What do you think?
Rate this book
The Baffler No. 35
In The Baffler’s frisky nineties youth, we’d designate the liberationist delusions of consumer capitalism under the running designation “New Bad Things.” This casual filing system seemed well suited to an age that was tricked out in every conceivable sort of lifestyle novelty. But the New Bad things have lately mutated out of control. In a few short political generations, Lyndon Johnson’s bold vision of the Great Society has ceded the field to its photographic negative; we are now marooned in the sprawling wasteland of the Bad Society.
How did we get here, exactly? That’s what this thirty-fifth Baffler is determined to explain. Starting with our rancid head of state, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw dissects the racist logic behind Donald Trump’s rise to power—a tale in which liberal fables of “colorblindness” play no small part. Adele Stan takes a close look at the networks of private capital that allow our Trumpian overlords to ransack the public weal with impunity. James Livingston chronicles the way that American culture has yoked itself to the work ethic, even at the moment when all the basic conditions of industrial-age labor are obsolescing before our eyes.
Perhaps, then, we are at last free to pursue glorious, self-determined leisure of the kind that Marx and Engels extolled in The German Ideology? No such luck, Miya Tokumitsu reports: the American romance with leisure is a rote and joyless affair, resembling nothing so much as the drudgery of the shop floor. Our cinemas and streaming set-top boxes offer no relief, notes Tom Carson: the superhero sagas now stoking the culture industries are studies in social fatalism. And as Ann Friedman reminds us, blue-state secession efforts are only cruel delusions.
What, then, is to be done? Far be it from Team Baffler to prescribe a reformist blueprint, but if we were to make a start, we could do worse than to build on the researches of our contributors by resisting the various best-case scenarists still contaminating our civitas. Heed our own chastened editorial history, and remember that bad things can always get worse.
How did we get here, exactly? That’s what this thirty-fifth Baffler is determined to explain. Starting with our rancid head of state, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw dissects the racist logic behind Donald Trump’s rise to power—a tale in which liberal fables of “colorblindness” play no small part. Adele Stan takes a close look at the networks of private capital that allow our Trumpian overlords to ransack the public weal with impunity. James Livingston chronicles the way that American culture has yoked itself to the work ethic, even at the moment when all the basic conditions of industrial-age labor are obsolescing before our eyes.
Perhaps, then, we are at last free to pursue glorious, self-determined leisure of the kind that Marx and Engels extolled in The German Ideology? No such luck, Miya Tokumitsu reports: the American romance with leisure is a rote and joyless affair, resembling nothing so much as the drudgery of the shop floor. Our cinemas and streaming set-top boxes offer no relief, notes Tom Carson: the superhero sagas now stoking the culture industries are studies in social fatalism. And as Ann Friedman reminds us, blue-state secession efforts are only cruel delusions.
What, then, is to be done? Far be it from Team Baffler to prescribe a reformist blueprint, but if we were to make a start, we could do worse than to build on the researches of our contributors by resisting the various best-case scenarists still contaminating our civitas. Heed our own chastened editorial history, and remember that bad things can always get worse.
- GenresPolitics
184 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2017
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 27, 2017
The Baffler is actually always full of New Good Things.
Tom Whyman's "No Prophets, No Honor" is something every budding critical theorist should humble themselves with (everyone, even his devotees, needs to remember Adorno died because he had a heart attack when women threw flowers on him during a lectured and showed their breasts).
Throw in some Amber A'Lee Frost, Miya Tokumitsu and Tom Carson and you've got quite the rag.
Tom Whyman's "No Prophets, No Honor" is something every budding critical theorist should humble themselves with (everyone, even his devotees, needs to remember Adorno died because he had a heart attack when women threw flowers on him during a lectured and showed their breasts).
Throw in some Amber A'Lee Frost, Miya Tokumitsu and Tom Carson and you've got quite the rag.
September 27, 2017
Another fine edition of "the journal that blunts the cutting edge." Eclectic articles range from Molly Crabapple's piece about America's black antifascist vanguard to examinations of everything from fake news to over-privatizing hospice care.
Some standouts:
Amber A'Lee Frost's "All Worked Up and Nowhere to Go" turns a critical eye to the short-term impact of most leftist strikes and argues for what's long been missing in the U.S.: an actual labor movement with revamped, efficient unions. Somehow, this should sound like beating a dead horse, but she makes it work.
In "Why Work?", James Livingston paints a picture of an American labor market that keeps coming into clearer perspective the more I read. It's one in which the jobs are no longer there and they're not coming back. We're in a day and age when the levels of production and efficiency require less and less actual people to work. And too many of the jobs are low-wage ones:
In "Did the Fun Work?", Miya Tokumitsu explores our obsession with "productive leisure" (self-improvement efforts masquerading as vacations, wellness excursions, etc., etc.). Americans have always been a little uncomfortable with the notion of relaxation (our European counterparts go on extended "holidays", which we compress to the occasional weekend or week-long getaway (depending on the flexibility and income one has). It's not just potentially productive time wasted, but the slippery slope into moral failure toward which laziness must inevitably lead. Idleness is, afterall, where the devil does some of his best work... But we needn't fear because social media and personal data allow us to document and quantify our fun, to prove how productive it is. Somewhere, behind all this, it feels like maybe we're not comfortable simply being.
