Useless Marches, Demonstrations, And Protests - Camaraderie, Solidarity, And Feeling Good About Yourself

Ophelia Marshall had been a solitary child, so much so that her parents worried about her.  Pleased that she was so attentive to her studies, quite religious in a quiet, respectful way, and as dutiful as a daughter could be; they were still concerned that she was becoming a recluse, timid, and hesitant to join others in the outside world. 

She was like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, a frightened young woman who spent more time with her delicate glass figurines than with people.  Laura finally comes out of this self-imposed reclusiveness to entertain a gentleman caller.  She is charmed by him and delighted that her fortunes might be turning around.  A life, a normal life, perhaps did await her. 

She is disappointed, of course, for the gentleman caller is otherwise engaged and joining Laura and her family only out of politeness, and when he leaves, Laura, disconsolate, wounded, and convinced that she has no worth except to her glass menagerie, returns to her room from which she will never leave. 

Ophelia was no Laura, at least not yet, but she was enough of a withdrawn, delicate, and sensitive girl that she might stay as a chrysalis and never emerge as a butterfly. 

Her parents needn't have worried, for Ophelia was only tending her garden, as she put it, a tender shepherdess of her own, special feelings.  She was sure that one day she would no longer need such tenderness and care, so she allowed herself the luxury of fantasy. 

True to her wishes, she began to gain confidence and certainty - the camaraderie of girls, their intimate clustering, and their shared secrets were comforting.  Ophelia knew that her life would not have to be alone, but in the company of women who shared her desires, fears, and ambition. 

The simple, innocent camaraderie that Ophelia had enjoyed at secondary school was a thing of the past at university.  Girls had grown up, matured, and while they still enjoyed female company, it was far less innocent and girly and much more demanding and political.  The young women joined together in solidarity rather than socialness - the innocent bonding had changed to collusive activism.  

The campus was filled with causes, everything from women's rights, to climate change, to the plight of the black man, and Ophelia was urged - dunned, actually, given the zeitgeist of inclusivity on campus - to join in one or more groups for social justice. 

Although Ophelia was not and never had been political - her parents were moderate Republicans, schooled long before the contentious politics of today - she understood that political affiliation and espousal of political values was tantamount to social acceptance.  Alliance For Climate Action, Bitches For Justice, and Gay Pride Forever were just some of the groups which courted her, and she accepted all of them.  Breathing the same heady air as a hundred like-minded women would be exhilarating.  

When asked about the specific purpose of their protests, demonstrators often answer, “To raise awareness”; but by now all issues have been presented, discussed, vetted, debated, and filed.  There is no more useful awareness to be had.

So it all comes down social collectivity – an expression of concern for a common cause which unites thousands into a community of ideas – an identity community with markers, banners, logos, doctrines, and liturgies.  Belonging feels good, feels important, feels useful, and most importantly reflects one’s own goodness.

The protests on campus were but the prelude to real, concerted action; and when a number of climate groups joined forces and headed to the National Mall for what they hoped would be a massive show of support for forcing radical change in energy use.  Ophelia was delighted.  This is what real female solidarity was all about - women's natural sociability, easy intimacy, and special, mature bonding joined with righteous passion was an irresistible force for change. 

The bus trip down to Washington was no different than the school bus shuttling girls from home to St. Mary's Catholic School in Radford - laughing, giggling about boys, virtual shopping for Manolo Blahnik and Armani, bitchy gossip about those girls on the peace train.  It was a joyful jamboree, a happy outing, an excursion that meant something.  The girl next to Ophelia smiled broadly and gave her a big hug. 

Ophelia was home.  This is what she as a timid, withdrawn little girl had  dreamed of and hoped for. The march was for climate sanity, but it could have been for anything.  The cause didn't matter, it was the generosity, emotional energy, and love that did.

