Never Mind about the Revolution

Amiri Baraka said Thursday night that "the most obvious infantile left anarchist error" would be not supporting Barack Obama this election.  Since the revolution is not coming (and I am inclined to take his word over George Katsiaficas', even though my UMass students seemed sort of revolutionary this week: they made a smiley face on the board next to the Malcolm X quote, "Let the dying be reciprocal"), we should work for Obama so we can pressure him to get the means of production under control, abolish the electoral college and the senate ("all the senate does is keep its foot on the neck of the house of representatives"), and form a united front government of international unions, the petit bourgeoisie, farmers, and I think there might've been another group that I didn't write down. (This sounds a lot like Lauren Berlant's description of the precariat, a concept/organizing principle that is really big in Europe right now.) So what we need is direct democracy and compulsory voting ("if they can tax you, they can make you vote"). And if we work for Obama and then demand accountability from him, maybe he will stop listening to corporations and start listening to the people.

Contrast this with Noam Chomsky's recent evaluation of Obama: "Yeah, Ronald Reagan made change alright. He changed a lot of people from alive to dead." But Amiri Baraka seems to believe in Obama's capacity to inspire--he was talking about students in Texas marching to get a polling place on campus, and he also attributed to Obamania the fact that Newark had gone 43 days without a murder ("the mood is different"). So part of this is Obama's power as a Kennedyesque cipher who can inspire challenges to capitalism and white supremacy (patriarchy, not so much) even if he is not challenging those things so overtly. Or at all. But I think Amiri Baraka really believes Obama might be amenable to substantively changing our political system.

 

He continued to emphasize this point in the Q & A, when a reunion with an old comrade from the Socialist Workers Party quickly devolved into a shouting match. Amiri Baraka said, "You're from the SWP? You people can't get elected to the school board!" And also, "So tell me, where's the revolution? Do you see any revolution around here?" At which point the guy turned around and left the hall. I guess he didn't want to waste his time if the conditions weren't right.

Anyway, I still think we should protest at the DNC. There's a new movie about the 1968 protests and ensuing trial that looks really exciting. I think it's one of those cartoon-hybrid movies,  like that one where Keanu Reeves discovers that the government is getting people addicted to drugs and then engineering the war on drugs so they can arrest people and force them to work on the farms where they're growing the drugs in the first place. Speaking of which, Amiri Baraka's 9/11 conspiracy theory seemed kind of convincing to me: he was an Air Force pilot before he was dishonorably discharged for reading Marx, and he explained that the second a plane goes off course the government knows about it and radios the pilots and if they don't hear from the plane, they shoot it down. And this was hours that the planes were flying completely off course. I don't know, doesn't that seem sort of plausible, given how diabolical this administration has been in so many other ways?

Candidates' Stance on Education

Candidates have remained mum as to whether they would can NCLB; publicly their stance is that NCLB needs considerable tweaking before it is reauthorized.

Obama cites some research which sounds like my organization's findings on drop outs (drop outs show evidence of wanting to go back to school, also mentions Diploma Plus); relatively little on higher ed accountability. On teacher policy, threads a pretty cautious path between support and accountability, with strong emphasis on more pay and mentoring. Cites Denver plan as a model for compensation as an incentive. On college access, mentions Gear UP and Trio.

Competitive Grants for Evidence-Based Models to Help Students Graduate: Studies show that a majority of students who leave high school without a diploma continue to pursue the goal of high school graduation. Unfortunately, states and districts lack the resources to make substantial investments in alternative education pathways. Non-profit and community-based organizations have tried to fill in the gap, but they lack substantial resources. As president,Barack Obama will establish a competitive grant process open to existing or proposed public/private partnerships or entities that are pursuing evidence-based models that work - such as Diploma Plus or Teacher Advisor programs. These grants will decrease the dropout rate by increasing the capacity of state and district leaders as well as outside leaders - foundations, politicians, entrepreneurs, and community leaders - to collaborate on improving graduation rates.

Hilary Clinton's platform both discusses her record and makes proposals for how she would spend money. A strong proponent of universal Pre-K, Clinton's plan also talks of creating greater alignment between K-12 and higher education standards. This also includes greater financial investment in the country's community colleges as well as ensuring facility in the transfer of earned credits. Considerably more concrete than Obama's with this reference to its interests on drop outs and higher ed:


Identify at-risk youth early on and provide $1 billion in intensive interventions, such as early college high schools and multiple pathways to graduation, to get them back on track. Double the after school program to ensure that 2 million young people have a safe and stimulating place to go between 3 and 6 p.m. Invest $100 million in a new public/private summer internship program. Provide opportunity for 1.5 million disconnected youth in job programs linked to high-growth economic sectors.



