what you're missing...

The reason there hasn't been content up here for a week or so isn't that there's nothing going on in the world, or in my life -- it's just that what I'm doing is staggeringly boring and self-involved (painting doors, building shelves, back and forth to the hardware store...etc), plus it warps my sense of everything else going on.

Finally, since 2002-03 I've been anticipating the summer of 2006 and the hotel workers campaign, which I'm now lucky enough to be involved in. Until we settle a contract in San Francisco, I won't be able to spend very much time at all on stuff that isn't my job, new house, or new marriage. I can't really offer many intimate details of the campaign, and I've already written plenty about the broad issues at stake.

So, like Tip said: hold tight.

why Prop 82 went down.

The failure of Prop 82 to pass in California this past Tuesday was the result of a set of suckily converging factors. Had it passed, Prop 82 would have funded universal pre-school for every four-year-old in California through an income tax increase on the state’s wealthiest one percent.

It got creamed, though. Here are a few of the reasons why:

1. Following years of questionable ballot initiatives, and a completely unnecessary and costly special election last November, Californians have developed a deep, lovingly nurtured grudge against the propositions in general. More and more voters simply vote no on every proposition in an effort to discourage people from bringing them to the ballot. I don't agree entirely with that philosophy, but there's no doubt that it's an inherently flawed system that's getting worse as more people with money and agendas enter the fray. Prop 82 was one of the genuinely good laws that, unfortunately, became a casualty of that legitimate resentment.
2. Rob Reiner has a reputation as a politically unsophisticated Hollywood liberal meddler. I’m not convinced that reputation is really deserved. He’s got a niche, just like Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston. But the opposition used every opportunity it could to refer to Prop 82 as " the Reiner Act," until it started to seem like he was hijacking the legislature.
3. Prop 82 was billed not as an increased funding initiative for preschool programs, but as a “universal” preschool program. That opened it up to the same familiar barrage of attacks that greets all proposals dealing with universal coverage of any kind: handouts to the middle class, failing to focus resources on the most needy, threatening private providers, etc.
4. This proposition involved taxing rich people, for no reason save their income. Good night.

This all sucks, because like I said it was a good law. It would have affected less than 1% of California taxpayers. It addressed the critical issues in the preschool crisis (teacher training, school construction, underserved areas). And it is a crisis, which our electeds, unlike in other states around the country, were completely dragging their feet on -- so it's actually a fairly legitimate use of the ballot initiative. I'm sure it'll be pursued in Sacramento now.

One last (obvious) thing: Voters seem to feel that pre-school, unlike kindergarten, is not worthy of public funding to make it universal – despite the fairly indisputable evidence that pre-school leads to better reading skills, lower dropout rates, higher incidence of matriculation, decreased crime, etc. It matters, and like kindergarten, pre-school represents a critical social investment that affects every member of any community. That’s why most industrialized countries have universal public preschools as well as universal public K-12 (or equivalent).

But not the U.S. Instead, preschool, like health insurance, college education, and affordable housing, has become a luxury item reserved for folks with money.

I have confidence that eventually, California will follow Illinois, Florida, Oklahoma, and Georgia in providing universal preschool. And I hope it'll be through legislation, so the Gap CEO Don Fisher and his crony all-star team can spend more energy finding tax loopholes and less hiring actors to play gentle, pragmatic, authoritative school principles (ethnic minorities preferred).

Search (Silly-) Strings

To hold y'all over until we've bought our new place and I can get back to goofing off at work.

Here are the choice strings from May '06.

not the same ben folds
I assume they're talking about the song, but it might also be this.

laurie anderson superman
Everything I love about this song, Camille hates with her whole heart.
But here's a nice ode from someone who shares my regard.

tumba palo cucuye is a song
Yes.

super timberlands that make you look taller
That's not what they do.

boo la migra
No astute comment, this just cracks me up. What search results would satisfy the originator of this string? Not to minimize the sentiment, but this is kind of the equivalent of getting up and typing "I'm hungry" into the Google search bar.

its not what you look like when you're doin what you're doin
Indeed.

evaluate article corporate social responsibility clive crook
Yeah, somebody should.

globalization affects old traditions.
No kidding, how about that?

