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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Apostles of the New Entrepreneur
Just before Christmas, Wal-mart workers arrive at their stores to find their boss grinning down at them from a video monitor. Sam Walton, utterly approachable (if only via satellite) in his trademark baseball cap, seems at first to want only to relate a few hunting anecdotes. ...

How May I Serve You?
If the business of America is business, as some blowhard once observed, then surely public relations is a close second. Indeed, while all governments spew propaganda at a prodigious rate, none can match our own in terms of conflating a genuinely reprehensible history ...

I Shall Be Released
Since soon after the stock market crash of 1929, United States securities law has required publicly-traded companies to evenly distribute to the public any news, good or bad, that may affect its stock price. Once, uniformed messengers armed with letters from companies and ...

In Dave Berman’s Tree
Have You Ever Been to Wheeling? (Have You Ever Had That Feeling?) Houses lean into the gold and brown hills. On the FM station someone sings “there on her face, a row of teeth he’ll replace.” Ten thousand souvenirs and not a single one worth having. A group of depressed ...

Free (Market) Verse
When James Merrill died ten years ago, the New York Times Magazine used the occasion to publish an obituary—not of the elegant poet himself but of the entire “poetry establishment.” Without Merrill’s inherited millions trickling down to fellow poets, the magazine ...

Milwaukee Bucks
January 24, 2013
In 1958 and 1959, in a dozen cities across the country, groups of businessmen huddled behind closed doors to hear a candy manufacturer’s panicked warning. America was in peril from communism, he disclosed, but not in the way that many supposed. The red hordes were not at the ...

William Burroughs: My Part in His Downfall
It was a savage summer for famous writers. They were either being rolled by their former wives, dissed by their former publishers, or busy getting dead in the heat of Kansas. We had seen this kind of thing before: F. Scott Fitzgerald never went to Kansas, but Zelda was the ...

Long Live Socialist Realism!
I don’t know why, but the rules of market-oriented literary culture remind me of good old socialist realism. I admit that my head’s a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe, but that’s what I think. I also admit that I travel too much—here, there, back ...

Go West, Everyone . . .
January 24, 2013
Somewhere in southeastern Utah I am looking down about two thousand feet into a canyon that appears candy-colored—pink swirls splashed against a white sandstone background. There is just the slightest evidence of a crooked creek outlined by green tamarisks. In the distance ...

Childish Things
January 24, 2013
I had a childhood wish fulfilled on Christmas Day—and this within mere months of my thirty-fifth birthday. My big sister gave me the Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Maré, a plastic objet d’art I’ve desired since I first saw it in a comic book ad years ago. The Prisoner is ...

Same as the Old Boss
Say what you will about the New Economy, that tired old tart: for me the dot-com bubble rocked. I got onboard in 1996, when the smart money was placing bets that two years later paid off fifty-to-one. That kind of action was way out of my league, but by the time the Nasdaq ...

Starving to Death on Red Herring
To get a dollop of what the dot-com days were about for those of us in the hot new field of New Economy journalism, consider this vignette: in the fall of 1999, when I was working as European editor of a publication called Red Herring, I was asked to speak at a conference in ...