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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

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 ...