that a chip-fab complex sited
in either metropolis would easily satisfy the
rule-of-thumb sourcing requirement of one-
day just-in-time delivery.
No, what STAMP boosters wantcon-
sistent with two decades of sprawl-inducing
developmentis control of the land and the
political landscape, for all the usual time-
honored reasons. They want what Wall Street
wants: the build-to-suit standard real estate
product type, which urban development ana-
lyst Christopher Leinberger calls the build-
ing block of the edgeless city.
If the STAMP folly goes through, devel-
opment companies will buy up all the sur-
rounding land, in anticipation of housing
workers from Buffalo and Rochester who will
not abide the slushy commute to Alabama.
(Area grocery mogul Danny Wegman has
already suggested hed build one of his mega
stores out that way if STAMP moves into
the full development phase.) Those vaunted
supply-chain businesses will follow, as will
the need to fund new water and sewer lines,
roads, schools, and police and fire services,
at taxpayers expense. Thousands of acres
of prime farmlandacres that we will des-
perately need to feed New Yorkers as global
warming tightens its grip on the internation-
al food tradewill be lost forever.
Meanwhile, Rochester and Buffalo, whose
citizens are busily repairing the urban fabric,
will continue to hollow out. The minority
working poor will, as usual, be deprived of
access to all that STAMP bounty. Business
bigwigs in the region pronounce stoically that
this is just how things have to beand that
they were, for all intents and purposes, ever
thus. When the Rochester Democrat and Chron-
icle asked Greater Rochester Enterprise presi-
dent and CEO Mark Peterson why STAMP
had to be sited so far beyond the reasonable
reach of existing cities, he shrugged. That is
the price you pay if youre going to play in this
industry, he explained, in full-on tough-guy
Gordon Gekko cadence.
It took us thirty years and the rise of in-
transigent structural inequality to learn that
greed is, in fact, not good. Likewise, myopi-
cally planned sprawl along the Thruway is
not a price worth paying for any industry,
and, in the age of global warming, it is even
more economically self-defeating than genu-
flecting before the occult powers of trickle-
down greed. It speaks volumes about the
incoherence of our loose, multijurisdictional
regional planning regime that state govern-
ment is staking out plans for expanding the
innovation economy into farmland while
simultaneously supporting the dense, ur-
ban, green economic revival of Buffalo, as
though the two initiatives couldnt possibly
have anything to do with each other. It sim-
ply fails to register, at the most basic level of
policy debate, that the STAMP project is all
but tailor-made to undermine and destabi-
lize the development approach reflected in
Buffalos Green Code.
Thats why its beyond perverse to fund
the latter project out of funds earmarked for
the former. And thats also why we shouldnt
entrust all the self-hymning apostles of in-
novation and smart governmenttied as
they are to Wall Streets standard real estate
investment productswith hatching an eco-
nomic game plan to equal the times.t
P. S . MUELLER
The Baffler [no.27] ! 143
Mo d e l s
Satirized for Your Consumption
3 Ben Schwartz
W e live in an age of satirical excess. If econo-
mists were to diagnose it, they might well call
it a comedy bubble. We currently have six late-
night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of-
the-party, white-guy topical jokersConan,
Kimmel, Fallon, James Corden, Seth Mey-
ers, and (come September) Colbertto sum
up, and send up, our day for us. We have four
comedy news-commentary showsMaher,
Larry Wilmore, John Oliver, and (for a little
while longer) Stewartand fake news from
SNLs Weekend Update, The Onion, ClickHole,
and several lesser lights. Vines, viral Funny or
Die clips, podcasts, Twitter: each new media
platform generates stars of its own, ranging
from seasoned comedians to everyday office
witsoften, people who have no intention of
seeking careers as professional humorists. It
would be easy to sniff in condescending high-
gatekeeper form and talk of the low signal-to-
noise ratio of truly funny people to not, but
with 280 million active users on Twitter alone,
that still leaves a pretty big signal.
And as often happens with bubbles, it
burst. Last year, American satire took one of
the stranger turns in its long history of mock-
ing, ridiculing, and joking about our target-
rich republic. Were used to comedians speak-
ing truth to power, to cruelly topical comedy
sketches and a steady diet of merciless politi-
cal cartoons. But in 2014, comedy was stolen
from the professional jokesters by their tradi-
tional targets and became, unexpectedly, the
new language of power, policy, and politics.
Thats a bold claim, but consider a few
representative instances. In June, just a few
months before the Senate Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence released its report on
CIA-coordinated torture, CIA administra-
144 1 The Baffler [no.27]
tors joined Twitters online community with
a stream of ironic, self-referential jokes. In
March, President Obama appeared on Be-
tween Two Ferns, a faux public-access interview
show hosted by a star of The Hangover com-
edies, Zach Galifianakis. Filled with funny,
rude insults from both the president and his
paunchy foil, Obamas guest spot brought the
then-troubled Affordable Care Act rollout to
the attention of Galifianakiss young, millen-
nial audience, who signed up in large numbers.
At Christmas, The Interview, a lowbrow
foreign-policy comedy from Judd Apatow,
Seth Rogen, and James Franco, presented the
imagined assassination of a sitting foreign
leader, North Koreas Kim Jong-un, as slap-
stick fare. But as its premiere approached,
the film provoked a series of improbable,
real-life plot twists that steered it away from
an Apatow buddy comedy and into a geopo-
litical farce owing more to the imagination of
a Terry Southern. First came a massive com-
puter hack on the movies backer, Sony, which
evolved into mysterious terroristic threats on
our nations theaters. The United States then
accused North Korea of the hack and threats,
and the Obama White House instituted a new
round of sanctions on the rogue dictatorship.
In an end-of-the-year press conference,
President Obama scoffed at North Korea for
overreacting to something as absurd as The
InterviewKim Jong-un, he implied, couldnt
take a joke. But given the Obama Administra-
tions own history of comedy-policy, we might
well ask: Who did the president think he was
kidding? Its a serious question. After all, our
own government leaders dont exactly laugh
out loud when citizens kid about assassinat-
ing them; we live in a country where writing

a farce about killing a U.S. president, or even
snickering about it online, could have the
NSA hacking your computers, land the Secret
Service on your doorstep, and put you in fed-
eral prison.
If North Korea is guilty as charged by our
FBI, the biggest punchline of all is that Kim
Jong-un may not be so crazy for taking Ameri-
cas new brand of weapons-grade humor so se-
riously. These days, we have a smirking CIA,
a healthcare overhaul that was sold via vaude-
ville sketch, a State Department that, as we
shall see, vetted and approved The Interview,
and a president whose signature moment is
the night he cracked jokes at a White House
R ANDALL ENOS
Correspondents Dinner while a U.S. Navy
SEAL team invaded Pakistan to assassinate
Osama bin Laden in his home. Kim Jong-un
may have embarrassed Sony execs and punked
The Interviews releasebut whos to say he
didnt get the joke?
A Greater Fool Theory
Its a common complaint that the abundance
of porn online has sexualized our culture, or
that mean-spirited Internet trolls have coars-
ened our national conversation. A similar ar-
gument can be made about online comedy,
which has humorized our lives. In the 1990s,
Maureen Dowd seemed cheeky when she pep-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 145
Mo d e l s
pered her Times pieces with pop-culture gibes.
Today, reading her column feels a lot like di-
aling up with a modemyou cant believe you
ever thought it was fast. News, politics, policy,
and cultural debate now reach us couched in
jokes. Professional, unfunny journalists fret
that young people get more of their informa-
tion from The Daily Show than from tradi-
tional sources, and the only time you heard
about NBCs Nightly News anchor Brian Wil-
liams, before he became our first casualty of
imaginary RPGs, was when he appeared on 30
Rock or Jimmy Fallons show to slow jam the
news. Comedians have so fully mastered the
language of reporting that when serious peo-
ple get taken in by absurdist Onion stories, no
one is surprised. Not the Onion has become
inside-the-Beltway shorthand for any offbeat
development in daily politics that seems like
farce but isnt.
The comedy culture all around us is also,
increasingly, the framework of public debate.
Several of the most heated arguments about
feminism in recent years have comedy as their
starting points, first in the long list of never-
serious Are Women Funny? think pieces, and
then in the online firestorm over comedians
telling rape jokes. Arguably, the phrase rape
culture came to the attention of many people
by way of humor, thanks to celebrity come-
dians like Patton Oswalt (who dislikes rape
jokes, and argues that there is a rape culture)
and Anthony Jeselnik (who tells rape jokes,
and thus proves there is one). Allegations that
Bill Cosby is a serial rapist went from impo-
lite celebrity gossip to a loud national conver-
sation only after comedian Hannibal Buress
brought them up in his standup routine.
When Bill Maher first adopted the tagline
satirized for your protection, it was an edgy
brag, not a humble one, meant to convey that
his show, Politically Incorrect, would not allow
the news of the day to remain safely spun.
Twenty years later, a better slogan for the hu-
mor of the Information Age would be sati-
146 1 The Baffler [no.27]
rized for your consumption. Forget stodgy
speeches that begin with trite one-liners to
break the ice. As the traditional targets of sat-
ire seek to demonstrate their relevance to our
wit-wired lives, full-on comedic performance
has become their principal disarming strategy.
Soon after President Obama appeared on Be-
tween Two Ferns, Hillary Clinton bandied talk
of a 2016 run at the presidencyon Jon Stew-
arts show, not on Meet the Press. And when a
recent blizzard in New York fizzled out ear-
lier than forecast, leaving little snow but many
transit closures, Mayor De Blasio charmed the
city by reading aloud from the Onions dysto-
pian parody of his snowmongering.
And then, of course, theres the CIA.
When the agency opened its official Twitter
account, it did so with a wry quip about its
own institutional inability to tell the truth:
We can neither confirm nor deny that this is
our first tweet.
Not unpredictably, spy watchdogs and in-
telligence monitors raised a hue and cry over
the agencys puckish foray into social media.
The CIA, after all, relies on the cover of of-
ficial secrecy to torture and assassinate, to
pay off unscrupulous leaders and bagmen, to
choreograph coups dtats, and to prop up cli-
ent states abroad. Theres nothing inherently
funny about such activities. More important,
it was more than a little jarring to see the
CIA lay claim to the language of satire. We
assume satire is for the truth teller, not the
truth obscurer. When George Orwell created
the irony-laden government-speak of Nineteen
Eighty-Four, his joke pivoted on one key dis-
tinction: we as readers, and not the gray and
earnest administrators of Oceania, recognize
its bleak absurdity for what it is. But now the
CIA has shown, in our satirized era, that it,
too, is in on the joke.
The strident detractors of the anonymous
smart aleck(s) behind the CIA account had
a point: when the official spokesmen of the
national security state greet you with a smirk
 Satire can be seen as throwing down the gauntlet.
That doesnt mean that the other side wont just pick it up
and throw it back at you.
9
and a good one-liner, youd probably better be
skeptical of their motives. Dark humor about
the CIA is nothing new. But humor from the
CIA? To mug for us, la James Bond wise-
cracking as he tosses Generic Foreign-Accent
Bond Villain #243 out of an airplane? Thats
something new.
A Nation of Class Clowns
As the CIA proved last summer, its quite easy
to co-opt the potentially subversive language
of satire. In the past, comedians, or their staff
writers, appeared to have a rare gift for wit
and getting laughs; the funniest kid in class
always stood out. Now, we are a nation of class
clowns. Social media gives us all a platform to
preach and vent, but also to crack wise on a
global stage. And these everyday wits are just
as sharp and funny as the professionals, with
some, such as Alison Agosti and Tim Seidell,
hired off of Twitter to write for the likes of
Seth Meyers and Larry Wilmore. Wit is much
more common than previously thought, and
what determines a professional humorist, it
seems, isnt rare comic genius, but mainly the
willingness to move to New York or Los An-
geles and suffer the entertainment industry.
Take the case of Dave Chappelle, who has
recently returned to show business proper af-
ter a long absence. Chappelle quit his some-
times brilliant Comedy Central sketch com-
edy show in 2005, after two seasons, and kept
a comparatively low profile for years. In 2014
he returned for a stand-up comedy tour, be-
ginning at Radio City Music Hall.
Nine years is a long time to be away, and
on Chappelles return, he found the comedy
world changed. Social media, podcasting,
micro-films, and serious Internet-backed fi-
nancing (e.g., Netflix, Amazon, and Yahoo)
had arrived, offering alternatives to movie
studios and television networks. Comedians
like Louis C.K. and Maria Bamford had be-
gun to offer their own comedy specials on-
line, directly to their fan base, with no net-
work or media executives acting as financial
or censoring middlemen.
To keep up, Chappelle launched his own
Twitter account, and quickly attracted more
than 463,000 followers. But like so many ce-
lebrities who sign onto Twitter, he found that
there was already someone pretending to be
him, a fake Dave Chappelle account, com-
plete with original jokes. The Fake Chappelle
had racked up more than 120,000 followers.
Thats incredible for an account clearly la-
beled as a counterfeit.
Its easy enough to start a fake celebrity ac-
count. Twitter allows you to use any name you
like (say, Dave Chappelle), post any picture
as your avatar (say, Dave Chappelles), and go
about pretending to be anyone you want (say,
Dave Chappelle). Some do it as a fans homage,
some do it to mock a hated celebrity and make
obnoxious statements in his name, and some
hope to deceive the celebritys followers, for
who knows what dishonest purpose. Chap-
pelle found his fake tweeter was something
else, something quite unexpected. As he told
Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, It turned
out, Jimmy, the guy was like, hilarious. . . . I was
like, this guys funny . . . and then, like a week
or two into it, he just turns evil!
Real Chappelle saw Fake Chappelle start-
ing Twitter feuds with an account associated
with Katt Williams, a comedian friend of the
The Baffler [no.27] ! 147
Mo d e l s
real Dave Chappelle. The Williams account
responded unpleasantly, which, Chappelle told
Jimmy Fallon, hurt the real Dave Chappelles
feelings. Only, as Chappelle learned later
when he ran into Katt Williams and braced
for an awkward meeting, it turns out that Katt
Williams has no Twitter account. Fake Chap-
pelle was feuding with a Fake Katt Williams.
Such was the comedy world, circa 2014. You
could read it as just another instance of In-
ternet celebrity identity theft, or of an Inter-
net upstart forcing a celebrity into a moment
of public embarrassment. But the discovery
that Fake Chappelle is actually funny? Funny
enough to attract 120,000 followers? That,
too, is something new in the comedy bubble.
Whos the Punchline?
This rapid-fire Twitter tutorial had to be par-
ticularly unsettling for Chappelle, whos been
struggling for some time to rescue his materi-
al from the clutches of bad-faith fans and imi-
tators. His realization that truly evil people
were co-opting his humor was a key factor in
his decision to quit his show and put his career
on hold. In much the same seamless-yet-dis-
turbing way that the CIA adapted its official
voice to mimic Twitters wit and snark, some
of the people Chappelle attacked regularly
racistshad taken to adopting his humor. In
a 2006 CNN interview, Chappelle explained
that he once was filming a skit for his show in
blackface and noticed a white person nearby
laughing uncontrollably. But, as he recalled,
it didnt seem that the onlooker was laugh-
ing with him. The way he laughed, it made
me feel like this guys laughing for the wrong
reasons. . . . It stirred up something in me that
was like, I dont want to subject anyone else
to. After his show became a hit, Chappelle
discovered that some of his white fans were
grievously misunderstandingor more likely,
intentionally distortinghis satirical intent.
Early on in the second season of his show, he
offered this anecdote:
148 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Last season we started the series off with
this sketch about a [blind] black white
supremacist. Very controversial. Yes, veryit
sparked this whole controversy about the
appropriateness of the N-word, the dreaded
N-word. And you knowand then when
I would travel, people would come up to
mewhite people would come up to me, like,
Man, that sketch you did about them niggers
that was hila [Chappelle does a double
take in shock here.] Take it easy! I was jok-
ing around! I started to realize that these
sketches, in the wrong hands, are dangerous.
Worse still, Chappelles name came up in a
lawsuit filed by the city of Baltimore against
Wells Fargo for its subprime mortgage loan
programs, which, the suit alleges, targeted
African Americans. In a moment of wince-
inducing irony, one employees complaint de-
scribed how a Wells Fargo loan officer quoted
Chappelle while he pushed black families into
foreclosure:
Dave Zoldak, who succeeded Dave Margeson
as my branch manager in 2005, used the word
nigger at the office. Although Wells Fargo
knew Mr. Zoldak used racial slurs, it promot-
ed him to area manager after I complained
about his discriminatory comments. On Oc-
tober 21, 2005, I complained in my email to
Mr. Zoldak directly about his use of the word
nigger and speaking about how African
Americans lived in hoods and slums. Mr.
Zoldak replied that he had used the slurs in a
humorous way, just as the African-American
comedian Dave Chapelle did on television
and thought that I would find the use of these
terms humorous.
Its hard to picture a more grim co-opting
of Chappelles comedy at the height of his
shows popularitythe Wells Fargo incident
occurred in 2005, the same year Chappelle
walked away. But the co-opting of satire, and
specifically, the racist misapplication of comic

