Friday, November 11, 2011

Nobody has occupied Emory. These days I see protests at Cal on YouTube instead of out my office window, or in front of my face.

I recommend:

Aaron Bady, "The Grass Is Closed"
Rei Terada,"'Not Non-Violent Civil Disobedience'"
Rei Terada, "Another Reality" (Remarks at UC Irvine protest, 11/09/2011)
Colbert

From Aaron's post, a video taken on 11/9:

The first woman pulled by the hair by police is Celeste Langan.

UPDATE: Celeste has written rather wonderfully about her arrest here:
Students are so concerned about their economic futures that they sometimes feel constrained in their choice of courses and majors, too anxious about acquiring the proper credentials for employment to explore areas of intellectual inquiry that might interest them but don't appear to have an instrumental value. When I was teaching Walden last month, I couldn't help but notice how incisively Thoreau diagnoses the effect of "insolvency" on the capacity to think and live freely; the time people spend reading and thinking, he suggests, is increasingly regarded as time "stolen" and "borrowed" from wage-earning.

I note the same narrowly pragmatic thinking in the haste with which the police acted and Chancellor Birgeneau's justification for his decision to authorize the police action: "We simply cannot afford to spend our precious resources and, in particular, student tuition, on costly and avoidable expenses associated with violence or vandalism." No one wishes to "waste" resources in this climate. Yet if one follows this logic one can see the looming threat: lawful assembly, peaceful dissent, and free inquiry—even so-called “breadth requirements”--can all entail some cost. They interfere with “getting and spending.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Because Emory arrested last year's Sodexo protesters.