May 2010 archive

Sometimes the White Man’s Burden is just unbearable. Try explaining that to my Stockholders now. All they want is a bottom line of profit. They don’t understand at times, what we are up against.

Katrina wasn’t enough, you know those levees had to fail for it to be the Perfect Disaster for a nice white Capitalist takeover. It was almost done. Most of the tract houses and apartment buildings are still boarded and abandoned. There were “just enough” people of color left to play for the Tourists on Bourbon. Maybe a couple Chiefs who can still convince themselves that there is “pride on Bourbon” enough to create a second line or two here and there; while working two jobs and moonlighting at the strip clubs as musicians. But overall, the Blacks and the Creoles left en masse, and the Real Estate is there for  the picking. Like manna from the heavens, room for all the rich white people who love just a “tiny bit” of color in their lives. You know, the “cultural absorption” spectator sport that convinced them in the past that seeing Buffalo Bills traveling Indian Show made them experts in Lakota, and that on Prince Spaghetti day everyone is Italian. God knows, there was no culture there in the slums, anyway. Poor people and their poor English, and the scariest of them at least stay way-back in the deep bayous. Those people are crazy.

We had such plans. The Resorts. The Marinas. The theme parks with genuine Cajun shrimp kabobs, but not too spicy for the freckle faced kiddies from the corn belt. Gauhrunteeeeed. Its not like we weren’t planning on buying east coast shrimp, anyway; and no one swims in the ocean when you have a series of cascading pools, but the smell? Its not just the oil and dispersants, now its dead fish too.

Though the national student strike was three weeks old on May 21, 1970, it was not yet over. While this is a day late for the 40th anniversary, I am going to highlight the day in two separate posts.

Ohio State University saw one of the biggest clashes of the whole May upsurge with hours of mobile combat as students and townspeople from Columbus took on the Ohio National Guard, even though they were the force that had gunned down four students at Kent State University on May 4.

Actually Governor Rhodes had initially mobilized the Guard at the end of April, because OSU had already blown wide open, even before the Cambodia invasion and the start of the national student strike. As at other campuses, the issue of racism was an initial trigger, with two Black students brought up on charges after a March 13 protest.

On April 20, 100 students in the School of Social Work had walked out, demanding more student voice in decisions, followed a day later by protests targeting recruiters for corporations from the military-industrial complex at a campus jobs fair. Various activist groups united and issued a joint call for a student strike to begin on the April 29, a call quickly endorsed by the student government.

The strike started successfully with picket lines closing classes and a 2000 strong rally on the Oval. By evening it had evolved into a blockade at the campus gates to keep out the Ohio Highway Patrol, called in by the administration. After a night of fighting and 300 busts, student heading for the Oval on the 30th found their campus occupied by the Ohio National Guard.

The Guard teargassed a rally of 4000 students that day. Following days saw more fighting and more gas. On the May 4, the administration finally started making concessions, even as the Guard occupation and the strike continued. Once the news from Kent State hit, it was too little, too late. The protests stepped up!

Two days later the administration announced the suspension of classes. OSU was closed effective May 7 at Governor Rhodes’ urging. They tried to reopen it on the May 19. Mistake. Two days later, renewed clashes erupted on the campus and spilled into adjacent Columbus. Scores were arrested. The strike was still on!

OPEN THREAD

40 years ago this Thursday just past, around 100,000 people marched down Broadway in Manhattan. With thousands of safety helmet-wearing members of various construction unions in the lead and American flags everywhere, it was perhaps the largest single demonstration in support of the war during the whole Vietnam era. As the march traversed the Wall Street area, it was greeted by cheers from crowds on the sidewalks and showered, from the upper floor offices of bankers, stockbrokers and lawyers, with spirals of tape from stock tickers.

Naturally the media gave the march intense play, contrasting it with the campus protests, by that point near the end of the third week of the national strike. And this hooray-for-war rally was in fact a direct outgrowth of the campus explosion. Specifically, it was the culmination of two weeks of orchestrated actions in NYC aimed at pushing the idea that the working class of the US supported the war and hated the protesters, starting with the intensely violent “Hard Hat riot” attacks on peaceful protesters which I wrote about on May 8, forty years after the event.