material, has long been a problem in American
humor. In 1832 the first minstrel star, Thomas
D. Rice, of Manhattan, went onstage with
black makeup on his face and took the name
of a folk character, Jim Crow. No modern
audience would tolerate his performance:
the casually offered racial slurs, the ugly ste-
reotyping, the racist imagery. But there was a
twist to Rices humor. He interpolated anti-
slavery lyrics into the music he appropriated
from African Americans:
Should dey get to fighting,
Perhaps de blacks will rise,
For deir wish for freedon,
R ANDALL ENOS
Is shining in deir eyes.
And if de blacks should get free,
I guess deyll see some bigger,
An I shall consider it,
A bold stroke for de nigger.
Im for freedom,
An for Union altogether,
Although Im a black man,
De white is calld my broder.
In a barbaric era of American history,
during which the very humanity of African
Americans and Native Americans was dis-
puted, Rice was, in these early days, an am-
biguous symbol of progressivism. Its hard to
The Baffler [no.27] ! 149
Mo d e l s
know whos speaking here, T. D. Rice or Jim
Crow, writes historian John Strausbaugh in
his study of race comedy, Black Like You: Black-
face, Whiteface, Insult, and Imitation in Ameri-
can Popular Culture. Maybe both. Thats the
importance of the blackface mask: Rice, as a
White man, probably would not have stood up
before an audience of Five Points rowdies and
openly advocated a violent revolt by de nig-
ger. But as Jim Crow he could. And the same
Bowery boys who put on blackface themselves
to hurl brickbats at their Black neighbors
cheered the idea of Blacks (in the South any-
way) rising up.
If Rices ambiguous Jim Crow helped make
minstrelsy a national fad, he could not stop
pro-slavery imitators from going onstage and
appropriating his own very much appropriat-
ed act. They turned his plea for freedom into
a tool of oppression. And in a further convo-
lution, Rices popularization of the Jim Crow
character went on to supply the name for the
postCivil War Souths century of terrorism
against African Americans.
As for Chappelle, one can only imagine
what he must have thought upon learning that
his humor about race was serving as an alibi of
first resort for a Wells Fargo manager seeking
to couch a business model of displacing Afri-
can American families from their homes in the
language of a Comedy Central sketch. Small
wonder Chappelle walked away to rethink his
career. Satire can be seen as throwing down the
gauntlet. That doesnt mean that the other side
wont just pick it up and throw it back at you.
In Chappelles imitators, one can see evi-
dence of a larger trend in American humor:
increasingly, the established culture seeks to
inoculate itself from the complaints of the
satirist by appropriating the satirists voice.
Comedians have always traded on the role of
the prototypical outsidera role often cov-
eted by savvy politicians, who hope to dis-
tance themselves from establishment Wash-
ington in the minds of voters. The Obama
150 1 The Baffler [no.27]
administration, for one, has managed to fuse
wiseguy wit with policy like no other White
House. And Obamas recent comedy-show
appearancesincluding an entertaining visit
to The Colbert Report, to take over Colberts
Word segmenthave helped demolish any
hard-and-fast distinctions between insiders
and outsiders in the world of satire.
With The Interview, state-sponsored satire
went next level. Certainly, slapstick foreign
policy comedies are nothing new. A partial
(and quality-neutral) listing of significant en-
tries in the genre includes Douglas Fairbanks
His Majesty, The American (1919), Will Rogers
Ambassador Bill (1931), The Four Marx Broth-
ers Duck Soup (1933), Wheeler and Woolseys
Diplomaniacs (1933), The Three Stooges You
Nazty Spy! (1940), Chaplins The Great Dictator
(1940), Kubrick and Southerns Dr. Strangelove
(1964), Woody Allens Bananas (1971), Falk and
Arkins The In-Laws (1979), Ramis and Mur-
rays Stripes (1981), Elaine Mays Ishtar (1987),
Sandlers You Dont Mess with the Zohan (2008),
and Sacha Baron Cohens The Dictator (2012).
Some of these movies drew political ire in
their day, but nothing close to The Interviews
notoriety. Yes, isolationists called Chaplin a
warmonger in the highly charged days before
World War II. But when Will Rogers praised
Mussolini by name in 1931s Ambassador Bill, it
was ignoredhe was a cowboy comedian, after
all, not a real ambassador. Duck Soup, produced
by Herman Mankiewicz, a serious satirist, is a
burlesque of World War I that posits that the
war was fought for bankers and millionaires (a
cynical bit of common wisdom in the Depres-
sion). Mankiewicz later cowrote Citizen Kane,
in which he and Orson Welles argue that their
Hearstian title character started the Spanish-
American War to sell newspapers. But unlike
the controversial Citizen Kane, Duck Soup was
seen as light, silly fare. Theres no record to
suggest that the Marx Brothers farce netted
so much as a single outraged letter from ag-
grieved Wilsonians or veterans groups. Ku-
 Try and find thirteen minutes on the vagaries of net-neutrality
policymaking on any serious network news broadcast.
9
brick and Southern tacked on a disclaimer
from the military that the events depicted in
Dr. Strangelove could never happenbut that
only makes the movie seem more subversive.
The military never seriously tried to ban the
movie from commercial release.
Yet The Interview was taken to be a true
reflection of American foreign policy, both
by our foreign policy professionals and (ac-
cording to the FBI) by North Koreas. Rogen,
Franco, and Apatowthe marquee comic
talent of the filmwound up sidelined as the
least interesting aspect of the whole debacle.
Consider The Interview from Kim Jong-uns
point of view. He sees the ongoing conver-
gence of U.S. power and comedy, the CIA
on Twitter, and Obama performing stand-up
comedy after ordering the Bin Laden assas-
sination. He can scarcely fail to notice that
comedy is now the means by which people
in the upper circles of U.S. power communi-
cate with the public. He duly notes that the
movies corporate coparents are based in Ja-
pan and the USANorth Koreas two chief
historical enemies. Then, he learns, via Sonys
hacked emails, that CEO Michael Lynton
and other executives behind The Interview
consulted with former and current State De-
partment officials, who vetted and encour-
aged this regime-change comedy. As The
Daily Beast reported, a North Korean defense
analyst for the RAND Corporation, Bruce
Bennett, heartily approved of the horribly
violent death of Kim Jong-un in the movies
finale. Bennett wrote, I believe that a story
that talks about the removal of the Kim fam-
ily regime and the creation of a new govern-
ment by the North Korean people (well, at
least the elites) will start some real thinking
in South Korea and, I believe, in the North
once the DVD leaks into the North (which it
almost certainly will). So from a personal per-
spective, I would personally prefer to leave
the ending alone.
And as Politico reported, Bennett wasnt
alone in this view.
The leaks reveal that on the same day Ben-
nett wrote his review, a top Sony official
emailed Bennett to say a U.S. government
official supported Bennetts assessment.
Sony CEO Michael Lynton wrote back,
BruceSpoke to someone very senior in
State (confidentially) . . . He agreed with
everything you have been saying. Everything.
I will fill you in when we speak.
Yes, if you came from a dynasty as violent
and paranoid as Kim Jong-uns, where all
culture is state controlled, and if you had an
adversary like our comedian president, you
might take The Interview seriously too.
Odd Comics Out
Rogen, Franco, Chappelle: in 2014, its the
comedians who lost ground in this comedy
bubble. Their work quickly moved out of their
control and became something they never in-
tended. We often hear talk of satires devastat-
ing impact on its targets. But this age of humor-
ous excess has shown that satire, even when
delivered in the sharpest and most unforgiving
forms, hardly makes a dent. The proliferation
of satirists has multiplied the amount of funny
material out there. But it has diminished the
belief that satire, political or otherwise, can
serve any real purpose beyond amusing us.
This, too, is a new consequence of the
comedy bubble. We once had all day to ab-
sorb the news, and the political parries and
counterparries arising from the news, before
The Baffler [no.27] ! 151
Mo d e l s
late-night comics went on to turn it all into
jokes. By that time, TV satirists could pro-
voke that cathartic (if clichd) response from
their viewers: Finally, somebody said it. To-
day, by 11:30 p.m., when the late-night shows
go on, millions of us online have already said
it, sometimes hilariously. Now the late-night
comedians job is not to speak for us, but to
top us. Some shows have hired writers from
Twitter, and others crowd-source jokes online
(@midnight) or feature tweet of the week
segments (Ellen).
Johnny Carson once had this field all to
himself. As the New York Times wrote of Car-
son when he died in 2005:
His credibility with the American public
was such that his monologues were carefully
monitored by politicians mindful that no
one who became a frequent target of Johnny
Carson could long survive in public life. It
didnt help Richard Nixon when Mr. Carsons
monologue produced some of the funniest
Watergate jokes around. Nor did it help when
Mr. Carson trained his sights on former Sena-
tor Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado
who found allure both in the presidency and
in women he didnt happen to be married to.
Mr. Carsons jokes about Mr. Harts extra-
marital activities were surely not the only
reason his political fortunes evaporated in
1988, but they were repeated often enough to
have played some part.
Survive in public life? Its doubtful Car-
son had the impact the Times describes; the
creepy behavior and considerable hubris of
Messrs. Nixon and Hart were far more instru-
mental in their undoing than any late-night
monologues lampooning their excesses. It
could also be said that the cautious Mr. Car-
son rarely got out ahead of the public, prefer-
ring to wait until the Nixons and Harts were
already punchlines before speaking up. Presi-
dents and their communications offices moni-
tor every major show that comments on them,
152 1 The Baffler [no.27]
but while they are always ready to mount
a charm offensive to influence the work of
prime-time network journalists and Times op-
ed columnists, they dont expend much energy
pushing back against late-night comics.
For one thing, the fallout from satirical at-
tacks is far more easily managed. Nixon found
this out during his 1968 appearance on Laugh-
In, arranged by the shows arch right-wing
head writer and Nixon friend, Paul Keyes. By
then, Nixons awkward public personality was
old news to comedians and cartoonists. Since
the appearance of being able to take a joke
greatly benefits a politician, Keyes took advan-
tage of Nixons greatest television negative, his
Tin Woodsman stiffness, by showing the ul-
tra-square Nixon struggling mightily with the
shows then-hip punchline, Sock it to me!
Nixons halting effortsSock it to me?are
still funny to see, nearly five decades later.
The larger lesson here is that presidents
dont fear comedians. They go on these shows
to take advantage of their big audiences, and
get points in the process for being a good
sport. The confrontations always end up cute.
Nixon said ... that appearing on Laugh-In is
what got him electedand I believe that. And
Ive had to live with that, the shows produc-
er, George Schlatter, has humble-bragged.
Schlatter might rest a little easier at night
knowing that the cultural and political tide
that brought Nixon back to power was far
bigger than Laugh-Injust as the New York
Times obituary desk would do well to recall
that far larger historical forces than a series
of Carson monologues brought down Nixons
presidency.
Presidents score points for being good
sports, but no one pauses to ask, What about
the comedians? For the most part, these en-
counters between the ruling class and the fun-
ny caste deflate the fiction that jesters speak
uncomfortable truth to power. After the cer-
emonial presidential visit to a comedy set, a
once devastating satirist is then revealed to
us as merely a professional entertainer. These
visits are now an accepted part of our electoral
vetting process; every four years, every serious
party nominee stops in to chat with the late-
night talk show hosts who mock them.
As the politicians show us that they can
take a joke, they also reveal that the whole
thing is only a joke. We often describe our great
political satirists as devastating or eviscer-
ating their targets, and call them brave for
speaking out. But more often than not, our
comedians are ignored by the nations rich
and powerful, who may dislike them, but who
never really suffer much for what they say. Has
there ever been a time when our newspapers
and media havent been full of sharp political
cartoons or gibes? A time without a Frank-
lin, a Washington Irving, a Twain, a Nash, a
Mr. Dooley, a Mencken, a Mort Sahl, a Garry
Trudeau, a Jon Stewart? Donald Trump insists
on answering seemingly each and every insult
hurled at him by nearly anyone on Twitter, but
his is the behavior of an egomaniac who feels
personally threatened by public ridiculeand
is one reason (on a very long list) why Trump
will never be president.
In some high-profile exceptions, American
satirists have suffered for their art, if never
anything like the Charlie Hedbo crew. Lenny
Bruce got sent to jail and died broke, drug
addicted, and unable to work. The Smoth-
ers Brothers lost their CBS show, and after
9/11 Bill Maher lost a networka blessing in
disguise, since moving to HBO gave him the
freedom he needed.
What impact does even the boldest satire
have on the powerful? A high-water mark of
contemporary satire is generally acknowl-
edged to be Stephen Colberts 2006 perfor-
mance at the White House Correspondents
Dinner. There, with President Bush in the au-
dience, Colbert delivered a masterfully ironic
faux-conservative tirade in his sublimely
boorish OReilly persona, advising the presi-
dent to ignore Americas clear disapproval of
him. We know that polls are just a collection
of statistics that reflect what people are think-
ing in reality. And reality has a well-known
liberal bias.
Whether the unnerved audience in the
room laughed or sat aghast as Colbert built
momentum has been a subject of some debate,
but either way, it was a great moment of awk-
wardly pointed satire. Colberts performance
made people uncomfortable because he was
saying all this directly to Bushs facewhat
more dramatic instance could there be of a co-
median speaking truth to power?
But then . . . what? After all, Colbert wasnt
at the dinner to topple the administration. He
was there to entertain it. Bush watched him,
chuckled politely, and, somehow resisting the
devastating power of Colberts monologue,
managed not to resign on the spot. As for Col-
bert, he returned to work, unharmed, by all
accounts, by the NSA.
Fans of political satire tend to think that if
only someone dares speak out, something will
change, the powerful will flip out, and, faced
with a hilarious and unanswerable exposure
of their misdeeds, the pols will reverse policy.
One need only consult Bushs own perfor-
mance at the 2004 Radio and Television Cor-
respondents Dinner to disprove that notion.
In that monologue, the president turned the
truly scandalous nonexistence of WMDs in
Saddam Husseins Iraq into comedy. Present-
ing a jokey White House photo album, Bush
showed a picture of himself haplessly search-
ing under his Oval Office desk. Those weap-
ons of mass destruction have got to be here
somewhere, he narrated. If Colberts shtick
represented a new level in speaking satirical
truth to power, so did Bushs performance
of co-opting that same satirical missionby
admitting he was not only wrong about Iraqi
WMDs, but utterly incompetent for ever be-
lieving they existed.
That Colbert said what needed to be said,
and Bush admitted what needed to be admit-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 153
Mo d e l s
ted, did nothing to derail the next four disas-
trous years of the official U.S. occupation of
Iraq. Instead, the expectant moments merely
dissipated, as intended, into memorable en-
tertainment. Colbert made that point with
unmistakable clarity in 2014 during the
farewell edition of The Colbert Report. For
his final show, he filled his soundstage with
celebrities and political figures, including
George Lucas, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Toby
Keith, and Henry Kissinger. As a group they
sang Well Meet Again, the World War
IIera song used to ironic effect in the clos-
ing credits of Dr. Strangelove as the films
superpowers enter a nuclear holocaust. But
the spectacle lacked anything like Kubrick
and Southerns bite. By appearing on stage
with icons of the far right and left, Colbert
let his audience know that he never really
meant it. His mugging faux-OReilly persona
turned out to be shtick wrapped inside more
shtick. The star-studded ensemble also made
it quite clear that CBS hasnt hired a lefty
demagogue, as right-wing detractors had
loudly insisted when the news broke that the
Comedy Central host was ascending to the
Letterman chair. In the new Colbert era, Dr.
Kissinger, a cold warrior only one small step
removed from Peter Sellerss Strangelove,
will occupy the same celebrity cultural real
estate as George Lucas.
In other words, it was always just a joke.
Eight years after publicly eviscerating Presi-
dent Bush and calling out the biggest for-
eign-policy blunder in a generation, Colbert
backed away from any truly subversive satiri-
cal intent. And President Bush? He was in the
news late last year, too, to unapologetically
reaffirm his support for perhaps the ugliest
aspect of his administrationhis torture
policy. He even refused the usual presidential
luxury of deniability and enthusiastically re-
endorsed the policy and those who executed
it. In 2014 it was Colbert who was distancing
himself from his legacy, not Bush.
154 1 The Baffler [no.27]
The White House Show
Starring Barack Obama
This key limitation of political satire is one
reason President Obama could safely appear
on Between Two Ferns, an often hilarious paro-
dy of community cable-access shows. We have
always appreciated quip-ready presidents like
Kennedy and Reagan, but selling policy in
insult-comedy sketcheswell, this too was
something else. Sitting face to face with Presi-
dent Obama, Zach Galifianakis, playing his
part as the vacuous stoner host of the show,
asks him, What is it like to be the last black
president? Its a funny, pessimistic joke about
American racism and its current miserable
state, one that cruelly deflates the loose pun-
dit talk of a new post-racial America.
When Galifianakis asks what Obama
would think of a third term, Obama replies,
It would sort of be like making a third Hang-
over movie. It didnt work out too well, did
it? Throughout the interview, Obama and
Galifianakis loft rude and funny jokes at each
other. From Galifianakiss side, he gets some
distinctly biting and mean laughs, which helps
to burst the dignity bubble that envelops the
American presidency. As with the 2006 en-
counter between Colbert and Bush, the ex-
change at first triggers shock: Is this mum-
bling schlub really saying that to the president?
But once Obama proves he can take it, and hits
back hard, he comes across as cool enough to
pitch the ACA to Galifianakiss hip, twenty-
something fans, a demographic that had thus
far failed to register for coverage under the law
in significant numbers.
The performance was rightly hailed as a
masterful Oval Office manipulation of youth
culture. Thanks in part to Between Two Ferns,
the ACA was satirized for our consumption,
and millions reportedly consumed. In seeking
out Galifianakis and his cult show, the White
House grasped something essential about the
conduct of political satire in our day: it feeds
on the audiences expectation that real conse-
 Dark humor about the CIA is nothing new.
But humor from the CIA? Thats something new.
9
quences might result from encounters between
comedy and power. And like other such fever-
ishly hyped dustups, this one drew a crowd
and ensured that, in the end, the jokes only
helped to shore up two high-profile careers.
Still, even as presidents mug their way into
the view of young constituencies, and even as
Mayor De Blasio twists the Onion to his will,
some satirists are punching out of todays
comedy bubble, or trying to. In 2014, John
Oliver emerged as one of the few comedians
who maintained his edge while influencing, or
at least distracting, real-world policymaking.
His net neutrality episode, in particular, re-
vealed that even in todays satire glut, a come-
dian can inspire an audience to take civic ac-
tion. Net neutrality, which the FCC is on the
verge of retiring in favor of a dual-tier model
that reserves speedier net access for those who
can pay for the privilege, is not a new issue.
And unfortunately, its a boring, complicated
subjectKryptonite to the usual comedy de-
livery systems. But in June, Oliver devoted
thirteen solid minutes of his showabout half
of itto net neutrality, advancing a hilariously
compelling argument in its favor and turning
his jokes into a cogent explanation of what is
at stake. Before he could ridicule the FCCs
policy, he had to unpack its missteps in detail.
Informing the audience, skewering illogic,
and building it all into a truly devastating fi-
nale the way Oliver did: thats more than just
throwaway jokes on Twitter. After the initial
HBO broadcast of the segment, it went on to
net 7.7 million views on YouTube.
When media watchdogs fret over young
people getting their news from comedy
shows like Olivers and The Daily Show, they
forget to mention that these comedians of-
ten spend three times more airtime on a top-
ic than a network news anchor will the same
night. Try and find thirteen minutes on the
vagaries of net-neutrality policymaking on
any serious network news broadcast.
To close his longform piece, Oliver called
on the Internets legion of utterly horrible,
culture-coarsening, snarky trolls and anony-
mous commenters to use their venom for
good, just this once, and contact the FCC. If
Dave Chappelle went into semi-retirement
over such people, and if Rogen, Franco, and
Apatow never saw the new policy-comedy as-
pect of the modern era coming at them, Oliver
understands this new comedy world perfectly.
His fans reportedly overloaded the FCC site,
which crashed. Its one of the few instances,
its worth noting, in which political satire has
had a demonstrable, government-stopping ef-
fect. Whipping up Internet rage mobs is easy
(any mention of Gaza, gun control, or Woody
Allen will do the trick). Whats hard is helping
millions of people understand a critical policy
issue that they perhaps hadnt reckoned with
before. Olivers plea actually took.
To say that Olivers stunt tipped Obamas
hand in favor of net neutrality is a bit much.
But the Internet-savvy White House, which
finally came out in favor of neutrality after
the 2014 midterms, had to have taken notice.
Olivers detour into comedy-advocacy showed
that fans of a satirist can, at least every once in
a while, make a very loud agitprop noise, one
that puts the policymakers on the defense for
the short term and that informs the public for
the long term.
Can satire hope to achieve much more than
this in todays comedy-Costco world? Most
of the time, its enough for us to feel that our
cultural, political, or otherwise ideologically
backward foes have been verbally drubbed
The Baffler [no.27] ! 155
Mo d e l s
before we turn in for the night. How else to
explain Twitters legions of quipsters? Theyre
certainly not getting paid for their work. Seth
Meyers coined a word for such cathartic mo-
ments, clapteri.e., that rather hollow and
perfunctory moment when a partisan audi-
ence is loudly applauding and cheering a po-
litical joke for merely hitting its target, more
than actually laughing. Our late-night talk
shows give us that much in truckloads: snark
about Bushs excessive vacation days, say, or
imitations of Obamas condescending profes-
sorial rhetorical style.
When satire has its greatest impact, it al-
ters our perceptions, or gives us a language to
answer and describe what we see going wrong.
In 1964, Britain was in its own satire boom and
had its own Colbert-Bush moment. Comedian
Peter Cook starred in the revue Beyond the
Fringe, which featured his impression of then
prime minister Harold MacMillan. Imitat-
ing anyone as dull as a PM was a novel idea in
swinging, early 1960s London, so much so that
MacMillan himself came in to see Cook do it.
Cook rose to the occasion, departing from the
script to speak to MacMillan as MacMillan
P. S . MUELLER
156 1 The Baffler [no.27]
to the man himself. Unlike Bush at the time
of the Colbert encounter, MacMillan had not
yet, until Peter Cook arrived, been seen as a
joke. After watching Cooks show, a young Eric
Idle, then nineteen, was thunderstruck. They
attacked everything that I had just spent nine-
teen years being oppressed by, he recalled.
Royalty, police, authority, teachers, every
single authority figure was completely pillo-
ried and destroyed and my life just changed.
... The government had been in power thir-
teen years. And the slogan was Youve Never
Had It So Good. And so when Peter Cook
did Harold MacMillan on-stage it completely
made them a figure of fun and redundant ... it
was no longer possible to take them seriously.
And I think that satire can, occasionally, do
things like that.
Beyond the Fringes impact on British humor,
from that legendary revue on, is incalculable,
from the Pythons up through John Oliver.
Fifty-odd years after Idle witnessed Cooks
MacMillan, in the heart of our own comedy-
saturated age, Jon Stewart came to a similar
conclusion about satire while promoting his
new (quite serious) drama, Rosewater. When
NPRs Terry Gross asked if he considered sat-
ire to be a weapon, Stewart replied, Satire, or
what we do on the show, certainly has its limi-
tations, but I think we try to utilize it to the
best of our ability. . . . I dont see it as a weapon
as much as I see it as a conversation . . . against
dogma. . . . I see all of these shows as in some
ways a weapon against complacency.
In the right moment, in the right place, sat-
ire can still alter perception and change the
conversation. The difference today is that pol-
iticians and policy apparatchiks now under-
stand this as well as the comedians. Whether
satire is devastating or not, whether the pow-
erful can survive it or not, perhaps isnt the
point. Theres no joke or movie that can topple
a president. Or maybe there is, and thats why
the CIA went on Twitterto find it.t
Berryman Anecdote
3 William Corbett

