Talkin’ ‘Bout Men Getting Up Close and Personal

Last night, I participated in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s daily show Life Matters, hosted by the ever-dynamic Natasha Mitchell on Radio National. The topic for the day was ‘Male Intimacy’.

Being on live radio is a pretty strange experience; I’ve only done it once before, on John Sutton‘s excellent, but now defunct, Ghost in the Machine on Eastside Radio in Sydney. (I see a pattern here: the only time I get to be on radio is on Australian stations. Clearly, I’m only a prophet in distant lands.) I don’t think I was the smoothest speaker ever as I repeatedly found refuge in verbal tics like ‘sort of’ and ‘actually’ again and again. Embarrassing stuff. (You can check out the audio link to see what I’m getting at; I go on at about the 20 minute mark but the whole show is worth a listen.)

Anyway, on to male intimacy. Natasha had me on to talk about cross-cultural differences, and so I talked a bit about how growing up in India meant being socialized into a domain of relationships with men where physical contact was relatively unproblematic: I often put my arms around my friend’s shoulders, inter-personal space was not negotiated rigorously, and physical contact was common. And as I noted on the show, I was warned–by those already resident in the US–to not expect such contact when I crossed the waters, and more to the point, to desist from such overt displays of friendship with any male friends that I might make in the US. Much of the content of those warnings was spot on; I found a male culture that set much store by the careful maintenance of a physical space between its members.

Of course, intimacy isn’t just about physical contact; it can be engendered by conversation, by shared activities. Here, interestingly enough, it has been clear to me for a while now that even in cultures where men are comfortable showing physical affection, they might not be so comfortable talking about matters close to the heart: sexual insecurity, feelings of masculine inadequacy (perhaps in the professional domain, perhaps in the physical or romantic) and so on.  And in this dimension, I found that Indian men were less inclined to open up about their insecurities: the social expectation of a certain kind of masculine stoicism seems to cut across cultural and national boundaries.

Men have evolved other rituals for bonding though: sports for instance, whether it is an outing to the stadium or the actual playing of a sport, or working out together at a gym (A pair of men bench-pressing together can generate an interestingly intimate, shared space!). I mentioned these on the show though I did not get a chance to talk about how these rituals can often be built on a foundation of misogyny and homophobia: the aggressive description of ‘weaker’ men as ‘pussies’ or ‘pansies’, for instance. This again, in my experience, cuts across boundaries: Indian men are just as likely to be misogynistic or homophobic as their American or Australian counterparts.

As someone who sets much store by his relationships with other men, I find this topic particularly fascinating and hope to think a bit more about it – aloud, in this space, somewhere down the line. In the meantime, comments welcome.

Stenographers, Megaphones, or Journalists?

Yesterday I posted the following on my Facebook status:

The New York Times gives us ‘news’ on the CTU strike and includes this:

‘Mayor Rahm Emanuel has focused on trying to improve the quality of public education, with a longer school day and more meaningful teacher evaluations. The Chicago Teachers’ Union, meanwhile, has been intent on reinstating a 4 percent pay increase, and protecting those who are laid off when failing schools are closed.’

Yup, this is ‘news’ reporting all right. Just the news.

From: (‘Next School Crisis for Chicago: Pension Fund is Running Dry‘, NYT, September 16, 2012)

I hope it is clear what the problem is with the ‘reporting’ above.

And over the weekend, the New York Times ran a piece on the too-cool-for-school endeavors of Mr. Peter Thiel. Today, the good folks at Techdirt have a response, which captures most of my central reactions to it.  ( I have a visceral reaction to showboats like Thiel that I will set aside for now.) To wit, it reads like:

[A] retweet of corporate PR.

In short, the New York Times article–by Caitlin Kelly–flirts with reading like a poorly edited press release. And the piece I linked to above–by Mary Williams Walsh–provides evidence too, of having been copied from Rahm Emanuel‘s manifestos.

We are, folks, seemingly confronted with creatures all too common in today’s journalistic world: the faithful stenographer and the eager megaphone.

