holy sociopaths, batman!

I suppose I could sit back and be amused about the War on Christians conference. After all, if a group of people can say (with straight faces and without their fingers crossed behind their backs) that Christian politicians are persecuted in this country, well, there's something mighty silly about it. Especially when it leads them to say things like:

"I believe the most damaging thing that Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously into public office, which made him a target for all those who despise the cause of Christ," Scarborough said, introducing DeLay on Tuesday. When DeLay finished, the host reminded the politician: "God always does his best work right after a crucifixion."

I mean, not only is that preposterous on its face, and factually screwy (DeLay's big mistake seems to have been taking bribes), but it's also blasphemous. And in the proper frame of mind, it would be incredibly funny that the self-righteousness of proselytizing propheteers leads them to such delusional states.

But mainly, it makes me want to rant and rave, because the people who lately have been assuming this position are not just ridiculous bozos. They're Majority leaders in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, and ranking members of both houses of Congress, and legislators and governors of states, and members of boards of education. Unless the whole thing is a cynical posturing to garner votes in their rabid districts, these people might actually believe some of their nonsense, and that's not funny, it's terrifying.

desk cleared

I did a modicum of research on the next paper - on Hunter S. Thompson and the ideology of objectivity in journalism. But before long I had an uncomfortable feeling, a feeling like something was wrong, something needed to be done. I looked elsewhere in the room, at Lauren looking up how to make her own skin-care stuff from household ingredients, at the guitars, at the cat sleeping peacefully, at the stack of ungraded papers.

Then I realized what it was that needed doing: my desk needed to be cleaned off. The need arises largely due to my method of keeping organized, which I call the "stacking method." In the stacking method, I put long-range items (like proposals for conferences in 8 months) in one stack, and urgent items on top of those items. Then there's things I've just finished (like conferences a month or two ago), which I put - um, let's see, uh - on that stack with the long-range and urgent items. Receipts go... on the stack, um, with grocery lists and bills - bills?! Is that the gas bill? Shit.

The stacking method is excellent for putting in front of me everything I need to be concerned with at one time or another. But it sometimes makes for unwieldy stacks of things that have little in common other than geographic location (it's sort of like Yugoslavia used to be). It becomes necessary, from time to time, to go through the stack and sort things out.

I do this just about every three months, usually when I have papers to grade. One might imagine a correlation.

In any case, I spent about 45 minutes going through the stacks today. Notable discoveries:

• a half-roll of Tums
  
• 5 guitar picks, including two medium picks (I don't use medium picks)
  
• the plastic cap for the power cord for my iBook
  
• a Stockton Thunder inaugural season program, from the game we went to in January
  
• four pens, two pencils, four pads of paper
  
• a library book on Habermas that I forgot was there
  
• my attorney's itemized invoice statement
  
• cordial invitations to have TurboTax do my taxes this year, to a conference I already went to, and to a CFA meeting I can't make it to, and to support Capital Public Radio
  
• another stack of papers I haven't graded

So, dammit, I should read the papers.

Ooh! Guitar!

student fees

The California Public Education Commission is studying student fee structures for higher education, specifically the CSU and the UC. Their press release details the dramatic rise in student fees at the CSU over the last few years - a time period when the CSU Board of Trustees has voted repeatedly to raise the fees rather than press the legislature or the public at large for full funding. CPEC points out that these shifts in costs represent a historic withdrawal of the State's commitment to broad access to public funded higher education.

I have thought for a few years now that during my young lifetime I have been a witness to a remarkable undermining of public institutions of all sorts. I can't immediately account for it. Critical social theorists I've read have tended to discuss it in terms of the crisis in capitalism at the beginning of the information age. Their analyses have ranged from powerful elites taking cynical advantage of shifting relations of production and imposing the costs of their doing business on the society at large, to failure of the will of governments to maintain social programs under the threat of capital expatriation. Habermas explains, usefully, that social welfare and educational policies serve to legitimate capitalist economic policies, basically by salving the wounds and ameliorating the pathologies arising from the contradictions of capitalism. In his discussion in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas notes in passing that the devolution of social welfare would undermine the main political legitimation of capital. But he doesn't, to my way of thinking, say enough about what happens next.

