The Mirvish Chronicles

Revisitation Rights

2011-11-10T00:49:00.001-08:00

Video surfaced this afternoon from the latest wave of inane student-led protests in Berkeley of members of the University of California Police Department jabbing protesters with batons. It's first worth noting that objectively, accounts of the November Massacre have been exaggerated in two ways. First, the purportedly angelic protestors were plenty hostile themselves, and if they were warned to back off, showed no intention of doing so. Second, referring to the underhand thrusts of the points of the batons as "police brutality" is an insult of the victims of real excessive force: a navel bruised - no matter how thoroughly - doesn't remotely compare to the broken bones the LAPD has become notorious for handing out. That said, this was clearly egregiously inappropriate behavior, and you'll be hard pressed to ever find me standing up for the UCPD, who time and again have proven an insult to real police nationwide.

My main purpose in this brief return from the dead was to offer the following choice image as a follow-up on old posts about the last two and a half years of extended "civil disobedience":

As the price of education inevitably continues to rise and students spend more and more days skipping their own classes and disrupting others at campuses across the country (my own included), I've been left wondering what exactly it is that they're looking for. A good number of them, of course, are socialists, whose arguments that the eradication of capitalism would result in an efficient, even distribution of wealth and an end to unemployment indicate that they've never looked into the histories of China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Korea, Poland, the Soviet Union, or Vietnam. Others are satisfied with the idea of capitalism but repulsed by the lack of taxation thrown at the cream of the crop. (Side note: the IRS reports that in 2009 the top ~0.7% of the country paid ~30.32% of the nation's total income taxes, and that they paid an average of 28.8% of their income in taxes compared to 11.6% for the rest of the country - a number which drops down to 10.4% not including the $200-500K households that make up another 2.3% of income tax filers.) Others that I've talked to don't know what the solution is to the financial crisis they find themselves in, they just know it needs to be fixed and that their voices have the right to be heard.

Ultimately, the only common theme I've been able to draw from the demonstrations is that people are tired of life being unfair. I sympathize with them. College degrees aren't automatically worth jobs anymore, as a consequence of the unprecedentedly high modern rate of college attendance. Healthcare is a more pressing concern now than ever before, because our population is larger and an unprecedented majority of Americans fully intend to live past 65 (requiring ever-spiraling costs for unprecedentedly complex healthcare procedures). The challenges of contemporary living could fill an entire post, to no purpose.

In the end, I see two possible solutions for individual students. One is to accept that life is as difficult as it always has been, and to pursue an expensive and potentially unpleasant load of continued schooling to ensure future employment, taking solace in the knowledge that the enormous majority of the lauded 99% is literate, has access to food, water, shelter, and vaccinations, and is protected from the marauding bands of murderers, rapists, and even kidnappers that so much of the world has to live in daily fear of. The second is to "speak your voice" along with the rest of the herd - the majority of which is as empty-headed and self-interested as the occasional policeman that jabs first and asks questions later. I lived in Berkeley long enough to know it will always choose the latter, using the grainy, black-and-white icon of Saint Savio to cover or accentuate whatever motives really do lie beneath. I like to think that a slim minority can see through the sound and fury and are doing their best to plan as best they can for what perpetuity has shown will be a challenging future.

Throwback Hatred

2010-11-23T04:05:00.000-08:00

On Friday, the Daily Cal published a rather shocking op-ed by one Matthew Soldad concerning the possibility of future war with Iran. The publishing in and of itself, of course, was little surprise: the managerial staff of the newspaper notoriously is as efficacious in weeding out offensive material before printing as a basketball hoop would be in straining linguini. Neither was it the article's anti-Semitic sentiments that caused this particular piece to stand out. Instead, it was the well-read, almost traditionalist tenor of Mr. Soldad's anti-Semitic argumentation that has led even the most cynical of Berkeley Jews (yours truly) perplexedly to furrow his brow. Ordinarily in such instances, the most appropriate course of action is to take the high road, and rather than lending credence to the inflammatory discharge by analyzing its logical flaws, instead demanding to know how such nonsense could have been given the floor in a public forum to begin with. In this case, though, the piece itself demands specific attention, not to issue rebuttal, but to explore context.

The purpose of Mr. Soldad's article is to unmask and berate an influential cadre of Neoconservatives who successfully demanded and orchestrated the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and who plan to launch war against Iran to reinvigorate the flaccid American economy and protect Israel. He grants said cadre an unusually all-encompassing sphere of influence for a Berkeley political theorist, going so far as to relieve George W. Bush and Dick Cheney of some of their ordinary moral culpability by arguing that their road to warpath was Google mapped by Neoconservative "slight of hand." He also takes the unusual (though by no means original) approach of relating Neocons to Trotskyites, whom, he argues, are their Soviet analogues. Soldad's piece takes the leap from contentious – and bizarrely placed – to objectionable when it defines Neocons as a "group of largely Jewish members who follow the teachings of the Jewish academic and neo-Machiavellian Leo Strauss." He accuses them of employing a "fog with which [they] disguise themselves," and cites Joe Klein (political writer for that bastion of governmental theory, Time magazine) in placing them among "people out there in the Jewish community who saw [Iraq] as a way to create a benign domino theory and eliminate all of Israel's enemies."

Of course, the notion of Jewish conspiracy stretches back centuries, at least as far as the Jewish Emancipation of the Enlightenment. The famous manifestations of these theories are widely recognized, and even, to some minds, excessively taken advantage of: the dissemination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the echoes of its vitriolic fear in the Beilis Trial and Doctors' Plot; the danger of the "Jewish peril" as described in Mein Kampf and the enacting of the Holocaust; American assertion that Jews were responsible both for the abandonment of the gold standard and for communism; and the recurring ideas of Zionist Occupation Governments, political lobbies, and control of the media. Though one would be irresponsible in comparing Soldad's powerless missive to these historical atrocities, one would be hard-pressed to miss the parallel arguments. What's described is nothing more or less than a concealed group of Jews, united behind a perverse code (some Straussian take on The Prince), manipulating world affairs to suit their own greed- and ideology-driven agenda.

Briefly, in anticipation of claims that these arguments are based not on racism, but on modern political exigencies: why mention Judaism here at all? Why describe Leo Strauss – with his city-first (i.e., tradition-unfriendly) philosophy and his profoundly uncertain stance on the truth of religion – as a "Jewish academic," unless you believe his ethnicity to be central to his appeal to the apparently Jewish Neoconservative alliance? For that matter, why label the Neocons "largely Jewish" to begin with? Is it to suggest that the vocal, rich, Fundamentalist Christian sector of the Israel Lobby has, like Bush and Cheney, been manipulated by Jewish slight of hand? Or to return to the lead-in of the article – and the oldest anti-Semitic chestnut in the canon – and imply Jewish conspiracy aimed at pecuniary gain?

One can only wonder what purpose the editors of the Daily Cal believed Mr. Soldad's op-ed would serve in the context of their (very) local newspaper. Presumably, they intended to give much-needed voice to the community, and possibly, to spread awareness of an alarming growing trend in the modern world. Yet what they've demonstrated most palpably is that as long as the fire of bigotry rages on within the hearts of small, hateful men, racist tropes need not necessarily adapt themselves to the times. It is, in fact, these oldest and most grizzled trees whose foundations bind the soil of this toxic forest, and we must be vigilant never to let our callous familiarity with their thorny branches distract us from our duty to uproot them.

Look Out Below

2010-10-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

The internet has negated the severance formerly granted (or forced, depending on your point of view) by graduation. True, it's made it easier to follow the humiliating exploits of your alma mater's rudderless football program, and easily possible to keep contact with a bevy of friends who would otherwise have been lost to the ages. But along with those blessings, the internet has also made it easier than ever to keep in visceral touch with the worst parts of your undergraduate experience – a particularly damning situation when you attended as spectacularly moronic an institution of higher learning as Cal.

Former readers of this blog will remember my disgust at the mass protests against university budget cuts that happened last year. My basic criticism boiled down to the following points:

--that students protested higher tuition by cutting one of the few remaining days offered at the old tuition rate;
--that protests against tuition hikes were used as overarching forums to complain about all the world’s ills, restricted to the University of California or otherwise; and finally,
--that protesters used the rallies as an excuse, at best to satisfy their own needs for indignation and attention, and at worst, to break storefront windows and roll burning dumpsters at cop cars.

Suffice it to say, like the producers who brought you Scary Movie 12, the powers that be are stirring up another unwarranted sequel – in this case, another day of communal rhetorical masturbation aimed to change the system from within. And suffice it to say, the plan is exactly the same as it was last time. In fact, this time they're even more open about it: the Facebook event for the “October 7th Strike & Day of Action for Public Education” calls for a united front composed of “a mosaic of communities that recoil from the unbearable.” Accordingly, the Facebook community has organized other factions whose lives are being ruined by the man. These include teenagers who can no longer abide the fact that getting high is, strictly speaking, illegal, as well as outraged citizens intent on taking a stand on Arizona's “fascist” SB 1070 by demonstrating against the University of California.

I understand the ethical dilemma of the Berkeley radical. For one thing, it’s easy to lose self-confidence under the withering guiding light provided by such patron saints of public condemnation as Mario Savio and that homeless guy with the John Lennon glasses on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft who yells at you when you don’t give him what he considers enough of your spare change. For another, where students of Savio’s day ostensibly had some legitimate complaints – widely prevalent national racism (only 7 years removed from Little Rock, for chrissake) and an administration actually denying students the right to say whatever they wanted on Sproul Plaza – the modern-day indignant Golden Bear has little more to complain about than a nationwide financial crisis and the persistent encroachment of such vanguards of capitalism as Panda Express. After four years of feeble high school rebellion against one’s parents spent dabbling in coke and figuring out which hole you can let him put it in before people start calling you a ho in public, the lack of an immediate opening to change the world with your original stance on troubling issues must be hugely sobering. In that light, it's hardly a surprise that such a large collection of angsty youth would happily gather their multifarious grievances into one slimy package and spew it forth at the first convenient opportunity. And of course, it must be said that the purported central focus of the get-together - education, something many of the people to be involved no doubt care deeply about - is obviously something worth holding on to (my hard-earned diploma affirms my sincerity on that count).

On the other hand, the setup of the modern world dictates that the road to practical educational reform doesn't run through soapbox pedagogy or mass demonstrations: it's a battle that can only be fought - much less won - armed with a ballot and valiant enough to trudge through a dark, bureaucratic swamp. More importantly, the sort of juvenile, potentially dangerous bullshit this bastardization of free speech will inevitably engender simply shouldn’t be allowed. So this ultimately powerless call for overdue change goes not to the perennially hopeless student body or the polio-stricken administration, but to Berkeley and UC police: if and when the impending rally is about to get out of hand, please see to it that all soon-to-be-rioters are arrested before they set poor, powerless Chancellor Bob’s house on fire, rip the copper wiring out of the walls in Durant Hall, or break more of the windows of innocent Southside business proprietors. Because the longer you wait to restore order, the more blatantly you’re going to be proving the need for vigilante justice to counteract vigilante idiocy. And I live too far away to be your goddamn Superman.

A Quick One

2010-04-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

In response to the swastikas posted at Clark Kerr, the Daily Cal editorial staff urges the student body of UC Berkeley to "Ignore the Ignorance." I urge you all to do just that by not clicking on that link.

Writing on the Wall

2010-04-28T02:15:00.000-07:00

To the surprise of no one with their cognition fully intact, three swastikas were recently discovered drawn on the walls at the Clark Kerr dorm compound. According to the UCPD, the first one was drawn last Wednesday night (4/21), followed shortly by two more early Saturday morning (4/24). They stand as the latest in what has been an unbroken series of incidents over my four years here – many of which I’ve been party to firsthand – of open, casual anti-Semitism. And lest you preempt me, in case you’re one of those indignantly callous Berkeley jerkoffs who considers any Jew crying anti-Semitism an act of inbred cowardice or overpreened sensitivity, allow me to define my terms: by an “act of anti-Semitism,” I mean some hateful resident of this monstrous wasteland employing racial epithets or traditionally anti-Semitic imagery to harass local Jewry.

As I said, though, that swastikas were drawn on University-owned walls came as a surprise to no one. After all, Berkeley is a hotbed of generalized sociopathy with a more-than-casual history of dalliance with anti-Semitism. What’s most irritating about the affair to date is the Daily Cal article covering the action, published on Monday. As ace journalists Jordan Bach-Lombardo and Javier Panzar reported, “though campus officials have condemned the drawings, classifying them as “hate incidents,” the drawings have elicited little student response.” They go on to note that “no students attended a community meeting hosted Thursday to discuss the incident, according to [dorm magistrate Marty] Takimoto.”

Since Bach-Lombardo and Panzar seem so confused by the apparent lack of student response, here’s mine: try asking anyone in the Jewish community, for whom this is nothing more than another bump in the proverbial untended San Francisco back alley of a road to their degree. You’ll find that used to such incidents though we may be, we were, as usual, unhappy to learn of the presence of yet another sociopath who took it upon himself to remind Berkeley Jews they’re not welcome here. As far as the unadvertised “community meeting” hosted less than 24 hours after the first swastika was drawn – and days before either of the other two were – take it from me when I assert that the lack of student turnout there was as representative of reaction to the swastikas as a freckle is to skin cancer.

In past posts, I’ve made perfectly clear my feelings about Nazi imagery in modern life. I recently assembled a Holocaust memorial issue of the Berkeley Jewish Journal, and encourage interested readers to check it out here. I’d offer some final, hopeful comment here that someday we wouldn’t be exposed to this sort of racist misanthropy, but I'm not inclined towards that kind of hope. So it goes.

What More Can I Say?

2010-04-17T03:17:00.000-07:00

On my way to Friday night services at Chabad this evening, as I was watching my feet while walking down Prospect St. with my kippah exposed, some asshole in a Nissan Sentra shouted “Jew Bastard!” at me as his friend drove by. What more indignities and ethnic slurs do I need to endure in this gangrenous hemorrhoid of a city before I leave?

It’s telling that this bastion of liberal thought is so engrained with the racism it vehemently denounces that I – an enormous kid with light brown hair who looks as little Jewish as any Jew I’ve ever met – have suffered the indignity of “drove-by” ethnic slurs at least 3 times since I arrived in Berkeley, when I’ve chosen to go outdoors with a kippah on. These actions can no longer be denounced as solitary assholes ruining some socialist utopia for the rest of us, nor can I ever again even entertain the notion of the hatred endemic to this modern-day Sodom being a ghoulish figment of my tormented imagination.

This city is a disgrace to its country; may all of its hateful bigots burn in the hell they so richly deserve in perpetuity.

Veto, vidi, vici

2010-04-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

Even amidst all the animosity on display at Wednesday’s ASUC meeting, the most hostile demonstration of all came from the sun. By 7am, the first rays of an unwelcome daylight had already broken over the fearsome silhouette of Barrows Hall and confirmed for all those who remained in Pauley Ballroom that they had just spent an entire night arguing to no purpose.

Our cause célèbre centered around ASUC President Will Smelko’s veto of Bill 118; the Senate spent what my addled brain would guess was 8½ hours listening to debates and arguing over whether or not they should overturn the veto following the GE Bill’s 16-4 passage nearly a month ago. Unsurprisingly, each Senator had their mind made up before they arrived. The final outcome was that the veto was upheld by one vote – an abstention – then reconsidered and tabled for future discussion.

Proceedings molded to the expected form. The requisite analogies were drawn: Israel as apartheid South Africa; the United States as a leading human rights violator; UC student activists as Mario Savio; ASUC senators as Martin Luther King, Jr. Speakers discussed our now-assured collective place in history. An antagonistically bipartisan effort ensured a filibuster worthy of a Frank Capra film. In sum, like a session at the United Nations, the events of the evening had no practical ramifications, but egos were defended, feathers were ruffled, and the bill was gleefully sent to Uncle Sam.

