Now I wouldn't dare compare myself with a writer and journalist of Ron Rosenbaum's caliber, but as it happens, the Baffler mission statement is a similarly easy-to-miss item that deserves a similar elucidation.

Some devoted readers may argue that I've already done my duty in glossing the heady style of Baffler honcho Tom Frank. Furthermore, I have reasons to avoid engaging the Chicago journal, which has published the fine work of Chris Lehmann, my editor at Long Island Newsday and an occasional writer of top-notch letters to simpleton. Most of my colleagues speak so highly of The Baffler that until I became familiar with the journal over the past year, I had considered my ignorance of it a serious hole in my education. And while I believe this publication even in its supposed glory days never came up with any ideas that weren't already contained in Mark Crispin Miller's lamentably out-of-print book Boxed In, I hesitate to condemn anybody who is trying to put out a serious journal of ideas.

Perhaps most important, the Baffler mission statement is not the stupidest thing I've read by a professional journalist in the past year. That honor still belongs to a journalist of the right. Specifically, to David Bass, Deputy Publisher of William Kristol's The Weekly Standard, who sent me an irate email in response to the Suck Egg prize I awarded to his boss. His unedited letter:

Just curious as to who is actually on your blue-ribbon panel doling out these idiotic awards . That is of course aside from the obvious two - Beavis and Butthead. "Conservative butt-scratcher" could of come from the minds of no one more sentient than these two. Anyway, congratulations on your useless and utterly sophomoric web-site. The tedium of reading through it was overwhelming. I am sure the non-reading, Oprah-watching, Suck visiting masses will greet it with much enthusiasm.

One more thing. Most apropos name for the magazine and website.

Regards,

David H. Bass
dbass@weeklystandard.com
Deputy Publisher
The Weekly Standard
1150 17th Street, N.W., Suite 505
Washington, D.C. 20036
Phone (202) 293-4900
Fax (202) 293-4901

"Could of"! This man is the publisher of a nationally renowned magazine!

However, when we come to the Baffler mission statement, we confront a depth of self-deception more insidious than the poor grammar and labored japery of a right-wing magazine stooge. And I believe this self-delusion is intimately bound up in the Baffler's compulsive, constant use of scare quotes. You would be hard pressed to find a publication that uses scare quotes with greater frequency. Even at their web site, the Baffler boys (or, as I suspect they'd prefer, "Baffler boys") can't help invoking the phrase, "Welcome to the Baffler 'web site'" - as if the term web site has not by now become a noun as common as such non-controversial words as "textbook" or "cable television" or "motorcar."

Those annoying little quotation marks contain something more than just stylistic limitations. They signal a limitless self-regard, a smug, supercilious narcissism that is at once palpable and frustratingly hard to put a finger on. Even if we accept the principle that the Baffler's self-described task of Blunting the Cutting Edge, or firing Salvos at the Culture Trust, requires a degree of discrimination that can be mistaken for snobbery, there's something beyond mere garden variety haughtiness at work here. Scare quotes are verbal ice tongs, a signal that the phrase in question is a kind of alien organism which may carry a horrible virus, and which you wouldn't even be handling except that, for the good of humanity, you are obliged to expose its virulence. But the most crucial function of scare quotes is the simplest - to let the reader know that you are too cool (or better yet, too anti-cool) to be using this word the same way that some slob in a smelly t-shirt would use it.

But enough of my preambles. Let's take a look at that mission statement. The following paragraph was published on the masthead and copyright page of The Baffler Number Eleven, which as far as I know is the most recent issue. It is reproduced here without emendation:

This BAFFLER was produced by its editors in the summer of 1998, without benefit of focus groups, town-hall meetings, phone polls, beeper studies, or, in fact, any input from the public at all. We call the research method the we use "thinking." We call our journalistic method "writing." For a couple ten thousand in foundation money, though, we'll gladly take up the standard of civic empowerment, start worrying about the problem of media criticism, and conduct interactive double-blind placebo studies on the Internet.

Is it just the scare quotes that are so off-putting here? Or is it the deluded bravado about eschewing focus groups (as if focus groups weren't already a universal bugaboo for creative types to complain about)? Maybe it's the reference to the couple ten thousand (an achingly precious construction) in foundation money - that hamstringingly clumsy attempt at a self-deprecating joke (Haha, we're just as willing to sell out as the next person! What a world!).

March 3, 1999: Reader Mail
Volume 29: Writing in the toilet, Germans on booze, Pratt on Abby,
a poem, a TV commercial, and several classic simpletons.
March 1, 1999: Prezzy beat
An Australian care package
February 25, 1999: Tough Questions
Your advice requested
February 24, 1999: Reader Mail
Volume 28: Booze, Rye and George Washington
February 23, 1999: Answer man
Our first-ever advice column
February 19-22, 1999: Absolut simpleton
Rolled in the cold
February 18, 1999: Loco-grams
Found messages from the marginally insane

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