By the way, I'm aware how self-referential (and self-congratulatory) these things are sometimes, so, a little humility:

janel moloney in her underwear
At first I kept wondering why this string appears over and over, month after month -- till I realized that they were all my searches.

riding to work two days ago...

Alek: "So, do you think we need to do that today?"
Camille: "No, it's not necessary."

[pause]

Camille: "It's unecessary."

[pause]

Camille: [quoting] "It's so necessary."
Alek: "..."
Camille: "Did you know I'm Jay-Z?"

[then, in the most surreal moment of my marriage to date...]

Camille: "But you can call me Hova."

AFL-C ya later

That pun in the title belongs to my sister, who's one of the flying purple people eaters.

Anyway, the Laborers (LIUNA) have broken from the AFL-CIO, which means 700,000 fewer members. They had been straddling, retaining membership in both the AFL and the Change to Win coalition, but no longer.

Now, this is good for a number of reasons. It diminishes the degree to which service sector unions dominate Change to Win, by adding construction workers to the farmworkers (UFW), truckdrivers (Teamsters), and carpenters that had already joined.

By freeing the LIUNA from AFL-CIO per capita dues, it allows the Laborers to fully make good on their commitment to prioritize organizing. They've been moving in that direction for a while, and growing fast, so now they will have a chance to put more ambitious programs into place.

Finally, it shows that the AFL-CIO's scare tactics don't work. Earlier this year, after the United Farm Workers disassociated, AFL president John Sweeney formally barred UFW locals from participation in labor councils. Apart from being bizarre, unfair, and possibly racist, a lot of folks speculated that the AFL was trying to send a message to other unions (particularly the Laborers and others in the building trades) about the consequences of disassociating. So much for that.

Quick Note: As part of the AFL/CtW agreement on political cooperation, the UFW was allowed back into the labor councils...so maybe that had something to do with this, but I doubt it. The LIUNA has been making noise about leaving for a while, and even set up their own building trades council separate from the AFL. Maybe they were waiting to see if the two federations would sort out their differences on the 06 election cycle, or maybe they just finally got it together.

Being the last person alive without cable television...

...I won't be able to watch Sorkin's new show when it debuts this fall.

But they did just release an extended 6 min. trailer on youtube.

I am wetting my pants.

I hope our new place has cable.

broker/therapist

Normally I don't just comment on press pieces, but this one hit pretty close to home. Since Camille & I are right smack in the middle of buying our first place, the headline "My Broker, My Therapist" naturally attracted my attention.

The article's definitely accurate in its contention that buying a home brings out the absolute worst in everyone involved. Anything that can be dredged up, will be. But, that said, a few quick things:

1) What kind of person (and especially what kind of spouse) complains, when her husband is buying a $3 million summer home for the family, "I wish you had a good job so we didn't have to live like this"? What would a "good job" be, exactly? And when you say "like this," what horrible circumstances, the result of your husband's sucky job, are you struggling to conceal? This doesn't seem like an instance of real estate offering a quick glimpse into someone's dark side -- this woman is suffering from compulsive greed and I doubt real estate has anything to do with it. Unless, of course, she was being sarcastic, which would be pretty funny.

2) What kind of person chooses an open house to reveal that she's pregnant? And who would do it in such an oblique way? It's one thing to keep it a secret for good reasons, but why decide, on the spur of the moment, to insist that you need a bigger apartment and then rub your belly in a significant way while saying nothing, like Charades? That's bizarre.

3) Somewhere in this article, it should have been mentioned that these people need actual therapy.


In other news, the Georgia Supreme Court is fine with you being a bigot, but you need to parse your bigoted arguments with a little more subtlety. What they really need to pass in Georgia is a statute that allows voters to hold utterly hypocritical views, thereby avoiding this "single-rule" nuisance.

lynx

I cleaned up and updated the links bar, so there's more & better stuff available.

alternate title: once upon a mattress

Following up on this rant, more news from the world of luxury bedding. UNITE HERE published a report last month on hotel housekeepers, their workload, and the amenities arms race currently being conducted by luxury hotel chains. It gathers data from recent surveys and publications, and also presents information from a multi-city survey conducted by the union itself.