The drafting, acceptance, and defense of the GE Bill have proven at least four things beyond a doubt. First, that while like the Golden Gate, Berkeley is a rocky, suicide-ridden gateway to an endless expanse, unlike the Golden Gate, Berkeley is marked by enormous gaps that will never be bridged. Second, that smarmy, holier-than-thou graduate students settle in Berkeley as much for the pulpits provided by its ubiquitous open fora as for its academics. Third, that the ASUC Senate will continue to consider itself impressive in its ability to get a few hundred students out of 36,000 to stay at a meeting overnight, even as it openly refuses to take a stand. Finally, that neither wastes of time nor wastes of money and energy will ever convince the powers that be that the system is broken.

Having already called to disassemble the ASUC infrastructure brick by brick, I will here simply offer a sentimental toast to the memories of our collective dignity and pride. May they rest in peace.

The G.E. Bill

2010-03-18T22:06:00.000-07:00

Leave it to the ASUC to defy your expectations even as it's fulfilling them.

Early Friday morning (or late Thursday evening, depending on how normal your circadian rhythms are), the Senate approved bills demanding divestment from General Electric and United Technologies "because of their military support of the occupation of the Palestinian territories." That they passed was hardly unexpected: they're the latest in a string stretching back at least the 4 years I've been here of bills with no practical value except to divide further the student body, and to satisfy the ASUC's self-righteous lust for grandiose displays of intelligence and largess. What is surprising is the count by which they passed: 16 for, 4 against. This means that for the first time in memory, the voting did not progress strictly along party lines (though unsurprisingly, all the opposition came from Student Action). I suppose it's only appropriate to the stupefying incompetence of our money-sponge student government that the vote that crossed partisan lines would be one of the worst calls in recent ASUC history.

A brief examination of the bills themselves. They insist that "[these] ASUC resolution[s] not be interpreted as the taking of sides in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict" – yet realistically, despite their assurance that they also condemn Hamas for the rockets it launches, they don't leave any other recourse. A pro-bill speaker at the argument session last night suggested that his opposition would try to downplay the bills' merits by suggesting that companies that (directly or otherwise) fund nations like Saudi Arabia are more deserving of divestment. Of course, he was right – but then, so is that argument. Israel ranks 47th in the world on The Economist's Index of Democracy, and received the top score of 1 (out of 7) in political rights and 2 in civil liberties from Freedom House. By contrast, as examples, China is ranked 138th and Saudi Arabia 159th in the Index of Democracy; and both received scores of 7 and 6 from Freedom House. Israel is clearly held against a higher standard in Berkeley than any nation in the world, with the possible exception of the US ("John Woo should be arrested and tortured," etc.), and to suggest otherwise is either dishonest or – even more frightening – misguided.

But this isn’t really about politics, skewed though they may be. The bills are a moronic exercise principally because they demand divestment from General Electric and United Technologies. It's a clever ploy to sugar coat the bill's intent, and I applaud Tom Pessah and Co.'s ingenuity in framing their destructive political desires. Still, I can't imagine anything dumber than disassociating with two such faceless conglomerates, in the hopes that such an action would send any message (except, perhaps, that we’re willing to lose money we desperately need if it’ll make the student government appear sympathetic to the local AARP crowd in the IRA t-shirts). GE doesn’t give any more of a crap about the ASUC's opinions than Israel itself does.

The biggest problem the affair suggests is that the ASUC will continue to disregard the consequences their actions hold for the student body in whose interest they were purportedly democratically elected to serve. Last night, more than any other time in my all-too-long tenure here, the senators showed no hesitation in parting yet further the gap between the Israel crowd and the Palestine crowd. In other words, the ASUC is intent on appearing to care about peace in the Middle East, 7500 miles away, but not remotely interested in ending conflict here in Berkeley.

It was somewhere between the first and second rounds of finger snaps synced to quotations of Mario Savio last night that I came to a realization: there is no way to reason with Berkeley's student government. It will always act in its own best interests, and to promote its own image in its own eyes; it will always waste money and time; it will always act as though more important than it actually is. It’s time to either redirect our efforts towards dismantling the hateful machine once and for all, or to leave our senators – all, that is, except for Parth Bhatt, Sandra Cohen, Anish Gala, and Noah Stern – to their beloved circle jerk in peace.

No Surprises

2010-03-10T23:49:00.001-08:00

Husam Zakharia. What a stupid asshole.

Oh, I beg your pardon – what was that? That was uncalled for? I see. You mean to tell me that Berkeley is an institution that fosters dialogue; that my hostility does nothing to advance meaningful exchange.

Well, having been raised as a human being (someone inclined to treat people well, because that’s what human beings should do), I’m of the opinion that some actions rob of you of your normal right to be treated with any shred of respect. And being a good man, I consider hitting a girl – a short girl – from behind – with a shopping cart to be one of those actions. To be fair, though, you’re right: I should have chosen my words more carefully.

Husam Zakharia. What a stupid, cowardly asshole.

(Additional props to Daily Cal political reporter Zach E. J. Williams – who, incidentally, between the perpetually sweaty brow and the buzz cut looks like a future repeat sex offender – for somehow erroneously suggesting, after a year of coverage of the very case, that John Moghtader was involved in the Zakharia-inititated throwdown of November 2008. Good thing you don’t need a good memory or scruples to go into journalism.)

For What It's Worth

2010-02-26T19:53:00.000-08:00

The conditions conspired on behalf of my ignorance. Last night, as another small riot paraded through Telegraph, I was a mere four blocks away, yet nestled in a small, crowded room in a friend’s apartment, playing boisterous poker. This morning, though Telegraph looked like a mess, it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary – especially given the winds foretelling the storm that would shortly rage, which by noon were already strong enough that they were hurling trash cans across the Bancroft sidewalks. All things considered, then, there was no reason for me to expect that another parade of self-righteous Berkeleyites had trashed Southside yesterday, even though I’d effectively been there during and after; it was left to Facebook to raise my ire.

To summarize, courtesy (shudder) of the Daily Cal: “A crowd of more than 200 people swarmed the streets of Southside early Friday morning in a riot involving six law enforcement agencies, runaway dumpsters, flaming trash cans, shattered windows and violent clashes between rioters and police.” The aftermath added up to only two arrests: Marika Goodrich, a 28-year-old senior, charged with assault on a police officer, inciting a riot and resisting arrest ($32,500 bail), and 26-year-old Berkeley alumnus Zachary Miller, charged with inciting a riot, resisting arrest and obstructing a police officer ($22,500).

The disorder began with an occupation of Durant Hall, once the home of the East Asian Library and soon to become office space for L&S. To get in, the “occupiers” broke a few locks; once inside, they broke some windows, applied some graffiti, and scattered some construction equipment. They chose Durant Hall with the idea that they would “reclaim it for students”. A brief pause here. It’s presumably safe to say that none of these people had ever set foot in the East Asian Library – even in its expansive new location, much less its cramped old ones in Durant Hall – because if any of them had ever done so, they wouldn’t have been laboring under the false impression that it had been anything to “reclaim for students.” In fact, it was a squat, poorly ventilated, ugly edifice with inadequate access to bathrooms; further, as a library, it had never exactly been the hangout spot they’re making it out to be. Another sad consideration in that the best these political heroes could do was a fenced-off, hollowed-out building whose year-long construction was bemoaned by anyone at Berkeley only because it meant you could no longer cut through the low road past Dwinelle on your way to the west side of campus. But I digress.

From there, our fearless leaders moved to the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph, where one of their number – presumably in a desperate act of compensation for a laughably small set of genitals – broke windows at Subway around 1:40 AM. The mob settled at Durant and Telegraph.

Police on the scene included “[o]fficers from UCPD, Oakland, BART and the California Highway Patrol, in addition to all but four Berkeley Police Department officers on duty that night.” They made a line in front of the Bank of America, and watched as the crowd, gathering momentum, pushed a dumpster into the intersection and set it on fire. The Berkeley Fire Department and Blakes employees cooperated to put the fire out.

The mob then threw glass bottles, plastic buckets, pizza and other objects at the police line, in between call-and-response exchanges of “Whose street? Our street!” Its leader, if anyone, was a shopping cart with a stereo in it, whose movements dictated the movements of the mob. In a similar display of missing touch with reality, the crowd ghost rode the whip alongside a white Dodge Charger, apparently blissfully unaware it was February, 2010. It was finally dispersed shortly after 3 AM by cop cars, after sending two dumpsters riding down Durant Ave. toward police.

Throughout, as our Mario Savio wannabes wandered, destroying private property in their wake, they offered choice epithets for the cops on the scene: “assholes,” “fucking pigs,” and other clichés of middle-class suburban unrest. To offer an idiom that would sail tellingly far over the heads of these troglodytes, sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.

All signs indicate that this petulant display of destruction will serve primarily as a warm-up for next week, when more large-scale rallies are expected in protest of the fee hikes. For now, the justifications will, of course, be the same as before. The responsible parties will offer either that desperate times call for desperate measures, or simply that there was nothing wrong with what they did, at all. This is all one can really expect from this crowd, the fists and testicles of the proverbial body responsible for Berkeley’s response to these fee hikes. The time has come to take the blame to the source: the brain.

In class this week, one of my wishy-washier professors (not herself a bad person, it should be emphasized) likened the wave of Berkeley protests to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It’s people like this that claim that these repeated instances of violence in response to the fee hikes are examples of a legitimate form of protest taken to an extreme by radicals. Yet really, it is they – and their ridiculously lofty rhetoric – that enable this sort of behavior.

This crusade is nothing like the Civil Rights movement. That was a group of minorities seeking the legal rights to which they were justly entitled by the Constitution: not a “just” cause, but a right cause, one to which there was no justifiable alternative, legally or morally, to taking direct action. This is a group of entitled post-adolescents (and others who should be way too old to qualify for this category, but aren’t) protesting fee hikes at a school whose tuition – even after the hikes – is still an unqualified bargain relative to other schools of its caliber. Now, this isn’t to say that the University doesn’t need to take drastic steps to remodel its finances. (And let the record show that I regularly feel guilty forcing my parents to endure a semester of yet higher tuition fees this Spring.) However, the simple truth of the matter is that the Chancellor’s reluctance to dig into his slush fund to keep fees low is not the reason fees are being raised. It’s because UC Berkeley is morbidly obese.

The mazes of paperwork and bureaucracy that Berkeley runs on puts Office Space’s Initech to shame. It has positions like a “Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion.” It has a student senate that absorbs funding like a sponge, one which has an External Affairs VP and feels compelled to offer statements of solidarity with the victims of the Darfur Genocide. Most of those who make arguments like that detailed two paragraphs back retort that a progressive university needs institutions like these to keep it running. They could be right (they aren’t, but that’s a different story), but Berkeley isn’t a “progressive” university – it’s a public university. In a state like California, this necessarily means limited funds to run an enormous school. Period.

By raising the conflict over the fee hikes to something more noble than it actually is, the “brain” of the movement has made no progress, and actually, moved backwards. Certainly, there’s been no movement towards lowering fees; the only thing that it’s clearly accomplished has been enabling the imbeciles of the movement to indulge their destructive impulses. If Berkeley’s populist intelligentsia truly wants to lead the rest of the state forwards towards an ideal California, they need to begin by holding themselves accountable for the angry sheep their follow them blindly, instead of merely apologizing for them. Until then, I think the ASUC should divert some of its slush fund to helping the proprietors of Subway fix their windows, and I hope we see many more than two people rightfully arrested next week if any more property is destroyed. Otherwise, I’ll have to start calling for a lobotomy.

There's a Riot Goin' On

2009-12-12T14:51:00.000-08:00

It takes something thoroughly messed up to get me to side with UC Administration. I see the it as the embodiment of everything wrong with modern infrastructure: horrific incompetence, systemic laziness, self-serving cold-heartedness, and miles – literally, miles – of red tape. Yet on Friday afternoon, another cavalcade of self-righteous, empty-headed Berkeley shitheads managed to not only leave me siding wholeheartedly with the beast itself, but disgusted enough to disrupt my work during finals season, something that no one deserves, but especially students at a school as soul-crushing as Cal.

On Friday night, at around 11:15pm, a group of protesters as big as 75 strong – some of them bearing torches – gathered around Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home. The slogan of the evening was “No justice, no peace,” and they fully intended to stick to their word. Things quickly descended to breaking planters, lights, and windows. It got worse: the torch-bearers actually threw their lit torches at the house and the cops.

Eight people were arrested, six of them non-students. It was about 67 people too few.

The most pressing concern, obviously, is that these assholes could actually have hurt someone, particularly with the torches. To put in writing what shouldn’t need to be said to anyone, ATTACKING SOMEONE BECAUSE THE UNIVERSITY IS RAISING FEES AND SLASHING BUDGETS IS BOTH UNCONSCIONABLE AND ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. But consider everything else wrong with this picture:

(I) These attacks were perpetrated against Bob Birgeneau. He could very well serve as a dictionary picture alongside the definition of “figurehead,” but even were he to occupy a more meaningful position, he still would by no means control the actions of UC Berkeley, much less the University of California as a whole.

(II) Creating a need for repairs at University House – which is, as the name suggests, university property – is counterproductive when one of the things you’re protesting is an unjust allocation of reduced funding.

(III) Even with their heads so neatly tucked up their asses, these idiots should have realized that the civil protests of the 1960s that they were so desperately hoping to emulate took place at least half a century after such affairs no longer had to be torch-lit.

(IV) And why exactly was this issue stirring enough to six non-students that they not only attended, but caused sufficiently disturbance to be picked out of the mob and arrested?

On that last note, here are the most noteworthy charges against Zachary Bowin and Angela Miller, the two Cal students arrested: rioting, attempted burglary, attempted arson of an occupied building, vandalism, and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Even accepting the idea that local wackos are liable to engage in this sort of behavior, shouldn’t two kids paying to go to school know better? What the hell is this school teaching kids, anyway?

10:1 odds they were Peace and Conflict Studies majors – just guessing.

Tedford's Last Stand

2009-10-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

I make no secret about the fact that the football team was a major factor in my decision to enroll at Cal; given my love of the sport and the school’s reputation as one of the better football schools on the West Coast, and overlooking dismissals along the lines of “It’s only a game,” it was a logical move. Yet as so often happens, the disconnect between the ideal and reality has proven vast. Despite being denied student section tickets each of my first two years at Berkeley, I’ve attended every football game (except those that conflicted with family or religious commitments), and mustered far more school spirit than would be suggested by my extreme enmity towards Berkeley as a university and a city. Suffice it to say by the inclusion of a football entry in this blog, my efforts have not been rewarded.

Since 2006, I’ve seen meltdowns and collapses by teams good and bad; heard 70,000 screaming people fall silent in an instant; sat through a downpour that left me returning home in clothes that weighed 15 pounds and shivering through a hot shower; and heard no fewer than 15 sorority girls discussing at full volume who they’d had sex with since the semester began. I’ve watched the uninspiring efforts of players less athletic than me, coaching decisions that showed less foresight than Custer’s declaration of victory at Little Bighorn, and execution far more brutal than that of Louis XVI. Yet the last 2 games have been the worst of my tenure here – indeed, of the Tedford Era – and have thrown the team’s inadequacies into the spotlight beyond the point of return. In Cal’s two losses to Oregon and USC, the team was outscored 72-6; they went 108 minutes and 12 seconds between their two made field goals. The coaching, incredibly, managed consistently to overshadow the team’s atrocious play, as evidenced by the almost comical number of times the team resorted to running its offense in the gimmicky “wildcat” formation – which, as former NFL coach Brian Billick was heard to say in an NFL game two weeks ago, “never works.”

Like the school’s problems in other departments (discussed in the backlog of posts here), the football woes would seem to be inescapable. There are two contributing factors. First, the self-perpetuating “black hole of talent” seen in today’s college football means that underperforming schools recruit inferior talent – and are thus, usually, forever robbed of the chance to escape mediocrity. More damningly, though, just as UC administration is unwilling to “trim the fat” in response to the current financial abyss, so too is the management of the football team unwilling to recognize that the coaching of this team does not work. History has already shown that head coach Jeff Tedford did a miraculous job of turning an abysmal program into a distinctly above-average one, but also that his self-destructively conservative play-calling and inability to instill a disciplined, winning attitude in his squads make him unable to transform Cal football into a good program, much less an elite one. Yet he will stay in place as long as the University’s systemic complacency remains intact, as, for the most part, will his squad of assistant coaches and coordinators.

