The Revolution is Just a T-shirt Away by Red Emma

It doesn't take much to please Red Emma.  Walking to the excellent talk today by labor rights & education journalist Liza Featherstone (Students Against Sweatshops), I saw coming my way a young woman student wearing a green "Stop Blackwater" t-shirt and got so very excited.  Of course, Blackwater is the mercenary army outfit run by a crook named Erik Prince. It thrived under Bush.  You will recall Prince and his paid killers (some were murdered on a bridge in Iraq, remember? - when they were not murdering civilians in Baghdad) from the excellent investigative reporting done by my hero, another terrific activist-journalist, Jeremy Scahill.

In fact, Scahill wrote a book (I read it) called Blackwater:  The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books.  As it happens, Featherstone, who is lovely and charming and funny, writes for The Nation magazine, so you can see I was also having a Happy Nation Day.  Or thought I was.

I stopped the young student to congratulate her on her t-shirt, a bright green deal exactly the same as the ones pictured above, at a San Diego-area protest against expansion of the professional Blackwater killer corps/corp. to northern SD county, as I recall, beyond its main "training" facility in North Carolina.  In fact, that's Scahill, above, doing his righteous piece in front of cameras and other protesters.

"Your t-shirt," I exclaimed.  "You were involved in the anti-Blackwater protests?"  Damn, I was happy. I thought we'd talk, and I would make a new friend, a comrade.  It could happen!  But, alas, she responded with "I don't know.  I'm just wearing this," and scurried away from me, clearly spooked by the friendly weirdo who is Red.  Possibly the saddest two sentence I had heard in a while, hers.

Call me a kook, but if somebody had shown some interest in the slogan on your shirt and you didn't seem to know what it meant, wouldn't you at least ask them about it?  If she had, I could have told her that Prince's outfit had changed its name - classic corporate PR move - and LOST the campaign to install itself in San Diego. Hoorah!  That it had been investigated for criminal action in Iraq and New Orleans, avoided prosecution, changed its name to "Xe," then changed its name again, to the smart-sounding "Academi." I wonder if they include this photo in their recruitment brochures, of a dead Academic:

And I wonder if somebody would wear that on their shirt, and why. Why not?  Why anything?

Of course, I am a wise guy who is puzzled by students wearing corporate logos on their chests, and always make a point of inquiring if they are perhaps stockholders or on the company's board of directors, or somehow benefit from their association by way of being a human billboard for commerce.  Sigh.  I wish more students would ask me about my own terrific t-shirts, including my current favorite, this one with the "Free Bradley Manning" slogan and image of the Army whistle blower and hero who is rotting in jail.  But that's just me.

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Hold the Presses - Red Emma Goes Positive!

Red enjoys (well, not exactly) making the rounds at UC Irvine, as it were, on Ring Road (round, get it?) during O-week, when everybody from the most excellent CalPIRG chapter to the Armenian Students to the vegans to twelve different flavors of Korean Christian evangelical church solicit your interest and membership.  

I lost count after twelve evangelical youth outfits. There were more.  Jesus loves all of them, it seems. He's like that.  I'm not.  I stopped to chat with the hipster kids from KUCI Radio and to sign up, whether I was supposed to or not, on the New University email list.  (I wrote for the paper as a grad student, and read it faithfully.  Not as in faith, as in Jesus, no.) As a result, I now get weekly communications from the Opinion page editor.  Despite some excellent pieces this week, next week's suggested topics were,, disappointingly, back to what passes for Normal. I kid you not:  General Patraeus, Space Debris, Thanksgiving, PMS and the Voting Rights Act.  This, with all the possible further editorials and commentaries you'd imagine on, say, the UC and Prop 30, student activism and student voter turnout, future fee hikes, protests by the UAW and Radical Students, like that.  

Beyond the obvious and childish J-school mimicry of some long-dead Parade magazine-style of nutty grab-baggery (Chelsea and Bill Clinton's vegan yoga weight loss recipes!) the whole concept of undergrads who appear to duplicate the sad, dead paradigm of this kind of commercial journalism is funny because, of course, nobody reads the old-school paper and, alas, nobody reads the school paper either (except, ironically, Yours Redly, who still believes - sigh).  Why?  Why not?  Why funny?  Partly because if, say, you wanted an analysis of the consequences or meaning or implications of Patraeus's resignation, you wouldn't go to the school newspaper, would you?  No.