Marches on the National Mall are unique phenomena. Although they are shows of popular democracy and free speech, they mean little or nothing to the residents of Washington - an unfortunate majority of whom are poor and isolated in nasty ghettos or managing in shabby middle class neighborhoods.  

Washington residents are used to these demonstrations and pay them little mind.  Washington is a city with its own problems – crime, drugs, dysfunctional families, corruption, and failing schools – and these are issues for the municipal government. Gun violence is endemic in the city, although concentrated in three majority black wards, and the issue is not gun control but police vigilance, community action, and  family responsibility. 

 

Marches for racial equality mean little in these de facto segregated wards where few if any white families live and even fewer risk driving through.  There is racial equality in Ward 8, but the worst, most pernicious kind – a persistent, dangerous, and violent homogeneity with no moderating influences.  No white, successful, middle class models of rectitude and community responsibility.  No entrepreneurial success stories.  No high-performing schools. 

 Yet the joy at these marches and demonstrations is palpable.  Demonstrators are not angry but happy, for they are shouting in unison with their sisters, hugging and kissing in exuberant displays of female solidarity.  Their soprano voices, loud and choral, might never be heard by the men that decide, but that is of no consequence.  It was femininity, femaleness, feminism expressed joyously and with abandon. 

What could be better, Ophelia thought, surrounded by hundreds of her sisters, all raising their voices in unison, validating womanhood and every woman, a great jamboree of togetherness, love, and affection. 

The trip back to school was memorable.  The young women, tired, worn, and hungry were in the best of moods.  Victory was a heady affair, and they had certainly won.  Won what was not the question, for the fact of such political commonality, of so many voices raised in unison creating one great orchestral piece on Washington's front lawn was more than enough. 

Some of the girls fell asleep on each others' shoulders, others were content to relive the event, and some chatted about this or that.  

Ophelia, who had for years longed to come out of her room and be one of the crowd, loved and accepted, had found a fulfillment she never dreamed of, and thanked her stars for such good fortune. 

Robbed Of Palestine - The Ivy League Scurries To Find Another Distraction

Esther Pilchman, great granddaughter of Shmuel Pilchman, labor organizer on the West Side, confidant of Samuel Gompers, granddaughter of tenants' rights activists, and daughter of a Distinguished  Professor  Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Columbia University.

 

Abraham Pilchman was a well-known scholar who had transformed the department from a carrel-bound dry, academic one to the center of progressive activism.  His seminal paper 'Irreducible Rights - Palestine And The Right Of Return', a seminal, ironic, bitter takedown of Jewish legitimacy over an Arab homeland, won his plaudits from the Columbia faculty, earned him invitations to speak at Harvard and Yale, and provided the intellectual foundation for the recent violent pro-Palestinian campus uprising. 

Pilchman was particularly listened to because he was Jewish.  The idea that such a prominent Jew could defiantly reject the claims of Israel and denigrate, humiliate, and intellectually disassemble the arguments of Israeli intellectuals and historians, made him an academic hero. An unsullied, undisturbed, and long Jewish lineage - Jewish blood pulsing strongly in his veins - did nothing to mitigate his passionate demands for a Palestinian state, the right of return, and sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; and he had to be taken seriously.

His daughter Esther, growing up in such a devoutly progressive home, could only follow in the footsteps of her forbears, and when the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel campus movement began to mature, she was one of its leaders. 

Unlike her father, Esther was a firebrand who condemned Israel from the top steps of Butler library, a banshee; a ferocious, possessed, prophetess.  Wild-haired, glaring, saluting, and imploring, she howled for justice.  The Israeli genocide of Palestinians must be met with a countervailing force - the State of Israel must be obliterated and every trace of it expunged, and washed into the sea.

Like her father, because she was Jewish she was listened to more than the many gentiles that joined the cause.  While there were some who dismissed her as an imposter, a Jew-hating Jew - a caricature of the Christianized Jew who exchanged Miami Beach for St. Bart's, mink coats for Armani, who dabbled in Hayekian economics, and who called themselves Muffy and Brent - but such bitchy allegations were quickly and easily dismissed.  Esther, her distinguished father, and all her ancestors never dismissed their Jewishness, but never once let it interfere with social justice. 