Today’s contest was the Joe Roth Memorial Game – the annual home game against USC or UCLA designated to honor the only man whose jersey has been retired by the University, and whose outstanding career and life were cut short by melanoma at the age of 21. Though the team’s disgraceful performance was more than enough to render this a woefully unbefitting tribute to one of the greatest players in school history, even worse was the fact that the sole reference to the night’s being dedicated to Roth was an advertisement for the sale of a memorial T-shirt during a media timeout. It’s abundantly clear that despite whatever our fish-out-of-water Canadian Chancellor Robert Birgeneau tries to suggest at games, the football team is nothing more than a cashcow for Berkeley, and one which will, on the strength of the unflinching loyalty of fans like me, remain profitable no matter how badly the program is allowed to stagnate. It’s an unpleasant discovery to make and one that provides a dreary outlook for the decade to come: records wavering between 7-5 and 8-4, and boring, inappropriately close victories in the Sun, Emerald, and Vegas Bowls.

I maintain that choosing a football team is a perfectly legitimate reason to select a university for those so inclined, and believe I always will. I’m also certain now that anyone doing so should save themselves the ordeal and forgo becoming a Golden Bear.

Take a Long Walkout Off a Short Pier

2009-09-16T01:17:00.000-07:00

Moments of fiscal crisis have traditionally proven heart-wrenching, difficult landmarks of American history; images leap to mind of bankrupted investors jumping to their deaths off New York skyscrapers and of Dorthea Lange’s immortal photograph “Migrant Mother.” Evidently, under the present circumstances, UC Berkeley’s faculty and students have decided to take a decidedly less heroic stand for posterity.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the University is set to suffer widespread budget cuts, which will inevitably lead to fee hikes – potentially, massive ones. UCs are by no means alone in their plight: my father, a professor in the CSU system, is going to have to take furlough days, as will all other members of the faculty. And yet, predictably, constituent parts of the University of California are set to take it upon themselves to stand against the issue, the only way they know how: public protest.

On Thursday, September 24, UC faculty plans to walkout, in what the University calls an illegitimate strike - one not carried out according to the procedure stipulated in the existing institution-faculty agreement. The demonstrations will include any number of faculty members picketing, and many others engaging in teach-ins purportedly designed to inform students as to what the practical impact of the $813 million budget cuts will be for students. The day is, of course, supposed to be an instructional school day, but classes are likely to be almost universally cancelled, to further heighten awareness of the situation. The move has been met with widespread approval from the collective student body: websites have been set up to organize students in collaborative demonstrations with professors, and on September 13, the UC Student Association unanimously approved a resolution supporting the stoppage.

Perplexing and irritating is the following oversight: in an effort to protest what is perceived as an immoral blow to hard-working students and faculty alike, the powers that be have arranged the cancellation of one of the few remaining days of school under the “reduced” price – one whose tuition has been paid in advance and whose work will need to be made up across the board. Even worse is the disingenuousness of many of the professors, who – though understandably upset about the paycuts – are taking this opportunity to rob their students of lecture time (lest we forget: students pay to go to class, professors get paid) under the pretense of protecting the student body’s interests. Worst of all are the students themselves, who have evidently bought into the idea that by proving their willingness to pay tuition for a day of no instruction, they’ll convince the University to reconsider the fee hikes and furloughs.

This is the sort of logical travesty I’ve gotten accustomed to over my 3+ years at UC Berkeley; I guess now, at least, I can take solace in the knowledge that I was getting it on sale.

(Don't) Panic of 2009

2009-06-15T20:47:00.000-07:00

I hail from San Francisco, and one of the main benefits I derive from summer is the chance to detach myself from the world of Berkeley – including both the psychos wandering its streets and the sadists responsible for apportioning grades. This detachment is so thorough (excepting the contact which I keep with my Berkeley friends) that, happily enough, I haven’t so much as visited this blog since I posted the last entry. Sometimes, though, Berkeley reaches me while I’m away, as it did today, with an email marked “URGENT” from Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau.

This particular communiqué addresses the continued dire financial straits in California, and the continued budget cuts to the UC system assumed to be pending. The good news it sends is that Berkeley’s $145 million deficit has, via several adjustments, been trimmed by $45 million. The bad news is that lingering $100 million deficit. Now, the Chancellor’s tone reads like one of wary optimism, based on faith that the ingenuity of the constituency of our institution will carry the day, despite any obstacles. He also assures that, regardless of what the as-yet still undetermined budget ends up saying, “We will not sacrifice Berkeley's commitment to breadth and depth of academic excellence.” Despite their comforting airs, though, his words of fortitude leave one wondering from whence the money is going to be drained; the rest of the email makes it clear that he’s not quite sure of that himself. In the public interest, I’d like to suggest some guidelines.

First: that on a probationary basis, strict limitations be placed on the ASUC Senate, as warranted by its extreme ineptitude and tendency towards financial waste last year. Any faith one has in the incoming personnel of the Senate should be overridden by these kind of lingering concerns, and besides, as I’ve spent pages arguing by this point, the Senate’s Constitution limits the institution’s power to the point that even if it was staffed by hardworking, earnest students, it wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything, anyway. In effect, it’s a waste of money no matter how much the Chancellor and his crew decide to allocate to it, and so should be the most obvious target to be trimmed.

Second: that the university should allow profitable businesses to rent out campus space and charge them accordingly. Berkeley’s antipathy towards chains is irrational. To use a pertinent example, the reason Panda Express hasn’t been allowed on campus is not because it, say, pillages the rainforest, or runs sweatshops in third-world countries, but because it’s a chain, and chains are inherently evil. A better approach is to understand that chains aren’t big principally because they’re unscrupulous, but rather, because they’re markedly better at providing their products and/or services than their competition. Allowing Panda Express (among others) on campus would provide a new, major source of revenue for the university, and give thousands of students cheap access to food they enjoy, to boot. As for the opposition, frankly, how the university parcels out its property should be for the administration, not the student body, to decide.

Third: that landscaping projects, no matter what size, should be drastically scaled back. Last year, there were an appalling number of construction sites to be found around Sproul Plaza, and presumably, many more in less visible places. None of these, so far as I or anyone I know could tell, were anything more than cosmetic modifications. Yet as anyone who’s ever had to deal with home repairs knows, even small projects inevitably prove costly – and I doubt I’m making too bold a leap in assuming that replacing Sather Gate was rather more expensive than installing new light fixtures. Granted, keeping up appearances is important in attracting new students, but if maintaining the “breadth and depth of academic excellence” really is the university’s top priority, the concrete botox needs to stop.

Finally: that the inevitable cuts should not be made “across the board.” Though this was mentioned in the email, where the Chancellor meant that larger departments would be experiencing cuts proportionate to their size, I mean that the university should make its most significant cuts in its least significant departments. Though I won’t enumerate which departments I feel are relatively unimportant, this should be perfectly clear: they should be those without notable faculty members; those with smaller numbers of students; those with smaller numbers of applicants; those not ranked as highly in the polls as so many of Berkeley’s departments are. It’s time that Berkeley acknowledged that the Cuneiform and Forestry departments simply are not as important as MCB and English are. Yes, this will mean some unfortunate losses of some fascinating subjects, but in economic downturn, the university should focus on what it does best, and save its “hobbies” for days when it has more resources to throw around.

Sadly, it’s hard to believe that Chancellor Birgeneau and the other parties responsible will consider any of the above arguments. Unnecessary expenses will continue to drain finances; the few obvious chances at supplementing income at the expense of someone other than California’s taxpayers will be rejected; unimportant departments will receive funding they simply don’t merit. I have faith in this country, and in the perpetuity of its history of economic fluctuation, so I’m sure that at some point, the UCs – including Berkeley – will once more have access to the budget they deserve. I just hope management hasn’t run the damn things into the ground by then.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

2009-05-07T04:14:00.000-07:00

A bizarre man came by Wednesday afternoon as I was tabling for Tikvah: Students for Israel. He wore BluBlockers manufactured during Kurt Cobain’s lifetime, a purple bucket hat, and black trousers with the fly proudly agape. He said he was born in Ethiopia, had immigrated to Berkeley in 1968, had joined the Black Panthers shortly upon his arrival, and had used and enjoyed great quantities of psychedelics in his lifetime; I believed him on all counts. He seated himself at the table and proceeded to talk continuously for around 25 minutes, telling me that “Israel” meant “god” in Ethiopia, and that members of the group should have faith that everything was going to be all right and work to make peace with the people in Students for Justice in Palestine. It was weird deriving nuggets of wisdom from the chain of blather, yet he noted that Israelis and Palestinians were brothers – a point which, I replied, people too often overlook. It made me reflect, though, on the last contact I had with SJP as a group.

Several Wednesdays ago, I was with a two or three other friends of Tikvah at the table, situated at the edge of Sproul Plaza, near the ramp that leads to Lower Sproul. While we were talking, the guys tabling for SJP began packing up and loaded everything onto their cart. As they reached the top of the ramp, all the stuff fell off the cart, and I (followed shortly by my friends) ran over to help them pick the table and chairs up. I certainly didn’t expect any thanks, but what I got instead was the coldest stare I’d received since I told my o-chem lab professor that I hoped I wouldn’t have to do lab on my broken foot.

In my eye, a rather half-assed stab at détente.

I’m certainly not tempted to jump to conclusions: I wouldn’t assume that that seething animosity is representative of the group as a whole, or necessarily, even of the individuals from whose eyes the thunderbolts of unrepentant frost emanated. Yet I’m inclined to point out from this particular incident that when I stood up to help them out, I didn’t do so in spite of their political stances: I did so without any concern for their politics, because that’s what I do for other people. I also wouldn’t feel compelled to draw attention to this in even so meaningless an arena as this blog, if it hadn’t been part of an unbroken chain of hostility I’ve encountered from members of SJP – on some occasions, even outside of moments of participation in the pro-Israel debate.

The Almighty and my parents have already teamed to provide me with the only two brothers I’ll ever really need. So if members of Students for Justice in Palestine decide to settle for treating my friends and I with the same basic decency I hope I treat them, I’ll be as satisfied as I will surprised.

Day 101

2009-04-30T01:16:00.000-07:00

To begin, a concise statement of my stance on domestic politics. I wouldn’t align myself with either of the major American political parties (nor, for that matter, with any of their wacky little sidekicks); however, I believe the Democratic one to be by far the worse of the two. Its espousal of traditional liberal values is, in my eye, undermined by the amorality, incompetence, hypocrisy, and duplicity it employs in pursuing its goals – which is a shame, given that many of those goals (e.g., equality) are ones I agree with wholeheartedly. I didn’t support Barack Obama in this past election because I considered him an inexperienced politician who might potentially become a tool of the party I believe to be far more dangerous than its counterpart.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the fact that the candidate I would have chosen was not elected, I support President Obama, feeling as I do that Americans are best served to place faith in the man selected their Commander in Chief. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t feel at all compelled to write about him here. However, the Berkeley deification I’ve described in the past has continued, and especially amidst all the hoopla surrounding H’s 100th day in office, locals have felt compelled to pontificate on conditions in the Obama Era.

This last phrase is what brings me here: I consider it faulty and irritating for a number of reasons. First is my belief (I refrain from using “the fact” because this is only exceedingly-likely conjecture) that the phrase would be used regardless of which Democrat had ascended to office back in January. This is to say, had the primaries and national election worked out that way, the Berkeley streets would be drowning in conversations about the “Clinton Era,” the “Edwards Era,” or even (try not to laugh) the “Kucinich Era” – anything, so long as it meant no Republicans past the White House lawns.

Second, tenure. H’s 100 days in office place him roughly halfway between the nation’s two shortest terms of office, which lasted 31 and 199 days, respectively. Though perhaps history will eventually vindicate them, as it stands today, one doesn’t frequently hear about the Garfield Era, much less the W.H. Harrison Era.

Finally, and most importantly, lack of change. Regardless of how much that term gets thrown around these days, any close examination of affairs will reveal that very little is different today than it was when Bush Light left office. Racism and partisanship still exist – the former, I fear, probably more so now that a black man holds our country’s most visible position. Public schools are still the punchline of thousands of jokes told in European lower learning institutions every day, and we’re still engaged militarily in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, as far as the raging fiscal storm for which H was supposed to be our proverbial high pressure front, the fact that every commercial on television begins with the phrase “In times like these” belies the lack of improvement.

When I posed this last point to an Obamanaut I was having a conversation with a few days ago, she responded with, “Well, you can’t expect miracles.” Oddly enough, she made my point for me: no, you can’t. So far, other than the Obamas getting an unbelievable dog (see right), the tenure of the 44th President has been about as eventful as those of the aforementioned 9th and 20th ones, and does not merit being deemed an “Era.” Not even in Berkeley.

Eleh Ezkarah, V'nafshi Alai Eshpecha

2009-04-21T01:47:00.000-07:00

The title of this entry comes from the selection of the Yom Kippur service that commemorates the brutal murders of ten Sages at the hands of the Romans, destroyed for their devotion to their faith. It translates to "These things I remember, and my soul cries out on them." I chose it because it manages to convey that which I cannot put into words - any kind of statement about the Holocaust seems inadequate. However, given how disgustingly lightly the term is thrown around in Berkeley, I feel obliged to say something.

I’m not going to explain the reasons why the deaths of innocent standers-by in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, much less why even the most negligent of beef slaughterhouses or the most wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest aren’t either. Anyone demanding that sort of argument won’t derive anything from my writings in this blog, anyway. I will simply say that the sentiment behind “Never Forget” is violated when one uses the Holocaust for comparative purposes. Far more repugnant than the idea that those 6 million+ cold-blooded executions in Europe are comparable to anything else is the way such a comparison degrades the memory of the dead – who had in life already been more thoroughly stripped of their purportedly inalienable right to humanity and dignity than any human beings in our species’ long, torturous history.

As much as it is our eternal duty to “Never Forget,” it is our obligation to safeguard the memories we fight to keep alive from those who would willfully defile them.

In loving memory of the 6 million+ martyrs who lost their lives at the hands of the most evil empire I pray the world ever knows.

Electioneering

2009-04-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

[An opening disclaimer: the following politically-oriented views are strictly those of their author, and their expression is, both technically and in spirit, completely unaffiliated with any organization, on campus or otherwise. Another disclaimer: the author’s offer of advice regarding this week’s election does not entail his condoning the existence of the ASUC Senate; to the contrary, the author would like here to express his hope that the institution will one day be dismantled, and to emphasize that the following piece is written merely in the hopes of making the best of an unfavorable situation.]

In perusing the voter’s guide for this week’s ASUC elections and reflecting upon my experiences with various candidates I met this week, I was surprised to find a good number who I wouldn’t be loathe to have responsible for doling out our university’s finances. I wish today to make concise arguments for the two candidates I most avidly support: Will Smelko and Matthew White.

I first met Senator Smelko when I attended a number of Senate meetings in the wake of the Eshleman Hall “fight” last Nov 13. He immediately struck me as a man far too good to be working in such a poorly-run, obscenely self-important environment – which is why I wasn’t surprised to discover he had a solid working relationship with Senator John Moghtader. I soon found him – along with Senators Moghtader, Meghana Dhar, and Tommy Owens – to be one of the few ASUC officials I liked, and one of the four I would admit to trusting. In him, I believe voters have not only an intelligent, good-hearted man for whatever reason willing to give yet more of his time in their service, but also an opportunity to elect the first capable ASUC President since my arrival in Berkeley in Fall 2006. Indeed, I believe he would be the only one in this span to have sought the presidency to affect positive change in the student government, rather than to expand his profile or pad his resume. He stands in particularly sharp contrast with CalSERVE candidate Oscar Mairena, who has with every speech and action I have witnessed presented himself to me as a grandstanding tool of Herculean proportions, and actually somehow managed, by dint of the personality he displays in the line of his Senatorial duties, to make me dislike him personally. Independently and by comparison, then, I believe Senator Smelko to be the only reasonable choice for ASUC President – this immediately dismissing Defend Affirmative Action Party candidate Ronald Cruz and with all due deference to SQUELCH! candidate Andy “Vote for Me and Get Laid” Morris.

