Saturday:
Saturday was the last day of workshops at the Social Forum, and I only went to two of them. My major goal by then was to attend things that I hadn't gotten a chance to do during the rest of the day. One was to go to a hip-hop session; there were several at the conference, but the one I had tried to attend on Friday was restricted to people of color only. The one I chose was called "COINTELPRO to Rapintelpro." While the name suggested government surveillance, the panel's most interesting feature was the inside discussion of "urban radio" marketing that we got from Davey D, an Oakland activist who once worked at AOL/Time Warner and Clear Channel.
The government element in the presentation was the recent NYCLU subpoena of NYPD documentsrelated to the 2004 RNC convention, which revealed that the police had been spying on people as "radical" and "way out" as Alicia Keys and Jay Z, but that was not such new news.
The corporate aspect of the censorship was also chilling. Davey D. talked about the way commercial radio has tried to get audiences to focus on brands (Yo MTV raps; Summerjams, etc) instead of artists, and described what programming directors would say when refusing to play artists such as Talib Kweli on urban radio ("our audience is not intelligent enough for that.") while record companies chose to market him and other political or "conscious" rappers through surfing and skateboarding magazines. The audience for this event was diverse and the conversation, while limited because the people in the front had so much to say, interesting.
** *
I had workshop fatigue and skipped the middle of the day to go to the "solidarity tents" and buy a t-shirt.
Then I headed for a 3:30 workshop by the group that had the buzz of the forum: Right to the City, a national alliance of urban community organizations working against gentrification. The workshop I went to was not the most popular one they did, and started off a little slowly, but became interesting later on. (My friend Alex said that he'd encountered this at another workshop, and thought that the audience of the social forum was such that workshop organizers would have to pitch their discussions past the introductory level in order to maintain interest.) So, for example, when people at this workshop were just talking about the basics of what they did in their groups, and answering questions with rather obvious platitudes, people were leaving. When people started to get into the nitty gritty of leadership development, and then - finally - the relationship of paid staff to membership organizations, it got much more interesting. That last issue in particular led to a dialogue between workshop presenters and audience members, who included people such as members of New York's Picture the Homeless and the fabulous FIERCE.
and that's all for now.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Social Forum Part Two
I've finally caught up on my sleep after four days of workshops in Atlanta, and have more to say about everything. As I said, I'll pick up first with the Friday evening workshop run by Project South (they also have a myspacepage). Project South is an organization that works on "popular education" and their workshop was designed to have us try out their training tools and see if we could take them back to our own organizations. One thing I liked at the outset was that they clearly stated a set of guidelines: the respect for time-limits, a way for people to interrupt by saying "whoa!" when they hear something they are bothered by, and the "step up/step back" rule was explicit (we'll call less on people who talk a lot/more on people who talk less).
The workshop starts with what they call an "Aha" moment. The exercise is to have people talk in small groups about the moment when they first felt themselves to be activists and to then identify the year. Everyone in the room also has a copy of a time-line including events in the history of global capitalism and social movements in the US. Given a smaller group and more time, there would then be a large group discussion about people's aha moments, placing them on the big timeline so that people could see clusters (say around the beginning of the current war, or around the 1960s). In addition to being an interesting demonstration of people's situation in a broader history, it also allows the group leaders to know the experience level of the people in the room.
The rest of the workshop that I attended had to do with how people compare their own vision of what they want the society to look like with what they think the society actually looks like. The group leaders distributed poster boards, tape, markers and little cards with words on them like "money (capital)"; "health care" and "environment," that each group was to put on the board in the order that the society wanted them in. The process of putting the cards on the board was very interesting in my group, which made up primarily of college student activists who had become active around the war in Iraq. Our biggest question was what "the society" meant - the people in power? or the people in general? (the people in power was the answer we got from Project South) When the groups came back to the large group, there was a lot of agreement about how what the values of the powerful were. Then we went to step two - designing the world/US *we* wanted, there was also a lot of agreement - and a lot of interesting creativity. Almost everyone made a circle instead of a line and put "people" in the middle. One group took the word Money (capital), shredded it, and taped the pieces all around the board to show redistribution. I can imagine a version of this workshop might work well in my union. When it shows broad agreement, it helps shoot past petty conflicts, and it also can illuminate reasons for conflicts by highlighting disagreements in a way that doesn't immediately lead to a big argument.
The pictures above are the beginning of the first step: showing society's priorities. The second one shows the end of part two, when small groups shared their vision of a new society with the large group.
The workshop starts with what they call an "Aha" moment. The exercise is to have people talk in small groups about the moment when they first felt themselves to be activists and to then identify the year. Everyone in the room also has a copy of a time-line including events in the history of global capitalism and social movements in the US. Given a smaller group and more time, there would then be a large group discussion about people's aha moments, placing them on the big timeline so that people could see clusters (say around the beginning of the current war, or around the 1960s). In addition to being an interesting demonstration of people's situation in a broader history, it also allows the group leaders to know the experience level of the people in the room.
The rest of the workshop that I attended had to do with how people compare their own vision of what they want the society to look like with what they think the society actually looks like. The group leaders distributed poster boards, tape, markers and little cards with words on them like "money (capital)"; "health care" and "environment," that each group was to put on the board in the order that the society wanted them in. The process of putting the cards on the board was very interesting in my group, which made up primarily of college student activists who had become active around the war in Iraq. Our biggest question was what "the society" meant - the people in power? or the people in general? (the people in power was the answer we got from Project South) When the groups came back to the large group, there was a lot of agreement about how what the values of the powerful were. Then we went to step two - designing the world/US *we* wanted, there was also a lot of agreement - and a lot of interesting creativity. Almost everyone made a circle instead of a line and put "people" in the middle. One group took the word Money (capital), shredded it, and taped the pieces all around the board to show redistribution. I can imagine a version of this workshop might work well in my union. When it shows broad agreement, it helps shoot past petty conflicts, and it also can illuminate reasons for conflicts by highlighting disagreements in a way that doesn't immediately lead to a big argument.
The pictures above are the beginning of the first step: showing society's priorities. The second one shows the end of part two, when small groups shared their vision of a new society with the large group.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
US Social Forum: My First Three Days
I'm writing now from the lobby of a big fancy hotel where I am staying because I am attending the big, but not that fancy, US Social Forum,an event that I had no idea would be as rich as it already has been.
The forum is more than a series of meetings, so even before I boarded the plane from New York City to Atlanta for the forum I was in the forum - without even knowing it. I shared my plane ride with thirty or more members of Community Voices Heard, a New York City low-income organizing group, two professors from Adelphi College who were bringing students, and one of my union brothers from the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY. Since that moment, I've been in one conversation about organizing and activism after another.
Wednesday:
By the time I was contemplating whether or not to go to the forum's opening march, I admit that I was not terribly enthusiastic. It was 90 degrees, I hadn't eaten, and I'd been travelling all day. Nonetheless, I met some Puerto Rican activists in the hotel who were going and decided I should go. We joined up to figure out the rail system and head to the demo. While in the rail station, of course I ran into an acquaintance from seven years ago in Minneapolis - we all exchanged "how d'you dos" and went off to town. By the time we got to the midway point, I left my new acquaintances and went outside to look for food. I thought I was totally lost, but within fifteen minutes, I'd spotted the tail end of the demonstration. I rushed off, joined it and despite my hunger and tiredness, found it to be one of the most spirited and diverse - in terms of race, age, and general demeanor - marches I'd been on in a very long time. It filled me with excitement about the days to come.
Later on in the evening, I ventured to the Civic Center, which was surrounded by "Solidarity Tents" and even a few food vendors. I managed to meet up with the rest of my union friends and get a snack. On my way home from there, I asked a woman outside the train station if she knew of a grocery store nearby. As she was a social forum participant, she offered to take me to a grocery store that was one station away from my hotel on the train system. Being a New Yorker, I had assumed that she meant that we'd get out of the train and find the store right there, but Atlanta is different, and it turned out that, in the spirit of the social forum, Crystal who is from Atlanta, but works with a Seattle group called LELO (Legacy of Equality, Leadership, and Organizing) drove me from the station to a grocery store and back to the metro. Clearly, it was going to be a good couple of days.
Thursday:
Early in the morning, I again chatted away on the buses and trains from my hotel to town with other social forum attendees. There was a guy from Finland with his mother and daughter, and a couple of artist /immigrant rights' activists from Providence.
The first session I went to at 10:30 am was a tiny group, but perhaps because of the size it became a powerful and intimate conversation between the session's "audience" and the organizers of the "Faces of Homelessness" campaign of the Washington, DC based "National Coalition for the Homeless." The panel began with an overview of general conditions of homelessness, causes of homelessness, and the current upswing in hate-crimes against homeless people perpetrated by young people. The main event of the panel were the stories of Joann Jackson and David Pirtle. Jackson, the director of the Faces of Homelessness speakers bureau told the story of growing up in a family that did not value education, which meant that despite being admitted to Howard University in 1965, she wound up working as a janitor after finishing at the top of her highschool class. Fortunately for her, her boss noticed her, promoted her to payroll clerk, and eventually helped her start her own business through a Small business administration loan. Despite her success, she became depressed, fell into alcholism and crack addiction. Although she maintained her business for a time as a "functioning alcholic" she wound up selling it, spending the money on drugs, and ultimately was living on the streets. Today, she lives in an apartment and is a national organizer giving a face to the experience of homelessness. The other speaker, David Pirtle, spoke about many of his experiences as a homeless youth with schizophrenia: sleeping in an abandoned house in Manhattan and waking up one night covered in rats ("I was the warmest thing nearby") and going back to sleep, and living more comfortably on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Eventually, he went into a shelter and received psychiatric treatment. He became an activist when the city tried to sell the homeless shelter where he lived to developers who wanted to make it a luxury hotel. Through that action, he said, he became empowered to ultimately get out of the shelter and get his own apartment.
Such stories are not didactic lessons in political strategy, but hearing the stories and talking with these formerly-homeless individuals highlighted the power of our society's hatred of the homeless simply by showing how the reality differs from the stereotype. In addition to that profound work, the workshop organizers talked about their project to have violence against homeless people classified as a hate-crime and about challenging local laws that criminalize homelessness. The media is one source of contempt for the homeless, but the laws directed at homeless (such as those that ban sleeping or lying down in public parks) are a more direct and serious problem - and those laws come from the real-estate developers and others involved in gentrification. Here, I also met to New York activists and exchanged information, in hopes that we could bring the "faces of homelessness" speakers to my school. My first impression of the Social Forum panels would hold true for most of the others: the session involved not just experts preaching to the converted, but became a conversation among a group of committed activists focused on a particular problem.
At 1:00 pm, I made it to the Jobs With Justice discussion and heard about struggles at Allied-Barton in Phildelphia, and Verizon. However, as would happen again, the most interesting speech was from a member of the audiene. Mid-discussion, Larry Newsome a 19 year employee of Blue Diamond almonds, told us about the chemical hazards of that work. Demonstrations and solidarity campaigns were announced, people got up and spoke with passion. It was a wide-ranging talk about union power in general.
At 3:30, I went to a session provocatively titled SAY WHAT?! featuring a dramatic reading of the US government's testimony to the UN human rights commission on their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast region. The panel began with a woman shouting/chanting a poem about the events, telling us how to participate "When you hear THE MAN!" she said, pointing at a man in a suit seated behind the table, "say a lie you say "SAY WHAT?!" When I say, "SAY WHAT" you say "I Want My Human Rights Today!"
The audience went right along with the program, shouting "SAY WHAT!?" Every time one of the dramatic readers of US government testimony read a piece. In addition to the audience's shouted response, members of the group stood up and read prepared statements about what the real conditions were in New Orleans and Mississippi, not only in those first few weeks, but continuing today. Not only was this a unique way to deliver information to the audience, but the group's analysis was sharp and exciting. They asked us whether we, and progressives outside the Gulf have "Katrina Fatigue." They talked about making Katrina a microcosm of the problems of the US. These speakers also discussed environmental racism, the criminalization of the poor in New Orleans, and the continued displacement of Louisianans from the region. The discussion was my first face-to-face encounter with organizers from New Orleans and I could see, after leaving there, that the left in general has much to learn from such organizers...the point is not just "helping" New Orleans, but seeing New Orleans activists as leaders and shapers of an improved US human rights movement fueled with a new sense of urgency. That was certainly the message that this panel meant to give, and I was convinced.
