Revolution on a Stick Welcome Guest | Login or Register

1. Patsy Cline, “Sweet Dreams (Of You).” We start it off this week very sad and very weepy. If you can’t feel the heartbreak spilling out of the speakers when this tune comes on, you may simply not have a heart to begin with.
2. Strangeloves, “I Want Candy.” And now for something completely different. No heartbreak here. A big, bouncy Bo-Diddley beat and a heady dose of young lust.
3. Tom Lehrer, “A Christmas Carol.” Way out of season, of course. But such is the randomness of shuffle play. And, as Lehrer notes in his lead-in, to get a Christmas song on the radio in a timely fashion, one has to start early. Very early. And given the expanding Christmas creep phenomenon, there may already be Christmas displays going up in shopping malls near you even as we speak.
4. Solomon Burke, “‘Til I Get It Right.” From Nashville, Burke’s 2006 followup to his surprising (and wonderful) 2002 “comeback” album, Don’t Give Up On Me. They’re both strong, though I like the latter more than the former.
5. Bonnie Raitt, “(Goin’) Wild for You.” Why did it take so long for Raitt to have a big hit anyway? It’s not like she suddenly got good with “Thing Called Love,” after all, or as if she adopted a new style that worked where the old one hadn’t . . . or even as if her “hit” style was simply something that the rest of the world finally caught up with late. Except in her case. Ah well.
6. Dominoes, “Sixty Minute Man.” My first MMM repeat track, I believe. And it’s certainly a fine one to revisit. All night long . . .
7. P.J. Harvey, “Highway 61 Revisited.” On my iPod courtesy of a “Girlfriend Is Better” mix of mine: songs originally sung by men, covered by women . . . who do them better. Or, at the very least (since some of the originals are pretty damned good), the covers still add something wondrous and different to the original. I think P.J.’s take on Dylan’s tune may fall into the latter category. I love them both. But, on any given day, I’d probably reach to play hers before his.
8. Muddy Waters, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” Another track from the aforementioned “First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record” discs. And a much better candidate for the honor than the Arthur Shibley track. (And, yes, for musical historians keeping score at home, “Sixty Minute Man” is on that list too.)
9. Tampa Red, “What’s That Taste Like Gravy?” Ahem. Very old, very saucy blues. In multiple senses of the word. And a rare dirty blues — at least among those sung by men — celebrating the glories of cunnilingus.
10. Gary “US” Bonds, “Quarter to Three.” Probably one of the muddiest mixes to ever hit the Top 40. But some damned fine early ’60s dance party music. And a major inspiration for the E Street Band’s sound a decade and a half later.

As mentioned in this space last week, the University is facing a strike by clerical, technical, and health-care workers that’s slated to start Wednesday. Last week’s bargaining[sic] session found the University coming back to the table without budging from the very same offer that workers had rejected when they declared their intent to strike.

So I dedicated a chunk of my Labor Day to writing the following letter to University President Bob Bruininks:

It’s the start of a new school year and — in all sorts of ways — the campus looks gorgeous. I’m especially impressed by the flowerbeds around the Mall area. Two weeks ago, they were nothing special. Today, they’re filled with brightly colored blooms. Minnesota has extraordinarily fertile soil, but I know those flowers didn’t suddenly blossom overnight. They were purchased and planted to make the campus look extra beautiful at a moment when students and parents could be suitably impressed. World class universities don’t look like sandlots. They’re scenic and picturesque.

At the other end of campus, where the old remote parking lots are being torn up to make way for the new football stadium, things may not look quite as pretty as those flowerbeds, but I know that this is growth that the University points to with pride. The temporary ugliness of bulldozers and cranes will give way to a sparkling new facility that will benefit the University community for decades to come. World class universities don’t limit themselves to short-term planning. They think big and they plan for the future.

Last spring, in what was widely hailed as a major coup, the University lured Tubby Smith away from Kentucky to coach the men’s basketball team. Big name coaches like Smith don’t walk away from big time programs for peanuts. Reportedly, his new contract earns him more than $2 million per year. World class universities don’t pinch pennies. They know that a high quality product often costs more, and they’re willing to pay for it.

This summer, some of the University’s lowest paid — but most vital — workers entered into a fresh round of contract negotiations with the University. They asked for a pay raise that would allow their incomes to keep pace with inflation. Reportedly, the gap between what the workers requested and what the administration offered amounts to a bit more than $2 million per year. World class universities don’t pinch pennies . . .