A little story before I go any further. Some sixteen or so years ago, a good friend’s cousin came visiting to New York City. I met him a few times at parties and dinners and struck up some light conversation about his work at a pharmaceutical company’s press and public relations department. His job was to write up press releases based on material provided to him by company scientists, and then send them on to media outlets like magazines and newspapers.  This being 1996, he did most of his work the old-fashioned way, faxing one-pagers to a list of numbers every day. Crib a little, write a little, fax a lot. He was good at his work, very prolific in the releases he put out, and he was paid well. All seemed hunky-dory.

But all was not well. For as my new acquaintance confessed to me, he was alarmed at the rate at which his press releases appeared in print. Note, I did not say ‘material from his press releases’; rather, quite simply, all too many ‘journalists’ at the receiving end of his fax blasts were simply taking the press release, removing his name, making some minor cosmetic alterations and then simply the running the release as their article. Job done. On to the next ‘story’.

The New York Times has been honest enough to admit that in the past it was part of the cheerleading crew that failed to flag the Bush administration’s ghastly, criminal, war on Iraq. But the lack of critical appraisal shown then seemingly still afflicts the Grey Lady. And they aren’t alone in this abdication of journalistic responsibility either: as responses to the US administration’s ‘lede’ on the Benghazi attacks show, all too many journalists today are simply uncritical purveyors of whatever nonsense is sent their way from corporate and political sources. The next time you read a debate about the indispensability of the journalist in the context of today’s blog-happy world, keep that in mind. (These ramblings  remind me I need to get back to reviewing David Coady‘s excellent What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology To Contemporary Issues (Blackwell, 2012), which provides a spirited and philosophically rigorous defense of the independent blogger.)

Breaking Bad Season 5 Speculation: Reconciliations for Redemption

Having finished watching Season 4 of Breaking Bad, and having no access to Season 5 till it emerges on DVD or streaming, I’m going to go ahead and speculate a bit about the show’s eventual direction and conclusion.  Many of the issues raised and provoked by the first four seasons seem to require resolution if the show is to wrapped up, as indicated, by the end of the fifth season, and though I’m not one of the writers, I’m going to throw my tuppence in.

Clearly, the tidiest and most obvious way to bring the show to an end is Walter White‘s death i.e., the cancer picks up pace and moves on to its grim finale. And as it does so, and as Walter senses the white light approaching, he steps up the pace of his cooking and manipulating, going out in a blaze of meth-infused bloody glory, leaving the usual trail of death and deception in his wake. (He will, of course, leave behind a widow and two fatherless children.) This should be extremely entertaining even if wrenching to watch. Or, perhaps the writers will give Walter a glorious back-to-the-wall-defending-his-family-shootout kind of death, saving  them from the depredations of a ruthless set of ganglords, thus redeeming himself in spectacular fashion even as he loses his life.

Be that as it may, the more important tasks for the show’s writers seem to be the resolutions of the conflicts in Walter’s personal relationships: Hank-Walter, Walter-Junior, Walter-Skyler, and Walter-Jesse. Both Hank and Junior have suffered from Walter’s deceptions, whereas Skyler and Jesse have suffered from their knowledge of, and involvement in, Walter’s activities.

For my money, the most crucial reconciliations are those between Hank and Walter and between Walter and Jesse. (Walter and Skyler have had a running conversation and plenty of time to air their angst about each other; this does not, of course, preclude their final takes on each other as Walter’s life comes to an end.) If I may hazard an educated guess, Hank will finally catch up with Walter, his Heisenbergean nemesis, a man who has nearly caused his death, and caused him plenty of misery.  (It is Hank’s fault that he is such an enthusiastic, unthinking participant in the war on drugs, but still.) But when Hank catches up with Walter, it will be too late; Walter will be dying, and Hank will let him go, cognizant of the price to be paid by the family if Walter’s cover is blown. Most centrally, Hank will keep Walter’s identity secret so that Junior does not come to know his father was a demented meth cook.

