Month: January 2006

“It’s Educational!”

I’m back from Amherst and I’m really excited. The Master’s degree that I’m working towards seems so besides the point. I hate the idea of ever having to stop going to ULA. The real value of the program is the ability to step back from my day-to-day work and see the forest from the trees. I found the Labor Education class that I took to be a stumbling, fumbling frustration for nine of the ten days. This morning, however, I think I came to an epiphany, while I sat quietly and reflected on the readings and discussions. It’s too soon to tell, but it might have been a life-changing event. We read a lot about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, the open learning center in the South that trained CIO organizers, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In his book, “The Long Haul,” Myles talks about movement periods […]

In the Papers

Amherst is one of those funny, left-liberal college towns. The cover story of yesterday’s Springfield Republican had a hysterical sob story profile of some of the town’s poor maligned conservative minority. “In Amherst, I can’t watch a production of ‘West Side Story’ but I can see the ‘Vagina Monologues’ at the high school and watch a junior throw up her arms like (Olympic gymnast) Mary Lou Retton and shout the c-word,” said fifth-generation Amherst resident Larry J. Kelley. Meanwhile, back in New York, Newsday has begun trying to turn the public against next year’s citywide hotel strike. Our friend Kate Bronfenbrenner weighs in: Hotel workers say they are not afraid to walk out. The last New York City hotel strike, in 1985, lasted 27 days. “This is a union that knows how to prepare a strike and knows how to win,” Bronfenbrenner said.

Pro-Union Bumper Stickers on Toyotas

We have a great mix of people at the ULA program here in Amherst. That’s one of the biggest appeals that this program held for me when I applied. In my narrow corner of the New York labor movement, I’m just not likely to make friends with Machinists and Auto Workers, nor with Canadian trade unionists or union activists from the South. My brother Dave Rossi, a Canadian Auto Worker (he’s the guy with the cheerleader on his shoulders in this picture; no, he did not throw her in the air), can get pretty riled up when he sees a pro-union bumper sticker on the back of a Toyota or a Honda. In an atmosphere where everyone is boycotting something (don’t buy Coke, don’t shop at Wal-Mart, avoid Poland Spring water, cancel your Verizon cellphone contract, etc.), it’s easy to feel a little outraged when your comrades buy a non-union […]

Scholastic Update

I forgot to mention that I’m away at school in Amherst this week and next. In a stab at credibility as an actual UMass student, I try to do as many “regular student” things on campus as possible. So, yesterday, a few of my union brothers and I went to a Minutemen basketball game (they beat St. Joe’s 68-58). I’ve never been to school where there were cheerleaders before.

Cover Controversy

The new issue of “The Socialist” magazine is out in the mail, and, to my utter befuddlement, its cover is provoking some controversy. Apparently, some comrades take exception to linking Rosa Parks’ image and legacy with a stupid teevee show, no matter the ironic effect intended. The party’s female Co-Chair thinks that linking Parks with “Desperate Housewives” is “historically inaccurate, belittling to her as an individual, and demeaning to the Civil Rights movement.” Our young, white male Co-Vice Chair denounces the cover as “controversial in the eyes of women or people of color,” and Wayne Rossi dismisses it as “a smarmy, self-satisfied pop-culture reference…that sets a bad tone for the enterprise.” I produce each issue of the magazine in collaboration with an Editorial Board, and I am always sure to direct their attention to items that I think might spur controversy (for example, I was awfully worried about the response […]

Six Dollar Movie Review: Capote

Phillip Seymour Hoffman perfectly impersonates the late author (as far as I can tell, based upon the clips I have seen of his later TeeVee appearances as a professional celebrity), and brings a subtle complexity to the role of Truman Capote as he uses (and abuses) everyone around him while researching and writing “In Cold Blood.” Capote traveled to a sleepy Kansas town that was the site of a grisly quadruple murder in 1959 to write a story for “The New Yorker” but worked instead for five years on the first “non-fiction novel.” He traded on his celebrity to gain the confidence of the wives of the town’s lawmen and used his money to fund the legal appeals of the murderers in order to win their trust and keep them alive long enough to get their side of the story. Of course, he needed to have them swinging from the […]