waagnfnp

By Dr. Free Ride

This week, I voted to ratify our new faculty contract with the California State University system. The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-day walkouts at each of the 23 campuses in the system. When strike dates were announced (and, we are told, with some serious political pressure behind the scenes to avert a strike that would have garnered national and international media coverage), the administration came back to the bargaining table with a contract the negotiating team deemed reasonably good. The vote this week should indicate whether the CSU faculty share that judgment (I’m betting they will).

The staggering thing to me is that we went almost two years without a contract before we could bring ourselves to the point where we were ready to strike.

I’ve been reflecting upon this, and it occurs to me that there are certain features of a good many faculty members that make it hard for us to embark easily on a job action. In honor of May Day, I’ll describe them here.

Continue Reading »

A specter is haunting America — the specter of financial apocalypse. Record-breaking current-account deficits, plummeting regional housing markets, a weakening dollar, and news that major central banks around the world are beginning to diversify their currency reserves have made the possibility that the U.S. could soon experience what happened to Mexico and Southeast Asia in the 1990s newsworthy even to the reliably rah-rah American corporate media. With Time and the Atlantic Monthly examining the cases for alarm and calm, respectively, in recent weeks, the time has come for the WAAGNFNP to consider its stance on global capitalism.

Flashback: It’s Fall 1997 and I’m teaching a course called Globalization and Its Discontents in the Princeton Writing Program. The course, which examines the processes and discourses of globalization, is a challenge for my students, who come from all over the western hemisphere, but they really get into it and work incredibly hard. After surveying attempts to define globalization in the context of major post-Cold War-paradigm-shift candidates, from Fukuyama’s “end of history” to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” from Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” to Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” we turn to debates over globalization of manufacturing, agriculture, trade, finance, labor, racism, civil society, and culture: is it really happening? is it new? is it a good thing? for whom? can and should it be stopped? why or why not?

Continue Reading »

By Patrick DeTemple

[A few weeks back, I met Patrick at a DFA gathering. I was surprised to hear he was already fully committed to the Barack Obama Presidential campaign. I, like most people who plan at some point to be involved, was (and still am) in the camp of “it’s way too early, and besides, I resent like hell that this thing is starting up so early - like Christmas decorations going up even before Halloween. No thank you!

Of course, I expressed my personal “Obama beefs” to Patrick in no uncertain terms - (#1 being his vote for the draconian bankruptcy bill). But mostly I was fascinated to hear how this seasoned, lifelong activist had come to his decision to commit so early and so completely. So I asked him if he’d share his story with us, and he was kind and gracious enough to take time out of his busy schedule to do so. Thank you, Patrick!
-Oaktown Girl: MOJ, WAAGNFNP.]

In 2004, reenergized by the Howard Dean challenge I was working hard to get John Kerry elected (mostly through data support to 527s via “Map The Vote” and later directly with ACT) and in July I found myself sitting in the Fleet Center with an old UFW organizer colleague, Artie Rodriguez and his family. I had no clue what to expect when Barack Obama took the stage. At the end of the mesmerizing speech that we’ve all now heard Artie and I spun towards each other with crazy grins on our faces and I said “now THAT’S who I want to vote for”. After that we all went back to work for Kerry…but with a little more energy than before.

Maybe the speech hit me (as for so many others) because no matter how hard I work on how many campaigns I always feel like a little bit of an outsider in the official Democratic Party. The reasons are simple: I have a decade’s long focus on issues of social class (which is not the same thing as making poverty less onerous) and a deep belief that politicians who don’t respect the common sense of ordinary people will deservedly get their ass kicked. Barack Obama placed himself in the middle – not of the political spectrum – but the middle of the people, and he spoke from the middle and he made sense. This isn’t the place to say why others don’t or can’t do that but let’s just say that it was unusually refreshing for all of us.