As for Jesse, Walter will apologize for having induced such a catastrophic trajectory to Jesse’s life, but I do not know if he will ever spill the beans about his role in Jesse’s girlfriend’s death. (Seeing Jesse’s reaction to that would be something, but I suspect that that knowledge would be too painful to burden Jesse with.) It may be that the ultimate happy ending would be Jesse inheriting part of Walter’s fortunes, becoming, as it were, another son of his, one more heir. (I am going to skip lightly past the issue of the morality of getting rich on the back of a trade as violent as meth cooking and dealing.) Then, we would come to view Walter as having rescued Jesse from a possibly worse fate: that of the petty drug-dealer who was sooner or later going to either end up in jail, or be shot by a rival.

These redemptions add up to a happy ending of sorts: there will be a funeral and tears will be shed, but Walter will have provided for his (extended) family, eased the uncertain torments of Hank, and maintained his image in the eyes of his befuddled son.

This is mere guesswork, of course, and half of Season 5 is done and dusted, so those watching the show might be inclined to chuckle at my babbling above. No matter; all will be clear once I lay my hands on the full season.

Note: Please, do not leave any Season 5 spoilers in the comments.

Mitt Romney, Tired Old Tropes and the Myth of Self-Reliance

Mitt Romney‘s comments at a May fundraiser describing 47% of the American population as, roughly, a bunch of no-goodnik moochers are merely the latest expression of one aspect of a peculiar view that many reasonably intelligent folks are fond of espousing. It is a view that insists on imposing a facile dichotomy on this world and its people: the world is made up of makers and takers, of those who produce and those who consume, of those who are self-reliant, independent, rugged types, and those who are quivering, jelly-kneed, dependent leeches. The logical conclusion–even if entirely fallacious–of this line of reasoning is the most ludicrous fantasy of all: the self-made man. (Rather unbelievably, so impoverished and misguided is this view that it has actually provoked David Brooks into writing a coherent sentence or two in his latest Op-Ed; that alone should give you some indicator of the intellectual poverty that lies at its heart.)

It’s not particularly difficult to see why this view is such a non-starter given that we begin our lives naked, bawling, and helpless, and spend the next few years unable to clean up after ourselves, fed at regular intervals, clothed, sheltered, and closely supervised by our parents.  But it persists, a stunning testimony to our ability to tell ourselves comforting fairy tales that elevate us in our own estimation: geocentrism, the Great Chain of Being, perfect self-knowledge, autonomous action, the list goes on. We are, after all, an extremely chauvinistic species, convinced we are God’s finest creation, the summum bonum of all that is good and wonderful about the universe. Once we are done crowning ourselves masters of the universe, why not look a little closer, and impose some further gradations among human beings as well? Perhaps that way, we can determine, even within our closed ranks, who the true summiteers are, the ones leaving the rest of the grubby masses back at base camp. We are, it seems, hell-bent on relying on vacuous, offensive hierarchies.

This misguided view persists even when it is pointed out that almost every single second of our waking lives we come into contact with the product of the labor of others, perfect strangers sometimes, who have stepped up to the pot of common resources and put in their share. (You, dear reader, are reading this post on a computing device, the abstract principles for which are due to a gay man, Alan Turing, hounded to his death for being so. The code for your computing device is the product of, presumably, dozens, if not hundreds of programmers.)

That little mountaineering metaphor I invoked above tells us all we need to know about the stupidity and incoherence of the sad trope of the self-reliant man: even the most austere Alpinist, even a Reinhold Messner-extraordinaire does not summit without having relied on others. Messner went solo to the highest peaks in the world, but he used maps, axes, boots, goggles, warm-weather gear, canned food, ropes, pitons, carabiners; the list is never-ending. Messner didn’t make those with his bare hands. He was a taker too.

The next time you find yourself tempted to classify the world into makers and takers, look up the word ‘ecology’ in a dictionary. Think about how it might apply to the human world. I promise you, a richer world will spring into view. It is an exhilarating vision.