He came into the Grolier

carrying his head,

hungover like death.

He told of the time

hed come into a class

and to introduce himself

written his name, hand

shaking, on the blackboard.

He turned and saw rows

of puzzled faces then turned

back to the board then back

to the class, They didnt hire

me, ash shook from his hand,

for my penmanship.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 157

Mo d e l s

Toxically Pure
Joe Bageant drops out
3 John Lingan

Shortly before the first election of the sec-

ond President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced
his third wife that they should move from Or-
egon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a
bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while
Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled lit-
erary aspirations, was editing an agribusiness
newsletter. They had money and lived well,
but when Military History magazine offered
him a job in Virginia, Joe saw it as an oppor-
tunity to return to his hometown of Win-
chester. He hadnt been back in decades, and
like many displaced Southern men on the far
side of middle age, he felt the pull of home.
The people were real there, he told his wife.
They took care of each other. Without spend-
ing too much, Joe and Barbara could buy a
colonial with a porch, right downtown, and
say hello to a dozen friends every time they
walked to the store.
So they moved. Bought the colonial,
downtown as promised, and settled into the
nominal capital of the Shenandoah Valley, a
250-year-old, tradition-bound town that had
given George Washington his first political
victory and Patsy Cline her first stable home.
Before long, Joe shook off the cultivated air
hed acquired in his west-coast days. He start-
ed dressing in cheap work clothes and guz-
zling beer alongside the rednecks hed grown
up with. At karaoke nights and in the 7-Eleven
parking lot, he listened to his people rail about
their menial jobs, their healthcare debt, and
their proud anti-liberalism.
Joe was familiar with the shitkicker ethos,
but he was unprepared for the tone of panic
and resentment that charged his old friends

158 1 The Baffler [no.27]

STEPHEN KRONINGER

The Baffler [no.27] ! 159

Mo d e l s
conversations. Increasingly despondent, he
vented his frustrations in writing, first in
chatrooms, and then in the galloping voice
that hed honed as a Hunter S. Thompson
obsessed newspaper columnist in his earlier
life. Something new and . . . ominous is afoot
down here, he wrote in 2004, in the first essay
to appear on his website, joebageant.com:
Our girthsome, ill-educated polity hoots,
cheers and guffaws at a Fox network made-
for-the masses political movie called America,
the Baddest Dog on the Block, as the power elite
pick every pocket in the audience through
regressive taxes, stopping only to loot the
local treasury on their way out the back door
to that money-insulated estate they bought
for a song.
That essay, Howling in the Belly of the
Confederacy, invoked a hellscape of blue-col-
lar anger. Before long, similar tractsabout
guns, real estate, alcohol, Pentecostalism,
and other aspects of the Scots-Irish Southern
trailer lifestylestarted appearing more fre-
quently than most people exercise, and by the
time Bush left the White House, Joe Bageant
had detailed Winchesters spiritual and eco-
nomic devolution in dozens of elite-indicting
online tirades, a book of which, Deer Hunting
with Jesus, brought him a six-figure advance
from Random House and blurbs from Studs
Terkel and Howard Zinn.
His return home, as described in that
book, had convinced Joe that American cul-
ture is based on two things: television and
petroleum. We live in an age of corporate
dominion just as we once lived in an age of
domination by royal families, kings, and war-
lords. He reserved his greatest ferocity for
the liberals who let it all happen, with their
thick-headed denial of what is obvious to
nearly every thinking white person: A class
conflict is being played out between the
Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb
160 1 The Baffler [no.27]
rightly called Americas paternalistic
Ivy League-centered, media-connected,
politically correct power centers. Whether
educated liberals believe this or not, it is true.
Tens of millions of Scots Irish and thousands
of Scots Irishinfluenced communities be-
lieve it is true and vote as if it is true, and that
makes it true.
Joes book prompted speaking invitations
in England, Italy, and Australia. His ideas
were quoted approvingly by the New York
Times, NPR, and the BBC, particularly as the
2008 presidential election neared. His rage
became his brand, a fishing vest and beer gut
his uniform, and before Barack Obama began
campaigning for a second term, Joe Bageant
was dead, at age sixty-four. It was cancer,
not suicide, but by the end hed grown so an-
gry about the root cruelty and unfairness of
American-style capitalism that the only sol-
ace he allowed himself in his columns was a
firm belief in the oncoming collapse. It is
seeing everything in material terms, just like
our avaricious capitalist overlords, that holds
us back, he wrote just months before learn-
ing of the tumor that had clenched around his
intestines like a fist. We are in the sixth great
species die-off here.
Returning as he did to Winchester right as
Bush took office, Joe Bageant stepped into a
writers dreama perfect confluence of sub-
ject, setting, and personal knowledgeand
he responded with fury, writing essay after
raging essay, a dazzling output that collec-
tively foresaw the housing crisis and recession,
Obamacare, and the 1 percent as a rhetori-
cal tool. Yet four years after his death, hes re-
membered for one book and a corresponding
moment of semi-fame as Americas Most Lit-
erate Redneck, if hes remembered at all.
From the outside, Joe Bageants career and
image seemed to materialize spontaneously,
but for all his bubba bona fides, Joes outlook
was equally the product of LSD, Buddhism,
 His rage became his brand,
a fishing vest and beer gut
his uniform.
9 pulled a crinkled brown shopping bag out
American Indian activists, Timothy Leary,
and the back-to-the-land movement. In fact,
the twenty-first centurys foremost chronicler
of red-state dispossession was more than just
a literate redneckhe was an avenging angel
of the forgotten rural hippie movement. If
his workparticularly his vivid second book,
Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, which remains
without a U.S. publisherwere more deeply
and widely read and his life more fully under-
stood, Joes most radical propositions might
seem worth considering: he insisted that tree-
huggers are the natural allies of trailer trash,
and that the political disasters of the last few
decades are a result of the mainstream lefts
disavowal of them both.
Off the Farm
I first met Barbara, Joes widow, in a cof-
fee shop in Winchesters newly refurbished
downtown walking mall. In a scathing 2007
essay about this quaint, yuppified historical
district, Joe described this exact place as the
towns obligatory Starbucks knockoff. Even their own vegetables and slaughtered their
Barbara, who grew up in the Midwest and
clearly has no moral objection to the yoga cen-
ter or artisanal jewelry boutiques across the
way, laughed at the impeccable leaf design in
her latte foam. Heres how you can tell D.C. is
creeping in, she said. We have baristas now. selfconsciously under the arc of Jeffersonian
It was hard to imagine this quietly thought-
ful, middle-aged womana genealogy and lo-
cal history researcher in the town library two
blocks awaysharing more than twenty years
with a man who eventually lived abroad be-
cause he refused to pay taxes to the empire to
kill brown babies. There was a semi-stunned
quality to her voice as she discussed those last
years, when Joes anger ambushed them both,
replacing marital comfort with a nobler, less
enjoyable purpose. But I was not the first aco-
lyte to come to town asking for a sense of the
man, and her pride, too, was obvious. Barbara
from under her chair and started searching
through her husbands makeshift archive.
She chose a couple of photo albums from
the bundle of manila folders and scribble-
filled notebooks. Outside, beyond the window
behind her, the walking mall stirred with the
usual weekend crowd: Civil War tourists and
parents visiting their kids at Shenandoah Uni-
versity on the other side of town. But the pic-
tures on these stiff pages recalled an earlier,
gruffer Winchester. Joe had put these albums
together haphazardly, so snapshots of his mid-
1960s beatnik phase sat next to pictures of his
three kids, twenty-five years later. There were
a few of his father, but only in old age, and
nothing at all from Joes earliest years, because
that life, the subject of Rainbow Pie, didnt in-
clude cameras.
Joe Bageant was born in 1946 and grew up
in the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Win-
chester, just over the West Virginia line. Joe
knew the family farm on Shanghai Road as
Over Home, a place where generations of
Bageants had grown, picked, and preserved
own hogs, all without modern machinery or
vehicles. In his memoir he describes his child-
hood as anachronistic even in the 1950s . . .
vestigial, charged with folk beliefs, marked by
an ignorance of the larger world, and lived un-
ideals, backed up by an archaic confidence in
the efficacies of Gods word and grapeshot.
The only currency in such a life was
work, calories burned. Joe estimated his
grandfather never made more than $1,000
a year, but the family lived well enough on
only a few acres of vegetables, a small stock of
animals, and deeply ingrained wisdom about
The Baffler [no.27] ! 161
Mo d e l s
the management of each. Shanghai Road was
dotted with similarly rooted families. They
patronized the same general store for staples
and relied on each other for the rest of their
worldly needs, like a truck to haul the yearly
tomato harvest to the nearest cannery. It was
a system where everyone benefited through
an economy of labor, he wrote in Rainbow Pie,
with the small money of small farmers sup-
plying the grease for the common-sense ma-
chinery of community sustenance. And even
before Joe was old enough to join hunting trips
with his daddy and uncles, it was doomed.
The postwar boom made quick work of
hill-country living like this. New highways
and subsidies gave large-scale producers an
advantage over family farms. It took barely a
generation for rural Americans to succumb,
and soon they were ensnared by corpora-
tions; whether on assembly lines or by driv-
ing truck, they started working for the same
people who had put them out of business.
With a Teamsters salary coming in, Joe
Sr. took his wife and children to the city and
left Over Home to the grandparents. When
the Bageants arrived in Winchester in the
late 1950s (or rather, returned, since the fam-
ily name had been there as early as 1755), it was
still largely controlled by a small group of land-
owning families. Chief among them were the
Byrds, whose patriarch, Harry Flood Byrd,
had been Virginias governor in the 1920s and
its senator since the 1930s. He also owned the
towns only newspaper, the Winchester Star,
and a couple other regional weeklies, as well as
the largest orchard business in the apple-rich
valley outside the city limits. Joe later claimed
to have mowed Harry Byrds lawn as a teen-
ager, though he had a lifelong fondness for
suspiciously unverifiable stories, particularly
regarding brushes with celebrity. (By various
friends accounts, he was either babysat or
given a toy or sung to by Patsy Cline, who was
still living on South Kent Street when the Bag-
eants came to town.)
162 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Whether or not he actually cut the sena-
tors grass, Joe was immediately affected by
the stark class division that Byrd and his ilk
enforced. His father quit trucking and began
working in an auto shop, but money remained
tight. The Bageants moved whenever they
fell behind on rent, which meant they moved
constantly. Even as a teenager, Joe sensed
that their relocation to the city had cost them
much more than a place on their ancestral
land. His mother was repeatedly hospitalized
for depression, and his father, whose labor had
once been enough to fill his three kids bellies,
now struggled to keep their bedroom heated.
Joe so pitied his father that he didnt even hate
the man for taking the shame out on him with
a belt.
Bad at school, bad with girls, beaten at
home, Joe found refuge at the Handley Re-
gional Library. He would often skip school to
follow what he later called a marvelously un-
directed pursuit of the mind, consisting of
Boys Life Magazine, the history of the Shenan-
doah Valley, Pericles orations, Jack London,
Fur, Fish and Game magazine, countless books
on painting and great painters, Civil War
diaries, American Heritage magazine, and old
hardbound editions of Lord of the Flies, Rich-
ard Wrights Native Son, Dickens, Genet,
Sartre, and Rimbaud.
He also painted well enough for a mail-order
art school representative to visit one of the
Bageants many addresses and offer a scholar-
ship covering two-thirds of the courses tu-
ition. Joe, then thirteen, offered to pick up an
extra paper route to cover half of the remain-
der, but his father still had to decline. That
last $50 was too much for the family to bear
on a car repairmans wages.
This was how Joe learned about the shame
of poverty. Not material lackthe subsistence
life on Shanghai Road had certainly been
dollar-poorbut the brutal reality of his dads
sixty-hour work week for non-negotiable pay

