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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

An Old Testament
January 15, 2013
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 ...

On the Stick
January 15, 2013
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” ...

Cordon Sanitaire
January 15, 2013
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
January 15, 2013
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
January 15, 2013
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
January 15, 2013
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 ...

Legionnaire’s Disease
January 15, 2013
It’s not difficult to understand the sense of historical frustration that informs so much of the bitter populism of recent decades. We, too, regret many of the ways the world has changed over the last thirty years; we, too, believe that the vast majority of Americans have ...