If the University of Minnesota genuinely wants to be one of the top three public research universities in the world, it can not pinch pennies when it comes to paying the people who are essential to making every department, every office, every unit on campus function. It needs to recognize that a high quality product often costs more — and it needs to be willing to pay for it. The University can find a way to pay for new flowers every August that will be gone by mid-September. The University can find a way to pay for a multimillion dollar stadium that will sit empty more days of the year than not. The University can find a way to pay a single coach enough money to resolve the current labor dispute. So why can’t the University find a way to give 3500 valued workers a wage increase that will let them keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads?

I recognize that, ideally, the University shouldn’t have to choose between flowers and football stadiums, coaches and clerical workers. There should be room for a world class university to have all those things — and more. I recognize as well that the University does not simply mint fresh money in the basement of Morrill Hall, and that there are often more demands — legitimate demands — on the University’s budget than it can adequately meet. Faced with the need to make tough choices, however, a world class university does not abandon the people who keep the machinery of the university running. It takes care of them first.

I like the fresh flowers very much. But I’d gladly forgo them — this year and every year — in favor of keeping knowledgeable, efficient staff members working at the University. Faculty can do our jobs perfectly well whether there’s a stadium on campus or not, whether the basketball coach is a Big Name or not. But we can’t do our jobs well without the colleagues who are currently asking for nothing more than the ability to keep pace with the rising cost of living.

I urge you to bring a fair and equitable offer back to the bargaining table — and to do so sooner, rather than later — so that the current labor dispute can be settled and so that we can all go back to the task of making the Minnesota the world class university we all believe it can be.

Sincerely,
Gilbert B. Rodman
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies

A little New Year’s Eve warning from the glory that is indexed.

So how are you celebrating the holiday weekend?

Fer the rest of the day, you’ll be rememb’rin’ to talk like the pirate that, deep in yer sea-lovin’ heart, ya know y’are — or else you’ll be scorned as a good-fer-nothin’ landlubber and forced to scrape the barnacles off the hulls of every schooner in the harbor with your teeth.

It’s Labor Day here in the US, a national holiday where we honor the contributions of the ordinary worker to society by giving everyone the day off. Banks, schools, and government offices are all closed today. Most (if not all) of the big buildings downtown are empty (except, perhaps, for a security guard or two — but it’s their job to work when no one else does, right?). Simply driving around town, you can tell it must be a holiday from the sparseness of the traffic.

Unless you’re at the mall. Or Home Depot. Or Best Buy. Or Wal-Mart. Or any of the thousands of other stores across the country where Labor Day means big sales and big crowds. And therein lies what has become the major contradiction behind Labor Day: the people who the holiday is supposed to honor and celebrate are often precisely the people who don’t get to take the day off. After all, you can’t really hold a big sale at Williams-Sonoma (or the Gap, or Restoration Hardware) so that all those folks with nice white-collar jobs can get non-stick omelette pans (or pre-distressed khakis, or faux retro cabinet fixtures) at 30% off if you don’t have a full complement of salespeople on the clock to keep the shelves stocked and run the cash registers.

To be sure, a lot of traditional working-class places of business — factories, warehouses, stockyards, etc. — also shut down on Labor Day. And many of the white-collar offices that are closed today still employ people who are several steps down the income ladder from the lawyers and corporate managers and account executives who head those firms. So there are certainly a number of ordinary workers who get to sleep in today as well.

But the US economy is now dominated more by jobs in the service and retail sectors than it is by jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry. And so the bulk of the “grunts” among the nation’s workers — e.g., the people who do the basic, relatively low-skilled jobs that keep the larger wheels of the economy turning smoothly — can’t safely assume that their holiday actually is one they get to enjoy. While I don’t have hard numbers on this, I suspect that the vast majority of salaried workers across the nation officially have today off, while a substantial percentage of workers who draw an hourly wage have to put in a shift today: even if, by all rights, it’s these folks — the ones who get paid by the hour, rather on two-week pay-cycles — who should be first in line for this particular bit of vacation time.