Here’s the link to the report, and an accompanying summary of facts and figures which documents all the findings, and provides extra details on the industry as a whole.

I think this report does an excellent job of clearly and accurately presenting what’s at stake for hotel workers’ health and safety, without exaggeration or (too much) melodrama. The anecdotal testimony from housekeepers makes abundantly clear the need for workload reduction, but even more persuasive is the list of tasks per room that a hotel housekeeper is expected to perform:

Bedroom Tasks

✔ Remove all room-service items from room
✔ Strip bed(s) of all sheets, blankets and duvets
✔ Place bottom sheet on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Place top sheets and blanket on each bed and tuck 4-8 times
✔ Spread duvet on bed
✔ Remove 4-8 pillowcases per bed and stuff pillows into fresh cases
✔ Dust all nightstands and desk
✔ Carefully restock and arrange pens, papers and other written materials (i.e. room service menus) on desk
✔ Dust armoire or dresser, including behind the TV
✔ Clean TV screen
✔ Retrieve TV remote and rearrange TV channel guides
✔ Pick up trash and empty bedroom’s wastebasket
✔ Wash and dry ice bucket and rearrange on counter
✔ Collect, wash and dry dirty glasses
✔ Dust vents
✔ Put away all ironing boards and other equipment
✔ Vacuum all floors

Bathroom Tasks

✔ Pick up soiled towels and place on cart
✔ Replace soiled towels
✔ Clean and disinfect toilet bowl
✔ Wipe down top and side of toilet
✔ Restock toilet paper
✔ Wipe down counter tops
✔ Clean sink(s) and polish faucets
✔ Replace and arrange toiletries (i.e. shampoo, soaps)
✔ Clean bathroom mirror
✔ Wash and dry coffeepot and cups and rearrange on counter
✔ Scrub inside of bathtub
✔ Clean/replace shower curtain or scrub shower door
✔ Clean bath and shower walls
✔ Pick up trash and empty bathroom wastebasket
✔ Mop floor
✔ Dust vents

A few things to keep in mind. Many rooms have more than one bed, doubling some of the bedroom tasks. Some housekeepers are expected to clean 20 of these rooms a day, giving them about half an hour to complete a room. Inspectors visit their rooms regularly, and any incomplete task from the list above is grounds for discipline. Obviously these conditions improve markedly in union shops, but the workload issues still persist. In particular, all tasks that require maneuvering bedding become much more difficult – and dangerous – when the hotels upgrade amenities.

This issue has gotten a lot of press recently, and for good reason. The industry is posting record profits due to the amenities arms race, and in the process, literally breaking apart the bodies of the women who do the actual work.

Tom Hanks knows how to fake-piss

I just saw The Green Mile last night, and without doubt Tom Hanks' finest moment in the film is the tight shot of blissful relief spreading over his face during his first piss after John Coffey heals the urinary infection.

It reminded me of his endless pissing scene in A League of Their Own, which, until I saw The Green Mile, I considered his finest on-screen performance.

So, is this, like, his hidden specialty? I didn't see Philadelphia -- does he piss in that?

favela rising

Just a quick plug for Favela Rising, which Camille & I saw at the SF International Film Festival last week.

It's playing a lot around the country -- worth going to see, without question. Great material for people interested in music, community organizing, urban policing, etc. etc.

One disclaimer, though: It's not a particularly balanced or intellectually rigorous documentary, nor was it intended to be, I'd imagine. Just a good thing to keep in mind, especially if you don't know much about the subject matter.

U-M can finally eat food

Yesterday, UNICCO workers at the University of Miami won the freedom to choose a union through a variant of card-check neutrality. This will, I hope, continue to inspire other student groups to pursue campaigns like this on their campuses. It’s especially critical that these type of student-labor alliances flourish on Southern campuses, where neither the unions nor progressive students can rely on a union infrastructure. This just rocks so hard.

