An observation on an observation

Some of you will have noticed that the lengthy reply the Drivler wrote was submitted twice. In other words, in a post about the evil of pushing a button, in which the Drivler insisted that pushing the button wasn't evil, he not only pushed the button, but pushed it twice, forcing you to look over his words more than once. Irony?

I have always wanted a soundbite on my computer which goes off whenever you double click again on an application that is trying to open. I want it to say, "Hey Moron! Quit Pushing The Fucking Button!" I gave up on that hope long ago because I could not figure out how to implement this esoteric feature. Driv ol' pal, I'm guessing your computer doesn't have such a feature either.

Workers of the world pt. 4

There are many chants one may offer during a protest. Many.

There's "no contract, no peace", the whole "wherever we go, people want to know"; there's "When I say Students you say first. Students! First!," "Hey hey, ho ho. Romly's plan has got to go!" and so on and so forth. But each of them has their merits and flaws.

For instance, in a circle of 30 people, there really are only about 4 real chant leaders and they will be expected to do all the work. A chant like "When I say students you say first!" is a grueling ordeal after only a few iterations. "No Contract, no peace" is better but it requires variation, which implies imagination, hard to muster when you've been walking around a circle for three hours. "No contract, No peace! No Healthcare, No peace! No Fair wages, No peace!" Inevitably the chant would start stuttering. "No contract, no peace. No contract, no peace. No uhmmm....health care, no peace!" No, if you want to keep up a wall of sound, you need to have community involvement on every syllable. Keep it symbol, keep it repetitive, keep it up. You don't disrupt the university with a tamborine. You need a bullhorn.

And we had a bullhorn. Josh is a great guy and he walks out into the middle of our circle and he begins to belt out his message of unity, but a minute later, some minion of a minion came out and took his bullhorn away. Took it away! That's what happens when you get a union of intellectuals--no brick bats, no arm and arm lines of defense. The powers that be need only send down the janitors to take away your bullhorn. I thought, 'what we need is a cadre of goons dressed all in camo.' But we didn't have any cadres. We had no major domos. There was no Hoffa to lead the rally. Only us intellectuals walking in a circle and rather than being overcome with our solidarity, being intellectuals, we were all questioning our rhetoric.

Some people were wondering why we were walking in a circle on an empty campus in the first place. Others didn't understand the central message of our chants. There were quite a few who wondered out of the circle to have a smoke and never came back. There was a little letter writing enclave off to the side and due to its nature as writing, it attracted English people slowly away from the circle itself. Some people showed up early, others late. No one was really sure what it was that we were trying to accomplish beyond shutting down the school. I think I should be included among the latter group. No one was going to classes who didn't have a midterm that day, what did it matter of a bunch of English grad students walked in a circle. Make the administration walk around and count empty classrooms. I walked for an hour and my feet were tired. Other's complained of blisters.

But let's get this straight, if we made a mistake in what we decided to do after we had demolished the school's business as usual, that's minor compared to the fact that we stopped our school from operating for a day. Walking in a circle may have been a waste of our time--it may not have been, but we sure as shit proved that the school operates because we, the 2,000 or so grad students (each with about 24 students in our classes) decide that it will operate. And that ultimately was the point of all this. It wasn't whether or not we could get more than 40 people walking in a circle.

Besides, we managed to walk in our circle in front of one gaggle of parents touring the school to determine whether their children should come there next year. That may have been worth all that lame chanting.

At noon, we all walked down by the pond (no boat in sight) and had a free lunch while hacky sack players hackeyed and a band played and some stuff was said on a bullhorn. We were given an update on our union's progress, all of which sounded good, and we were finally able to see all the grad students who had been marching in circles elsewhere on campus or who had shown up at noon for a free hotdog and a band. There was probably about a thousand of us.

I found Jed at that point and asked him about what was going on with the cops. He was in a hurry, being the V.P. of all this, but he did have time to answer me. There was a police acadamy graduation down at the Mullins Center. What I had seen was the future of Massachusetts State Trooper-hood. The vehicles were a display for the visitors. The tank/tractor/snow plow would not be coming up the hill to bust up our fun. In fact, the state troopers are union and so they supported what we were doing (so long as we kept off the grass).