The campus was set aflame, and Esther was always the first to set it alight.  She was everywhere, waving a Palestinian flag, wrapped tightly in a keffiyeh, brandishing a torch, and howling 'Down with the Jew!' until she was hoarse.  Only once or twice when memories of the prayerful, intimate, profoundly spiritual seders of her mother's family came unexpectedly into her head, did she hesitate in her virulently anti-Semitic speeches. 

Her grandmother who read to the young girl from Kings and Samuel, was more than a bubke, but the keeper of the flame, a sanctuary from the secular world, a calm, centered, and warm woman; and Esther hated to think of what Rebecca would think of her granddaughter now.  Yet the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people was a strong enough firewall for irritatingly persistent words of her grandmother. 

The demonstrations on the Columbia campus became more defiant and more violent.  The University administrators as invested in the Palestinian cause as the students did nothing to stop what had become mayhem and which had turned from peaceful pro-Palestine protests to violent anti-Israel ones, and from there to rabid anti-Semitic torchlight parades. 

 

Using his administrative authority, Arthur Goldberg, Associate Dean for Student Affairs, a Jew, but as militantly pro-Israel as any IDF sabra, called in Esther for an 'academic review', cover for an opportunity to confront the young woman on her virulent anti-Semitism.  Goldberg kept his own counsel, necessary as a spy in the enemy camp, but felt this was one time his Jewish patriotism could not be kept in check. 

'You are a Jew, Esther', he calmly but resolutely began. 'Does that mean nothing?'

At those words Esther was ready to stand up and spit in his face.  The audacity, the chutzpah to think he could pull the Jewish card on her, berate her for unassailable political positions, and try to change her mind, get her back to temple, to the Wailing Wall, to join the IDF and murder, rape, and eviscerate little Gazan children. 

But the dean was an imposing, authoritative, and intimidating man, and when he raised his hand to stop an unfortunate outburst from the young student, she demurred and began to listen. 

The dean reminded her of Jewish history, the proto-Jewish Semitic tribes from Arabia, the imprisonment in Egypt, the glorious march to Canaan and Jericho, the thousands of years of community, belonging, cultural strength and reverence.  

 

From there the elision to modern Israeli history was easy - the UN, the Jewish State, the creation of a long-awaited and necessary homeland, the spontaneous, untoward, and hateful reaction from the surrounding Arabs; the victorious Israeli wars, and the persistent, noxious, bilious hatred of all Jews by the Palestinians.  Had they simply acknowledged Israel's right to exist, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be living in the same modern, forward-looking, rich environment as Israel's.  Instead they chose to remain a failed state, a dismal, backward, Paleolithic society ruled by venal opportunists. 

You are not demonstrating for a poor, oppressed people, but for a nasty, hateful, murderous population that wants death, destruction, and the genocide of the Jewish people.  'You are on the wrong side, Miss Pilchman'. 

Of course Esther dismissed everything that the Dean had said out of ignorance, distorted patriotism, and racism; but like her grandmother's words, the Dean's kept niggling their way into her consciousness.  Could he be right? she wondered late one night when the campus had finally quieted down.  

It was a moot question, for Donald Trump quickly sued the University, withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid and assured the administration that unless they took unequivocal steps to rid the campus of anti-Semitism and to expel those who were fomenting violence, they would be called before judge and jury. 

The frailty and febrile politicization of Columbia was exposed in a matter of days.  We believe in the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people, the University said, but they are not worth $400 million. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, and without Palestine to howl over, something had to replace it - something to justify the privileged education of Columbia; something to show that students were not just wealthy brats with no social conscience, but as committed to social reform and universal justice as anyone. 