On a related note: I’ve heard educational institutions described as a “soft target,” for any of the following reasons:

• Their “product’s” value relies largely on the kind of prestige susceptible to public pressure.
• If public, they are funded directly by taxpayer dollars, if private, indirectly through grants.
• They are not perceived as profit-seeking enterprises, nor as vital engines for economic growth, so the imperative to reduce labor costs, especially at the expense of service to students, appears unseemly.
• They are expected to operate in an ethical manner and set that same example for students.

One theory goes that it’s not always good to focus on soft targets, since changing them has little effect on the “regular” targets that drive down standards and control industry. This argument holds water in some situations – like efforts to organize public employers while ignoring the vast private sector labor market. But in the case of universities, the “soft target” label doesn’t fit very well. For one thing, they often sub-contract with the largest operators in the service industry (like Sodexho and Aramark in food service), and universities may offer an opening foothold in unionizing these companies wholesale as opposed to contract by contract. For another – and this argument is as older than the hills round these parts – universities are grounded capital, growing in urban areas, and expanding services and jobs. So, in many cases, they can set local or regional standards in places where no other employer (or industry) could do so. They're increasingly emerging as the economic backbone of cities abandoned by other, more mobile industries. Finally, there’s all the ancillary benefits of having a unionized campus: training new activists, affecting the course of knowledge-production and research, etc. etc. etc. Those arguments take a lot of rhetorical energy to put together, and since I’m not organizing students I don’t have to make them anymore, thank fancy Moses. Go here for more.

Anyway, congratulations to the U-M workers, SEIU, and the students who fought so hard throughout for this precedent-setting win.

The Go! Team

Great American Music Hall
4/28/06

I saw The Go! Team last week, the night after Sekou Sundiata. But I decided, instead of reviewing the show, to just develop a list of all the relevant terms, ideas, comparisons that have accumulated over the last 2 years of unrelenting hype for this band. Originally I was gonna list them at the beginning of a longer review, to get them out of the way, but once done with the list I realized that I didn’t have much else to say. Feel free to explore these at your own leisure – Pitchfork, RS, VH1, et al have all covered the group.

Cheerleading
70s cop show soundtracks
Mixing issues (album & live)
Crowd participation
Original vs. US release
Record vs. live lineup
Why do they use sampled horns?
Ninja works the crowd
Two drummers
Buzz Band
Fatboy Slim/Public Enemy/Motown/etc./etc.
Experience/Exuberance

The show was a total rave-up, and the crowd was more into the band than any I’ve seen since the 2001 Okayplayer tour. So that was great. But intentional or not, mixing was pretty horrible. Based on the arrangements, I'd assume the density is intentional, but that's all the more reason for a good mix. It did help cover Ninja’s lame lyrics, but I thought the lame lyrics were sort of the point.

Swedish psychedelic rockers Dungen co-headlined. They look like they just left the Shire and grew 14 feet, and they play a weird, Scandinavian breed of hairy, stompfoot Viking rock. I think Jethro Tull would be the closest analogue, but that might just be the flute solo talking. The bassist, who we could barely see through the hobbit-fro, had the line of the night:

“Excuse me. We sing in Swedish, so if you do not understand…

...then that is the reason.”

Sekou Sundiata

Sekou Sundiata is basically a poet, of the spoken word variety as opposed to the Edna St. Vincent Millay variety, though in the last few years he’s transformed into more of a performance artist. I went down to Stanford last week to see the world premier of his new performance piece, The 51^st (Dream) State, which he’s been developing during a residence. As the title suggests, it’s sort of a dreamy rumination on American identity. The performance set-up for this new piece fairly resembles that of his critically-lauded blessing the boats: a full band on stages, vocalists, and Sundiata moving about speaking poetry and prose with musical backing. They had also erected a series of screens at the rear of the stage, which projected dancing, photo collage, and interview footage.

