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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The Banality of Leisure
January 17, 2013
The leisure class is dead: According to a 1999 article in the New York Times, even the wealthiest of Manhattan trust fund twenty-somethings are seeking gainful employment (“The Rich Find It’s Uncool Not to Have a Job,” announced the bold type.) We are all doing our part ...

Chicago ’72
When future historians of twentieth-century American politics go looking for a single scene with which to encapsulate the Great Reaction against Sixties radicalism and reform—now mercilessly barreling toward its fourth decade—they might do well to examine the harshly lit ...

Generation Backlash
January 17, 2013
It’s back! Bet you thought all that blather about Generation X had ended, what with Douglas Coupland’s sales declining and slacker movies failing at the box office. But, no, the idea of Generation X has returned with a vengeance. This time it’s not about culture, it’s ...

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 ...