Brooklyn Cooking: My Nose’s Best Friend

One of the pleasures of living in Brooklyn, and more specifically in zip code 11218, supposedly once the most ethnically diverse zip code in the US, is the aromatic extravaganza available to one’s olfactory apparatus. In plain English: you can smell a lot of really delicious things around here. Once you are done with the obligatory snickering about New York City odors,  we can get on with the intended subject of this post: the many, endlessly varied fragrances of cuisines from the world over, wafting out from apartment and co-op windows, restaurant kitchens, and of course, roadside vendor stalls and carts, tickling my nostrils and sending my taste buds quivering and fluttering. Nothing else quite reminds me of what an amazing crossroads of the world this section of New York City is.

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for close to ten years. The first three years were spent in Fort Greene, and since then, in my present location in Ditmas Park/Kensington/Flatbush. (I’m not quite sure of my precise location because, thanks to real estate marketing pressures, neighborhood names seem to be in a state of flux; we have though, been ensconced in the same building for the past six years.) My current neighborhood is host to Orthodox Jews, Russians, Ukranians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Mexicans, Trinidadians, the list goes on and on.  My building’s residents were, and are, a representative sample of this mix. For instance, the door to my co-op apartment still features a mezuzah case from one of its past residents. Its demographics, and the restaurants on Cortelyou Road, have, of course, changed as gentrification proceeds apace. (I was one of the gentrifiers. Guilty as charged. But in my defense, I can at least say that since my wife and I cook a lot, and it isn’t just all the same thing all the time either, we have added to this building’s offerings in the aromatic dimension.)

In all my years in this neighborhood, it has been a rare day that I’ve not wondered as I have walked around in the surrounding streets, or walked up the stairs to my apartment: ‘Mmmm…what is that?’ Sometimes, I can make some of the ingredients–fish for instance–sometimes I can hazard a guess at the ethnic origin of the cook. Sometimes, I am utterly and totally stumped, my sensory receptors bewildered by the rich combinations of spices, meats and vegetables being transformed by expert human manipulation, kitchen tools and heat in someone’s proximal, and yet frustratingly out of reach kitchen. Trust me, there is nothing quite as cruel and tantalizing as coming home tired and hungry after a long day at work (or perhaps a workout at the gym), walking up the stairs, smelling someone’s delicious cooking all the while aware that nothing is as yet ready to be eaten at home.

Sometimes, I have wondered if I could ever muster up the courage to run around like a demented bloodhound in my building, tracking down the source of a particularly delicious vapor, to knock on the door of the master chef, begging for a taste, a sample, a glimpse of the culinary promised land. One ladle from the pot will do.

Neighbors: consider yourself warned.

Seamus Perry on Samuel Palmer and the Laying Bare of the Artist

A quick pre-disclaimer: Pardon me for referencing the London Review of Books two days in a row, but that’s what weekend-catching-up-with-a-stack-of-unread reviews can do to you.

In reviewing Rachel Campbell-Johnson‘s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer (‘The Shoreham Gang‘, LRB, 5th April 20120), and in particular, on Palmer‘s ‘The Valley Thick with Corn,’ Seamus Perry writes:

Oddity in art can be a bravura display of brilliant perversity, like Glenn Gould taking Bach at a counterintuitive lick; but the best Palmer is odd in a much quieter and more mysterious way than that, as though serenely unaware of its own peculiarity. It is hard to imagine an art less calculating: the picture is not the emphatic expression of a personality but more the exposure of one, as though allowing an intensely private kind of idiosyncrasy to reveal itself to a public gaze; and a good part of its quiet power comes from the implicit sense of vulnerability which goes along with that sense of exposure.

Perry has captured an interesting aspect of the public, revelatory aspect of an artist’s work: how the understatement of the inevitable exposure involved in putting out an artwork for public consumption and evaluation can produce a more powerful statement.

Much great art is recognizable as an emphatic signature, a distinctive stamping or watermarking of the cultural landscape by a particular vision made manifest. There we admire the artist for having forcefully asserted a unique personality through the medium of choice; the artwork is suffused with the artist made immanent. But as Perry is right to note, what makes some great art work is that the artist can make into his work into an inadvertent confession.