I can’t speak for the music in the last one, but The 51^st (Dream) State ran the gamut from jazz to gospel to raga and back again. I find this kind of hodge-podge wonderful to enjoy in the moment, and less memorable as time goes on. Programmatic music needs a pervading musical sensibility -- not necessary a strict genre, just a style and tone -- in order to communicate and sustain whatever themes it's intended to accompany. The Hindustani improvisation over Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” was jarring and beautiful at the time, but its disturbing effect fades in memory and the cavalcade of other musical styles that preceded and followed it effectively prevent listeners from gaining an understanding of its function within the whole. That's a major problem, and an easy way to make your audience into a bunch of glassy-eyed trout.

The same problem extended to the poetic content, unfortunately. When poetry is presented well (not that I’m much of a judge, but I have some experience due to my parents’ occupation and my own early aspirations), an audience over the course of an evening gains a sense of how the poet interacts with the world, and what he/she would like to reveal to you about it. Sundiata’s poetry, at times transcendent, at times aimless, did not accomplish this, at least not for me. He prefers to inundate you with words, imagery, and rhetoric, which may entertain you but will only communicate something substantive if he's exercised discipline in putting them together. I loved his trenchant re-vamping of the tired cliché “Everyone’s a nigga if you look at it right," and so did the rest of the crowd. Meanwhile, his first-person narrative of the confusion and horror immediately following a terrorist attack left the audience (included me) shocked and clammy – his character describes recognizing brain tissue, amongst the carnage, because it’s “ticking like a watch.” You don’t hear that everyday. Even the juxtaposition of taped interviews with a Japanese internment survivor and a post-9/11 Arab-American, heavy-handed as it was, did a good job bringing our struggle with American identity into relief.

Sundiata's weaker material simply rambled through a variety of clichés about facing up to our own injustice, greed, etc. I hate to say this of a respected poetry professor, but he sometimes kind of sounded like a sophomore AmStud major doing a book report on Notes of a Native Son. Which isn’t to say that the sentiments aren’t appropriate for the times, given the current, volatile conflict over what is and isn’t American. This was just a classic situation of trying to address much more than anyone could cover in two hours -- especially through the medium of song and poetry. Camille described it well when she said, leaving the theater, "I just wanted them to follow up something."

One last thing I’ll say: one thing I admired about The 51^st (Dream) State was that, of all the art I’ve seen in the last six years, I think it was the most comfortably situated in the 21^st century. It made no effort to be timeless, or to explore history separately from its relation to the present. It avoided various dated paradigms of race, gender, colonialism, etc., while confronting head-on violent acceleration of culture, commerce, and empire that has characterized the last decade. With more focus, any of these topics could have made for a challenging (and memorable) theme.

As it was, all I can say is that I saw Sekou Sundiata perform last week. I’m not too sure what he did.

Rainer Maria review

Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
Grunion Records
4/4/06

I was so far behind on this band, that when I became a fan of Rainer Maria, it was during not their first, not their second, but their third wave of popularity. It was about a year ago, when I saw them at Café Du Nord, which was both my first time hearing their music, and my first time eating Du Nord’s super-crispy Kennebec fries with chili ketchup and garlic aioli. Awesome night.

In the intervening year, I’ve developed a medium-sized obsession – somewhere between my consuming devotion to the Magnetic Fields and my vague infatuation with MF Doom. They’re from Wisconsin…which is nice. Not because they have a particularly Midwestern flavor, but because they don’t have the permeating (and infuriating) aura of being from New York, or the Bay Area scene, or – worst – fucking Montreal.

I love three-pieces, especially G-B-D types. Rainer Maria works on basically the same formula as The Who, although the content, performance, etc. are plenty different. Really virtuosic performers, who just tear into their instruments like they just bought them yesterday, filling up as much space as possible. I also have to admit that I like female bassists. Don't know why.

