ABlog

The term “McCain Mutiny” is the invention of my father, Victor H. Clausen, who, along with my mother, visited me in New York during the run-up to the May 19th Madison Square Garden donnybrook and not only tolerated but encouraged my hectic round of organizing activities during their stay. I want to thank both of them for their generous support of my rebellious involvements on this occasion and over many years.

This blog has lain fallow over the past two weeks while I devoted my time to the New School protest over the selection of Senator John McCain as our commencement speaker. The ceremony took place on Friday, May 19; I “attended” it by standing for several hours on the sidewalk in front of the Madison Square Garden venue, clutching a poster-board sign mounted on a three-foot length of cardboard tubing. One side bore the message PRE-EMPTIVE WAR IS NOT A NEW SCHOOL VALUE; the other, BOB KERREY…THE GREAT DECIDER (DIVIDER). When I woke up on the 20th, tore open the New York Times, and saw David Herszenhorn’s story “In the Garden, Graduates Boo McCain. Kerrey, Too.” above the fold on the front of the Metro section, then Maureen Dowd’s column on the same topic (“Make Poetry, Not War”), I felt the ecstasy of an actor in avant garde, low-budget off-Broadway play who gets up on the morning following the premier to find that the show is, against all odds, a smash hit.

All the better that this production doesn’t boast just any old plot. This is an anti-war hit, set to the tune of “New College Grads Celebrate by Raising Their Voices in Defense of Justice, Sanity, and the Planet.”

What are the ingredients of such a hit? I will tell you, provided you promise not to fall prey to the naive supposition that those ingredients can be readily duplicated—or that, even if they were, the same results could be counted on. DO try this at home—but be very, very patient!

First of all, the historical moment has to be right. It makes all the difference that this story unfolds just when the mainstream media have decided that the Iraq war and the Bush administration are “unpopular” with the citizenry. Next, we owe a great deal to Senator McCain’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination; fascination with his aspirations and prospects, rather than sincere interest in the opinions of young people or the state of higher education as reflected in the vagaries of a certain tuition-driven, increasingly corporate, historically “liberal” university in picturesque Greenwich Village, propelled this coverage. After all, McCain’s speech at Liberty University on May 13 was covered by nearly 50 reporters, according to the Times. So it stood to reason that at least a handful and maybe more would show up to bookend the story at the New School.

The dynamic of press attention leading to more press attention was reinforced by the irresistibly binary setup: ultra-conservative Liberty University versus the left-wing New School—could a more seductive incarnation of the media’s favorite either/or construction of opinions and issues easily be envisioned? McCain not only insured the perception of fatal symmetry but greatly facilitated the efforts of his detractors by telegraphing his punch, having his aides announce following the Liberty appearance that he would be delivering the same speech at the New School. Finally, nothing would have jelled without the astonishing arrogance of President Bob Kerrey, who evinces, in his own tiny sphere, an imperial overreach worthy of our country’s Republican rulers. Bob evidently assumed that he could foist anti-choice, anti-gay-marriage, pro-war-all-the-way John McCain on the New School as our commencement speaker and nobody (or not enough somebodies to make the slightest difference) would dare to squawk. He misjudged the extent to which his choice would be perceived by a broad range of students, faculty, and middle-level administrators as, quite simply, overstepping a line of decent regard for popular opinion; he evidently ignored, as well, the fact that students are the group within the university most generally empowered to vocalize opposition without fear of reprisal—and that graduating students are granted extra freedom and authority by virtue of the convention that the day’s events are consecrated to their achievements.

But I don’t want to focus here on the conditions that set the stage, merely note that they need to be taken into account. What I want to do is to capture, before vivid memories fade, a few of the small connections that made possible our response: not a squawk, but a roar heard, briefly, around the country. Because what has impressed me so much about the McCain mutiny is the extraordinary experience of people coming together in the exigency of the moment and each contributing something to a large effect, a powerful joint effort that requires, to be sure, hard work and organization—to some extent, the impression of spontaneity conveyed by media reports misleads in its omission of all the planning involved—but also depends a great deal on the inspired borrowing that is one operating principle of any highly contagious rebellion.

The ad hoc quality of our uprising reminds me of the story “Stone Soup”: an impoverished, thoughtful old woman who has no food in her pantry places a stone at the bottom of a pot of boiling water, proclaims that she is engaged in cooking a delicious meal according to a time-honored recipe, and persuades her neighbors to add whatever ingredients they can spare: here a couple of carrots, there a marrow bone, over here a handful of barley—and finally produces a rich dish that feeds the whole village. We began with nothing except our outrage, rather anticipating a rerun of past experiences of marginalization; instead, thanks to the efforts of a great many people who quickly inventoried and made available their own personal or local resources, we ended up making headlines. As I review the events that led up to that outcome, I also find myself silently reciting the chant, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the rider was lost…” all the way down to “…the kingdom was lost.” Except that our story is about winning, not losing, and the chain reaction is not so much linear as it is a hyperlinked affair, allowing for continuous feedback and multiple vectors of influence.

