May Day, May Day

In honor of May Day, this article from the The Nation about graduate student unionization.

This is the supplement to the entry on Los Alamos, where other "disgruntled" workers took to blogs in order to take some measure of power back from management.

It is indeed the truth that the graduate assistant is now the low-paid laborer of choice for administrations (read management) who are taking away full faculty lines from departments even while student enrollments across the country are generally going up, not down.

Los Alamos: The Real Story

Incredible! An insurgency against an abusive and incompetent director at Los Alamos led by a blog LANL: The Real Story.

Let every abusive director quake in their shoes (at least a little). Yes, transparency from the ground up in labor relations can work!

Labor unions, AFSCME and SEIU could put the blog accomplishments of the Los Alamos scientist to good use!

join the party party

well, it does not have a beach video with flags - but on the heels of the earlier recommendation, listen to this album, available on the web: join the party party

China's Hu, Taiwan Opposition Leader Meet

"Analysts disagree on whether Lien's trip will help ease China-Taiwan tensions. Some say the former vice president and foreign minister can win Beijing's trust. Others say Chinese leaders are using Lien to widen the schisms in Taiwanese society." Read more here...

China's Hu, Taiwan Opposition Leader Meet

I agree with the "others" since Lien, who lost a tight race to the DPP incumbent Chen Shui-bian has actually refused to call his political adversary "President" Chen since last March's election. This gives the impressionj that the KMT is intent upon de-legitimizing Chen as the elected leader of Taiwan. The DPP have had great trouble ruling, more and more I'm realizing because the government bureaucracy is completely dominated by the KMT. Forty years of one party rule is enormously difficult to live down. Civil servants born and bred in the arms of the KMT are an incredibly powerful force in Taiwanese society.

But if Lien thinks that re-unification with the Mainland will lead to a restoration of the KMT in one big happy Chinese family, he will be in for a big surprise.

wayward cloud

I took my UNDERGRADUATE film class to see Tsai Ming Liang's latest film Wayward Cloud.

I would never have dared to do so in Minneapolis -- I am sure that I would have been reported to the Dean, the Student Ombudsman, the President, sued perhaps even for requiring my students to watch a man dressed as a penis in one of the musical numbers.

Tsai's film is about the unlikely love between a porno actor and a docent at Gu Gong Museum and takes place during a drought that has dried up all water sources in Taiwan. Ravishingly beautiful, the film features Lee Kang Sheng as a cross between Charlie Chaplin's tramp and Mark Wahlberg. Lee's physical beauty and his sly, streetwise, thuggish sexuality have never appeared more compellling.

The climate of the University of Minnesota, located in the heart of the Upper Mid-West is not really conservative, but it is religious. And there is a subtle and pervasive moralization that makes "offending" some one else's sensibilities a vice more than crime that must be punished. This phobic reaction to the other, the alien, the provocative, the disturbing, the erotic, the immoral, the failed has been encouraged by both left and right-wing in that city and is reflective of the growing narrowness of the American mind. I am no admirer of Allan Bloom, but he did get his title right. It's just that his right-wing cronies had as much to do, if not more with the door slamming on a spirit of free and critical inquiry in American public discourse and universities.

My Taiwanese undergraduates here were stimulated, delighted, disgusted and willing to talk about the film and all of its tragicomic complexities.

In Taiwan, the recent massive expansion of the universities has left an unevenness in teaching quality and research projects, but it is no small irony that I have encountered greater receptivity, curiosity, less resentment, and more open-mindedness here among my students in a country that shed its military dictatorship in 1987, that saw free presidential elections for the first time in 2000, than I did in my students in the Mid-West.

new law a FECAL matter

Something about the DVD filtering measure Bush quietly signed today stinks. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act creates an exemption in copyright law to protect one Utah company that sells a filter for DVDs, censoring their content at $5 per month. Now I am not going to come to the aid of Hollywood on their "understanding" of copyright, nor do they need any help. But apart from the two obvious problems with this new legislation - namely that it supports censorship, and that it aids only one company, Clearplay and cracks down on their competition - I wonder why this kind of law is even possible under the current interpretation of the US constitution... And Hollywood product without sex scenes, violence and foul language? What are clients of Clearplay going to watch?