McCain doesn't have education as a topic on his website.

The Savage Book Corner: The Lengthy and Wondrous Wait for Oscar Wao

It was the elephant in the room whenever my friends and I interacted with Junot Díaz, or had a Junot sighting. For 10+ years we have been anticipating Junot’s “soon to be released forthcoming novel”: a follow-up to Drown, his collection of short stories largely credited for his stature as a premier young writer for said period of time. I can only wish I get as much mileage out of anything I write.1

While the novel begins auspiciously, offering footnotes on the last century of Dominican history that would have made Mr. Cliffsnotes himself salivate with envy, soon afterwards, the footnotes mysteriously disappear. I was left to wonder when this transition had occurred until I realized the narrator had somehow slipped into the plot and become an actual character in the story. Not only that, but he unrealistically knows all this shit about Oscar’s family--his sister, cousins, grandmothers, parents, you know the rest….

Oscar’s story is so minimal in the broader scheme of this novel that I forgot about Oscar and focused my attention on the female characters in the book; they are the most developed characters in the book and essentially its backbone. Unfortunately, the gender politics leave much to be desired. Throughout the novel, Oscar is to represent the moral antithesis of the Dominican mujeriego.2 However, the novel culminates with Oscar having lived a good life because he had managed in unrealistic time to get a makeover, go back to D.R., have sex with an older woman, and get himself killed by the woman’s man for having all types of cojones.3 The problem with the ending is that instead of continuing to subvert the politics of Dominican masculinity, it forces us to celebrate Oscar's transition from nerd to stud. A friend of the savage detectives believes that “Oscar should have been gay.” While I see her point, I don’t agree completely with the notion that every male who is sensitive, emotionally fragile, or a bookish nerd has to be gay.

I love the novel’s subtle fusion of how sci-fi of the first-world and the “magic-realism” (for lack of a better term) of the developing world, i.e. D.R., is not so different as the genre purist might lead us to believe.

Oscar made his public debut late in 2007, just in time for the holidays and for thoughtful fellow blogger, Molly, to gift me a copy. THANK YOU MOLLY!! Now that I am living in Boston, we should really up our efforts to become friends with Junot.

1.You won’t have to worry about waiting as long for the release of the second novel; I only have one good novel in me, and that is all I am promising to deliver to the world.
2.Mujeriego=playa
3.Cojones=mad guts!
4.These whore-with-a-heart-of-gold/sexual-initiator characters are SO TIRED!

Romance Kills: The Global Gift Economy

It's not just conflict diamonds. Or plastic surgery deaths. Or the monumental waste of destination weddings.

In Kenya and Colombia, two of the world's largest flower-exporting countries, the mostly female flower industry workers face criminally long hours, repetitive stress injuries, mandatory pregnancy tests and other forms of blatant gender discrimination, and pesticide-related illnesses, all so the inarticulate global elite can reinforce heteronormativity and subjugate their partners and crushes (see Derrida on the gift economy) by saying it with flowers.

Click here for the campaign to stop Dole Fresh Flowers from crushing unions formed by their workers at their Flores la Fragrancia, who formed the Untrafragrancia union in response to repeated labor violations and the horrible working conditions sketched above.

Here's another petition in support of Colombian flower workers and their right to organize.

Also, has Obama begun to dissent from the neoliberal agenda? In a recent speech in Wisconsin, he questioned the benefits of "trade deals like NAFTA," at least for U.S. workers. So now will he rethink stances like his recent support of the Peru Free Trade Agreement? Will he abandon the creepy patriotic rhetoric and expand his framework to include a conception of global labor rights? Like the plaintive signholder braving the pouring rain in Central Square all day Super Tuesday, "I HOPE[,] OBAMA."

Lies and Damn Lies with Statistics: The Roger Clemens Story

I spent this morning in Somerville Hospital’s ER
waiting room watching Brian McNamee and Roger Clemens
testifying before a congressional committee on Capital
Hill over Clemens’ alleged use of performance
enhancement drugs. This is the most important stop on
the Clemens tour to save his reputation, his
credibility, and his butt from going to jail.

In response to being mentioned 82 times in the
Mitchell Report for using federally banned performance
enhancement substances, Roger Clemens and his PR team
have embarked on a massive campaign to convince us
otherwise. One of the primary tools employed in this
campaign involved the publication of a statistical
report that through its extensive number-crunching is
to provide “robust” evidence of how it was feasible
for a pitcher in his late 30s/early 40s to be
conceivably more effective than he was when athletes
are believed to be at their athletic prime—their 20s
and early 30s. After all, numbers don’t lie, or do
they...?

