Mayday 2024

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Sure, Trump could get elected or installed, and further shrink the NLRB, and impose a national right-to-work law. The Supreme Court majority could invent an interpretation of the Constitution that eliminates Social Security and Medicare, maybe even labor unions. Congress could find more ways to top load our already finance-heavy economic pyramid and push more people from the bottom out onto the streets.

But this May Day, I’m feeling this is not the time to feel discouraged. The labor movement is on the move.

It’s not just the UAW big win at The Big Three, or the follow-up victory at VW in Chattanooga, or now the contract victory at Daimler Truck. It’s the fact that all this is part of a plan to organize the auto plants across the south, along with the Amazon warehouses, schools, auto parts plants, and whatever other dominos begin to fall.

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“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear” (Redux)

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Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death on April 24 for lyrics that excoriated the Islamic Republic’s rulers and enablers. His uncle tweeted a message for the Iranian diaspora that should be heard by every believer in free speech…

xxx

The following First dispatch was originally posted in January, 2023…

Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about his music and the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”

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Weberian at the Gates (with “Haaretz” Interlude & Post-Bust Postscript)

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“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.

The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.

I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind.

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No Way Out (Yet)

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Early on some people talked about changing algorithms and AI, but I don’t know anything about precisely how IDF calculations and behavior have changed since October 7th. My rough impression, drawn from people who know the country much better than I do, is that the IDF was usually more scrupulous before October 7th than it has often been since, that minimizing civilian deaths is now of less concern to the military, and the details of those deaths is of less concern to other Israelis. Friends who follow Israeli politics closely say that many things do concern and for that matter enrage the electorate:  the failures of the IDF before the war, perhaps also during it, the possibility of their government’s strategic vacuity, its apparent cynicism, ultra-orthodox draft evasion and political extortion,  also many other things, above all how this war can end with what people at first called “deterrence restored”,  but Palestinian civilian casualties unintentionally inflicted while trying to destroy Hamas does not seem to make the list.

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Frau Gertrude Kugelmann and the Five Gates of Marxism

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Open one of the gates to Marxism — “The Working Day” chapter in the first volume of Capital — and you’ll find paragraphs with equations (“As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C…”) Stones in your pass-way? Yup. Yet once you’re through the gate, you’ll see a path that leads to a life in struggle. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll be worthy. Not that you’ll feel a need to be (what Karl said he wasn’t) a Marxist, but you’ll always wish to come down on the commoners’ side of class conflicts. And the older you get, the more you’ll suspect the only regard that matters comes from militants with the brains to turn tears into controlled rage as Marx does throughout his “Day”…

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Pop History Play

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Let’s start with a hypothetical. Suppose you’re 21 years old, you’re a raging Anglophile obsessed with British music, culture, and history, and you’re in London for the first time ever, with a flat to yourself for 1 week. For that week only, you have no responsibilities and are free to do whatsoever you fancy, in this city which Samuel Johnson once remarked that to be tired of is to be tired of life. How do you choose to spend your time?

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River Sides (“Hey, hey, hey”)

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A cover from last summer’s leg of the Never Ending tour…

Well I was born up in the mountains
Raised up in a desert town
And I never saw the ocean
Till I was close to your age now…

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey, you rolling river
Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
Hey, hey, hey
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right
Only a river gonna make things right

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Good News from Chattanooga: Paul Baicich & Tom Smucker on Operation Dixie (21. C.)

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The UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is not simply impressive; it is HUGE. With 3,613 ballots counted, some 73% of the workers voted in favor of union representation. (The final total was 2,628 votes in favor of joining the UAW, and 985 votes against.)

Clearly, the union gained the confidence of the VW workers after impressive UAW strikes and contract victories last year at “The Big Three.” This election in Tennessee has been closely watched because the union has struggled for years to organize foreign-owned auto operations in the South.

Will Mercedes-Benz in Alabama be next? Could be: Those workers vote next month.  — Paul Baicich

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It’s even better than you think.

I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left-wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years past, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster’s Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.

As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south.

