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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Literature and Democracy
One of the most enduring stereotypes stuck in the heads of citizens of Western democracies is the idea that people in the former Communist systems were mere numbers deprived of individual freedom. Now that the Communist countries have been shattered like cheap cups, it is time ...

The Bubble That Tony Built
January 23, 2013
If you visit London and follow the Thames a few miles east of the city center, you will see a giant bubble as worthless and discredited as the bubble puffed up not long ago in the investment banks upstream. Britain’s Millennium Dome is now as good a reminder of the facile ...

Pop Goes the Weasel
January 23, 2013
There’s a blurb from the New York Times on the cover of the paperback edition of James Patterson’s Violets Are Blue, proclaiming Patterson to be “one of America’s most influential authors.” Like many such testimonials, the blurb is both edited and ...

Facts on the Ground
January 23, 2013
On the morning of January 7, Morton Walker went, as he often does, to the Chicago Bee Branch Public Library at 36th and State Street, across from the Stateway Gardens public housing development. He and a friend, Mike Fuller, were walking on State Street when an unmarked police ...

In Memoriam: HLM
Henry Louis Mencken was the greatest American journalist of the last century and possibly the best writer of American English ever. He was also an asshole, and it is for the latter quality that we are doomed to remember him, if we remember him at all. Ask an educated layperson ...

Cordon Sanitaire
Rock and the Backlash The Los Angeles Coliseum, October 9, 1981, nearly a year after Ronald Reagan’s election. The Rolling Stones are touring behind the dull Tattoo You album. Their performances are memorable mainly for the way Mick Jagger, wearing football pants, is hoisted ...

My Love is a Free Free Market
January 18, 2013
Russell Roberts is that rare bird of the dismal science, the public economist. While his colleagues glory in mathematical obscurantism, shrouding even the most patent of observations in indecipherable formulae, Roberts sings hosanna in low-church tones to the democratic ...