On the other hand, this Steve Brozak character who’s apparently running for Congress in New Jersey comes off as a cross between a bad SNL sketch and a marionette. Who knew a person could go so long moving his fist back and forth in exactly the same arc, opening and closing his mouth the same way, and keeping the rest of his body perfectly still? That, and while I know this “wouldn’t hesitate for a moment before deploying the army to destroy the terrorists” business isn’t targetted at me, suffice it to say it manages to come off as disingenuous and troubling at the same time.
Tag Archives: language
The Times makes a poor attempt to contrast Kennedy’s and Obama’s speeches last night:
If Mr. Obama reached for the middle with his promise of a new kind of politics under Mr. Kerry, Mr. Kennedy spoke to the most fervent and frustrated Democratic voters, weary after four years out of power.
This unfortunate sentence echoes some of the false synechdoches I find most frustrating in the way we discuss politics in this country: Eliding a positive vision with moderation and a negative critique with extremism, partisanship with ideology, open-mindedness with moderation, and the disengaged or disenfranchised with the moderates. Kennedy’s speech touted the historic accomplishments of the Democratic party and condemned the crimes of the Bush Administration. Obama’s drew on his narrative and those of his neighbors to craft a vision of the urgency and potential of democratic politics. There’s no cause to identify the former as a more radical project than the latter, and strong ground on which to argue the reverse.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, given the tremendous success of Obama’s speech and the lack of Black leaders with popularity and credibility articulating the right’s view of the path to Black uplift, that some conservatives would try to claim the speech as their own. Witness Roger Clegg’s flat attempt over at the National Review‘s Corner:
Barack Obama gave a fine speech, but it was not a speech that reflects the current Democratic Party. It celebrated America as “a magical place”; it did not bemoan our racism and imperialism. It professed that this black man “owe[d] a debt to those who came before” him; it did not call for reparations. It spoke of an “awesome God”; it did not banish Him from public discourse. It admitted that black parents, and black culture, need to change the way black children are raised; it did not blame or even mention racism. It quoted “E pluribus unum” and translated it correctly as “Out of many, one”; it did not misquote it, as Al Gore infamously did, as “Many out of one.” Most of all, the speech celebrated one America, “one people,” and rejected the notion of a black America, a white America, a Latino America, and an Asian America–a notion completely foreign to the multiculturalism that now dominates the Democratic Party.
Give me a break. It’s always been the work of the left to recognize and reclaim what is great about the reality of this country, what is greater about its ideals, and what broken promises maintain the gap between the reality and the ideal. Hence the appropriateness of Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” as a centerpiece of the Kerry campaign: The poem calls out and decries the myriad ways in which America falls short of the American ideal, makes appeal to an inherited vision of America, and yet recognizes that the dream of a just America past is itself a construct, that America never was fully America, but rather might just someday be through a struggle which begins with recognizing what is broken. As Obama says:
I’m not talking about blind optimism here – the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores.
It’s only by falling back on the tired and baseless image of Democrats as visceral America-haters that Clegg can pretend that Obama’s patriotism leaves him out of place at the Convention. And it’s only by falling back on a similarly tired and baseless image of Democrats as deniers of the agency of the disenfranchised that Clegg can label his claim of individual and collective responsibility as conservative. While I and others might question Obama’s choice to compare waste in the Pentagon and welfare budgets, or his implication that stigma is attached to Black success based simply on choices made by Blacks, they show up in the speech to clarify his central assertion about the urgency of collective action. The idea that human beings bear no agency or responsibility is not a Democratic one, and it’s not a leftist one either, unless Rush Limbaugh is granted the authority to define the left. What is a leftist idea – and sometimes a Democratic one – is that human responsibility extends beyond the individual, or the family, to a broader community, that problems faced by collectives can be faced and defeated through collective action, that government in its purest and most justified form represents a vehichle for the achievement of individual strivings and collective aspirations through collective solutions – and that when a community, and its government, abdicate its responsibility to those wronged, they erodes, not protect, the conditions for the flourishing of the human liberty to which they are each individually born. As Obama says:
If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum.
And to argue that Obama’s celebration of that unum, and his assertion that there’s “one America,” make him an anti-multiculturalist depends on an assumption that that one America is defined on the terms of its white constituents. Clegg would be right to argue that Obama’s no separatist – but neither are the Democrats, and neither are many on the left either. But the narrative he tells of his Kenyan and Kansan parents isn’t a melting pot that forges homogeneity either – he even uses the d-word which has become anathema in National Review circles:
My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ”blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential…I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my two precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.
I’d like to know more about Obama’s family and his struggle for and forging of a personal identity. Fortunately, he’s written a meditation on the topic, “Dreams of My Father,” which I hope to read soon. Maybe Roger Clegg should too.