After the loss in ’04 I was not excited about our prospects. I’d voted for John Edwards (loved the ‘Two Americas’ stump speech) and fought to get him on the ticket but with those high expectations his performance was very disappointing. Hillary just reminded me of everything I didn’t like about Al From and the DLC – they make a cynical kind of sense if the only pieces in the game are inside the beltway and the rules consist of ‘things as they are’ but I’ve been an organizer most of my life and that life is built around the constantly tested premise of ‘things as they can be’…so I don’t have that much in common with those folks. Gloomy days.

Then a year later came Al Gore’s speech on Martin Luther King Day, January 2006, and I perked up. Yippee! Al is sounding smart, articulate, gutsy and he’s laying out the big picture with both intellectual integrity and passion – where was this man years ago? And so I began talking, hoping and agitating for Gore to step into the race. That enthusiasm changed in both positive and negative ways over the following months. Seeing him a few more times reminded me that he was still essentially the same Al Gore, the pretty limited candidate that I’d known in 2000 and 1988. On the other hand, his movie reminded me of the passionate, deeply committed thinker who’d written “Earth in the Balance” so long ago. So I was very happy to have Al back in the mix but doubtful about the candidacy.

For Barack I had only high hopes but, viewed from the perspective of politics as usual, Obama was clearly too young and inexperienced to be a serious contender, right? I mean Hillary already had all the money, the keys to the rest of it, the highest paid staff, the major donor bundlers either charmed or beaten into submission, a large disciplined operation that was the envy of all political operators and she still had Bill in reserve. As everyone said back then Hillary had already sucked the oxygen out of the room and nobody could challenge her except maybe Al with netroots support. And then I actually started listening to Barack Obama.
Continue Reading »

Friends, fellow-travellers, and members of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, I come before you today not to praise Technorati but to bury it. Will you join me in declaring war on this Enemy of the Party?

Consider the function of its nefarious popular page, which is a huge step toward doing to blogoramaville what was done to radio and tv (which in their day inspired similar public sphere utopianism as teh intertubes, according to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan’s New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005) — namely, promoting crap over quality, elevating voyeurism and invective over reflection and dialogue, and making ratings and profits the name of the game. Don’t get me wrong — there are certainly some good blogs among the most linked and most favorited top 100s (a certain ex-fugitive from Party justice is at #85 on the latter list) — but everyone’s heard that even a bad function can find nuts twice a day (or something like that). It’s not like Technorati doesn’t have the capacity to do better: imagine if they produced 100 top 100s, each recognizing a particular bloggy genre. But no, what counts as a new idea for them is WFT (Where’s the Fire) — I say “wft?!” to its WTF Topics list, which takes Technorati’s default-celebrity-sex-tapes/gadgetry/wingnuttia-obsession-mode to its logical and absurd end.

Ah, but Technorati is the royal road to the American unconscious, you say; This Is What the People Want. To which I say, Fuck the People; the WAAGNFNP is all about the annihilationism, not the populism or the humanism.

Others then chime in: an imaginary political party can’t declare war — only the Congress can do that (in the U.S., at least). To which I say, ever heard of the neocons? The Project for a New American Century? Dick Cheney?

Continue Reading »

This is a shot I took last month of my older and younger daughters outside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I blog about them here and there every so often. This is one of those times.

Imoto’s stroller is almost exactly at the hypocenter — what Americans are more accustomed to calling Ground Zero. With my caption, I’m trying to capture something of the effect that the museum’s opening exhibit had on me. It was a small, dimly-lighted room filled with photos of everyday life in Nagasaki the morning before the blast and items large and small that testify to its force, including beams from a school water tower, remains from a church, and a clock stopped at 11:02 am, all staying still to the beat of an ominously ticking clock.