The report purports to “evaluate the career of Roger
Clemens, one of the most successful pitchers in major
league history. It will examine both the quality and
quantity of his pitching over the course of his
24-year career.” The report’s omission of an executive
summary; its absence of a framework; lack of explicitness in comparison group selection; and nonexistent rational methodology all make the report less palatable for public consumption, which raises the question of who exactly is the intended audience for the report. Furthermore, it is hard to extrapolate the research question(s) from the paper's multiple data tables, its redundant text, and its didactic tone. This is why I am grateful an article dissecting the Clemen’s report appeared in
this Sunday’s New York Times.

Given the shortcomings of the Clemens Report highlighted in the Times article, perhaps Mr. Clemens would have best been served by arguing that his stellar performance during the past 8 years was, in fact, freakish. If anything, in every data set there are always a few points that are disregarded because they deviate from the established norm.

Flat Earth Watch

Check out this review of a new book by economist Ha-Joon Chang debunking Thomas Friedman's flat earth theory.  It's not as radical as it could be (not, for example, exposing the entire system of free trade as an exploitative sham), but it does explain how free trade policies are about powerful countries, who themselves became rich by protecting their own markets, forcing poor countries to open their markets in the name of development.

If you want you can also read my comment,which is the 6th one down, entitled "We were never good samaritans." It was 4:10 in the morning so my use of pronouns is a little ambiguous, but I was trying to explain how from 1947-73, which the book argues was the golden age of U.S. Good Samaritanism, the United States actually set the stage for neoliberalism by deposing democratically elected leaders all over the world and installing dictators who would capitulate to our economic interests. 

And while we're on the subject, I also want to say that those of us on the left should be very afraid of the Democratic candidates lionizing misogynist racist warmongers like JFK and LBJ, both of whom  sold out the civil rights movement in favor of military adventurism (see JFK giving a speech about the "southern half of the globe" as "the great battleground for the expansion of freedom today" on the very day in May 1961 that the first Freedom Riders were imprisoned in a show trial; LBJ drowning out, then selling out Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention in favor of the segregationist delegation; LBJ defunding Head Start to pay for the war on Vietnam, explaining later, in that fun folksy way of his,  how "that bitch of a war killed the lady [he] really loved--the Great Society").  I suppose this is all of a piece with our backlash-fueled misremembering of the sixties generally, but the fact that Hillary and Barack are extolling the virtues of men whose main achievements were leading us into a horrible, vicious, immoral war is something we should be figuring out and watching closely. Protest at the DNC anyone?

 

Bill Gates Has Epiphany 150 Years After Marx!

Bill Gates has been thinking recently that perhaps capitalism isn’t working. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal,

“Three weeks ago, on a flight home from a New Zealand vacation, Mr. Gates took out a yellow pad of paper and listed ideas about why capitalism, while so good for so many, is failing much of the world.”

Another epiphany includes the realization that unfettered capitalism, with its focus on generating profits for a few, does a disservice to the majority of people throughout the world. Read more here.

That's not feminism! (Or is it?)

Twice in the last 24 hours, I've been stopped by middle-aged white women and regaled with stories of H. Clinton's right to the presidency. The first time, the woman was fairly kooky: she had made her own buttons that said "Clinton Now, Obama Later," which confused me (later meaning at the convention? In 2012?), and when Patricia asked her about HRC's militarism with regard to Iran, the woman said, "She'll get us out of Iran, don't worry." She was also explaining how middle America is so racist, they'll never elect "a black." Of course, she has no problem with him, except his supposed lack of readiness. It's the other people.

The second time, though, it was an ostensibly reasonable librarian who caught me off guard, after she had just exhaustively explained how she was going to present the library's resources to my students. (The only thing duller than a presentation of electronic databases on an overhead projector is hearing the plan for that presentation in excruciating detail.) She explained to me that we know sexism is worse than racism because rich white men are voting for Obama. And she kept doing this thing where she would say, "it's the boys club she's up against, all the white men, and then Hillary--oops, I mean, you know, Obama's not white, but still." She did this over and over--indicating that Obama's racial difference didn't matter? That we live in a post-racial society?

