In Which Victory Means What's Next?

For those of you who don't know, I am - pomp and circumstance! - a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley and a quiet, if impassioned, member of Academic Workers for a Democratic Union. (AWDU is the progressive caucus within UAW Local 2865, which represents graduate-student instructors, readers and TAs throughout the UC system.) Over the last few weeks and months, we at AWDU have been campaigning for seats on the state-wide Executive Council - and for campus-level positions at each of the UCs as well. Elections were last week and now - after an unfortunately bitter and partisan vote-counting bonanza - it's official: we've won.

There are many brilliant people involved in crafting AWDU's message, and there are many insightful commentaries out there on the 'webs on what we do and why. I have little to add here. I'd merely like to say that I am inspired and humbled in equal measure by the people I've had the privilege of working with in AWDU. Their courage, tenacity and take-no-prisoners approach to social justice are exemplary. While I'm sure that many among the old guard of the union care deeply about the same issues that concern us, I have no doubt that AWDU will do a better job of standing up for student workers and their rights and dignity in the workplace. I look forward with joy and abandon to standing with my friends and colleagues and fighting the good fight for the next year (and maybe longer if they'll let me).

There are those, perhaps, who would pooh-pooh our movement as inconsequential. I would only say this: American higher education (and especially public higher education) is in deep crisis. The entire system needs to be radically reformed if it is to fulfill its mission of creating an informed and engaged citizenry. It's simple: we need more and better teachers, from K through Cal, and we need them now. All of us at AWDU - indeed, all of us in graduate school, and in teacher-training and -accreditation programs everywhere - are committed to doing our part to fill the gap. Working to ensure that student teachers are treated fairly is only part of our ongoing effort - in solidarity with our students, our faculty mentors, and the incredible support staff that make our work possible - to fix the system. If you know us at all, you know that we won't stop, ever, until our schools and colleges and universities are the havens of justice and inclusion, ingenuity and curiosity, diversity and debate they were always meant to be.

So look out. Because victory for AWDU in this election doesn't just mean yay. Victory means what's next. And what's next - to invoke Donald Trump - is gonna be huge.

In Which Bin Laden Isn't Voldemort

When the news broke yesterday that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American special forces in Pakistan, some of the nerdier precincts of the internet lit up with the realization that Mr. bin Laden, Adolf Hitler and Lord Voldemort all met their end in the general environs of May Day - Hitler on the 30th of April, bin Laden on the 1st of May, and Voldemort in the dawn hours of May 2nd. (Yet more proof, if any were needed, that organized labor - celebrated, as my unionist readership no doubt knows, on May Day - will always eventually triumph over evil.) But while it's no doubt interesting to speculate on what effect Mr. bin Laden's death might have on the zeitgeist as manifest in the impending release of Deathly Hallows Part II, our tendency to subsume Mr. bin Laden into Voldemort's villainous mystique is dangerous - and not only because it's bad Photoshop. It's dangerous because it gives the impression that with Mr. bin Laden's death, the story is definitively over - that, in in the haunting words with which J.K. Rowling closed the Harry Potter series, "all is well."

The appalling violence of 9/11 and the subsequent declaration of "war on terror" occasioned, as many have intuited, a spate of American myth-making that has set the tone of public discourse ever since. Mr. bin Laden was cast as the enemy, as a figure of absolute alterity, of pure evil, who had to be captured, in then-President Bush's turn of phrase, "dead or alive." I do not wish to deny, by any means, the obvious fact that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2011 were monstrous and disgusting asks of indiscriminate violence for which Mr. bin Laden was at least partially responsible. I further do not wish to deny that Mr. bin Laden was a bigot, a sadist, and a mass murderer who deserved to be held accountable for his actions. But his casting, in the wake of 9/11, as Public Enemy Number 1 did enable the forgetting of all sorts of things - among them the fact that the United States had armed him (and the Taliban) in the first place, and that the West's coercive regime of economic sanctions and debt colonialism had impoverished and alienated the Muslim world - that ought not to have been forgotten. "Terrorism," in al-Qaeda's case, was stripped of its political content and reduced to unthinking barbarity, while America's - subtler, but still brutal - military/intelligence/foreign-policy machine was accorded the rights and privileges of the avenging hero.