I will say this though. There were a 1,000 people out on that grass. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people who saw all the cop cars and kept on up that hill to walk in their circle and yell stupid slogans sans bullhorn. I'm imagining that for everyone who showed, there had to be another person who decided they didn't want their heads cracked that day and went back home, and each of us have 24 students.

I am a member of the union, but unlike my gung ho brethren, I'm a little more realistic. To convince the administration that they should give us a raise, and not take away our benifits (which is really what this thing's about after all; we're not asking for more, we just don't want stuff taken away), the banter and the walking in circles isn't necessary. If I'm right with my figures (and I'm pretty sure I am), we hold between 24,000 and 48,000 grades in our hands. That alone should say "don't fuck with us." That's the grades of graduating seniors and students who's parents will call administrators should they be unhappy with their child's grades. That's a lot of reasons not to come to UMass-Amherst should the graduate students be forced to flex their muscles.

In the end, you don't have to shout, "no contract, no peace." The reality of our shutting down the school for the day should be enough to deliver this message. I'm actually somewhat confused why the administration would force these kinds of negotiations. They're forcing action by the very people who make their university run and he need really only flex their muscles to shut the whole thing down.

The Nature of Evil pt. 7

Recently, the Drivler has tried his hand at my "Evil" thought experiment. That is, when asked what set of circumstances would define evil within this rather closed system, he attempted to come up with more circumstances. That's fine. Think of as many circumstances as you'd like. Posit conditions A through Z, as long as they exist within or in relation to this system, you've not answered the question, only complicated it--but this system which I have described bears complication. If you want to include janitorial motives and room designer motives, they too will work in here.

Let's try this another way. The experiment is designed with a specific variable to be deciphered. If we agree that there is the potential for an evil act within this room with its red button, then we must also agree that there is the potential for an innocent act. Notice, I am positioning innocence, and not virtue, against evil. By doing so, the experiment becomes binary--either the act under description is evil or it isn't. What decides the evil of this act is always the conditions present around the button pressing, and more importantly, not what the person pressing the button knows, but rather what they should know. When should they know that pressing the button is not a very good thing to do, and not because of what pressing the button WILL do, but what it MIGHT do. Also notice their is no capitulation in this experiment. If the button presser kills off a million people, there is no suggestion that anyone, not even the button presser, will know who to blame.

What's up for grabs in this experiment is not actually an answer as to the nature of evil. Instead, the experiment defines what you, the experimenter, are willing to call evil and what you are willing to call innocent. But in that it asks you to make such a decision, the experiment allows you to examine the process to go through in order to come to your decision. You cannot say that there is no evil act possible. I need only posit a set of circumstances which indicate that pressing the button will immediately kill the janitor and that the presser of the button knows all of these circumstances and the only factor as to what the button presser doesn't know is whether or not the machine would work--and of course, the only reason to kill the janitor is because it is possible.

No matter where you draw the line in this experiment, no matter what trappings you place around the button, or context you place around the button pusher, the room designer or the janitor, at some point the act of pushing the button ceases to be innocent, accidental, or playful curiosity, and instead moves into a position of irresponsibility. In short, the button presser should have known better than to press the button, and as a result of this carelessness, people may have died.

What becomes evident at that point is that the entire nature of evil in this experiment is based on what the button presser aught to be able to figure out from the contexts surrounding the button. Moreover, if our button presser presses the button despite all possible signs, contexts, and symbols of caution, we can only come to three possible conclusions as to the nature of the act. Either the button presser is negligent (he/she doesn't bother to use what he knows to analyze the context), the button presser is ignorant (he/she lacks the ability to analyze the context), or the button presser is malicious (he/she knows the context and presses the button anyway).

Because El Drivler is reading this blog, I think it necessary to analyze a special case which seems to diverge from the three positions I have suggested: the button presser may be skeptical (he/she can analyze the contexts but simply does not believe them to accurately describe the nature of pressing the button). This special case does not hold up and in fact falls into one of the three positions I have already posited. Either the skeptical button presser is ignorant (they are unable to read the context clearly and this is the source of their doubt), or they are malicious (in which case they aren't sure whether the button will or won't kill millions of people, but they are willing to take that chance just to end their skeptical position).

