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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges
When Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor ...

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
January 08, 2014
A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those ...

Future Schlock
January 07, 2014
If there is one beacon in the landscape of American industrial decline, it’s the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or so it seems to the science and business reporters who regularly troop through its doors for their “Ten Breakthroughs That Will Change ...

Revolt of the Gadgets
It’s a sweltering midsummer afternoon in Ismailiya, a city of 700,000 people that lies on the west bank of the Suez Canal halfway between Port Said to the north and the city of Suez in the south. Two hundred striking workers, some dressed in company coveralls, rally at a ...

Water World
January 05, 2014
Here’s a little-noted quirk of our literary history, unlikely to turn up on the Trivial Pursuit board: the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Ernest Poole, devoted much of his writing career to cheering on the demise of capitalism. Poole won the prize for ...

The Animal Cure
Encounters with lions, mountain goats, grizzly bears, dolphins, and whales are not least among the exotic experiences offered by the tourism industry. The attractions are obvious: a chance to be outdoors in stunning scenery, to see creatures you may have known only as ...

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic
Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund ...

We Told You So
Like many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the ...

Putting Creativity to Work
Ah, creativity. We’ve always known it was desirable stuff, good for kids and poets and so on, but in the last few years creativity has entered that exalted realm of sacred social concepts. Today it ranks with “competitiveness” and “excellence” as one of the ineffable ...

Atlas Finally Shrugged
The late Sixties and early Seventies were a tough time for the owners of American industry. The postwar recovery had peaked. Europe and Japan had rebuilt their industries and transformed themselves from hungry markets for American goods and capital into aggressive economic ...

Once More, with Actors
I am an American, Midwestern-born, and I have gone at American things. I have skinnydipped and snowmobiled, bowled with others and bowled alone. I know the lyrics to “It’s a Small World” by heart; I brighten at the sound of bat hitting ball; I have been known to frequent ...

Requiem for a Bureaucrat
August 20, 2013
On January 11, 1937, two weeks into the epic sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, a young socialist named Victor Reuther arrived in a rickety sound car at GM’s Fisher Body Plant No. 2. GM had just turned off the plant’s heat—it was 16 degrees ...