by
The Baffler
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Maybe it’s true, as the NDEers claim, that physical death unites us in the next life. It’s certainly true that it unites us in this one, though largely against our will. At the conference, I was perplexed by Alexander’s dazzled insistence that “we are all deeply connected” in the glittering web of the universe. Strip away the woo-woo embellishments, and you have a basic account of life on Earth. We are strange animals on a shared planet, tethered to each other by our social and biological dependence, by the complex networks that govern our lives and deaths. Only in a society deformed by individualism could this fact be repackaged as a mystical insight.
At some point during the miners’ shift in Number 9 that November, one of the four gigantic fans that were meant to suck the methane out of the tunnels stopped running. There was supposed to be an alarm system tied to the fans rotation, but someone had disabled it. Unbeknownst to the workers, the tunnels started to fill with methane. This alone could have killed the entire crew, but at about five-thirty in the morning, there was an explosion so powerful that it rattled the windows of a house twelve miles away. Seventy-eight workers died.
This might not have been such a remarkable incident in the coal fields; deadly accidents happened all the time. But the public comments on the behalf of the officials suggested that no one cared. One public relations flack for Consolidation Coal said that the explosion was “something that we have to live with.” An assistant secretary from the Department of the Interior parroted the comments, and the governor of West Virginia, wringing his hands, conceded that “we must recognize that this is a hazardous business and what has occurred here is one of the hazards of being a miner.” Politely, the governor intoned, the miners could fuck off and die.
One of John L. Lewis’s successors at the head of the UMWA, Tony Boyle, didn’t feel much different. In a speech he gave just days afterward, Boyle praised “Consolidation Coal Company’s safety record and its history of cooperation with the union,” Bradley writes. “He reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living.” There wasn’t any friction between the coal companies and the union’s leadership. “I hated him right then,” a twenty-one-year-old coal miner’s widow told the Washington Post.
After the disaster, Nader began looking into the finances of the UMWA with the sneaking suspicion that Tony Boyle was fleecing the union. It turned out he was right: Boyle was exceedingly corrupt. The union was, for Boyle, a surefire way for him and his family to get rich. When he was a union official in Montana, Boyle pressured inspectors to close mines owned by rivals to help those owned by his brother. As head of the UMWA, he installed family members in no-show jobs that paid high salaries. Boyle also used the members’ massive pension fund to enrich himself. He kept the money in a bank owned by the union, in an interest-free account, meaning that retirees were lending the bank millions of dollars for free. For this, Boyle sat on the board of the bank, received what in today’s dollars equates to a six-figure salary, and often slept through meetings. Boyle’s wealth, you might say, was contingent on having no problem with seventy-eight people dying in the dark of a West Virginia coal mine.
A lot of workers responded to this tacit, cowardly pact with business as they did in the 1930s: they weren’t having it. Beginning in the 1960s, there was wave after wave of wildcat strikes across the industries of coal mining, automobile, trucking, education, railroad, construction, and transit. Workers were extraordinarily militant at the time, and to my contemporary eyes, fucking crazy. During one strike in New York City, workers shut down the metropolis by raising the drawbridges and taking fuses, keys, handles, and electrical parts with them as they walked off the job. And it wasn’t just about money. Workers wanted much more than just raises and guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments; they wanted racial equity, healthy communities, and responsive, politically active unions. And they were willing to fight for it.
It’s a simple process that recurs throughout history: workers see injustice, they organize each other, and they fight for change. Institutions and their leaders are often worthless, corrupt, intransigent, cowardly, moronic, or some delightful combination thereof. Bradley’s book, in grisly detail, shows what the basic project of democracy is up against, and how it might triumph again. We mourn Yablonski—and everyone else who died so the masses could see a better world—but it is never about one person. In fact, if we have any imagination at all, every leader will disappoint us. This isn’t a reason to give up on the process. In fact, this is yet another point that the taxi driver Joe hears from his wife Edna in Waiting for Lefty.
Edna: When in the hell will you get wise—
Joe: I’m not so dumb as you think! But you are talking like a red.
Edna: I don’t know what that means. But when a man knocks you down you get up and kiss his fist! You gutless piece of bologna.
Joe: One man can’t—
Edna (with great joy): I don’t say one man! I say a hundred, a thousand, a whole million, I say. But start in your own union. Get those hack boys together! Sweep out those racketeers like a pile of dirt! . . . Goddamnit! I’m tired of slavery and sleepless nights.
