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Everyone You Know Someday Will Die

This is going to be unforgivably morbid.

A lawsuit has been filed against the Port Authority by the kin of those who died in the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center. Without comment on the lawsuit, which has serious merits, one motivation is dubious. According to the NY Times:

“Among survivors of the first attack, which left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured, there has long been a feeling of neglect, as if their suffering was not valued as highly as that of the people who endured the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. There was no federally engineered compensation fund, no blue-ribbon panel to apportion blame.”

Well, geez, whose death is as valued as those who perished in the attack on New York four years ago? And what, exactly, is fair about valuing any random death over another? We have in the Gulf Coast devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina a clear example of our weird priorities. Only weeks later, as the death toll reaches 9/11-like proportions, is there anything approaching the outrage that was palpable in this country four years ago. Maybe it’s because we can’t bomb God and Nature in retaliation, or maybe it’s because we’re so numb to daily life that doesn’t directly affect us that we’re only moved by astronomical body counts.

I’m working again – organizing – and without giving too much away, I am brought in daily contact with senior citizens (shucks, I’ve probably given it away). I met a woman the other day who was all too eager to talk about her life’s tragedies with anyone who would listen, particularly any young man who reminded her of her own son, who died years ago at the age of 33. Apparently he got into an argument with a friend of his, which resulted in a karate chop to the neck and a death from internal bleeding a few days later. Totally random and tragic, but who’s left to mourn him except his elderly mom and maybe an old flame, if he’s lucky? The old woman still beamed with pride over her lost son. She talked about the flashy job in finance he had landed a year or two before he died. He worked for some firm on the hundred-and-somethingth floor of the World Trade Center. “He would have died anyway,” she said wistfully.

Of course he would have. Everyone you know someday will die. So why privilege certain deaths over others?

Why do the 9/11 widows get to veto any kind of cultural space downtown that acknowledges the USA’s imperialism? Why is Cindy Sheehan’s voice privileged over those of the moms whose kids didn’t die in Iraq, or over the kids themselves who have yet to be shipped there?

My younger brother was at the World Trade Center on that fateful day in 1993, part of a third grade field trip to the observation deck. And had that been an airplane bomb instead of a car bomb, then I would be devastated by the loss of my kid brother and probably still climbing on the soapbox afforded me. But my brother will still die one day (I promised this would be morbid, Brian), and if I’m still around to see it, I’ll still be devastated. So why the double standard over everyday tragedies?

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Instant Run-off’s Gonna Get You

Anthony Weiner’s concession in advance of the Democratic primary run-off is the best possible result of Tuesday’s election, and not least of which because I have no intention of voting for Whitey (whatever name he may go by).

Freddy Ferrer, whose campaign has been rather timid until now, deserves the chance to finally take on Mayor Mike directly, without diminished strength and campaign funds. His “two New Yorks” theme from four years ago was exactly the message that voters deserved, and I will always appreciate that Freddy didn’t back down on September 12, insisting that nothing had changed. We still had then, and still have now after four years of Bloomberg, a city of inconceivable riches that is pushing its poor and desperate farther out into the margins. If Freddy campaigns like a populist from now until November, our CEO Mayor may yet get fired.

Better yet, the possibility of wasting $12 million in taxpayer money on an unnecessary run-off election opens the possibility for significant election reform. It’s time to put proportional representation back on the agenda. Taxpayer outrage was a significant, if not primary, factor in San Francisco’s recent switch to instant run-off voting (elections by ranked ballot, where the votes for the lowest vote-getting candidate are redistributed to the next choice listed on each ballot until a candidate finally achieves a majority vote). It could be here, too. The gradual demographic shifts in the city virtually ensure lots more run-off elections, with a splintered, Balkanized electorate unable to elect majority candidates.

Those run-off elections are bad for democracy, too, for how divisive they can be. Four years ago, when Ferrer had to face Mark Green in a run-off, Green’s campaign played the race card, using fears of Al Sharpton to galvanize the white suburban vote. Green won the primary, but lost support and lost the election. But Whitey won anyway.

That wouldn’t happen in an instant runoff vote. A candidate must appeal to his rivals’ supporters for their second and third place votes in order to prevail in multiple rounds of counting. Divisiveness doesn’t work if you’re simply a plurality, nor does painting certain candidates (the wild ones, with the kooky lefty ideas) as “spoilers.” Voters could finally vote their conscience and their true preference, and candidates would have to emphasize common ground and areas of agreement.

