Thomas Frank - Commodify Your Dissent

O THER THAN The Baffler , I can think of no American journal of opinionleftist, new age, Ultra, post-modern, Jacobin, conservative, monarchist, evangelical, legitimist, neo-gothicthat could credibly describe its essays and criticisms as salvos. The less spirited journals produce muffled squibs and tentative ranging shots, sometimes sinister winks, loud coughs, or violent tremblings of the jowl, but not salvos, and never broadsides meant to sink anything larger than the pretensions of a disagreeable politician or the semiotic theory of a rival paraphrast.

Extend the sea-going metaphor to the armada of print that shows up every month on the newsstands or in the mail, and the different rigs and tonnages can be seen and classified as various kinds of ships. The business journals ( Forbes, Fortune, Business Week , etc.), like deep-laden oil tankers, heavy with the statistics that sustain the faith in late twentieth-century capitalism and fuel the lamps in the temples of Mammon; Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as festive as Caribbean cruise ships, glittering with strings of colored lights and loud with the music of trendy calypso bands (sometimes a celebrity falls overboard, which is a cause for great excitement and rejoicing); National Review and The New Republic towing long lines of barges loaded with intellectual waste products and the rusted hulks of political causes long since sold for scrap; the precious literary journals and reviews, too many of them to name or count, like Sunday yachts pirouetting through nimble turns, making a pretty show of running up and taking down their coded signal flags.

But H.M.S. Baffler I choose to imagine as a British frigate of thirty-six guns close-hauled on a port tack, temporarily detached from Vice Admiral Lord Nelsons Mediterranean squadron and operating without fleet orders in the Bay of Cant. Targets of convenience and opportunity present themselves at all points of the compassfat merchantmen sailing under the broad pennants of Cond Nast and Hearst, double-banked galleys rowed by gangs of captive intellectuals chained to the oars of the Cato Institute and the Chase Manhattan Bank, Chinese junks flying the Nike ensign, gilded barges bearing the magnificences of Martha Stewart and Arianna Huffmgton, high-speed cigarette boats running around in furious circles under the grinning command of George Gilder and Newt Gingrich.

The gunners aboard H.M.S. Baffler never miss, and the accuracy of their observation is a job to behold. The cannonade in the present volume falls most effectively on the flotilla that its several authors variously identify as The Culture Trust, The Body Demographic, The Age of Corporate Feudalism, The Mechanical Yammering of a consumer society long since departed from the rails of meaning or democracy. In brief and in sum, the advertised life formed in the firmament of Madison Avenues brand name strategies and then (after first being processed into a very large wheel of very pale cheese) sold to the American public in the different shapes and packagings marketed as movies, nose-rings, shoes, books, t-shirts, automobiles, music videos, after-shave lotions, alternative lifestyle, cyberspace, punk and post-rock, nihilist poets, and menacing hairdos. But it is all the same cheese, and its what we have here in the great American market space instead of art or thought or politics or literature.

The twenty-one essays in the book fire their grape-shot at different product linesThomas Frank talking about popular music, designated dissidents, and the New Age handbooks of corporate self-help, Keith White leafing through the merchandising catalogues disguised as magazines ( Details and Wired ); Maura Mahoney on pre-frabricated, beat generation angst (sold, like black cotton, in six yard lengths of hip-lit or la vie intellectuelle); Gary Groth on Quentin Tarantinos movies (the embodiment of living junk); Tom Vanderbilt on Edge Cities and the syntax (sometimes brutish, always cute) of commercial speech.