Looks like Errol is (not surprisingly, given the number of debates the two of us have had previously over this issue) celebrating the NLRB decision stripping graduate student workers of legal recognition of their right to organize. Errol contends that this represents “Finally a common sense decision by the NLRB.” I’d say common sense explains the motivation behind this decision – as part of a broader Bush agenda of chipping away workers’ rights through court decisions, executive orders, and legislation, and as one with tremendous cache with certain University Presidents, including some with significant influence – but that that’s about the only relationship common sense and this decision have. There are a lot of points to be made in this argument; for now I’ll stick to responding to those Errol brings up directly.
It’s always been especially telling to me that the graduate student unions have all changed the name of what they do to being “graduate employees” in order to fight this battle. What does that say to me? Well it says that there is a PR game and that most people don’t actually see them as employees at all, so it’s necessary to confront them with the idea. “See I am an employee, because my wannabe union has the word employee in it.” That sort of thing.
This is a cheap and, I’d say, pretty misleading argument. The people subject to this decision are students at the Universities in question and employees of these universities. Sometimes they call themselves graduate employees because those two words communicate that they are both graduate students and employees. Hence GET-UP, Graduate Employees Together, U-Penn. Yale’s parallel union is called GESO, Graduate Employee Student Organization (Light and Truth alleged last year that the fact is was called GESO rather than GSEO showed its members were lazy students. I’ll like to hear them pronounce GSEO). I’m not sure what Errol means when he says that they “changed the name of what they do,” although he certainly makes it sound sinister. What they’ve done, rightfully, is come up with various phrases which allude to the multiple identities they take on simultaneously in the academy. I’d guess it’s the confluence of those identities, not their reflection in names, which Errol and others have a problem with:
That being said, it is obvious that graduate students do work, and probably much of it. Why doesn’t that make them employees of the university and not students? The only thing that separates the two is the possibility of the award of a professional degree. All the other people who recieve payment from the university who are employees are not being paid in their capacity as degree candidates, and it seems to me someone being paid in their capacity as a degree candidate should be considered a student. The payment that the university extends to it’s graduate students for their work is more akin to the financial aid of an undergraduate being paid in work study than it is to a teacher in secondary education.
To insist that GESO members are not “employees and not students” is to take down a straw man argument – GESO members have never contended not to be students. What they are is employees and students. The receipt of educational certification from an employer doesn’t make them as singular a phenomenon as Errol seems to suggest. Apprentices organized some of the first unions in this country so as to better secure the conditions and compensation they deserved for the significant work they were doing while training under their employers. Stipends and benefits for graduate student teaching assistants and researchers are not comparable (except in that both are too low…) to financial aids grants for undergraduates because, while the university’s award of financial aid is hopefully grounded in an understanding that education at the university is strengthened by the presence of a more diverse student body, undergraduates are not being compensated for the provision of a service to the school. Just ask the IRS, which recognizes the former, and not the latter, as salaries. Meanwhile, it’s Yale’s administration, not GESO, which has for the past months engaged in covert and strategic renaming, couching the teaching and research requirements for graduate employees in new language as academic requirements in anticipation of a new NRLB ruling. The fact of the matter is that graduate students are doing over 30% of the work of teaching at our august university, and that they are replacing paid faculty in doing so.
The [generalized] University’s obligation to all its students to provide an atmosphere conducive to learning is perhaps it’s highest one and that being said, it matters very much to that atmosphere if a graduate students’ family doesn’t have an affordable health care plan, or enough money to eat well balanced meals. The University should take care of these needs, and, if the best way to assure that it is in tune with the needs of its students is to recognize them as a group rather than a collection of individuals, I certainly believe that the University should do that. The University should also be perceptive to the outcries of its students that they want to be represented collectively because it’s in the best interest of both the students and families involved and the University to do so. However, that group, those families, that collectivity, are not, and shouldn’t ever be considered a union.
No organization (certainly not the Graduate Student Assembly) has acheived as much for Yale’s graduate students as GESO, whose organizing drive has won the concessions on stipend increases, childcare, international visa reform lobbying and a score of other issues which then become repackaged by Yale’s administration as further evidence of why Yale’s graduate students don’t need a union. That’s because no other type of body has demonstrated the same capacity to leverage pressure, represent constituents, and effect change. But we needn’t just look at Yale. Graduate student unions across and beyond this country have won landmark agreements with universities protecting the institutional support, resources, and freedoms whose procurement by graduate student employees, as Errol says, are vital to the health of the university for all its members. Why shouldn’t graduate employees pursue collective representation through unionization?
It doesn’t do justice to the struggles of everyday working people by calling it so, but most of all, it doesn’t represent the truth of the situation.