Apparently, what happens next is that those with power keep shifting burdens onto those without power, and those without power keep taking it.

In the newz

In the ongoing in-depth media coverage of the six-year campaign of blatantly obvious deception and egregious policy moves, AP reporter Jennifer Loven has discovered that Bush's speeches are full of argumentatitve fallacies. Great scoop, Jen.

It sure would have been helpful if the US newz media had reported some of this stuff before. A well-informed populace might have found it relevant to know, for example, that the stated policy objectives of the war on Iraq are basically impossible to realize. One might recall that the stated pretexts for war in Iraq included introducing democracy to Iraq. If democracy means self-destruction of the people, by the people, then we've done great. But hey, we got rid of Saddam. So it has to be better, despite there being no functioning infrastructure, let alone government.

And extremely long-memoried folks (who can remember, say, 2000 and the campaign for President) might recall Bush's abusive rhetoric about the wrongheadedness of "nation-building" overseas. He claimed the Clinton-Gore administration (as he called it) had followed in this futile and hazardous course, and that he wouldn't. Obviously, this makes perfect sense: the US has indeed a terrible record when it comes to intervening in other nations' governments. We supported Marcos in the Phillipines, and Pinochet in Chile. Oh yes, and back in the day, we supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And sent arms to Afghan rebels who became the Taliban. (Compare to the relative calm of those nations whose governments we haven't attempted to remove, replace, or simply destroy: Canada is doing quite well, for example. Knock wood, Canadians!)

Ah, the glory of the free press. Where would we be without the fourth estate? Lost! Lost in the dark, in a wilderness of misinformation, lies, deceit, and total confusion about who really seeks our best interest. Oh, wait... damn.

going to The City

Ah, The City. San Francisco. The City so full of itself that they call it The City.

We're going to see Eartha Kitt, who is 78.

Proof that if you beat Americans over the head for six years, they'll get the point

Apparently, Bush's poll numbers continue to plummet. This pleases me, not because I hold our President in such low regard, but because of the way voters chose to elect him, to wit, because of the campaign's assertions that he had a set of characteristics that his actual behavior demonstrates he lacks, honesty and integrity chief among them. And it only took six years.

Meanwhile, the serious issues of the national import continue down the same path: making sure we get plenty of oil. The Iran project has already begun in exactly the same tone as the Iraq project. The Multiple Pretext Model (TM) is being employed, to offer several reasons why we should fear and loathe Iran: they have a nuclear program (allegedly); they support terrorism (allegedly); they are committed to the destruction of Israel (allegedly); they oppress their own people (allegedly); and we want to bring them freedom (allegedly).

Comics

I don't subscribe to a newspaper any more. I once wallowed in the daily self-destructive habit of reading the Modesto Bee, which is like watching paint dry on a train wreck - endless, boring, and horrible. The Bee is a family-oriented newspaper, which means they print a constant stream of letters by people who say brilliant things like Democrats cause abortions or that the US constitution is a Christian document. They also print a comics page that is entirely useless. Although they print Boondocks (which is often mordantly funny and generally somewhat offensive, both of which I like tremendously in a comic strip) and Doonesbury (which used to be funny and topical, but now Trudeau only seems capable of one at a time), they print them on a page buried inside the classifieds, so their brilliant subscribers don't accidentally run across them. This doesn't work, of course: they turn immediately to them, and then write letters complaining that Aaron MacGruder causes cancer and that Family Circus prevents terrorist attacks. (I wrote that to be funny, but now that I consider it more carefully, Family Circus sort of is a terrorist attack.)

Lately I've discovered and have taken to reading a blog called "The Comics Curmudgeon." Yesterday's entries included a nice bit about the aforementioned Family Circus. I'm pleased to find someone else who shares my repulsed loathing for Family Circus. I love Pope jokes, too.

Inordinate desire - for guitars?

I've been having fun with my Intro to Philosophy class lately, reading Augustine's dialogue "On the Free Choice of the Will." An important part of the dialogue tries to define sin, as "inordinate desire."

