Month: February 2014

This was passed around the internet for the past few days. It's a picture of a 1960 lunch counter sit-in at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, NC.

I like this picture a lot (and this one, with the bespectacled fellow and that "Well, I guess this is what's gonna happen now" look on his face). The customers have that look on their faces that combines excessive confidence and pure terror in the way that only 19 year old kids can pull off. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that the employee behind the Whites Only lunch counter is also black. That's curious, since on the scale of intimate social contact one would think that having someone handle your food ranks above sitting next to a fully clothed stranger on adjacent stools.

When I first saw this picture and learned about this period in our history (or more accurately, learned it formally and from someone who wasn't using the N-word regularly) I thought that racism was about believing that another race is inferior. Like most people I got (slightly) wiser with age and eventually figured out that racism is about keeping someone else beneath you on the social ladder.

You know, that Gene Hackman line from Mississippi Burning ("If you ain't better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?") If you actually thought black people were dirty savages you wouldn't eat anything they handed you.

But of course it has nothing to do with that. You're fine being served food because servility implies social inferiority. And you don't want to sit next to them simply because it implies equality.

It's pretty simple, then, to understand these last-ditch efforts on the part of hayseed legislatures to legislate discrimination based on sexual orientation. Very few of them are stupid enough to believe the excuses that they put forth as their motives.

To maintain my faith in humanity I have to believe that some of them understand that these laws aren't going to stand up in court anyway and this is all a big waste of time.

It helps, though, to understand it for what it is: a desperation move by a group of people who are no longer socially relevant to assert their superiority, and to codify the idea that they are Better Than someone who is in some way different.

In a couple of decades they will look just as pathetic to us in hindsight as the knuckle-dragging segregationists do to us today. Then again I'm starting to think that some of us look back on them as heroes. Let's not spoil the ending for them.

Back when I had a life and did things that made me happy I spent about two years doing stand-up. The first lesson everyone learns when doing comedy is that it's harder than it looks. That is, people have an illogical tendency to think that performing stand-up entails walking onstage and just…talking. For a few minutes. You know, you just get up there and talk, right? Anyone can do that!

Of course this perception is fueled by the fact that people who are really, really good at stand-up are so natural that it might seem like they're just talking off the cuff. In reality they have told those jokes word-for-word a thousand times practicing the inflection, the pauses, and things you'd never even think about until you try it. My point is that not everyone can do stand-up (Hell, even a lot of people who do it all the time can't do it) but people tend to think they can.
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At least ignorant people do; thoughtful people don't look at someone else and assume that they know how to do their job.

The next time you order a drink at a bar, take a few sips and then start pontificating loudly about how you could make a better one. Talk about how you know all about bartending because you've been to a lot of bars. Hell, sometimes you make drinks at home and you're great at it. Take note of the way the bartender is looking at you. You feel like kind of an asshole, right? Well, if you're capable of feeling shame you'll notice it.

I've found myself saying this a lot lately, but the worst part of teaching for a living is that everyone thinks they know how to do your job. Most of them think they know how to do it better than you do. And when I saw this piece from the Post I had one of those "Well thank god I'm not imagining it" moments. The tone is too smug overall, but the author makes an excellent point – everyone thinks they know how to teach because everyone has spent a lot of time in school. We've all seen countless teachers teaching (some of them not particularly well, we feel) and for those of us who aren't particularly incisive I suppose it's not hard to conclude, "Well how hard can it be?" After all, you just stand up there and talk, right?
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I can't explain – and I've stopped trying to explain – what makes teaching more difficult than particularly glib non-teachers think it is, and I've settled into an unsatisfying "Try it, then you'll understand." In fairness, this is true of almost any job that requires skill.
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I'd probably be terrible at your job if I tried it. That's why you wouldn't hire me to design a building or represent you in court. That's also why I don't tell you how to defend someone in court or design a building. That would be a dick move, right? And you would probably think, "Wow, this guy is so full of shit," right?
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Yes, I understand that most of the increasingly shrill rhetoric over the past decade has nothing to do with teachers or teaching and everything to do with a coordinated assault on public employees by wealthy sociopaths. They're acting on self-interest and I get it. The collateral damage, though, is the millions of reactionaries being spoon-fed angry rhetoric about what Those Union Thugs are doing and how Real Americans know better. I'd love nothing more than to invite the average comment troll into my classroom and tell him, "All yours. 75 minutes. I'll be over there laughing."

