by
The Baffler
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If I, like Raymond Moody, had learned to my own satisfaction that the soul is real and life is eternal, would I really rush to convene an association of “interested researchers”? I didn’t think so. I’d take up skydiving or scripture. I would not submit my divine revelation for peer review. After all, religious experience has never drawn its power from rational discourse but from the fact that rational discourse has always felt insufficient to explain it. The very notion of “proof of Heaven” is inimical to faith, which depends on the absence of certainty, on a leap into the unknown. Even if you could reconcile epiphanic experience with science, it wasn’t clear to me why you needed to.
I don’t recognize the Mayses in Wolfe’s analysis of the 1970s. They might have been New Agers, but they certainly weren’t narcissists; Suzanne spent years playing therapeutic music for people in palliative care[*]. I did, however, recognize a familiar brand of cynicism. Permeating Wolfe’s assessment of the Me Decade is a contempt for utopian thinking of any kind. He makes no distinction between left utopianism and old-fashioned holy rolling—both, in his mind, are expressions of the same self-obsessed irrationalism. In Wolfe’s analysis, class consciousness had become a joke by the 1970s; the New Left always was one. The utopian politics of the previous decade—of the previous century—had just been the comedic setup for the punchline of the New Age. It’s not an uncommon view. From the standpoint of secular liberalism, utopian beliefs—whether in a worker’s paradise or the Kingdom of God—all flow from the same cracked pot. Religion, despite the supposed Great Awakening of the 1970s, has been in steady decline for sixty years. Marxism strikes many Americans as, at best, an embarrassing anachronism, not much different from believing in spirit mediums or psychics. And yet wages are more or less the same as they were in 1978; income inequality is on the rise; young generations enjoy far worse financial prospects than their parents; the list goes on. Most Americans have discarded the idea of paradise, and yet we’ve come no closer to achieving it here on Earth.
The IANDS may exist to give scientific legitimacy to the claims of near-death experiencers, but I suspect most of its members would believe in Heaven even if it didn’t. Their belief isn’t predicated on scientific research but on the essential strangeness of life and death; I thought again of Chris Kito in his little blue hospital socks, almost killed by a peanut and flooded with love. To my mind, NDEs aren’t proof of Heaven, but they do prove that nearness to death changes you, rearranges your sense of the possible. And so it does. I stopped believing in God in my furtive way after my dad died—some switch was flipped, and that high clear tone, a frequency I could once hear, went dead. God was there and then he wasn’t; my dad was alive and then he wasn’t. And yet the world seems vaster and stranger than I had fully accounted for. Even now, I sometimes let myself imagine running into my dad at the grocery store—I turn the corner and spot him in the dairy aisle, wearing sweatpants with suspenders and trundling along with his shopping cart. Just plainly there, unremarkably alive. To see him resurrected in an Acme would confound my sense of reality, but I’m not sure it would be any more confounding than his death. On any scale, death feels arbitrary and inexplicable. It shouldn’t happen, so when it does, you get to thinking that anything might.
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.