I’ve been browsing the Strike For Peace website for a while, honestly attempting to take it seriously. I have been aided in this by some of PJ O’Rourke’s pithier essays on Boomer protest narcissism, a large glass of Scotch, and two icepacks: one for the drink and one for my head. I have a few more comments.

First of all, the kindest thing that can be said about the Strike for Peace view of pre-1950 history is that it is naive, and reading the Petition for Peaceful Priorities I’m inclined to think “revisionist” might not be too harsh a term:

When America was born a people-first country, the concept of freedom spread rapidly throughout the world without military force…

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonsense. The concept of freedom didn’t even spread particularly well throughout America without military force. And depending on when Bogart is pronouncing the birth of the nation, “born a people-first country” is either a euphemism for “taken by brutal conquest”, “seized by armed revolutionary struggle”, or “riven by a bloody civil war”, none of which seem especially accurate. Bogart’s vision of a peaceful and harmonious international community subverted by evil profiteers since WW2 (so, perhaps not coincidentally, during Bogart’s own lifetime) strikes me as completely at odds with reality and seems to be among the factors that have driven him around the bend. At the risk of spoiling the party, may I point out that the world was arguably an even worse place before Bogart’s generation came along and taught the world to sing?

Also, and I’ve gone through the PPP with a fine-tooth comb looking for an answer to this, what the hell is Bogart actually demanding? Well, he’s demanding that “our national policies reflect our priorities and serve the rights and needs of the common people.” But what does this mean? Well, his primary beef seems to be that ” more than 350 of our universities are developing weapons for the Department of Defense,” where the word “weapon” is, I suspect, being interpreted rather loosely. OK, so he wants to cut the Pentagon’s R&D budget. Or I assume he does; the PPP is not long on specifics. By how much? Or, since “[d]eveloping weapons at our institutions of enlightenment contradicts the inherent purpose of learning,” is it OK if the research he objects to is carried out at other labs? (This would be a major loss of research funding for universities, by the way.) Since Bogart feels that military subcontracting is impeding the ability of, say, Campbell’s to coordinate a massive stand against war by the nation’s soup manufacturers, is he demanding (as he has implied in Eugene Weekly pieces) that the military should once again take internal responsibility for meeting all its soldiers’ needs? If so, is he relaxed about the fact that such a policy would be incredibly, unnecessarily expensive and make the military an even larger public employer than it already is?

Oh, and while I’m sniping: the point of a strike is that a group of workers can collectively withhold something of value from their employer as an extreme negotiating tactic. What exactly is being withheld here? (I mean, the guy’s even getting credit for his classes during this alleged strike, so the University is presumably still getting state money for having him on the books as a student.) How is this negotiation supposed to play out? Slice the Pentagon’s R&D budget by some amount to be specified later, or Brian Bogart will never set foot in a classroom again! And then he’ll get rained on in the winter! And then… and then you’ll be sorry? I’m not sure I’m buying this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 19:12 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.