But it does represent the truth of the situation, which is that these unions’ members are workers with a right to organize protected by the Wagner Act and the Declaration of Universal Human Rights. They receive payment for the work they do for an employer, and unlike most undergraduates, the majority of them depend on the funds they receive from the university to support themselves and often dependants (this proportion rises as the benefits provided by the university rise, and as this proportion rises, so does the diversity of the graduate employees). The construction of a group called “everyday working people” as the proper constituents of a union, and of a distinction between that group and the workers in question – be they teachers, writers, waiters, nurses, or graduate employees – is not new, and neither is the struggle of every group of workers to demonstrate and defend their right to organize. These struggles absolutely have different contours, and different stakes. But they remain parallel struggles, and while a good number of Yale undergraduates believe that the question of whether Mary Reynolds, GESO Chair and American Studies Teaching Assistant, has the same right to a union that Bobby Proto, Local 35 President and pipefitter does, is a question of whether Mary’s is more or less oppressed than Bobby, my experience is that many fewer members of Local 35 and Local 34 (Yale’s service and maintenance and clerical and technical unions, respectively) see it that way. My experience is that many more members of Locals 34 and 35 see their stake in GESO’s right to organize as similar to Local 35’s stake in Local 34’s right to organize back in 1984, when conventional wisdom was that “pink collar unions” were a contradiction in terms which would destroy the collegiality and intellectual vigor of the university. What doesn’t do justice to their struggle for the right to organize is not GESO’s campaign for the same right, but rather Yale’s campaign, with the unfortunate assistance of the Bush administration and the NLRB, to deny it.
The Democrats’ choice to have a response to Bush tonight by Bill Richardson simulcast in Spanish is a good one on both counts: The Democrats can use Spanish without hypocrisy because unlike the GOP, they haven’t been fighting to keep the fastest-growing language in the US out of schools and voting booths (certain elements, of course, can be depended on to deride this, like any move for inclusion or any policy benefiting people of color, as patronizing/ race-baiting/pandering); and Richardson is a successful and respected Southern Latino Governor who recently came into the spotlight negotiating with North Korea – and an excellent candidate for Vice President.
Laying the groundwork for the unveiling of his new new tax plan, Bush has trotted out the tired accusation of “class warfare” to fend off criticism. “Class warfare,” when used by Republicans or DLC-leaning Democrats, labels comparison of, say, a tax cut’s impact on the rich and the poor in this country, or the level of economic stratification in the US and Norway, as an attempt to pit one class against another. The vitality of the term seems directly linked to its efficacy and its elegance – it removes the need to enter the fray and address the gaping inequalities in this country, it reframes cooperation as the agreement of all people to grin at the gains of the privileged few, and it does so with just the appropriate hint of red-baiting to scare off opponents without seeming, say, “partisan.” The Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s, with equal logic, could be described as “race warfare,” insofar as it addressed injustice in racial terms. Today’s Republicans, however, are all too eager to take credit for that one – in part because it gives them the chance to portray opposition to Affirmative Action as a logical continuation of the same process. The extreme of the conservative stance on race today, in fact, is epitomized by Ward Connerly’s recent description of race as a “cancer,” we must “consign to the ash heap of history” – thus his campaign in California to forbid the government to track whether, say, Black drivers are stopped more often than White drivers, or White women on welfare are sent to vocational training programs, while Black women are sent to “dress for success” classes – solve racial injustice while ignoring it. Conservatives cannot as easily demand that the government not keep track of family income (not that none will try), but they can try to sweet-talk voters into turning away the “anachronistic,” “partisan,” “divisive” politics of “class warfare.” Only such a choice will give them a free pass to bring back that pizza napkin creation “trickle-down economics,” one of many 80’s ideas (like slap bracelets) that some just aren’t ready to give up. Public jobs are socialism, we’re told – the best way to create jobs is to flood the top with enough money that a little bit can’t help but slip on down. Never mind, for example, the role of consumer demand, rather than management budget, in determining hiring and firing… If you look left or right at what conservative-style capitalism has wrought, you won’t be looking up to notice the windfall trickling down… Bush, keep in mind, is a “compassionate conservative,” “a uniter, not a divider.” Look for a long-overdue extension of unemployment benefits and economic bail-outs for the state governments whose economic crises are most embarrassing as the proverbial canaries in the magician’s hand to distract us from the proverbial elephant behind him – generous tax breaks for the usual suspects. Welfare rolls are climbing, unemployment is climbing, and the Bush solution is…tax cuts on stock dividends. But don’t worry – Bush “understand[s] the politics of economic stimulus.” Decades ago, the Rev. King declared, “To end humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task.” Accusations of class warfare should be rejected for what they are – baseless tarring of those of us who think solving problems tends to start with addressing them.
Josh Eidelson 