Now anti-Japanese protests are illegal AND evil

Yup, that's what the official tune is now according to the an editorial in Shanghai's Liberation Daily. Follow the links here .

Not only are the Japanese fomenting evil plots, the anti-Japanese protesters were actually anti-Chinese! -- they're fomenting evil plots -- AGAINST the Chinese Communist Party through their expression of anti-Japanese sentiment.

That's the newest twist of logic coming out of the official organ of the Shanghai Communist Party. You know, it's hard to come up with convincing propaganda 24/7, so sometimes you have to reach for stars and produce some completely irrational stuff just to keep your adversaries off balance. Because you know what? They're hatching evil plots against irrationality and misinformation and that just isn't right.

Nixon on tape

but he normalized relations with the People's Republic of China during a brief respite from Anti-Semitism...A Tiny Revolution: The Main Problem With Richard Nixon? He Wasn't Anti-Semitic Enough.

And for my second grade presidential biography project I wrote in a laudatory manner about tricky dick (he was good for the Chinese) and now I understand the look of horror on Miss Levine's face.

umm...if we're not winning, and we're not losing

then what's is going on in Iraq? Rumsfeld sez...

A Tale of Two Nationalisms

By way of New Left Review -- critical reading for anyone who wants to understand what is going on in China and Taiwan right now. WANG CHAOHUA - A TALE OF TWO NATIONALISMS

Wang reminds us that Benedict Anderson pointed out that there are two kinds of Asian nationalism -- both evident in the recent Chinese anti-Japanese protests. One is a "popular" nationalism based upon resisting Western and Japanese imperialism, the other an "official" nationalism based upon restoration of Imperial ambitions greatness and glory through the re-establishing of pre-modernborders. I agree with Anderson's assessment --but with many reservations. The first form of nationalism is too often exploited by the second to the point where the two strains of nationalist sentiment can no longer be properly separated at all. In the days of Mao's principle of Third Worldism or Third World solidarity, the first form of nationalism was based upon an understanding that the grievances, the suffering of all Third World nations could be forged into revolutionary principles of resistance and autonomy.

Therefore, when Mao stood before the microphones at Tiananmen in 1949 and declared, "The Chinese people have stood up!" from the point of view of solidarity and internationalism, this was a thrilling metonymy -- the seizure of power by the oppressed people of China would lead to other declarations of independence. This was one meaning of the success of teh Chinese revolution.

The second form of nationalism sees in this declaration a revival of Chinese imperial ambitions, and is based upon exceptional grievance and Nietzschean resentment. China's extraordinary victimization knows no comparison. Therefore its demands for reparation are to be singular and not associated with other struggles.

MOST importantly, Wang emphasizes the importance of resolving the issue of Taiwan's status for the development of Taiwanese democracy. Whether or not Taiwanese culture is Creole or Chinese, the state of limbo has consigned the increasingly sophisticated and well-educated islanders to a kind of political impotence and sense that the promise of the 1990s when the island experienced a powerful wave of perestroika-like political and cultural activity have been betrayed.

This stasis and paralysis is actually advantageous to the right-wing KMT, which wants reunification and sees that as the only way of resolving the present crisis.

The DPP unfortunately has been unable to offer a compelling vision for independence, hampered many say, by pressure from the Americans to whom Taiwan is beholden for military support in case the Communists should decide to take military measures. So Taiwan has to dampen its sense of sovereignty, muzzle is political aspirations for greater participatory democracy all in favor of a mythical "status quo."

CrazyJianZhu

I've wanted to blog this for a long time, but having tried to take in my share of bad architecture here in Taiwan, I was in a kind of bad architecture toxic shock and I just couldn't process the KTV motel baroque facades that are hiding barracks style sheet metal buildings. I've recovered enough to refer you to a blog that takes care of Mainland China for you bad architecture lovers! CrazyJianZhu

French greed = greed

The French Center Right demonstrates once again that it is always ready to cuddle up to dictatorships if there are a few euros to be made. French leader signs Chinese trade deals and criticizes arms ban

Even though other EU countries are getting cold feet about lifting the arms ban against China, Raffarin and company are spearheading the movement to lift it, hoping in return for a reward, I'm sure.

Social Security: the definitive piece

Left Business Observer writes: "Standard anti-government ideology to the contrary, Social Security and Medicare work very well: they largely accomplish the tasks they set out to, and do so at administrative costs far lower than their private-sector counterparts."