The new album is called Catastrophe Keeps Us Together, and it’s...sorta different, sorta not. The band smoothed out the sudden changes, abrasive vocals, and dissonance from the previous albums, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I love their last LP, Long Knives Drawn, because it sounds so much like their live show, full of careening energy and furious attacks. The new one is more controlled, more carefully arranged, less muddy. For the songs with depth, of which there are a handful, the added care improves the material. For the more banal songs (this poetically-themed band occasionally writes some pretty lame lyrics), the cleaner mix and simplified lines pushes the music dangerously close to modern-rock territory. On previous albums, slightly juvenile melodrama was well complimented with punk abandon. And you can’t fault bands that make this kind of music for writing simple lyrics – as with Sleater-Kinney, or The Walkmen, complex verbal exploration wouldn’t fit the tone or the style. That said, modern-rock + simple lyrics = Hootie, so you’ve got to be careful.

As with the last two albums, the first cut serves as the anthem, (see Long Knives Drawn’s “Mystery and Misery” or “Artificial Light” from A Better Version of Me). Cashing in on the post-millennial, pre-apocalypse tension, “Catastrophe” opens the album with a vaguely political alarm call/love song. It’s the best cut on the album, and even got me a little misty at the end, when Caithlin De Marrais repeats over and over: “I’ve got a plan/I’m gonna find you/at the end of the world.” What can I say, she’s hot and I’m a sucker for screamy professions of love against the odds.

Other album highlights: “So Terrified,” which would be cheesy if it weren’t so earnest and resolutely anti-cliché. “Bottle” is a great love song that employs the charmingly Garth Brooks-ish metaphor of love like a bottle to the head. “Already Lost” has a mounting anguish that purges itself through lots of thrashy chords and desperate wail, along with trademark "I'm sad/I'm ok/wait, am I?" lyrics:

I waited up all night
And my thoughts were all of desolation
But the best part of waiting up all night
Was in the morning when I didn’t feel a thing.

There’s some familiar stuff here, too. “Life of Leisure” is basically “Ears Ring,” a little watered-down and Interpol-ed (Peter Katis, the Interpol’s producer, did the first two cuts). “Clear and True” has a generic catchiness that I know Camille will love, and I’ll endure and probably sing along with mindlessly. Unfortunately, William Kuehn’s wild drumming can’t save “Make You Mine” from lines like “I’ll make you mine/Cause I love you so, tonight,” and Kyle Fischer’s endlessly inventive guitar work can’t save “Burn” from similar problems.

But the album as a whole is great, and I’m sure it’ll grow on me, because De Marrais’s voice is so affecting, and they play so well. If you don’t own a Rainer Maria album, and you’re interested, I’d recommend Long Knives Drawn or A Better Version of Me, to get a sense of what their best songwriting sounds like un-handicapped by “sophisticated” production. Also download “Catastrophe” from iTunes and try not to sing it under your breath.

Oh – also, Rainer Maria are going on tour to support the new album, and I can’t recommend their live show strongly enough. I’ve been seeing live music long enough not to trust the frequent impulse to buy an album as soon as the show’s over. But I did after the show last year, because they were having such a blast on stage, dancing around and tearing into the songs. Kyle Fischer, especially, is not to be missed. It probably depends on the mood, but on the live DVD, and at the show I saw, he was just shredding and doing some killer Pete Townsend moves.

Tour dates

Band website

Ask New Plastic Alek

I stole this idea from Alex Ross, though of course I've seen it elsewhere. I wouldn't have done it myself, but after finding "new plastic alek" among the search terms that returned my website last month, I figured that if I've got a nickname, I should answer some questions.

Yes, immigrant housekeepers are underpaid: find out more.

I'm no expert, but I think if the chorus of a song is "I'm Black and I'm proud," it probably does exemplify black power.

Janel Maloney is not ugly -- consult a physician for your problem.

Hey man, once you found Angelo Badalamenti's theme for Twin Peaks, weren't you wishing that someone had remixed it?

Wouldn't we all love to read the Nice & Smooth blog? Greg Nice's posts would probably be pretty similar to his lyrics. "Today I bought some Timberlands. Does that make you jealous, per se wishing you had some? Don't get p-noid like Sigmund Freud. By the way, I love women. Do the seats recline in your car?"

To whoever was looking for the main idea of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, let me know if you find it. Same goes for Sahlins' history of conjecture.

At least those folks are reading my college essays, instead of just downloading them from swipe pages.

For the millionth time, I'm a heterosexual white Jew: I know next to nothing about black male sexuality.