Most issues in politics are contentious, but not not all of them are contested. Some issues have been effectively won by one side. The issue of gun control, for example, might as well be declared over since Heller and the non-response to Newtown. You need not like the NRA or buy their arguments to recognize that they've won on the issue. They've won in Congress, in court, and in the realm of public opinion (Most Americans' positions on the 2nd Amendment consist of verbatim NRA talking points). Anti-gun groups will continue to fight when the opportunity arises, but doing so serves a symbolic function at best. The outcome is predetermined.

I think it's time to add the battle to save American labor unions to that list of lost causes.

If you've been following the efforts to unionize Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant – Autoblog's coverage has been extensive and remarkably impartial – you understand that the Detroit Free Press is being charitable by describing the No vote as a "devastating defeat" for the UAW. The auto industry has been migrating southward for decades, lured to places like Chattanooga by massive subsidies, lower wages, and a docile, anti-labor workforce. The Chattanooga plant was the UAW's first major campaign to unionize a Southern plant. Volkswagen is unusually pro-union (Chattanooga is its only non-union plant in the world, and the No campaign was led not by the company but by the usual rogue's gallery of right wing bagmen and sycophants). Despite the favorable setup, or at least a setup as favorable as any likely to be found in the South, the drive failed – 712 opposed and 626 in favor with 89% of eligible workers participating.

The UAW and the other once-mighty industrial unions in this country have been in decline for four decades as a result of a combination of factors including anti-union rhetoric from the right, mainstreaming of a "business friendly" attitude toward regulation and the labor market, overseas competition, and the restructuring of tariff and trade policies to make it appealing to manufacture in low wage countries. Had the UAW been able to declare victory at Chattanooga, they might have had a chance to establish a foothold in the rapidly growing Southern auto industry. Hyundai, Honda and Mercedes are in Alabama.
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Nissan and Toyota are in Mississippi. BMW is in South Carolina. Kia has a nation-sized complex in rural western Georgia. To be able to unionize in Chattanooga and arm future campaigns with the fact that the UAW did not spell the end of all life in Tennessee as right wingers claim would have been a boon. Instead the UAW appears to have lost its last, best chance to stop the bleeding.

The efforts by Republican bottom feeders to sway the outcome of the vote were vile even by their standards. TN state legislators were making the most bizarre of threats – to vote to end tax breaks for VW, as if that is something Republican state legislators are interested in or capable of doing. Bob Corker, aiming to prove that he is a shitheel of historic proportions, violated Federal labor law by announcing on the first day of the vote that he had "secret information" about VW planning to expand the plant if only the UAW could be kept out. In reality VW has been planning to expand in Chattanooga for years, as anyone who follows the auto industry even casually knows, in order to satisfy demand for the Passat and new CUV models to meet the company's ambitious new global sales goals.

In reality I think the efforts of the Peanut Gallery to manipulate the vote were meaningless.
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Auto plants are popping up all over the South specifically because the local workforce is anti-union and they don't need any last second shenanigans from Bob Corker to prejudice them against the UAW. Besides, everyone in that factory knows damn well that VW is at capacity and will be expanding it soon. It is informative to see how mendacious and low class Republican elected officials are willing to be in the context of a labor organizing effort, but I honestly believe that this vote, prior to which VW provided the UAW with open access to the Chattanooga facility to campaign directly to the workforce, reflects the desires of the people who voted. The anti-union leanings of the labor pool in a place like Chattanooga is one of the selling points of the South, after all.

The question is not where the UAW goes from here, because it is perfectly clear where the UAW is going. It will continue along the same path it has been traveling since the 1970s, losing membership to attrition, age, and the shifting political wind. Union membership seems to hit a new record low in the U.S. labor force every year and it's hard to see how that trend is going to be reversed. The Democrats do little more than pay lip service to organized labor. Republicans are almost cartoonishly vicious in their opposition to the idea. And the average American has absorbed enough anti-union rhetoric over the last thirty years that I can't fathom how even to begin to dislodge any of it. If the UAW even exists in another thirty years it will be as a shell of itself. I wouldn't argue with an assertion that it already is, for that matter.

If Chattanooga didn't work, Mississippi and Alabama and South Carolina certainly aren't going to work. I'm a proponent of organized labor and unionization but realistically I think it's a lost cause at this point. Our working conditions, wages/benefits, and standard of living are going to have to sink much lower, unfortunately, before the unions can start fighting back with a chance to win.
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Don't worry. We'll get there soon enough with this attitude that we'll be better off if everyone earns less.