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The Rats and the Big Rats

The Bush appointed National Labor Relations Board is poised to curtail the use of those giant inflatable rats that we’ve grown to love. A staple of labor demonstrations for the last decade, the rats are apparently a victim of their own success: increasingly viewed as a signal to the public not to patronize certain ratty, union-busting establishments.

That any branch of the government would ban an effective tactic of the labor movement should come as no surprise. The law’s just not on our side. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin amendments to the National Labor Relations Act expressly restricted labor’s solidarity power by banning so-called “secondary activity.”

“Primary activity,” for your edification, would be the employees of Company A striking and boycotting the products of Company A (for example: the UFW grape-pickers at Gallo striking and calling for a boycott of Gallo wines – that boycott is now over, by the way). “Secondary activity” would be the employees of Company A calling for a boycott of Company B for engaging in business with company A (for example, the UFW picketing wine stores that continued to carry struck Gallo wines – something that never happened, because of the law).

Try to imagine Teamsters deliverymen refusing to transport struck goods or UFCW grocery clerks refusing to sell struck goods or even UNITE HERE garment workers picketing Gap stores for selling sweatshop-made underwear, and you’ll see how the law denied the labor movement one of its most potent weapons. In fact, all of this talk about how the labor movement was at its peak membership when the AFL merged with the CIO in 1955 usually fails to mention that Taft-Hartley was passed by Congress in 1947, and Landrum-Griffin followed in 1959.

What about free speech, do I hear you cry? Well, yes, there is that pesky first amendment, and the courts have ruled that speech alone is exempt from labor regulations.

So, one can stand in front of a wine store and shout, “Do not shop in this store, because the rats are selling lousy wine made by scabs,” and that is fine. You can even hand out fliers saying the same.

Once you combine that free speech with any kind of activity (say, picket lines or picket signs), the courts have ruled that you are making an illegal “signal” to the general public to boycott the establishment, in violation of the amended National Labor Relations Act.

About ten years ago, the Laborers union begin accompanying their handbilling with large inflatable rats, as way of attracting attention to themselves and their message. The idea caught on like wildfire and other unions started doing the same. The message was certainly not a clear signal at first. I remember the first time I handbilled with a big rat, sometime in 1997 or 1998. More than a handful of passersby stopped and asked, “Is this about Giuliani?”

Now, people love the rat. As the sight of the big inflatable rats has become more familiar in New York City, people cheer when they see them, honk in support and jeer the bosses (whom, the rats are meant to evoke, in case the meaning was lost on you) and the judges and lawyers have taken note. “The rats think the big rats are a ‘signal,'” noted my UMass classmate, Jen Badgley, when we first heard about this in our labor law class this spring.

The rats admittedly are a signal to those of us with a little conscience and class consciousness (although, I’m not really sure how many people truly have the cause of labor in their hearts to allow for any kind of activity to be a meaningful “signal”). My favorite rat quote comes from the legendary president of the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, who responded to Taft-Hartley’s anti-Communist provisions by saying, “I’d rather be called a red by the rats than a rat by the reds.”

Another quote from Mike Quill is more appropriate at this time: “the judge can drop dead in his black robes.” That’s what he said to the press after being sentenced to prison for taking his union out on strike in violation of New York’s public sector Taylor Law.

Three weeks later, it was Quill who was dead, felled by a heart attack. Jail was not kind to the old man. Such is labor’s lot.

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The Aristocrats

“The Aristocrats” is a disappointment. For all the talk of how the World’s Dirtiest Joke is like some great jazz improv, which improves with each new teller’s unique voice, mostly, it’s the same joke. There’s diarrhea, there’s incest, there’s Joe Franklin and the same lame punchline.

I always thought the joke was that aristocrats (like England’s royal family) actually engage in some of the child-fucking, shit-eating acts described in the joke’s set-up. In fact, the punchline is meant to contrast the genteel evocation of the “aristocracy” with the foul deeds detailed in the joke itself. For that reason, the montage of interviews with comedians laughing at the existence of a better punchline (“the sophisticates!”) around the middle of the film is one of its funniest bits.

Likewise, when comedians digress from the established joke into hilariously ribald tangents, the film finally hits its stride. George Carlin riffs on the consistency of diarrhea, Gilbert Godfried explains the preponderance of blood in the set-up, Sarah Silverman makes it personal with Joe Franklin and damn near everyone picks on the absent Gallagher.

“Tell me a joke” would have been a better motivation for the filmmakers than “tell me the same old dirty joke.”