The Critic as Radical

I considered myself pretty clever for arranging an interview with cultural critic Thomas Frank at San Francisco's newest cineplex mall, the Sony Metreon. Not only had I proposed we meet in its 350,000-square feet of faux-futuristic gadget shops, where thumping techno and screechy R & B blare from thousands of competing speakers, I had suggested we first grab a coffee at the most loathsome retailer of the "New Economy:" Starbucks.

Starbucks, I imagined, would allow Frank, a writer with the acerbic punch of H.L. Mencken and the caterwauling wit of Tom Wolfe, to riff freely on the extremes of American consumer culture. I could imagine him passing a caustic eye on the Metreon's "multicultural bistro-style" restaurants and, after a knowing sigh, saying: "Consumerism is no longer about 'conformity' but about 'difference,'" as he had written in an essay published in his journal The Baffler. Or passing the Microsoft Store, whose entrance is flanked by ATM machines, and pronouncing: "Markets may look like democracy, in that we are all involved in their making, but they are fundamentally not democratic," as he had propounded in page after page of his new book: "One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy."

But my plans for such a made-for-journalism mise-en-scène were foiled. Forty minutes passed before I discovered it was not Frank who was late but I who had misjudged the commercial reach of Starbucks. To my great horror, I was informed that there was not a Starbucks in the Sony Metreon but five and Frank, should he be in the complex that would have sent Aldous Huxley straight to the hospital, was in one of them.

I did find Thomas Frank, after much frantic searching. He is a surprisingly mild-looking man. Rosy-faced and bespectacled in a pink Oxford shirt and nicely tailored jacket, he looks more like someone given to spending time in a country club parlor chatting about stocks than in a cramped, book-lined office in Chicago, editing and writing articles on cultural co-optation and the demise of economic equality.

Frank is an anomaly in this day of intellectuals who have no audience beyond their Ivory Tower. Like the social critics Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag, he is a man made for academia (he has a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago) who decided not to pursue tenure track and go it alone as a writer and editor. He is also a scholar who believes he can fight for the working class. For the last five years he has written on how corporate life has dominated American culture, while his former fellow classmates have produced fashionable treatises on pop culture's "hidden loci of resistance" in TV series, rock videos, and shopping malls.

After noting that the nearby clamor was "barristas doing the Starbucks cheer in the Starbucks Number Three of the Sony Metreon," Frank told me that he wrote "One Market Under God" -- his book on the "fraud of the 'New Economy'" -- because an event similar in scale to the anti-Vietnam or the civil rights movement is soon to befall the post-'60s generation.

"I think very soon we're going to be faced with something not so far from those movements because of what we've done to the welfare state, because of what we've allowed corporations to do," Frank explained with no inkling of pleasure. "The huge issue is going to be getting the beast back into the box, bringing democracy to bear on economic life."

Frank, who grew up in the '70s in Kansas City, the son of a mechanical engineer, has found little salvation in the radical legacies of the Age of Aquarius. His first book, "The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism" became a national bestseller among twenty- and thirtysomethings because he argued that the '60s counterculture was a kind of marketing hoax, as much an invention of the advertising industry as a movement with authentic grass roots. For him, the last genuine progressive era -- uncorrupted by ad men and the chimeric media world -- took place longer ago, during the 1930s populist politics of the New Deal.