This confession is unlike the tell-all revelations of modern memoirs; rather, it is a peek behind the curtain, one pulled aside for us by the artist. It is to ‘bare one’s soul’ but not because that was the explicit motivational intent; rather, in viewing the work, we realize the artist has had to pay such a price  to make it possible. This exposure is a little more bashful, a little more ‘vulnerable’; it commands respect  because we are made aware of the seeming reluctance that underwrites it.  As such too, it is less flamboyant, perhaps more modest. These features add up to a distinctive style of their own.

In producing art works of this kind artists make another kind of familiar statement about the relationship between artworks and those who make them: sometimes the artist is merely a conduit, a channel of sorts, for the expression of forces greater than him; the works make themselves available to the world through him. The exposure of his ‘intensely private kind of idiosyncrasy’ is the burden the artist bears for having turned himself over to these. Here, the artist is not lord and master but something more humble, modest, and circumscribed. Our appreciation of this visible ‘vulnerability’ then, finds its grounding in our acknowledgment of the cost exacted, our gratitude to the artist for having performed this service for us.

Roald Dahl’s Magical Chocolate World

The editors of the London Review of Books blog have reminded me–not personally, silly, I don’t know them that well, or rather, at all–that September 13th was Roald Dahl Day. They do so by noting Michael Irwin’s review of George’s Marvelous Medicine (which, sadly, I have not read), one that references in turn, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book that more than any other, enabled me, and perhaps thousands of other kids to feel that, finally, an adult had understood just how insane chocolate drove us.

I had borrowed the book from a friend’s bookshelf, in the midst of what may be described as my ‘Roald Dahl phase.’ And it wasn’t a phase for me alone; indeed, at that time, it seemed like my entire family–my father, my mother, my brother and I–were caught up in Dahl-mania. We were members of the local British Council Library, which stocked many of his works, and for a few giddy months, it was all Dahl, all the time. My brother and I–thirteen and eleven respectively, I think–read both his adult fiction and his children’s stories. (Some of the former were deliciously raunchy, especially My Uncle Oswald, and once again, for the umpteenth time, I must thank my parents for not being prudes and letting us read what we wanted.)

We all found Dahl’s signature twisted endings and dark humor hugely entertaining, and I chuckled over many, many stories with my parents (for some reason, I remember more discussions with my mother) but still, it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that confirmed Dahl’s status as literary genius in my pre-teen mind. I was dimly aware, even as I read it, that this wasn’t a children’s book like others I read: the seemingly almost-Dickensian descriptions of Charlie and his family’s poverty, the mysterious factory, and the grim fates of Charlies companions–the obese Augustus Gloop, the spoiled Veruca Salt, the quasi-ruminant, gum-chewing, Violet Beauregarde, and the television obsessed Mike Teavee–reminded me that this packed a dark punch, one enough to make me shudder a bit and resolve to not be indolent or bratty. And what about those pygmy-like Oompa-Loompas?

But, as I started off by saying, what made the book really work was that it was about chocolate, wonderful, lovely, dark, sweet, nut-ridden, soft, melting, chocolate, the most precious thing of all. It was always rationed, always scarce, and no gift from family friend, overseas-returned relative or parent was as treasured. (That’s a slight exaggeration, because I was nerdy enough even then to treasure gifts of books as much.) Still, those amazing descriptions of eating chocolate, its aromas, its consistency, all enabled Dahl to deftly, cleverly and finally, magically, create what felt like an almost unimaginable sensual extravaganza: a world populated by chocolate.  Yes, Charlie got to go to heaven for being a good boy, so perhaps there was something disappointingly moralistic about it all, but I was willing to overlook it then, my brain addled by all that cacao and sugar, caught up in its own frenzied imaginings of a world in which ambrosia was not strictly rationed and came one’s way, when and whenever I wanted.

Breaking Bad: This Generation’s Western

The fourth season of Breaking Bad is done and dusted. (Yes, I am a Netflix-viewer of television series, and so, invariably lag behind; in this case, a full season.) I’ve not written on this blog before about Breaking Bad, and given my admiration for the show, find myself surprised by this omission. So here goes nothing.