As long as I've been reading this with the class, I've been thinking about inordinate desires of my own, specifically, my inordinate desire (or maybe not) for guitars. In the last couple months, I've gone from interest to desire to lust for amplified guitars, and after buying a 40% off classical-acoustic-electric Cordoba last month, and nearly buying a hollowbody electric instead, today I went and did the deed, picking up an Ibanez AG85 for about 40% off list price. And, you know, hubba hubba hubba. (This is an update to the entry: I had originally posted a picture of the AG86. Turns out, the AG85 is no longer in production, which could explain the low price. Frankly, I like the look much better.)

I took the pick guard off, so the f-holes on both sides are visible in all their loveliness (I'm a sucker for f-holes; they're unbearably sexy to me). Actually, the guitar on Ibanez's site isn't as nice as the one I picked up. The grain on mine is much prettier.

So, for anyone keeping score at home, that leaves me with my old Takamine classical, my Seagull 12-string, my Cordoba, and the Ibanez. In my office I keep a crappy Greg Bennett Samick just to noodle with to restore calm.

Can a guitar be the object of lust? Can it be the object of "inordinate desire"? If one intends to play this guitar, and if, instead of the $3500 Gibsons and $2000 Gretsches offered by one's local guitar shop, one seeks out a $350 Ibanez, is one truly inordinately desiring?

cool it

It's Friday. It's time to get the Led out, as they say.

This has been, not to put too fine a point on it, a hell of a week. Just since Wednesday, I've been in meetings as a CFA rep presenting testimonials to the campus president, as an IRB member and CFA representation committee member in a meeting about research protocol compliance, and a meeting of the IRB, in addition to classes. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot. But it is. And the kind of energy and attention it takes to talk about Augustine in my 9:05 Intro to Phil class, to talk about forming ethics rules in my two Pro Ethics classes, to talk about Borges' "Library of Babel" in my Human Interests and the Power of Information class, and then shift into two different modes of committee-speak, back and forth, repeatedly, is hard to explain.

Academics don't work more or harder than anybody else. If they say they do, they're lying. But I think a reasonably committed academic works in more mind-bending ways in an average week than most people do.

So, Led.

Buying meat online pays off

The stuff arrived yesterday before noon, while I was on campus. Lauren signed for it, put the bulk of it (two London broils, three packages of lamb chops, and two filets mignon) in the freezer, and left out two filets.

I decided to keep it simple. I baked potatoes. I cooked broccoli. I sautéed sliced mushrooms in butter. I seared the steaks in a sauté pan, then poured red wine over them and deglazed the pan, tossed in two ice cubes of demi-glace, and covered the pan. I turned the steaks a couple times, tossed in the mushrooms, heated them, then added a little butter - simple pan sauce, nothing fancy at all.

Unlike industrial beef, which when treated this way can be cut with a spoon, the grassfed beef maintained muscle fibers even after cooking. It's denser, more muscular, and consequently doesn't melt apart. But it was still incredibly tender.

The package, and the web site, and the shipping notice, all informed us that grass fed beef takes less time and less heat to cook. This seemed true enough, although the thickness (about 1.5") of the steaks left them pretty much uncooked on the inside, the way we like them. (That's another difference, maybe due more to aging than feed: these things are purple before cooking, and the interior remained deep red.) There's frequently something a little metallic tasting to not-actually-cooked industrial beef, but despite having a similar raw taste, these didn't have that metallic aspect.

I was awestruck at one point during dinner. Lauren wasn't sure what my face meant when I just sat there, looking stupid. It was this: the beef tasted more animal than I was expecting, or used to. Even though this is prepackaged, even though it had been deep-frozen prior to shipping, something about it was fleshier than other meat. I can't quite put it in words. I suppose we'll just have to eat more of it.

Buying meat online is weird

I bought a new watch at Target yesterday. I lost my watch over last weekend, and spent the week out of synch with my life and the campus (which is out of synch with itself already, so it's hard enough when you can time it). I had been thinking of buying one, but this felt stupid, because I have an old watch with a dead battery and broken band. Isn't it more sensible to get a new battery and band? Well, no, because (1) the band and battery together cost 75% of what a new watch would cost, and (2) the new battery made the watch run for ten seconds before it revealed that it's broken.