If you're an aspiring drum major searching for tricks, you've come to the wrong place -- unless you consider being tall and sick of band class a "trick."

And if you want to know what caused the holocaust, you've really come to the wrong place: try my mom.

Finally, this is all I know about your topic, sir. But they're newborns and they can't fly, so you can probably catch one and study it.

times is changin'/young niggas is agin'

Bloggin's gonna be spotty for a week or so more. Camille and I are looking at properties (or, in the proper parlance, "units") to actually buy with money and live in.

I can't describe how far that is from my youthful ideas about what I'd be doing at age 25. Not that this is worse. I thought I was going to be trying to make it as a professional clarinettist. Which meant, presumably, that when people asked me what I do for I living, I would have had to say "I'm a clarinettist." Glad I dodged that bullet.

I'm married. I have a cat, two fish, and a monthly car payment. I'm about to have a mortgage, and in a year and a half I'll be starting law school.

Things just ain't the same for gangstas.

*bends over, hands on knees, breathing deeply in and out*

aqui estamos y no nos vamos

A few reasons why Monday’s immigration rally in San Francisco was good.

1) It was short.

2) It had a mix of broad and narrow scope, i.e. Broad: Everyone deserves justice and citizenship in our country, regardless of where they came from or how they got here. No human being is “illegal.” Narrow: Boo HR 4437.

3) Our union was keeping things live with chants adapted (on the spot) for the occasion. "El pueblo-Arriba! La migra-a bajo!" etc. Local 2, baby.

There’s been tons of coverage on this issue already, obviously, and I’d expect that pretty much everyone reading this will be familiar with the relevant stuff here anyway. What interests me is the relation between the massive pro-immigration demonstrations (for lack of a better term), and the anti-war/anti-Bush mobilizations last month.

Leading up to, and following, the March 18 protests, I spent a lot of time talking with other folks in the movement about the effectiveness and utility of "mass mobilization." I’ve been complaining for a while now that, instead of being a focused demonstration of support for a particular change or set of changes, these anti-war mobilizations end up turning into Lefty-Con 2006. Hardly a rare complaint on the left, or anywhere else of the political spectrum for that matter, but no less valid for it. These are basically just large gatherings of people with similar, or related, or at least non-conflicting interests (like vegans and First Amendment advocates). That's why the proper term is "mass mobilization," as opposed to "protest." Well, really, I'm just splitting semantic hairs to prove the point -- I don't actually care what you call them. Anyway, Ben Adler wrote an article in Campus Progress last year about the September mobilizations, which I think sums it up very well:

Here we have the opportunity to bring together tens of thousands of Americans to implore someone (the president) with the power to grant a specific, achievable request (withdrawal from Iraq), and it may well be wasted. Where activists could demand a policy change that has significant and growing public support, too many choose to protest every U.S. policy under the sun.

…this view, in its attempt to be all encompassing, is in fact quite myopic; it trades actual gains for people suffering under occupation for the immediate satisfaction of unloading invective on every aspect of U.S. foreign policy for a day.

Should we resent people for believing in Lefty-con, or even just enjoying it? Well, obviously not -- and I admit that the part of myself I'm not crazy about frequently prompts me towards derision, either because I've decided to be holier-than-thou for the moment, or because I'm guilty about doing little to challenge US military aggression, or because I have a jerky knee despite my best efforts. But regardless of how mature I feel like being on a given day, I still don’t go to “mass mobilizations” as a rule. I don’t get much out of them, they’re rarely effective in my view, and I believe my time could be better spent working on focused campaigns, or taking a break from work on focused campaigns. And I won’t be arrogant enough to say I’ve heard every counter-argument to my position, but I’ve heard plenty. Think globally, act locally. Show the rest of the world visible resistance to the Washington consensus. Give activists a chance to communicate, recharge their “batteries,” get pumped. Etc. etc. etc.

