Seattle in Academic Context (Was: Ignorant Students at WSU)

>>>>> "bijan" == Bijan Parsia <bparsia-vEoVa6Jh+/J4piUD7e9S/[email protected]> writes:

  bijan> On Mon, 22 Oct 2001 [email protected] wrote:
  >> Hello. I am a freshman at WSU in Pullman, WA. I was very
  >> disappointed to find the lack of political activism here in
  >> contrast with UW and WWU. For my English class I have made it my
  >> undertaking to enlighten the mechanical corpses roaming this
  >> cultural wasteland. The purpose of my class research paper is to
  >> explain the reasons for political dissent specifically in
  >> Seattle. I think activists are widely misunderstood mainly
  >> because of false media coverage.

  bijan> We generally agree :)

I'd put this a bit differently, actually. I'd say that the
antiglobalization movement is misunderstood because the media tends to
focus on the lunatic fringe of the movement, which it seems always to
represent quite accurately (i.e., it lets lunatics come across as,
well, lunatics).

And then it simply *ignores* sane folk like Uncle Noam, Vandana Shiva,
Walden Bello, Robert Weissman, Lori Wallach, and so on. (And, note,
here I'm not making a distinction between the weird radicals and the
non-weird reformers; the distinction lies along a different, more
purely cultural and aesthetic fault line.)

The net effect is the same, but there is something to be said for the
most common print media complaint about the antiglobalizers, namely,
"they're so *weird*". Some of this is the weirdness that the
establishment always sees in any radical movement; but a good deal of
it is accurate.

  >> I plan to focus particulary on the WTO police riot and the
  >> corrupt Seattle Police Department.

  bijan> Cockburn has some stuff on counterpunch (I think he wrote a
  bijan> book about it...though I don't find Cockburn *uniformly*
  bijan> careful and reliable).

Bij is referring here to *Five Days That Shook the World*, which I
have but have not read. It's a collection of essays, most of which I
suspect are available on the Web.

You might want to read it, but I wouldn't rely on it too heavily, not
least because of Bij's point about Cockburn/St Clair quality, but also
because it's just not very substantive at all from what I remember.

  >> My goal is to explain why dissenters believe in their cause in an
  >> attempt to validate their opinions.

  bijan> Hmm. Well, some dissenters believe in thier cause because
  bijan> they think its hip. Even so, the cause is worthy.

  bijan> (I say this only because I think the "why" question may get
  bijan> you off tract...I'm not sure that the protesters varying
  bijan> psychohistory is going to persuade folks that they're
  bijan> right. OTOH, it's commonly said that they "don't have a
  bijan> clue", or have "a vague mismash of a world view"
  bijan> etc. etc. You might do better to focus on disproving various
  bijan> specific media slanders, perhaps by reference to what various
  bijan> protesters actually have said or written.)

No suprise here, but I agree with Bijan.

The motivational psychology stuff is, in my opinion, boring and fairly
obscure. In addition to the media criticism idea Bijan suggests, you
could also try to put Seattle into a labor history context, since
that's a moderately well-documented history, there was massive labor
participation in Seattle, and Seattle, as an instance of radical
American direct democracy, fits in nicely, say, with the Wobblie
history of radical American direct democracy.

For a more *W*SU angle, you could talk about Seattle in the context of
*Seattle* radical labor history, from which there are plenty of
interesting and important events to choose.

  >> Hopefully I will spark a plug in somebodies' brain that these
  >> people have points to make and good reason to act apon them. The
  >> WSU Holland library has little to offer on this subject. I write
  >> monkeyfist to ask you for reccomendations on sources to!
  >> consult: including books, articles, journals, people, etc..

  bijan> Any indymedia is likely to have some stuff, though it won't
  bijan> be very well organized.

  bijan> http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Globalism/GlobalEcon.htm

These are good points. You might also consider doing some
interviewing, which would work very nicely in this project, if you
have enough time. You might send some emails to some of the key
organizers involved: Global Exchange was heavily involved, as was
Seattle AFL-CIO (if I recall right), the Direct Action Network, (which
is now called "Continental DAN" or "see-dan", I think), Ruckus
Society, Seattle IWW.

Your library should have stuff on local Seattle and Pacific Northwest
labor history, including the Wobblies, and on American labor history
generally; the IWW.org site is pretty good place to try for some more
specific suggestions. There isn't a *lot* of this stuff, but there is
enough, and you can certainly get it through interlibrary loan if your
university doesn't have particular titles.

Something I've been reading casually lately which you might want to
look at is a very new biography of Mother Jones.

  bijan> Kendall has a bunch of media quotes under "taming the
  bijan> bestiary", so ask him! :0

Yep, if you go for a media criticism angle, email me and I'll send you
my clip file. It was at one point pretty complete. (But a bit messy.)

  bijan> Horowitz goes nuts in reply:

  bijan>
  bijan> 	http://www.frontpagemag.com/horowitzsnotepad/2001/hn10-22-01.htm

Which is not to say Horowitz isn't simply nuts anyway! :>

Kendall
--
"I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself.
That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem." 
                                        -- The Madness of  King George