This is also one of the many ways that the class divisions that exist in the US are rendered invisible. The mainstream media typically make much of this as one of “our” noble national holidays. Every year, it seems, you can count on a warm and fuzzy piece on the nightly news about the workers who built this country, and the sacrifices they made, and the glory of their achievements. And they’ll probably also run footage of holiday crowds lounging at the beach or enjoying picnics in the park. But the odds are good that they won’t have much to say about the sizable number of “us” who don’t get the day off at all.

In fact, this sort of news coverage helps to maintain a prominent image of “us” as a nation that simply doesn’t include working class folks — or, at best, it only allows them to exist on the margins of the national community. If “we” all have the day off, after all, then folks who actually have to work today are presumably excluded from the “we” that (allegedly) characterizes the nation as a whole. If this is what it means to have your contributions to society honored, I’m not sure I want to know what it would look like to have those same contributions ignored or dismissed.

For my dog (Mocha Java, Empress of All North America), Independence Day is all about the fireworks. Not the big ones that get sanctioned by the city, but the little ones that ordinary people around the neighborhood shoot off every night from sometime in late June until their supplies finally run out in mid-July. And Mocha hates fireworks. In Tampa, she would hide in the tub and tremble for hours (and you know that your dog’s really terrified when the place where she gets bathed becomes her chosen safehouse). In Minneapolis, she simply heads for the basement and refuses to leave. She, for one, will be very happy when freedom rings out less frequently. Or at least with fewer explosions.

I’m less certain what Independence Day means to my undergraduates — if only because there are more of them, and thus the range of answers to the question is undoubtedly a bit broader. But perhaps only a bit. On three different occasions — twice in the Freedom of Expression course I taught at USF, and last semester in the Media Outlaws course I taught at UMN — I’ve given students an in-class exercise on the Hancock Coalition. The scenario in question is fictional — at least insofar as no such organization exists today — but it’s also a very thinly disguised version of the story behind the Declaration of Independence. The scariest thing about the exercise isn’t that my students usually don’t recognize the origins of the tale (though that’s disturbing enough): it’s that, even after I point out the allegory, they’ve still always sided with The State against The Citizens, and the majority have still felt that military force was an appropriate response to a press release. This past spring, the final straw vote we held was actually unanimous. Freedom, it seems, is for other people.

My students, of course, aren’t the real problem here. Whenever I do this exercise, I also always discover that the vast majority of them have never actually read the Declaration of Independence . . . or the Constitution . . . or the Bill of Rights. Not even in the context of a high school US history class. Freedom, it seems, isn’t something worth teaching.

Of course, these days, freedom’s clearly not something that The State is keen on people exercising too readily. There are far too many real life examples of this problem to mention here, but this one, which crossed my desk this morning, is particularly appropriate today. [And props to the cool folks at Sivacracy.net for the link.]

Happy Inde-fucking-pendence Day, indeed.

Today’s Flag Day, one of the quirkier US holidays. On the one hand, it’s a bit odd to have a formal holiday dedicated to a piece of symbolic fabric (do other allegedly civilized nations do such a thing?). Most of the other big holidays are attached to Important People or Major Historical Events (or at least somebody’s idea of what counts as “Important” and “Major”). But unless I’m simply forgetting something, Flag Day stands alone as a holiday in honor of an inanimate object.

To be sure, it’s an inanimate object that’s imbued with a lot of symbolic power for many people — but that’s what makes Flag Day an even odder holiday. Given the reverence that so many people seem to feel towards “Old Glory,” Flag Day is a pretty pathetic holiday. If there are parades or school closings or paid vacation days so that people can pay proper respect to the flag, they’re the exception, rather than the rule. If nothing else, one would think that all those people foaming at the mouth in support of a Constitutional Amendment to “protect the flag” would be equally vocal about the nation’s collective failure to make Flag Day into something much more than it is.

But then maybe the problem here is that the flag simply doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean anymore — and even the folks who celebrate it most enthusiastically must know this. The average patriotic citizen may still express pride in his/her country with a modest flag hanging from the front of their home — and that’s fine. But if you really want to see the flag on display as The Flag — undulating oceans of redwhiteandblue as far as the eye can see — the odds are good that the flag-wavers in question are either politicians or car dealers.

Given who the big flag-wavers are, then, the flag’s new meaning seems to be one of dishonesty: i.e., for every flag that you wave after the first one, you’re allowed to tell one big lie and get away with it.

Hmm. On second thought, maybe that’s unfair: there are some honest car dealers out there.