COURTESY OF BARBAR A DICKINSON
Joe Bageant in Winchester in 1966: a twenty-
year-old Navy vet and LSD enthusiast.
that barely covered lifes necessities, let alone
his sons blooming artistic dream. It was the
unfair terms of the struggle that stuck with
Joe, the fact that wealthier people had pushed
his family off the farm, and then kept them in
a chokehold when they landed in town.
And then, like a bomb: acid. He first took it
in 1965,
thanks to my gay friend George, who was
being treated for his homosexuality with
lysergic acid and enjoying every minute of
treatment. ... After creating a small medita-
tive space with plants, a Tibetan mandala,
and classical music on the turntable, we took
it. Five years later I was still taking it at least
once a week, and to this day I consider LSD
the Promethean spark of whatever awaken-
ing I have managed to accomplish in th[is]
life. ... For the first time in years, my life in
that small town was very enjoyable.
By this point Joe had dropped out of school
and married a curly-haired country girl named
Cindy. He was also a veteran, having lied
about his age to join the Navy at sixteen. He
had served noncombat time aboard the USS
America, but his military career was only just
long enough to secure VA benefits, and when
he returned home, he had found a
small psychedelic scene, one among thou-
sands in heartland America at the time ...
an assortment of perhaps fifty artists, gays,
hillbilly hipsters, academics from a nearby
college of music, passing beatniks, and
psychedelic enthusiasts ... hanging out at a
marvelous old dinner and juke joint in the
poor section. ... Finally, the good fundamen-
talist Christians and Republican business
community just couldnt take it any more.
Joe was the inaugural victim of the crack-
down. He claimed for years to be Winchesters
first marijuana arrest, and also claimed to
have lived while awaiting trial in Resurrec-
tion City, an encampment in Washington,
D.C., set up by Martin Luther King Jr.s Poor
Peoples Campaign. This dates the ordeal to
the summer of 1968, meaning he was already
a father; Cindy gave birth to Timothy, named
for Leary, in 1967. Joe was acquitted, but the
experience shook him enough that he knew
he couldnt keep his young family and newly
expanded consciousness locked in Byrd coun-
try anymore. In 1969 he and Cindy escaped in
a school bus, hayseed flower children set free.
A Fleeting Paradise
At the time, Boulder, Colorado, was referred
to as the Buckle of the Granola Belt, and in-
deed there might as well have been a dog
whistle blaring on Pearl Street, beckoning the
nations dropouts and longhairs. The clean air
and relative seclusion attracted everyone from
the Weathermen to the Nitty Gritty Dirt
Band to Allen Ginsberg. The nearby Pyg-
my Farm, one of the many rural communes
sprouting up at the time, hosted visitors like
Chgyam Trungpa, a Buddhist scholar who
loved the area so much he stayed, founding
Naropa University and the Shambhala Medi-
tation Center in the early 1970s.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 163
Mo d e l s
Joe and Cindy pulled in after nearly a year
of travel in their school bus. They were head-
ing for San Francisco, that better-known hip-
pie mecca, but the Rockies felt like kismet.
Joe liked to say that they pulled into Boulder
on the inaugural Earth Day: April 22, 1970.
The atmosphere of Buddhism, banjos, and
Beat poetry made San Francisco seem unnec-
essary.
Jerry Roberts, now an assessor for Boulder
County, was a recent college graduate when he
first met his neighbors Joe and Cindy in 1973.
Jerry came from West Virginia, but his other
connection to Joe was musical; they spent
most of their early friendship playing guitar
together. Joe had an encyclopedic knowledge
of Appalachian and country music from Over
Home. Jerry, a few years younger, was plainly
in awe. He was an incredibly creative per-
sonit just oozed out of his pores, he told me.
The mood in Boulder was high-minded in
every sense, but Joe was the son of a laborer
with a son of his own, and he wasnt afraid to
take on manual work. At one point, moving
boxes at a grocery store, his back gave out.
Laid up in the hospital, Joe began to write in
earnest. He shared a poem when Jerry came to
visit, a Howl-indebted portrait of Boulders
nightlife scene. With a couple of friends, Jerry
made copies of it and posted the poem around
the city. His name was left off, but when he
was discharged from the hospital, Joe was
happy to see his work out in public for the first
time.
He started picking up freelance bylines,
writing features about local characters and
touring musicians. His steadiest work came
with a Boulder-based ersatz Rolling Stone
called The Rocky Mountain Musical Express. Joe
was its main editor by 1977, and also its most
frequent contributor; he filled pages with his
own writing under multiple pseudonyms. His
freelance staff included Mark Bliesener, a stu-
dio musician who arrived in Boulder in 1976
while playing in a late incarnation of Question
164 1 The Baffler [no.27]
His return home
had convinced Joe that
American culture
is based on two things:
television and petroleum.
9
Mark and the Mysterians. Bliesener, who had
never written seriously before the Musical Ex-
press, recalls visiting the Bageant trailer home
to deliver a draft for the upcoming issue: He
gave me a copy of The Elements of Style, sold me
a bag of speed, and said, If you want to write,
heres what you need.
Joe started taking road trips with the Ex-
presss distributor, Ward Churchill, who is now
a prominent American Indian advocate (and
a former college professorhe lost his job in
2007 after referring to World Trade Center
workers as little Eichmanns). Churchill took
Joe on numerous trips to reservations, and in-
troduced him to activists like Russell Means
and Vine Deloria Jr. Joe was still a voracious
reader, and would almost certainly have read
Delorias epochal Custer Died for Your Sins: An
Indian Manifesto (1969), a wry and bitter essay
collection about the historical exploitation of
a rural minorityand a book that Joe may well
have had in mind while writing Deer Hunting
with Jesus.
It was an era of agitation for Indian rights.
In the summer of 1979, a federal court award-
ed the Sioux tribe more than $100 million in
damages for their forced removal from the
states Black Hills region. The Sioux refused
to take the money and began a prolonged, vio-
lent standoff in the Black Hills. Joe patrolled
the occupations border with Ward Churchill
and a group of John Birch Society members
imperfect but willing partners who had come
on board out of shared contempt for the U.S.
government.

COURTESY OF BARBAR A DICKINSON
Joe with Gypsy Joe Hess, to whom he
dedicated one of his later essays. Boulder,
Colorado, 1975.
But for all his broadening horizons and
writing momentum, Joe hadnt yet made a
proper home for Tim and Cindy, so after a de-
cade out west, they decided to move back to
Winchester. There were few goodbyes, and
this would prove to be a pattern. Joe could
make friends with anybody, anywhere, but
always had an eye on the exit. I dont know
anyone in my life who was smarter than Joe,
recalls Jerry Roberts, but that doesnt give
you self-esteem. He was always wanting to go
somewhere else. Later, Joe would look back
on his time in Boulder as one of the happiest
periods of his life: All these years later I am
beginning to understand the effect [that] liv-
ing for a decade or so in a genuinely free time
and place had on my life. . . . A weird electric-
ity arched over everything, as blown-away
rap sessions drove into the starry night while
sanity cowered in the back seat. Yup, this was
paradise all right.
Back to the Land
Joe had left Winchester as a high school drop-
out, teen father, and purported drug casualty,
but he returned as a seasoned journalist, and
ended up working for the Byrd family once
again, this time on the staff of the Star. Rem-
nants of the Granola Belt still clung to him:
he claimed a battered, thrown-away desk for
his office, and lined up almost twenty contain-
ers of vitamins on its edge to advertise a strict
regimen that hed heard would give him total
recall.
But Joe had few other outlets. He and Cin-
dy separated in 1979, and Joe was devastated.
Hed found his way into the Winchester mid-
dle class but didnt get much comfort from it.
The divorce, as he surely recognized, would
disrupt Tims life right at the age when Joes
had been shaken by the loss of Over Home.
He retreated back to Boulder, a radical with
no outlet and a romantic with a broken heart.
By then, Boulders conversion from hippie
outpost to commoditized yuppie playground
was well underway. The Peoples Republic
vibe was losing out to higher costs of living and
real estate development. The Musical Express
was no more, though Joe managed freelance
features with other local and national maga-
zines. He met a bright and idealistic woman
named Nancy, who was writing a newsletter
for the well-known Boulder Free School.
United in their disappointment over para-
dise lost, Joe and Nancy dropped out. Joe
knew that Indian land was cheap, so they got
married and set out for the Coeur dAlene
Reservation in the Idaho panhandle. Plenty
of their peers had attempted a similar feat,
but the heyday of Mother Earth News and
The Modern Utopian had passed. And most of
those middle-class homesteaders in the 60s
and 70s had tried some kind of communal ar-
rangement, whether sharing a house between
several families or joining a collective. Joe
and Nancy, by comparison, found a desolate,
forest-adjacent plot about ten miles from the
nearest town, St. Maries.
They bought the shack in 1982, with no
electricity, running water, or address. It was
The Baffler [no.27] ! 165
Mo d e l s
on a dirt road about halfway up a mountain,
which must have recalled Shanghai Road. Joe
worked tirelessly, clearing forest and planting
a garden behind the house. He built a barn for
horses and livestock. Their first child, Patrick,
was born in November 1982, and their second,
Elizabeth, arrived in May 1984.
To the extent that any couple can remove
themselves from the politics and culture of a
country while still living there, Joe and Nancy
managed it, living more or less self-sufficiently
apart from rare trips to the St. Maries food
co-op. But as a quest for personal happiness, it
wasnt as successful. The kids reached school
age by 1988, and by that point the pressures of
self-sufficiency were too much. Like his father
before him, Joe took his kids from the country
to the city, in this case Moscow, Idaho, on the
border with Washington state. He and Nancy
divorced soon after.
Joe was now forty-two years old, with three
children, two failed marriages, and no defi-
nite home. He took up writing again, this time
for a local paper, The Idahonian. From his easy
but musical style you wouldnt guess that hed
been chopping wood and tending to horses for
the previous six years. He interviewed Wood-
stock attendees for the festivals twentieth an-
niversary, and touched on politics by talking
to locals like Big Leroy about everything
from gas prices to Vietnam veterans.
Around this time he met Barbara, who was
living in Pullman, Washington, right across
the border. Both are small college towns, so if
you were over thirty, you just wanted to meet
anybody, Barbara told me. Anything besides
watching how drunk the twenty-year-olds
could get on the weekends. But it turned out
that she and Joe had more in common than
simply being stranded. The decade before,
Barbara had been an antiwar protester and
vocal feminist in Madison, Wisconsin, rais-
ing her son in a reflexively liberal community
steeped in Gloria Steinem and Free to Be You
and Me. From the first, she recognized a fellow
166 1 The Baffler [no.27]
In 1969 Joe and Cindy
escaped in a school bus,
hayseed flower children
set free.
9
traveler. A lot of women my age were raised to
accommodate men, she says, but that wasnt
a big thing with Joe. Instead, they could talk
about books and music. He cooked for her and
reminisced about his own radical days.
On January 23, 1990, Joe wrote an Idaho-
nian column about Mississippi, particularly its
blues traditions and poverty: Sometimes it
seems to me like the Mississippi River washes
all the unconscious repressions of the rest of
America down to the Delta, where they lie in a
volatile, dormant state until some new change
comes along to touch them off. After an evoc-
ative litany of southern scenerykudzu, field
hands, bobbing white cottonhe ended the
essay on a personal, not political, note: I miss
it. I really do.
Nevertheless, he went west next, not south.
Eugene, Oregon, was a more liberal town
than Moscow, but the move inaugurated the
straightest, most middle-class period of Joes
life. He first worked for a nonprofit that served
foster children, writing their PR materials and
mentoring kids. On one field trip, he took a
group of young boys to see then-candidate Bill
Clinton on the 1992 campaign trail. But soon
he left that job for Crop Production Magazine, a
glossy trade publication that had one patron:
the gigantic food processor ConAgra, which
sent issues to all its customers.
The arrangement was beyond lucrative,
and as editor, Joe was obliged to live the same
lavish lifestyle as his publisher: dinners out on
the corporate card, sometimes in San Francis-
co, and expenses-paid trips to Las Vegas with
the wives, where a $500 shopping allowance
awaited them at check-in. Joe was suddenly a