Lastly, I have argued before that maliciousness is not a very good definition of evil, and yet this experiment seems to double back on that previous assertion. It does not. The nature of the experiment is such that any number of contexts may be applied. One may find the act evil before assuming it to be malicious, and therefore, maliciousness is nothing but window dressing for evil. It reinforces our idea that the act is evil, but it is not a necessary component.

Workers of the world pt. 3

Don't bother the....graduation? Seriously?

I made my way across the street and up the hill. I heard a bullhorn. I didn't really see anyone.

To our merit, we did shut the school down. I didn't see any undergraduates walking around. It looked like campus on a weekend. I will say that. But neither did I see the giant offering of protest that would have meritted the varitable police army in front of the Mullins Center. What the hell was going on. For a few moments I entertained the very strange notion that while I had been listening to my tape of Modest Mouse, announcements for evacuation due to full scale nuclear war had been announced over the radio. That's what it felt like. The empty campus was just plain eerie.

Then I turned the corner and I saw them...my people...the thirty or so people walking in a circle in front of Bartlett hall. When you consider that 16,000 people probably missed one or possibly all their classes that day, you expect to see more than thirty people walking in a circle, and you know what...I'll say it, we sucked at it.

I remember being in a hotel in SF during the hotel worker strike and wanting to KILL the people shouting downstairs. They shouted all night. They shouted all day. They shouted all the way through my hangover. When I went down for a cigarette, I actually contemplated walking across the street and punching somebody. That's not an exageration. They shouted in Vietmanese, they shouted in Spanish, they shouted in English.

Our English revelers couldn't seem to figure out that they had to make constant noise. They didn't want to make constant noise. Hell, they didn't want to walk. They wanted to go home and read. That's what people like me do. So, we'd walk in a circle and every so often one of four of our union leaders would attempt a chant.

Workers of the world pt. 2

As I approached the concourse of the Mullins center, it became ever clearer that I was in the midst of what one might call a police presence. There were cops directing traffic, cops in patrol cars, cops on horse back. Cops here, cops there. Some grim, some jovial (neither of which really made me feel much better--I don't know if its better to have one's skull bashed in by a deadpan cop or one whose laughing). They were everywhere.

I rounded the corner and there it was. I had a view of it from the side, the opposite side from when I saw it on my way in. I did not get a good look at it from the front because there had been a cop there and I didn't want to look supicious. I had the feeling that if these people had an idea that I was there for the protest I would have been arrested immediately. I knew that if one of them stopped to ask what I was doing, I would tell them that I was an undergraduate and fake stupidity. After all, I am 32. If I was still an undergraduate, chances are I wouldn't be the brightest of the bunch.

Regardless, there it was: two tracks, one in front of the other, and tall. A tank.

And right behind it, a boat. Now, I realize that UMass has a really cool pond in the middle of it, but it's still just a pond. You could run around it if someone tried to get away from you without too much trouble. You don't need to call out Aquaman for any crime likely to be committed on the UMass campus. In that same vein, you don't need a boat. But they had a boat.

I tried to imagine them dragging the boat up the hill, but I couldn't think of any reason that would pay off such an eneavor. I mean, the tank I understand. Nothing says, "DISPERSE!" like tear gas and a tank, but a boat?

A group of people carrying signs that read, "No Contract, No Peace," which is our Union motto crossed the street approaching both tank and boat, and I thought, 'Great! If all these cops are going to arrest somebody it will be these idiots flying right into the belly of the beast, and hopefully, in all this confusion, they won't hassle me.' But then I saw the tank from the front.

I had been a little premature in my decision to call the vehicle a tank. Snowplow would probably be a little more accurate. Farm equipment painted in state police colors maybe? The group of protestors stopped in front of one of the mounted police and...

...and ASKED whether they could protest there. And the cop said, "Just stay off the grass and don't bother the people in the graduation."

Ummm.... Rrrrrnnnn.... Huh?

Workers of the World pt. 1

When I drove to school yesterday, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. Or more precisely, I'd never seen one in the context of a school yard. I crawled all over one at the age of 6 or so back when my brother was in the marines.