* * *
The evening plenary was also about New Orleans, and featured some of the speakers I had just heard, but also an Ecuadoran activist who had come to New Orleans to work. After describing the horrendous working conditions, withholding of pay, and general disregarding of human rights experienced by Latino immigrants he said, he didn't come to New Orleans to "steal" anyone's job. Rather, he said, we should united "The New Slaves with the Old Slaves." The audience responded with applause of chants of 'Si Se Puede!"
When the floor opened for comments, Mama D(scroll down till you get to 12/06) gave a rather sensational speech which began with her chanting in a deep, slow voice "WE DON'T NEED NO MORE N-----" and included criticisms of non-profit 501-C3 organizations, racism, capitalism in general, and with the defiant comment that she couldn't respect the plenary time-limits on speakers because we needed timet to heal.
* * *
Friday....
I went to three sessions on Friday, although of the first one I tried to go to (about gender in the Palestinian movements), was cancelled. I ran into someone I knew from several years ago, and we chose a nearby session on US war crimes to attend. That turned out to be a session of the Bush Crimes Commission featuring Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, C. Clark Kissinger of the RCP, Dennis Brutus, and Ann Wright. They argued that it's important to get people to talk about the acts of the Bush administration as war crimes, not mistakes. They also believe that the movement to impeach Bush may come back. Although most of what they were saying was familiar to me, Ann Wright, a career army colonel who resigned because of her opposition to the US war in Iraq was quite amazing to hear, and I would love to see a film of her testimony in congress on US war crimes.
* * *
The second session I went to was about the debate between two different alternatives to contemporary globalization. One was global Fair Trade. The other was localized farming. This panel, set up by the grassroots organizing initiative and the Center for Popular Economics, staged a debate between two economists who played the opposing sides, and then featured comments by activists from other perspectives. The audience generally found the local position untenable in its pure form, though nice in principle, citing the problem of calling on denuded, deforested, and pillaged countries to produce locally despite a likely lack of resources. The most interesting speaker on that panel was Omar Freilla of the Greenworker collective in the South Bronx. His local cooperative in the Bronx was born of deep-roots in that communty as well as intensive study of other cooperative endeavors including tiny towns in the Basque country of Spain.
The third (and final) session I went to on Friday was a popular education program run by Project South, who were among the forum's main organizers. I'll say more about it in a separate post, with pictures....later.
I skipped the evening plenary to attend a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society with members of Bob Moses' Algebra project. I had been told that this would be a meeting of students and teachers about anti-war activism, and it wasn't quite that - but it was inspiring to listen to the process as a group of young high school and college activists tried to plan future actions.
And now, readers, it's almost two am, and there are more sessions tomorrow, so I'd better get to bed.
The forum is more than a series of meetings, so even before I boarded the plane from New York City to Atlanta for the forum I was in the forum - without even knowing it. I shared my plane ride with thirty or more members of Community Voices Heard, a New York City low-income organizing group, two professors from Adelphi College who were bringing students, and one of my union brothers from the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY. Since that moment, I've been in one conversation about organizing and activism after another.
Wednesday:
By the time I was contemplating whether or not to go to the forum's opening march, I admit that I was not terribly enthusiastic. It was 90 degrees, I hadn't eaten, and I'd been travelling all day. Nonetheless, I met some Puerto Rican activists in the hotel who were going and decided I should go. We joined up to figure out the rail system and head to the demo. While in the rail station, of course I ran into an acquaintance from seven years ago in Minneapolis - we all exchanged "how d'you dos" and went off to town. By the time we got to the midway point, I left my new acquaintances and went outside to look for food. I thought I was totally lost, but within fifteen minutes, I'd spotted the tail end of the demonstration. I rushed off, joined it and despite my hunger and tiredness, found it to be one of the most spirited and diverse - in terms of race, age, and general demeanor - marches I'd been on in a very long time. It filled me with excitement about the days to come.
Later on in the evening, I ventured to the Civic Center, which was surrounded by "Solidarity Tents" and even a few food vendors. I managed to meet up with the rest of my union friends and get a snack. On my way home from there, I asked a woman outside the train station if she knew of a grocery store nearby. As she was a social forum participant, she offered to take me to a grocery store that was one station away from my hotel on the train system. Being a New Yorker, I had assumed that she meant that we'd get out of the train and find the store right there, but Atlanta is different, and it turned out that, in the spirit of the social forum, Crystal who is from Atlanta, but works with a Seattle group called LELO (Legacy of Equality, Leadership, and Organizing) drove me from the station to a grocery store and back to the metro. Clearly, it was going to be a good couple of days.
Thursday:
Early in the morning, I again chatted away on the buses and trains from my hotel to town with other social forum attendees. There was a guy from Finland with his mother and daughter, and a couple of artist /immigrant rights' activists from Providence.
The first session I went to at 10:30 am was a tiny group, but perhaps because of the size it became a powerful and intimate conversation between the session's "audience" and the organizers of the "Faces of Homelessness" campaign of the Washington, DC based "National Coalition for the Homeless." The panel began with an overview of general conditions of homelessness, causes of homelessness, and the current upswing in hate-crimes against homeless people perpetrated by young people. The main event of the panel were the stories of Joann Jackson and David Pirtle. Jackson, the director of the Faces of Homelessness speakers bureau told the story of growing up in a family that did not value education, which meant that despite being admitted to Howard University in 1965, she wound up working as a janitor after finishing at the top of her highschool class. Fortunately for her, her boss noticed her, promoted her to payroll clerk, and eventually helped her start her own business through a Small business administration loan. Despite her success, she became depressed, fell into alcholism and crack addiction. Although she maintained her business for a time as a "functioning alcholic" she wound up selling it, spending the money on drugs, and ultimately was living on the streets. Today, she lives in an apartment and is a national organizer giving a face to the experience of homelessness. The other speaker, David Pirtle, spoke about many of his experiences as a homeless youth with schizophrenia: sleeping in an abandoned house in Manhattan and waking up one night covered in rats ("I was the warmest thing nearby") and going back to sleep, and living more comfortably on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Eventually, he went into a shelter and received psychiatric treatment. He became an activist when the city tried to sell the homeless shelter where he lived to developers who wanted to make it a luxury hotel. Through that action, he said, he became empowered to ultimately get out of the shelter and get his own apartment.
Such stories are not didactic lessons in political strategy, but hearing the stories and talking with these formerly-homeless individuals highlighted the power of our society's hatred of the homeless simply by showing how the reality differs from the stereotype. In addition to that profound work, the workshop organizers talked about their project to have violence against homeless people classified as a hate-crime and about challenging local laws that criminalize homelessness. The media is one source of contempt for the homeless, but the laws directed at homeless (such as those that ban sleeping or lying down in public parks) are a more direct and serious problem - and those laws come from the real-estate developers and others involved in gentrification. Here, I also met to New York activists and exchanged information, in hopes that we could bring the "faces of homelessness" speakers to my school. My first impression of the Social Forum panels would hold true for most of the others: the session involved not just experts preaching to the converted, but became a conversation among a group of committed activists focused on a particular problem.
At 1:00 pm, I made it to the Jobs With Justice discussion and heard about struggles at Allied-Barton in Phildelphia, and Verizon. However, as would happen again, the most interesting speech was from a member of the audiene. Mid-discussion, Larry Newsome a 19 year employee of Blue Diamond almonds, told us about the chemical hazards of that work. Demonstrations and solidarity campaigns were announced, people got up and spoke with passion. It was a wide-ranging talk about union power in general.
At 3:30, I went to a session provocatively titled SAY WHAT?! featuring a dramatic reading of the US government's testimony to the UN human rights commission on their handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast region. The panel began with a woman shouting/chanting a poem about the events, telling us how to participate "When you hear THE MAN!" she said, pointing at a man in a suit seated behind the table, "say a lie you say "SAY WHAT?!" When I say, "SAY WHAT" you say "I Want My Human Rights Today!"
The audience went right along with the program, shouting "SAY WHAT!?" Every time one of the dramatic readers of US government testimony read a piece. In addition to the audience's shouted response, members of the group stood up and read prepared statements about what the real conditions were in New Orleans and Mississippi, not only in those first few weeks, but continuing today. Not only was this a unique way to deliver information to the audience, but the group's analysis was sharp and exciting. They asked us whether we, and progressives outside the Gulf have "Katrina Fatigue." They talked about making Katrina a microcosm of the problems of the US. These speakers also discussed environmental racism, the criminalization of the poor in New Orleans, and the continued displacement of Louisianans from the region. The discussion was my first face-to-face encounter with organizers from New Orleans and I could see, after leaving there, that the left in general has much to learn from such organizers...the point is not just "helping" New Orleans, but seeing New Orleans activists as leaders and shapers of an improved US human rights movement fueled with a new sense of urgency. That was certainly the message that this panel meant to give, and I was convinced.
* * *
The evening plenary was also about New Orleans, and featured some of the speakers I had just heard, but also an Ecuadoran activist who had come to New Orleans to work. After describing the horrendous working conditions, withholding of pay, and general disregarding of human rights experienced by Latino immigrants he said, he didn't come to New Orleans to "steal" anyone's job. Rather, he said, we should united "The New Slaves with the Old Slaves." The audience responded with applause of chants of 'Si Se Puede!"
When the floor opened for comments, Mama D(scroll down till you get to 12/06) gave a rather sensational speech which began with her chanting in a deep, slow voice "WE DON'T NEED NO MORE N-----" and included criticisms of non-profit 501-C3 organizations, racism, capitalism in general, and with the defiant comment that she couldn't respect the plenary time-limits on speakers because we needed timet to heal.
* * *
Friday....
I went to three sessions on Friday, although of the first one I tried to go to (about gender in the Palestinian movements), was cancelled. I ran into someone I knew from several years ago, and we chose a nearby session on US war crimes to attend. That turned out to be a session of the Bush Crimes Commission featuring Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild, C. Clark Kissinger of the RCP, Dennis Brutus, and Ann Wright. They argued that it's important to get people to talk about the acts of the Bush administration as war crimes, not mistakes. They also believe that the movement to impeach Bush may come back. Although most of what they were saying was familiar to me, Ann Wright, a career army colonel who resigned because of her opposition to the US war in Iraq was quite amazing to hear, and I would love to see a film of her testimony in congress on US war crimes.
* * *
The second session I went to was about the debate between two different alternatives to contemporary globalization. One was global Fair Trade. The other was localized farming. This panel, set up by the grassroots organizing initiative and the Center for Popular Economics, staged a debate between two economists who played the opposing sides, and then featured comments by activists from other perspectives. The audience generally found the local position untenable in its pure form, though nice in principle, citing the problem of calling on denuded, deforested, and pillaged countries to produce locally despite a likely lack of resources. The most interesting speaker on that panel was Omar Freilla of the Greenworker collective in the South Bronx. His local cooperative in the Bronx was born of deep-roots in that communty as well as intensive study of other cooperative endeavors including tiny towns in the Basque country of Spain.
The third (and final) session I went to on Friday was a popular education program run by Project South, who were among the forum's main organizers. I'll say more about it in a separate post, with pictures....later.
I skipped the evening plenary to attend a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society with members of Bob Moses' Algebra project. I had been told that this would be a meeting of students and teachers about anti-war activism, and it wasn't quite that - but it was inspiring to listen to the process as a group of young high school and college activists tried to plan future actions.
And now, readers, it's almost two am, and there are more sessions tomorrow, so I'd better get to bed.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Social Forum Opening March with Pictures
I can't write much this morning because if I want to get a seat at the 10:30 "Right to the City" panel, I've got to leave my hotel in about fifteen minutes. Look below for pictures from the very spirited opening march of the US Social Forum in Atlanta from Wednesday June 27th.
I arrived in Atlanta that afternoon at about 12:30, and for the rest of the day just about everyone I met was also here for the events. I had a little trouble figuring out where everything was, but I was lucky enough to run into the opening march before it ended. As you enjoy the pics imagine the sound: an extraordinarily good drum section, and a blaring hip-hop against patriarchy truck shouting "down with coca cola" "Down with the war" - not to mention the conscious rhymes. Atlanta's business people were gaping on the sidewalks and the Hooters waitresses, in hot-pants came out to cheer and do a kick line. Was it for the "End Patriarchy" message? or the fresh beats?