And so it was that the protesters took up the cudgel once again for the black man and gay and transgender rights, slightly old, mildewed chestnuts by now, but given the racist homophobe in the White House, important to put back on the fire.  

Old queens, Bernal Heights bull daggers, and an avant garde of transgender wannabes (there were simply not enough real chopped and channeled transgenders to make a phalanx) led the new protests for gender fair play.  Not only was the new movement righteous, there were no legal pitfalls.  The White House could care less about a bunch of prancing fa--ots, and would leave the university alone.  

The university, stung by the White House reprimand, and bound and determined to show that they had not been intimidated by this conservative Anschluss, backed the demonstrators to the hilt.  'We are for diversity, inclusion, and equity' no matter what'; and with that raised the gay pride and old Black Lives Matter flags high above the library. 

'Enough is enough', said wealthy Columbia alumni and the flow of generous donations slowed to a trickle; so slowly but surely students returned to their classrooms.  Not that that mattered much since the curriculum had been so politicized that learning anything substantial or important was moot; but at least it was a beginning. 

'The Ivy League?', was now a meme.  'Who needs it?' 

The Ivy League Or Aggieville State? Yale Goes Ghetto, Balaclava And Gender-Queer

It wasn't supposed to be this way, the decline of a once great institution into an intellectual miasma, but there it was losing ground to Aggieville State and other two-bit public schools in the Midwest. Elihu Yale and John Davenport were turning over in their graves at the sight of a once patrician, intellectually elite college founded on solid Christian principles and right behavior becoming a dismal educational sinkhole, its reputation scuttled, its premier status relegated as it opened its doors to all comers. 

 

Dean Inslee Clark was the first to declassify Yale - or in his words to 'democratize' it and let in all those Brooklyn Jews with SATs off the charts and violins to boot, and make some space for them by winnowing out all the legatees, children of the Cabots, Lodges, Hamiltons, and Trowbridges who were as dumb as stones but let in because of breeding and future endowment.  

Yale did not become a Jewish place like some others and certainly graduated far more geniuses than ever before, but lost that special aristocratic veneer that most characterized it - the ethos of noblesse oblige, good manners, Renaissance learning, and a full, rich, and romantic life.  

In other words, they let the grinds in and the swells out.  In a matter of a few decades Yale had become as plebian, unwashed, and as basically untutored institution as Chillicothe A&M. 

New Haven in the old days was a very Italian American city, overwhelmingly so, and Italians from Wooster Square were the janitors, dishwashers, garbagemen, and laundresses of Yale.  Not one was admitted as a student until the aldermen of the New Haven city council demanded that their people should forthwith stop serving strawberries and start eating them.  It was high time for Italian Americans from New Haven to join the Jews from Brooklyn, and they nominated what they thought was an ideal candidate, Lorenzo Puzzi, a young man of talent and promise. 

Yale refused, insisting that Puzzi was a fluke. Unfortunately for Yale, with the arrogance and disdain that characterized Yale Town-Gown relationships up until the mid-Sixties, its politically naive spokesmen were more than candid and public in their pronouncements. "Mr. Puzzi", an Assistant Dean told the Journal-Courier, "may be a champion of his people, but he is certainly not a champion of ours".

The townspeople howled until Yale listened.  To avoid further roasting in the press and increasing political pressure from Connecticut and national politicians, Yale made a generous proposal to New Haven: it would take a minimum of two New Haven residents per year, would make a public apology for the "our people" interview, and would recruit up to five Italian Americans from Connecticut per year if and only if they were the most exceptional candidates. 

The standards Yale set were so high that the Admissions Office was convinced that they would get no suitable candidates. The Connecticut politicians, a bit uneasy about the almost unattainable qualifications, felt at the same time that they could not back down on them - of course the descendants of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Bernini could meet the highest standards.

Puzzi turned out OK, needed a little remedial help but beefed up varsity football line, fit in eventually, and was soon forgotten in the still pedigreed stable of the rich and privileged that was Yale. 