Still, driving down the road that essentially divides Hadley from Amherst and which then continues on to encircle my campus, who would have thought that there would be a tank on the Mullins center concourse. I mean seriously, a tank.

Well, I realize that we were protesting the administration and that I, along with my fellow graduate students at UMass-Amherst--a campus pretty much devoted to graduate study (1 grad for every 8 undergrad)--were planning on shutting the school down for the day as a pretty big "hey, look what we can do" to the administration. Furthermore, I realized that UMass is essentially one of those kinds of campuses, or at least it used to be. Our beloved administration building has a ramp running up to it so that armored vehicles can block off exits (should students try to occupy), but what I really imagined was thirty English people walking around in a circle in front of Bartlett, shouting various "strike" phrases, and not very convincingly.

We are, after all, English people. We study Marx, but like all good white upper middle class people, revolution just really isn't in our blood. I would go so far as to say that it needn't be.

After all, if 2,000 student teachers decide to walk off their job, and you're the administration, well...you're fucked. There's really no two ways about it. Our students are upper middle class too, they will complain. More importantly, their parents will complain. It's not like we teach high end, five students to a class, type classes. We teach general education--in other words, required courses--in other words, courses that no tenured faculty would want to teach, in some cases, can teach. After all, how many English professors do you need to teach 60 or 70 sections of Freshman comp. And that's just the English Department.

No. To be honest, we needed only to say, "give us a good contract, or teach these 500 classes yourself. Oh yeah, and grade your own papers." After they shit themselves, whoever was in charge would sign that contract without delay. But here in Massachusetts it's illegal to strike.

Imagine that. This state is so close to communist that it seems absolutely counter-intuitve that a strike would be illegal. Anyways, what we did (yesterday, anyway) wasn't a strike. It was a work shut down.

Still... the tank.

So, I'm driving down the road that seperates Hadly from Amherst which leads to my parking area which is technically in the town of Hadly. I do not park in the same town as my school. How sad is that. Regardless, I see this tank and I think, 'holy shit, this is serious.' It does not help that I have driven past four or five police cars and I see two mounted police getting ready to mount up.

A group of thirty or so bikes past me going the opposite direction, all carrying union banners. They're engineering a traffic jam for anyone who's trying to go to campus as per usual.

I attempt to park. I pull into my lot, which is dirt and in the middle of nowhere. There are no designations for parking spaces whatsoever and so some of the rows are only wide enough for one car, while others are big enough that you could have a drag race down them. But there are no spots to park.

I start going down the aisles hoping to find a car and on each aisle I find myself cursing some car that's parked there without a lot permit. I after all had to pay $40 for my right to park in Hadly. Who are these transgressors to just simply park in my lot?

They're the police. There must have been about fifty patrol cars placed indisciminately in my lot, and as I see this I start thinking, do I really want to go have my head busted in when, as I said before, if all the grad students simply didn't come to school one day we could affect this business shut down from the comfort and club-free environment of our living rooms. Plus, I could get some reading down to boot. In any case, I would not up in jail or a hospital.

But sometimes, dear readers, Monstro's kind of dumb.

I finally found a place to park so far from everything that it took me five or ten minutes just to get to the bus stop--which is in the middle of nowhere. I did not take the bus, but instead decided to walk. After all, before I went up the hill to join my union brothers and sisters in solidarity, you can bet your ass I wouldn't a closer look at that tank.

The Nature of evil pt. 6

Did you know that if you hope to rent a place, and that you call a landlord and he/she tells you over the phone that you they won't rent a place to you sight unseen, they aren't saying that they won't rent a place to you that you haven't seen? It's that they won't rent to you until they've seen you. Maybe they aren't racist. Maybe you're just not their kind of people. Regardless, that's what that means.

More on the nature of evil. I'd like to drop out of the hypothetical for a second and instigate something only a slight bit more concrete--a thought experiment.