A simple example of this occurred at the very outset of our organizing. I sent a message to a newly formed listserv encompassing union activists from Goddard, New School, and NYU part-time faculty unions. I relayed the information that McCain’s selection as New School commencement speaker had been confirmed and asked for ideas about how to respond. Cate Fallon, an NYU faculty member and officer in our union local, wrote back with links to articles about a protest over last year’s commencement appearance by President Bush at Michigan’s Calvin College, a Christian liberal arts college where the president spoke, reportedly by arrangement of Karl Rove, to shore up relationships with his constituency in the heartland. In the material on Calvin, I recognized most of the issues I thought we would face, such as the argument that support for free speech bars disinviting such a guest, on one hand, and on the other the point that there’s something especially odious about offering a commencement platform to a powerful official seeking political gain. The articles referred to a Web site established by Calvin students opposed to the appearance: Our Commencement Is Not Your Platform was the site’s title. Little did I know when I first read these articles early in April that, on the evening of May 18th, I would be standing over a hot photocopy machine churning out bright orange fliers bearing those exact words on one side and text about McCain’s reactionary voting record on the other—or that Herszenhorn’s Times coverage would describe how “several graduates held up a banner aimed at Mr. McCain…declaring: ‘Our commencement is not your platform’.”

Herszenhorn did not mention that the banner in question was bright orange, a protest color carried over from the response to McCain’s speech at Columbia’s Senior Class Day on May 16th , on which occasion several New School students and faculty helped out with the protest at the invitation of Columbia seniors who then, in turn, aided us. (Orange was initially chosen for its stark contrast with the Columbia school color, baby blue; it’s a nice coincidence that, as a New School colleague pointed out to me, orange is also, for Buddhists, the color of heaven.) The genius of popular protest is eminently intertextual: we learn from each other how to say what we already know; we discover through doing and re-doing—through the conversation of public action--which communication strategies work best.

It’s intriguing to note, by the way, that the power of orange in the Garden protest did not necessarily depend on a broad New School constituency’s awareness of the Columbia link. I saw e-mail correspondence between a New School graduating senior who’d been at Columbia on the 16th and another New School student who would be receiving a doctorate at Madison Square Garden. The undergraduate favored using orange as a reference to what had happened uptown, while the Ph.D. candidate complained that the color wouldn’t communicate anything to most members of the audience. Although he had a point, events showed that the bright color was powerful in and of itself, and I think that the association for those activists who were aware of the significance—including the half-dozen Columbia protesters who joined us in solidarity—made a big difference to our own feelings of being part of something large and powerful, a movement extending in time and space beyond our local effort.

Obviously, my access to the articles about Calvin College drew not only on the work of those at Calvin who had organized against the Bush event, but on the existence of a faculty union movement at the New School. And therein lies one of my favorite examples of feedback, or synergy, or…let’s try a new term…spiral solidarity? Often throughout these past weeks, part-time faculty colleagues and I have commented on how fortunate it is that ACT-UAW got its first contract last fall, providing real job security to several people most disposed to take an active role in organizing the McCain mutiny from the faculty side. We found ourselves, quite ironically, in a much better position to speak out than some of our non-unionized full-time colleagues who also wanted to object but, facing impending job reviews, had to maintain a low profile.

Our union contract was in itself the outcome of a long, complex campaign, one crucial element in which was vocal, sustained support from students who formed a group called SLUG (for Student Labor Union Group) and gathered signatures in support of the faculty right to unionize. Eugene Lang College undergraduate Elijah Miller was a founder and key member in SLUG. In my next post, I’ll examine how Elijah’s eloquent call to his fellow graduating seniors to protest McCain helped trigger the rebellion in the Garden.

Elijah quite literally seized the microphone at Lang’s graduation event, held on May 18th in the ornate Gothic Revival sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. He did so over the pantomimed protests of the college’s Dean, who stood behind him in a red robe gesturing like a pissed-off cardinal. What if Elijah hadn’t made his bid for communication--or if the Dean had been a more efficient policeman? In her explanation of “Why I Spoke Up” on The Huffington Post (http://www.huggingtonpost.com/jean-rohe/why-i-spoke-up_b_21358.html), student commencement speaker Jean Rohe—the woman who set the tone for the rebellion on May 19th with her brilliant advance deconstruction of McCain’s speech—writes that Elijah’s dissenting voice, greeted by loud cheers from his fellow graduates, convinced her of her duty to articulate not only her own sentiments but those of so many other students whose views had been disregarded when President Kerrey chose McCain.