Though I am personal friends with Matthew White, my endorsement of him is not drawn from my enjoyment of his company, or even from some of our shared political views, but strictly from my faith in his capacity as an elected official. Speaking from a deep bank of personal experience, Matt is an intelligent, ethical man with an unusually wide network of connections that keeps him adrift of developments in Berkeley circles far beyond his own. He has a strong sense of morals, derived both from the sharply-defined laws of kind and proper behavior he follows as an observant Jew, and from his own unrelenting conscience. He is a loving person who makes friends in a manner genuinely blind to race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. He has been intimately involved with a number of campus-tied organizations, and will thus serve in Berkeley’s best interest – as he himself has too much invested emotionally to see conditions decline any further. He will stand above the pettiness of ASUC party politics not because he’s running as an independent, but because he has seen firsthand, as an associate and friend of Senator Moghtader’s, the waste and divisiveness they always cause. He will vote with his mind and his conscience – both of which I guarantee make him more genuinely interested in “preserving diversity” than any of the narrow-minded, self-serving candidates running for CalSERVE or the Defend Affirmative Action Party. In sum, I would trust Matt with my life – so it should go without saying that I’d trust him with an active hand in the future of the ASUC.

I would encourage readers to read through the growing archive of MirvChron posts, which I hope illustrate the reasons I believe the CalSERVE party has shown itself to be a petty assemblage of incompetent, self-serving men and women who do not deserve access to the obscenely large ASUC slush fund. I would also mention briefly that I met, talked to, was impressed by, and throw my support behind the following candidates: Rick “Rollin’” Chen (#64), Serge Sarkissian (#111), J.P. Shami (#113), and Parth Bhatt (#117).

ASUC voting runs from April 7-9; polls can be accessed here. Thank you.

A Moment of Darkness for Our Collective Dignity

2009-03-28T21:36:00.001-07:00

This evening I find myself annoyed by a Berkeley-like phenomenon that extended the world over. Purportedly, over a billion people took place in “Earth Hour” this evening, dimming their lights as part of “a global event designed to highlight the threat from climate change” (see here). World-famous landmarks and ordinary homes alike reduced their artificial luminescence in an apparently united “up yours” to global warming.

Now, I happen to believe that climate change is a serious issue: that even though I think Al Gore’s sheep-like followers – who really have transformed greenness into nothing less than a cult – have exaggerated humankind’s malicious, apocalyptic contribution to the situation, I believe that the world’s getting warmer (and yes, it has been) is a genuine problem. My problem lies with this self-satisfied “display of solidarity” against our inanimate foe, the greenhouse gases. The demonstrators as a whole have the right idea, but as usual, they think that by inconveniencing themselves ever-so-slightly for a brief period, that they’ve done their part to solve the issue.

In the end, one desk lamp isn’t melting the polar ice caps; neither, for that matter, are a billion. The problem is 4-person families that own 3 cars and drive them to work, 15 blocks from their homes, because they don’t want to walk, bike, or (heaven forfend) take the bus. The problem is idiots that own and use private jets because they don’t find flying first class sufficiently dignified. The problem is jackasses that buy pickup trucks when they work at Kinko’s/FedEx. So when people around the world turn off some of the lights in their homes for an hour and then look down on someone else for not doing the same, they’re not really as close to being a part of the solution as they probably assume.

I don’t mean to disparage the sentiment, and I’m sure there were millions upon millions of well-meaning people who took part in the gesture because it was just that – an excellent gesture. And yet, I bet “Earth Hour” was a big hit in Berkeley, where it would give so many smug morons yet another unearned chance to feel proud of themselves. I’m very glad I wasn’t there. The complacent attitude that would lead these people to go to the limited trouble of flipping a few switches is the same that has seen so many people complain about the Piedmont Penetrator’s existence, while not actually doing anything to help local women by seeing to his capture and extended imprisonment.

Maybe it’s just hot air causing global warming, after all.

Back... and to the Left.

2009-03-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

I once took a walk along the pier at the Berkeley Marina. The sea was choppy, the clouds lying ominously above me, and out along the horizon, the vague silhouette of a freighter could be seen against the crimson flare of the setting sun. Amidst it all, there was a seagull sitting on the right hand railing of the dock, eyeing me suspiciously. As I approached, he took off and flew further down the same railing, towards the heart of the bay. We exchanged this little back-and-forth the whole way down: every time I moved too close for comfort, he would fly further down the dock. We got near the end – by which time, mind you, I felt really bad for pushing the little idiot as far as he’d gone – and he ran out of dock to which he could flee. Not wanting to force him to think of an alternate course of action, I turned around and walked home.

I couldn’t help but think back on this when it was revealed in the Daily Cal last week (see the article here) that Senator John Moghtader, after much deliberation with his lawyer, was prepared to release a video taken on the balcony at Eshleman Hall on November 13 – one which purportedly negates the testimonies presented by first-hand “witnesses” Husam Zakharia and Dina Omar, among others. I liken those who falsified the evidence to the seagull, and myself (arrogantly enough) to the truth: you can try to run away from it, but if all works as it should, sooner or later, you’ll run out of dock.

The long-term repercussions of this new development are difficult to make out, particularly as very few have had access to the video itself. Still, its very existence certainly raises concerns about the recall, which was primarily based on the assumption that Moghtader had engaged in conduct unbefitting his role as an ASUC Senator by joining in the fight, as outlined in Dina Omar’s editorial. In recent days, the argument has been made that the results of the recall are not invalidated by the new tape, since Moghtader acted against student interest by withholding said evidence from the voting body. I, however, would answer that it would not have made any difference: if the actions of the District Attorney of Alameda County weren’t sufficient to convince students to vote on the recall, the outcome would seem to have been predetermined.

Don’t be fooled: this video is not important because it can undo the results of an unjust election. It presumably won’t do that, and even if it does, it’s pretty meaningless, because (a) the term is largely expired, (b) this year’s Senate can’t get anything done, and (c) the ASUC Senate is a worthless organization to begin with, as I’ve been writing all year. No, the video is important only because it will, based on what’s been revealed so far, prove that the dubious claims presented since November were, indeed, wholly falsified.

Ideally, it would be nice to see those whose dishonest claims saw the election presented to the disinterested populace in the first place face some personal repercussions, though presumably such will not be the case. Realistically, there are two things that should come out of this affair. First, it should lead to a serious reconsideration of the recall procedure on all fronts. The administration should recognize that the cost of a recall election is virtually unjustifiable, and that it needs to pressure the ASUC to amend its constitution accordingly. Student government should recognize that the proceedings have been far more divisive than the events that triggered them in the first place, and that the process was both far too easy to begin (those shady 1000 online signatures) and far too easy to finish (with just less than 2700 people deciding to remove the 7th highest vote getter). Finally, the students themselves should recognize that it’s apparently easy to waste a boatload of money to divest yourself of political enemies provided one is willing to intentionally distort the truth. Assuming another recall takes place before too long – which I’ve got to say, given how easy it is, it clearly ought to – students would be well-served to bear in mind the likelihood that testimony they’re presented with from anyone with something to gain from lying cannot necessarily be trusted.

Second, and even more important, students should recognize that the repercussions of this extend far beyond those who provided the fraudulent testimonies: those implicated in the email leak were as responsible for the spread of any lies as the students who provided them. I by no means intend to imply that the CalSERVE party is inherently ideologically opposed to Moghtader and all he stands for, but I posit that it can’t be a coincidence that the emails were all written by members of that group. It should also be noted that in the email written by CalSERVE Senator Kifah Shah, she did not express hope that Student Action Senators could be convinced of the legitimacy of their claims, but rather merely that they would “think of [Moghtader] as dispensible.” For a party that prides itself on “transparency,” CalSERVE’s practice feels uncomfortably more like a return to the rampant corruption of the United States’ Harding days. What’s emerged since November has been a political slate that has worked as a unit to overturn the democratic process they so insist they love in a transparent (oh, the devastating irony) attempt to remove the fly from their proverbial ointment. I refuse to waste money on a recall to remove the guilty parties from office. However, I sincerely hope that this political impropriety has not been lost on voters, and that when the April elections come up, they give a good, long thought as to whose interests CalSERVE really promises to defend – and to how much value transparency really has when you’re frightened by what you see inside.

I saw that same seagull again the last time I walked to the pier; once more, he took off down the dock. Remember, some people never learn.

Speed Kills

2009-03-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

This is one I was going to let go, because I was willing to categorize it as a brainless mistake by an often well-meaning institution that a number of my friends actually care about. However, an email I got yesterday attempting to downplay and defend said mistake made me realize, upon reflection, that it was even worse than I’d thought.

In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, Berkeley Hillel ran a “speed friending” event (think speed dating, but with less appeal to college students), and put out ads featuring the image seen right. Now, it’s easy enough to see how this could have been intended to mean something other than “we’re scared of traditional Judaism as an institution,” even if it doesn’t. And so, even as the barbs were flying around here, in the form of machine gun exchanges over Facebook and the Jerusalem Post’s website, I refused to join in, for the reasons listed above.

The email I received was penned by a guy I respect, and yet the sentiment scared me. He called it “an example of a collegiate attempt at humor that fell flat, and exploded it into something it wasn't, suggesting it was an attack on Orthodoxy.” He went on to say that the outrage this piece of work prompted was just an attempt by people who don’t like “Hillel's big tent approach to Israel issues and attitudes” to discredit the institution any way they know how.

It rather sickens me that people are trying to play something like this off as some local political spat. Even assuming the best, is it any more comforting to think that it didn’t occur to the author that this could be offensive than it is to think that they were straight-up admitting they were scared of observant Judaism? This could only happen for one reason: whoever wrote this for Hillel didn’t have any Orthodox people to pop up in their mind and make them think twice. Speaking as someone who doesn’t give a crap about Hillel’s “big tent,” I can say that since my arrival in 2006, Hillel has steadily pushed observant Jews out – myself included. Not by putting on speed friending events to celebrate holidays named after saints, either: by refusing to take the minor steps to move their kitchen past dubious kashrut; by doing nothing for Passover, the hardest of Jewish holidays for college students to observe; by serving gummy snacks with gelatin in them on Purim; by sticking the Orthodox minyan in a side room because the yoga minyan needed the space more. The list goes on.

This ad was not wrong because it was a poorly-executed attempt at a joke that shouldn’t have been considered funny to start with; it was wrong because it’s representative of a situation that has progressed to the point where it doesn’t occur to anyone that there are Orthodox Jewish students even tangentially tied to Hillel who might take offense. And to reiterate, regardless of intent, this ad was EXTREMELY offensive, as are all attempts to justify it with anything other than “it won’t happen again.”

Here’s a picture of what I left Hillel for: Doesn’t scare me. And I’ve never looked back.

And They Still Had to Cheat?

2009-03-06T01:57:00.000-08:00

A Daily Cal reporter asked me on February 23 whether my like-minded voters and I were surprised by the low turnout projected for the recall election; as I recall, my reaction was, “I wouldn’t say we’re surprised, but we’re definitely disappointed.” This sentiment pretty neatly sums up my feelings in light of the news that Senator John Moghtader has successfully been recalled. My lack of surprise results from the knowledge – advertised here for weeks – that this election was nothing more than a vendetta campaign launched by personal political enemies of Senator Moghtader’s, and one which meant little-to-nothing to most students on campus. The disappointment, in large part, results from the self-importance and laziness of Berkeley students – the former of which led waves of kids to express their outrage at the egregious waste of their money, and the latter of which made the same juveniles unwilling to go three feet out of their way to express this outrage in any effective manner.

Thursday morning, a story broke in the Daily Cal (see here) reporting a leak that revealed emails sent by ASUC President Roxanne Winston and Senator Kifah Shah, advocating the recall of Senator Moghtader. (The reason this is newsworthy is that ASUC Senate officials are forbidden to use their positions of – for lack of a more befitting word – “power” to pull sway as far elections are concerned.) Further implicated were External Affairs Vice President Dionne Jirachaikitti and Senator Mary June Flores: the former had an offending email sent through her listserv (though she, in proper Nixonian fashion, denies any knowledge of said email’s existence), while the latter publicly demonstrated her colors by pushing for the election to take place during finals last semester.

Senator Shah’s email – an odd, haphazardly worded little ditty that displays an alarming disregard for the sanctity of the English language – concerned the mobilization of Senators from the opposing party (Student Action, the proverbial Aaron Burr to CalSERVE’s Alexander Hamilton) in garnering support for Senator Moghtader’s removal from office. She claims that the email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as a Senator to assist in the takedown of the president of Tikvah: Students for Israel; despite her well-publicized status within the ranks of Students for Justice in Palestine, I am, of course, inclined to believe her wholeheartedly.

President Winston’s email was addressed to senators and an SJP official, intended to put them in contact with one another and express her intent to “lend [her] support as best [she could]” in the recall campaign. She, too, has recently claimed that her email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as President of the ASUC to assist the takedown of a Senator she’d presumably long wished had never been elected. Her email, though, ended in an electronic signature that identified her as the President of the ASUC.

I smell a rat... and this time, it isn’t just that standard Berkeley odor.

Though I can’t say I know her personally, from my position Roxanne Winston reminds me a good deal of Star Wars crimelord Jabba the Hutt – not because of her Rubenesque proportions, but because of her position as the self-serving, short-sighted, and woefully incompetent figurehead of a bloated organization that holds little realistic claim to power and seemingly never gets anything done, yet nonetheless is somehow capable of dragging untold sums of cash out of an unwilling populace. I believe the fact that this ASUC Senate has developed a distinct reputation – mind you, among the pantheon of incapacity that precedes it in the annals of ASUC history – as one that can’t get anything done must lie, in large part, at her feet. In this particular instance, I can’t tell if she’s lying because she’s been caught, or if she was just too damn lazy to erase the letterhead at the bottom of her email – and frankly, I don’t know which would be worse. It would seem we’re either dealing with a woman who illegally abused her position and then lied about it to her constituency (again, rather Nixonian), or else one whose unwillingness to make the slightest effort even when it’s most called for is exacerbating the chronic Senatorial stagnation! Call it one simple man’s opinion, but abuse of power and incompetence sound more like legitimate reasons to begin an obscenely expensive recall than anything I’ve heard or read since this hullabaloo started.

I’m at this stage disappointed that the recall went through for four basic reasons: (a) I believe it was an overblown vendetta, parlayed into a simple miscarriage of justice; (b) I believe the 3717 votes cast in the recall election should not constitute a sufficient percentage of the 24,636 undergraduates enrolled at Berkeley to overturn the purportedly democratic election that saw Senator Moghtader receive more votes than all but 6 other candidates last year; (c) at the risk of beating this dead horse officially beyond recognizability, I believe that the recall of a Senator from a meaningless Senate with 2 months left in his term was categorically NOT worth the astonishing expenditure; and (d) finally, I fear that the outcome, combined with my readily apparent stance on the election itself, will mislead readers into believing that my disgust with the would-be politicians outed in Zach E.J. Williams’ article stems only from resentfulness. To be candid: the very “behavior unbefitting an official of the ASUC” that those behind the recall were (evidently successfully) attempting to convince voters that Senator Moghtader was guilty of has here been ably displayed by both Senator Shah and President Winston, to say nothing of Jirachaikitti or Flores.

For me there is no way around the conclusion that a concerted effort must now be made to ensure that the responsible parties do not find their way back into the ASUC. If some putrid cocktail of fate, lies, corruption, and laziness has seen to it that the Berkeley student body was not able to make use of the recall election to declare that it’ll have no part in yet more unrepentant squandering of public funds, then the regularly scheduled election will have to do so in its stead.

It’s funny that the most important thing I get out of studying history is something they don’t try particularly hard to impress on us in classes at Berkeley: that the only thing worse than electing conniving, manipulative politicians is electing them twice.