Here is the set-up. You go to visit your friend at work--he's a janitor--and he's showing you around the place where he works. He shows you a rather technical looking room with a control panel and a big red button and then begins to empty the trash. No ones looking. There's no indication that the machine to which this control panel is connected is even on. Now I ask you, at what point are you evil? What extra details do I have to add to this story for you to consider the guy in the experiment, which I have deemed "you", evil? Thank of this as a Mr. Potato Head of morality. Right now, you aren't evil. You're in a room. Big deal. Maybe you shouldn't be there, but most people aren't going to say that you being in an off limits area is immoral.

So, what if you press the button? What if you press the button, and do to whatever it is the button does, someone dies. Are you evil then? Do you have to know that someone dies in order for you to have committed an evil act? Do you have to have some suspicion that there might be dire repercussions should you press that button? How strong do the implications have to be?

If I say that the button controls the launch of a nuclear warhead and that you know this, and that you press the button anyway, well, yes, then that's clearly evil. But what if you just know that this is a military base that you're in, and you don't know what this particualar part of the base does? What if you do know what this particular part of the base does, but you don't know what this particular machine does? Also, is it only evil if the machine with the red button controls a nuclear warhead? What if the machine caused some robotic arm in plant that makes artificial hearts skip some all important screw, and the deffective heart goes out? What then? Do you have to figure in whether there is a sign or not that tells you not to touch the button. What about common sense, common decency, common ettiquette. Which of these, if breached, constitutes evil.

And what if the button does none of these horrible things that I've suggested? What if the button only might have done something, but you'll never know what it does or doesn't do, are you let off the hook then?

There is obviously potential for evil in these circumstances, but the question is what shape this scenario would have to take in order for it to pass the level of potential and settle finally in our own ability to call it evil?

Checking in

I want to start off subject. Picasso used to abbreviate the name for his journal to jou--which evidently in French means a certain lust for life and playfulness. I am currently reading a book on modernism and jazz so the information seems appropriate, but I'm also here writing a journal of sorts, and I'm thinking, 'do I have fun with this thing?' I'm not sure that I do--though, I'm sure that I should.

But the long cold Winter is over. I am in shorts today. And with the end of the Winter comes an insurmountable will to read. Yes, it might have been more profitable to have this will during the colder months, but no, my nature has an irony all its own, and so it is only now that I am devouring books. In the last couple weeks, in addition to my school work, I have finished Vineland, read The Postmodern Condition, gotten half way through the Washington Irving's The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, 3/4 of the way through this book on Modernism and Jazz, and...it feels like I'm forgetting a book.

Also, writing...I'm writing, it's true. Though I cannot blame this at all on the lack of snow on the ground. Rather, herr Drivler has taken the role of my #1 fan until such time as I can go to book clubs in order to give me the necessary boost to the arm to get the ole shock tea juices a-flowin' again. We're moving page by page through the book, and it's going great. I write this of course so that in five hundred years, scholars working in a Clemins Studies department will trace up on my name (a footnote in some journal somewhere) discover my blog, learn of my book, read it, and then attempt to shift all of that centuries critical perspectives so that they can see it as good, but to no avail, and I'll be forgotten again in a couple of decades. But still, two decades five centuries from now aint bad.

The Drivler is, by the way, incredibly insightful, and anyway, it gives us something to talk about on the phone....well, more than "so did you read my blog," or, "I knew this lady once and she...had like...lawn ornaments." This all of course a lie, normally we just hurl racial slurs at each other. I'll say, "You marginalized other." And the Drivler will say back, "Yeah, well well...you're a deracialized heteroginist."

Damn that hurts.

Today, I picket. I actually should be going down there soon, but I'm hoping to go for maximum picketage (we're on strike today only). In other words, its always bad to show up and then leave, but if you show up late enough, you can ride the event out until the end, and then you look like a trooper. Which, in fact, I am. Then after that, its off to discuss Lisa Lowe and her ground breaking theories about Asian Americans. Nobody has ever written this particular book, using these particular words in this particular order the way that Lisa Lowe does.

So, I'm putting this out on the wire. I'm buying a new computer. This one is breaking. It's overheating and I want to get a new one while I can still jump on the internet with the old one, in case I have to find all the drivers that haven't been updated on the new one. I'm getting a Dell desktop. Lynn, having listened to my computer's high pitch screech (which is what it does when it decides to break), jumped on line on her Macintosh laptop and got me a whole bunch of information. Man, I love her. She even looked up the requirements for Doom 3. Take that all you married men out there with less cool wives.