But then I bought meat today online. This isn't something I think of as normal. Books or CDs, sure. Guitar strings, definitely. Meat seemed a little too, I dunno, perishable.

The story is, Lauren and I have decided that we're meat-eaters, since we're omnivores, since we're humans. But being meat-eaters doesn't, or at least shouldn't, mean that we willingly support the practices of the Big Food industry, which are too often harmful to the environment, cruel to the animals, and unhealthy for consumers. We've switched to free range organic chicken, which is worlds apart from those bizarrobirds Foster Farms sells. But range-fed, grass-fed, humanely-raised beef is rare to find. We've seen it exactly twice at Trader Joe's, bought it both times, and decided that this is what beef really tastes like.

I used meat production as an example in class earlier in the semester, having found some interesting facts online that might be the basis of a moral judgment that eating meat is a terrible thing to do. One page had a link to a company selling the genuine article, even emphasizing the butchering and dry-aging techniques that are critical to good beef production.

Today I found several others, but then bought from US Wellness meats, because they had lamb as well (this ain't an endorsement, obviously). It should ship out tomorrow, and be here by Thursday at the latest.

Random thought of the day

A cockroach once wrote a terrifying short story about waking up to discover he'd transformed into Franz Kafka.

I have no idea what made me think of that.

Shock and Outrage!

Months after Hurricane Katrina broke levees, leading to the inundation of New Orleans, news-media stories about government ineptitude continue. What's remarkable is not that government officials couldn't handle the emergency. There was no will to do so.

No, what's remarkable is that the press has ignored the real story here, which is that for years the Army Corps of Engineers, who have the task of maintaining the levees in question, had budgets for construction in southern Lousiana and Mississippi woefully inadequate to the task. It was foreseen, for years, that a hurricane could destroy the levees and flood the region, causing billions of dollars in damage, to say nothing of the toll in death, destitution, and homelessness. But the money wasn't spent in a critical area.

Priorities, it would seem, lie elsewhere.

The conference

My loveliest has already wrtten about going to the conference (the pictures sometimes don't load, and we're not sure why), but what the heck. I was president, after all.

Amazing as it seems, I was let to be president of something, in this case the Society for Phenomenology and Media. I'm a founding member, the only person to have attended all eight of the annual conferences. I hope I was a good president, but I think that despite my leadership qualities (which it turns out, always to my surprise, I have), I couldn't actually do much presiding. Organizing academics to get things done is a lot like herding cats, I like to tell people.

In any event, as a conference of a society for phenomenology and media, the conference was rather lacking in a couple of key elements, namely, phenomenology and media. There were a number of very good papers on media, mostly not involving phenomenology at all, except as an afterthought, an excellent paper on media making no reference to phenomenology at all, two or three goodish papers that involved phenomenology and media to some degree. There were also a large quantity of papers that didn't involve phenomenology or media, and many of those weren't any good, either.

Part of the problem is that the conference was a joint venture of two groups, the other being directed toward deception. But the conference program seemed to mix these indiscriminately, if not actually randomly. I spent a lot of time wondering why presentations were being made in this forum. Phenomenology and media are both broad fields, but not without some distinctness. I would imagine that, generally, presentations that discuss media (as relation, as artifact, as social system, as anything, as long as it discussed media) would seem like a good half-fit, at least. Likewise papers that discuss phenomenology (whether in the transcendental Husserlian, existential Heideggerian, French, or some other mode, as long as it discussed phenomenology) would also seem like a good half-fit.

I don't think there's a lack of interest in media among phenomenology folks, nor lack of interest in phenomenology among media folks. But those with an interest in either would have been puzzled.

By the way, I presented a paper challenging the very notion that a phenomenological investigation of media experience (i.e., the research project that has consumed me for the last 8 or 9 years) is fruitful at all for developing critique of media. I received no comments or questions, because there wasn't time in the schedule.

Things I don't recommend

My friend Bobo the Wandering Pall-bearer, aka The Most Optimistic Man in America, aka Jim, has just written a brief account of things he doesn't recommend. He picked three, but I think he should've picked four.