COURTESY OF BARBAR A DICKINSON
Joes professional portrait for The Idahonian.
Late 1980s.
man for whom Scotch preceded dinner, and
dinner preceded brandy. Which is to say, he
had finally caught up to the business class that
ran his hometown, and to the kind of compa-
ny, ConAgra, that had driven his people into
the cities.
And it made him miserable. The work was
vapid and superficial. It was as bad as Joe had
always assumed the world of the Byrds was,
even while envious of its money. Now he had
money of his own, more than hed ever ex-
pected to have, and he came to the realization
that it didnt quiet his mind or offer any sense
of meaning. And so he asked Barbara, what
about Winchester?
A Colonial Home
Their house was on the west side of town, far
from the train tracks and close to the unof-
ficial royal mile, Washington Street, where
the properties are more like castles. Nearby
was Stonewall Jacksons former headquarters,
now a museum. Joe and Barbaras place, with
its pillars and porch, fit right in, even if they
had to clean a little mold off the walls.
Winchester had become unrecognizable.
For one, an influx of outside companies had
brought a huge new labor force, many of whom
were immigrants. More than 50 percent of
Winchester residences were rentals, a fact Joe
gleaned from conversations at working-class
bars like the Royal Lunch and Coalie Harrys.
He further learned that the biggest property
owners served on the local government, and
had efficiently suppressed any regulations on
rental properties. The old anger returned, as
did the memory of watching his father trem-
ble when the rent money ran out, and soon Joe
founded the Winchester Tenants Board.
He interviewed renters and gave away his
own money when they asked him. He wrote
regular scathing letters to the Star detailing
the exploitation. He killed rats in the unregu-
lated apartments and brought them to city
council meetings in a boxanything to call
attention to the abuse. Soon Coalie Harrys
could no longer contain his exasperation, and
he began writing in chat rooms under the
screen name ScreamingMan. Then came
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy,
and the deluge began.
As a private citizen, Joe despised Win-
chesters cretinous Republican class, but once
his writing grew more ambitious, he tapped
into a deeper, more personal resentment of his
self-satisfied liberal peers who could somehow
never understand his feelings about work-
ing people. Fifty years ago, men and women
of goodwill agreed that every citizen had the
right to health care and to a free and credible
education, he wrote in Deer Hunting.
It was to liberal Americans and their party
that these humanist ideals were entrusted.
... Nobody kidded themselves that Republi-
The Baffler [no.27] ! 167
Mo d e l s
cansthe party of businesswould look out
for the education of the working class, or for
the health of working-class children and old-
sters. ... Thats what Democrats and liberal-
ism stood for: working people and collective
progress. Between 1932 and 1980, Democrats
held comfortable majorities in both houses of
Congress in all but four years (19471949 and
19531955). Youd think that sometime during
those forty-eight years the party of Roosevelt
would have done the right thing about health
care and education for everyone. Especially
during the fat nineties. But the stock market
was booming, and middle-class professional
and semiprofessional liberals had their diplo-
mas in hand and their student loans paid off.
They had jobs and those newly established
401(k)s that begged to be fattened, and air-
fare to France was cheap and ... well ... you
know how it is. I cannot point fingers here. I
was certainly among them at the time.
This vein of anger, guilt, and sadness
proved surprisingly relatable. By January 2005
Joe was receiving so many fan emails that Ken
Smith, a fan himself who had offered to create
and manage joebageant.com, started running
them on the site. The emails came from all
over: Fair Oaks, CA, and Auburn, WA; Du-
Quoin, IL, and Davenport, IA; Chatsworth
Island, Australia; Leeds, Vancouver, Beijing.
The writers tended to be Joes age, with a sim-
ilar perspective on Americas despoliation.
My roots are in the Texas dirt, but I made a
journey through the student radical acid com-
munal left, said one. Your articles remind
me so much of my family. They are the same
pissed off, ignorant white trash that fought
their way from Virginia, through the Appala-
chians, to East Texas, said another.
He signed his book deal in May 2005; the
working title was DRINK, PRAY, FIGHT,
FUCK: Dispatches from Americas Class Wars,
though late in the editorial process it was
changed, in part because of commercial con-
168 1 The Baffler [no.27]
siderations, but also because its metrical thun-
der had been stolen by Eat, Pray, Love.
Joe used his advance to move to Belize,
a country he hadnt seen in thirty years, and
then only as a tourist. As he told it, he arrived
there and soon met a young family from the
town of Hopkins Village, a coastal outpost
founded by the survivors of a slave ship crash.
He agreed to pay for and help build a guest
house that the family could rent for extra
income. As payment, he could stay in it for
free whenever he came to Hopkins. Three
thousand miles from Shanghai Road, Joe felt
hed found one last bastion of the communal,
sustainable life that American consumerism
had long since made impossible. What I get
out of it is a feeling of direct accomplishment
that a man can never have in this country, he
wrote on his site.
Being a working man in America means that,
no matter how much you earn or how hard
you work, it is never enough and the job is
never done. Never do you feel the immediate
satisfaction, much less security, from your la-
bors as a citizen of the empire. Pay and work
and grind and pay some more as everything
drags on forever extracting ever-increasing
sums of money just to hang onto what youve
already paid for. And always there is the
specter of retirement and all the geet that is
supposed to require. ... I have no doubt that I
could easily live in Hopkins for about $400 a
month ... and manage to have some left over
for rum, guitar strings and a little ganja.
It wasnt the romanticized toil of rural
labor that Joe missed, nor the uneducated
culture of mountain people. Rather, it was a
sense of wide-eyed exploration and a genuine
affection for the soil. This is what the Colora-
do Buddhists espoused, what the Nitty Gritty
Dirt Band and the other newgrass acts of the
era conveyed. That attitude was short-lived in
America, though Joe lived through its zenith,
and Deer Hunting with Jesus, which only glanc-

Joe near the height of his middle-class period, meeting candidate Bill Clinton
on the 1992 campaign trail.
es at this aspect of his life, is shot through with
its influence. In one chapter, Joe describes his
sideways kin Tom, another country trans-
plant. Theyd met back in 1957 in Winchester,
and bonded over Dylan and drugs. Given this
shared background, he wrote,
you can imagine my slack-jawed incom-
prehension when all these years later we
meet again and I see that he has become
a conservative hard-liner and, at least for
a while, a born-again Christian. ... Tom is
intensely antiunion, which amazes me since
I can remember when he had a Che Guevara
poster on his apartment wall. Youd think
after twenty years in a southern factory a guy
would be begging union organizers to sweep
through this town like Grant took Rich-
mond. But Tom and most other plant workers
here have bought the rightist mantra that
goes: Maybe unions were once valuable, but
COURTESY OF BARBAR A DICKINSON
they have priced American labor completely
out of the market. ... Tom, like me, has heard
this line from birth.
Joe blamed Toms transformation in part
on liberals, who, in their noble rush to disown
the racist southern elements of their party
during the civil rights era, pulled away from
the region entirely, leaving an information
vacuum that Fox News and GOP operatives
would later exploit. There is no good reason,
Joe continued,
why for the past thirty years the uncertainty
and dissatisfaction of people like Tom ... was
automatically snubbed as unenlightened by
so many on the left. If the left had identified
and dealt with this dissatisfaction early on, if
they had counteracted the fallacies the Re-
publicans used to explain that dissatisfaction,
if they had listened instead of stereotyping
The Baffler [no.27] ! 169
Mo d e l s
blue-collar angst as Archie Bunkerism ... we
might have witnessed something better than
the Republican syndicates lying and looting
of the past six years.
There was a time, Joe contended, when
Americans were concerned with actualizing
individual potential, and that time was the
1960s. He cited the desegregation of schools
and colleges, the commitment to social
change, and of course the cultural-pharma-
ceutical innovations.
There was such vigorous electricity in the
air, so many possibilities in ourselves and in
America, that this working-class boy grabbed
his wife one day and said: Lets grab the
baby and head west, and grow our brains and
hearts, read Rilke and Chief Joseph and Rim-
baud and Lao-Tzu and burn meat on open
fires with cowboys! Maybe even meet Allen
Ginsberg! And we did it too.
Joe Bageant was hardly the only one to view
the sixties this way. The sons and daughters of
mainstreamed baby boomers have heard it
all our lives. But Joe recognized that the eras
passing meant more than just a dropoff in the
quality of pop radio. It signaled victory for the
money-grubbers. The most prominent liber-
als of Joes generation, people like the Clin-
tons and John Kerry, were corporate types
just like their purported foes: They support
the troops. . . . They play the imperial game,
maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep
the beach house and the retirement invest-
ments no matter how dismal life may grow
for the rural residents of West Virginia, New
Mexico, or Mississippi. Joe argued that Amer-
icans turn away from the earthand with it,
our marginalization of people who live for it,
red or blueconstituted a denial of the one
truth held in common by every enlightened
civilization: we are our brothers keepers.
This new, profits-first society driven by fear,
debt, TV, and petroleum is a Republican-de-
170 1 The Baffler [no.27]
signed dream, so they always win, even when
they lose. And Democrats were willing to
forsake their old base of Southerners and en-
vironmentalists just to enjoy their own small
version of that victorious feeling.
Expatriots
Joe lived much of his final years in Ajijic, an
expat-filled town near Guadalajara, Mexico,
at the invitation of his webmaster Ken Smith.
Joe needed the international airport in order
to honor his frequent speaking invitations
abroad, and though he still lived half the year
with Barbara in Winchester, he wanted to
avoid paying American taxes. Barbara says
he used to joke that his months away were his
gift to her; he knew that hed grown intoler-
ably bleak, and he was so terrified of a third
divorce that it seemed better to just stay away
and avoid fights. Joes ethical view had grown
toxically pure, with no room for the normal
compromises most people must make in order
to buy affordable clothes or occasionally enjoy
themselves in the First World. He had the
moral high ground in every argument we had,
Barbara claims. She didnt discuss her own life
because she didnt feel like getting a lecture
or being made to feel petty. Compared to the
Belizean poor, she had nothing to complain
about, after all.
A few days before Christmas 2010, less than
a week after Joe had gone into the Mexican
mountains on horseback to drop acid with a
group of gauchos, Ken took him to a doctor to
have his stomach pains checked out. An X-ray
revealed a gastrointestinal stromal tumor, big-
ger in mass than his liver. I dont want to die
in the America I see emerging, he had written
four years earlier, justifying his move to Belize.
He would not get his wish. After three months
in and out of VA hospitals and in a prescrip-
tion painkiller haze, Joe died with his three
kids, Barbara, and Cindy by his side. In lieu of
a funeral, they drove up to Shanghai Road and
scattered his ashes in private.
 The outpouring of grief came on his web-
site, where Ken rounded up tributes by blog-
gers and writers from around the globe. It is
the final irony of Joes life that he found his
largest audience by writing about the dissolu-
tion of his community. Raised on the eastern
frontier, reborn in the acid-drenched West,
and lost all over again in the corporate hinter-
lands, Joe Bageant returned to Winchester to
bury the shame of childhood poverty at last.
Instead, he found a battlefield on which he
could finally use the full force of his drop-out
beliefs on behalf of the people who had taught
him to love the land in the first place. These
people, of course, didnt read his book; they
barely read anything.
Where was home for this terminally dis-
placed, community-obsessed man? He gave a
hint in one of his essays that appeared online
after Deer Hunting. Often at my speaking en-
gagements or readings, I see one or more of
them in the audience, he wrote, long gray
hair, loose-fitting, sensible, well-worn cloth-
ing, soft eyes, and perhaps an herbal amulet
around the neck or in the hair. . . . Immediately
after the reading or talk or whatever, I seek
them out if at all possible (press agents some-
times screw this up). Always there is the big
smile and the hug.
And we are again brothers and sisters, as
we used to sincerely address each other on the
street. And again I have been granted the gift,
that brief spark of unquestioned mutual love
and goodwill in a darkening time.t
MICHAEL DUFF Y
The Baffler [no.27] ! 171
 Haut Monde
3 Manohar Shetty

Hes not yet into botox

but vain enough
for a transplant on his
thick head of hair to offset,
he confides, the future loss
twenty years on when
his pate might glint
like a Nikon
flash on the ramp.

It was painful but worth it
these dont fall or turn lank
grey with age, though
he concedes the docs fees
were steep with zeroes
on the cheque like the wheels
of a goods train,
but now is the time, isnt it,
to live life like an Express?
And who cares if
the folliclesas doc calls them
are artificial?

I admire his raven black presence
but cant resist the obvious:
What of heart, kidney,
other internal parts?
But his smile is broadest,
teeth flashing like forked
lightning in glossy ads
for a cosmetic dentist.
Those parts, he beams, no one
can see and in my business
seeing is believing,
external is eternal.

172 1 The Baffler [no.27]

Mo d e l s

Transcendental Rites
3 Edward Mendelson, with John Summers

E dward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and
the literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden. His new book is Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century
American Writers (New York Review Books, $21.95), which contains portraits of Saul Bellow, Alfred
Kazin, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, William Maxwell, Frank OHara, and, as it happens, Lionel
Trilling and W. H. Auden. Moral Agents is dedicated to Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of
Books, where earlier versions of these portraits appeared. John Summers, a great deal less distinguished, is
editor of this magazine. Even so, Mendelson agreed to answer some of our questions about his book in the
wee days of the New Year (that would be January 1 and 2). Eds.

John Summers: Lionel Trilling was the

first tenured Jewish professor in Columbias
English Department and a public figure
whose literary essays served as some form of
national therapy, as you write. Yet you also
quote the following passage from Trillings
journals: I am ashamed of being in a uni-
versity. I have one of the great reputations in
the academic world. This thought makes me
retch. What gives?
Edward Mendelson: It was part of Trill-
ings genius that he saw that his own status
as a campus sage was harmful to himself and
to everyone who admired him for it. He let
himself be revered as a calming presence who,
merely by being there and talking in his mea-
sured, deliberate way, suggested that rational,
well-meaning people can solve all problems.
But in order to do this, he had to suppress all
the unsettling things he knew about his own
and everyones irrational impulses, everyones
self-deceptions, and he despised himself for
Lionel Trilling
suppressing what he knew. He never blamed
anyone but himselfhe never thought he was DAVID JOHNSON

forced to be decorous because he was the first

but dont actually care about because they
tenured Jew in his departmentbut he knew
dont increase the endowment. Trilling might
he was betraying his own genius by present-
have taken deep pleasure from his teaching
ing himself as the kind of loyal beloved
if he had let himself say what he believed,
professor whom universities always honor
instead of letting himself get frustrated with

The Baffler [no.27] ! 173

Mo d e l s

Columbia because it was the place where he

suppressed himself.
JS: This years freshman class at Columbia
will be graduating during the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the 1968 protests. What do you think
of the university now as a host for Trillings
kind of calming sagacity?
EM: The calming figure of the beloved
professor is just as prevalent now as in Trill-
ings day. The beloved professor becomes
loved by telling people the comforting things
they want to hear. What Trilling wanted
to saybut seldom did, except in the most
roundabout waywere things that people
dont want to hear because it would make
them uncomfortable about themselves.
JS: Are you worried that, like their pre-
decessors, todays students will wise up to
what America has in store for them and tear
through the campus for old times sake?
Granted, students in U.S. history have almost
Norman Mailer
never been a hinge of social change. But you
never know. Trilling himself seemed merely
bewildered back in 1968, when they rebelled
the present atmosphere of frustration and
the first time.
intimidation? Maybe it will soon be time for
EM: People who are staring at their cell the beloved professors to desublimate!
phones never rampage. They merely bump
EM: Maybe so, though I dont have any
into things.
specific recommendations. It seems to me
JS: But thousands of people are protesting that whats wrong with universities right now
police brutality on the streets of New York cant be fixed without massive changes in the
even as we are enjoying this Very Serious whole national economy and the way univer-
Conversation. At least a hundred Columbia sities are run and funded. As long as intel-
University students have joined in. Some of ligent, strong-minded people see that a career
them have been pepper-sprayed. in the university is likely to mean teaching
The cohort of writers in your book embod- six sections of remedial English while leaving
ies the ideal of free-ranging skeptical inquiry them unable to pay the rent, theyre going to
and the fact of social mobility. How can we go into other work, and the kind of university
imagine a contemporary university capable that you ask about isnt going to exist.
of carrying on this kind of inquiry, and a city
JS: Ive read a whole bunch of Norman
with its economic prerequisites, without wag-
Mailers books, but even after appreciating
ing some sort of adversarial struggle? What
your portrait of his life and work, where you
quality of culture may we expect to flow from

174 1 The Baffler [no.27]

argue that his whole career was a quest for
transcendence, I have trouble regarding him
as any kind of moral agent. I cant seem to
get past his deplorable treatment of women.
Given all the horrible things he did and wrote
in this respect, Im sometimes tempted to
think of Mailer (since he loved sports analo-
gies) as the Ray Rice of American novelists
only thats unfair to Rice, who never stabbed
his wife with a penknife during a party held
to announce a quixotic run for New York
Citys mayoralty. Is it wrong to hold Mailers
immoralities against his books?
EM: Moral agent doesnt mean a good
moral agent (or a bad one); it means someone
who is morally responsible for his or her own
acts, who wasnt forced into them involun-
tarily by culture, biology, parental mistreat-
ment, or anything else. Mailer was certainly
that, and he knew it. One thing thats espe-
cially interesting about him is that he took
Alfred Kazin
ideas seriously enough to act on them, and he
acted on some very bad ideas. Hes a classic DAVID JOHNSON

example of how bad ideas (about hipsters and

psychotics, for example) lead to bad actions in
someone who might not have done anything
of the kind if he hadnt had those bad ideas.
And those bad ideas were Mailers own moral
choices, his own inventionshe wasnt driven
to find some merit in a shopkeepers murder
(as he did in one of his more theoretical es-
says) because someone else propagandized
him about politics. What went wrong in
many of Mailers books is essentially what
went wrong in a lot of his life: he was more
comfortable with theories about human be-
ings than he was with human beings.
As for holding someones bad acts against
their books, I think everyone is selective
about this. Louis Althusser murdered his
wife, and, for me, that just confirms what I
dont like about his political writings. But
Carlo Gesualdo also murdered his wife (and
her lover), and it doesnt stop me from being
moved by his music. I have the same mixed
feelings about Mailers books that I have
about his life.
JS: Yes, as you suggest here and say in your
introduction, Moral Agents alights on the
conflicts between the inward, intimate
private lives of its eight authors and the lives
they led in public. So you read their public
and private writings, plus the memoirs about
them (Diana Trillings, Ann Birsteins, Greg
Bellows, Adele Mailers, for starters). And
in knuckling through their conflicts, you
dont stoop to accusing any of your subjects of
hypocrisy, which must have been tempting,
given the sometimes reckless and unpleas-
ant emotions they displayed in the service
of their personal ambition. Mailer was not
the only writer in your group to make the
quest for transcendence look a bit ugly now
and again. Did you find a common attitude