Read about it here.

Much of what we thought was fringe or extreme 20 or thirty years ago has saturated public discourse and the airwaves-- "public = bad" "private = good" has been hammered into our brain so that we are all reacting like Pavlov's dogs at the dinner bell even when there is nothing in our dishes-- we are trained to salivate for our present masters -- the ones who covet the social security pot of public gold as their rightful booty.

China's BIG victim complex

Orville Schell, old China hand, as they used to call China Watchers during the cold war get it so right on the mark in the Taipei Times that it is a little scary. Unable to assume its position as a powerful nation among many, the Chinese prefer to whip up nationalist sentiment in order to justify a kind of exceptionalism that has obeys one logic -- hegemony, or expansionism.

Schell's characterization of China's victim complex reminded me of all the times during my childhood when I heard about how Chinese and dogs were not allowed on Shanghai's legendary Bund, today home of countless Shanghai harbor cruises, the occasional beggar and reams of tourists Chinese and foreign, looking to get a good view of the Buck Rogers Pudong skyline. Were any of these complaints motivated by a demand for justice? I think not, they were, and continue to be demands for recognition -- recognition of exceptional Chinese suffering.

But the politicized inflation of historical victimization ignores and represses the present regime's brutal history. Whipping everyone up into an anti-Japanese fervor is a very calculated political strategy to justify a military and diplomatic offensive on Taiwan: because in the mind of Chinese hyper-patriots, Japan is demonically instigating Taiwan to declare independence in order that it can again dominate the once colonized island.

Finally, the Western press is waking up to this ugly and dangerous wave nationalism on the Chinese Street .

We have to denounce this for what it is -- the kind of government sanctioned rabble rousing that also made the average German citizen forget his or her woes in 1936. "Grossdeutschland" or "Greater Germany" is a concept that the Chinese government is reviving, with Chinese language and culture as the common binding trait that will allow the nation's expansionist ambitions to appear as "rescue" of Chinese culture.

Mongolian Sandstorms

The Mongolian sandstorms have reached southern Taiwan today. Strangely enough, there are no stories of this in English posted on the Taiwanese newspapers on line. Air quality in Taipei was supposed to be really bad today, and down south, the sky was yellow -- it looked like tornado weather in Minneapolis and Leo and I have had a phlegmy cough for weeks. Spring sandstorms are presumably rather common affairs now in Taiwan and rumor has it that the desertification and deforestation of Mainland China has produced spring sandstorms that travel from the Mainland to Korea, Japan and drift down Taiwan.

It gives us a taste of the environmental damage caused by China's rapid industrialization and economic growth. But who can deny that prosperity is better than poverty? And wasn't some cultural studies guy who suggested that enviornmentalism was a conspiracy of developed nations against developing nations? As we read Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of Odysseus today, my students all admired Odysseus as a survivor and asked why I thought A&H were perhaps a little bit critlcal of the Attic hero's impeccable survival instincts...then, one of them said, "We've watched too many Hollywood films." And it's true, they do watch a lot of them.

John Bolton's nomination going down

I've been so preoccupied with the heat in Asia -- and I'm telling, you, it is getting hotter here by the minute, that I almost missed this very important development. John Bolton's nomination looks like it's going down. Friends in MN, call Norm Coleman and tell him what you think of the freaky guy who tries to fire people for telling a truth that contradicts their hardline policies against Cuba. Read about it here. The Washington Note Archives

the single most beautiful video ever "made"

Umm....words cannot do justice to this...you've got to see it to believe it....America We Stand As One Audio

What was in Adorno's Lunchbag? Or Academic Blogging

"No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist."

The Village Voice "covers" academic blogging ... Of course, no mention of Karl Kraus (1874-1936, to whom the quotation above is ascribed), of 18th century pamphleteers, or of the broadsheets of past centuries. No mention, either, of the recent death of newspaper journalism...

no Left left in Taiwan

Lest one think I idealize Taiwanese democracy, let is be stated clearly that there is no Left left in Taiwan, as I have gradually discovered, at least not in academia. Leftists were killed and persecuted by the KMT first during the Chinese Civil War when the island returned to Chinese rule and then through the years of the KMT's military dictatorship.