Who knows, but it made me feel that:
....Another World is Possible; Another US is Necessary!
I arrived in Atlanta that afternoon at about 12:30, and for the rest of the day just about everyone I met was also here for the events. I had a little trouble figuring out where everything was, but I was lucky enough to run into the opening march before it ended. As you enjoy the pics imagine the sound: an extraordinarily good drum section, and a blaring hip-hop against patriarchy truck shouting "down with coca cola" "Down with the war" - not to mention the conscious rhymes. Atlanta's business people were gaping on the sidewalks and the Hooters waitresses, in hot-pants came out to cheer and do a kick line. Was it for the "End Patriarchy" message? or the fresh beats?
Who knows, but it made me feel that:
....Another World is Possible; Another US is Necessary!
Saturday, June 23, 2007
The UCU Boycott of Israeli Universities - Whose Freedom Counts?
Among the issues being misreported in the American media, there are few that have been as befuddling to American progressives as the UCU's decision to discuss a boycott Israeli universities and Hugo Chavez's denial of a broadcasting license to RCTV. Both are represented in the American media as challenges to fundamental liberties cherished by those on the left. Today's entry discusses the boycott. I'm saving Chavez for tomorrow.
* * *
The other night, my union, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY passed a resolution objecting to the British University and College Union's beginning of discussion of a boycott of Israeli universities. The hour being late, and the US media being what it is, there was very little substantial discussion of the reasons and logic of those who are promoting this boycott, most of which have to do with what actually goes on at these universities. Those supporting this resolution to oppose the UCU boycott proposal were probably reading articles like this one, by Charles Small at 'Inside Higher Ed," which claims that the boycott proposal is motivated by anti-semitism and that it thwarts academic freedom.
Indeed, it did give me pause to think about boycotting academic institutions in particular. When I came home from the meeting, I wanted to know what my favorite Israeli leftist academics had to say about the boycott. I started with Tom Segev, whose works on Israel's history are hardly "extreme" in their orientation. He supported the boycott of Bar Ilan University in 2005, on the basis that the only people who could support that particular university were those backing settlements in Palestinian territory.
Ilan Pappe, a professor at Haifa University, strongly supports the boycott, saying that pressure on his own school was one of the only reasons that he was able to continue teaching there after he defended a student who was charged with libel and stripped of a "research" MA because of his thesis about a massacre of Palestinians.
Avi Shlaim, on the other hand, is against the academic boycott, arguing that it would be polarizing:
I tended to agree with Shlaim before reading the articles about the policies of these schools, but after reading about the lack of academic freedom at the Israeli universities, about their cooperation with the Israeli military and finally their discrimination against Arab students, it seems to me that one can't argue that academic freedom currently exists in those universities. In that case, as the boycott's authors argue, there will be more space for real academic freedom in Israel if people around the world confront the issue of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israel has long claimed to be unusually democratic and has held itself up as a shining example of democracy in contrast to the Arab regimes of the Middle-East. Its academic institutions are one example used ot bolster this argument. If people knew more information about the scandalous violations of academic freedom - and freedom in general- within these universities, they would be less inclined to support them as bastions of liberalism.
* * *
The other night, my union, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY passed a resolution objecting to the British University and College Union's beginning of discussion of a boycott of Israeli universities. The hour being late, and the US media being what it is, there was very little substantial discussion of the reasons and logic of those who are promoting this boycott, most of which have to do with what actually goes on at these universities. Those supporting this resolution to oppose the UCU boycott proposal were probably reading articles like this one, by Charles Small at 'Inside Higher Ed," which claims that the boycott proposal is motivated by anti-semitism and that it thwarts academic freedom.
Indeed, it did give me pause to think about boycotting academic institutions in particular. When I came home from the meeting, I wanted to know what my favorite Israeli leftist academics had to say about the boycott. I started with Tom Segev, whose works on Israel's history are hardly "extreme" in their orientation. He supported the boycott of Bar Ilan University in 2005, on the basis that the only people who could support that particular university were those backing settlements in Palestinian territory.
The university's attempts to assert that politics had no place in academia were undermined by Bar-Ilan's embracing of the College of Judea and Samaria, and in the government's decision to upgrade it to a university.
Mr Sharon's education minister, Limor Livnat, said that upgrading the college "is designed to support the settlement vision out of a national interest of the state of Israel". Tom Segev, a renowned Israeli author, said that far from being an attack on Israel, the boycott of Bar-Ilan Uni versity hit the intended target. "The boycott of Bar-Ilan doesn't hurt the state as a whole, but at most, those Israelis who support the perpetuation of the Israeli presence in the territories," he wrote in the newspaper Haaretz.
Ilan Pappe, a professor at Haifa University, strongly supports the boycott, saying that pressure on his own school was one of the only reasons that he was able to continue teaching there after he defended a student who was charged with libel and stripped of a "research" MA because of his thesis about a massacre of Palestinians.
Avi Shlaim, on the other hand, is against the academic boycott, arguing that it would be polarizing:
I'm for a boycott of Israeli goods and against a boycott of Israeli academics. Israel does 40 percent of its trade with the EU and very little of its trade with the US, so EU economic sanctions against Israel would be effective and I'm in favor of them, as well as an arms embargo. Britain to its credit has implemented an embargo on arms sales because Israel has violated the rule it purchased British military equipment. A cultural and academic boycott is an entirely different proposition: that wouldn't hurt the government. On the contrary, it would play into the hands of the government,because the government would say, "You see, there is anti-Semitism, there is hostility towards us as a people. We are all in the same boat, so you should rally behind the flag." Most Israel academics are liberal. Or they used to be anyway. You don't want to discourage them from dialogue and contact.
I tended to agree with Shlaim before reading the articles about the policies of these schools, but after reading about the lack of academic freedom at the Israeli universities, about their cooperation with the Israeli military and finally their discrimination against Arab students, it seems to me that one can't argue that academic freedom currently exists in those universities. In that case, as the boycott's authors argue, there will be more space for real academic freedom in Israel if people around the world confront the issue of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israel has long claimed to be unusually democratic and has held itself up as a shining example of democracy in contrast to the Arab regimes of the Middle-East. Its academic institutions are one example used ot bolster this argument. If people knew more information about the scandalous violations of academic freedom - and freedom in general- within these universities, they would be less inclined to support them as bastions of liberalism.
Monday, May 28, 2007
War Funding, Democrats and the Next Step
For the past few weeks, I've been aware of, but not closely following the funding bill's passage through congress and to the president. I knew enough to know that the Democrats had finally voted to approve war funds with no withdrawal time-table on Wednesday. You can imagine my scorn then, when on Thursday, as I was walking down 42nd street at lunchtime, someone from the DNC stopped me and asked me for money. I said, I wouldn't give them any money since they hadn't done anything to end the war. "Yes we have!" the man protested. Looking like a crazy person, or just an irate voter, I shook my head and walked away from him, shouting over my shoulder, "you rolled over!"
Maybe others knew exactly how I felt. With hopes in the power of a Democratic congress dashed, the public's perception that support for the Democratic party is the best way to beat Bush may be changing. Markos Moulitsas, a longtime faithful Democrat, has written several entries at Daily Kos
criticizing the recent "capitulation bill." In one, he declares:
David Sirota, who used to be a regular on DNC-friendly Al Franken's Air America show, is calling the Democrats' attempt to spin their vote last week "Orwellian." He was in favor of the "benchmark" funding bill in contrast to what he called the blank checkfor the war that the Republicans and the president wanted (and got).
Meanwhile, Josh Frank's piece on Hillary Clinton's historic hawkishness has been making the internet rounds. On the other side of the political spectrum, Trent Lott's old buddy, Dick Morris is now calling her a hypocrite for responding to the clear demands of voters and changing her vote to oppose the "blank check." I was heartened myself that she and Obama both voted against it, but....I hadn't been following the news very closely over the last few weeks, so I didn't know much more than what they said on NPR about the entire battle.
In all the discussions about linking funding to the achievement of "benchmarks," I did not hear, until I was busy calculating final grades while listening to a week-old Counterspin interview with David Swanson, that the first benchmark is the passage of the infamous "oil law" - a privatization bill promoted by the US administration and opposed by most Iraqis. Truthout's Ann Wright has an article about it today.
I also hadn't heard, in all the talk of Bush's veto and congress's response, that if congress had just let the veto stand, and not brought forth any new legislation, Bush wouldn't have gotten his money for the war. A short comment from FAIR puts it this way:
Finally, John Stauber, whose article on the Democrats and their supporters is the first one I linked to, has this to say about moving forward following this vote.
It's the point that those of us to the left of the Democratic party have been making for a long time. However, I wonder what you think. Has the time come when Americans will join a mass movement to end the war? Or is that just a leftover fantasy based on the experiences of the 60s generation? What is the next step?
Maybe the place to get it all together is Atlanta??
Maybe others knew exactly how I felt. With hopes in the power of a Democratic congress dashed, the public's perception that support for the Democratic party is the best way to beat Bush may be changing. Markos Moulitsas, a longtime faithful Democrat, has written several entries at Daily Kos
criticizing the recent "capitulation bill." In one, he declares:
Democrats have lined up to announce that this isn't the endgame, that this is just the first round. They are promising to keep putting pressure on the administration and using other legislative vehicles to impose withdrawal deadlines and other accountability provisions.
They let us down this time. But the opportunities for them to make amends still exist. If Democrats take advantage of them, as they promise they will, then all might be forgiven. They can prove to us that they in fact know what they are doing, and that they, in fact, do plan on honoring their most sacred promise to the 2006 electorate. And if they don't? Well, no one, not even the most rabid partisans, have an endless supply of patience.
David Sirota, who used to be a regular on DNC-friendly Al Franken's Air America show, is calling the Democrats' attempt to spin their vote last week "Orwellian." He was in favor of the "benchmark" funding bill in contrast to what he called the blank checkfor the war that the Republicans and the president wanted (and got).
Meanwhile, Josh Frank's piece on Hillary Clinton's historic hawkishness has been making the internet rounds. On the other side of the political spectrum, Trent Lott's old buddy, Dick Morris is now calling her a hypocrite for responding to the clear demands of voters and changing her vote to oppose the "blank check." I was heartened myself that she and Obama both voted against it, but....I hadn't been following the news very closely over the last few weeks, so I didn't know much more than what they said on NPR about the entire battle.
In all the discussions about linking funding to the achievement of "benchmarks," I did not hear, until I was busy calculating final grades while listening to a week-old Counterspin interview with David Swanson, that the first benchmark is the passage of the infamous "oil law" - a privatization bill promoted by the US administration and opposed by most Iraqis. Truthout's Ann Wright has an article about it today.
I also hadn't heard, in all the talk of Bush's veto and congress's response, that if congress had just let the veto stand, and not brought forth any new legislation, Bush wouldn't have gotten his money for the war. A short comment from FAIR puts it this way:
In order to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, the Democratic Congress didn't have to pass the bill over Bush's veto--it just had to make clear that no other Iraq War spending bill would be forthcoming. Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of such a strategy, but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.
Finally, John Stauber, whose article on the Democrats and their supporters is the first one I linked to, has this to say about moving forward following this vote.
There is an organized anti-war movement in America that is not an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Up until now, it has been weak and divided and unable to organize itself into an effective national movement in its own right. In its place, therefore, MoveOn and its Netroots allies have become identified as the leadership of the anti-war movement. It is vitally important, however, that a genuinely independent anti-war movement organize itself with the ability to speak on its own behalf.
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement was most definitely not an adjunct of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Far from it, it was a grassroots movement that eventually forced both parties to respond to its agenda. Likewise, the movement against the Vietnam War was not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which claimed to have plans for peace while actually pursuing policies that expanded the war.
It's the point that those of us to the left of the Democratic party have been making for a long time. However, I wonder what you think. Has the time come when Americans will join a mass movement to end the war? Or is that just a leftover fantasy based on the experiences of the 60s generation? What is the next step?
Maybe the place to get it all together is Atlanta??
Thursday, May 17, 2007
I bet you thought I was never coming back.
