The Eyes of Spiro Are Upon You
The myth of the liberal media.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
An Old Testament
In 1981, I put on my yarmulke and went off to the political wars. They are over now, the casus belli is merely history: The left hand can no longer distinguish itself from the right. I do not know who won. It was not me.
Some say it was all because of Stalin and the Moscow ...
The Rod of Correction: Cold Warrior in a Cold Country
Canada has never been a hospitable land for right-wingers. Even so, 1991 was a low point for the country’s long-frustrated friends of wealth and established power. Unemployment had soared to almost 11 percent, putting an already well-organized union movement on the ...
On the Stick
If Hollywood were casting Backlash: Attack from the Right, the male lead would probably be a white guy—call him “Butch”—with a short haircut and a vaguely Southern accent. His Ford pickup truck would have a gun rack and bumper stickers announcing “Abortion Kills” ...
Remainder Table: Jack B. Tenney and Lawrence Dennis
Jack B. Tenney (1891–1970)
Jack Tenney, the man who led the California legislature’s famous red-hunting committee, began his career, ironically, as a lawyer whose politics veered from progressive to socialist. Since his views precluded his doing much work with the more ...
Cordon Sanitaire
Iolanthe
The best song of the last quarter-century is “Iolanthe” by James McMurtry, but it’s a version only I’ve heard. In the summer of 1995, when McMurtry’s album Where’d You Hide the Body? was released, I received a promotional cassette copy at the Topeka Capital ...
Hollywood’s Corporate Art
Men don’t make movies. Industries don’t make movies. Corporations do. Hollywood studios make films not only to achieve the usual corporate goals of profit and prestige, but also to advertise, to tell audiences what kind of institution the corporation would like to be and to ...
Radical Madison
Madison, Wisconsin was by no means the Athens of the Midwest—unless Athens is badly overrated—but it looked awfully good to a homegrown Marxist from downstate Illinois in August 1967. In Champaign of unhappy memory, a mucky green-bottomed swamp passed for a picturesque ...
Cream City Confidential
A trip down North Avenue tells more about Milwaukee than any tour guide could. The four-lane commercial artery begins near an enclave of palatial houses overlooking Lake Michigan and some five miles to the west empties into the leafy suburb of Wauwatosa, followed by the even ...
Modernism as Kitsch
If you are one of those who dismiss the art critic Hilton Kramer as a kind of antiquated aesthete with a deep anger against the modern world and a mad glint in his prose, you should know that it wasn’t always that way. Although nowadays his magazine, The New Criterion, ...
The Brand Called Shmoo
Alfred Caplin emerged from the dim, gray depths of the Great Depression as Al Capp, creator of the beloved hillbilly comic strip Li’l Abner and the most celebrated cartoonist of the American century. In the strip’s early years, Li’l Abner was praised by liberal ...
The Rod of Correction
In June 1968 the world was in flames. The Vietcong had recently overrun Saigon, American cities smoldered in the aftermath of the King riots, and the Yippies were threatening to drop acid in Chicago’s water supply. Readers of that month’s Reader’s Digest learned how to ...