The Baffler [no.27] ! 175

Mo d e l s

toward the aesthetic use of private experience

that these writers shared and that influenced
your own method?
EM: Only in that all these writerslike
every other writersaw the world in ways
that were shaped by their private experi-
ence. Human beings cant avoid that, but
that doesnt mean that everyones view of
the world is equally valid or invalid. Auden
says somewhere that goodness can imagine
evil but evil cant imagine good, and its fairly
obvious that one sign of intelligence is the
ability to recognize that someone else is even
more intelligent. What struck me about all
these writerssome more than otherswas
their ability to see that their own perspec-
tives shaped what they saw. I hope that by
telling their stories as parablesas truthfully
as possible, but in the shape and form of a
parablepeople who read those stories can
decide for themselves whether the stories tell
them anything worth thinking about.
JS: I spent some time during the George
Bush years reading Ralph Waldo Emersons
journals, maybe as gesture of mental dissent W. H. Auden
from the war technique. So Im fascinated
that you say Alfred Kazins journals portray
him, unexpectedly, as Emersons Jewish that lifelong socialist Irving Howe wrote
heir. Later in the same chapter, you applaud an approving book on Emerson late in life,
Kazin for standing up to the bellicose lead- and Howes approach had a lot in common
ers of the neoconservative movement. Do with Kazins. The point in each case was to
you ever wonder whether Emerson himself read an earlier writer in order to find out
wasnt something of a neocon, with his what that writer had to say that was worth
spiritual laws projecting noble justice and learning, not in order to condemn him for
all? having some ideas that intellectual thugs
later endorsed.
EM: I think Kazin read Emerson selec-
tively. Some of Emersonthe parts that JS: Well, in a country that continually
sound like libertarianismseemed to him subverts its own cultural traditions, one must
merely childish. What he admired were scramble to explain how the thugs have won
the parts that made him feel independent- the realm of politics. In that same spirit,
minded, not freed from social responsibility. let me ask you about W. H. Auden, another
When he said, Emerson made me a Jew, independent, religiously committed poet.
this was basically what he had in mind. Even You write that he was less interested in the

176 1 The Baffler [no.27]

obvious distinction between a responsible
citizen and an evil dictator than he was in the
more difficult question of what the citizen
and the dictator had in common, how the
citizens moral and psychological failures help
the dictator to succeed. What might Auden
have said, or helped us to understand, about
the contents of the U.S. Senates torture re-
port, released in part in December? Are they
our fault?
EM: Auden wrote half-seriously that politi-
cal history is something far too criminal to
teach to children. What are surprising are
the moments when dreadfully evil things
dont happen, not the moments when they do.
I dont want to guess what Auden or anyone
else would have said about current events.
But I am reminded of many things Auden
said about temptations to power, about every-
ones sense that justice means one-point-one
eye for an eye, about the fantasy that what
works is worth doingalso the passage in
his Christmas Oratorio where Herod mas-
sacres the innocents in order to save civiliza-
Dwight Macdonald
tion, and much else. But these are things that
everyone knows, or ought to know, without DAVID JOHNSON

anyone telling them.

police misconduct with the world-historical
JS: If the torturers and their handlers knew bullshit peddled by the secret intelligence
their actions were evil, then they should be in agencies. What can the next generation learn
jail. If they didnt know, maybe the rest of us about the moral imagination from the writers
should be. What might Auden have said to us discussed in your book?
pie-eyed citizens who cannot accept as real
EM: I hope youre right about younger
the premise of his Christmas Oratoriohu-
persons, and, if so, they seem to me to be
manity lying low in its fallen state, etc.or
facing structural problems in world society
who, for whatever reason, insist on our right
that are almost as intractable as the ones that
to be surprised when we encounter evil done
people faced in the Cold War. Its not exactly
in our name?
easy to deal with a world where governments
Many younger persons today who havent
and corporations seem to share the idea that
traveled far enough into the professional mid-
if something is technically possible (infor-
dle class to be saddled with its go-along/get-
mation gathering via spying or torture, for
along mode of resignation are aroused with
example), then they ought to go ahead and do
half-articulate and semi-organized fervor
it. Governments used to think that way about
over the crimes of their government. Theyre
bombs, and now they think that way about
struggling to connect the up-close realities of

The Baffler [no.27] ! 177

Mo d e l s
enhanced interrogation techniques and
data-gathering.
Maybe the only thing I would feel com-
fortable saying about the relation between
moral imagination and political reality is
something like this: When you think mostly
in terms of partisan politicsour side versus
their sidethen you inevitably start worry-
ing about whether an action or attitude helps
your side or the other side, and you lose sight
of what your real goal is, which (I hope any-
way) has something to do with a social world
that might be fit for free and responsible per-
sons to live in. But if you think about politics
as a way of putting your moral intelligence
into effect, then you make it harder for other
people to obfuscate the issue in order to serve
their own immoral purposes.
It seems to me that in recent years the
people who have done the most to make
some worthwhile change possible have been
the truth-tellers, those who said things that
did themselves no goodtheyre going to be
on the run from the authorities more or less
foreverbut that they couldnt stop them-
selves from saying because of a moral, rather
than a partisan, motive. Theres a pretty clear
178 1 The Baffler [no.27]
contrast between such truth-tellers and the
Nobel Prizewinning president who cam-
paigned on a platform of moral action and
then decided it was safest to forget about it.
Parables about this kind of thing run
through the book, and some of them com-
plicate the whole issue. Norman Mailer, for
example, was always committed, in what
seems to me a thoroughly admirable way, to
the democratic left, very much like Dwight
Macdonald, but Mailer got himself tangled
up in the idea that his own personal mythol-
ogy and vision mattered more than what
happened to other people. Macdonald never
made that mistake, but Macdonald paid a
price for seeing things as clearly as he did: he
spent many years in something like passivity
and despair, which didnt do him any good,
and certainly didnt do any good for the kind
of society he wanted.
Auden once said something to a friend
that I think may get to the heart of both the
difficulty and hopefulness of all this. He said
(Im paraphrasing from memory), Americans
get very angry when you tell them there are
no answers, but in a crisis, they look forward,
unlike Europeans, who look backward.t
P. S . MUELLER
Photo gr a ph i c 3 Carl Van Vechten

Harlem Women

PHOTOGR APHS BY CARL VAN VECHTEN 2015 VAN VECHTEN TRUST | EAKINS PRESS FOUNDATION

Marian Anderson, contralto, 1947.

The Baffler [no.27] ! 179

180 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Mary McLeod Bethune, educator, 1949. Ruby Dee, actor, 1961.
 The
Katherine Dunham, anthropologist, 1940. Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer, 1940.

Baffler [no.27] ! 181

182 1 The Baffler [no.27]
Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, anthropol0gist, 1935. Mahalia Jackson, gospel singer, 1962.
 The
Bessie Smith, blues singer, 1936. Fredi Washington, actor, 1933.

Baffler [no.27] ! 183

Mo d e l s
The Monk Retires
Letting go of Philip Roth
3 J. C. Hallman
T he phenomenon of Philip Roths retire-
mentand that seems to be what it is now, a
phenomenonis not about a writers vanity, an
ego grown so massive its like a publicity black
hole sucking up limelight that might have
shined warmly on other equally deserving au-
thors. Nor is it about an inability to shut up,
even though Roth admitted that his decision
to quit writing, announced abruptly in 2012,
had triggered in him an impulse to chatter.
(Almost everyone has taken this quotation
out of context, and I have too, which means
that chatter may be on its way to becoming
one of those offhand remarks that gets used to
make a famous person appear to mean the op-
posite of what he probably did mean.)
No, Roths announcement that he would
leave the literary stage, followed by his con-
spicuous failure to do so in favor of a series
of curtain calls, is about usRoths audience,
a community of readers. Were the ones end-
lessly fascinated by Roths penchant to pontifi-
cate about himself in public, from an interview
with the BBC aired last spring (titled Philip
Roth Unleashed) to a promised appearance
on The Colbert Report (reportedly scheduled
for last summer, but apparently scrapped).
Through it all, Roth continues to insist that
hes retreating into full Garbo mode. You can
write it down, he told a reporter last May after
a star turn at the 92nd Street Y. This was abso-
lutely the last public appearance I will make on
any public stage, anywherethis just a week
before collecting an award from the Yaddo
writers retreat and two weeks before accept-
ing an honorary doctorate at the conservative
Jewish Theological Seminary.
184 1 The Baffler [no. 27]
Roths Wheres Waldo? approach to forsak-
ing the public stage shouldnt trigger another
wearisome debate over how trustworthy the
utterances of fiction writers need to be (short
answer: not at all). Instead, it should give us a
moments pause to ask just who Roth thinks
hes talking toa question that, not inciden-
tally, continues to sit, unanswered and argu-
ably unanswerable, at the heart of all literary
enterprise. Just as the moment of reading, the
event of literature, is as much a function of a
readers excited mind as it is the end product
of a writers work, so too does the phenome-
non of Philip Roths retirement say as much
or more about what readers expect from their
relationships with writers as it says about
Roth, and his gnomic, ever-shifting sense of
his own literary posterity.
When it comes to the question of what writ-
ers are, exactly, in relation to readers, there is
a remarkably broad range of thought. On the
academic side of book culture, you have the
whole death-of-the-author spiel, which would
have us believe that writers are completely ir-
relevant to the literary experience, apart from
having served as the corporeal conduit be-
tween ether and text. In contrast, on the busi-
ness side, theres an entire industry dedicated
to manufacturing author personas: a market-
ing complex based entirely on the notion that
readers use books as a means to become in-
timate with writers who either have, or have
been outfitted with, compelling backstories.
These extremes have something to do,
I think, with Roths assertionmade in
the same interview in which he initially of-
fered his momentous announcementthat
 PHILIP BURKE

The Baffler [no. 27] ! 185

Mo d e l s
he would have preferred to have had no bi-
ography written of him at all. (Here, too, he
was airing a flagrantly Whitmanian self-
contradiction: he had just recently begun col-
laborating with biographer Blake Bailey.) This
interview was first conducted in English two
months before the 2012 presidential election,
and then translated into French for publica-
tion by the arts magazine Les Inrockuptibles.
Several weeks later it was translated back into
English to appear, in snippets, on Salon and
Hyperallergic; finally, The Paris Review got its
hands on the original English transcript, and
posted it online a week after Obamas reelec-
tion. The exchange is worth a closer look, and
not just because it happens to be the one in
which Roth gave out that he planned to write
nothing at all for at least ten years. (Given that
he was seventy-eight at the time, this was tak-
en to mean retirement, but its noteworthy
that Roth himself never used the word.)
Roth was interviewed by the French liter-
ary journalist Nelly Kaprilian, and, in truth,
Kaprilians questions are a little cringeworthy
in their simplicity, the sort you might expect
an undergraduate to pose for extra credit. (One
representative sample: So what makes you
write?) I think its possible to sense frustration
from Roth when he realizes, at one juncture,
that Kaprilian is not particularly familiar
with his work: Kaprilian asks whether Roth
could imagine writing a book about a happy
marriage, and Roths exclamatory replyBut
I already wrote that book! (he means The Pro-
fessor of Desire)might indicate anything from
mildly perturbed condescension to haughty
fury. But hes clearly annoyed, maybe because
writers, as a general rule, would prefer to have
their books speak for them; thats what books
are for. Yet whether in interviews or in biog-
raphies, readers push for something more or
something different, and then, more often than
not, look askance at the results.
Indeed, Kaprilian doubts Roths answers
on several occasions (Arent you exaggerating
186 1 The Baffler [no. 27]
a little bit?), and at one moment seems flus-
tered when Roth doesnt make the straight-
forward sense she expects (But you just spent
our whole interview saying that the life of
a writer has no bearing on his work). From
there, its not hard to imagine that Roth,
having gone through hundreds, maybe thou-
sands, of interviews like this, might have been
starting to wonder whether his books had
somehow failed. A glance at his last ten years
of production certainly reveals a predilec-
tion for dark and ascetic turns of mind, and it
doesnt seem much of a stretch to suggest that
by this point hed sunk into another private
oblivion, one that could only be exacerbated
by evidence of his books having not been read
by the very sorts of people who are charged
with safeguarding his contemporary literary
reputation.
Its worth putting the pivotal moment of
the interview under a microscope. Kaprilian
has just asked Roth a facile question about
whether The Professor of Desire is autobio-
graphical, and Roth handles it with aplomb.
She follows up with a simple Why?a way
to buy herself a moment to segue to some new
topic, perhaps. Then we get this:
[Kaprilian:] Do you still have the desire to
write?
[Roth:] No. Anyway, I have no intention
of writing in the next ten years. To tell the
truth, Im finished. Nemesis is going to be my
last book. Look at E. M. Forster. He stopped
writing at around the age of forty. And I, who
used to churn out book after book, havent
written anything in three years. Ive been
working instead on my archives so I can turn
them over to my biographer. Ive turned over
thousands of pages which are like memoirs
but not literary, not publishable as such.
What catches my eye here, beyond the odd
bombshell that Roth drops in the least likely
of places, is the phrase To tell the truth. Ive
always been curious about this phrase and
 Philip Roths retirement may well go down in history
as one of the literary worlds greatest pranks.
9
phrases like it, such as Just between you and
me and Frankly: they are more tone than
literal meaning, and they manage to commu-
nicate the exact opposite of what they say.
These phrases are interesting, too, because
you really cant, when they turn up in conver-
sation, offer an immediate challenge to them.
To do so would to be to slap the face of some-
one who appears to be extending to you an
uncommon intimacy. You cant very well, as
youre being entrusted with private informa-
tion (Just between you and me) or addressed
with unflinching directness (Frankly), sug-
gest in the next breath that the speakers real
goal is either to widely publicize a delicate fact
or to make a quasi-rational assertion that is
more the product of guile than honesty.
In reality, though, thats just the sort of as-
sertion that these phrases prefacethey are
rhetorical tricks that lubricate a strategic du-
plicity. So whenever I hear someone say To
tell the truth, I always take it as an admission:
either my interlocutor has been deceiving me
up to this pointthe statement implicitly con-
cedes that whatever has been said before has
not amounted to truthfulnessor whatever
he or she is about to say is not true at all.
Its worth mentioning that Roths To tell
the truth in announcing his retirement is
actually the second time the phrase appears in
what is really a quite short interview. The first
time, Roth uses it to distance himself from
abstractions: To tell you the truth, Im not
much given to abstractions. But from there,
he immediately attests to a lifelong interest in
stories, which are, arguably, a form of applied
abstraction, a way of couching ideas in con-
crete detail that give them body, shape, and
substance. This use of To tell you the truth
is perhaps the first note of Roths annoyance
in the interview: it comes after Kaprilian has
challenged his assertion that hes not interest-
ed in philosophy. Wasnt Nemesis, she wants to
know, full of philosophical ideas? Roth dodg-
es that part of the question. And when he goes
on to say that stories are the only things that
interest him, its hard not to wonder if what he
really means is that interviews are most defi-
nitely among those things that do not interest
him.
From there, Kaprilian asks a series of
increasingly annoying questionsshes be-
coming his nemesis. To the three questions
prior to his momentous announcement, Roth
responds, semi-hostilely, by rejecting their
premises. The interview must have hit a very
weird mood for Kaprilian to have even come
up with the relevant queryDo you still have
the desire to write?as its hard to imagine
any interviewer jotting that one down be-
forehand. And Roths answerNo. Anyway,
I have no intention of writing in the next ten
years. To tell the truth, Im finished (which,
incidentally, came as a complete surprise to his
agent and his publisher)is notable because
To tell the truth seems like an invitation to
recognize that what hes about to say is utter
nonsense, nonsense that mirrors and mocks
an increasingly nonsensical set of interview
questions. The anyway smacks of a kind of
plaintiveness, a giving up, and its tempting to
see it as a signal that Roth has now decided to
toy with this silly interview, which he prob-
ably shouldnt have agreed to anyway, because
readers should read the books a writer writes
and not the interviews he or she gives. Its still
more tempting to speculate that what has hap-
pened since the interviewRoth chumming
the waters of a great bizarre frenzy of analy-
sis that is still under way two years latermay
The Baffler [no. 27] ! 187
Mo d e l s
well go down in history as one of the literary
worlds greatest pranks.
Anyway, we all know writers dont retire.
Writers might become incapable of going
onthat seems to be what happened to Gar-
ca Mrquez in his later yearsbut they dont whats more, this particular way of conceiving
just get tired and quit. They cant quit. Take
Stephen Dixon. Not too long ago, I read an
assessment of his inexhaustible work in which
the critic appeared to be mystified as to why a
book of Dixons from a decade and a half be-
fore was titled 30. The critic was unaware of
Dixons early career as a journalist, so he can
perhaps be forgiven for failing to make the
connection with the traditional mark that
journalists use to indicate the end of a story:
30. I admittedly have some inside infor- for incredibly voluminous production, and it
mation on this one: I studied with Dixon at
Johns Hopkins while he was working on 30,
and he was telling everyone that it would be
his last book. Yet at least seven others have
come since.
So too with Henry James. James never an-
nounced a retirement, but he did agree to the
190709 reprinting of his lifetime of novel-
writing in the so-called New York Edition,
which weighed in at twenty-four volumes; in
fact, he produced eighteen prefaces of seven
thousand words each for the occasion, prefac-
es that aimed to solidify his work and vision.
But James lived more than six years after the
last volume of the New York Edition was pub-
lished, and more books duly arrived. James
turned out to be so incapable of retiring that
even on his deathbed, after speech left him, he
was observed twitching his fingers, as though
moving a pen.
The James example is especially appropri-
ate here, because in the Kaprilian interview,
Roth admits to having recently read through
all his own published work, much as James
did while writing his prefaces. Indeed, Roth
reread and annotated first editions of Portnoys
Complaint and American Pastoral for a Chris-
188 1 The Baffler [no. 27]
ties charity auction last winter, his notes on
the former amounting to a short essay dated
12/21/13. (So much for no intention of writ-
ing in the next ten years.) And Roth, like
James, is an author whose dedication to litera-
ture has been described as monastic in nature;
of an authors vocationand hence, his or her
relationship with the literary audiencemay
come from James himself, who likened Balzac
to a monk in The Lesson of Balzac, a speech
that James delivered across America during a
1905 series of appearances that was probably
even then regarded as something of a valedic-
tory tour.
Of course, the writers Ive just listed here
Roth, Dixon, James, and Balzacare known
should be noted that, for all Roths claims of
churn[ing] out book after book, measured
on sheer quantity alone, Roth ranks as the
least productive among the four. (And this
is to say nothing of his contemporaries: were
Roth to go on writing and somehow publish
fifty more books, he would still lag well behind
the output of Joyce Carol Oates.) The ques-
tion of quantity may be critical to understand-
ing whats really going on with Roths retire-
ment. Recall that Roth compared himself to
E. M. Forster immediately upon making the
announcement. Forster would appear to chal-
lenge the idea that writers cant quit writing:
he produced a relative handful of novels and
stories and then packed his bags. But did he
retire? Did Hawthorne? Did Rimbaud? Did
Harper Lee? I dont think so, and its impor-
tant to note that Roth did not say that Forster
retired, only that he stopped writing. This
distinction points us back in the direction of
what an audience expects of a writer.
The literary audience is collectively and no-
toriously fickleand thats putting it politely.
Write too little, and the audience will cry for
more and question your nerve if you cant bring
yourself to produce. (This was the recent ex-
perience of the celebrated short story writer
George Saunders, who came in for a round of
Internet carping for his failure to put out a
proper, full-scale novel.) Write too much, and
the audience will accuse you of mercenary mo-
tives and whine about not knowing where to
begin in your oeuvre. (Cf. the prolific Oates,
and scores of revered but now-neglected mas-
ters of the Victorian novel.) Readers, it seems,
want enough books to be able glimpse an au-
thor from a number of angles, but they dont
want so many that they would have to sign
over a significant chunk of their lives just to
keep up.
I ts likely that Roth picked Forster as a model
because his British forebear hit that just-right
sweet spot: a half-dozen novels that, over a
few years, just about any reader could fit into
even the busiest of schedules. And that brings
us to one part of what I have to say about Phil-
ip Roths retirement: it may be that Roth,
by his own standards, has written too much.
Even if his announcement has since morphed
into a brilliant marketing ploy, I think it start-
ed out as a sudden and sad realization that in
the end hes going to wind up feeling that a lot
of his work has been unnecessary, and will be
misunderstood even if it does get read.
And now for the other part: The imposi-
tion of retirement on Roths initial claim
may well be a kind of joke, the literary worlds
way of insisting that Roth is nothing at all like
Forsterhe obviously writes from need and
compulsion, like Oates and James, and if he re-
ally thinks that hes going to stop writing, well
then, well just have to see about that, wont
we, pal? But it also indicates something else,
something rather unseemly, I think, about
what readers expect from writers these days.
Corporate stooges retire. Athletes retire. Fac-
tory workers and soldiers and surgeons retire
when they are no longer capable of doing their
jobs. The whole point of thinking of Roth
and James and Balzac as monks of a kind is to
emphasize that being a writer is not like hav-
ing a job from which you might retirethats
not what a writer is supposed to be in relation
to his or her audience. The usefulness of the
monk metaphor peters out after the obvious
in-this-world-but-not-of-it similarity, and the
truth is that writers are not particularly monk-
like: they are neither mystics, nor hallowed,
nor pure. But the point is that being a writer
is a special kind of life, and a writer serves a
special role in relation to his or her culture
and society. And to suggest even in jest that
a writer has retired is to cheapen that role,
and to cheapen that culture.
One sees this studied diminution of writ-
ing and writers almost everywhere these
days, as writers are pressed, more and more,
to promote themselves, to become their own
publicists. Take, for example, the unexpect-
edly popular event series known as Literary
Death Match, in which writers become the
sort of vague celebrities one used to see on
game showsthough Literary Death Match is
even more disturbing in that it would appear
to offer metaphoric comfort to the academic
notion that a writers job is, ultimately, to
get out of the way, to die. The phenomenon of
Philip Roths retirement has been driven by
the fact that he said he would make no more
appearances yet has repeatedly appeared, to
receive awards, to sit in on conferences devot-
ed to his work, and even to grant more media
interviews. What if what Roth really wants is
to avoid agreeing to those kinds of appearanc-
es that cheapen the writers role in society, the
kinds that, whatever their intentions, turn the
idea of the writer into a clich? If that were the
case, would we still chide him for retiring? Or
would we see this deconstruction of the phony
intimacy produced by the accessible celebrity
author as another reason to thank Roth for his
service? Who knowsit might be a welcome
excuse to return to a few of the many books
he published when we were too busy to take
notice.t
The Baffler [no. 27] ! 189
E x h i bi t E 5 Michael Duffy