Total Recall

2009-02-23T01:10:00.001-08:00

The two people pictured above are my dad, Adrian Mirvish, and my mom, Lissa Rechtin. My dad’s a philosophy professor at CSU Chico, and my mom’s a child psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente. Their jobs cumulatively pay pretty well, and the 5 of us in my nuclear family are acutely aware of how lucky we are; nonetheless, the family does have many sizable drains on finances. As regular readers know, I’m a student at UC Berkeley; as the enormous percentage of those few and (hopefully) proud readers who are also close friends of mine know, my older brother, Ezra, is a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, and my younger brother, Asher, is set to enroll at UC Davis. The price of having 3 kids living away from home while enrolled in institutions of higher learning is, as comedians with no original material will tell you, significant. My family also lives in a house big enough for 5 in San Francisco, with a correspondingly expensive mortgage. We are in the process of paying off two cars. Taxes are significant on a doctor’s salary. My dad, lamentably, has to pay for fairly regular dental work; I, as the inner circle will already be aware, am on a bevy of fairly costly ophthalmic medication; my mom takes an expensive osteoporosis pill. We also all like to own warm clothing and indulge in some food on a fairly regular basis. My parents pay for all of the above and much, much more.

An unusual election is taking place in Berkeley tomorrow and the day after, polling the student body as to whether or not to remove ASUC Senator John Moghtader from office. For the uninitiated, the ASUC is a worthless governmental institution, one which gets nothing done (as a dual result of widespread incompetence and constitutionally-granted power that doesn’t entitle it to accomplish much under the most ideal of circumstances), yet constitutes a very sizable drain on university finances. John Moghtader is a fully competent officer of this hopeless legal body, whose threatened removal from office stems not from illicit activity or conduct unbefitting a Senator, but from the personal vendetta of a small group of UC Berkeley students. The details on this are as follows:

Senator Moghtader also serves as the president of a student group known as Tikvah: Students for Israel, devoted to Israel advocacy on campus. On November 13, 2008, on an Eschelman Hall balcony overlooking a concert being held on Lower Sproul Plaza by the Zionist Freedom Alliance, an (in the eyes of this direct eyewitness) exceedingly minor physical altercation broke out between Israel and Palestine student advocates. The organization of this concert had seen significant effort and input at the hands of members and associates of Tikvah, and it was one of these, Berkeley alum Gabe Weiner, who was most actually involved in the scuffle. Moghtader himself was at the time in the area of the so-called “fight” but remained visibly uninvolved.

The recall campaign has been run by members and friends of the Palestine advocacy group most associated with the counter-demonstration that served as the basis of the fight, Students for Justice in Palestine. A number of these have been people involved in the altercation themselves, or else friends of participants, such as Husam Zakharia, the man who (as I can directly attest) started the “fight” by punching Weiner in the right cheek. They claim that Moghtader’s behavior in light of the event – which, as far as a number of eyewitnesses and the District Attorney of Alameda County can tell, was limited to being nearby – was unbefitting of an ASUC Senator, and that, for this reason, the democratically-elected official needs to be removed from office.

I almost wish there was any more to the charge than that, but there isn’t: the only ostensible reason Berkeley senior Yaman Salahi and his like-minded compatriots are seeking to have Moghtader removed from office is his demonstrably nonexistent participation in the events of that evening. This can only lead me to believe that the real motivation behind the campaign has less to do with anything Moghtader has done than with what he represents to Salahi and his fellow members of SJP: a political opponent, one whom they simply wish hadn’t found enough support to win office in the first place. My late, great friend Dan Kliman immediately diagnosed the campaign as a “witch hunt,” and he was right. Regardless of where one stands on Israel/Palestine or any other pertinent political issue, it should be clear from the evidence that Moghtader did not do anything to warrant removal from office – that this entire grandiose production is based on nothing more than petty resentment, and that the cause is a repugnant if magnificently-orchestrated sham.

Yet it gets a good deal worse: by dint of the evil miracle that is modern bureaucracy, the recall election is going to cost the University of California $25,000 – a bill which goes directly to the taxpayers. Admittedly, particularly spread across everyone who pays the University, $25,000 is not that much money (for scale, the projected California budget for 2009-10 is $135 billion.) Nevertheless, especially in light of the widely-acknowledged financial difficulties the United States and all its constituent parts find themselves in, any new addition is a crime.

I am unrepentant about my political stances: I am myself conservative (and just for the record, you’d do well not to equate that to “Republican”) and stand firmly in support of the State of Israel. This means that though I think that debates in Berkeley about the situation in the Middle East are a stupid and worthless enterprise – dividing a populace as they do and, let’s face it, having as nonexistent an impact on the Middle East as they do – I still believe it my duty to defend my political beliefs when they are assailed on campus. In essence, this means that when Salahi and company attack Senator Moghtader’s ASUC position because they disagree with him on grounds irrelevant to his post, I am both ideologically obligated and personally happy to argue the charges and do whatever I can to come to his aid. However, I am adamant that this responsibility does and absolutely should not extend to my mom and dad – both unflinchingly wonderful both as parents and as people – who sacrifice far too much for the good of the family already, and for whom ANY additional burdens are not only uncalled for, but also, I’m convinced, morally reprehensible.

My situation could not be further from unique: in all likelihood, there is no family out there that could not use any extra money they could get their hands on. Accordingly, there should be no one out there willing to outlay money that could – inevitably must – be used to pay mortgages, fund down payments, buy food or clothes or medicine, or even (heaven forfend) simply enjoy life to instead collectively fund an isolated case of puerile, narcissistic greed. That Salahi and co. are bothering the public to win that 3:15 fight at the flagpole on the proverbial schoolyard playground of life makes me angry; that they’re succeeding to do so at the expense of innocent people across the state makes me absolutely furious, and if, dear reader, you’ll forgive my forcing feelings upon you, it should do the very same to you.

Of course, as everyone is aware, it’s too late to stop the election: too late to amend the constitution to allow an ASUC Judicial Council to dismiss transparently frivolous suits; too late to stop the ASUC from accepting a laughably insufficient online petition; and much too late repair the abysmally-worded bylaws that allowed this entire monstrosity to take place after those first two failures had occurred. The $25,000 are already spent, and so in some sense, the outcome of the election itself is irrelevant. Yet I beg all who are entitled to vote to go out of their way into the wet, gray abyss of Berkeley to vote no on removing Senator Moghtader from office for two reasons:

First, simply, because a detached, discerning mind should come naturally to the conclusion that it’s the right decision. Second, because only by stopping this witch hunt where it currently stands can we, the students of UC Berkeley, assure that when, in the future, the University’s twin jewels of illustrious incompetence, the administration and ASUC Senate, fail to do anything/enough to prevent a similar event from recurring, history will have already shown that the student body is wholly unwilling to be party to such vainglorious horseshit.

For yourselves, for me, for our parents, for everyone - get out and vote NO on the recall of Senator John Moghtader.

(The online voting site can be found here. Thank you.)

This is 48% Off?

2009-02-17T23:45:00.000-08:00

Today, an article in the Daily Cal (see here) reported that the ASUC Senate has decided that the impending recall election could follow less strict guidelines than a normal one, meaning a price tag of $25,000, instead of $48,000. Good tidings, no?

Admittedly, anything that saves taxpayers $23,000 is great news; still, I can't get excited when our Senatorial putzes are still wasting such a gigantic sum of cash. To put it in perspective by citing a few examples, with $25,000, I could:

(a) Buy a 1999–2002 Mercedes-Benz E55, according to Car and Driver; (b) legally purchase the entire discographies of my top-20 favorite bands and artists on vinyl, CD, cassette, and 8-track tape; (c) purchase a surplus eyeball on the North Korean black market for replacement surgery; (d) comfortably live and go to school in Berkeley for a year; (e) buy a catapult to protect my loved ones; (f) order a Slovenian mail-order bride and hire an idiot savant to teach her the fine art of counting cards, so she could earn me a modest fortune; or (g) redo my house's kitchen, among other things.

Instead, we're spending it settling a petty grudge, and regardless of whether or not Senator Moghtader is removed from office, the money will have already been wasted. Even more than to prevent the miscarriage of justice I've been writing about since November, then, Senator Moghtader needs to be kept in office to prevent setting a dangerous precedent - one which could pave the way for frivolous recalls for years to come. We already have to pay for one useless election a year; let's leave it at that.

It's decision '09... and for once, it means something. Don't just get out the vote, get the vote the fuck out - and vote NO on removing Senator John Moghtader from office.

Happy Happy Happiness is a Warm Gun

2009-02-11T15:25:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I found myself walking around Sproul Plaza with a distinctly unusual sense of contentment. The environment was delightfully calm, tablers and flyerers having already packed up for the day. I was wearing a newly purchased sweatshirt; this allowed me to enjoy the crisp air while feeling comfortably warm – and looking snazzy, if I do say so myself – and with the sweatshirt on, I was looking forward to donating the old one I had replaced it with to a homeless dude. (It was stained enough that a student couldn’t reflect well on his colleagues while wearing it, but still in pretty good shape for someone less image-conscious.) To top it all off, I’d just bought myself a Churro, and was lost in its sugary, doughy goodness. Truly, it was a happiness in which I felt secure. Berkeley’s response was so immediate and so perfect I had to stop and marvel.

As I reached the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, I heard and then saw something I’d been dreading for months: the triumphant return of my first mortal enemy, The Happy Man.

As reported in the Daily Cal some 3-and-a-half years ago (see the article here), Happy Man is J.J. Chin, a native of Taiwan and graduate of the University of Utah – I daresay the second most unloved one in the Bay Area, behind 49er “quarterback” Alex Smith. The near-septuagenarian stands on a precariously balanced bucket all day long, holding up a sign featuring the messages he receives from god while chanting that ubiquitous, obnoxious mantra, “Happy, happy, happy,” on an infinite loop.

Back in my first semester at Berkeley, the only thing that would get me through my morning chemistry classes was the thought of an eventual lunch break at Subway, across the street at the same intersection. This son of a bitch ruined that for me every time, shouting just loud enough for me to hear it faintly over the sound of “My Heart Will Go On” on the radio and my chewing. It wasn’t just that he was interrupting my lunch that pissed me off, though: it was the shit he had written on his signs.

It turned out, Happy Man doesn’t like white people or Jews. His signs usually contained some rant about the satanic George Bush and his rouges’ galley of associates, but they made it bitingly clear to anyone who actually stopped to read them that his main problem with the man was his being white. His constant criticism of Israel worked in the same vein, complete with allegations of Jews everywhere running the world. That blood libel charges never made it into his repertoire was a blessing that can only be attributed to his apparent inability to speak the English language, despite having lived in America for 45 years. That the man’s never gotten into any trouble despite his racist diatribes can only be attributed to the Berkeley Doctrine, which firmly establishes that prejudice against white people is both moral and fair.

With H. in the Oval Office, the name has changed on the sign but the sentiment remains the same – proving once and for all that this is a man with no particular political agenda, rather just an urge to spread his unflinchingly racist prophecies to everyone unfortunate enough to be within a sandwich-eating radius. The only thing more repugnant than the asshole himself is the fact that so many people get a kick out of him.

I’d like to get a kick out from under him.... I need a Churro.

Hendel's Messiah

2009-02-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

An important part of the hostility of Berkeley that has to this point been neglected in blog coverage is antagonism to religiosity, stemming both from haters’ internal conflicts about religion and the glib self-satisfaction endemic to academia. On that note, let’s explore Professor Ron Hendel.

I encountered Hendel this morning in Jewish Studies 101, a course that offers an overview of the various professors associated with Jewish courses by having a different one give a lecture each week. Today was the first such lecture, purportedly centered around the topic “The Hebrew Bible and its Historical Contexts.” As it ended up happening, the lecture had little to do with the Hebrew Bible itself, and equally little to do with its historical contexts; instead, it was little more than a 40 minute session explaining that nothing described in the early parts of the book of Genesis ever happened, which we can be sure of for the scientifically credible reason that Hendel and Co. say so.

Now, I have no problem with non-believers, but I maintain that they have no more proof that god doesn’t exist than I have that he does, and I absolutely oppose people who dismiss religion out of hand. As the talk progressed, Hendel went on to say that the Bible’s fictitiousness is irrelevant, because of the “cultural memory” it provides to those who believe in it (in this case, giving a moral compass and communal identity to Jews). Yet he did not explain of his own volition why we could be certain that the 7 days of Creation were a crock, nor did he provide any such insight – knowledge that has eluded man for millennia, but which he evidently has access to – when prodded by his audience.

As a consequence, I ended up learning more about the man himself than I did about what he was supposed to be teaching. I learned that while his wife was in labor and asking why it hurt so much, he answered by quoting the line in Genesis that deemed it punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve in Eden. I learned that when his kids came home from school excited about the Pilgrim-Indian cooperation on Thanksgiving, he explained that Pilgrims were actually an extremely “intolerant” people, and that only by his strength of will did he refrain from continuing that had his children been at Plymouth in 1621, they would have been burned at the stake as heretics.

Hendel’s dismissiveness of his students spoke to a man disdainful of his religious heritage; his treatment of his family spoke to a man unkind to the people that surround him (I can only hope the image isn't representative) and indignantly sure of the credulity bestowed upon him by his PhD. Yet it wasn’t a stuffy professor unflinchingly faithful to the work done by him and his colleagues that gave us a lecture this morning. Instead, it was a geeky young boy who’d been beaten up because of his fondness for school and his corrective orthotics, taking revenge on his tormentors the only way he could – by getting paid to attack the religious beliefs he’d never agreed to sign up for, under the protective umbrella of academia.

If smarmy childishness is what Professor Hendel’s gotten out the “cultural memory” he’s allegedly an expert on, he’s missed the point entirely. And those of us who found that out this morning were not impressed.

Hallway to Hell II

2009-01-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

And to think I was upset yesterday. This morning produced a different flier, which I had been told about, but failed to find between classes – one that asserts that “Israel has successfully turned the world’s largest prison into the world’s largest concentration camp.”

To begin with, ignoring the conception of Palestine as a prison, the concept of a territory that constitutes a mere part of a country that itself constitutes somewhere around 0.15% of the total land mass of the Middle East as the largest of anything is laughable; but to compare the 1,300 the flier has listed dead in Palestine to the 16,000+ dead in Somalia and the 450,000+ dead in Darfur (just to name two of the more frequently cited ongoing crimes against humanity) – particularly given the role Hamas has played in provoking the IDF into action and keeping Palestinian citizens in the line of fire – is wildly opportunistic and thoroughly reprehensible.

Further, the comparison to a concentration camp is simply appalling. As I’ve written before, I maintain that Nazi imagery is off-limits for use in analogy, regardless of the subject or context; the reasons that the comparison is invalid are, I hope, sufficiently self-evident that they need not be enumerated. I’ll leave it at saying that only once in the long, tortured, and ugly history of mankind have one set of people built enclosed pens that served the express purpose of holding and exterminating another set of people. I suppose it’s that lingering strain of faith in people that would lead me to hope that even the authors of a flier like this could at least feign respect, but I guess this is what I should expect from the people who responded to Yoni Weinberg’s reference to the horrors of the Holocaust at an ASUC Senate meeting on November 19 with venomous, unrestrained laughter.

* * *

As I was walking Telegraph Ave. this afternoon wearing a green t-shirt bearing the insignia of the IDF, the bitterness of the reactions I drew out of people – in body language, guttural noises, and even less ambiguous English – was surprising, even to me. Nor did it come from the usual suspects (fat white guys in keffiyehs, Terry O’Brien, etc.): I drew the marked disdain of no fewer than 10 strangers doing nothing more than walking 3 blocks down the street with what was intended as a harmless expression on my face. One chick told me flat-out that I “should be ashamed of [my]self.”

You almost can’t even get angry at a place where it’s the dude looking for a place to get himself some food, and not the asshole laughing at the Holocaust, who ought to be ashamed of himself.

Almost.