Mickey and the D men

I watched Supersize Me, but you know what? I didn't need to watch Supersize Me. I mean, honestly, does anybody?

Let me start this another way. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I used to find myself often driving home from San Jose where my girlfriend lived, and quite often I would begin this journey by going to the McDonalds around the corner from her house and then braving traffic. Until one day, I looked up at the menu, and I realized that I didn't want any of it.

None.

I mean, you can kind of go down their menu in your head. Big Mac, Quarter Pounder, QP w/chi, Filet 'o' Fish, McChicken (in its various incarnations), Nuggets, and the sandwich of the week that they're trying to sell that's basically a Big Mac with character. I still remember the McLean. If you live in certain parts of the country, you may add the McRib sandwich. There, I've just mentioned a whole bunch of food. Do you feel hungry at all? Seriously.

Well, neither did I. I was sitting at the drive through being assaulted by the foul smell of their greese, and their bread (why does their fucking bread smell) and I realized I wanted none of it. The guy says, "can I take your order?" and I reply, "no thanks." That was probably ten years ago. I have not seriously sought out a McDonalds since (except for their breakfast menu for some reason, and that's maybe once a year). I simply drove through the drive through empty handed affecting a great cosmic revelation that what I wanted was not McDonald's; what I wanted was food.

That's why I made it through that drive through without ordering anything--even out of sense of propriety in that you're supposed to order something if you're in the drive through. But it isn't food. It's not that it isn't good food, though if I were forced to term it food, I would refer to it as ass food, but that's not the point. It doesn't actually belong in that catagory. That meat. When does ground beef ever cook up to look like that? It doesn't. It's as simple as that. I've already mentioned that bread shouldn't smell like McDonald's bread smells, and no ammount of sesame seeds is going to cover that fact up. They sell hamburgers for $.69. Try that. Try to go buy the ingredients necessary to make a hamburger on a budget of $.69. It can't be done.

People say that they like McDonald's because it tastes good, but for the most part, I don't see it. I mean, I've been smoking for fifteen years. My taste buds should be all but dead, and still I can't stomach that shit. Where are these golden arches where people are buying the good tasting Big Mac. They don't exist. These people are delusional.

Regardless, not food. Supposedly, arsenic tastes like almonds, but that doesn't make arsenic food. That's the point I'm getting at.

Now bring this all back to Supersize Me. The movie was made due to the legal claims that a steady diet of McDonalds has caused obesity and diabetes. But I'm curious how it ever got to that point. Once you realize that what they sell isn't food, you realize that McDonald's isn't actually a restaurant (an assumption that isn't hard to make), and then what legal claim can you make that the diet they supplied is unhealthy. Of course it's unhealthy, it isn't a diet. I don't sue my local hardware store because my steady diet of nuts and bolts is playing havoc on my colon.

Now, I could add that one should note that McDonald's isn't what it claims to be based on the logic of their scene. Sixty billion people cannot be served; there aren't sixty billion people in the world. However, that would be really close to knit picking. What it really comes down to is this:

McDonald's, in not being a restaurant, is failing as a restaurant without any sort of other business to define itself as. It is crumbling. Already it is the shit heel of fast food--similar to what K-Mart was about 15 years ago. K-Mart, of course, made a recovery not by its own hand, but by the prominance of other Mart stores like Target, Wal-Mart, Deals and Steals. Those kinds of places. It ceased to be a crappy department store, and started being an average Mart store. McDonald's will find no such salvation.

A class of my students asked me what I thought about Walmart. They asked me whether I believed their evil empire could crumble. My answer concerned Rome--a much grander edifice than Walmart will ever be--it fell. If Rome fell, so then shall Walmart. But Rome is a far away example. Sadly, people don't know enough about Rome to see the lessons inherent in imperial thinking. My new example is McDonald's. It's crumbling and who would ever thought it possible, even twenty years ago. It is my new Ozymandius. "Look on my Big Mac, ye mighty, and despair!"