The admissions door, at first ajar, was finally completely open, and what had been a legitimate talent search for the best and the brightest Paolillos, Schwartzes, and Kowalskis, was now a color fest. 'Bring me some black people', said a Yale administrator, and so it was that the university became a public school clone, its patrician, Anglo-Saxon, Martha's Vineyard-Nantucket student body now irreversibly blended, an indistinguishable potpourri. 

Before long this limited racial diversity did not satisfy, and the Admissions Office was charged to recruit the 'other-gendered'. Tentative at first and somewhat squeamish, they recruited a few straight-looking, semi-closeted, careful boys from the Main Line; but then when the DEI juggernaut rolled up to Harkness Tower, they went farther afield and went Agender Flux, Neutrois, and Winkte.  Yale in a short few decades had become a mix of the Castro, Bernal Heights, Folsom Street, Anacostia, East Baltimore, and South St. Louis, a virtual racio-ethno-quoisexual jamboree. 

The one thing these various groups shared was political idealism, that marvelously naive, innocent belief in the possibility of more verdant, peaceful, compassionate, and considerate world despite all historical evidence to the contrary.  Political choice was a matter of conviction, not logic, and classes were skipped and stadium seats left empty as students poured out in support of the climate, black people, transgenders, and the poor; and against capitalism, neo-colonialism, and predatory economics. 

Demonstrations were joyous cavalcades of unity and good will.  Camaraderie, social intimacy, and generational bonding were as least as important as the political grievances aired.  The cabal of administrators, professors, and students was a trifecta - no one opposed the transformation of the campus from a place of intellectual integrity to one of emotional hysteria. 

Along came Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinians, and virulent, violent anti-Semitism.  The Palestinians - a put-upon, marginalized, and discriminated population oppressed by the Jew - could do no wrong. It was a perfect storm - support for a non-white, non-European, non-Christian people was a defiant opposition to Jewish hegemony and an outcry against capitalist, neo-colonialist, imperialism.  

The students amassing on the Old Campus were as pleased as punch to have such a felicitous consortium of hatred at hand.  Together, singing, marching, chanting, this polyglot stew of 'diversity', long ago untethered from the rigorous academic logic of earlier days and encouraged to express their identity and their feelings, 

 

Yale, Columbia, Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League never saw Trump coming.  They had assumed that this blowhard, this imposter, this blatant racist would never again sit in the Oval Office, but there he was on a vengeful tear, uprooting the federal bureaucracy, sending cattle-car loads of illegal aliens back across the border, and putting academia on notice - stop the anti-Semitic bullshit or lose your funding, be subject to legal action, and lose any stature or standing within the university system. 

The Palestinian fanaticism was so loosely wired and so puerile in conception, that students disbanded and universities capitulated.  The fact that campuses became so quiet after one Trump threat showed how transparently ignorant were students, administrators, and faculty - the famous university cabal. 

Chastened, silenced, and finally neutered, Yale organizers returned to first principles, and a campus demonstration for Queerdom was orchestrated soon after the Trump edicts. The old race-gender dyad was alive and well at Yale, and the gathering was a New Orleans Mardi Gras and Folsom Street parade combined - an outrageous, flouncy, all get out show of burlesque queens, ghetto pimps and ho's, all doo-dadded up to beat the band. 

 

'We will be back', shouted LaShonda Williams, an affirmative action baby, putting her arms around a proudly transgender Blaise Underwood after Trump's DOJ shut the university down; but woke had had its day, and whether Yale would  regain any of its former cachet is another story.  Having become a woke caricature with a student body no different than Aggieville State, why go there?

One Old Blue, big alumni donor and Yale to the core, however, was only anxious to hasten the move. 'Fuck 'em', he said, and his millions went back to an offshore Aruban bank account where it would eventually enrich his grandchildren.  As it should be for a Yale graduate.