Yes, it's been more than a week since my last post, and all I've managed to do lately is post pictures of my flower garden. Sorry about that. I just don't have the gusto I once had for reading and commenting on internet news articles. I'm hoping that it will come back once classes end. Meanwhile, this is the last day of classes at CUNY, and I am sitting in my house averaging my students' quiz grades, listening to Tony Joe White, and generally "taking care of business." It's that time of year when this blog is a welcome respite from the chorus of excuses and cries of unfairness that come from students who have, in the last week of the course, just figured out that they really should have read the syllabus I handed out on the first day.
Since I last wrote, my union's progressive slate has won an election on my campus, and I've been nominated as my campus's representative on the CUNY-wide contract organizing committee. Perhaps that means I'll try to renew my energy for this blog with academic "labor" news a bit this summer. The latest outrage from CUNY management is that they have decided not to pay adjunct professors for their work during the fifteenth week of classes because they're only "proctoring exams" and not really teaching. The cheapness!
CUNY faculty will be protesting next week at lunch time at all the campuses where this is the case, in what's called the Campaign of Outrage
Here are the picket dates:
Monday, May 21 – Baruch, Vertical Campus, 12 - 1:30 pm.
Tuesday, May 22 – Bronx CC, Language Hall, 12 - 1:30 pm.
Wednesday, May 23 – College of Staten Island, Administration Building 1A, 12 -
1:30 pm.
Thursday, May 24 – Queensborough CC, Administration Building, 12:00 - 1:30 pm.
Thursday, May 31 – Kingsborough CC, Administration Building A, 2:00 - 3:30 pm.
For more information, call PSC Organizer Sue Li at (212) 354-1252
and that's all for now.
Since I last wrote, my union's progressive slate has won an election on my campus, and I've been nominated as my campus's representative on the CUNY-wide contract organizing committee. Perhaps that means I'll try to renew my energy for this blog with academic "labor" news a bit this summer. The latest outrage from CUNY management is that they have decided not to pay adjunct professors for their work during the fifteenth week of classes because they're only "proctoring exams" and not really teaching. The cheapness!
CUNY faculty will be protesting next week at lunch time at all the campuses where this is the case, in what's called the Campaign of Outrage
Here are the picket dates:
Monday, May 21 – Baruch, Vertical Campus, 12 - 1:30 pm.
Tuesday, May 22 – Bronx CC, Language Hall, 12 - 1:30 pm.
Wednesday, May 23 – College of Staten Island, Administration Building 1A, 12 -
1:30 pm.
Thursday, May 24 – Queensborough CC, Administration Building, 12:00 - 1:30 pm.
Thursday, May 31 – Kingsborough CC, Administration Building A, 2:00 - 3:30 pm.
For more information, call PSC Organizer Sue Li at (212) 354-1252
and that's all for now.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Tribeca Film Fest Review One: Lillie and Leander: A Legacy of Violence
I figured I could handle the matinee prices at this year's Tribeca Film Fest ($14). I'm glad I swallowed my complaints and went, because my choice for today: "Lillie and Leander: A Legacy of Violence" was a movie worth seeing on a big screen, and seeing at a festival. In our culture, so saturated with cathartic stories of violence, justice and redemption, there have been very few films that have dealt seriously with the issue of lynching. "Lillie and Leander" succeeds in tackling this difficult subject because of the way it makes the past so present.
The film, which centers on a hunt for long-buried bodies evokes in the viewer a sense of the South as a haunted place where death and terror are both ubiquitous and invisible. At one point, an archaeologist says of what she expects to find at one promising site something to the effect that "the graves will be shallow. Just dirt thrown quickly to cover the bodies." But, in the end, the bodies can't be found.
It's a bit like a metaphor for the larger problem. During the film, we hear the stories of living communities, both Black and white, who simultaneously have carried around and handed down secrets of extraordinary violence in the midst of the mundanest of lives. A Black family sits on the screened porch as the eldest member talks about the day the white folks came for Uncle Wiley in the middle of the night. Several people say that they knew not to go to that county, where there was a sign on the road that read "Read, Nigger and Run, and if you Can't Read, Run Anyhow."
After a large picnic, the whites whisper and and some laugh nervously about what their uncles and grandfathers did over at the "curve in the road", about a small child finding a skull on the ground near the local church.
The stories match up eerily. In one especially poweful sequence, the film juxtaposes the narrow perspectives of the whites who think the deaths are insgignificant anyway, with the discussions of lost relatives and friends among the Blacks, all punctuated by shovels smacking the dirt of a suspected grave-site. In these interviews, people express great truths without any effort at profundity. The film-maker's 96 year old uncle stumbles along, trying to explain what the outcome will be if they find some bodies now. He looks worried about whay may happen now that times have changed, and says, "Of course, there wasn't much...there wasn't really any...law back then." Despite that concern, the hard evidence has yet to come out in Pensacola. As the film-makers explained in the Q&A after the screening, the more they found out about the bodies, the less interested were the police in investigating the scene.
Like Anna Rasmus, the real woman depicted in the the German film, "The Nasty Girl" , Alice Bruton Hurwitz's research into the story of her own family and town led to controversy. Several outspoken members of her family would much prefer that the past be kept that way and in their efforts to keep the secret within the family, they reveal the same indifference to Black lives as their murderous parents. However, unlike Hurwitz's family, the city of Pensacola has proven to be supportive, and is screening "Lillie and Leander" next fall at their own festival. I look forward to the dialogue that this film may inspire when it does, and when it moves to other Southern venues, but I admit I feel a bit trepidatious when I think about the number of similar buried secrets that may come to light in its wake. That reaction must be a sign that this movie works in some important way; it opens up, but does not neatly resolve or seal up the big problem of racial violence in our society. As the archaelogist suggests at the end of another day of digging, "the fact that we didn't find the body today doesn't mean there aren't bodies there; they just aren't in the spot where we looked." But one reason the bodies were so hard to find was that the smell of the cadavers had, over time dispersed into the soil itself. It's not unlike the way we experience race today: the problem is all around us but it's become so diffuse that it's very difficult for most people to see it, to identify it and do something about it.
The film, which centers on a hunt for long-buried bodies evokes in the viewer a sense of the South as a haunted place where death and terror are both ubiquitous and invisible. At one point, an archaeologist says of what she expects to find at one promising site something to the effect that "the graves will be shallow. Just dirt thrown quickly to cover the bodies." But, in the end, the bodies can't be found.
It's a bit like a metaphor for the larger problem. During the film, we hear the stories of living communities, both Black and white, who simultaneously have carried around and handed down secrets of extraordinary violence in the midst of the mundanest of lives. A Black family sits on the screened porch as the eldest member talks about the day the white folks came for Uncle Wiley in the middle of the night. Several people say that they knew not to go to that county, where there was a sign on the road that read "Read, Nigger and Run, and if you Can't Read, Run Anyhow."
After a large picnic, the whites whisper and and some laugh nervously about what their uncles and grandfathers did over at the "curve in the road", about a small child finding a skull on the ground near the local church.
The stories match up eerily. In one especially poweful sequence, the film juxtaposes the narrow perspectives of the whites who think the deaths are insgignificant anyway, with the discussions of lost relatives and friends among the Blacks, all punctuated by shovels smacking the dirt of a suspected grave-site. In these interviews, people express great truths without any effort at profundity. The film-maker's 96 year old uncle stumbles along, trying to explain what the outcome will be if they find some bodies now. He looks worried about whay may happen now that times have changed, and says, "Of course, there wasn't much...there wasn't really any...law back then." Despite that concern, the hard evidence has yet to come out in Pensacola. As the film-makers explained in the Q&A after the screening, the more they found out about the bodies, the less interested were the police in investigating the scene.
Like Anna Rasmus, the real woman depicted in the the German film, "The Nasty Girl" , Alice Bruton Hurwitz's research into the story of her own family and town led to controversy. Several outspoken members of her family would much prefer that the past be kept that way and in their efforts to keep the secret within the family, they reveal the same indifference to Black lives as their murderous parents. However, unlike Hurwitz's family, the city of Pensacola has proven to be supportive, and is screening "Lillie and Leander" next fall at their own festival. I look forward to the dialogue that this film may inspire when it does, and when it moves to other Southern venues, but I admit I feel a bit trepidatious when I think about the number of similar buried secrets that may come to light in its wake. That reaction must be a sign that this movie works in some important way; it opens up, but does not neatly resolve or seal up the big problem of racial violence in our society. As the archaelogist suggests at the end of another day of digging, "the fact that we didn't find the body today doesn't mean there aren't bodies there; they just aren't in the spot where we looked." But one reason the bodies were so hard to find was that the smell of the cadavers had, over time dispersed into the soil itself. It's not unlike the way we experience race today: the problem is all around us but it's become so diffuse that it's very difficult for most people to see it, to identify it and do something about it.
Anxiety Index: The Cell Phones and the Bees
Since I last posted on flowers, and even though I did notice a single bee busily pollinating one of my perennials just yesterday, I thought I'd post this article on Colony Collapse Disorder.
Not only does it suggest that a collapse in the beepopulation might be linked ot cellphone radiation, but also brings up the issue of the connection between cell phones and brain tumors, which hasn't surfaced in a while.
So, while I start worrying about crop failures and starvation, I'm going to get a new headset for my cellphone.
Not only does it suggest that a collapse in the beepopulation might be linked ot cellphone radiation, but also brings up the issue of the connection between cell phones and brain tumors, which hasn't surfaced in a while.
So, while I start worrying about crop failures and starvation, I'm going to get a new headset for my cellphone.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Briefly, Imus - Sharpton Links
I see that a lot of people came here yesterday looking for the Al Sharpton - Don Imusargument on the radio. Here they are. I woke up to it this morning being replayed on WBAI's Wake-Up Call. Here's something that I haven't seen anyone talking about, and it speaks to the general politics and economics of talk radio. Sharpton's show, on Syndication Oneisn't on the radio in NY. It is too bad, because listening to this conversation between not only Sharpton and Imus, but also Rev. Buster Sawyers and Byron Monroe, the head of the National Assoc. of Black Journalists was one of the few times when I've heard a number of Black people get together to confront a white dude with his racist statements. Crooks& Liars doesn't have the whole thing, and Syndication One doesn't seem to have podcasts available.
Meanwhile, for other "Blacks in the News", here's the Black Agenda Report's commentary on the Congressional Black Caucus/Fox scandal.
Comments?
Meanwhile, for other "Blacks in the News", here's the Black Agenda Report's commentary on the Congressional Black Caucus/Fox scandal.
Comments?
Monday, April 09, 2007
Shortcuts Along The Information "Superhighway": You Too Can Be an Expert, or Just Feel Like One.
I think the lesson I've learned from doing this blog is that answers to questions about major news items are readily available if you are willing to look for them and if you know how to evaluate sources. You don't have to be an expert, or even following a particular news cycle with great attention, to find out more than what the "mainstream" media has to offer.
For example, the first big piece of news I read in the corporate media this morning was the Washington Post story on the problems of Kyoto's "Cap and Trade"efforts to reduce carbon emissions as practiced in the EU. It lays out the idea that the plan is pushing energy prices in the EU so high that even "green" companies can't survive. I found it curious that the paper would be so critical of a policy to reduce carbon emissions, and that it would use the "too expensive" claim that is so important to global warming naysayers. I also found it interesting that the paper reported that companies were able to get around climate regulations by buying products made in developing countries who weren't part of the Kyoto treaty, given the American press's general dismissal of such arguments in other contexts as being against "free trade." As Europeans have long argued, it will be hard to get developing countries to agree to participate in international cap and trade agreements when the world's biggest polluter continues to opt out.
So, I wondered what else had been said about it. The Guardian printed a rather differentstory on the problems with Cap and Trade earlier in the week. According to them, the problem with the "cap and trade scheme" is that large companies have figured out how to get around the system, but they also quote environmental organizations, who say that the second phase, which will "squeeze" more, will be better. Indeed,it has led big companies from polluting countries to "squeal" - to the delight of these environmentalists. US Steel, for instance, is suing over Slovakian allocations. That would suggest that the "cap and trade" policy is working at least a little bit. Then, I learned that a large group of American CEOs had earlier this year, been lobbying the Bush admin. to do a similar "cap and trade" plan.
