ABlog

I feel that I’m caught in the invisible arms of government in a country slowly dying beyond our grasp--David Wojnarowicz

November 9, 2005: It’s just past 8 a.m. when I turn the corner onto Washington Square South, taken aback not to hear any noise yet. It seems like a normal morning in the NYU imperium. I’m two blocks from Bobst Library before I spot the police vans. Then I know it’s going to be all right. A little nearer and the pudgy, tired-looking gray inflated rat looms over a spirited picket line, a “GSOC on STRIKE” placard hanging from each front paw. The grad students have rustled up a lively percussion session; they’ve printed clever picket signs (“THE NERDS ARE PISSED”). In addition to “Union Power” and other standards, they’re chanting a novel, esoteric tongue twister: WE’RE NOT WORKERS AND WE’RE NOT NOT WORKING!

The slogan refers to a scurrilous decision by the Bush-appointed Labor Board; reversing the opinion of its Clinton-era predecessor, the NLRB has ruled that graduate teaching assistants are not actual employees of the institutions where, as at NYU, they often shoulder a large percentage of undergraduate instruction. In the wake of that decision, a number of Ivy League institutions have dug in their heels, firming up their initial reluctance to recognize nascent graduate TA unions. And NYU, where a groundbreaking graduate TA contract had been in place for the past 3 years, took advantage of that contract’s August ’05 expiration date to refuse to negotiate a new one, effectively withdrawing recognition from the union. Thus this showdown is crucial not just for NYU grad students, but for a huge segment of contingent academic labor.

“So, are university professors going to lead the working class now?” asks a sectarian friend of mine, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. He’s on the way to the GSOC rally, but I know damned well he doesn’t believe any university professors are going to be on the cutting edge when the shit hits the fan and The People rise up.

And neither do I, but—

***

Butter couldn’t melt in the mouth of the employer of my mind in the wake of our bloodless coup, a.k.a. a contract settlement (a good contract settlement) for part-timers at the New School. The employer of my mind is merely extending its time-honored progressive legacy. (Or protecting the investment in its recent re-branding initiative.)

I’m still getting congratulatory e-mails remarking how unaccustomed is the notion of “victory” in these times.

***

I can’t keep track of the mayhem. The banlieus are burning, Iraq writhes, the beat goes on in all respects, encompassing invisible racking of ghost detainees and run-of-the-mill collaterally damaged bodies while Dick Cheney’s fixation on torture as policy has become fodder for light humor on Op-Ed pages.

“Don’t you feel like there was something in this fight that you needed to go through—I mean for you personally, for your growth?” a union friend asks. We’re sitting over a post-contract-settlement beer in the Cedar Tavern. (Isn’t this where the Abstract Expressionists used to drink to excess?)

I say yes, grudgingly, not yet willing to squander my moral capital over how grueling the whole thing was. I admit that I’ve come up with a new, outrageous analogy for my situation (following on my habitual overinflated citizenship metaphors—contingent academic labor as a kind of illegal alienhood or at best guest worker status): now that we have a tentative contract agreement with the 16-year employer of my mind, I feel exultant as any long-time squatter in some favela or shantytown who’s finally been granted title to her proudly maintained shack.

My friend—my sane friend, my non-ego-driven friend, my brilliant dedicated completely steadfast organizer friend--starts talking crazy, talking about how it’s fights like this that show us how we can turn this thing around. (What thing, exactly, is she referring to? The nightmare of history. The everything.) “It’s about refining the knowledge of what power is, how to take power and use it.” “Take it away from the few who are maintaining this madness in their own interests.”

But the structure to do that, I say.

Well. The labor movement.

God help us then! I roll my eyes, gesturing in over-dramatized despair.

Get the old guys out of the leadership, of course. The basic organization’s there. It can be used for other ends.

I scoff and scoff. I bring up the craven Democrats, the shameless indentureship of organized labor to the two-party stranglehold. From my perch of superior knowledge based on having lived through a few years more of history than she has, I recall the losses upon losses upon losses that make up the story of ordinary people’s resistance (a.k.a. basic survival attempts) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I recall Ernesto Cardenal’s poem about flying into Managua after the victory of the Sandinista Revolution, and thinking that the flight attendant ought to announce, “Welcome to Nicaragua—a vast tomb.” It was one thing to acknowledge the level of loss, I say, at a moment when the sacrifices could be seen as having a purpose. But now Nicaragua’s a hellhole again. And the same could be said of so many other places: “Welcome to East Timor—a vast tomb.” “Welcome to South Africa—a vast tomb.”

I tell my friend about my novel, how it stars a group of people who believe that the only hope for humanity is to pull the edifice of so-called civilization down. For them, there’s no possibility of taking the controls—only the dizzy hope of forcing a crash landing.

I tell her a thousand sectarian groups also think they hold the secret of taking power.

“But they don’t know how,” she insists. “We do.”

On the way to the subway, we pass the hideous bordellos of fashion that line Fourteenth Street just south of Union Square and I quote David Wojnarowicz: “Soon all this will be picturesque ruins.”

All week I keep the argument going in my mind, prove to myself over and over again how winning a minor labor battle is completely different from taking state power away from a lethal imperial ruling class. I believe in the accuracy of my analysis, the propriety of my pessimism. But something bothers me: why am I so emotionally entrenched in it? Why am I so…the word is not “comfortable,” but…what is this inertia in the face of a reasonable expectation of total disaster?

Why does one resent the goad of the rescuer, the voice that insists we rise from our comfortable bed of ice, forego the anesthetic Emily called a “formal feeling,” and trudge head down into a killing wind?