Hallway to Hell

2009-01-27T23:54:00.000-08:00

Fliers surfaced today in Dwinelle Hall's hallways advertising “Gaza Solidarity Week,” to take place from January 27-29, as sponsored by a veritable Who’s Who list of the campus organizations – affiliated with the university and otherwise – identified with the Palestinian cause. The flier troubled me for reasons that go beyond the obvious jokes about the 3-day “week” (what is this, Canada?).

First, and most petty, the image printed on the background of the flier shows two Palestinian boys happily playing soccer on a grassy field next to a 25-foot-high concrete wall. Presumably, this is meant to instill pity in the heart of the viewer, suggesting how confined the lives of these children are because of the oppressive measures taken up by their neighbors. For me, though, the height and drabness of the wall fail to take away from the seemingly endless expanse of grassy land just to the right of the wall, and the wall doesn’t seem to bother the children in the picture in the slightest. Personally, it reminds me of hours spent on Ocean Beach in my hometown of San Francisco, kicking around a volleyball (admittedly, not its designed purpose, but it worked fine) with my dad near the beach’s concrete retaining wall. Though I guess I shouldn’t complain – it’s nice to see that, despite what Mr. Salahi, Senator Shah, and crew would have me believe, life in Palestine isn’t all occupation and blood libel at the hands of Zionist predators, after all.

What I find more distressing, though, is the flier’s description of the “We Are All Palestinian Vigil,” to take place on the second (and thus, penultimate) day of Gaza Solidarity Week – specifically, the part that compares the unfortunate deaths of Palestinian civilians during the recent military activity in Gaza to “violence experienced by communities of color here at home.” This is to be followed up by Thursday night’s “We Shall Remain Palestinian Cultural Night,” which invites discussion of any issue, “from Gaza to Oakland.” Methinks this smacks of disingenuousness.

Now, to be fair, is this really just “playing the ethnic card”? I mean, if you discount the fact that members of ethnic minorities living in Oakland have access to free speech, work within the confines of a functional economy, and are represented by a government that gives them access to electricity and running water and has no vested interest in having them gunned down by enemy forces, aren’t they just about the same as Palestinians in Gaza? The quote they picked to lend credence to the comparison comes from the late Berkeley poet June Jordan: “I was born and black woman, and now I am become a Palestinian.” Cosmetic surgery aside, though, I fail to see how such a transformation could ever take place – besides which, the line sounds uncomfortably similar to Steve Martin’s “I was born a poor black child” as Navin Johnson in The Jerk.

The flier really crosses the line when it follows up the “here at home” statement with the line “Remember Oscar Grant,” referring to the poor man killed by a BART policeman on New Year’s Day. Despite what the juxtaposition was meant to suggest, the Grant case and the civilians deaths in Gaza are by no means analogous: the former was an isolated killing by an individual policeman which, pending investigation, appears to have been done in cold blood, while the latter are unfortunate casualties which could have easily been prevented, either by Hamas ceasing firing its rockets at Israeli cities, or else by the same government allowing its citizens to clear an area targeted for attack by the Israeli military when that army issues warnings. Further, the only two groups listed among the sponsors that would seem in any position to comment on “violence experienced by communities of color” in Oakland and thus justify the comparison are the “Black Recruitment and Retention Center” and “Students for Hip Hop” – and the latter’s a stretch.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of Berkeley turning the dead into symbols and ideological ammunition, instead of treating them as erstwhile human beings, with the respect most others would probably agree they deserve. For those keeping track, that makes the score Berkeley 8, The Deceased 0.

The $48,000 Question

2009-01-25T16:10:00.000-08:00

And the recall is on.

One of the most impressive – even miraculous – aspects of American government is that it has managed to survive on a Constitution that has only been amended 27 times since 1788, particularly, I would argue, since the world has changed more in the past 220 years than in any other 220 years in world history. While it’s hardly surprising that the ASUC’s Constitution was drafted with considerably less foresight than that of our national government, it is nonetheless disappointing that since it “merely requires a recall petition to include a ‘specific statement of reasons,’ not ‘specific facts’ or ‘specific reasons’ in order to initiate a recall election,” we are potentially set to remove a man from office for no reason and at a reported price of $48,000 – or exactly what the average American earns before taxes for 1.5 years of work.

I suppose that’s what you get for having your founding legal document written by a cadre of inbred marmosets strung out on PCP, instead of an elite council of highly educated geniuses.

As mentioned in the Direct Judgment, “[the assenting three] agree with Senator Moghtader that the reasons cited in the petition against him seem overly vague. However, we are not ruling on their veracity, and they nonetheless constitute a specific statement of reasons, which is all that the ASUC Constitution requires.” The Panel may come to regret these words; I feel the floodgates might have just been thrown open. I myself now plan to initiate recall petitions against Mary June Gascon Flores for having more names than me and Oscar Mairena for being shorter than me. Hell, I presume there are hordes of kids on campus just dying to throw their parents’ money away. They’d just blow it on mortgage payments and food, anyway.

I stand wholeheartedly in support of Senator Moghtader in this Dreyfussian Affair. I know the man, respect his intelligence, and admire his forthrightness; his removal from office would not be a miscarriage of justice so much as a mockery of it. I also firmly believe that almost no instance could justify the horrific expenditure involved in recalling a Senator from a ruling body that is, in reality, so wholly inconsequential. Yet there’s a part of me that wouldn’t mind if this ended up going as its instigators had planned: this could prove once and for all that the ASUC Senate is not and has never been the proper arena for promoting improvement in Berkeley. If, in the end, that's the lesson we have to bring away from all of this, we could do a lot worse.

That said, don’t be an idiot. Make sure to vote ~~on Monday~~ whenever the election finally takes place, and to say no to this ridiculous witch hunt.

Rain Down on Me

2009-01-21T20:15:00.000-08:00

The first day of classes yielded few surprises – an endless mob showed up to watch President Obama be sworn in, and presumably because of the prevailing good mood, there were no protests against the situation in Gaza.

The second day of classes yielded few surprises – a vocal swarm staged a protest against the situation in Gaza.

This time, the demonstration took the form of milk-crate coffins draped in Palestinian flags to represent the Palestinian dead (evidently, someone forgot to inform the members of Students for Justice in Palestine that Muslims, like Jews, aren’t buried in caskets), along with the standard bevy of flags stapled to sticks and signs signaling distaste for the neighbors. On the whole, the response – essentially made up exclusively of Tikvah: Students for Israel – handled itself admirably, maintaining its presence while refraining from interfering with the demonstration’s line of visibility. Typically, this display of deferment of animosity was less than mutual, and though opposition and abuse are hardly new, it was still rather jarring, given how little time ago everyone arrived back in Berkeley.

Other than the rain, the day went by in standard fashion, featuring cameo appearances by UC cops and Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard, and various interchanges with Husam Zakharia along the lines of “Don’t hit me!” “Don’t hit me first!” Yet despite its familiarity, the ugly experience yielded a couple of important realizations. (I) That the vast majority of students at Berkeley don’t give a shit what’s going on in the Middle East. (II) That of those who do, those who demonstrate in support of the Palestinian cause don’t consider the rocket fire an act of reprehensible aggression, much less one of war. (III) That the vast majority of politically active young adults who use the term “apartheid” have no real idea what the term describes, or concern as to how despicable their abuse of that word is. (IV) That while this does not necessarily reflect on SJP or the composition of its members as a whole, a sizable number of students are members because their attitude towards Jews – be it one of fear, hatred, or whatever else – is an unhealthy one, which can most easily find a socially acceptable outlet under the group’s auspices.

Perhaps most striking was the realization triggered when among all the hubbub an a cappella group that had quietly assembled itself in front of one of the sets of coffins suddenly burst into a Stanford-themed rendition of Billy Joel’s 1983 smash hit “Uptown Girl” – a timely reminder that we’re just at UC Berkeley, where despite what the Free Speech Movement Café would have you think, no social activity that takes place is of any significance.

At 2 PM, SJP packed up their display and left, leaving behind no trace of their self-righteous indignation except outlines of their coffins left by the rain. It was oddly affecting: a perfect echo of the way that once the dead among their constituency are no longer of use to Hamas as ideological weaponry to pull sway in the international community, it becomes as though they’d never existed.

This image only hammered home the idea that despite how meaningless our clashes are in light of the bigger picture, as long as the fight continues in the Middle East, so too it must in Berkeley. Of course, we need to continue if only in the name of trying to prevent the spread of hate to more innocent passers-by; but even overlooking the sakes of bystanders, the dead that needn’t have died deserve better than this disingenuous, self-serving form of “tribute.” If doing what’s right and respecting the dead on the side I oppose politically means engaging an opponent grounded in hateful irrationality and intent on making my life miserable, so be it. Come rain or shine.

Ruminations on Coronation

2009-01-19T23:16:00.000-08:00

And so it is official: the deification of Barack Obama has been ratified.

Tomorrow, the 19th of January, marks the beginning of President Obama’s tenure in office, and the Chancellor of UC Berkeley has graciously invited all to communally ~~celebrate~~ watch with an appropriate air of gravity as the swearing-in is broadcasted on a jumbotron. Refreshments will be duly served. With this final step, the separation of Church (of Obama) and State (of California) has officially been undone.

It’s not the celebration of Jesus 2.0 taking office that bothers me, or even so much the obscene expense the event must entail: it’s the sanctimonious tone with which the event is being touted – as if the reason we’re all invited to watch Barack Obama get sworn in is because he’s going to be the next president of the United States, and not because he’s set to be the millennium’s first Democrat in the Oval Office. I was in tenth grade in 2004, and even though my brother was at Cal at the time, I can’t say I remember what the environment was like in Berkeley when George W. Bush officially began his second term; still, I don’t think I’d be going too far out on a limb in saying it probably involved far fewer flags, Pibb Xtra, and jumbo televisions, and far more hunger strikes and empty threats to defect to Canada.

And yet this goes beyond the everyday worship of the Democrat, by a wide margin: never since the arrival of LeBron James in Cleveland has one man been so universally hailed as a messianic figure in America. The assumption is that Obama is set to fix all our problems in one fell swoop, and to do so with a heretofore unseen level of forthrightness and dignity, at that. Indeed, in the eyes of many, the man has seemingly become both an American hero and the greatest President in our history without so much as having been sworn in. Of course, this is not to trivialize his feat: it simply cannot be a coincidence that he’s the first black American to have ever been elected. However, I would remind the reader that no one hailed John F. Kennedy as an American hero upon his swearing in as the first Catholic President – and if you think that in the heady days of the civil rights movement Irish Catholics were not still subject to tremendous racial discrimination, you’re deluded.

I’m struck by the adjacent celebrations of the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inauguration of President Obama. The former is the man I thank god existed – a true American hero, and a man with a clarity of vision and strength and stability of spirit that all Americans should strive for. The latter is a President-elect who, despite undoubtedly being one of the most notable black Americans in the nation’s history, is nonetheless not (certainly not yet) among the most admirable black Americans in the nation’s history. Yet in all the hubbub over the last week or so, with Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Steve Carell, Tiger Woods, and countless other celebrities of legendary-to-dubious stature celebrating the arrival of an as-yet unproven politician in office, have any of them - or anyone on TV, for that matter - stopped to pay tribute to the man chiefly responsible for ensuring that this nation would indeed “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” to see a black man elected at all?

Only time will tell what our one-term Illinois Senator with so befuddlingly little to prove does with his tenure in office. Regardless of what the world ends up thinking of him, it’s comforting to know that he’ll always be Berkeley’s adopted native son and Savior; in times as uncertain as these are purported to be, it’s one of the few things one knows he can depend on.

ARCHIVE #5: ASUC Senate Speech (11/19/08)

2009-01-08T00:19:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: This was a rant I gave at the ASUC Senate meeting on 11/19/08, in the context of the infamous concert tiff and the subsequent talk of a campaign to recall Senator John Moghtader. I've decided to post it here because I think it retains an emotional honesty that's inevitably lost in prose, at least when I'm writing. The speech referred to in the 2nd paragraph was delivered by a Dahlia Elkinawy, relating threats of violence on campus directed towards Muslim students, male and female. The text of the rant was recovered from the meeting minutes; I have attempted to be faithful to what I read and to make the text clear. Forgive any instances of syntax errors - this was done on the fly. Retrospective insertions to the text are demarkated by brackets.]

I wish I had something prepared – please forgive me if my statements sound off the cuff… They are.

I’m so glad the last speaker made that speech; I’m here to talk about racism also. I’m not intending to make any grand, sweeping statements, but just to relate personal experience. I feel it’s finally time to relate my story, what’s happened to me since I got here.

Within a week of my coming to Berkeley, about 3 years ago, I was walking around on campus with my kippah – a traditional Jewish head covering – on, and somebody called me a “kike.” And it wasn’t long before that sort of thing was repeated. I’ve been called a “kike,” a “sheeny” [only in Berkeley are the racist swine well read enough to use that one], and a Nazi – presumably, I think, by someone who got their ideological symbols mixed up… And believe it or not, I’ve been called even more offensive things that I don’t want on the record. It’s been absolutely disgusting.

Incidentally, though I appreciate people’s support, I would ask you to please refrain from snapping your fingers – I come from San Francisco and you’re giving me flashbacks of the beatniks. But I appreciate your support.

I’m not here to talk about violence. Everyone here has mentioned violence, which, obviously, makes sense, given what’s been going on… But as someone blessed by G-d with good genes, and a gigantic and strong frame, I don’t feel physically threatened walking down Telegraph at night, and I sure as hell don’t feel threatened on campus during the day. Instead, I want to talk about racism – not because it puts people in danger physically, but ideologically – the danger it poses in terms of damaging people emotionally. To me, this is no less of a problem. I think ideologically, this is a huge problem.

I don’t care about myself. [Pause for consideration of previous statement.] That might sound stupid, but it was exactly what I meant, oddly enough. I don’t feel that my standing in the way of these epithets – that it’s really been a problem. By virtue of a physical ailment I suffer, I spend an hour to 12 hours a day in physical pain that most people would describe as insufferable. I’ve also managed to survive the proverbial rape and pillage of my GPA that’s happened since I arrived in Berkeley.

[My allotted 3 minutes expired. Motion to extend my time was made by Senator Dhar, and seconded by Senators Moghtader and Owens. Thanks, guys.]

Frankly, I challenge anyone in the world to level a challenge at me that I can’t handle. But the fact remains that I know people, speaking as a non-partisan and as an Orthodox Jew, who identify very strongly not with any state, but purely religiously. I’m speaking on behalf of many Jewish friends I have – mostly, for Orthodox Jews, since they are the people in my experience most identified with their Judaism. (Many non-observant Jews also have a strong identification, but because of the rituals involved in Orthodox Jewry, those Jews are more permanently tied up in Judaism. It’s just pragmatic, as it takes up more hours of the day when one forces themselves to follow all the rituals.) Speaking on behalf of many of my Orthodox friends who’ve undergone similar treatment – I worry about that. For many years, I’ve said you can level any charge at me you want, but you attack my family, I freak out, that sort of thing… I can handle anything, but my friends I worry about.

While I’m speaking on behalf of Jews, at this point my comments go out to all racism on campus. I’d speak for all racism on campus, but I don’t feel I’m in a position to, because frankly, as a boring white dude, I don’t have anything to talk about except that I’m Jewish. That’s the only way I’ve been prejudiced against, racially. So speaking on behalf of Jews – but I’d like to think it extends to anyone who’s suffered racism under any circumstances, not just on campus, but in the city (I feel like this city has basically destroyed my soul… At this point I really despise it) – I don’t have an answer. I am, unlike many people I know, painfully willing to accept the fact that I’m a fucking college student and don’t know anything about the way the world works; and that I don’t understand anything about solutions; and that I don’t know how people think, or how they work, or why they work that way. Frankly, that’s why I put this to the Senate. Because for whatever reason, you are the student’s representatives, duly chosen to try and solve these overwhelming problems. I have as much faith in you as I could possibly have faith in any other college students, so I beg you to realize that my message, despite being so hilarious, is also incredibly serious. If I was more secure with myself, I’d probably be able to talk about things this serious without joking about it; but I guess I’m not.

[The 2nd 3 minutes expired; I finally stepped down.]

A Brief Pause

2009-01-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

Don't worry.