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Playing the Long Game: A College Education

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I. What Do I Know?

Just prior to college basketball’s conference tournament week (which I relish more than the giant carnival it relentlessly feeds, as rivers do the sea), I glanced briefly at an NBA game — just to check on the night’s outcomes — and caught a furtive glimpse at Lebron James going up for a jump shot. I noticed, with surprise, that James had drifted — egregiously — to his left.

“Uh oh,” I muttered to myself, watching the shot miss badly, reminiscent of the fate of many of The King’s early career jumpers, before he somehow corrected his awful habit of not going straight up, at long last making himself into a good shooter, not just a great scorer and everything else.

I took comfort in feeling that my ability to size up and divine what is happening, and what was about to happen — my cherished (if apocryphal) wisdom — remained intact; because, like many who count themselves fans of our beautiful game, I knew next to nothing about men’s college ball this year, outside the Big East: well, St. John’s and some of their conference rivals.

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Emotionally Yours

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Jordan Poole got his comeuppance all over again this year — as he slumped for months and became the butt of a thousand jokes and memes — but he came through (as his bosses affirmed in their exit interviews)…

 [Poole talk ends at 30:00.[

I’m glad to find out Winger felt JP’s comeback, though I’m ambivalent about nice white managers of black genius. (Hi, Bob Myers.) It was on Poole to find his game once the Wizards’ other less talented point guard, Tyus Jones, went down with an injury, enabling JP to play his natural position. Haters aren’t done with Poole. He brings out the mean in recessives shamed by his fluency — “I’m an expressive person” — and physical gifts that enable him to show out like so…

And so…

JP heated up pretty often in games after the All Star break in late February, but what really counted were moments that led to a (rare) Wizards winning streak — an end of game strip of Giannis and this beautiful assist to Cory Kispert…

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Forces of Victory

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Today in Dakar, during the inauguration of Sénégal’s new president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye put on a heavy gold necklace signifying he was “Grand master of The Order of the Lion.” The ceremony made me think first of Les Lions — Sénégal’s national soccer team — but I also heard echoes of Shelley…

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.

Faye’s party won a landslide victory, though he was released from prison just ten days before Sénégal’s March 24th election (after eleven months in pretrial detention on a bogus charge)…

A few hours after the polls closed, partial results were already pointing to a first-round winner: Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the candidate of the most outspoken opposition to the incumbent government, and second in command of the African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity party (PASTEF). Faye will be the youngest and most unexpected president in the history of independent Senegal.

Before his presidential candidacy, Faye was little known to the Senegalese public, working in the shadow of party leader Ousmane Sonko. Sonko, also a former tax official [and another victim of a rigged judicial proceeding] … gained popularity, especially among young people, for his highly critical discourse on the traditional political class and for his promises of a radical break from how the country has been governed for decades.

I flashed on Shelley again when I saw this photo of the grey-haired Maitre Cire Cledor Ly at the inauguration…

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Thinking Ahead

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Hate to be a Gloomy Gus, but it seems fair to say, Trump will not be tried on federal charges before the election.

Bur let’s say he gets convicted in New York or Georgia for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or screwing with the electorate.

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Driving in Circles

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Songs can work like time capsules, shooting us through space to remember the sweet awkwardness of a first dance. Or sink us back into the free magic flowing through every vein at the party of our lives. Yet sometimes we get stuck inside that time capsule: Tracy Chapman speeds down the highway in her fast car, and Luke Combs turns out to be the little kid singing in the backseat the whole time, all grown up now.

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Rape? What Rape? (Denial as a Tool of Liberation)

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Great philosophers can make great errors when they confront things that challenge their closely held beliefs. Theodore Adorno, a brilliant critic of classical music, wrote ignorant essays about pop and jazz. Noam Chomsky, whose work is fundamental to modern linguistics, has a naive grasp of how media operate. Michel Foucault, whose writing on discourses and authority shaped postmodern thought, regarded the Ayatollah Khomeini as a guide to liberation from Western materialism. And then there’s Judith Butler.

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