What we have is a battle between two conservative parties for the hearts and minds of the citizenry in the present democracy. The KMT is a champion of Chinese values and Chinese re-unification. Ironically, they are friends of the Communists now. The ruling DPP is supposedly a green party, but other than national health care, I don't see much green in their politics. They are into the identity politics of place, but perhaps they have been most skillful at exploiting the Taiwanese sense of marginalization by the mainlanders during the post 49 years.

There are two aesthetics at war here -- the aesthetics of kitsch traditionalism and the aesthetics of kitsch presentism. the following image from a local Chinese Year's parade in MaDou, a nearby town exemplifies the current tensions and contradications of this confusing place -- there is the rooster in front of an important local Buddhist temple in honor of the Chinese year of the Rooster, the lovely beauty queens, in imitation of American homecoming parades -- and then to top it all off, in the middle of February, the reindeer, pulling the float -- in honor of Santa Claus.

Chinese nationalism

Spontaneous expressions of Chinese nationalism in the form of anti-Japanese sentiment actually surfaced in the winter of 1986 in Beijing as university students took to the streets to demand more government accountability about trade policies with Japan. We know how that student movement evolved -- it ended in Tiananmen Square three years later on June 3. Today's anti-Japanese protests are equally symptomatic. Read it here at in French at Le Monde.

These protests are authentic expressions of discontentment, but in no way are they progressive; the demand for justice from the Japanese is terribly displaced.

What the demonstrations demonstrate is that no amount of consumerist pacification will be able to stop these kinds of protest movements. And even if they are not initially progressive, they can serve to become "alternative" spaces where, as in the student movement of the late eighties, greater political maturity evolved and the demands for justice, more transparency and more participatory politics were made explicit during the movement itself, transforming most immediately the geography and libidinal economy of the city of Beijing, albeit briefly. Citizens supported the students occupying the square in material ways with food, water, sleeping bags, amazed by their idealism and their commitment.

racial hatred

Read the April 10th entry on hate crimes as a growth industry in Orcinus.

This is the other face of the right, and it always has been -- the one that the smiling, modern face of the right winks at...it is a face of the enjoyment of regressive de-sublimation, a fantastic indulgence in the most violent fantasies of omnipotence fueled by the images of what can be wrought by force alone.

China's anti-Japan rallies spread

The outrage over a Japanese textbook that glosses over the Nanjing Massacre is sparking Anti-Japan rallies all over China. Note first of all, that the government has been less than vigilant about suppressing these "spontaneous" expressions of political discontent while it put dissidents under house arrest and kept a tight lid on all signs of mourning for Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted during the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Anti-Japanese sentiment and Chinese nationalism are condoned and encouraged by this government that allows its citizens few if any means of political expression.

Even though I would like to think that the Communists are playing with fire in allowing even this degree of political expression (the 1989 democracy movement was preceeded by anti-Japanese protests), I think that any progressive grassroots protest on a massive scale against domestic corruption and political repression is highly unlikely. Reactionary protests such as the anti-Japanese ones will probably continue and continue to be tolerated.

Once again, a force for change may emerge out of the Chinese peasantry and sweatshop laborers. The peasants have been left out of the economic growth of recent years, suffering from the petty tyrants and corrupt local officials, their political consciousness may in fact be one motor for political transformation. But they can't do it alone -- the workers now who are making most of the world's cheap consumer goods in special economic zones like Shenzhen have been content to labor under extreme conditions, with no disability insurance, no benefits, at minimal wages, no legal protections, no legal housing even. They are terrified of being replaced by more desperate country cousins. We don't hear about them very much do we?

But when we buy our cheap flatware, our plastic baby toys at Target and Walmart, they're ones whose labor allows middle class Americans to maintain a standard of consumerism impossible if we were to buy goods made by Americans paid a living wage. We hear about the US debt that the Chinese government is holding, but we don't hear about the Chinese workers whose every ounce of energy and intelligence is spent on satisfying our hunger for the latest Gizmo Whatsit Cute Little Thing I've Just Got to Have.

Can a "Patriotic" Mob Take Over the Universities?

Baruch Kimmerling is a prominent Israeli sociologist. The Chronicle of Higher Ed rejected this article. Our commitment to academic freedom these days seems as deep as Donald Rumsfelf's commitment to world peace. Read Kimmerling on the Columbia witch hunt.