MICHAEL DUFF Y

190 1 The Baffler [no.27]

wS T O R Y
How Much
Women Know
3 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
T his story concerns a perfect girl, raised by
her perfect mother and grandmother. Three
ageless beauties, crme de la crme of Mos-
cows Jewish intelligentsia.
The grandmother resembled a charming
infant. A former pianist, she wore lace gloves
in the summer. The mother, a psychiatrist
in a mental clinic, looked plainer, but her pa-
tients adored her. In her presence they forgot
about dangerous emanations, pursuers, and
threatening voices. Among her patients were
celebrated musicians, poets, and artists. She
never mentioned their names outside the
clinic, but the top shelf in her bookcase at
home was lined with their autographed books
and records. Even the hard-drinking nurses
at the mental clinic worshipped her.
Like many great women, Maria Iosifovna
had a weakness: her daughter. She loved the
girl surpassingly. She mopped up after Katyas
bath, brought her tea in bed, and refused to
lecture or discipline her. Katyas classmates
adored her; the girls surrounded her in a ring,
while the boys studied her every move. But
the teachers couldnt forgive Katyas innate
sense of superiority, which expressed itself
in an exaggerated, icy politeness. A new gym
teacher put his foot down and demanded
performance and attendance in physical
education. Katya was a lazy child who didnt
believe that she should be expected to run
laps with her tongue out, to climb ropes
like a monkey, or to hurl discs in a vulgar
squatall mandatory exercises. She tried
once, and her girlfriends giggled at her, while
the boys gasped. Katya then refused to go to
school, and her mother provided her with an
unreadable but impressive medical note of
excuse, something to do with Katyas legs
prophetically, as it turned out. From then on,
Katya sat in a corner of the gym with a book,
while the boys paraded their athletic prow-
ess. Katya looked like a pink beauty from
Renoirs paintings.
At college she chose math, but later
switched schools and took up languages
(she already knew two)in other words, she
took the path of least resistance. Most boys
came to that college after their army service;
they were hardened ambitious men, a lower
breed. After college, Katya found much-
coveted work in the periodicals section at
the Library of Foreign Literature, which
was frequented by intelligentsia and artistic
bohmes. Katya fell in love there. She fell
in love with Anton, an older, degenerate
gambler who made a living as an orderly at
a hospital. She brought him home to intro-
duce him to her mother and grandmother.
He brought with him a suitcase.
Maria Iosifovna took one look at Katyas
fianc and diagnosed psychopathology with
a touch of epilepsybut she couldnt exactly
send him to the clinic for a Wassermann
test. Soon, Katya became ill and hid her
symptoms. An abortion was performed:
Katyas beloved had insisted on taking her
to a back-alley clinic he knew. The mother
knew about Katyas pregnancy and word-
lessly supplied the required sums. Then,
one day, Katya tossed an empty vial past
the trashcan. Her mother, who cleaned and
mopped the house (the grandmother had
taken to her armchair) picked up the vial,
The Baffler [no.27] ! 191
w
Even the hard-drinking nurses
at the mental clinic worshipped her.
9
read the label, and asked Anton to join her in
the courtyard for a little talk. Anton blamed
Katya, who, he claimed, had picked up the
disease from someone at workwho knew
what went on at that library? Maria Iosifo-
vna did the impossible: Anton disappeared
from their house. Go, she told him. They
are sending you on a business trip. In fact,
he had nowhere to go. What housing he had
once, he had surrendered to an ex-wife and
their child. All he had to his name was three
years of jail, as hed once confessed to Maria
Iosifovna.
T he same day, Katya came home from a
clinic, where she was secretly undergoing
tests. She found a note on her desk. She read
it, collapsed on her bed, and stayed there.
She remained in bed for months, next to
the phone. On hearing the wrong voice,
she simply hung up. She ate nothing. Her
mother brought Katyas letter of resignation
to the library. She began giving Katya IVs
with glucose and vitamins, but her condition
worsened, and the grandmother returned to
life from her armchair to nurse Katya and to
walk her to the toilet.
Katya eventually put two and two to-
gether. She must have understood what
made Anton disappear; or maybe Anton got
in touch with her. In any case, she stopped
talking to her mother. After some time, the
grandmother brought her a letter from the
mailbox. It was empty and without a return
address, but the handwriting on the envelope
was definitely Antons. Katya revived. She
began leaving her room, and talked about
going outside.
Katya didnt know that her mother had
192 1 The Baffler [no.27]
copied Antons handwriting from an old
envelope he had addressed from a prison
camp to another woman six months before
he met Katya. (So this Anton was barely out
of prison when he latched onto Katya.) The
letter must have been returned to Anton in
person. The woman must have broken up
with Anton violently and for goodpeople
usually save letters from loved ones. She must
have loved him once, as she did take the time
to throw that letter in his face.
Later, Katyas grandmother observed her
flipping through the phone book. Katya
asked for the map of Moscow, probably to
look for the post office where the fraudulent
letter had been stamped. But to actually get
up and go, Katya didnt have the strength.
Mother and daughter began speaking again,
their exchanges brief and to the point. Maria
Iosifovna offered to resume Katyas IVs to
improve her blood and complexion. A nurse
came and took a blood test, which showed
that Katyas venereal disease had been cured
but that Katya herself remained as weak as a
newborn kitten.
Katya grew stronger and began leaving
the house. After a tremendous effort, she
returned to work at the libraryas a part-
time replacement of someone on maternity
leave. Katya was trying to place herself in
Antons old tracks. Instead of Anton, how-
ever, she captured Gleb, who set for himself
the herculean task of asking her out on a date.
Negotiations were conducted over the fam-
ily phoneeveryone in the house followed
Glebs progress. Finally, Gleb invited Katya
to join him and some friends at his dacha for
a New Years party. Maria Iosifovna imme-
diately added a certain compound to Katyas

IV, and it worked: Katya came back from the
dacha with swollen lips and shadows under
her eyes. Her resistance had been overcome
by Glebs sexual onslaught (Gleb was built
like a spermatozoidstocky, with a large
head), and now she followed him around like
a zombie, eyes half closed, lips perpetually
swollen. Through the flimsy door in Katyas
room, her family listened to the creaking and
the thumping.
At the wedding banquet, Katya briefly re-
gained consciousness and ran outside to cry.
Her mother and grandmother left soon after.
K AREN BARBOUR
Glebs parents, Colonel Ivan Petrovich
and his wife, Emma, liked to emphasize
their blue-collar origins and to keep their
manners simple. Without waiting for the
banquet to end, therefore, they threw an
ugly scene and practically kicked Gleb out,
together with his young wife. The newly-
weds had planned to settle in Glebs room
in his parents apartment, where he had
painstakingly redone the floors and painted
the walls, but what can you do? Gleb shoved
Katya into a cab and took her back to her
mothers. There he dumped the entire story
The Baffler [no.27] ! 193
w
The mother was screaming,
Arent we all family? outside the locked door.
9
on Maria Iosifovna (people dumped their
stories on her whether she wanted them or
not), and stayed there to livethere was no-
where else to go. Katya cried all night. Her
mother didnt come to her.
Eight months later, Katya gave birth to a
girl. Every night, Gleb carried the child for
hours: the girl had a hernia. Two years later,
a boy came who lookedsurprise, surprise
exactly like Anton. Nonetheless, Gleb car-
ried this child, too, every night, despite his
mothers protestations that the boy wasnt
his. Katya, in the meantime, grew thinner
and weaker, like her grandmother, who soon
died. Maria Iosifovna held herself like the
Queen of England, despite everything. Her
son-in-law hated her absolutely.
In her youth, Glebs mother, Emma, had so
charmed Col. Ivan Petrovich that he left his
wife and son and never heard from them again
until the first wife died and left their teenage
son alone. That son ended up in a colony for
juvenile delinquents, from which he wrote to
his father asking for food. No food was ever
sent: Emma saw to that. Later, the son resur-
faced once more. He came to visit, was sent
away for good, and, apparently, died.
Emmas husband found her enchanting.
She sank her teeth into her son like a bulldog
and kept on gnawing and nagging, gradu-
ally killing all that was best in his nature:
his kindness, his sense of pity for the ailing
Katya, his love for the babies who both had
hernias and werent supposed to cry. Emma
couldnt stand all that sickness and weakness.
She ridiculed Gleb, kept telling him that he
was being used by these strangersthats
right, instead of giving all that love to her, to
194 1 The Baffler [no.27]
his own mother! She expounded like this in
front of Maria Iosifovna, declaiming loudly
that Katya must be suffering from gonor-
rhea at the last stage, that she must be tested!
(Katya must have confided to Gleb in a ten-
der moment.) Her other constant theme was
that the children were not Glebs.
Poor Gleb bounced between his mother
and his own family. He despised his mother
but couldnt help believing her; he loved his
wife but didnt trust her. He came home
drunk, reeking of booze, and often slept on
the floor where he collapsed. His dissertation
stalled. He stopped talking to his mother,
who began calling Maria Iosifovna to shower
Katya with obscenities (prostitute with a
lover from prison and so on).
Maria Iosifovna died. She died a strange
death, at her desk, during her shift at the
clinic. Why did her heart stop like that? At
the funeral her colleagues were seething with
hatred and suspicion. Again, why? Maria
Iosifovna never revealed the goings-on in her
house to anyone. But people knew. (People
always know.) Glebs parents were there with
unspoken words frozen on pursed lips.
Katyas family survived. Gleb stopped
drinking after the funeral.
He didnt even drink at the wake. He told
his parents to stay away from the wake, but
they came anyway, and he slammed the door
in his mothers face. (The father was hiding
on the stairs, the mother was screaming,
Arent we all family? outside the locked
door.)
Katya was made director of the periodi-
cals at the library. Her mothers soul seems
to dwell in her. Always surrounded by ador-

ing colleagues, serene and competent, Katya
can barely walk. Her husband fetches her in
his car, carries her down the steps, and then
places her in the elevator. The kids are grow-
ing. They bring their homework to mamas
library and stay there all afternoon.
Emma continues with her prophesying.
She calls her son regularly, to accuse him
of abandoning her and to warn him that
Katya and her children must be carrying bad
blood, as she puts it, since Maria Iosifovna
clearly killed herself. Who knows where
she picked that one up! According to her,
K AREN BARBOUR
Maria Iosifovna made her own heart stop,
without any pillsshe knew, you see, that
Gleb was going to leave his family because
of her, because of her unyielding pride. But
you wont, Emma screams into the phone,
you wont leave them like your idiot of a
father left his family, you take after me, not
him! The screaming is harrowing, but Gleb
cannot hang up on his mother. He sits there,
squirming, taking it all in.
How much women know, how much.t
Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.
The Baffler [no.27] ! 195
Ancestors

Man Is Not a Rock

3 Joseph Brodsky, with Elizabeth Markstein

This conversation between Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and

Austrian writer Elizabeth Markstein happened in Vienna during
the summer of 1972, and its believed (by us, anyway) to be his first
recorded interview after being expelled from the Soviet Union for
no good reason. Privately held until Marksteins death in Vienna on
October 15, 2013, the recording, along with a transcript, was published
two weeks later by the magazine Colta, one of the few independent
outlets in Russia today. The interview appears, abridged, in English
translation for the first time here.*
The conversation begins with Brodsky reading five poems, includ-
ing The Candlemas, or Nunc Dimittis, dated February 16, 1972.
The poem alights on the meeting of Simeon and Jesus at the Temple
and is dedicated to Anna Akhmatova. Brodskys final stanzas seem
to foreshadow his own torch-carrying exile (in translation here by
George L. Kline):

He went forth to die. It was not the loud din

of streets that he faced when he flung the door wide,
but rather the deaf-and-dumb fields of deaths kingdom.
He strode through a space that was no longer solid.

