Salon.com > Scott McLemee

“Punching Out”: The last days of a Detroit auto plant

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:30:00 +0000

In the early 1950s, my friend Marty Glaberman wrote a pamphlet called "Punching Out," reflecting on his experience of working in the auto factories of Detroit. Marty later became a professor of labor history at Wayne State University. But when you talked to him or read his writings, it was always clear that he'd gotten the better part of his education from his decades "on the line" -- participating in the constant struggle of workers to retain their humanity as they coped with the unrelenting pace of the assembly line. That was what he tried to convey in "Punching Out": the vitality of the working-class community that emerged on the shop floor. In Detroit's factories, people were creating not just cars, but a way of life.

When Marty died, 10 years ago, the city of Detroit was already in bad shape -- factories closing, people leaving, abandoned buildings going up in flames each Halloween in a grim festival of urban self-destruction. As it happens, Paul Clemens has given his new book "Punching Out" -- which follows the dismantling of a Detroit auto factory -- the same title as Marty's essay from six decades ago. Evidently this is a coincidence; there are no references in the text to suggest otherwise. But either way, the echo is meaningful, for Clemens is writing about the destruction of both a workplace and a social world.

How Abraham Lincoln really viewed slavery

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 14:01:00 +0000

Just after publishing "The Black Jacobins" (1938), his great history of the Haitian slave revolt, the Trinidadian man of letters C.L.R. James settled in the United States, where, in due course, he began to think of writing about Abraham Lincoln. The project that took shape in his mind was unusual. For one thing, James thought historians should look at history from below, with an eye to how the slaves had fought back against their oppression. He wanted to treat Lincoln as part of their story, not vice versa. But James also wanted the book he had in mind to discuss both Shakespeare's play "King Lear" and the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin.

Peculiar as this may sound, it made a kind of sense. For James, Lear is the definitive picture of an old social order in the process of disintegration, while Lenin was the visionary architect of a new way of life (though James, as a fierce anti-Stalinist, had nothing good to say about what had been done with the blueprints meanwhile). In effect, Lincoln would appear in the middle panel of a triptych: the most Shakespearean of presidents, and one whose enemies saw him as a dictator.

The Best Of Crank!

Wed, 21 Oct 1998 19:00:00 +0000

| At the end of the millennium, prosperous urban hipsters have discovered the retro-futurist look. (So the papers report; I don't know anyone that cool.) Their apartments are decorated ` la the Jetsons -- except, of course, for the robot maid, though inexpensive flesh-based units are still on the market. There is something quaint and charming about reviving old-fashioned visions of the push-button future. And as Bryan Cholfin writes in the introduction to "The Best of Crank!" that cozy spirit also prevails in science fiction writing nowadays. "Much of the new SF, in particular the short story markets, looks backwards into the literary past," he complains. "The writers and editors increasingly turn to the 'Golden Age' of SF (generally meaning the '40s and '50s), viewed through the filters of nostalgia, for the models to emulate."

I Married A Communist

Tue, 29 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Only Philip Roth could have written "I Married a Communist"; the man's fingerprints are everywhere. You may think of Roth as a novelist of great comic extravagance, his satirical imagination controlled by a realist's sense of detail. Or you may scramble for the exit at the thought of one more book revisiting his core obsessions, namely: 1) the libido and its discontents; and 2) anti-Semitism, particularly its most convoluted form, Jewish self-hatred. These form two sides of a coin that has become a prop for Roth's narrative tricks, in which mirrors have become crucial to the magic act. Even Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, writes novels in which he creates alter egos. No American writer has put himself in greater danger of disappearing up his own keister.

With his most recent work, though, Roth has been climbing back out. As in "American Pastoral" (1997), Nathan Zuckerman's attention returns to radical politics, and the new book takes place between the fateful election season of 1948, during the last gasp of Communist influence in American political life, and the era of McCarthyism. Chronicling that important transition is part of Nathan's ongoing inventory of his own psyche, but it also anchors the book in public history.

Master of allusion

Tue, 18 Aug 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Mark C. Taylor, a professor at Williams College best known for his work combining Derrida and radical theology, may be the first American philosopher to embed his thought in a computer game.

Last year, in conjunction with Taylor's "Hiding" -- a collection of essays on the surfaces, mysteries and depth(lessness) of postmodernity -- the University of Chicago Press released a CD-ROM titled "The Real." A fusion of post-apocalyptic sci-fi with Las Vegas kitsch, "The Real" is set in 2033, with the gambler's paradise completely buried in sand -- except for a dilapidated motel, presided over by a melancholy figure known as the Janitor. While installing the game on your C drive, you learn from the packaging that the Janitor is Professor Taylor, who created "The Real" in collaboration with designer Jose Marquez (identified therein as "Cabin Boy").