Investigating Professorial Anger

Joseph Massad has been proven to have replied "angrily and heatedly" to a student. He has been proven to have asked a rhetorical question in a testy manner during an off-campus talk. He is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. Does this in itself mean that he has acted unethically, or that he was not a rigorous scholar? The New York Times Editorial at the very least suggests that given his positions and his personality, he warrants further investigation.

It glosses over the question of the hate mail and death threats received by the professors themselves and by continuing to imply that they are indeed "guilty" of something, they will encourage the virulence of pro-Israeli extremists in and around the Columbia controversy to suppress dissent.

Read "New York Times Supports McCarthyite Witch Hunt"

The New York Times would rather see attempts to voice sustained, rigorous dissent over US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. See why Juan Cole is cancelling his subscription. Informed Comment

Iif you criticize Israel, and if you do it in a consistent way, and if you are sympathetic to the cause and the struggle of the Palestinian people, you will be accused, if not of anti-Semitism, then of demagoguery. The editorial says that judging the quality of teaching at Columbia was not the mandate of the investigation, but of course it was...because poor teaching is demagoguery.

What Massad and some of his colleagues at Columbia are teaching is a Middle Eastern history that does not favor Israeli OR American state policy. His right to continue to do so is guaranteed by the academic freedom policies of American Universities.

The pseudo-liberalism of the New York Times should be seen for what it is..., the news from the US makes me shudder...

the Pope continued...

Never, ever did I want my last post to be construed as an endorsement of the Pope or Catholicism. Nor do I think that the poverty = grace doctrine is in any way justifiable. The Cold War Pope only appeared progressive or "modern."

So, it is in that spirit that I post what Tania has sent:

"No praise for pope from AIDS campaigners" AIDS campaigners sounded a jarring note Monday over the papacy of John Paul II, describing his ban on condom use, abhorrence of homosexuality and conservatism on women's rights as bleak failures in the fight against HIV." The pope's tenure straddled AIDS' rise from a disease first seen in a handful of American gays to a global pandemic that by last year had claimed more than 20 million lives and left nearly 40 million others infected with HIV. As the catastrophe unfolded, the pontiff repeatedly called for support for people sickened with the human immunodeficiency virus and always pleaded for the cause of AIDS orphans. But he always followed an unbending line when it came to the causes of AIDS and preventing its spread. In his edicts, he fought tirelessly against condoms, branded homosexuality immoral and emphasised a passive role for women as family anchor and child bearer. With an eye to Catholic liberals who suggested condoms could help protect against HIV, the pope declared in a landmark message in 1988 that use of contraception was "intrinsically illicit." "No personal or social circumstances could ever, can now, or will ever, render such an act lawful in itself," he said.--"
PARIS (AFP) Apr 04, 2005

"Pope: Afro-Cuban Cults Not Religion" -- "Ending his Cuban visit Sunday, Pope John Paul II cautioned against putting Santeria and other Afro-Cuban religions on a par with the Roman Catholic Church. ... As many as 70 percent of Cubans adhere to Afro-Cuban beliefs, according to anthropologist Natalia Bolivar." The brief story also said John Paul excluded Santeria representatives from a meeting he had with leaders of other religious traditions. Associated Press, Jan 25 '98.

"a new world war" in higher ed

A higher-education think tank warns of a “new world war” among universities fighting to hire talent. Read about it in The Times

blogging the pope

I was about to get all mad about the endless coverage of the Pope's death, until I talked to a friend in the Upper Midwest this morning who said that she heard some one say in the Protestant bastion of bad haircuts and self-righteousness, that John Paul was the leader of a cult. Now that is just unfair and incorrect. Catholicism is not really suited to capitalism since it actually does preach a doctrine of poverty and grace, and so appears to the common-sensical Lutheran as excessive and superstitiou, or what the Brits used to call simply "popery" (rhymes with pot-pourri).

The Protestants have triumphed in every conceivable way against the Catholics over the past four centuries. The ruthlessly pragmatic Protestant attitude has made them so much more adaptable to capitalism -- even when they are going evangelical -- look at W! I decided that because of that Protestant low blow, I would honor John Paul's passing by linking to thoughtful reflections upon the progressive aspect of his legacy. Informed Comment and Body and Soul .