The support for such a plan by major CEOs made me suspicious again. Finally, by searching "Kyoto too little too late" I found this article on Alternet which calls for "cap and tax" over "cap and trade," and includes a reference to a new book by George Monbiot called Heat which denounces the "trading" part, (ie, buying Carbon offets) as akin to buying absolution from sin in the Middle Ages.
So, in a bit more than an hour I found liberal, conservative, and left critiques of the Kyoto protocol and was able to sort them out.
The problem is, of course, that many people take the common-sense claims of corporate media without skepticism so they don't bother to look up other sources. I find this hard to understand in an age of such intense skepticism. However, if you think about it for 1/2 a minute, you'll realize that a lot of the skeptical impulse has already been channeled into futilty by a host of corporate spin-meisters. The thing that annoys me most about these wacko conspiracy theories is that researching things from "alien abductions" to "the Freemasons" and the great effort of the government to "regulate us to death" with carbon emissions caps, provides the experience of asking probing questions, and hunting up things on the internet (ie doing research). However, without a simple standard for evaluating their sources, lots of people are getting off the superhighway at the exit that says "Willy Wonka's Cognigive Rest Stop Up-Ahead - Don't Criticize, Just Supersize...the Only limitation is your Imagination!"
sigh.
For example, the first big piece of news I read in the corporate media this morning was the Washington Post story on the problems of Kyoto's "Cap and Trade"efforts to reduce carbon emissions as practiced in the EU. It lays out the idea that the plan is pushing energy prices in the EU so high that even "green" companies can't survive. I found it curious that the paper would be so critical of a policy to reduce carbon emissions, and that it would use the "too expensive" claim that is so important to global warming naysayers. I also found it interesting that the paper reported that companies were able to get around climate regulations by buying products made in developing countries who weren't part of the Kyoto treaty, given the American press's general dismissal of such arguments in other contexts as being against "free trade." As Europeans have long argued, it will be hard to get developing countries to agree to participate in international cap and trade agreements when the world's biggest polluter continues to opt out.
So, I wondered what else had been said about it. The Guardian printed a rather differentstory on the problems with Cap and Trade earlier in the week. According to them, the problem with the "cap and trade scheme" is that large companies have figured out how to get around the system, but they also quote environmental organizations, who say that the second phase, which will "squeeze" more, will be better. Indeed,it has led big companies from polluting countries to "squeal" - to the delight of these environmentalists. US Steel, for instance, is suing over Slovakian allocations. That would suggest that the "cap and trade" policy is working at least a little bit. Then, I learned that a large group of American CEOs had earlier this year, been lobbying the Bush admin. to do a similar "cap and trade" plan.
The support for such a plan by major CEOs made me suspicious again. Finally, by searching "Kyoto too little too late" I found this article on Alternet which calls for "cap and tax" over "cap and trade," and includes a reference to a new book by George Monbiot called Heat which denounces the "trading" part, (ie, buying Carbon offets) as akin to buying absolution from sin in the Middle Ages.
So, in a bit more than an hour I found liberal, conservative, and left critiques of the Kyoto protocol and was able to sort them out.
The problem is, of course, that many people take the common-sense claims of corporate media without skepticism so they don't bother to look up other sources. I find this hard to understand in an age of such intense skepticism. However, if you think about it for 1/2 a minute, you'll realize that a lot of the skeptical impulse has already been channeled into futilty by a host of corporate spin-meisters. The thing that annoys me most about these wacko conspiracy theories is that researching things from "alien abductions" to "the Freemasons" and the great effort of the government to "regulate us to death" with carbon emissions caps, provides the experience of asking probing questions, and hunting up things on the internet (ie doing research). However, without a simple standard for evaluating their sources, lots of people are getting off the superhighway at the exit that says "Willy Wonka's Cognigive Rest Stop Up-Ahead - Don't Criticize, Just Supersize...the Only limitation is your Imagination!"
sigh.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
The Once Friendly Tribeca Film Festival Prices the Rest of Us Right Out
I just checked the Tribeca Film Festival program to find that the once fun & public friendly film-fest has changed its ticket pricing policy. Last year, tickets were $12.00 with a $1.00 internet surcharge. This year, most screenings are $18.00 - with $2.00 internet surcharges. Indiewire has a piece about it, and notes that festival promoters in other cities, where ticket prices remain similar to those in local theaters are "surprised."
My reaction is more like disgust - and I see that I'm not alone in that. It already annoys me that the TFF uses the building that I work in and does not give a discount to either students or teachers there, but does give discounts to people who live in Tribeca, among the most expensive zip codes in the United States. Given the facts that many of the good movies shown at the festival will eventually make it to major distribution on DVD or in theaters, that there are many other things to do in NY, that there are a number of good film venues that regularly show better films (Film Forum/MOMA/Anthology/Walter Reade) and that critics have often responded with skepticism to the programming choices at TFF, I can't think of this as a smart business move. I will suck it up and pay to see the restored print of "Attica", & possibly the new Forgacs movie if they have a "cheap" daytime screening. Otherwise, I'll just be waiting for their releases, just like I waited for "Who Killed the Electri Car?"; "Jesus Camp" and that Jonestown doc. to come out on DVD. So for my big festival fun, perhaps I'll be hitting the NY Underground Film Festbefore it's over and then waiting for the Sundance at BAM.
Too bad, too bad! It's really too bad that the prohibitive ticket prices will keep local kids from getting a chance to see Melvin Van Peebles in person at the first screening of "Blackout."
My reaction is more like disgust - and I see that I'm not alone in that. It already annoys me that the TFF uses the building that I work in and does not give a discount to either students or teachers there, but does give discounts to people who live in Tribeca, among the most expensive zip codes in the United States. Given the facts that many of the good movies shown at the festival will eventually make it to major distribution on DVD or in theaters, that there are many other things to do in NY, that there are a number of good film venues that regularly show better films (Film Forum/MOMA/Anthology/Walter Reade) and that critics have often responded with skepticism to the programming choices at TFF, I can't think of this as a smart business move. I will suck it up and pay to see the restored print of "Attica", & possibly the new Forgacs movie if they have a "cheap" daytime screening. Otherwise, I'll just be waiting for their releases, just like I waited for "Who Killed the Electri Car?"; "Jesus Camp" and that Jonestown doc. to come out on DVD. So for my big festival fun, perhaps I'll be hitting the NY Underground Film Festbefore it's over and then waiting for the Sundance at BAM.
Too bad, too bad! It's really too bad that the prohibitive ticket prices will keep local kids from getting a chance to see Melvin Van Peebles in person at the first screening of "Blackout."
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Polemicists Parry: The Cockburn- Berube Rumble
Alexander Cockburn has started a fracas with blogger and liberal academic, Michael Berube with his article about the Laptop Bombadiers which lambasts "progressives" who supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In one particularly lyrical paragraph he says:
Berube has responded to Cockburn at the blog "Crooked Timber." In his response, he calls Cockburn intellectually dishonest, primarily offering evidence of this dishonesty by quoting articles by Ed Herman, which is OK for him, because according to Berube, everyone in the "Z/Counterpunch crowd" is interchangeable. (Herman responds to Berube here.)
After reading both articles, and the original article by Berube, which, before the war, ignited the ire of anti-war activists, I'd say that Cockburn is more honest than Berube.
Both are polemicists and employ a similar style of argument; Berube attacks everyone associated with the anti-imperialist left as being oddly obsessed with the notion of "sovereignty"- which is a neat way of avoiding the words empire and imperialism. Cockburn writes that everyone who supported the Clintonian sanctions regime, the bombing of Kosovo, and the attack on Afghanistan is also, regardless of their stated opposition to it, essentially responsible for the current debacle in Iraq.
While I do think it's weird to refer to "anti-imperialists" as the "sovereignty left," I don't think that's intellectually dishonest of Cockburn to make the argument that support for other US military interventions paved the way for the current one, or that public condemnations of the anti-war movement such as the one that Berube wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, effectively amount to support for US imperialism - and therefore for the current war.
I also think that it's an important argument to make as we talk about solutions to the current crisis. As Gilbert Achcar pointed out redeployment is not withdrawal, and as CODEPINK is currently arguing, funding the war is not an anti-war strategy. Most democratic policy proposals, as they did in the case of the war in Vietnam, have opposed the Bush administration's bad strategy in Iraq, not the immorality, criminality, etc. of the war in the first place.
So, why be a non-interventionist and why does it matter for the current situation? I opposed the 1990s sanctions regime and I opposed the bombing in Kosovo, not, as Berube suggests in his response to Cockburn et al, because I loved either Saddam or Milosevic, but because I thought "no good can ever come from US-led military intervention." In my study of history, no matter what the US may say about its reasons for intervention, it has never really been humanitarian (nor has any major empire) and it wasn't in those wars. Berube suggests that a humanitarian intervention is possible, and says that he wouldn't sign major anti-war statements in 2002 and 2003 because they opposed interventions generally. I also read enough about the specificso each situation to believe that neither was any good. The sanctions regime was devastating to the Iraqi people and actually strengthened Saddam Hussein's power, while the Kosovo campaign has not, even according to one of my enthusiastic Albanian students, done much to "liberate" the Kosovar Albanians.
From the point of the view of the anti-imperialist left, those who, like Gitlin, Berube, and others on the "right wing" of the opposition to war in Iraq in 2003, hurt the anti-war movement because their public critiques of the left were more both more audible and more meaningful than their arguments against the war itself; they gained the public ear by echoing what was said in the corporate media. While they may have argued that they opposed the war in the "right" way, what was heard publicly was not "I oppose the war," but "I am a well recognized liberal and I oppose the anti-war movement because it is composed of a bunch of far-left wingnuts."
Criticizing the left publicly in the same terms that one can find in the "mainstream" news organizations, the "Dissent" crowd, has helped marginalize critics of US imperialism by calling them anti-Semites, lovers of Milosevic, supporters of Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinists, etc. etc. THEY argue that members of ANSWER discredit the anti-war movement with their bad politics. However, I would argue that the public condemnations of ANSWER (of whom I'm no fan) and Not in My Name (a slightly better group) by this crowd have done much more to discredit and dissmiss the left in the public's eye than anything you will see at an ANSWER demonstration, particularly if you don't listen to the speeches, as most people don't. In addition to that, despite their bad politics, ANSWER has done more to build the anti-war movement than have Gitlin, Berube, et al.
Those who have insisted that the anti-war movement should NOT talk about the Clinton era as part of the history of the current crisis, should NOT talk about US imperialism, and should NOT talk about Israel, would narrow the terms of debate and limit the range of critique because they see making the opposition to the war about opposing ongoing US policies in the world, not just the current war, as narrowing the number of people who can join the anti-war movement. They worry that being too left will marginalize the movement and keep it tiny and ineffective. Pragmatism, they say, demands building bridges on the narrow issue of...well, not exactly pulling the troops out NOW.
Those who oppose the war as part of a larger imperialist project would argue that just opposing the war as the Bush debacle will not stop the larger problems, and might, if it is done in such a way to reduce opposition in the US while continuing the exploitation of the region, actually make things worse. This demand that anti-imperialists shut up in order to stop imperialism doesn't make sense to anyone who knows anything about US foreign policy in the long term, nor does it make sense as a strategy to anyone who's ever been "radicalized" in the process of political organization. It would mean that instead of offering people who are new to an anti-war movement arguments about the deeper roots of the conflict, that people in the anti-war movement just...
wait a minute, I think I know the answer:
agree that the answer to our problems is ANYBODY BUT BUSH.
I suppose that if you really, really believe that Bush is the *only* reason that the US is in the current mess that it is with the rest of the world, or that the real problem with the war in Iraq was that it was "unilateral" (as Berube's earlier argument suggests) anything else is just beside the point and a bunch of sectarian nonsense.
In some cases, "sectarian" arguing of this type is important for clarifying the issues and can't be avoided. Perhaps you disagree? Let me know, oh commenters....
But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, -- Friedman, Hitchens, Berman -- like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.
Berube has responded to Cockburn at the blog "Crooked Timber." In his response, he calls Cockburn intellectually dishonest, primarily offering evidence of this dishonesty by quoting articles by Ed Herman, which is OK for him, because according to Berube, everyone in the "Z/Counterpunch crowd" is interchangeable. (Herman responds to Berube here.)