The rustle of time ebbed away in his ears.

And Simeons soul held the form of the child
its feathery crown now enveloped in glory
aloft, like a torch, pressing back the black shadows,

to light up the path that leads into deaths realm,

where never before until this present hour
had any man managed to lighten his pathway.
The old mans torch glowed and the pathway grew wider.

Elizabeth Markstein: Are there trends, schools, in contemporary

poetry?

* W hy the interview was not published (in any language) during the lifetimes of the two participants we dont know.
Brodskys literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, informs us that he speaks critically of several writers and friends
whom he held in high regard during the decades following; perhaps this was a constraint, and he did not in the end
elect to make those viewsnecessarily of the momentpublic. Thanks to Ann Kjellberg for her kind permission
to publish this interview, by the way.

196 1 The Baffler [no.27]

JOSEPH CIARDIELLO

The Baffler [no.27] 197

Ancestors

Joseph Brodsky: I dont really keep up. There are directions, I

suppose. And they all smack of something unpleasant. If the piece is
about, say, national pride, then its full of chauvinism or just general
idiocy. If its something romantic, there is an agenda.
EM: Socialist realism?
JB: Exactly. Or, if its a satirical piece, its just plain negative. There is
no sense that a person is engaged in satire from some high viewpoint.
He stays within the imposed frame of reference. There are a handful
of poets who could have gotten somewhere, but now it may be too
late. They were not silenced, or shot, or even prosecuted. They more
or less choked on lack of air, lack of an outlet. In any art, but espe-
cially in writing, you have to be totally possessed by it if you are to
keep going in spite of any circumstances. Because sooner or later you
are visited by the thought, What on earth am I playing at? Its just
a pleasant hobby, really, one needs to make a living. So you begin to
look around, maybe compose a little play, a little script, sell it on the
side. Become a hack. After all, hackwork is literature too. And the dis-
tinction isnt that important in the end. So you cant get published, so
what. Chewing on the same negative emotion is exhausting. A sense
of relativity sets in, and thats really dangerous.
EM: Do you have someone specific in mind?
JB: Vladimir Ufland, for one. This man is certainly very gifted. Then
there is living in Leningrad one poet, Mikhail Eremin, who writes
one or two poems a year maximum, in the manner of Ezra Pound, but
very provincial. He started by composing wonderful, strong poetry
reminiscent of Velimir Khlebnikov. But then he needed to find his
own way, and at that stage, because he was his own judge and audi-
ence, because there was no atmosphere, no milieu, he began to thin.
You know, became more and more sophisticated. Then he crossed the
line into riddles. Crosswords, rebuses, with Chinese hieroglyphics,
or Latin or Greek words. On the one hand, its all very clever, but silly
too. In any case, the lyrical tone is muffled.
There are three others, of varying quality, but in my opinion
good. If they had had an opportunity to work normally, they could
have grown into something interesting. Now, Im afraid it may be too
late. Ive learned a lot from them. They are two or three years older. I
met them in 1960, for better and for worse. We became friends, and
then it all fell apart. In each case, it ended badly. Anna Akhmatova
called us the magic choir. But when she died, the dome collapsed.
The choir ceased to exist, split into separate voices. They are Yevgeny
Rein, Anatoly Naiman, and Dmitry Bobyshev. There were four of us.
Now, well, Rein makes a living churning out magazine articles
and popular science scripts, and little by little he is becoming some-

198 1 The Baffler [no.27]

 If you really want to enforce principles, if you dont want
them to remain just empty words, bubbles in the air,
then the only way to do it is by shedding blood.
9

thing of a monster. He is already pretty much broken, by his own

personal circumstances. He doesnt know which plane he occupies,
whether he is a poet or a hack.
Naiman is a translator. He has never been an independent figure;
still, he had some sharpness, some spiciness, some subtleness. But
those translations of his, all that hackwork hes done, they ruined
him, really. Because he no longer knows which words are his own and
which are not. Words are just like bricks for him, as they are for all
translators. They contain nothing of innate value. I feel the same way,
incidentally.
Bobyshev, I know him less well. He is pretty talented, has a very
high sense of language, of its possibilities. This was his strength, and
he exploited it to death. He didnt seek new tools. I guess he would
have, if he had had some collegial competition, some audience. It may
sound funny, talking this way about poetry, but poets need that too,
competition with peers. If it existed, something might have come out
of him and out of the others. As it is, they are more or less going off
the rails. Or maybe switching to new ones, I dont know.
EM: Do you consider yourself a Soviet poet?
JB: I object rather strongly to all definitions except Russian, because
I write in Russian. Still, Soviet would be correct. Whatever its ac-
complishments and crimes, it exists, and in it I existed for thirty-two
years. And it did not destroy me.
EM: Im glad you brought this up. There are migrs, and Soviet citi-
zens too, who try to deny its existence, pretend its not there. But how
can you? The Soviet Union is a historical and cultural fact.
JB: A cultural fact. Exactly. So many Soviet artists drew their inspira-
tion not from divine intervention but from the idea of resistance.
That is something to consider, with gratitude even. True, I unexpect-
edly found myself in the position where one can feel grateful. While
you actually live there . . . Im not sure what it is, what is wrong with
my nervous constitution, but when I lived there, I couldnt quite raise
myself to anger or to hatred. Anger, yes, but never hatred. I always re-
membered, you see, that the regime and its manifestations were indi-
vidual, ordinary people. I couldnt give it a single face. For a resistance
fighter, for a questing dissident, such emotion is death. Therefore, Im

The Baffler [no.27] ! 199

Ancestors

not a fighter. An observer, perhaps.

EM: In Czechoslovakia in 1968, in some cities during the first seven
days of Soviet occupation, or maybe it was just one city, there was a
slogan, Remember that you are people of culture.
JB: This is precisely what ruined their cause.
EM: How so? I believe they had won more ground than was expected.
JB: I really dont think so. They behaved like schoolchildren. They
decided that the principles they were defending, that somehow they
had discovered a new way of defending those principles. But in fact,
if you really want to enforce them, if you dont want them to remain
just empty words, bubbles in the air, then the only way to do it is by
shedding blood. Otherwise, all you will get is a better or worse form of
slavery. Once you start talking freedom, how you deserve it, how you
want it, how its been denied you, how you refuse to remain a slave,
youve got to take up arms. There is no other way to fight a slave-
master. True, they did disgrace the Soviet Union, but pragmatically
speaking . . .
EM: I used to think that death is preferable to life on ones knees. But
now Im not so sure. Im beginning to think that any life is better than
death.
JB: True. But still, the question is, what should we remain alive for?
Man is not a rock, he cant exist just for his own sake. Theres always
the what for. I understand that here, in the West, I wont find the
answer. Because when I look around, I dont understand what people
live for. My impression is that they live for the sake of shopping. That
human life exists for the sake of shopping. The only solution is to stay
on the margins, to not get too involvedin shopping, I mean. If I had
grown up here, I dont know what I would have become. This is a very
disorienting feeling. I just dont understand what its all for. It must
be a very Russian, very totalitarian idea that something so good must
come only as a reward, not as a given.
EM: Yes, this is a very Russian way of thinking.
JB: From my perspective, I see what is good in it, but I do not like
it very muchits the illusory multitude of choices. No matter what
you choose it will at best affect only your pocket. But psychologically,
subjectively, as a person, youll be in the same condition you were in
before. Unless you buy a car, which can move you forward. But in
a spiritual sense, this gives nothing, absolutely nothing. Here, you
would need to be an extremely sensitive, exceptionally gifted person,
a person in whom the gift is strong enough to vibrate all the time, so
that the gift is more real than anything else. It must be something

200 1 The Baffler [no.27]

unhealthy, you know? Only a very physiological artist can exist here.
Not a calm, reasonable, normal person with some ideas about life.
Poetry, however, is something else. Im not sure what it requires:
protest, indifference? But in all situations, whether good or bad, when
I managed to put together something passable, I always told myself,
Joseph, you need to take a higher note. Here, Im not sure if a higher
note alone would do it. Because here, life appears as if justice had
triumphed. Its a bewildering thought.
In Leningrad, I know this person, he is a son of an important uni-
versity professor, a terrible scoundrel. So this Mikhail always moans
and complains that he doesnt know what to do, because his daddy has
done this and that, and his hands are in blood to the elbow. Meilakh,
Im talking about the son of Boris Meilakh [Ed. notea leading Soviet
Pushkin scholar, beloved by the Party and government, whose books are a
perfect example of conformist scholarship]. So he lives in his daddys sum-
mer place. I told him to leave it alone, to imagine that he lives on the
family farm.
He quieted down, and then came back, still moaning, but this
time he crawled. So I told him, Mikhail, suppose you are right, you
defend the good, and he defends the evil, and that makes you enemies.
In that case, how do you imagine the triumph of justice?
How? he asked.
The triumph of justice in the end, I told him, will come down to
this very same summer place and all these same . . . Because in their
material design, justice and injustice are identical, correct?
EM: In a sense, this happens to 95 percent of dissenting artists, who
are immediately put in a golden cage.
JB: Exactly.
EM: I wanted to ask whether you agree with Dostoyevsky, his
philosophy of sufferingthat a person can realize himself fully only
through suffering.
JB: No. Through happiness. But thats very rare.
EM: But you said earlier that poetry is inspired by resistance.
JB: Right. Poetry is always a conquesta conquest of someones at-
tention. In the Soviet Union, for example, it happens instantly. You
instantly grab someones attention, maybe two or five or ten people.
How much attention is needed depends on ones vanity. Five people
read you, agree with you, and you are all right. Then there are oth-
ers, like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who require a full arena. Here in the
West, its more extreme. Here, you need to be able to look calmly into
a void, not expecting it to be inhabited by any applause and so on. And
if a person can stand it . . . No, Dostoyevsky was absolutely right, yes,

The Baffler [no.27] ! 201

Ancestors

through suffering. But perhaps though happiness, too . . .

EM: Thats never happened.
JB: Yes, it has. I know some people, but theyre still in the midst of it.
I dont know yet how it will turn out.
EM: I still believe that the cornerstone of human development must
be suffering. Happiness could be a turning point but not a cornerstone
experience. In theory, I cant imagine how a person can become fully
human without having suffered.
JB: You know, I knew such people. They are a couple, they are very
happy, they simply love each other very much. And they are people of
a very high order.
EM: Maybe they suffered at some early point in their development?
JB: Maybe they did suffer in childhood. I dont know. Who knows
what happens in childhood and why we should make it a foundation
for everything? They werent persecuted, they never lived with other
spouses, they had never been jailed. I know from experience: most
people dont realize themselves through suffering. Most people break
down and turn into something uglyso I wouldnt insist on the thera-
peutic role of suffering.
EM: But the artist suffers when he works.
JB: I wouldnt quite agree with that. I understand how an artist can
be happy when he discovers something new while he works. I believe
that Georges Braque, my favorite painter, was not a sufferer. He didnt
become an artist through suffering. Enormous inner wealth and work
itselfthis is what fulfilled him. Even Marc Chagall is not a sufferer, I
think.
EM: Are there differences between painter, writer, composer?
JB: Of course. The writer is especially like no one else.
EM: Are there differences in the process of creation?
JB: No. Only in the means of creation. Language is a very special
instrument. Because one cant use it freely, any way one wants. Thats
why the writer comes to the process of writing already frustrated. In a
sense, writers, poets, are condemned to suffering a priori. Painters less
so. Composers less still.
EM: You are right. They are so much freer. In Mozarts case, one can
imagine the act of creation as complete liberation.
JB: The longer art exists, the more time passes, the harder it is to
practice, because, among other things, art requires not only what the

202 1 The Baffler [no.27]

artist has to say, but new means, new tools and so on. And this is not
simply an internal process, but is also in a kind of competition with
the past, with whats been already said. And in this regard the writer
is, of course, in the most difficult situation.
EM: I think that a writer, a poet, speaks directly to the audience, the
reader, whereas an artist or a composer addresses himself to nature, to
harmony of the highest level.
JB: I agree that everyone has a different language. A writer certainly
addresses himself to the society, but not only. In the long run, a writer
doesnt really address himself to the society; it is a matter of the inner
life, he is writing for himself. He does it for himself and has to be
more critical of himself than any other artist. Self-imposed quality
control. Musical language allows more leeway. It doesnt box you in on
every side.t

Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.

P. S . MUELLER

The Baffler [no.27] ! 203

Bafflomathy [No. 27]
Danielle Blaus (How Long Now Since
the Mailmans Gone Missing? p. 41) mere eye
was selected for a Poetry Society of America
Chapbook Award. She teaches at the City
University of New York. Joseph Brodsky (Man
Is Not a Rock, p. 196), a Nobel Prize winner, was
a Russian poet. Elizabeth Bruenig (Keeping
Up with the Babadooks, p. 10) is an essayist in
Washington, D.C. Monica Byrnes (Gustus
Dei, p. 60) debut novel is The Girl in the Road.
William Corbett (Berryman Anecdote, p. 157)
is a poet, memoirist, and writer on art. He lives in
Brooklyn, where he directs the small press Pressed
Wafer. Barbara Ehrenreich (Mind Your Own
Business, p. 70) is a contributing editor of The
Baffler. Her memoir is Living with a Wild God.
Lucy Ellmann (Three Strikes! p. 42) was born
in Illinois and now lives in Scotland. Her latest
novel is Mimi. She likes poodles and running for
her life. Ann Friedman (Idle Threads, p. 34)
is a columnist for New York magazines website.
Peter Gizzi (Re-Make/Re-Model, p. 20) is the
author of several collections of poetry, including
Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, and Artificial
Heart. David Graeber (Dickheads, p. 30) is a
contributing editor of The Baffler. His latest book
is The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and
the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. J. C. Hallman (The
Monk Retires, p. 184) is the author of The Chess
Artist, The Hospital for Bad Poets, and Wm & Hry.
His book on the work of Nicholson BakerB &
Me: A True Story of Literary Arousalarrives this
month. Russell Jacoby (All Hail the Grumbler!
p. 120) is the author of Bloodlust: On the Roots
of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present, The
Last Intellectuals, and other works. He teaches
in the history department at UCLA. Caroline
Knoxs (Why would the Minoans, p. 75) ninth
book, To Drink Boiled Snow, will appear this fall.
Chris Lehmann (Purple Reign, p. 76) is senior
editor of The Baffler, coeditor of Bookforum, and
the author of Rich People Things. John Lingan
(Toxically Pure, p. 158) lives in Maryland. Xu
Lizhi (I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron,
204 1 The Baffler [no.27]
p. 113) worked at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen,
China. Several of his poems have been translated
into English by friends of the Nao project and
published at libcom.org. Jessica Loudis (Bubble
Butts, p. 16) is coeditor of the essay collection
Should I Go to Grad School? Edward Mendelson
(Transcendental Rites, p. 173) is the Lionel
Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia
University. His latest book is Moral Agents: Eight
Twentieth-Century American Writers. Christina
Moon (Splurge and Purge, p. 8) is an assistant
professor in fashion studies at Parsons The New
School. Evgeny Morozov (The Taming of
Tech Criticism, p. 102) is a contributing editor of
The Baffler and the author of To Save Everything,
Click Here and The Net Delusion. Ludmilla
Petrushevskayas (How Much Women Know,
p. 191) books include There Once Lived a Girl Who
Seduced Her Sisters Husband, and He Hanged Himself:
Love Stories. Ben Schwartz (Satirized for Your
Consumption, p. 144) is an Emmy-nominated
comedy writer and journalist. George Scialabba
(People Who Influence Influential People,
p. 114) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and
author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and For
the Republic. Manohar Shetty (Haut Monde,
p. 172) is a poet and fiction writer who lives in
Goa, India. His new book is Goa Travels: Being the
Accounts of Travellers from the 16th to the 21st Century.
Jacob Silvermans (VCs Take the Media, p. 92)
book, Terms of Service: Social Media, Surveillance,
and the Price of Constant Connection, is published in
March. John Summers (To the Ninety-Nines,
p. 6) is editor in chief of The Baffler. Catherine
Tumber (Buffalo Exchange, p. 128) is a
contributing editor of The Baffler and the author
of Small, Gritty, and Green. Carl Van Vechten
(Harlem Women, p. 179), an early twentieth-
century writer, photographed many artists of the
Harlem Renaissance. Eugenia Williamson
(The Revolution Will Probably Wear Mom
Jeans, p. 22) is a contributing editor of The Baffler.
Translators
Anna Summers, friends of the Nao project.
 LEWIS KOCH

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The front cover of this issue of The Baffler is illustrated

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The Baffler [no.27] ! 205

 C on t e n t P rov i sion s

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Invite Us
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At this point, you feel a pang of courage. Sure, your boss and his boss above
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invite one of our editors or contributors to say all the things you wanted to say
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206 1 The Baffler [no.27]

 MARK S . FISHER

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