But, instead of complaining, Red Emma trudged, reluctantly, up the high road, and wrote a sunny and affirming (and short) thought piece, and emailed it this morning.  Let's see if they run it, shall we?  Meanwhile,  pretend you are opening next Tuesday's edition of the New University Opinion section, with my byline and a clever headline.  Here goes nothing: 

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

For six weeks I stood on Ring Road near the flag poles, handing out literature against the odious Proposition 32 and supporting Prop 30.  I endured grimaces and taunts, was ignored by students wearing buds in their ears, received polite smiles from non-English speakers and, yes, was thanked by many who wanted to read what I described as the position of UC Irvine teachers, which is to say Librarians and Lecturers represented by my union, the University Council-American Federation of Teachers.

One fellow instructor asked me what I was doing out there.  As if it wasn’t obvious.

Here, then, like my volunteer outreach work - unsolicited – a post-election analysis.  First, it was (mostly) nice to meet you all.  Even the young sorority women wearing their weird “Amerika” (sic) t-shirts, and the young men who screamed at me, smugly, that they’d voted the opposite.

Second, we won.  Big-time.  (Hear that, angry dudes?)  The voters of California saved, temporarily, public education and crushed the cynical and super-millionaire funded anti-democratic effort to destroy a key privilege of democratic trade unionism.

But here’s the real takeaway, at least for this activist teacher.  I stood out there, and mostly enjoyed it, for only a total of ten hours.  Only ten hours, total.  I still taught my classes, graded papers, drove my kid to school, and otherwise lived a full, rich life.  It was, to be honest, the very least I could do.  Just ten hours to help win a campaign or two and re-elect a president.  And it was less, much less, than the excellent collective work done by the Associated Students, whose volunteers registered something like two thousand UC Irvine students!

So, maybe we did a lot, by way of doing very little.  The absolute minimum required for participation in the flawed, sometimes annoying democratic electoral process involved registering voters, handing out literature, talking to our community.  Granted, we had to compete with other “outreach efforts,” some frankly anti-democratic:  religious proselytizers, merciless boba and cupcake hucksters, coupon peddlers, come-on artists.  You haven’t lived, friends, until you’ve stood for two hours on a Wednesday mid-day and watched the campus go by.  And, no, you have not been an engaged citizen until you have jumped in and asked it to stop, please, to listen, read, and talk about the most important if easy way to change the world.

Me?  I wish we had more of that, a lot more.  I wish we had elections every month, if only to remind me (you, us) of how good and bad and, finally, good things are – or could be - and how little it takes to be a part of them.  

The author is president of UC-AFT Local 2226 and teaches Composition.

Introducing Squintilian - on Tropes & Schemes

Editor's note:  It is with delight and all kinds of pedagogical excitement that we introduce contributor Squintilian.  For those rusty on their rhetoric, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c.35-c.100) - Quintilian - authored the seminal Institutio Oratoria when he was not, as our own cheerful local teacher and rhetorician, grading student papers.

     How many writing teachers have set their students loose on the world to find examples of creatively used language?  But why ask student readers to hunt for powerful sentences or apt word choice in the works of professional writers, when their own texts lie before them, untapped resources in the quest for variety and unusual language effects?

               I propose a modest project of mining student work for those tropes and schemes that composition teachers so love. We start this morning with the powerful figure "antistrophe" with two examples from a local 10th grade honors English class.  The literate reader will no doubt guess which bedrock text of 20th century American literature informed these students' writing muse.

               Our first writer succinctly combines antistrophe with the ever-popular figure of personification: "They were asked the same question which asked if they were a witch."

               And perhaps more elegant because of its simplicity and symmetry: "In addition to many people being hung, many people were also hung." 

               Enough for now. In the words of another of my students, "The people blamed everyone and soon came to an end."