After reading both articles, and the original article by Berube, which, before the war, ignited the ire of anti-war activists, I'd say that Cockburn is more honest than Berube.
Both are polemicists and employ a similar style of argument; Berube attacks everyone associated with the anti-imperialist left as being oddly obsessed with the notion of "sovereignty"- which is a neat way of avoiding the words empire and imperialism. Cockburn writes that everyone who supported the Clintonian sanctions regime, the bombing of Kosovo, and the attack on Afghanistan is also, regardless of their stated opposition to it, essentially responsible for the current debacle in Iraq.
While I do think it's weird to refer to "anti-imperialists" as the "sovereignty left," I don't think that's intellectually dishonest of Cockburn to make the argument that support for other US military interventions paved the way for the current one, or that public condemnations of the anti-war movement such as the one that Berube wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, effectively amount to support for US imperialism - and therefore for the current war.
I also think that it's an important argument to make as we talk about solutions to the current crisis. As Gilbert Achcar pointed out redeployment is not withdrawal, and as CODEPINK is currently arguing, funding the war is not an anti-war strategy. Most democratic policy proposals, as they did in the case of the war in Vietnam, have opposed the Bush administration's bad strategy in Iraq, not the immorality, criminality, etc. of the war in the first place.
So, why be a non-interventionist and why does it matter for the current situation? I opposed the 1990s sanctions regime and I opposed the bombing in Kosovo, not, as Berube suggests in his response to Cockburn et al, because I loved either Saddam or Milosevic, but because I thought "no good can ever come from US-led military intervention." In my study of history, no matter what the US may say about its reasons for intervention, it has never really been humanitarian (nor has any major empire) and it wasn't in those wars. Berube suggests that a humanitarian intervention is possible, and says that he wouldn't sign major anti-war statements in 2002 and 2003 because they opposed interventions generally. I also read enough about the specificso each situation to believe that neither was any good. The sanctions regime was devastating to the Iraqi people and actually strengthened Saddam Hussein's power, while the Kosovo campaign has not, even according to one of my enthusiastic Albanian students, done much to "liberate" the Kosovar Albanians.
From the point of the view of the anti-imperialist left, those who, like Gitlin, Berube, and others on the "right wing" of the opposition to war in Iraq in 2003, hurt the anti-war movement because their public critiques of the left were more both more audible and more meaningful than their arguments against the war itself; they gained the public ear by echoing what was said in the corporate media. While they may have argued that they opposed the war in the "right" way, what was heard publicly was not "I oppose the war," but "I am a well recognized liberal and I oppose the anti-war movement because it is composed of a bunch of far-left wingnuts."
Criticizing the left publicly in the same terms that one can find in the "mainstream" news organizations, the "Dissent" crowd, has helped marginalize critics of US imperialism by calling them anti-Semites, lovers of Milosevic, supporters of Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinists, etc. etc. THEY argue that members of ANSWER discredit the anti-war movement with their bad politics. However, I would argue that the public condemnations of ANSWER (of whom I'm no fan) and Not in My Name (a slightly better group) by this crowd have done much more to discredit and dissmiss the left in the public's eye than anything you will see at an ANSWER demonstration, particularly if you don't listen to the speeches, as most people don't. In addition to that, despite their bad politics, ANSWER has done more to build the anti-war movement than have Gitlin, Berube, et al.
Those who have insisted that the anti-war movement should NOT talk about the Clinton era as part of the history of the current crisis, should NOT talk about US imperialism, and should NOT talk about Israel, would narrow the terms of debate and limit the range of critique because they see making the opposition to the war about opposing ongoing US policies in the world, not just the current war, as narrowing the number of people who can join the anti-war movement. They worry that being too left will marginalize the movement and keep it tiny and ineffective. Pragmatism, they say, demands building bridges on the narrow issue of...well, not exactly pulling the troops out NOW.
Those who oppose the war as part of a larger imperialist project would argue that just opposing the war as the Bush debacle will not stop the larger problems, and might, if it is done in such a way to reduce opposition in the US while continuing the exploitation of the region, actually make things worse. This demand that anti-imperialists shut up in order to stop imperialism doesn't make sense to anyone who knows anything about US foreign policy in the long term, nor does it make sense as a strategy to anyone who's ever been "radicalized" in the process of political organization. It would mean that instead of offering people who are new to an anti-war movement arguments about the deeper roots of the conflict, that people in the anti-war movement just...
wait a minute, I think I know the answer:
agree that the answer to our problems is ANYBODY BUT BUSH.
I suppose that if you really, really believe that Bush is the *only* reason that the US is in the current mess that it is with the rest of the world, or that the real problem with the war in Iraq was that it was "unilateral" (as Berube's earlier argument suggests) anything else is just beside the point and a bunch of sectarian nonsense.
In some cases, "sectarian" arguing of this type is important for clarifying the issues and can't be avoided. Perhaps you disagree? Let me know, oh commenters....
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts in the Age of 9/11....
Since I've been teaching American history survey courses, I've noticed very strong student reactions to three pieces of legislation that I always include in the primary sources for particular topics. They get agitated about The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918, and The Korematsu decision.
The sedition act includes the following:
When I teach this document, I also have the students read excerpts from the newspaper "The Aurora," a partisan paper from Philadelphia whose editors were thrown into prison under the terms of the Sedition Act because of their opposition to the Adams administration. The "Alien Acts," of which James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, On May 20, 1798, the "Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents" gives the President the authority to deport people from nations with whom the US is at war, and also to deport "Alien Friends". Since there was no war between the US and France in the 1790s, it was actually against Irish and English supporters of Thomas Paine, who had fled Britain's suppression of the political clubs, that the Federalists used their handy law.
Three years ago, I recall that my entire class was united in opposition to the law, and that they were highly critical of the one person in the classroom who thought it was a valuable piece of patriotic legislation. Ironically, perhaps, the one person who supported the law was an immigrant. She may have been, as some anti-immigrant activists of the 1890s would have argued, unfamiliar with American "institutions" and therefore not appreciative of just how directly these laws undermined the basic freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights. She might have just been trying to impress her teacher, not realizing that advocating everything those in power have ever done was not the way to do so. Last Fall, when my classes were discussing the similar Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during WWI, my class was so unified in opposition to the laws that the only person creating controversy later admitted that he was just arguing for the laws to "stir things up, like in Professional wrestling."
Nonetheless, this semester, the balance of the class has shifted. While many of my current students found the sedition bill puzzling, and asked "how can they pass this law? Doesn't it violate the Bill of Rights?" several students responded by defending the laws, arguing that it was necessary to protect the government from "alien enemies" and to curtail the freedom of the press. One student, clearly thinking of present day issues, made a big point of hidden, alien subversion of the government. I wonder who he thought these alien enemies were in 1798? Would he have had the same reaction if he'd known the immigrants being subjected to interrogation and deportation were the Irish supporters of Thomas Jefferson?
Immigrant students tend to be the most vehement in their opposition to the laws, which they associate with current anti-Immigrant sentiment, while native born Americans seem more likely to support them. I find this all very interesting. I see it as a sign of the times that students, even in a school with a large percentage of immigrants, would be willing to deny rights to "aliens" as a matter of course, but I am shocked that they are so willing to trust the government wih the suspension of freedom of the press, even though I am aware that ACLU poll results sometimes show that about 60% Americans would probably scrap the First Amendment if they could.
Most of the time, I hold back from expressing my own views in the classroom when students are discussing documents, in order to let the conversation play itself out among the students. This time, however, partly due to time considerations, I had to just come out and say that OF COURSE the Sedition Act of 1798 violated the First Amendment. I wish I didn't have to come in and settle that particular question. These are indeed, strange times, and I may have to come up with some kind of lesson on the rest of the amendments that addresses this other problem that Americans seem to have with the Constitution.
The sedition act includes the following:
That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.
When I teach this document, I also have the students read excerpts from the newspaper "The Aurora," a partisan paper from Philadelphia whose editors were thrown into prison under the terms of the Sedition Act because of their opposition to the Adams administration. The "Alien Acts," of which James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, On May 20, 1798, the "Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents" gives the President the authority to deport people from nations with whom the US is at war, and also to deport "Alien Friends". Since there was no war between the US and France in the 1790s, it was actually against Irish and English supporters of Thomas Paine, who had fled Britain's suppression of the political clubs, that the Federalists used their handy law.
Three years ago, I recall that my entire class was united in opposition to the law, and that they were highly critical of the one person in the classroom who thought it was a valuable piece of patriotic legislation. Ironically, perhaps, the one person who supported the law was an immigrant. She may have been, as some anti-immigrant activists of the 1890s would have argued, unfamiliar with American "institutions" and therefore not appreciative of just how directly these laws undermined the basic freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights. She might have just been trying to impress her teacher, not realizing that advocating everything those in power have ever done was not the way to do so. Last Fall, when my classes were discussing the similar Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during WWI, my class was so unified in opposition to the laws that the only person creating controversy later admitted that he was just arguing for the laws to "stir things up, like in Professional wrestling."
Nonetheless, this semester, the balance of the class has shifted. While many of my current students found the sedition bill puzzling, and asked "how can they pass this law? Doesn't it violate the Bill of Rights?" several students responded by defending the laws, arguing that it was necessary to protect the government from "alien enemies" and to curtail the freedom of the press. One student, clearly thinking of present day issues, made a big point of hidden, alien subversion of the government. I wonder who he thought these alien enemies were in 1798? Would he have had the same reaction if he'd known the immigrants being subjected to interrogation and deportation were the Irish supporters of Thomas Jefferson?
Immigrant students tend to be the most vehement in their opposition to the laws, which they associate with current anti-Immigrant sentiment, while native born Americans seem more likely to support them. I find this all very interesting. I see it as a sign of the times that students, even in a school with a large percentage of immigrants, would be willing to deny rights to "aliens" as a matter of course, but I am shocked that they are so willing to trust the government wih the suspension of freedom of the press, even though I am aware that ACLU poll results sometimes show that about 60% Americans would probably scrap the First Amendment if they could.
Most of the time, I hold back from expressing my own views in the classroom when students are discussing documents, in order to let the conversation play itself out among the students. This time, however, partly due to time considerations, I had to just come out and say that OF COURSE the Sedition Act of 1798 violated the First Amendment. I wish I didn't have to come in and settle that particular question. These are indeed, strange times, and I may have to come up with some kind of lesson on the rest of the amendments that addresses this other problem that Americans seem to have with the Constitution.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Left Forum Part Two: Frances Fox Piven Still Rocks
I have to say something about my second day at Left Forum, even if I'm almost a week late in doing so.
I recovered enough from the stomach flu to return for the Sunday 10am Iraq panel with Gilbert Achcar, Anthony "support the resistance!" Arnove, Christian Parenti, and the ever-pompous AK Gupta. Parenti and Achcar were interesting, though I wouldn't say that anyone there said anything I hadn't already heard before. Experts agree: The situation in Iraq is terrible, and the question that they mostly wound up discussing was whether it would be possible to force the Democrats to take some meaningful action to stop the war. This year, LF had the audience put their questions on slips of paper and pass them to the front. So, predictably, one of the anonymous questions, probably from someone from the ISO, was why people had "stopped supporting the Iraqi resistance" recently, and Achcar explained in detail why he thought there was no national resistance movement in Iraq, but only sectarian resistance that couldn't be supported. If you stop talking about a "mythical, fantasy" "so-called" resistance, Achcar said, and look at what's there, you won't be able to support it. There's a difference between the right to resist and calling the militias currently killing Iraqi civilians a national liberation movement. Parenti said that the Iraqi resistance today is like what would happen in the US if we were occupied by an Islamic fundamentalist power. Iraq, more so than the US, had a completely demobilized left that Hussein had effectively driven underground. So, their resistance is comparable to what would arise here: groups of former CIA and DEA operatives, heavily armed and trained in counter-insurgency on the one hand, and the evangelical Christian right on the other.
Arnove (who has never been to Iraq), had been the featured speaker in a debate two years ago that called on the US anti-war movement to "support the Iraqi resistance." It seems to me that the ISO as a whole has backed down from that position since, but Arnove said, "imagine if there was no resistance and the US had achieved their agenda!" So, even a vicious sectarian resistance that mostly kills Iraqi civilians is better than none? Hmmmm.
