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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Bring Us Your Chained and Huddled Masses
Massive waves pound the quarter-mile concrete jetty that shelters the bay off Crescent City, California. On either side of the inlet rise small and mangy hills, ravaged by cycles of clear-cut logging. Beneath these slopes is Highway 101 and the gaudy motel-littered strip of a ...

The Hidden Injuries of Balance
January 15, 2013
By some grim stroke of luck, the sweatshop reemerged as a cause célèbre a few years ago when California labor officials raided the now-notorious El Monte garment factory on the outskirts of Los Angeles. In this virtual prison, dozens of Thai immigrants, mostly women, toiled in ...

Cordon Sanitaire
While “late” capitalism has failed to deal the long-promised death-blows to “ideology” and “history,” it did manage a trick that likely took even Francis Fukuyama by surprise: It has killed rock ’n’ roll. There was an eerie parallel between the fate of rock’s ...

Smoke, Drink, Don’t Think
January 15, 2013
When I was in grade school in the late Seventies, all the other girls used to get together during recess to talk about which Charlie’s Angel they wanted to be. The überbabes tended to view themselves as Jills, flipping their hair back à la Farrah, while the submissive but ...

The Prole Inside Me
January 15, 2013
Crime writer Jim Thompson spent his final years in Hollywood amid decidedly grim circumstances: None of his twenty-nine books remained in print, he was in ill health, and his talents were exploited by up and coming young Hollywood spoon-wearers. Shortly before he died in 1977, ...

The New Global Vulgate
Across the world, all manner of intellectual professions and state elites are speaking a strange new language whose vocabulary seems to have come from nowhere but is suddenly in everyone’s mouths: “globalization” and “flexibility,” “multiculturalism” and ...

The New Myth of the Happy Worker
In late 1990, the first Saturn rolled out of the Spring Hill, Tennessee plant that General Motors had been building, fine-tuning, and hyping for most of the eighties. To announce the event, the ad agency for the GM division-that-could produced a TV commercial celebrating it as ...

McSploitation
January 15, 2013
Huddled in Chicago’s neon-scarred River North tourist district, Fadò Irish Pub desperately strains to pass for one of those quaint public houses common to postcards from the Old Sod. Its brightly painted façade, Celtic-lettered signage, and gimcrack-cluttered windows ...

A Funny Kind of Boosterism
First it was Chilean Alberto Fuguet, the author of Mala Onda (1991), a tale of adolescent satiety successful enough to travel northward to its alternative-spiritual birthplace and go into publication in the United States as Bad Vibes (1997). Then came Peruvian TV host Jaime ...

Rat Choice and Other Tastes
Perhaps the most annoying conceit of neoclassical economics is that it alone, among the social sciences, comprehends human behavior, and does so in a way that makes perfect sense to the man in the street. Sociologists and anthropologists may come up with more or less ...

New Consensus for Old
January 15, 2013
The prominent sociologist Herbert Gans had been writing about popular culture and its audiences for some twenty years when he published his 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture, a 159-page summary of his thinking on the subject. The volume is now twenty-five years old, ...