They say that animals can sense an impending earthquake - that they feel the tremors before they happen (in response, birds take off, dogs run for cover, and turtles don't do anything because it took them all day to get there, so they'll be damned if some uppity earthquake's going to make them move). Similarly, that woozy, thrilling feeling in the pit of your stomach is just you sensing amazing impending news.

As of today, The Mirvish Chronicles has an online store, featuring t-shirts and other assorted merchandise. It can be found at http://www.cafepress.com/mirvchronshop. All prices are list prices - don't worry, I reap no profit - and several of the items feature the phenomenal alternate logo seen below, designed specially for this momentous occasion.

Permit me to take this occasion to formally thank everyone who reads this, and to wish you the very best, from the bottom of my heart, as we move into 2009. Classes reconvene in Berkeley on January 20th; I'm moving back on the 11th. Blog posts are, unfortunately, likely to shortly follow. Thank you for your patience; we now return you to your regularly scheduled ~~whining~~ programming.

I Left My Heart in Deir el-Balah

2008-12-31T03:59:00.000-08:00

A rally took place in San Francisco yesterday – that is, December 30 – in front of the Israeli consulate to protest the armed conflict in Gaza this week; I attended a concurrent counter-rally. I debated for a (short) time whether or not to include this here, given that the blog is about Berkeley, but have decided to because (a) Berkeley is very much a part of the San Francisco Bay Area and (b) the only reason that a similar event didn’t take place in Berkeley is because the students are on break, leaving the older unwashed masses to take their VW buses (which fittingly enough, given its hypocritical drivers, are exempt from smog checks) across the bridge in the name of their great crusade.

The rally was standard enough for one of its kind in the area. The crowd was comprised partly of Arabs and Muslims with some vested interest in the situation, and largely-to-mostly of self-righteous white people with no reason to express an opinion on the matter other than their superior moral and intellectual skills of judgment. These are human beings of the most irritating variety: the ones who subscribe to the Daily Worker (there’s a delightful contradiction in ideologies), circulate cartoons about Karl Rove eating children, and rant on LiveJournal about how Warren Buffett is destroying the planet’s fragile ecosystem and how the barista keeps overfrothing their chai. (Not to racially profile, of course; statistically, there were probably also blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and/or Pacific Islanders to be found in the crowd, but these were not present in large enough numbers to noticably stand out.)

The activity at the rally was also pretty par for the course. The crowd, speaking as a remarkably unified whole, called for an end to Israeli terror while defending the Palestinian right to fire rockets into Ashkelon; demanded that Palestinians not be forced from their homes while chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free”; condemned racist bigotry while insisting that “the Jews have no right to force their presence on the land of Palestine”; and decrying Israeli PM Ehud Olmert’s reprehensible bloodthirstiness while praising the “proper” course of action thus far taken by Hamas, among other things. One particularly lurid gentleman beat a tom with a pair of hammers while chanting “Death to the Jews.” Still, the only thing that especially struck me as disgusting was the common display among the rally’s constituency of signs equating the Star of David with the swastika – on one sign, going so far as to depict the Israeli flag with the symbols swapped.

I feel the time has come to here put into print the response I’ve given to the people at Berkeley who’ve called me a Nazi since I arrived in 2006: I, a blind Jew, would in Nazi Germany have been classified, simply enough, as target practice. For this and other reasons, I do not take the use of the swastika lightly. I believe firmly in the nearly unmatched power over people of iconography, and I will here go on the record as saying that regardless of context – where it’s used, what it may have meant to any other culture at any point in time – the swastika is off limits for use, stretching back to 1933 and to eternity. I would violently condemn its use in ignorance; how much the more so, then, when the guilty party knows and laughs at its connotation?

A man approached me and my brother, Asher, at the tail end of the rally and asked why we supported the side we do. At some point in the interchange, I told him that Israel is desperate for peace, but that this was impossible as long as the opponent’s government was headed by a cadre of terrorists. He responded that the onus was on Israel to bring peace about: after all, they are the ones “growing strawberries in the desert,” while the Palestinians remain lamentably undereducated. My question for the attendees of yesterday’s rally and all who are like-minded is, “Shouldn’t men too ignorant to broker peace not be allowed access to Kassam rockets?”

Regrettably, I’ve come to terms with the fact that they’ll never give me an answer.

It Ends Not With a Bang

2008-12-22T23:48:00.001-08:00

A letter was circulated on December 19, 2008, authored by UC Berkeley Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard and addressing the “fight” that got me started on this blog in the first place. It related the news that as of December 12, the Alameda County District Attorney has decided that there will be no charges filed. JP further informs us that “the D.A. has indicated that statements provided by witnesses to the altercation were both inconsistent and ambiguous” – that to the D.A., it remains “unclear who among the participants initiated the physical confrontation.”

The eyewitnesses to the “fight,” who saw Husam Zakharia end a heated verbal exchange with Gabe Weiner by punching him in the right cheek, have been successfully drowned out by a group of dissenters who apparently feel no compunction about lying under oath. For once, the blame doesn’t lie with the school, or even with its much maligned police force, but rather, with its dishonest student body. The most infuriating part of the entire enterprise is the way these students – the ones who by their actions render the law-keeping force incapable of activity – then turn around and berate the admittedly inept police to the equally incompetent ASUC Senate, telling them that nothing is being done to ensure the security of “ethnic” students on campus. I’m not sure if it's the taxpayer, the (unfortunately) white man, or the rational thinker in me that takes offense at all this, but I’m willing to wager that all three have a legitimate right to be pissed.

I suppose the lesson that needs to be learned here is that in our modern society – in which the worst form of defense is your fists, and the best your lawyer – when it comes down to “he said, she said” (figuratively, of course; if it ever actually came down to “he said, she said” in court, “he” would be fucked), having the truth on your side doesn’t win you any points. If anything, it loses you the wiggle room that comes with the opportunity presented by a lie to stretch your imagination to its fullest. I guess from now on, anyone planning on stirring controversy in Berkeley should hire a cameraman to follow them around, to provide incontrovertible video evidence for the inevitable trial date.

Until then, I’ll just have to come to terms with the fact that dishonesty pays huge dividends, especially in Berkeley, and especially when there are “ethnic” concerns involved. Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to be angry about it. I swear, it really always comes down to the argument I would make back in first grade: Justice would be so much better at her job if she would just take that goddamn blindfold off.

Black Friday

2008-12-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

The only thing more Berkeley than having an inflammatory opinion is gathering together a cadre of similarly-minded people and staging an unimpressive display to annoy passers-by. Cue the Women in Black, a group of incensed nonagenarians standing together to protest the bloodthirsty, imperialist Israeli occupation of the land of Palestine. To paraphrase their flier, for nearly 20 years they’ve been blocking foot traffic, mouthing off, and toting decorative umbrellas each Friday in front of Sproul Plaza.

These women have nothing to do with the Middle East: they are your standard white Berkeley residents, who, despite no familial or friendly ties to the region and no education or training on the history of the conflict, feel it is their duty as outraged mothers of children who don’t call to tell foot pedestrians about the “Apartheid Wall.” They demand “[a] shared Jerusalem for everyone” – which is to say, one under Hamas control. They demand that “Palestinian workers… be allowed to work to survive” – which is to say, they blame the Israeli government, and not the incompetent Palestinian one, for the backwards-assed Palestinian economy. They demand “[a]n end to the highly militarized… checkpoints” – which is to say a cease-and-desist order to the Israeli army against racial profiling based on backpacks filled with plastic explosives. The list goes on; these women recommend you join the fight by calling California Senators Feinstein and Boxer to complain about something that infuriates both them and incompetent one-time Head of State Jimmy Carter (and as such, must infuriate you) halfway around the globe.

Distressing though it admittedly must be to watch the flower of your youth wilting literally right in front of your eyes, I, in my youthful naïveté, believe there must be a more constructive way to vent the resulting bitterness towards the world. For instance, macramé. Practice of the knotted arts is just as time-consuming as making 15,000 photocopies, one by one, of a poem written in 1986 by Mahmoud Darwish, but far less irritating to the people who have some actual, compelling reason to care about what goes on in the Middle East.

That said, though, one has to admire the unity displayed by these 5 women, insistent on proclaiming their ill-informed point of view to a disinterested world, armed with nothing more than their dwindling Social Security checks, AARP discounts, and doctors’ assurance that even decked out completely in black, people are rarely known to get sunstroke twice in a month. Or not.

They assert that “[w]hen the Oslo Accords began, many women felt that peace was close and that protest was no longer necessary.” Overlooking the fact that ever since, these women have self-righteously continued to protest, they also willfully ignore the reason the Oslo Accords didn’t get us anywhere: the bitter, unquenchable hatred of Yasser Arafat.

It’s appropriate that these women have chosen to associate their cause with darkness, since it’s abundantly clear they’ll never see the light.

Conflict Studies

2008-12-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

This response took a long time. This is unlike me – usually I find myself hammering away at the keyboard in very short order after whatever sets me off has done so, yet this time, it’s been allowed to ferment in my head. This is in large part due to circumstance. Between a giant history paper and everything else going on in my head, there hasn’t been much room for Berkeley claptrap. Still, this issue has hammered away at my thoughts, standing tall (relative to its hunchbacked associates) among the worst that this claptrap has had to offer over the last few weeks – which incidentally have been a veritable Renaissance of what Borat Sagdiyev would refer to as “anti-Jew warrior” activity.

An unfortunate article appeared last Friday in the Daily Cal entitled “Historical Meaning of The Palestinian Flag,” offered by Matthew Taylor, an ostensibly 35th-year student in Peace and Conflict Studies, and another in Berkeley’s proud tradition of people who publicize their Jewish heritage to lend credulity to their assaults on things that many other Jews hold dear. The article can be found here.

The problems begin with the very concept of Peace and Conflict Studies. In the realm of what my elitist sensibilities deem “bullshit majors,” this takes the crown of being the “most Berkeley” of them all; truly, one would be hard-pressed to come up with any subject Berkeley considers itself to be more qualified to teach than just why it is that violence exists in the world today. Typically, what I hear from P&CS majors betrays a complete ignorance (willful denial?) of how things really work in the world. As usual, this entails sympathy for terrorists and befuddling support for countries and governments that stand for the exact opposite of the liberal ideals these men and women smugly advertise as the basis for their entire identities. As usual I grant that I could be entirely wrong: it is possible that I have misjudged these people, or indeed, even that the world really can be the puppy-sunshine-gumdrop cocktail they envision. However, my deep-seated cynicism leads me to suspect that all of my observations and resulting prejudices against people who feel sufficiently satisfied with themselves that they major in Peace and Conflict Studies are on the money. I hope I’m wrong; I suspect not.

I don’t have the strength to go about a complete point-by-point rundown of what about the article I find repugnant, yet there are a few points that merit individual mention. Mr. Taylor’s condemnation of Tikvah’s use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Israel will soon be free” – which is reported without mention of the Students for Justice in Palestine’s use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free,” which I read as equivalent – is terribly biased. The equation of life in the Middle East to South African apartheid and the heart-wrenching tale of how watermelons saved free speech are but two of the many things found inside I wish I never had to read again. Sickening though I find these (particularly the former, which given the wretchedness of what happened in South Africa I find unforgivable), though, what strikes me as most troubling is Mr. Taylor’s equation of life in the Middle East to life on the Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley is perhaps most culpable to blame for perpetuating the laughable assumption that people going to university in America can actually understand what life is like elsewhere. Men and women like Mr. Taylor, who steady Peace and Conflict and take a few tours through the “occupied territories,” think they’re well-placed to judge what they’ve seen – and more troublingly, what they haven’t. The smugness with which Mr. Taylor reports that the petition to recall Senator John Moghtader from the ASUC Senate was begun by “[f]ive conscientious Boalt Hall law students” shows just how much he and his comrades-in-arms see themselves as Messianic purveyors of truth; they’re even resentful that the Revolution Will Not Be Televised, because it means less face time to promote the understanding that they themselves are out to save the world.

A statement of what I consider to be an undeniable truth: Husam Zakharia punching Gabe Weiner in the face – to say nothing of John Moghtader being nearby when it happened – does not hold a candle to the launch of Kassam (Qassam, if you prefer more modern Arabic transliteration) rockets into heavily populated areas. Even as “Tikvah's vision [becomes] more real every day,” no one has been hurt – much less killed – over the pro-Israel/pro-Palestine feud on campus. The “fight” (which again, I feel compelled to mention, happened near a month ago, not that that apparently matters) did not constitute a “microcosm of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians,” even if you want to lend credence to the latter half of that absurd statement.

Berkeley would be better off if its loudmouths stopped seeing the situation here as representative of what goes on where people are physically dying; it will be better off when Mr. Taylor finally graduates and takes his hateful, prejudicial diatribing with him.

Mumbai Vigil

2008-12-04T17:20:00.000-08:00

In loving memory of the 164 civilians killed, 11/26-9/2008.

Inflammatory Flyers (And a Goodbye)

2008-12-02T16:48:00.000-08:00

A day and a half ago, I posted in a note on Facebook announcing the launch of this blog that I hoped nothing in Berkeley would ever happen again that prompted me to write here. Though I knew this was a hopeless hope, even I didn’t anticipate returning so soon. To jack a line from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (and, by extension, The Verve), “so it goes.”

This morning on Sproul Plaza, I was unsurprised to find flyers being distributed advertising a teach-in scheduled for this evening (co-sponsored by the Berkeley Stop The War Coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Muslim Students Administration), offering a clinic on “racism, Islamophobia, and US imperialism,” in reaction to the evidently not-so-distant memory of the scuffle on the balcony overlooking the Pep Love concert on Nov. 13. Admittedly, I am ill-informed on many of the modern world’s most pertinent issues. I am willing to concede, too, that the larger causes and consequences of the “fight” (I use quotation marks because I maintain that paraplegic lepers could have staged a more harmful fistfight) may elude me. That said, I nonetheless fail to see how US foreign policy is responsible for “blows” exchanged between two college-aged men. Further, for the record, I would like to state that I do not in any regard fear Muslims – not the 1,000,000,000+ who have no interest in doing me any wrong, and least of all the relative handful who would like to see me dead. I would like to believe that all my friends share these sentiments.

More inflammatory statements than these were issued on the back of the flier, authored by the Campus Antiwar Network and reproduced below:

At around 6pm last Thursday (11/13) [sic], three Palestinian students (1 male, 2 female) were beaten up on the UC Berkeley campus by members of a right-wing Zionist group, the Zionist Freedom Alliance. A second incident occurred the following night in which another Palestinian student was attacked by unknown assailants on campus.

My first complaint is an admittedly petty one, though I believe it legitimate: is it wrong of me to think that, in the interest of public safety, anyone distributing literature publicly should be able to tell the difference in the time lapse between one week and three?

Dispensing with the levity and skipping an umpteenth recap of the correct chronology of the scuffle (succinctly documented in Archive post #2), the author’s condemnation of “this despicable act of racist violence” is an exemplar of the Berkeley hogwash that birthed this bounteous font of vitriol in the first place.

To begin with, the inference cannot help but be drawn from this piece that it is because the “fight” (as represented by the members of BSTW, SJP, MSA, and CAN) was directed against Palestinians – especially given that two of them were female – that action need be taken! I am shamelessly adamant in my position that violence against a white man is no less blameworthy than violence against a “noticeably ethnic” woman! Further, the imagery conjured in the first sentence lies uncomfortably closer to describing hired goons waiting in an alley with baseball bats to mutilate their targets than it does to the tiff I witnessed. Finally, the direct juxtaposition of the phrase “Zionist Freedom Alliance” and the report of the “second incident” clearly insinuates that organization’s participation in the “attack.” I am in no position to judge whether or not any of the three of these points were intentional, but regardless, the author should have been aware that it was his/her responsibility as a distributor of public literature to be more careful.