* * *
The next session I went to was about globalization, corporatization and public education. I arrived really late, almost at the end of Janelle Scott's fascinating talk about the actual evidence on "school choice" policies. Based on what I've seen of her previous work, it looks as if she moved to her current position, which is highly critical of charter schools, from seeing them as an experiment in democracy. This panel also featured a lively discussion from the audience, almost all of whom were women, and were either parents or teachers, and one of whom was involved in an interesting public ed. project. From there I went to the 3pm session sponsored by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) on the subject of "financialization." The centerpiece was a talk by Chris Rude, who suggests "financialization," a term which describes the increasing percentage of money made through financial transactions in overall profits, is capital's solution to economic crises. The conclusion of one of the speakers was that in such a context, it might make more practical sense to fight for actual socialism than to try to squeeze out reforms like national health care under the existing system.
Finally, I went to the plenary session on the future of the left. This began with a highly "postmodern" keynote address from Boaventura de Sousa Santos suggesting that people in the "global North" should adjust their paradigms, abandon the search for an overall theory of resistance and follow the lead of the "global South"; and continued with responses from Anarchist anthropologistDavid Graeber, FRSO-soft/Democratic party hopeful, Bill Fletcher Jr, and best of the bunch, as usual: Frances Fox Piven who spoke in no-nonsense terms of practical politics in the current moment of crisis. My fried, D. reflected that she was great as a speaker in the same way that she was great as she blew by us in the crowded book exhibit on her way to the session. She was firm and to the point, not mean. Dr. Piven impressed Bill DiFazio too, and he had a long interview with her on his WBAI show City Watch the following week.
* * *
While the panels were informative and interesting, I was disappointed by the low turn-out at this year's Left Forum. It was dispiriting and felt as if the only participants were members of FRSO, the Brecht Forum, various IS tendencies, members of the CUNY grad center faculty, and the Black Radical Congress. In other words: the usual suspects. I think this was probably an organizing failure from the center and not a reflection of the lack of energy for social movement at the current moment. It's too bad, because this is the moment of peak opportunity for people on the socialist left to reach out to the growing number of people who are unhappy with the war and the current administration.
I recovered enough from the stomach flu to return for the Sunday 10am Iraq panel with Gilbert Achcar, Anthony "support the resistance!" Arnove, Christian Parenti, and the ever-pompous AK Gupta. Parenti and Achcar were interesting, though I wouldn't say that anyone there said anything I hadn't already heard before. Experts agree: The situation in Iraq is terrible, and the question that they mostly wound up discussing was whether it would be possible to force the Democrats to take some meaningful action to stop the war. This year, LF had the audience put their questions on slips of paper and pass them to the front. So, predictably, one of the anonymous questions, probably from someone from the ISO, was why people had "stopped supporting the Iraqi resistance" recently, and Achcar explained in detail why he thought there was no national resistance movement in Iraq, but only sectarian resistance that couldn't be supported. If you stop talking about a "mythical, fantasy" "so-called" resistance, Achcar said, and look at what's there, you won't be able to support it. There's a difference between the right to resist and calling the militias currently killing Iraqi civilians a national liberation movement. Parenti said that the Iraqi resistance today is like what would happen in the US if we were occupied by an Islamic fundamentalist power. Iraq, more so than the US, had a completely demobilized left that Hussein had effectively driven underground. So, their resistance is comparable to what would arise here: groups of former CIA and DEA operatives, heavily armed and trained in counter-insurgency on the one hand, and the evangelical Christian right on the other.
Arnove (who has never been to Iraq), had been the featured speaker in a debate two years ago that called on the US anti-war movement to "support the Iraqi resistance." It seems to me that the ISO as a whole has backed down from that position since, but Arnove said, "imagine if there was no resistance and the US had achieved their agenda!" So, even a vicious sectarian resistance that mostly kills Iraqi civilians is better than none? Hmmmm.
* * *
The next session I went to was about globalization, corporatization and public education. I arrived really late, almost at the end of Janelle Scott's fascinating talk about the actual evidence on "school choice" policies. Based on what I've seen of her previous work, it looks as if she moved to her current position, which is highly critical of charter schools, from seeing them as an experiment in democracy. This panel also featured a lively discussion from the audience, almost all of whom were women, and were either parents or teachers, and one of whom was involved in an interesting public ed. project. From there I went to the 3pm session sponsored by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) on the subject of "financialization." The centerpiece was a talk by Chris Rude, who suggests "financialization," a term which describes the increasing percentage of money made through financial transactions in overall profits, is capital's solution to economic crises. The conclusion of one of the speakers was that in such a context, it might make more practical sense to fight for actual socialism than to try to squeeze out reforms like national health care under the existing system.
Finally, I went to the plenary session on the future of the left. This began with a highly "postmodern" keynote address from Boaventura de Sousa Santos suggesting that people in the "global North" should adjust their paradigms, abandon the search for an overall theory of resistance and follow the lead of the "global South"; and continued with responses from Anarchist anthropologistDavid Graeber, FRSO-soft/Democratic party hopeful, Bill Fletcher Jr, and best of the bunch, as usual: Frances Fox Piven who spoke in no-nonsense terms of practical politics in the current moment of crisis. My fried, D. reflected that she was great as a speaker in the same way that she was great as she blew by us in the crowded book exhibit on her way to the session. She was firm and to the point, not mean. Dr. Piven impressed Bill DiFazio too, and he had a long interview with her on his WBAI show City Watch the following week.
* * *
While the panels were informative and interesting, I was disappointed by the low turn-out at this year's Left Forum. It was dispiriting and felt as if the only participants were members of FRSO, the Brecht Forum, various IS tendencies, members of the CUNY grad center faculty, and the Black Radical Congress. In other words: the usual suspects. I think this was probably an organizing failure from the center and not a reflection of the lack of energy for social movement at the current moment. It's too bad, because this is the moment of peak opportunity for people on the socialist left to reach out to the growing number of people who are unhappy with the war and the current administration.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Left Forum Part One
I didn't succeed in a making it through a marathon day at the Left Forum. I was interrupted by the stomach flu (perhaps its this one)that seems to be making its way through most of my friends. Really, I wasn't vomiting in the women's room at Cooper Union just because I didn't like Curtis Mohammed'stalk about his good work in New Orleans; I did feel I had to wait to run out of the lecture hall until he was done, however, for fear that he might see a small white chick running from the lecture hall as confirmation of his view that everyone at the LF was probably a phony, white, academic poseur. He may be right, I only mind a little that he began his talk by raising his eyebrows and playing at what he assumed was the audience's fear or guilt in the presence of a genuine a Black radical. In a room full of Trotskyists, Maoists and old-guard Stalinists he asked, "Did you know that everything won for Black people was won through bloodshed?" as if this were the first time they'd ever heard it. It's all for the good though, because after all, what is a good conference of lefties without an insult to the audience for its lack of commitment, knowledge, and its disconnection from real people's struggles?
The panel on which Mohammed spoke was called "What's Left and Who's Left in New Orleans"? I did wish that the flu hadn't rushed me out the door, because I was curious to hear the third speaker, Gary Younge . I went to the whole thing because I really wanted to hear the real deal, of what it's been like to have members of every sectarian left organization in the world descend on New Orleans to help out, and to find out what these groups are doing, and whether they feel they are getting anywhere.
Jordan Flaherty, who's done some of the best writing on NOLA since Katrina, has written an indictment of the poverty pimpingin NOLA that probably comes from the same general place as Mohammed, who recently participated in a trip to Venezuela with members of his organization. I'm sure the audience discussion was enlightening,because the speakers started out from a more moral position and I hope that the conversation became more informative after the initial presentations.
The first talk I went to today was sort of like that. Gilbert Achcar talked about Lebanon, Bashir Abu-Manneh talked about Palestine and Hamas, in what was the most informative talk of the day for me, and Sabah Alnasseri, who talked about Iraq, insisted that there was no "civil war" in Iraq, and that the Shiite/Sunni division was irrelevant. All these talks are connected to papers that will eventually show up in the journal The Socialist Register, where we can find more explanation of Alnasseri's argument, which seemed to veer between the Maoist and the Post-modern, at least in my fever-addled brain. Achcar and Nasseri looked as if they might be in for an argument, but time was up.
Unfortunately, the flu led me home so that I could watch some cheerful movies while sucking down a bottle of ginger ale. As a result, I am missing the 5pm Iraq panel featuring Achcar (who, as he was last year, is on appearing in several different sessions), Phyllis Bennis, and Nir Rosen, whose book In the Belly of the Green Birdis one of the more interesting descriptions of Iraq under occupation. If anyone reading this does go this evening's Iraq panel, please post a little comment here saying how it was.
Over all, I'd say that the conference wasn't particularly well-attended in comparison with last year's, but I didn't try to go both days then, so I may find more people in the crowds tomorrow. And, now, well, I think it's time for me to head to the bathroom.
The panel on which Mohammed spoke was called "What's Left and Who's Left in New Orleans"? I did wish that the flu hadn't rushed me out the door, because I was curious to hear the third speaker, Gary Younge . I went to the whole thing because I really wanted to hear the real deal, of what it's been like to have members of every sectarian left organization in the world descend on New Orleans to help out, and to find out what these groups are doing, and whether they feel they are getting anywhere.
Jordan Flaherty, who's done some of the best writing on NOLA since Katrina, has written an indictment of the poverty pimpingin NOLA that probably comes from the same general place as Mohammed, who recently participated in a trip to Venezuela with members of his organization. I'm sure the audience discussion was enlightening,because the speakers started out from a more moral position and I hope that the conversation became more informative after the initial presentations.
The first talk I went to today was sort of like that. Gilbert Achcar talked about Lebanon, Bashir Abu-Manneh talked about Palestine and Hamas, in what was the most informative talk of the day for me, and Sabah Alnasseri, who talked about Iraq, insisted that there was no "civil war" in Iraq, and that the Shiite/Sunni division was irrelevant. All these talks are connected to papers that will eventually show up in the journal The Socialist Register, where we can find more explanation of Alnasseri's argument, which seemed to veer between the Maoist and the Post-modern, at least in my fever-addled brain. Achcar and Nasseri looked as if they might be in for an argument, but time was up.
Unfortunately, the flu led me home so that I could watch some cheerful movies while sucking down a bottle of ginger ale. As a result, I am missing the 5pm Iraq panel featuring Achcar (who, as he was last year, is on appearing in several different sessions), Phyllis Bennis, and Nir Rosen, whose book In the Belly of the Green Birdis one of the more interesting descriptions of Iraq under occupation. If anyone reading this does go this evening's Iraq panel, please post a little comment here saying how it was.
Over all, I'd say that the conference wasn't particularly well-attended in comparison with last year's, but I didn't try to go both days then, so I may find more people in the crowds tomorrow. And, now, well, I think it's time for me to head to the bathroom.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Crony Chronicles: The Latest Bush Admin Scandal
If I didn't get those Portside emails, and if I hadn't been actually looking at them today, I probably would have missed this news item about the corruption in "No Child Left Behind's" Reading First program.
Although this latest expose of the direct use of a federal program to funnel money into the hands of Bush's friends in the corporate world, shows a less capital-intensive scheme than say, the selling-off of Iraq, it's still pretty damn scandalous. A dept. of education audit revealed that:
Surprise, surprise, the people getting the cash at McGraw-Hill are big Bush donors.
Another, more in-depth piece at San Francisco's "BeyondChron" points out that
All this is happening just in times for the major assessment of the NCLB act as a whole. Bush is touring the country trying to sell his "standards" package, while ten senators have just called for the law to be significantly revised. The folks at the Forum for Education and Democracy are also holding a conference on "Fixing NCLB" in Washington, DC next week.
Bush's latest craven cronyism doesn't refute the general testing philosophy of the NCLB program (you can find that here), but it certainly undermines any effort by Bush to proclaim that his law is well-intended. It also reveals a larger pattern in educational reform policy that dates back before NCLB. Most education reform efforts could be better called schemes than programs.
