protest

Graduating students at Yale did not take kindly to a speech delivered this weekend on "Class Day" - one of the many events involved in the Yale commencement weekend. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered the address, and his presence was protested by a number of students due to his support of the war in Iraq:

Mr Blair's arrival was met by a small but vocal contingent of protestors waving placards that read "No to Blair" and "Yale! Don't Support a War Criminal", but police held them back from the ceremony, which was held in a large gated garden.

But as he took to the podium, Mr Blair, 54, was met with dozens of red signs that students had hidden under their graduation robes, reading "Peace Now" and "No War".

One student, a young woman wearing a headscarf, stood throughout the ceremony, holding a "Peace Now" sign above her head just 10ft in front of the former Prime Minister, who appeared to be doing his best to avoid looking at her.

Mr Blair also avoided referring to Iraq by name as he talked about the rise of India and China as future world superpowers, the problem of climate change, and the threat of "terrorism fueled by religion".

Normally I'm skeptical of student anti-war protests. While throwing a pie in Tom Friedman's face might be emotionally satisfying on some level, it accomplishes very little in the way of real change. In recent years, students have achieved far greater success on campus when their protests were directed at their college or university. Over the past half decade, student protests have helped establish a living wage for workers at Harvard, many campuses, bowing to student pressure have divested from regimes involved in human rights abuses, and many more campuses have made strides toward becoming carbon neutral thanks to the pressure of students. The same cannot be said of student anti-war efforts.

That may be changing. Over the course of the last year, a number of high-profile war supporters have found less than hospitable environments on the campuses of America's high schools and universities. Earlier this year students at the elite boarding school Choate successfully protested plans to have Karl Rove deliver their commencement address, and Alberto Gonzalez, the disgraced former Attorney General, has found it quite difficult to raise money for his legal defense fund via speaking engagements on campuses.

One of the great traditions of politics is that after you work your ass off in the White House or some appropriately high-level government position for 5 - 8 years, you get to retire, write a book, teach or consult a little, and deliver speeches all over the country. All of these tend to pay pretty well, compensating the writer/teacher/lecturer admirably for their many years of service for which they were compensated well below their earnings potential. For a select few - most recently President Clinton who earned millions on the lecture circuit after his retirement - it's the cherry on top of the pie of a career government service.

Denying government officials like Rove, Gonzalez, and even Tony Blair, lucrative speaking engagements and high profile awards like honorary degrees won't stop the war. But at least it effectively hits those who supported the war where it hurts - in their pocketbooks and reputations. That's a whole lot better then just some pie in the face.

Yay on the students at Choate, who are calling on their headmaster to rescind his offer to Karl Rove to deliver the school's 2008 commencement address:

The News deeply objects to the appointment of Mr. Rove to speak this June. At Commencement two years ago on June 4, 2006, Headmaster Shanahan asked graduating seniors to think of their responsibilities to themselves, and to others. He lamented how “responsibility to others and for oneself has been all but forgotten in certain circles.” Mr. Shanahan alluded to various public figures who have been exposed for scandalous activities, noting that in spite of their lack of ethics and sense of responsibility they were all found to be “not guilty.” At that Commencement Mr. Shanahan posed a very important and pressing question: “How can so many moral, ethical and legal laws be broken and still no one is guilty, no one assumes public responsibility for having chosen to do wrong?”

It is ironic that the man who issued those words two years ago has chosen a commencement speaker who has gained infamy in many circles for less-than-ethical decisions and actions.Thus far, Mr. Rove has not been indicted for any major crimes. But, many would argue that he is as culpable for the compromised situation the country finds itself in as any other figure of the Bush administration.

This is becoming something of a pattern. Former Bush Administration officials aren't finding the lecture circuit to be as lucrative or welcoming as they'd hoped. Last month, the Washington Post reported that Alberto Gonzalez was having a hard time booking speaking gigs at colleges and universities, a situation that has put a crimp in his fundraising efforts to pay off his extensive legal bills.

There's a great (and scary) article in The Nation today about how homeland security has invaded our higher education system and altered the face of political participation on campus through the use of "free speech" zones, tasers, hidden cameras and data mining techniques. It's pretty scare and well worth a read.

Two comments on this. First, this goes directly to what I've said in response to statements by Boomers like Al Gore and Thomas Freidman that young people today aren't political enough and aren't radical enough, and generally fail to live up to the legacy of the 60's. As this article thoroughly details, campuses are a very different place now than they were when Boomer were growing up, and the consequences of radical political action are MUCH higher. The Boomers have completely disincentivized the kinds of activism they use a a yardstick for measuring political action.

Second, government interference on campus isn't necessarily a new thing. When I was studying Russian in college, I heard many stories from my professors about how, at the height of the Cold War, the government had plants in graduate programs, keeping an eye out for potential "Reds." Also, let's not forget that the United States Student Association started out with funding from the CIA. What's different now is the degree of interference and the consequences brought down on students who fail to abide by new guidelines.

Recently, there have been an extraordinary number of dismissive, sneering media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers. 