It wasn’t only that this simple exhibit made me replay the all-too-typical “imagine you and everyone you love disappearing in an instant” nuclear disaster fantasy scenario anyone who, like me, grew up near a U.S. military base during the Cold War has probably run through their heads a million times by now: it wasn’t quite the imaginative empathy of identifying with the victims or putting myself and my family in their place. It wasn’t only that standing at the second place in human history where this fantasy became reality confronted me with its limits: it wasn’t quite the ethical recognition of the impassable gulf between witnesses-thrice-removed and victims. And it wasn’t only that I was nevertheless forced to reflect on my tangled ties to Nagasaki, as an American citizen married to a Japanese citizen whose two daughters are dual citizens (until they turn 21, under current laws, at least).
Continue Reading »

By Heraclitus (Jeff)

Of course we want our efforts here at the shiny new WAAGNFNP blog to be appreciated by as many readers as possible (all hail the effortless efforts of our glorious Minister of Justice!), and what better way to signal to readers that this isn’t just a one-joke blog than by writing that most quintessential and automatically engrossing of blog posts, a navel-gazing meditation on the nature and purpose of blogs and blogging. So although my title, “Against Centrism,” suggests that I’m going to say something of some wider interest and utility to our political life, I’m really just going to kvetch about some commenter somewhere who said something that irritated me six months ago. But of course I’m going to be as bombastic and self-inflating about it as possible, and carry on in these broad, general terms. Dismal, no? Just another reason to do everything in your power to hasten the arrival of the sublime Giant Nuclear Fireball, which will cleanse us all of our pedestrianism.

So, although the people I’m discussing no doubt manifest these traits in meat space as well, I’m thinking particularly of a certain kind of internets personage, who bemoans the “extremism” of a blog post that will “alienate the center” or “the majority” (and who can forget those always excellent admonitions about driving away “people who should be your allies”?). What probably annoys me most about these self-styled “moderates” or “centrists” is the way they manage to combine such a sanctimonious, school-marmish tone of pinched moral superiority with such excruciatingly banal opinions (although some of them are more rude and abusive). How have they managed to convince themselves that simply adopting whatever the majority position is, or letting the two extremes dictate their opinions to them, is some kind of intellectual and moral virtue? There couldn’t be a lazier or more cowardly way of arriving at a set of (most likely completely incoherent) convictions, yet these people are forever engaged in the most grating and stultifying ritual of self-congratulatory finger-wagging imaginable.
Continue Reading »

Last week i got into a bit of a pissing match with an associate who is a powerful voice and advocate for progressive politics. He had sent out a email post sharing the views of a friend of his, and i took some offense at one startling paragraph. I’m not sure if i need to preface my posting of that paragraph, or leave it for the reader to decide how this particular comment relates directly to the founding of the WAAGNFNP. I do know that there might come a time, along that spiralling arrow, when some future/past commentator might say the same thing about the “us” now, that the paragraph says about the “us” then (i being one of the us thens to whom the author Scott Lilly refers). Well, obviously i chose the path of prefacing now, didn’t i?

To this day, I think those who insisted on injecting arguments about drugs, sex, personal hygiene, and respect for law into the debate over Viet Nam prolonged the war (perhaps by years) and, as a consequence, contributed to the deaths of hundreds and possibly thousands of my fellow soldiers. That is a lesson that anyone engaged in a struggle to build a coalition large enough and strong enough to change national policy should remember.

Wayback in that wayback machine of Peabody and Sherman, a rift did develop between the antiwar movement and the counter-culture movement, particularly in the Bay Area of California. The lines seemed to have been drawn between Berkeley (antiwar camp) and San Francisco (hippie/prankster camp). {Country Joe MacDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish, regularly attempted reconciliation but mostly to no avail, as it were.} Those on the East side of the Bay professed the view that the war was the one and only cause worthy of all the efforts and activism. Those on the West side (when you’re a Jet with Ruben) were more concerned with altering consciousness, environmentalism, back to nature intentional communitarianism, individual liberties and freedoms, and so forth. Lilly states, seeminglingly unequivocably, that the West siders (Pranksters, hippies, yippies, freaks, commune celebrants et al) were directly responsible for empowering the “man” to keep on keeping on in Vietnam. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Continue Reading »