An addendum: I believe the time has come to publically make the distinction between blind hatred of members of ethnic minorities and unshakable hatred of assholes. To state this as clearly as I am able: the former is called racism, and is both dimwitted and illogical in addition to being morally reprehensible, while the latter, to me, qualifies as both rational and laudable behavior. In a truly progressive and tolerant society, people would acknowledge both the existence of races within humanity and the complete irrelevance of a person’s race to their character. This is to say, that an asshole’s skin tone has no bearing on his being an asshole; neither can it make him any more or less of one.

In light of the events that took place on the evening of Nov. 13, I resent Husam Zakharia for giving in to his intense hatred of Gabe Weiner and for popping Gabe in the face. I begrudgingly applaud his ability not only to get away with it, but even to turn it into a hate crime going the other way.

* * *

On a personal note, I was dumbstruck today to hear of the death of Dan Kliman, which occurred under stupefyingly freakish circumstances. He was a giant in Bay Area Zionism and an even better man. He was also 38 years old. Any death that takes place full decades before its time, as this one did, is tragic; in this case, I feel the world was particularly wronged. Dan was a kind, intelligent, and funny man, and one who took upon himself the unenviable chore of proving that advocacy of traditional liberal causes – most notably gay rights – and of Israel are not mutually exclusive. I feel particularly sorry that he was taken from us only as I was getting to know him better personally. I am consoled by the knowledge that his memory will continue to inspire myself and everyone else who knew him to stand up for what’s right – under any circumstances and in gleeful defiance of what anyone else may consider "odds."

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing.

ARCHIVE #4: “We Support ASUC Senator John Moghtader” Description (11/18/08)

2008-12-01T01:59:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: This post is the first in a series of four retrospective posts to this blog, all of which are relevant to its theme and were instrumental in prompting the author to see to its inception. This post originally took the form of the description of the Facebook group referred to in the title. The Daily Cal article referred to in the body can be found as it was printed here.]

In light of the confrontation that took place at the Israel Liberation Week Concert on Thursday, Nov. 13 between a group of those running the concert on one side and protesting members of Students for Justice in Palestine on the other, the Daily Cal reported on Tuesday, November 18 that Yaman Salahi, a UC Berkeley senior and SJP higher-up, was in the process, in conjunction with unnamed "current ASUC senators," of collecting a petition with 1000 Berkeley students' signatures to "begin the recall process of... senator" John Moghtader. This group is dedicated to the proposition that John Moghtader should – indeed, must – not be recalled because such an action would be a perversion of justice and an abominable waste of funds.

Under the current political climate on campus, the vast majority of any support for the aforementioned petition would come from students who associated Moghtader with the physical altercation – one which thanks to shoddy reporting is tied to his name, but also one in which neither John Moghtader nor any current Berkeley student associated with Tikvah: Students for Israel or the Zionist Freedom Alliance (the group that ran Israel Liberation Week) engaged. Moghtader's lack of involvement has been corroborated by eyewitnesses and is verified by his lack of citation by the UCPD.

Salahi also cited as a reason for the recall campaign the disruption by Moghtader and other members of Tikvah of an Oct. 15 lecture hosted by SJP. However, this is a highly hypocritical allegation: SJP has traditionally made its name disrupting pro-Zionist events on Berkeley's campus, and in personally conducted interviews, security personnel at an Oct. 16 lecture hosted by Tikvah revealed to this author sighting several presumed UC Berkeley students, some of whom were sporting what they deemed "anti-Zionist"-themed clothing accessories (pins, etc.), leaving disgruntled after sighting the metal detectors. Whether or not these people were indeed intended disruptors, and in that event whether or not these were tied in any way to SJP, can, of course, simply not be verified; however, in keeping with the ASUC Senate tradition of reporting "I" Statements, the collective, non-representative suspicion of the interviewees was that these were indeed thwarted disruptors associated either with SJP or else with some other local anti-Zionist organization. Regardless, the point stands that disruptions take place regularly on both sides, and that Moghtader has gone no further on this count to alienate members of "all student groups" than has any Senator that is also a recognized member of SJP (a notable example being Kifah Shah).

But perhaps there is no readily publicly-expressible reason for Salahi's pursuit of the Senator. Bay Area Zionism activist Dan Kliman described the proceedings as a "witch hunt," and he is hardly alone in possessing this opinion in the Zionist community – not only within the confines of Berkeley or the Bay Area, but even on a much wider scale, where the whole unfolding drama has come to be symbolic of the unfortunate situation of Zionist collegiate youth nationwide. For his part, Moghtader was quoted in the Daily Cal: "Salahi and his associates never wanted me elected in the first place, and they're looking for any opportunity to remove me from the Senate."

To interject another "I" Statement, this author understands that both witch hunts and money wasting are time-honored Berkeley traditions. At the same time, though, he is firmly opposed to the relocation of "tuition" funds to pay for the ASUC Senate to begin with, and was appalled by the absurd waste of time that was Monday, Nov. 17th's Community Forum. In this author's opinion, the last thing the collective student body needs is the recall of any current Senator from our self-righteous student government, much less the recall of one of the few who serves without pretention on charges that are either merely puerile attempts at retribution or else simply completely fraudulent.

Join this group if you express agreement with the arguments formulated above and oppose the planned attempt to recall ASUC Senator John Moghtader.

ARCHIVE #3: ASUC Community Forum (11/17/08)

2008-12-01T01:44:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: This post is the third in a series of four retrospective posts to this blog, all of which are relevant to its theme and were instrumental in prompting the author to see to its inception. This post originally took the form of a Facebook note.]

Tonight, those who attended the ASUC Community Forum learned precisely why the system fails: because the University, and by extension its student government, is hogtied by reels upon reels of administrative red (duct) tape and spools upon spools of the proverbial barbed wire that is political correctness.

At the beginning of the meeting, members of the discussion were instructed to "assume positive intent," "step up and step back," and "respect symbols," while making "'I' Statements" and acknowledging a rule they set down as "one mic, one diva." Agreement with statements was to be expressed in the form of snapped fingers. (Unfortunately, I’m referring to the hand gesture, not to the breaking of finger bones.) The whole thing, then, felt like an amalgam of Pre-K-style circle time, sex offender parole meetings, and UNICEF commercials in the trite, saccharine rules; the familiar "stop undressing me with your eyes"-style discomfort; and the highlighted ethnocentricity, respectively.

Were the rules followed, nothing would have been fixed. Notoriously inadequate ASUC Senate president Roxanne Winston would have helplessly flailed about in an attempt to keep things civil despite the overwhelming animosity, and the management would have sat idly by as Tikvah: Students for Israel was made out to look like the National Association of Traffic-Obstructing Puppy-Abusers, only to feverishly deny opportunity for rebuttal on the chance things would spin wildly out of control. As it was, the rules, for the most part, were treated like any other polite suggestions (i.e. disregarded), and things went roughly like that, anyway.

As I stepped out of the hot air circulating in that stuffy Senate room into the crisp, cool night to the sound of a 3-person brass band playing an endearingly (?) off-key attempt at "Tearin' Up My Heart" (itself a classic of modern music), I realized again that the problem with the situation is that the key players here are college students, and that these, like most any others, are angsty and self-absorbed, with the added Berkeley feature of being terribly satisfied with themselves. These are overseen by Jonathan Poullard and spend their time carousing with the fucking psychos that refuse to stop hanging around this campus just because it isn’t 1969 anymore (NOTE: Worker’s Vanguard sighting at 6:18 PM). Speaking with my prejudices admittedly intact, I still assert that this seems to have rubbed off on the "I wear a keffiyeh as a political statement" crowd more than on anyone else attending tonight's meeting.

I could, of course, point to specific instances of where things went wrong in the meeting; that much should be painfully evident by now, as some people tell me I’m insightful, and regardless, I run my mouth off when- and wherever I feel it potentially salubrious. There were a number of examples of violations of these rules, with at least two that I counted (three, if you count El Presidente's cell phone going off) occurring at the hands of the very people who’d proposed the rule violated. In the end, though, specifics don’t matter; as anticipated, tonight only confirmed that all the assumptions everyone had already laid down were true. This is to say, the University’s administration really is comparable to the mumbling octogenarian in the scooter plastered in "FREE MUMIA" bumper stickers; the student Senate really is akin to the potentially cancerous mole growing ever closer to independent sentience on the back of his neck; and the students on both sides of the Israel/Palestine debate are firmly set in their opinions, with supporters of the former side in Berkeley about as welcome as those Palestinians are in Jordan, Syria, or Afghanistan (i.e., unfortunately, not).

I suppose, then, that the major news flash of the evening would be, "UC BERKELEY BUREAUCRACY FAILS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS," announced to a collective lack of gasps and a typically uninspired headlining article in tomorrow morning's Daily Cal.

ARCHIVE #2: "Fight Erupts at Israel..." Feedback (11/14/08)

2008-12-01T01:31:00.000-08:00

[NOTE: This post is the second in a series of four retrospective posts to this blog, all of which are relevant to its theme and were instrumental in prompting the author to see to its inception. This post originally took the form of an email, written in response to an article in the Daily Californian that can be viewed as it was printed (though with a preceding apologetic retraction) here.]

To whom it may concern:

I attended the concert covered in the article mentioned in the subject line, and as a casual observer - one who, let me make it as clear as possible from the outset, is an enrolled member of neither Tikvah: Students for Israel nor Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) - I have a few corrections to the piece:

-I had seen the feverish flyering on Sproul Plaza over the course of this week, and so I was interested to see if and how the hip-hop and politics would overlap; as such I was listening intently, and I can say with full certainty that the rapping I heard (unless Husam Zakharia is referring to anti-Palestinian propaganda issued in Spanish by Jermz that I wouldn't have understood) contained no material that an impartial observer could call "anti-Palestinian."

-As a Jew, I find the phrase "[a]ll three men are Jewish" irrelevant and EXTREMELY offensive; as an African-American friend of mine says, "If you'd said, 'all three men are black,' you'd have a monstrous lawsuit on your hands."

-I talked to Senator Moghtader when I noticed him in the crowd during Pep Love's set, and he was never handcuffed or cited for battery.

-I recognize both Husam Zakharia and Gabe Weiner, and was watching as the latter stepped onto the balcony, anticipating some form of altercation; while I cannot vouch for words exchanged up on the balcony, the first blow was issued by Zakharia, who punched Weiner in his right cheek. Unless this is his first experience with physical altercation, he should have not have been "surprised by the violent reaction."

-I have had a conversation with Senator Shah at the SJP table on Sproul Plaza; to my mind, neglecting to mention her affiliation lends credence to the article's closing statement, one which otherwise would seem necessarily biased (though perhaps this was intentional?). Furthermore, though it may just be my inner fifth grader speaking, I still believe that the first person to throw a punch doesn't deserve to be exonerated on the grounds of retaliatory strikes.

- - -

Over the past week I have seen far more exchanges between the two aforementioned student groups than* I ever would have wanted in the past; tonight, I saw a cloud cast over a previously benign event, unprovoked. I'm sure I speak on behalf of many of the undecided in the crowd when I say that the arguments put forth by guest speaker Yehudah Hakohen (sp.?) were disconcerting in their insistence that there exists a palpable, unwavering bias against Israel across the nation's college campuses and newspapers, but tonight he has you to thank for confirming his claims on both counts. Even as a lifelong San Francisco Chronicle reader, I can safely say I've never been this disappointed in a "legitimate" newspaper. I won't venture a guess on whether or not the combined efforts of your field reporters and SJP will cause a spike in Tikvah enrollment, but I can say for certain you've convinced me and a number of my friends they need all the help they can get.

-Judah Mirvish
3rd Yr., UC Berkeley

[*EDITOR'S NOTE: Typo corrected.]

ARCHIVE #1: Election Day Dry Heave (11/4/08)

2008-12-01T01:18:00.000-08:00

The treatment I have and many like me have endured over the past 3 weeks or so has been shameful, even by Berkeley standards. Confronted with, “Embrace the Revolution! Have an Obama/Biden campaign sticker!” I calmly replied, “I support John McCain in this election” and was promptly spat at. On a separate occasion, when I identified myself as conservative – not a Republican, mind you, but conservative – the girl I was talking to called me a Nazi. (I wish I could say that was the first time I’d faced that charge in Berkeley.) When I told an older Obamanaut that I supported equal rights for gay people (all people) but “[didn’t] really care” about whether or not the civil union was termed a “marriage” or not, she called me a cancer on society.

Cancer kills people. I’m society’s cancer. Ergo, I, Judah Joshua Mirvish, am killing society.

Even I, by far my harshest and least forgiving critic, feel I deserve way better than this. In all of these and upwards of 10 other incidents I can recall over the last 3 weeks, I was – even speaking as objectively as I can – quiet, calm, polite, and even unassertive; and yet, I am a contemptible murderer; I am a terminal illness; I am a spittoon. Among other things. That I cannot identify myself as right-leaning even to the degree that I am without being spat on (literally, for fuck’s sake!) is an unqualified disgrace. The very tolerance and open-mindedness preached by Berkeley’s political left is entirely absent in that political left, and the hypocrisy has disgusted me to the point that if I had a car, I’d leave the Bay Area for a few days. But it goes beyond saying one thing and doing another: basic human decency should transcend party lines, and I can tell you assuredly that even in heated debates with hard-line Republicans about why I believe in the existence of a welfare system, that line has never nearly been crossed, much less defecated on as we zoomed by it as it has of late, when it has happened without even perfunctory discussion.

What really breaks my heart and makes me wish I lived elsewhere is that in my (unequivocally vast) experience, the Berkeley liberal that does not fit this mold is the exception, not the rule. Even the average Berkeley liberal that doesn’t go so far as to attempt to publicly shame me or deny my humanity automatically looks down on me once they discover any hint of my affiliation. Yet I will always actually believe in open-mindedness, and so I extend to members of the Democratic Religion the benefit of the doubt they’ve so heartlessly robbed of me: I listen to, respect, and even whole-heartedly love many Dems. So to any liberals who’ve defied the stereotype and actually read to this point, parting pleas in the wake of Senator Obama’s election:

Don’t go partying in the streets, rioting, or even hooting and hollering. It’s tasteless; we still have brave men and women dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Don’t join the “Obama as Messiah” cult. I am willing to give a man I do not believe in the chance so many “If that geriatric piece of shit gets elected I’m moving to Canada” Democrats wouldn’t have given John McCain, and more; but the man is an ordinary one, a politician, and to my mind, an unremarkable, Party-oriented one like so many others, on both sides. He may rise above this in his tenure – it’s all I can pray for – but even if he does, he will still be a man like any other, and he, like the so many who’ve preceded him and the rare one of those to have been a true American hero, will inevitably fail to fix all of America’s problems. The economy will improve, in part thanks to his programs and in part because it’s going to anyway, as it has time and time again throughout our history (see the Panic of 1837, the Great Depression, the Energy Crisis of 1979, and the one we suffered earlier this decade); despite the genuinely wonderful, long overdue election of a black President, racism will continue to exist; the list goes on. Look to the future with reasonable expectations, because it’s more than likely there will still be endless things to complain about in 2012, and with hope, because things may drastically improve. And if Barack Obama goes on to be the best president the United States has ever had, you’ll find none more thankful than me.

Extend human kindness to those different from you. Don’t rub this victory in the faces of people who voted for John McCain, like your compatriots did when the party took the House in 2006 or like they’ll be doing for the next few days to weeks. Practice (or, with any luck, continue to practice) the open-mindedness the liberal aesthetic preaches. Equally – perhaps more – important, when you see something shitty going down – like a gentle, harmless man driven quite honestly to the brink of the brutal violence he’s physically, if not temperamentally, capable of – don’t just promise to yourself to never do something like that (which you fucking better be doing anyway), but interfere! Stand up for your fellow man under any and all undue oppression, even if it means ignoring an opinion you don’t agree with.

I have no right to preach. I make no pretension of being a paragon of morality, and I frankly don’t consider myself good enough a person that I can go telling people I don’t know how to behave. I also, unlike many of the people I’ve ranted against in the preceding diatribe, fully appreciate the amazing country I live in, and am not only willing but thankful to put up with the occasional inconveniences that our various freedoms engender. But I have had enough, and, thankful those of you who care enough about me to have read this far, ask you to remember this PMS-y rant. And to be damn proud that America has elected a black president.