Best Friday Night Ever

Friday night at about 9:30 p.m., my roommates and I were relaxing in the living room watching Indiana Jones, and my phone rang. It was Pancho, my awesome Marxist popular education expert coworker, calling to say that he and Laura (another awesome coworker) were with a big group of workers that hadn't been paid, and a lot of them didn't have a place to sleep. He was calling to see if a roommate with a car and I would drive to Casa Juan Diego, the Houston Catholic Worker house, to pick up a bunch of food, and then take it to the Salvation Army shelter where they were going to take the workers.

My very cool roommate Vicky, who has her car here, said she would drive, and another awesome roommate Katie asked if she could come along too. We drove to the house with the food, which was Casa Juan Diego's men's residence, where the door was answered by a young man who no doubt wondered why on earth there were three gringa girls asking for food in broken Spanish. We waited a bit for him to get someone else, and an older man came to the door who knew what was going on. We loaded up 75 small boxes of food in the car, and I called Pancho to confirm where to deliver the food. He said there was a change of plans, and the shelter said it would be best if the workers ate before they arrived, so we took the food to our office. We could have gone home at that point, but I think we all wanted to stick around for the workers to arrive. We started chatting, and pretty soon a guy named Bryan from TEJAS, an environmental justice organization, and his girlfriend showed up. They do some cool media work, and they had been out there with the workers taking some photos and video. A few minutes later, Pancho and Laura showed up with about 15 workers. We gave them food, and as Pancho was describing our organization, the topic of religion came up (since we're an interfaith organization, at least in theory). Pancho started talking about Jesus. Who did Jesus spend his time with while he was on earth? The poor, the exploited. Who would Jesus be spending his time with if he were on earth right now? "Nosotros" (us), they answered. Yes, Pancho said. Jesus is walking with you. He's walking with us. As we organize and and work for justice, we know that Jesus is walking with us. As we try to get stolen wages back, we know that Jesus is walking with us. Even if we can't get the money, Jesus will still be walking with us. (If Pancho had a church, I would definitely go.) As we were talking about how interfaith our organization is, a debate arose about what is the largest religion/denomination in the U.S. One man said the Catholic church was the biggest, and another said the evangelical church. Pancho then noted that capitalism is actually the largest religion in the country. Just look at the size of their temples, he said. A little later, he began to talk about the labor movement and how the rights that we have now are the result of the struggles of many people who came before us. We got these rights because people organized and fought very hard for them. He pointed out to the workers that their efforts to get their money isn't just about them - it's about trying to bring about a more just society for the people who come after them. One man started talking about how terrible his working conditions used to be in El Salvador, and the conversation among the workers turned to structural economic injustices, and how there are so many forces working against them. One man started a rant on neoliberalism.

It was a perfect Friday night.

On Saturday we had an action outside the company office where the workers gathered waiting for their checks. A lot of media came, which was great. I took some photos, which you can see here, and you can see a TV news report here.

If I am Number 6, who is my professor?

When I read blogs, I tend to get on an intellectual high, probably because the blogs I read are either my professors' or other scholarly sorts. Funny how that doesn't get any homework accomplished.

Okay, here's a question on my midterm due tomorrow: If you (that is, me) are Number 6, who am I (that is, my professor)?

This alludes to the fantastically strange show, The Prisoner. I'm going to brainstorm here. He could be Number 1, but, as the professor kindly points out, we don't even know for sure if Number 1 exists. We can be relatively sure that the professor does exist. That doesn't definitively mean that he is not Number 1, though. Just because we don't know who was Number 1 doesn't mean he was not in front of us the whole time. We trust the professor to be on our side, to be teaching us things to help us learn and be good thinkers, but is he not part of a system structured to maintain the status quo? He claims to try to teach otherwise, which makes us trust him even more, but perhaps he's calling the shots without us even realizing it. What about Number 2? Number 2 is the visible person in charge (as is the professor). Number 2 tries to extract information from Number 6 (as does the professor from his students). As the professor notes, if he were Number 2 that would mean he would be a prisoner too, in a way. As a matter of fact, he is a prisoner to many norms and conventions, but my impression is that he is not a willing prisoner, unlike Number 2. Maybe, as he suggests, he is Number 5. Perhaps his "sickness" which caused him to miss class on Wednesday was not in fact a cold, but that he lost his hair, gained weight, and turned yellow, becoming Homer Simpson. Hmm... I don't think I'd have much to back up that argument. What else could he be? One of the women? He is not a woman, nor does he cry or swoon regularly (in front of us), nor does he seem particularly manipulative. Rover? As far as I know, he does not physically hurt or kill any of his students, and if we leave the classroom, he doesn't stop us. What's left? Maybe he's just another person in The Village. He's too self-aware and critical for that. Could he be the penny-farthing bicycle? That wouldn't make sense, but I'm beyond that point. This is way too much fun.

Okay, my favorite is the professor as Number 2. I'll explain away his apparent criticism of the status quo with capitalism's ability to absorb anything and make us believe that we are hearing something subversive, when in fact it is just perpetuating the system. We are paying thousands of dollars to listen to this professor, whose lectures make us think that now we are smarter than everyone else because we say things like "repressive tolerance" and "signifiers and signifieds," but in the end we'll get our degrees and become economically productive adults, allowing ourselves to be exploited and alienated. We'll just use big words as we do it.

Here's a Language Log posting with some of my favorite things: Semiotics, rethinking homosexuality, and challenging middle-aged conservative white men.

A happy note: I just realized that I don't have to illegally track down episodes of The Office online when we have them in the house on DVD. By the way, I am doing this for purely academic purposes, to do a Marxist critique for a paper. I've been waiting for the day I could count watching The Office as homework.