It's a nifty idea. If everybody posted three things they don't recommend, maybe fewer of us would engage in foolhardy and self-destructive pursuits. Maybe not. Who knows? Who cares? In any case, herewith...

Doc Nagel's Things I Don't Recommend

1. Sticking your finger in a light socket.

In fact, I didn't do this. What I did do was this: curious and experimental a lad as I was, I decided to investigate electricity. I did this by tearing a paper clip in half, inserting each half into one of the two slots in an outlet, and then carefully completing the circuit with a lockblade pocket knife I had. Despite holding onto the wood portion of the knife handle, I felt a surge of current and was more or less pitched backwards, while the circuit breaker did its job and shut down the whole demonstration. I was about 14. I don't think my parents know about this (or knew about this; I suppose the cat's out of the bag now. Any by the way, bagging cats seems like a phenomenally bad idea).

2. "Drafting" behind semi trucks on the freeway.

I didn't do this either, but I was complicit. Back in college, I took a couple trips up from Charlotte to Greensboro (about 90 miles) with my pal Doug, in his 1980 Honda Accord hatchback. Doug had developed a skill at semi-truck drafting.

Drafting is a term from bicycle racing. Cyclists conserve their energy by getting into the vortex of wind formed by cyclists in front of them. The advantage is that you get pulled along by the other cyclist, and use less of your own power. It takes steely nerve and steady hands - you have to place your bicycle within a few inches of the bike in front of you, hold on tight, move in synch with the bike in front, and meanwhile watch the road ahead of you.

With cars and semis, you have one advantage and one disadvantage. The advantage is that, with the much larger semi drawing in wind, you have a fairly big chunk of space to stick your car. The rather obvious, in fact frightening, disadvantage, is that semis, being huge honking beasts, could crush your 1980 Honda Accord hatchback instantly.

We also used to drive with Doug leaned all the way back in the driver's side, working the pedals, while I steered with my hand under the dash, simulating a car driving with no driver. This is, without doubt, extremely and ludicrously dangerous.

We also used to drive around the campus area playing a tape of ourselves screaming at full volume, with all windows rolled down.

We also drove to a rural area and performed a violation of social norms - Doug giving someone the finger - and were chased through the region by a presumed redneck in a pickup truck.

I can't say I recommend any of that. Damnation, it was fun.

3. Relying on posted tabulature of Paul Simon tunes

I know, it's not important to you, but it is to me.

I have yet to see anything posted to any guitar ripoff site that gives any reliable account of any Paul Simon tune. Jim's explanation of this is soothingly and benignly simple: any account of a Paul Simon tune, but especially one endorsed in some way by Paul Simon, is purely fictional.

Like I said, not necessarily for mass consumption. Nonetheless, beware.

I get back from San Diego, and this is the best the news can offer?

I was surprised to read that US-India relations are hunky-dory, since while I was in San Diego the news was that the US had denied visas to three scientists from India. Indeed, one of the conference participants couldn't get an entry visa from India. Three others were denied visas as well.

This was more than a little annoying. It was potentiallly embarassing while the President was trying to strike a deal with the Indians that would effectively share US nuclear expertise. And what with the Prez having to rely on Indian security (to the tune of thousands of troops) during his visit. But luckily, a quick deal was made, to allow one of the three scientists in. One out of three ain't bad.

I can but hope that the US Olympic hockey team will be denied re-entry into the country.

(Oh, I shouldn't say that. They tried. Sorta.)

Update on the Habermas paper

I spent a few more hours this weekend on what has come to be named, in my consciousness at least, "The Goddamn Habermas Paper." Not that I have anything bad to say about Habermas at this point. Reading Theory of Communicative Action again has been something of a revelation, and a renewal of philosophical investigation. Plus, I like how it feels to think through Habermas. But I have a hard time setting down in words any of the ideas that this has sparked.

I should perhaps point out, for new readers of this blog, as well as for anyone who happens across it, that I have philosophical training in phenomenology, existentialism, Hegel, and Marx. My dissertation was on the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and how his philosophical perspective arose from his appropriation of Hegel (especially the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit).