New JFK death film

Tue, 04 Aug 1998 19:00:00 +0000

When "JFK" was released in 1991, Oliver Stone talked excitedly about the great speed of the film -- the enormous number of cuts, yanking the viewer back and forth between Technicolor and grainy black-and-white, between clips of actual news footage and purely imaginary scenes (with only the most fragile roots in reality).

"It is like splinters to the brain," the director enthused. "We were assaulting the senses in a kind of new-wave technology. We wanted to get to the subconscious." Stone's vision of himself as tribal shaman (blowing the public mind with stroboscopelike editing, rewriting history with lightning flashes of imagery) sounds quite a bit like the poems Jim Morrison wrote while in film school, before joining the Doors:

Cinema is the most totalitarian of the arts. All
energy and sensation are sucked up into the skull,
a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood ...
-- and so forth. These very '60s-ish notions found their ideal expression in Stone's telling of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For if you assume that film reaches down into primitive and concealed layers of the psyche, you can't find a better subject than the most archetypal of rituals, the killing of the king.
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Cocaine Nights

Mon, 22 Jun 1998 19:00:00 +0000

There's a fine line, sometimes, between feeling tranquil and being tranquilized. Still, there is a difference. Tranquillity usually proves fragile and short-lived -- taking a Valium, or watching MTV for a few hours, creates a certain momentum of stupefaction, not so easily broken. J.G. Ballard's most recent novel is set in a resort enclave on the Mediterranean coast, populated by British and French expatriates who have made their money and retired while still young enough to enjoy themselves. Estrella de Mar offers its residents a utopia of leisure and comfort. But utopia is boring. Tranquillity has gotten out of hand.

Anyone familiar with Ballard's vision -- as it has taken shape, over the years, in a highly accomplished and often unnerving body of work, most of it in science fiction -- knows what to expect next. Psychic numbness and jaded tastes require extremes of stimulation. Sometimes it takes a good dose of barbarism just to get through the day. "Cocaine Nights" is not a sci-fi work; but as characters in the novel remark on a few occasions, Estrella de Mar offers a taste of what a "leisure-dominated future" might be like.

Rethinking Jonestown

Wed, 17 Jun 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Cults make great video. The TV newsmagazines have rediscovered this lately, and it's a good bet they won't forget it as we count down to the millennium. This spring, ABC's "PrimeTime Live" devoted a segment to a group called the Brethren -- an itinerant cult, adept at recruiting teenagers, whose male members resemble Hasidic Deadheads. (The group combines intense Bible study with regular dumpster-diving expeditions.) Another hard-hitting exposi concerned the followers of an Arizona New Age figure called Gabriel of Sedona -- a channel for space beings who reveal (in high-pitched voices) that the earth will soon be a paradise. The bummer is that certain catastrophic events are scheduled in the meantime. This good news-bad news message has attracted a number of disciples who've turned their possessions over to the group; they now live in a commune. A hidden camera recorded a session in which the space folk insisted on two basic points: 1.) Obey Gabriel! and 2.) Don't leave the compound!

Errata

Wed, 18 Mar 1998 20:00:00 +0000

Among the best collections of essays by a contemporary literary critic is one gathering George Steiner's work from the New Yorker over the past three decades. It's comprised of around 200 pieces: miniature dissertations on literature and philosophy (mainly European), composed while Steiner wrote his own books on tragedy, linguistics, chess, Homer, Hitler, Heidegger and other matters. At this point, I ought to mention the title of this volume -- but there's one small problem. It doesn't exist. You could assemble your own copy in the library, at the Xerox machine, with some patience and a lot of quarters. Why Steiner himself hasn't reprinted them (the way Edmund Wilson used to do every few years) is difficult to imagine.

Excessive modesty does not appear to be the reason. Steiner's latest book, "Errata," is a slender tribute to his own genius. It is an autobiography, of sorts. It rehearses most of the characteristic ideas and problems explored in his earlier books. But Steiner, for all his customary eloquence and learning, sounds bitter. Fellow professors have dissed and/or ignored his work, while pilfering shamelessly from his bounty. (They have been especially unkind yet kleptomaniacal about "After Babel," his prodigious work on the theory of translation). And some of his protigis turned out to be ungrateful bastards. This is a self-portrait etched in acid.

