The Baffler no. 78 - Homeland Insecurity

FORTY-FIVE HAS BECOME 47, and Donald Trump is now the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. With protective tariffs anathema to Uncle Jumbo, as Cleveland was known to family and friends, the two wouldn’t have agreed on all counts, but our twenty-second and twenty-fourth president was also a downsizer cartoonishly obsessed with small government. (Handing out nearly six hundred vetoes in total, he earned the additional nickname “His Obstinacy.”) When denying aid to drought-stricken farmers in Texas, Cleveland proclaimed, “The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” Once reelected, Trump said nothing as nakedly hostile to the idea that a state should provide for its citizens, preferring nationalist banalities and “work smarter, not harder”…

WHAT CAN BE DESCRIBED of the Livestock Saboteur, without identifying him to authorities, is that he has a high school education, dresses shabbily, lives in squalor, is widely read and highly intelligent but also a vulgarian. He works odd jobs to survive, spends half the year in a tent, and loves the public lands of the West, those last wild places in a domesticated nation. After years of correspondence, I’d gained his trust to the point that he let me tag along with him for three days last January, tent-camping in terrific cold in his stomping ground: the remote woodlands, canyons, and mesas of a national forest in Arizona where heavy grazing by cattle has come at a devastating ecological cost. I wanted to see if direct action by a…

THERE IS IN AFRICA a select minority of people I call “native expatriates.” They are not the prodigal African for whom their homeland is a distant abstraction. Nor are they the rooted subject of shifting imperial powers who crave some kind of permanence in a world that has largely rendered them invisible. Outwardly at least, they are denizens of the continent for as many generations as you care to count, but they also inhabit a metaphysical space that makes them alien by design. They have almost invariably studied abroad, usually in the European country that colonized their homes—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain—where they own a summer house and quite possibly employ servants of the same ethnicity. The Francophones are the worst, dating from colonial policies that favored a deleterious definition of…

PHILIPPINE LE NOIR DE CARLAN had been dead barely a week when her image began to blanket protest signs and her name started to ring from the mouths of France’s most powerful. The nineteen-year-old had last been seen on September 20 of last year at Université Paris-Dauphine, where she was studying economics and financial engineering. It was a Friday afternoon, and she had plans to head to her parents’ home near Versailles, just southwest of Paris. When she didn’t arrive, her family alerted the authorities. Her body was found the next day, partially buried in the Bois de Boulogne park just behind the university. Witnesses told police they’d spotted a man wielding a pickaxe around the same area, a mere few hundred meters from the campus on the western edge…

LET’S NIP THIS IN THE BUD: I hate it here. The greater area of Knoxville, Tennessee, exists to curdle my hard-won equilibrium, from the hillbilly-themed minigolf courses of Gatlinburg to the disco ball folly of the dilapidated Sunsphere, that copulatory 1982 World’s Fair eyesore that mars the skyline and impugns my genitalia. Oh, how I rued returning last winter to the all-clogging revues of the outdoor stages in Market Square and the hideous full-body Big Orange jumpsuits that blight one as an enthusiast of the Vols’ varsity scrimmage. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I’d ever really awakened from the nightmare of Baptist churches that double as city-states, reeducation centers, and mini-malls, vending every variety of Christ-branded merch whose secular equivalents can be procured among the godless camo-print bargain…

Let me be clear:As a matter of principle, we offerBundle deals and console cross-playAs if words had ever been so beautifulLapping at the transpersonal dreamThe procedurally generated magnoliasEncourage pollination by means ofYour mind’s interpretive functionA rich sap filled the clichés laid bareWhile the stream crashedAs a matter of principle, we maintainAn expectation of your complianceAs the sky marshals order overThe five layers of atmosphere, a senseTemperature offers to reason the heavensUnder which regulated panic burnsCrying out turn on gamer lightsTurn the flesh outward, place itInside this monitor’s realismThere we can speakOf an ordinary ideomotorResponse, the ground from whichMultistable percepts coilMy impulses, plunged into picture-In-picture, the eye a twentySecond delay from its movementThis empty receiver you submit meTo with your own gaze, interminable…