Like many viewers of the show, I have been struck by the remarkable descent of Walter White into the depths of moral depravity, the steady darkening of his character, his pathological tendencies, and concomitantly, the painful decline of the young Jesse Pinkman, his former student, and now, his seemingly doomed partner in crime. (And like most viewers of the show, I’m reminded of the grim toll the war on drugs continues to exact.) A great deal has been written on these themes: Walter has truly been the single worst thing that could have happened to Jesse; life as a petty meth-dealer was infinitely preferable to the high-stakes, even if well-paid, hellish ride Walter has taken Jesse on; beatings and death threats have been the least of it. (My wife and I cheered Jesse on as he handed out a thrashing to Walter in season 4; never have I been happier to see a lead character take a beating.)

Rather than repeat some of those commentaries, I want to quickly make note of another player in this saga of  murderous desperation and deceit: the classically Southwestern landscapes of New Mexico. (The often grim urban setting of Albuquerque is undoubtedly a key participant too, but those are less novel given the context of the show.)

From the first episode onward, when Walter and Jessie head out to the desert to cook their first batch, the Southwestern high deserts and plateaus are ever-present players. The harsh glare of the baking sunlight, the parched landscape it shines on, beautiful and deadly, are suitably incongruous partners to the business our chemical artists are engaged in, bringing together the elegant precision of Walter’s chemical formulas and cooking techniques with the deadliness of a ‘product’  sent out to be sold by homicidal paranoiacs and consumed by derelicts with rotting teeth, wasting bodies and addled brains. Walter’s mobile meth lab seemingly desecrates this landscape, but it has seen plenty of violence in the past too. This desert plateau is the setting for mass executions, violent interceptions of meth shipments, pow-wows with Mexican cartels,  the disposal of corpses, and edgy, teetering-on-the-edge-of-catastrophe encounters; its light always brightly illuminates the darkest deeds imaginable.

In utilizing the Southwestern landscapes as he does in Breaking Bad, the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, has added another dimension to the wildness of the Wild, Wild West, and provided us a new kind of Western, one suitable for this day and age. Here, there are no heroes, merely villains and victims of one stripe or the other. When the smoke will have cleared at the end of the fifth and final season, and guns holstered and put away, it seems highly implausible the good guys will walk out of the saloon – for the simple reason there were never any to begin with.

The CTU Strike: Facile Reliance on Evaluation Won’t Work

Reading responses to the CTU strike has dismayed me: that there is so much hostility directed at teachers and their unions in a country where the path to middle-class success used to be understood as a good public education, but which is now directly under attack from a shrieking horde of carpetbaggers and rent-seekers. (Thankfully, the good folks of Chicago seem to be squarely behind the CTU.)

I’m stunned too by the  unquestioning reliance on the notion that teacher evaluation is the key to resolving the supposed crisis of public education.  When so much remains to be done for school students how can evaluation, a poorly understood notion at the best of times, become the centerpiece of reform? And indeed, given the pedagogical controversies that surround testing as a means of evaluating students, how can those scores be turned into a vehicle for evaluating their teachers? If someone had suggested to me that my 8th grade teachers be fired because of my scores in tests that year, I’d have been shocked; their teaching had nothing to do with my poor performance. And the idea that Aziz Akhtar, my high school chemistry teacher–a maestro whose explanation of the structure of benzene rings attained an almost poetic quality–should have been blamed for my slacking off and scoring poorly in the 11th grade chemistry exam fills me with horror.

What a student ‘gets’ from a teacher is not the kind of thing that is easily measured in quantifiable scores; more often than not, if a teacher is to be evaluated, it is best done by another teacher, by a process of observation, peer mentoring, and consistent, constructive feedback and criticism. Teaching is part science, part art; we are still a long way from understanding how learning proceeds and how teaching succeeds. To shoehorn this process into a ready-made quasi-Taylorist template is sheer folly. If school reform is to be carried out, it will be a necessarily slow and expensive process, and not one that can be hurried along with a slap on its rump from Michelle Rhee and her cohort.

Note: I’m often asked, ‘Would you like to teach in schools’? (i.e., high school or lower). My answer has always been, ‘Not on your life.’ It’s too hard: I simply cannot imagine dealing with the kinds of issues school teachers have to deal with on a daily basis. (Disciplinary for instance; I like dealing with students that are a bit more ‘mature’, ‘more adult’). Selfishly, I would like to be able to teach material that sometimes impacts my so-called ‘research.’ Thus, I stand back, and admire those that can take it on. I’ve met plenty of school teachers over the years and I’m impressed by their grace under fire, their careful navigation of the shoals of disciplinary issues, their deep commitment to their wards, their working in poorly equipped and funded school districts. Right from the time I was first offered an opportunity as a substitute teacher in Newark, NJ, I have turned away from school teaching. It’s fundamental to our society, but on this one, I have let others take the bullet.

The New York Times Joins the CTU-Bashing Party

This morning, I posted the following on my Facebook status:

I wouldn’t use today’s NYT Editorial on the CTU strike as a window-cleaning schmatta.

Unfortunately, editorials in influential newspapers cannot be dismissed so easily. So let’s take a closer look.

The editorial begins unpromisingly:

Teachers’ strikes, because they hurt children and their families, are never a good idea.

Notice how it is the ‘idea’ that is problematic, thus indicting the agent of the strike i.e., the union. A more promising start might have been:

City administrations should never let negotiations with teachers get to the point where they feel compelled to strike.

Because, you know, city administration policies can also hurt the ‘children’ that the New York Times is so worried about. Let’s move on. (The next sentence, incidentally, undermines the seriousness of the situation by putting it down to a personality clash between Rahm Emanuel and Karen Lewis.)

The Times is quite sure that the union is opposed to ‘sensible policy changes,’ ones that,

[A]re increasingly popular across the country and are unlikely to be rolled back, no matter how long the union stays out.

Well. I hadn’t realized aping bad policies implemented elsewhere was such a good idea. And perhaps the Times could evaluate these ‘sensible’ changes for us? Thankfully, it does tell us that Mr. Emanuel rescinded a 4-percent pay raise last year, and that he, in keeping with the current fashion of diminishing organized labor in every way possible, by-passed the collective bargaining process to implement a longer school day.

The Times’ ‘why don’t you follow the lemmings’ query is on display again when it comes to noting the union’s resistance to ‘an evaluation system in which a teacher’s total rating depends partly on student test scores’:

Half the states have agreed to create similar teacher evaluation systems that take student achievement into account in exchange for grants under the federal Race to the Top program or for greater flexibility under the No Child Left Behind law. Such systems are already up and running in many places.

The Times does not stop to consider that such evaluations and ratings might be flawed and that the CTU’s stance might make more pedagogical sense. No sir; this is a fait accompli, fall in line!

The primary beef, in any case, over and above everything else, is that the union is ‘holding the city hostage’ by not bringing forward its ‘legitimate suggestions’ (if any) for improving the evaluation system in the right way. I hate to break the news to the New York Times, but the power to strike is organized labor’s weapon of last resort, one only to be used when faced with a recalcitrant and obdurate management. That same management, if not confronted with that threat, can all too easily stonewall its way into a resolution that favors it alone (and not the city’s students).

The editorial continues,

What stands out about this strike, however, is that the differences between the two sides were not particularly vast, which means that this strike was unnecessary.

But it is only the union that is required to make concessions.

Moreover, Ms. Lewis, who seems to be basking in the power of having shut down the school system, seems more inclined toward damaging the mayor politically than in getting this matter resolved.

Pardon me, I thought this was about a ‘personality clash’ between two folks. Why is Ms. Lewis’ personality the only one to be indicted?

If the strike goes on for much longer, the union could pay a dear price in terms of public opinion.

And the editorial page of the nation’s most prominent newspapers is helping that process get started.