In recent years, this dispensation had largely been discredited, and rightfully so, and so it was with some surprise and not a little sadness that I turned on the TV last night and saw crowds outside the White House and in Times Square chanting "USA! USA!" when news reached them of Mr. bin Laden's death. Apart from being a macabre way to greet the news that someone - a monster, no doubt, but still, as the line from the Talmud that a very wise friend of mine sent me reminds us, a man who was "the work of...[God's] hands" - had been shot in the head, the impromptu celebrations seemed a return to the jingoistic rhetoric I thought we had moved beyond. More than that, the scene immediately recalled for me, in eerie symmetry, the grotesquery of the street parties that followed in some quarters of the Muslim world after 9/11. Indeed, a look back at the YouTube footage of those celebrations showed that commenters had already made the connection themselves, albeit in a different, and horrifying, way: "FUCK YOU PALESTINIANS, YOUR HERO IS NOW DEAD!"

To which I would reply, as I know others have and will continue to: have we learned absolutely nothing since 9/11? Haven't ten years of waste and hurt and sorrow impressed upon us how useless all this hate is? I of course sympathize with those who lost loved ones on the hijacked planes and in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and share with them their desire to have some justice and closure, but justice and closure are not the same as bloody revenge, and the memories of their loved ones are ill-served by parties in the streets that almost cannot help but further radicalize those who looked to bin Laden for inspiration and now count him among the martyrs of their cause. Indeed, it strikes me as all the more sad and unfortunate that this is how we've greeted bin Laden's death when I think that events in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world over the last few months had already given the lie to al-Qaeda's twisted theology. Think of how much better it would have been if we had greeted bin Laden's death with a statement of solidarity for our brothers and sisters in the Muslim world who have stood up against tyranny and oppression and with a pledge of renewed commitment to counter exploitation, bigotry and violence here in our own country and abroad with cooperation, respect and peace.

Because bin Laden isn't Voldemort. The story isn't over. And the only way we can expect an end to hatred and terror is first to stop resorting to it ourselves.

In Which Courage, Big & Small

I'm reminded today - as Egypt continues to show the world what democracy looks like - that courage takes all shapes. Sometimes it takes the shape of fed-up workers and students, mothers and sons, Islamists and atheists packing into a crowded square and staying there for days to demand the ouster of a dictator. Sometimes it takes the shape of a young soldier, or a police lieutenant, refusing to use force against his countrymen - and even stripping off his uniform to join the sloganeering crowd. Sometimes it even takes the shape - yes, Mr. Mubarak, alright - of a used-up old oligarch finally admitting to himself that his time has come, his people have spoken, and it's best to swallow his pride.

Are there tough days ahead? Yes. The headiness of revolution fades quickly, and the real business of state-building takes time. The Egyptian people have to guard against this military interregnum becoming a permanent police state, as military interregna are wont to do. But what cannot be extinguished, no matter what's to come, is the idea that's taken old and made itself manifest again: when the people speak as one, remarkable things can happen. It's tough for me to work my way through the layers of jingoistic guck that usually coat utterances like that here in America, but for now at least it seems justified to hope.

In this connection, I'm reminded of quieter news that I read the other day: Brian Jacques, one of my favorite authors as a child, has died. His, of course, was another kind of courage - the courage it takes to believe in, and act upon, the absurd conviction that it's worthwhile to try to add a little beauty to the world. But then there's more to it than that. I may be wrong, but I'm reasonably sure it's people like Mr. Jacques - with his armed menagerie of warrior mice and badgers, all of whom had an unfailing, almost quaint, faith in the power of goodness and loyalty and peace - who convince children the world over that there are things worth fighting for, and that the fight can someday be won. Like the crowd's in Tahrir Square, his courage was exemplary.