Daniel Brook excoriates Richard Florida in"Creative Alibis" starting with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and its drumbeating for economic salvation via high-tech gentrification. Sure, Brook, benefits from the benefit of hindsight, but the financial crisis and the way the "New Economy" continued to chew up and spit out the middle class, makes it look like Florida would have had better luck as a prognosticator if he'd simply not published a book of any kind.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper plays the you-kids-get-off-my-lawn social conservative role in her essay, "Childhood's End". She bemoans the adult-child--the one who bemoans the responsibilities of adult life and gives their kindergartner a mohawk. In her view, the erasing of the line between childhood and adulthood serves no one and accelerates a cultural degradation we can ill afford. Personally, this seemed a little reactionary to me, but I sometimes think articles like this describe a reality to which I have little exposure.
In "You Gotta Serve Somebody", Dave Denison takes a fascinating look at the way the Christian right walks an impossible tightrope between belief and politics. It's one of the few recent pieces I've read that mulls over the inherent contradiction between Christian values and Republican policies. It delves well beyond such surface issues as how Evangelicals embraced a heathen like Trump and on into how morality itself is impractical in politics. Who knew Machiavelli and Christ mixed so well?!!
Ann Neumann closes out this issue with "Death Trips", making one wonder whether it really is better not to die alone.
Fans of the publication may be excited to learn it's moving from a quarterly, large novella schedule to something more frequent in 2018...
--------------------------------------------------
WORDS I LEARNED WHILE READING THIS BOOK
sachems | revanchist | kodokushi
Some standouts:
Amber A'Lee Frost's "All Worked Up and Nowhere to Go" turns a critical eye to the short-term impact of most leftist strikes and argues for what's long been missing in the U.S.: an actual labor movement with revamped, efficient unions. Somehow, this should sound like beating a dead horse, but she makes it work.
In "Why Work?", James Livingston paints a picture of an American labor market that keeps coming into clearer perspective the more I read. It's one in which the jobs are no longer there and they're not coming back. We're in a day and age when the levels of production and efficiency require less and less actual people to work. And too many of the jobs are low-wage ones:
A quarter of the adults actually employed in the United States are paid wages too low to lift them above the federal poverty line; almost half of them are eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance. Nearly a quarter of American children live in officially defined poverty: food stamps and emergency rooms keep them alive. The direct result of this severance between hard work and a living wage is the recent explosion of transfer payments and so-called entitlements. Put it this way: every Walmart with three hundred or more “associates” costs taxpayers roughly a million dollars in public assistance each year because the wages paid these employees don’t cover their food and health care. In the absence of such assistance, at least half the labor force would be officially poor.Full employment seems more and more like some sort of chimera (see also "Capitalism & Poverty" by Matt Bruenig writing for Jacobin Magazine). All this begs the questions of what it will one day mean to be a "productive member of society" and whether that can still be tied to the labor market.
In "Did the Fun Work?", Miya Tokumitsu explores our obsession with "productive leisure" (self-improvement efforts masquerading as vacations, wellness excursions, etc., etc.). Americans have always been a little uncomfortable with the notion of relaxation (our European counterparts go on extended "holidays", which we compress to the occasional weekend or week-long getaway (depending on the flexibility and income one has). It's not just potentially productive time wasted, but the slippery slope into moral failure toward which laziness must inevitably lead. Idleness is, afterall, where the devil does some of his best work... But we needn't fear because social media and personal data allow us to document and quantify our fun, to prove how productive it is. Somewhere, behind all this, it feels like maybe we're not comfortable simply being.
Daniel Brook excoriates Richard Florida in"Creative Alibis" starting with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and its drumbeating for economic salvation via high-tech gentrification. Sure, Brook, benefits from the benefit of hindsight, but the financial crisis and the way the "New Economy" continued to chew up and spit out the middle class, makes it look like Florida would have had better luck as a prognosticator if he'd simply not published a book of any kind.
Natasha Vargas-Cooper plays the you-kids-get-off-my-lawn social conservative role in her essay, "Childhood's End". She bemoans the adult-child--the one who bemoans the responsibilities of adult life and gives their kindergartner a mohawk. In her view, the erasing of the line between childhood and adulthood serves no one and accelerates a cultural degradation we can ill afford. Personally, this seemed a little reactionary to me, but I sometimes think articles like this describe a reality to which I have little exposure.
In "You Gotta Serve Somebody", Dave Denison takes a fascinating look at the way the Christian right walks an impossible tightrope between belief and politics. It's one of the few recent pieces I've read that mulls over the inherent contradiction between Christian values and Republican policies. It delves well beyond such surface issues as how Evangelicals embraced a heathen like Trump and on into how morality itself is impractical in politics. Who knew Machiavelli and Christ mixed so well?!!
Ann Neumann closes out this issue with "Death Trips", making one wonder whether it really is better not to die alone.
Need someone to “be present” for your final hours? Need music, aromatherapy, reiki? A death doula will, for a fee, swoop into your home and help you navigate the end of your life, from your spiritual needs to the arrangement of the furniture in your sickroom. Awkward, Americanized, consumer-focused forms of Buddhism have long since taken over our exercise (yoga), our offices (mindfulness), and our homes (feng shui). Now, with doula programs popping up like mantras in the mind, they’ve come for our deaths.The fact that there is a "death industry" might tell you all you need to know, but this gem kind of nails it: "Through made-to-order rituals, your death can be propelled into the realm of the unique, just like everyone else's."
Fans of the publication may be excited to learn it's moving from a quarterly, large novella schedule to something more frequent in 2018...
--------------------------------------------------
WORDS I LEARNED WHILE READING THIS BOOK
sachems | revanchist | kodokushi
June 25, 2017
No such thing as a bad Baffler. Subscribe.
July 19, 2017
One of the better recent Bafflers.
September 18, 2017
I’m subscribing now, which includes ebook copies as well. Good reading.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews