Optometry (Red Emma)

Posting for the Reb: RED EMMA

“Can’t tell the difference ‘tween a turkey & a provocateur.”

.from “Blame the thought, Cling to the Bummer”
by Allen Ginsberg

.THE FIRING or, I guess, unhiring of Erwin Chemerinsky finds Red Emma, Lecturer and union activist at UC-John Wayne, er, Donald Bren, er, Sperm-Mart, er, Irvine, getting calls from colleagues confiding their own UCI “Can you top this?" stories, most all of them most impossible to share officially, about administrators and department heads and deans.

.My own theory regarding this class of well-compensated Yes-men and women is that they are tested for that optometric condition called myopia, which is to say that the folks at HR take them into a room and stand them in front of an eye chart. If they pass it, they are thanked and returned to the classroom, but if they fail, they get a title and a parking spot and a big salary. If, that is, the candidate cannot see forward past the length of their own arm or backward as far as their ass, he or she becomes a school chair, dean or Chancellor.

.Michael Drake strikes me as sadly typical. With all that power, salary (reported on UCI webpage as $350k), not to mention a potentially strong community behind him (staff, however meek and quiet are, I think, mostly), he appears to have been psyched out, coerced, cooked his own goose, panicked or, perhaps, been set up from the start so that, yes, this morning on KPCC’s “Air Talk” the rightwing OC Register editor started the call for his removal.

.For the record, I see Drake as a Good Guy, a medical doctor, opposed to the odious Prop 209, who must have cribbed the eye chart, and by that I mean practiced failing because he imagined he could do right, make a difference, you know. Which makes it hard to understand how somebody who worked for UCOP and has been in the system, already eaten a lot of shit for the institution (medical scandal and more) couldn’t see this coming. A generous critique suggests that nobody can, to bowdlerize Mencken, go broke underestimating the reactionary politics of this funny little historically rightwing county run by a cabal of old school GOP kooks in our funny little state, with Democrats who cooperate with Schwarzenneger for their own political gain, allowing a Gary Miller, for instance, to keep his district in a quid pro quo and who don’t fight when the Guv vetoes a ballot measure on the war. Yes, the war. Bush. Alberto Gonzales. Sorry, I’m not gonna disappoint Dissent readers.

.This is about the war. For whatever weird reason, it was Chemerinsky’s LA Times commentary piece on Alberto Gonzales (albeit his other war, on death row federal court reviews) that Drake said—not the subject, but its “existence” (sic)—led to his decision. Connect the dots, paint by number, fill in the blanks, and there appears a picture of an academic in Orange County, Birchtopia, Reaganville, Nixonland, California taking on the national Republican agenda: killing people, whether in the criminal justice system or Iraq.

.Call me Mr. Reductio Ad Absurda, I don’t mind. The metaphor is the message here, and that the “libertarian” Register editor arrived there before me—calling for the removal of a stooge, an incompetent who happens to be, yes, a putative liberal and African-American—is only one step in front of the next conservative call for, say, Mr. Gonzales, who I hear is out of a job, as dean of Bren Law School. Or John Woo or, more insidiously, some other toady who failed the eye chart too.

Andrew Tonkovich