By Steve Rhodes
While Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas was not without its problems, it still stands as one of the most incisive works not only about recent American politics but American culture in at least the last decade.
The fact that Frank is a University of Chicago graduate who founded The Baffler here doesn’t seem to get him any special dispensation from the local media, though, much of whom I’m certain have never heard of him. The larger political universe has heard of him, though, and not just because he lives in Washington, D.C. now (and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, but because he is one of the leading political and cultural intellects of our time.
Still, his latest book, The Wrecking Crew sounds like a bit of a disappointment – not just because it is getting lukewarm reviews, but because those reviews seem to ring true in their main complaint that Frank has fallen into a leftist ideological prism that he can’t get out of long enough to see, for example, that Democrats are evil too. My God, didn’t Chicago teach you anything?
In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind writes admiringly of Frank’ “gifts as a social observer” and his take on lobbyists and libertarians, but argues that “Frank’s portrait of the conservative movement, however, sacrifices complexity to caricature.”
I haven’t read The Wrecking Crew myself but an acquaintance whose judgement I respect has described it to me as solely blaming government malfeasance and the rise of the corporate-lobby state on Republicans, ignoring the more hypocritical sins of Democrats who claim to be above this sort of thing.
This notion is not only bolstered by Lind’s review, but by the review a day later in the Times by Michiko Kakutani, who writes: “Less humorous and far more hectoring than Kansas, this volume quickly devolves into a highly partisan, Manichaean-minded screed against conservatives and private-sector economics . . .
“Instead of carefully dissecting the many failures and missteps of the Bush administration (from its handling of the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina) and its penchant for favoring political loyalty over expertise, Mr. Frank tries to extrapolate its many stumbles into an object lesson about the wickedness of conservative governments in general.”
Gee, Democrats would never favor political loyalty over expertise.
Is this what happens to your brain when you move to Washington?
The Revolution Will Be Faked
More relevant to today’s political scene is Frank’s first book, The Conquest of Cool, in which he described Corporate America’s co-optation of rebellious language and codes to make raw capitalism and mindless consumerism seem cool. Call it gentrified dissension. It looks an awful lot like the Obama campaign – all of the symbols but none of the content.
RFK Street
“But Fred Dutton, Robert Kennedy’s campaign manager in 1968 and the champion of a ‘new politics’ uniting suburban idealists, college students and racial minorities (sound familiar?), went on to become a lobbyist for Mobil Oil and Saudi Arabia, earning the nickname ‘Dutton of Arabia,'” Lind notes.
Pabst Blue Hipster
Paging Tom Frank and the Obama “movement”!
“Consider Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Farhad Manjoo wrote recently in a Times of Rob Walker’s Buying In. “Beginning in the 1970s, the cheap beer that had long been synonymous with the blue-collar heartland began a steep decline, with sales by 2001 dipping to fewer than a million barrels a year, 90 percent below the beer’s peak. But in 2002, Pabst noticed a sudden sales spike, driven by an unlikely demographic: countercultural types – bike messengers, skaters and their tattooed kin – in hipster redoubts like Portland, Ore., had taken to swilling the stuff. When asked why, they would praise Pabst for its non-image, for the fact that it seemed to care little about selling.”
I’d say it was more because of blue-collar chic, its perceived-to-be ironic label design, and its affordable price, but whatever. It was a genuine countercultural trend. Like Howard Dean. But then . . .
“Neal Stewart, Pabst’s marketing whiz, had studied No Logo, Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto, and he understood that overt commercial messages would turn off an audience suspicious of capitalism. Thus the company shunned celebrity endorsements – Kid Rock had been interested – and devoted its budget instead to murketing, sponsoring a series of unlikely gatherings across the country. Like ‘some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture,’ Pabst paid the bills at bike messenger contests, skateboarder movie screenings, and art and indie publishing get-togethers. At each of these events, it kept its logo obscure, its corporate goal to ‘always look and act the underdog,’ to be seen as a beer of ‘social protest,’ a ‘fellow dissenter’ against mainstream mores.
“Pabst’s campaign was designed to push beer without appearing to push it. To the extent that it conveyed any branding message at all, it was, Hey, we don’t care if you drink the stuff.”
But of course, they did. It was a marketing ruse.
“In reality,” Manjoo writes, “Pabst Blue Ribbon’s anti-capitalist ethos is, as Walker puts it, ‘a sham.’ The company long ago closed its Milwaukee brewery and now outsources its operations to Miller. Its entire corporate staff is devoted to marketing and sales, not brewing. ‘You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding,’ Walker writes. But PBR’s fans don’t care. In the new era of marketing, image is everything.”
China Syndrome
Unusually well-written – and timely – local reviews!
“Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo is a little novel, less than 180 pages,” writes Mary Wisniewski in the Sun-Times. “Told in short, slangy sentences, it seems to be about not very much – a peasant girl coming to Beijing and getting work as Extra No. 6787 in the movies. She plays parts like ‘waitress-wiping-a-table’ and ‘woman-walking-over-the-bridge,’ while fighting off roaches in her terrible apartments.
“But Twenty Fragments resembles a Chekhov story in containing, under its brief, chatty surface, an enormous world. Here is modern China, struggling to belong to the 21st century while still tied to fascism and Communism. And here is a universal story of a young woman figuring out who she is, and deciding, despite the machinations of bad boyfriends and noisy neighbors, what she really wants.”
And a a lively read from Jessica Reaves in the Trib ends like this:
“Some folks read travel books to get a sense of a place before they go; others hope to learn about foreign lands they’d love to visit but fear they will never see. I read Troost because he’s willing to navigate his way around countries that hold little or no appeal for me as travel destinations. There is almost nowhere on this Earth, for example, that I have less desire to visit than China. Now, thanks to Troost’s hilarious and cutting narrative, I don’t have to. And if that’s not worth $22.95, I don’t know what is.”
Traffic Jam
Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) has been getting a lot of attention and indeed it sounds like a fascinating book. My favorite review line so far is from Mary Roach in the Times: “An alternate title for this book might be Idiots.”
Posted on August 20, 2008