These schemes, such as Edison schools, typically are private initiatives that promote "fix-it" curricular solutions that can be plugged in with relative ease. They are popular because they involve less federal spending than larger, more expensive comprehensive strategies emphasizing such global issues such as economic inequality, and system-changing solutions such as support for teachers, smaller class sizes, integration efforts, intensive early education programs, and they certainly make messier, more creative, more student-directive and more long-term learning/teaching efforts nearly impossible in public school environments.
Every few years, I hear from my friends in the public schools about some new curriculum that they are supposed to use to revamp their classes. These curricula are meant to help them pass the new methods of "assessment" (ie, tests) on which their future increasingly hangs. This superficial approach does little but throw money at testing institutions and textbook companies, while limiting the freedom of teachers and stressing-out generations of school kids.
Let's hope that the recent expose of Bush's malfeasance will fire up congress to take meaningful action to change our federal education policies.
Although this latest expose of the direct use of a federal program to funnel money into the hands of Bush's friends in the corporate world, shows a less capital-intensive scheme than say, the selling-off of Iraq, it's still pretty damn scandalous. A dept. of education audit revealed that:
the conferences promoting Reading First were overtly biased toward two particular approaches to reading instruction: Direct Instruction, an intensively structured literacy program, and a related program known as Open Court. Both teaching methods are marketed by publisher SRA/McGraw Hill. The report concluded that the Department of Education had violated prohibitions to control or endorse any specific curriculum.
Surprise, surprise, the people getting the cash at McGraw-Hill are big Bush donors.
According to public records, the McGraw and Bush families are longtime friends. McGraw company head Harold McGraw III served on President Bush’s White House "transition team." And Voyager’s co-founder, Randy Best, has been a major financial supporter of Bush.
Another, more in-depth piece at San Francisco's "BeyondChron" points out that
The impropriety not only clearly breached ethical norms, it serves as a clear example of the privatization goals of NCLB and of the underlying philosophy that profit making is of greater importance than educating our society’s kids.
All this is happening just in times for the major assessment of the NCLB act as a whole. Bush is touring the country trying to sell his "standards" package, while ten senators have just called for the law to be significantly revised. The folks at the Forum for Education and Democracy are also holding a conference on "Fixing NCLB" in Washington, DC next week.
Bush's latest craven cronyism doesn't refute the general testing philosophy of the NCLB program (you can find that here), but it certainly undermines any effort by Bush to proclaim that his law is well-intended. It also reveals a larger pattern in educational reform policy that dates back before NCLB. Most education reform efforts could be better called schemes than programs.
These schemes, such as Edison schools, typically are private initiatives that promote "fix-it" curricular solutions that can be plugged in with relative ease. They are popular because they involve less federal spending than larger, more expensive comprehensive strategies emphasizing such global issues such as economic inequality, and system-changing solutions such as support for teachers, smaller class sizes, integration efforts, intensive early education programs, and they certainly make messier, more creative, more student-directive and more long-term learning/teaching efforts nearly impossible in public school environments.
Every few years, I hear from my friends in the public schools about some new curriculum that they are supposed to use to revamp their classes. These curricula are meant to help them pass the new methods of "assessment" (ie, tests) on which their future increasingly hangs. This superficial approach does little but throw money at testing institutions and textbook companies, while limiting the freedom of teachers and stressing-out generations of school kids.
Let's hope that the recent expose of Bush's malfeasance will fire up congress to take meaningful action to change our federal education policies.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Lyrics of the Day: In Honor of Ms. Williams' New Record
Lucinda Williams' new record, West showed up in my mailbox yesterday. This is a powerful album, featuring the pain and rage we're used to hearing from Williams, who said in a recent interview with the Baltimore Sun,"I was addicted to bad boys...It was almost a drug in itself. I had to get past it."
Robert Christgau, hasn't really brought out the love for Lucinda since his review of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," and finds some of the songs on the album "dull" and washouts (He thus dismisses "Learning How to Live," which as far as melody goes, is more like the pop songs on Christgau's favorite early Lucinda records than anything else on the record).
Rather than being dull, I think these songs echo the emotional honesty and sometimes deceptive simplicity that characterized her first records. That simplicity, along with the lessons of experience, delivers some of the greatest break-up songs ever penned. One of them is "Wrap My Head Around That": 9 minutes of fed-up near-rapping beginning with the lines "you told me you loved me/you said you wanna be with me/you looked right into my eyes/said I'm not like those other guys" and then turns to a rebuke along the lines of a pop-Henry James:
I know what I think I saw
and what I thought I seen
and what was coming and what was going and everything in between
and what I thought I heard you say
and what you really said
and what I thought you thought I thought was actuallly in your head
and what you meant to tell me and what I meant to say
and what I said you said I said
and what went the other way
I know what you did to me
and I know what we did
and who did to what to who
and who the hell were you tryin to kid?
I know more than you think I know, more than you think about
and know and think you know and think you've got it all figured out
I know I'm missin something or something's missing here and there
and all over and over around and up and everywhere
and you're just all up in it
look out your zipper's gonna break
out popped your little party favor
and you just take the cake
I can't believe I believed you when I found out where you're at
and finding out why you're too much
And trying to wrap my head around that
"West" is about going through it and getting past it, and the getting past it is important. While there is sadness on the record, it's not the bottomless well that was "Essence." I identify with Williams in her effort to kick an addiction to dangerous men and embrace a more serious and honest relationship. I imagine that a lot of women, single or coupled, will hear something similar here.
She sings of the wish to be healed by another love in "Unsuffer Me," a profound exploration of the rebound: unbound my feet/untie my wrist/come into my world of loneliness/and wickedness/and bitterness/unlock my love.
She sings of a quest for the "man she loves" someday coming along in "Where is My Love": Is my love in Birmingham?/ Making honey from the bees?/overjoyed to be my man/and rolling up his flannel sleeves?
She undoes both those fantasies with "Rescue" : He can't rescue you/can't pull the demons from your hair/can't lower you from your sleepy bier/He can't protect you/from the powers that will be/the hours of insanity/he can't protect you. He can't change you/change the summers of your beauty/the thunderstorms within your purity/he can't change you. He can't carry you/past the door of every danger/every foe and every stranger/he can't carry you.
Beyond what I hear in her songs, what little I know of Lucinda Williams' real life comes through shreds of gossip from my friends-of-friends in the Minneapolis music scene along with whatever articles published about her reveal.
Here, she announces that she's moved on from her toxic relationships past and looks at the world from a newly grown-up perspective. She told the Sun that during the making of West, she'd met "the Love of her life."...."Some people find that when they're 19 or 20," Williams says. "It took me a bit longer."
In honor of going through it to get past it, here are two sets of lyrics.
First, the words to a great break-up song on the new album
Come On:
I'm so over you
You don't even have a clue
All you did was make me blue
You didn't even make me
Come on
You're so self-involved
You're in some kind of fog
You're hung up on your hog
You didn't even make me
Come On.
You think you're in hot demand
But you don't where to put your hand
Let me tell you where you stand
You didn't even make me
Come on.
Dealing with this old fire (?)
Shut up, I'm not inspired
All I'm feeling now is tired.
You didn't even make me
Come on.
You weren't even worth it
I'm sorry I ever flirted
The effort wasn't even concerted
You didn't even make me
Come on.
All you do is talk the talk
You can't back it up with your walk
You can't light my fire, so fuck off
You didn't even make me
Come on.
and second, because I've been recently re-appreciating the breathless enthusiasm of her first album of original songs, 1988's "Lucinda Williams."
I Just Wanted To See You So Bad:
I drove my car in the middle of the night
I just wanted to see you so bad
The road was dark but the stars were bright
I just wanted to see you so bad
It didn't matter what my friends would say
I was gonna see you anyway
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
You were staying in a big hotel
I just wanted to see you so bad
I didn't know you very well
I just wanted to see you so bad
We'd always talked on the telephone
But I'd never been with you all alone
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I got off on the seventh floor
I just wanted to see you so bad
I couldn't have asked for anything more
I just wanted to see you so bad
I saw your face so clear and bright
I must have been crazy but it sure felt right
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
Robert Christgau, hasn't really brought out the love for Lucinda since his review of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," and finds some of the songs on the album "dull" and washouts (He thus dismisses "Learning How to Live," which as far as melody goes, is more like the pop songs on Christgau's favorite early Lucinda records than anything else on the record).
Rather than being dull, I think these songs echo the emotional honesty and sometimes deceptive simplicity that characterized her first records. That simplicity, along with the lessons of experience, delivers some of the greatest break-up songs ever penned. One of them is "Wrap My Head Around That": 9 minutes of fed-up near-rapping beginning with the lines "you told me you loved me/you said you wanna be with me/you looked right into my eyes/said I'm not like those other guys" and then turns to a rebuke along the lines of a pop-Henry James:
I know what I think I saw
and what I thought I seen
and what was coming and what was going and everything in between
and what I thought I heard you say
and what you really said
and what I thought you thought I thought was actuallly in your head
and what you meant to tell me and what I meant to say
and what I said you said I said
and what went the other way
I know what you did to me
and I know what we did
and who did to what to who
and who the hell were you tryin to kid?
I know more than you think I know, more than you think about
and know and think you know and think you've got it all figured out
I know I'm missin something or something's missing here and there
and all over and over around and up and everywhere
and you're just all up in it
look out your zipper's gonna break
out popped your little party favor
and you just take the cake
I can't believe I believed you when I found out where you're at
and finding out why you're too much
And trying to wrap my head around that
"West" is about going through it and getting past it, and the getting past it is important. While there is sadness on the record, it's not the bottomless well that was "Essence." I identify with Williams in her effort to kick an addiction to dangerous men and embrace a more serious and honest relationship. I imagine that a lot of women, single or coupled, will hear something similar here.
She sings of the wish to be healed by another love in "Unsuffer Me," a profound exploration of the rebound: unbound my feet/untie my wrist/come into my world of loneliness/and wickedness/and bitterness/unlock my love.
She sings of a quest for the "man she loves" someday coming along in "Where is My Love": Is my love in Birmingham?/ Making honey from the bees?/overjoyed to be my man/and rolling up his flannel sleeves?
She undoes both those fantasies with "Rescue" : He can't rescue you/can't pull the demons from your hair/can't lower you from your sleepy bier/He can't protect you/from the powers that will be/the hours of insanity/he can't protect you. He can't change you/change the summers of your beauty/the thunderstorms within your purity/he can't change you. He can't carry you/past the door of every danger/every foe and every stranger/he can't carry you.
Beyond what I hear in her songs, what little I know of Lucinda Williams' real life comes through shreds of gossip from my friends-of-friends in the Minneapolis music scene along with whatever articles published about her reveal.
Here, she announces that she's moved on from her toxic relationships past and looks at the world from a newly grown-up perspective. She told the Sun that during the making of West, she'd met "the Love of her life."...."Some people find that when they're 19 or 20," Williams says. "It took me a bit longer."
In honor of going through it to get past it, here are two sets of lyrics.
First, the words to a great break-up song on the new album
Come On:
I'm so over you
You don't even have a clue
All you did was make me blue
You didn't even make me
Come on
You're so self-involved
You're in some kind of fog
You're hung up on your hog
You didn't even make me
Come On.
You think you're in hot demand
But you don't where to put your hand
Let me tell you where you stand
You didn't even make me
Come on.
Dealing with this old fire (?)
Shut up, I'm not inspired
All I'm feeling now is tired.
You didn't even make me
Come on.
You weren't even worth it
I'm sorry I ever flirted
The effort wasn't even concerted
You didn't even make me
Come on.
All you do is talk the talk
You can't back it up with your walk
You can't light my fire, so fuck off
You didn't even make me
Come on.
and second, because I've been recently re-appreciating the breathless enthusiasm of her first album of original songs, 1988's "Lucinda Williams."
I Just Wanted To See You So Bad:
I drove my car in the middle of the night
I just wanted to see you so bad
The road was dark but the stars were bright
I just wanted to see you so bad
It didn't matter what my friends would say
I was gonna see you anyway
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
You were staying in a big hotel
I just wanted to see you so bad
I didn't know you very well
I just wanted to see you so bad
We'd always talked on the telephone
But I'd never been with you all alone
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I got off on the seventh floor
I just wanted to see you so bad
I couldn't have asked for anything more
I just wanted to see you so bad
I saw your face so clear and bright
I must have been crazy but it sure felt right
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
I just wanted to see you so bad
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