"But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms."

Bobby Kennedy didn't travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage  - and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL's growth in the 1890s or of California's Wobblies in the 1930's have rolled their eyes at RFK's silly methods?  Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins.  No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited! 

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman's beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they're just all too Facebookey. "But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." Really? Online equals... quiet?  What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest.  (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman's head off his shoulders.) 

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet's free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones "twitter" and the dread facebook...  the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands. 

"This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves," said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing."

So I have just one more thought to add on the now infamous Diamonds vs. Pearls incident. This website has featured multiple articles in the last three days attacking CNN over this piece, now I want to look at the flip side for a second.

As many have noted across the blogosphere, at the end of the day, the student did have a choice. In fact, she had three choices.

1. She could choose to ask the fluff question.
2. She could have refused to ask the fluff question.
3. She could have agreed to ask the fluff question, but then screwed CNN and ask a more substantive question anyway.

Obviously the student chose #1. If she had chosen #2, she would have maintained her integrity, and CNN probably would have had 5-10 other people with similar fluff questions lined up to take her place. Shame on CNN for that, but also shame on the student a little bit for being complicit along with CNN in this whole debacle.

Number three is the most interesting choice the student faced, and in everything I've read doesn't seem to have occurred to her at all. In this instance, she was offered a perfect opportunity to perform a small act of media protest/civil disobedience, which she failed to act on.

But of course, it's not quite that simple. She may have signed some sort of agreement with CNN that would make her liable in some way were she to deviate from the pre-approved questions. If so, then this whole incident is a confirmation of what Professor Matt Lassiter writes in his essay Apathy, Alienation and Activism, namely that the stakes for civil disobedience and protest are much higher for today's youth than they were in the 60s, and yet another reason why protest as a vehicle for activism is less effective and less-embraced today among Millennials than it was in the 1960s. However, if there is no such agreement/contract/waiver with CNN, then it's not unreasonable to suggest that Maria Luisa Sandoval lived up to the low-expectations of Thomas Friedman. Both cases are problematic, but it would be interesting to know which one is the more accurate before we use up any more ink on this story.

Here's the good the bad and the ugly (mostly ugly) from the last week:

• Starting off with the good, check out this article about the youth vote in the Politico. Yeah, The Politico. Say what you want about their GOP talking point tendencies, they've got a better track record reporting on the youth vote than most papers.
• Now some bad. Real Clear Politics picked up that terrible Adam Nagourney piece and piles on some more. Why is it that these jokers always make it all or nothing with the youth vote. We're supposed to save the day or stay at home playing X Box. WTF? Why can't we just be a normal, respected piece of the electorate like everyone else? Note to Blake Dvorak - this is the second time you've done this to the youth vote. Read this and how about getting the story right?
• The ugly: one of our own, Texas Blue, also picked up the Nagourney story and piled on with more anti-youth vote rhetoric based on bad information. WTF?
• Now for some good to lower your blood pressure: FaceBook will soon lift the ridiculous ban on messaging groups over 1000 and will integrate group activity into news feeds. That's good news for those using Facebook as an organizing tool.
• Brace yourself. Radar makes us all a little dumber with this "look" at the candidates.
• We'll end on a high note - did you read about the student protests in Iran?

Alex at The Seminal takes issue with my "drooling economium" over Nicholas Handler's essay on the current meaning of college. His critique is short, so I'll reprint it here:

And to conclude, Mike Connery over at Future Majority has a drooling encomium of a piece by Yale student Nicholas Handler entitled The Post-Everything Generation. The gist of this thing is that college kids nowadays aren’t like the “radicals” of the 60’s. They are the generation of the postmodern, the “open book” that rejects the “dogmatism” of modernism and the expected revolution that never came for their parents. Our activism is supposed to be one of the “rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change…”

I think Handler’s fool of shit. Our generation has only inherited the theory of the 60’s, the same postmodern tripe that didn’t call for changes at the point of production and real changes regarding oppression, be racial, gender, or on any other front. No, the 60’s and us as its ideological inheritors have only been concerned with changing the “spectacle” of society, rejecting the “mainstream” culture and adopting our own to “subvert” it, as if some subjective rearrangement of the semiotic chairs could seriously “affect change” on the sinking ship of oppressive institutions. I recommend a perusal of Heath & Potter’s The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. While I don’t agree with all their points, it raises a lot of good questions about the effectiveness of what Connery calls the “New College Experience” and its predecessors.

I think Alex missed the point, or at least we have very different readings of Handler's essay. Alex lumps myself and Handler in with the "predecessors," which is shorthand for 60's radicals and theorists, but that misses the point. We're talking about a rejection of those groups. I don't want to "semiotically rearrange the deckchairs" anymore than he does, and I assume the same is true for Handler. We are rejecting so much of the past - that rebelliousness and college as an "incubator of radical change" - precisely because we recognize how coopted and inneffective it is for actually accomplishing real, fundamental change.