During grad school, I started into a serious project investigating phenomenologically the experience of media. I had the idea then that typical "media studies" perspectives had given short shrift to the fundamental issue of how we perceive and how we live through and in media. By focusing attention on the content of media presentations, these perspectives basically ignored the perceptual aspects.

Often, media studies approaches imagined an audience duped by media into buying things - products, political candidates, etc. - on the basis of misleading, or on the more subtle basis of soliciting agreement, by speaking to the audience as a member of the group addressed as buyers of those things. In short, media presentations don't persuade us to buy things, they persuade us that we're people who buy things, and then the images of products/candidates simply offers us something to buy at that moment that we're considering ourselves buyers-of-things.

It's cute. But here's the thing I thought I'd discovered: those analyses miss out on the way media trains our perception to be the perception of one buying (for instance). The problem of media (so to speak) is not deliberate manipulation of the dumb masses, nor ideological solicitation of an audience you produce as consumers, but the habituation of modes of perceiving that undermine looking deeply into - well, into anything.

Exhibit A was the way television prompts us, 10 times an hour or so, to watch television. On one level, this is obviously in order to get us to watch that channel, so that network can retain advertising dollars by selling our eyes to someone. On another level, television tells us to keep watching, and thus to continue to learn the habit of watching. Television moves in to our perceptual schemata, constructs our ways of perceiving, and becomes a model of how to view the world itself. This, I felt, was the real meaning of the old CBS (I think) slogan "We Bring You The World."

Now I'm reading Habermas, and finding that all the meaningfulness of media - ideologically or perceptually - could be ancillary to its main achievement, which is the coordination of social action. For example, television has not only constructed my consumer identity, not only trained my perception, but has regulated time in accordance with a rational order whose purpose has nothing whatsoever to do with the sense I make of the images on the screen. As an element of the communicative action of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism, television is part of a system of economic forces, part of the media of money and power, which affect how I live my everyday life regardless of what I perceive or understand the images on the screen to be. In fact, television has this mediated effect even if I don't watch.

So, now what do I do? I'm writing a paper in which I am planning to tell the Society for Phenomenology and Media, of which I'm the current president, for crying out loud, that phenomenological analyses of media make no difference, because "experience" of media is only one part of the situation. Difficult task.

And by the by, it was only last week that Lauren and I were in transit, for 21 hours, home from New York. And we leave for San Diego Thursday.

Don't &*^% with Dick Cheney

So, the guy Dick Cheney shot has made his first public appearance since the incident, and since he had a mild heart attack while in the hospital recovering. According to this AP news story, however, his main concern seems to be to apologize to Cheney for all the trouble he caused by having the temerity to get shot by the Vice-President.

I'm speechless.

CFA roadshow revelations about collective bargaining

I've had a long day. I've had a long week. I've had a long month, and it's only getting longer. Luckily, being February, it can only get so long.

Today was the CFA roadshow visit to our campus. The roadshow initiated, I believe, in the 2001 contract bargaining, when the union and management reached an impasse. CFA decided urgent organizing was needed, and before long they were able to hold public protests of 800-1000 faculty members outside a venue in San Francisco where the CSU Chancellor, Charles Reed (salary: $362,000 per year, plus car allowance, plus housing allowance) was speaking.

A lot of faculty look at the world in such a narrow and logically coherent way that they can only see their being underpaid and overworked as the result of somebody (i.e. their union) not informing management of this fact. When they are told how irrationally and bizarrely the CSU negotiators behave, they can't understand it. They also don't understand how it would help if a handful of faculty writing about their working conditions and showing up at a meeting with the campus President to inform him of it, and asking the President to bring their descriptions of their working conditions to Long Beach to present to the Chancellor.

The thing is, going to the President is an exertion of moral pressure. Sure, he can ignore it, but the physical presence of 20 or so faces of faculty in his office - faces he has seen before and will see again - makes it uncomfortable for him to deny their request. And the President could be resisted by the Chancellor, sure, but the Chancellor will have to talk to the President again someday - this is how moral pressure works.