It's not that I didn't sympathize with her critiques of the virulent attacks on Clinton, attacks that seem to focus on her gender rather than her politics. Particularly, I think the media attention to her body and clothing is totally disgusting. I voted for Obama (after supporting erstwhile populist hopeful Edwards, despite his obnoxious comments about Clinton's clothing), but I wasn't full of hope or change, and I continue not to be. Neither candidate has convinced me that he or she will put the interests of people before the profits of corporations. I just thought Obama might be a tad less inclined to imperialism, and I still think so.

If it were just the kooky button makers and ostensibly reasonable librarians of Cambridge, it would be alright. Then I could explain to them that second-wave feminism is not about ranking oppressions; rather, I would say, it's about understanding how different kinds of oppression work together, and how women can be oppressed in certain ways while at the same time oppressing other women, or men, or themselves. That's why consciousness raising was so important to the movement, and why feminism is proto-deconstructionism: because feminism gives us the tools to understand and fight all kinds of oppressive systems.

Unfortunately, I might be wrong. Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem are also working hard to prove that sexism trumps racism, making horrific comparisons to hypothetical white-supremacist speech and action as if racism isn't happening in this country every second (see the previous post). And this really got me thinking: have I been wrong about radical feminism? Are its roots in the civil rights movement and the abolition movement, where white women made their claims to rights through analogies to racial oppression, perpetually reducing the debate and writing women of color out of the equation (or worse, arguing that they were already liberated because of the matriarchal culture Moynihan theorized in his classic synthesis of racism and misogyny), too strong to be overcome?

So, a few conclusions, in outline form:

I. We're living in an incredible moment of backlash against BOTH civil rights AND feminism. We need to think about how the right has connected their racist and misogynist agenda by

a)constructing deviance as both racially and gender/sexuality coded

b)pitting race against gender, as in endless discussions of "is hip-hop misognyist?" ( Of course it is, but not all of it, and no more so than 99% of prime-time TV and movies, and much less so than anything featuring Katherine Heigl.)

c) advocating "free trade" policies that displace, enslave, and endanger people all over the world, most of whom are nonwhite and most of whom are women

d) advocating militarism and war, often in the name of what Gayatri Spivak calls "white men saving brown women from brown men."

II. We need an an anti-imperialist, antiracist feminism that allows us to do complex analysis and activism. This is the only way feminism will survive. U.S. Feminists should never, ever allow "women's rights" to be attached to these imperial missions.

III. We need to rethink some of our ideas about representation.

(to be continued--Janet, feel free to add to this outline.)

The wonderful world of Rhode Island politics

Rhode Island's first lady, Sue Carcieri, compares Southeast Asian young people speaking out for adequate translation services to Benazir Bhutto's assassins:

"First of all, I think they have mentors  who are much older than them who are training them up. You know--how those terrorists have kids blow up, you know, Benazir Bhutto and so forth? You think the kids thought of it? I don't think so."

Read the full story.

Take a look at and/or fund PrYSM, the dangerous group behind it all.

Coke: the silencer

Although we did appreciate the Giants ending the perfect season and disappointing legions of New England sports fans who would otherwise have been casting drunken votes for Brady and Moss on Super Tuesday, our favorite part of the Superbowl was the ad in which alleged political archrivals James Carville and Dr. Bill Frist (whose medical expertise last found the national spotlight when he remotely diagnosed Terri Schiavo-- "there seems to be insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state") were b(r)ought together by Coca Cola, which depicted their companionable silence after a rollicking round of jinx and coke buying/swilling as a heartwarming victory for democracy. 

It's nice that Coke is not just silencing Colombian activists anymore.

But in all seriousness, we appreciated this ad because it so beautifully illustrated the effects of corporate influence on our political system. We have been thinking very seriously about whether democracy and capitalism are ever compatible, and the ad suggests, probably not. More about this later.

Get ready.

The revolution is coming this year. According to humanities professor and longtime activist George Katsiaficas, sometime before July 2008 massive upheaval will spread from the isolated pockets where it currently exists throughout the entire world. Upon hearing this exciting news, we, the savage detectives, decided to establish ourselves as cultural workers so we wouldn't get stuck with the more unpleasant jobs the rest of you will be scrambling for. Muahahaha!

Closer to home, we were inspired by our friends who have had the courage to enter into public debates about important issues. Putting aside our fear that they will win the coveted cultural worker positions, we salute them. We hope that we, too, can add something to ongoing discussions about lackluster movies, mediocre academics, reductive political commentary, racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, war, exploitation, people.com, Ugly Betty, well-meaning institutions, theories of economic development, history, the ecological crisis, immigration, imperialism, social policies, our "novels," police brutality and the music that accompanies it all.

The Savage Detectives