The Long Con
Mitt Romney lies to be loved.
Baffler Archives: Salvos
Columns
I’ve Seen the Future, and It’s a Sony
I figure it’s my duty. In earlier times, in other places, I would have consulted the tribal elders, heard the debates at the amphitheater, or gone to the town meeting. But as a good citizen of the overdeveloped world living in the dawn of the age of corporate feudalism, I ...
The Killer App
The Gateway to the Consumer
Earlier this year, some sixty slathering publishing would-bes jammed the upstairs of a brew pub in San Francisco’s SOMA district to hear the fifth in a series of “soirées” sponsored by the San Francisco writer’s guild. The soirée ...
Dark Age
I. Wealth Against Commonwealth Revisited
In the United States, where political “change” means further enriching the already wealthy, and where political “dialogue” is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must ...
The Nostalgia Gap
There is something unsettling about the pattern of 1970s nostalgia which has afflicted “twentysomething” thinking over the last several years, something beyond the immediate banality of an entire generation reveling in the luminescent wash of The Brady Bunch and the ...
Back in Black on the Beaten Path
So you’ve just completed the inevitable arc from derision to interest to all-out consumer craving over bell-bottoms, and now a new, or rather, a renewed trend has reared up along the ever-jagged cutting edge. And worse, this latest expression of the herd—oops, ...
Burn Down the House of Commons in Your Brand New Shoes
I wanted to be a Details man. I had recognized my need for bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair, the washboard stomach, the baggy Versace suits, the attendant awed babes, the tattoos—you get the picture. I wanted to pal around with other young sophisticates dressed just as ...
The Teen Rebel as Model Consumer
“The true exemplar of différance is she who, by dint of unflinching critical rigor and unlimited credit, has achieved maximum accessorization of her lifestyle.”
—James Hatt, in conversation.
Sassy does not want you to think that it is just another version of the ...
What’s Hip for General Motors Is Hip for America
One of the most important elements of the culture industry’s cherished self-image as an institution of surpassing hipness is its curious historical awareness. Despite the fact that the three networks and the various Hollywood studios were founded well before World War II, the ...
Brain Dead in Seattle
Beavis: Huh huh, like, what’s Seattle?
Butthead: It’s this place where stuff is, like, really cool.
I start with what I take not to be a radical assertion. Beavis and Butthead are, at the very least, supposed to represent a form of humor. People, from the local TV critic to ...
We’re Marketed, Therefore We Are?
The marketing of our generation was bound to happen sooner or later. After the success of Linklater’s Slacker, the promotion of Coupland’s Generation X, and the “discovery” of Seattle grunge, it was just a matter of waiting for the wave. And it came. It started in the ...
Twenty-nothing Revisited
So what was the result of all that “twenty-something” soul-searching that so enlivened the mass media over the last year? After months of delicate inquiry and painstaking attention to the subtleties of “our” generation’s experiences, angsts, and deep ...