Those Dirty Rotten Taxes

Tue, 03 Mar 1998 20:00:00 +0000

Cartoonist Matt Groening once drew a guide to the species of professor a student could expect to encounter at college. There was the Marine-like disciplinarian, the I'm-OK-you're-OK classroom therapist, the inaudible lecturer, the midlife lech and so on. One square in the cartoon was devoted to the instructor with an idie fixe -- an obsessive theme coming up, lecture after lecture, no matter what the topic. Groening portrayed him as a wide-eyed little guy saying (if memory serves), "Remember kids, it's all about magnesium!"

According to the biographical note to "Those Dirty Rotten Taxes," lawyer and independent scholar Charles Adams was "formerly a lecturer at UCLA."
I'm pretty sure where he fits on Groening's professorial grid. Adams hates the income tax with a passion. That is not, in itself, so unusual --
especially this time of year. And lately, it does seem that public disgust with the high-handedness of the Internal Revenue Service is at an all-time
high. But for Adams, taxation is more than a burden. It is the root of all evil.

Fragments

Mon, 01 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

From the mid-'60s through the mid-'80s, Jean Baudrillard was your standard ultra-hip, post-everythingist French intellectual, publishing a series of philosophical works on Desire, Revolution, Death and the Sign. He treated the ideas of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche with much the same attitude that J.G. Ballard's characters brought to automobiles. They were sexiest when accelerated to high speeds and brought into collision. Out of the resulting conceptual wreckage, Baudrillard fashioned his theory of "the order of the simulacrum." To simplify a bit: Once, it made sense to think of signs as pointing to reality. But with the total saturation of society by the media, cybernetics and mass production, the world has turned upside down. Life is an effect -- a byproduct -- of television images, computer programs and market surveys. Society and information form an increasingly escalating feedback loop: Each "simulates" the other, until both finally "implode." All reality becomes virtual.

The man who took sex out of the closet

Wed, 05 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

The history of sex in America falls into two large, unequal, yet clearly defined periods. The first era belonged to the Puritans, the Victorians and related figures of restraint and misery. People were supposed to battle their urges. If they did not win that fight, the consequences were dire -- even if nobody got caught (or pregnant, or the clap). For within the individual psyche, society had posted a heavily armed policeman who would bludgeon you with guilt and toss you into solitary confinement to brood over the transgression. Information about sex was largely anecdotal and seldom reassuring. This epoch of libidinal prohibition lasted until Jan. 4, 1948. The following day, Professor Alfred C. Kinsey of Indiana published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." Whereupon, as the expression has it, the earth moved.

At first glance, the "Kinsey report" -- as the book was instantly dubbed -- made an improbable candidate for the bestseller list. Issued by a publisher specializing in medical texts, it was thick and somewhat forbidding. Its pages were packed with graphs and statistical matrices; the prose was definitely that of a scientist writing for an audience of his peers. Kinsey was a biologist at Indiana University. Until the first week of 1948, his professional reputation rested firmly upon decades of research into the taxonomy of the gall wasp -- an insect he had studied with exceptional patience, thoroughness and attention to variety.

Weird morning in America

Fri, 25 Apr 1997 19:00:00 +0000

the all-American lost poet Delmore Schwartz -- best remembered for the proverb "even paranoids have real enemies" -- also deserves credit for the Caffeine Theory of the Enlightenment. By this account, the Age of Reason owed its brilliance, energy and encyclopedic ambition to the arrival, in Europe, of the java bean. Schwartz meant it as a joke. Yet cultural historians have spent many happy years researching the economic, social, literary and political (if not gastrointestinal) consequences of the coffeehouse for the rising bourgeoisie. And the example of Voltaire -- who sucked down a few dozen cups a day whenever possible -- has long seemed to me to clinch the case.

Media Circus: Sect Appeal

Thu, 06 Feb 1997 20:00:00 +0000

it is never difficult to spot the Spartacist League at a demonstration. They are the ones with the most intricate (not to say unchantable) slogans. To the consternation of many who opposed the Gulf War, television cameras invariably zoomed in on the Spart banners reading "Defend Iraq! Defeat U.S. Imperialism!" And though the League itself has always been tiny, it maintains a vigorous publishing empire. The Spartacist literature table offers a biweekly newspaper, the Workers Vanguard, plus two or three issues a year of the magazine Spartacist (which also publishes in French, Spanish and German). There are other journals and pamphlets too numerous to mention, much less read. Yet a consistent tone runs throughout the whole catalog -- an in-your-face quality, Camille Paglia meets Lenin.