Here’s the thing: it seems like whenever I ask organizers and attendees a few direct, strategic questions, things get way too murky for my taste. Who’s in charge of making the change you want to see happen? What do you think is most likely to influence their decision? Assuming they’re not inclined to make the change of their own volition, what do we believe will persuade them, threaten them, or leave them no option but to make that change? Those are the critical strategic questions to me. If you want to win change, as opposed to just demanding it, then strategic questions should be at the center of every action you perform and every dollar you spend.

If, for instance, I thought that mass mobilizations of leftists had any significant impact on the people who set U.S. military policy, then I would attend them. Unfortunately, even if they did have an effect, the mass mobilizations would still require a focused aim. The goal of gathering a whole lot of people in one place, or multiple places at once, ought to be to demonstrate that an enormous number of people were capable and willing to join together to push/oppose a particular course of action. And either the numbers, the demographics, the location, or the activity (ideally all) should demonstrate to people in power that they need to heed the will of the gatherers. Meanwhile, all that Lefty-Cons demonstrate is that thousands of leftists understand how to operate a listserve, and are willing to indulge each other for a short period of time. I know that sounds harsh, but it's hard for me to imagine how this kind of event would inspire someone (in an accountable way) to further action. I’m all for it if it does. And if there’s literally no other way to transform that person into a progressive, critically thinking, active member of society, then all the more reason for mass mobilizations to take place. I'm trying to work the scorn out of my system, and replace it with bland support, or at least indifference. But without clear, persuasive answers to the strategic questions I posed above, you will not find me there.

All that said, the immigration protests were the exact opposite of Lefty-con. There's pending legislation in Congress that will profoundly affect millions of immigrant families, communities, and the U.S. economy. Moreover, it will set the course for future federal decisions in this area, and public opinion is in flux.

Should we have a march for immigrant rights, human rights, no more sweatshops, organizing rights, and fair trade? No. We should have a march opposing the crappy legislation, and supporting a humane, just immigration policy to be implemented now, or at least begun now, while there’s a window. We’ve got legislation that’s up in the air, a critical wedge issue in the 2006 midterms, and a group of people that haven’t had any voice on the national stage since 2003. Politicians who are in charge of drafting and approving this legislation are watching their constituents because they know what's at stake. They're seeing business and labor unite on lobbying day, and they're seeing huge numbers of "legal," voting immigrants (and the naturalized-by-birth children of "illegals") turn out across the country. They're seeing the politicization of immigrant communities that are less than a generation old, and growing at enormous rates in hundreds of major cities. That covers who's in charge and who/what might be likely to influence their decision. It's clear that the organizing is there to make this one of the crucial political issues of the next ten years, and that leaves people and powerful institutions with no choice but to address it. Also, sad to say -- it's here in town, not across the world. Unlike US foreign policy, we have immediate and effective ways to confronting the injustice in our own communities, which means that voters, workers, taxpayers, and consumers can be mobilized to exert pressure directly on the folks that make these decisions.

RIP William Sloane Coffin Jr.

I tried a few times to summarize Sloane Coffin's life, or express the lasting impact his work had, and will continue to have, on everyone that struggles for social justice.

But it's the end of the day and I'm wiped out. And tonight is Pesach.

So instead of waiting a long time to gather my thoughts, I'll just echo his most famous quote, in the hopes that it causes you to pause for a moment and mark his passing.

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."

(In fairness, his most famous quote is probably the one about winning the rat race and still being a rat, but this one seemed more appropriate)

pesach

Passover begins tonight at sundown.

Josh, as usual, has put a lot more thought into this than I would have (or at least he linked to previous moments when he'd put thought into this).

I'll just add that the janitors at the University of Miami are entering their second week of a hunger strike for organizing rights, and that when we feast tonight we should remember not only those who hunger in a world of plenty, but also those whose hunger for justice has brought us -- and continues to bring us today -- ever closer to the promised land.

In case that was a little preachy, I'll also point out the the UM students straight GAFFLED an idea from the Better Way Village at Yale. Look at this picture, taken at UM last week:



Now look at this one, taken at Yale in April 2003:




I know, the mock negotiating table idea has been used before. This was too blatant to pass up, plus the 3-year anniversary of the BWV is coming up on Friday.