Indiana’s work is abundant and motley: there is video art, poetry, plays, a monograph on Andy Warhol, several years’ worth of art criticism for The Village Voice, a memoir, and of course, the novels. If one cared to assign all this an overarching theme—the exercise is dubious, but no less so than reviewing in general—it might be, put bluntly, bullshit. Concretely, bullshit in America: the way clichés from the media, pop culture, so-called high culture, and self-help books are grafted into conversation and seep into awareness, obstructing the possibility of an individual understanding of the world and oneself, and, in the process, perverting any human drives that might be called authentic, bending them in a direction consonant with that weird amalgamation of capitalism, rapacity, entitlement, egotism, and whininess that forms the marrow of what passes for moral awareness in much of the United States. The contempt inspiring this vision was well in evidence in such early dramatic works as The Roman Polanski Story, with its grotesque shifts from hyperbole to euphemism, all phrased in a kind of détourned Leave It to Beaver-ese that disarms any programmed sanctimoniousness the audience might bring to the appalling highlights of the director’s life:
What is fascinating, if at times baffling, in Depraved Indifference are the complex financial arrangements of the wealthy, the murky amorality of which eases the transition from licit to dubious to unprincipled and vile. Evelyn’s husband, Warren, apart from his properties, keeps money in an offshore account in the Caymans thanks to his connections with a licentious Saudi sheik; together, he and Evelyn sign over their assets to a series of cutouts to avoid paying penalties in a civil litigation suit. They file insurance claims for fake burglaries and damages from fires they set themselves; they even cook up a scam for America’s Bicentennial that gets them briefly into the White House, with the justification, “it’s a country full of morons, we really owe it to ourselves to make some money off them.”
In a profoundly outré but very suggestive 1935 essay on mimesis and entomology, Roger Caillois coined the term “teleplasty” to suggest the way bodily forms might migrate across space. Indiana invoked this same notion several decades later in one of his Village Voice columns, concluding that “some mimetic creatures fool their own kind well enough to eat each other.” His three crime novels are an exhaustive consideration of such creatures, and they show the monstrous side of the American ideal of the self-made man: what we might call the self-making man, stripped of any abiding attributes, shedding his skin at will to suit his surroundings. The traits he appropriates are pulled prêt-à-porter from the utopian pornography of mass media, with its perfunctory and hence readily imitable models of success, sophistication, intelligence. He is a response to a peculiar condition of our era: the hardly realizable sense of possibility that capitalism gives rise to as it multiplies the quantity and luxuriousness of its temptations. All the things one might own, all the fun one might have, are a spur and an affront to the pure egotistical potency that is the only thing left when generosity and compassion are either absent or burned away, as they easily may be in a culture where “winning” is the ne plus ultra.
On Day 1, the photographer walks into camp
and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us
at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks
reading Stars and Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep.
ooo
Winston Churchill described Iranian oil as “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” The British in Iran were extracting oil from the country and paying back to the Iranian people only 16 percent of profits after taxes—taxes they paid to themselves, since British Petroleum was then a subsidiary of the Crown. When Iran had had enough and expropriated the oil industry, the British were outraged. They appealed to the United Nations in New York, the International Court in the Hague, and the Truman administration in Washington, losing in each, on all counts.
Truman was on Mosaddegh’s side. A Brit from the coup interviewed in the film says it was because “Americans like to talk to a man who has charisma,” inadvertently implying something about the British at the time. Churchill waited for Eisenhower to be elected, then convinced the new administration that Mosaddegh was a pro-Soviet threat, and the coup became a coproduction of the U.S. and the UK. To front it, MI6 and the CIA enlisted a pro-Shah general who’d been imprisoned by the Allies during World War II as a Nazi sympathizer and who in retirement was spending most of his time with prostitutes. The general’s son, a fancy relic living in Swiss exile since the 1979 Iranian revolution, explains to the camera, with a bare minimum of conviction, that no, it was actually Mosaddegh who had syphilis.
After the coup, the CIA set up Savak, the Iranian secret police, and taught them how to arrest, torture, and execute leftists. The oil companies moved in, and the Shah got $45 million in aid from the Eisenhower administration. Ike became convinced coup d’etats were better than real wars, because they were cheaper and Americans didn’t die in them, and that democracy in the developing world was bad for natural-resource extraction. The United States tested that theory in Guatemala the next year. It worked there too. Twenty-five years later, however, in Iran, it was Long Live Khomeini, Death to Shah, Death to America the Great Satan, etc., with fifty-two American hostages held at gunpoint for 444 days. It’s outrageous that this important film—which many have already seen because it was a film festival hit—is now being suppressed under the threat of further censorship.
love this
So when she was at the Spearsons’ Labor Day picnic, and when Sally Spearson had handed her the baby, Adrienne had burbled at it as she would a pet, had jostled the child gently, made clicking noises with her tongue, affectionately cooing, “Hello punkinhead, hello my little punkinhead,” had reached to shoo a fly away and, amidst the smells of old grass and the fatty crackle of the barbecue, lost her balance when the picnic bench, dowels rotting in the joints, wobbled and began to topple her—the bench! The wobbly picnic bench was toppling her! And when she fell backward, spraining her spine—in the slowed quickness of this flipping world she saw the clayey clouds, some frozen faces, one lone star like the nose of a jet—and when the baby’s head hit the stone retaining wall of the Spearsons’ newly terraced yard and bled fatally into the brain, Adrienne went home shortly thereafter, after the hospital and the police reports, and did not leave her attic apartment for seven months, and there were fears, deep fears for her, on the part of Martin Porter, the man she had been dating, and on the part of almost everyone, including Sally Spearson who phoned tearfully to say that she forgave her, that Adrienne might never come out.
god