Instead, we're talking about a generation dedicated to new institution building. Working precisely within the economic and political systems that govern us to effect change. That's what I see when I talk about a [dot]Org Boom in youth organizating, initiated and run by our own generation. That's what I see Handler referencing using the short hand of "MoveOn.org." That's what Rick Perlstein observed in his conversations with kids interested in corporate social responsibility in his essay, which kicked-off the contest.

My familiarity with postmodern and Marxist theory is admittedly 6 years rusty, and I haven't read The Rebel Sell, but I think Alex is misreading Handler, and I wonder how different our opinions of this really are.

A few months back, the New York Times initiated an essay contest in which is asked college students to write a response to an essay by Rick Perlstein, What's the Matter With College?

Last week, the winner was announced. Nicholas Handler (Yale '09) responded with his essay, The Post-Everything Generation. Perlstein's essay was a nostalgic look back to a time when college was a place of rebellion, political agitation, and exploration of outsider culture. His essay seemed to lament the fact that kids today are too damn smart, too damn ambitious, and eager to take a seat at the table in society and the business world. Handler's essay puts a very different spin on the current college experience, summing up nicely something we've discussed here before on Future Majority: a guiding philosophy for the Millennial Generation.

Here's the relevant excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:

For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.

But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

As a former English Lit. grad student, and an ex-philosophy major to boot, I love Handler's grounding of his piece in Jameson's Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. His movement from postmodern literary theory towards a positive vision of civic action and participatory democracy via the netroots is literally the arc of my life for the last 6 years. As such, Handler's piece resonates to my core. Take away the horn-rimmed glasses and skinny-jeans, and the whole thing rings true to me. What do you think of his take on the Millennial ethos the the college experience?

The folks from The Seminal had the bright idea to attend the Sept. 15th anti-war protests in DC while wearing suits. Dressed for success, these kids made an impression:

We were four strong. But the response that we got, especially from other protesters, was incredible. First, no one criticized us or made any negative comments. Though many were skeptical, skepticism quickly turned to curiosity or approval after we said the words “professionalism” and “seriousness,” and many people walked away from us only to stop a few feet away, deeply absorbed as they read our pamplets. Second, people took us seriously. People complimented us on our ideas, made way when we walked by, and spoke to us more politely than they would have had we been dressed in casual clothing. Third, we could feel ourselves challenging stereotypes. The counter-protesters on the side of the streets looked at us strangely; one woman whose sign read “hippies smell” was clearly perplexed. Fourth, our appearance sparked several interesting conversations with strangers, drawing out larger issues of organization and discipline at protests.

Our conception of protest stems primarily from the anti-war student marches of the 60s and 70s - as does the aesthetic of protesters today (when they aren't taking cues from the Anarchist or Socialist movements). But it wasn't always this way, and dressing in professional attire when protesting isn't a new idea. During the civil rights era, protesters frequently wore their Sunday clothes. MLK was a great speaker, but he and the others who orchestrated some of the major events of the civil rights era were also brilliant tacticians and strategists. They knew that appearances mattered and worked to make sure that those who participated in the marches and sit-ins put forth the best image possible.

About four years ago, I wrote that protest had become an impotent act - a broken tool in the toolbox of the antiwar movement. In part, that was because of how easily we were marginalized by the media and those who supported the war. We didn't look like the mainstream, so we - and by default our position - must have been fringe.

If protest is ever going to be a viable once again as a tactic for a national anti-war movement, we need to shake up that dynamic. The Billionaires did this in 2004 with their satirical counter-protests. Their street theater garnered national media attention, including a profile in New York Times Magazine - better than the anti-war movement did during the run up to the Iraq war. Cindy Sheehan did it a few years later with her vigil outside of Bush's Crawford Ranch. Interestingly, as soon as Sheehan started to act more like a stereotypical protester (getting arrested all over the country, etc.), she immediately lost all effectiveness as a voice that could penetrate the consciousness of "moderate" Americans.

Not every protester needs to wear a suit (though it wouldn't hurt if they did), but shaking up that dynamic and doing something that rattles people's expectations should be mandatory (note: papier mache puppets don't count). Otherwise anti-war protests will never move past ranting, unserious, dirty hippie status or have a significant impact on public opinion and policy.

A few quick hits for a Saturday morning:

• Rock the Vote and Working Assets have unveiled their voter registration widget. By the end of the summer it is supposed to be portable to any website, blog or social network. This could be huge for online voter registration in 2008.
• The North Carolina General Assembly has passed a same day registration bill that will let voters register and vote on the same day up to three days before the election. The bill is awaiting the Governor's signature. Read our previous coverage of this here.(h/t Rock the Vote blog)
• Democrats Work is teaming up the Young Democrats to host a community service operation during the YDA Convention in Dallas. The groups will assemble back to school backpacks for the children of soldiers deployed in Iraq. Sign up here.
• AlterNet reports on the Bush Campaign's anti-protestor advance manual. The handbook outlines tactics for sidelining protestors and marks Young/College Republicans, local sororities/fraternities, and local athletic teams as footsoldiers to do the dirty work.