And moral pressure is a biulding block for creating conditions that allow us to morally shame. The demonstration in 2001 in San Francisco involved puppets, pickets, chants, songs, marching - a display calculated to embarrass Reed, a prominent man, a man not used to this kind of treatment. Without the step of creating the moral pressure (and the organizing), the chance to morally shame wouldn't exist.

From that point, political pressure, or maybe I should call it moral insistence, is the next step. Say the Chancellor isn't that easy to embarrass, or finds in himself the ability to dismiss faculty complaints as unimportant, or as a bunch of whining. (We could imagine a scenario, for instance, in which Reed would say, "Bunch a babies! So we've cut more than 200 tenure track positions, increased enrollment, and hired 40% more administrators in ten years - so what? If they were professionals, they'd do their jobs!") Go to the legislature, and show them how Reed and the CSU administrators have essentially failed to negotiate in good faith, and have stonewalled. They pay the bills; they'll put some pressure on. This is insisiting you have a legitimate complaint.

That builds legitimacy for the next steps: collective action, civil disobedience, and direct action. Unless you've built the case all along, step by step, from moral pressure on up, and organizing all along the way, your collective actions won't be successful.

I frankly didn't get this until today. I understood why moral pressure was important to apply - especially as a legitimating narrative so you could go back later and call people jerks. From the other standpoint, I understood why it would be potentially uncomfortable to flat-out deny someone's claims about their working conditions. Collective bargaining seemed to me to be a game of Blackjack - either you have the cards or you don't. (In our collective bargaining situation, if we can't reach agreement, we go to impasse and fact-finding, but ultimately the CSU can impose working terms on us - so on this level, bargaining seems like it always puts labor in a distressingly, desperately weak position.) But today, in that room full of faculty, I started to see the moral reasoning at work in labor organizing, and how bargaining happens. It's not entirely a question of whether you have the cards, whether you have the legal authority to do what you like. Power is not the same thing as legal authority, and comes from many sources.

One of the key sources, it turns out, are those baby steps that we take when we do what seems to have nothing to do with bargaining power - for instance, meeting the President and asking him to listen to us.

Total and complete exhaustion - luckily, the semester is starting, and I'm going to San Diego next weekend

We were in New York for the blizzard. Actually, it wasn't an official blizzard, it was just two and a half feet of snow and 20 mph winds. In any case, it was enough to cancel our flight out of LaGuardia Sunday, and to propel us onto an aeronautic adventure through Washington, Charlotte, and finally San Francisco. We finally arrived home after twenty and a half hours travel.

It was a little disorienting. In fact, I double-checked my class time for today last night upon arriving home, to set an alarm, and mis-read the online schedule. I read that my class (the honors class I designed a few years ago) started at 11:15 am, in contrast to all previous years, when it has started in the afternoon. But apparently I misread this: the class started at 9:40, which I learned at 10:15, when Teresa Berry, our fabulous department secretrary, called to find out where the hell I was. I was at home, waiting to go to class.

Anyway, I got to class. I was a little surprised to find them there, and told them so. They were, for the most part, good sports about it. My confusion isn't really excusable, except insofar as I was coming off a 23 hour day, following a very stressful day dealing with heavy snow in New York (where, it turns out, they don't really deal with snow - go figure). I spoke a bit about the course, gave the students the course syllabus, and came home. After that I scored some Valentine's Day items, and we went erranding into the wilds of Modesto (aka Funkytown, aka "No Me Modesto"), since we lacked any of the essentials of daily life (to wit: fruits and vegetables).

And lo, I was suckered in by the damnable servants of Demon Capital, and I did go into the dark world that is called Guitar Center, and lo, there I did play many instruments, and was made weak in spirit; and there did I find a Cordoba classical acoustic-electric guitar half off, and it was good. And yea, verily, did I play upon it, and found its tones lovely and seductive; and its performance amplified sonorous, fat, and toothsome; and yea, verily, did I succumb to this lust in my soul, and bought it, and brought it home, with an amp, and &$*$!#*@#$$$, it was good.

Note that I haven't described either (a) why, or for what purpose, I bought this guitar; (b) the nature of our errands in Motown; nor (c) our trip to New York. That will all have to wait. I'm exhausted. We're going to have ice cream.