THE PATRIOT RETURNS |
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Vol. 48, No.1 April 17, 2009
WHICH DEMOCRATIC SENATOR WILL THE DEAR LEADER TARGET NEXT?
Two weeks ago, our Dear Leader, Barbara Bowen, and her fellow New Caucasians kicked off their quixotic campaign of targeting state Senate Democrats. They sent a PSC staffer, a New Caucus executive committee member, and two or three others to picket the office of Senator Carl Kruger, whose views on taxation the New Caucus has deemed insufficiently "progressive." Whether it made any political sense to alienate a key Senate Democrat—given that the New Caucus doesn't even talk to Senate Republicans, even when they make pro-CUNY proposals—doesn't seem to have crossed our Dear Leader's mind. With $70,000 of our dues money going to hire a new "organizer/activist," the PSC will have another body to send off to picket lines. So which Senate Democrat has views on non-CUNY issues that will trigger the Dear Leader's fearsome five-person picket line? Will it be. . .
NEW CAUCASIAN OF THE WEEK:
With our editor a retired member of Kingsborough's faculty, we have been following closely the KCC list-serv discussion about the pending union elections. On the list-serv, one faculty member has set himself apart from the rest. Professor Jacob Segal, Ph.D. has taken considerable time and energy away from his busy publication schedule to post on election-related matters. Whether it's attempting to explain away the Dear Leader's anti-Israel zealotry or celebrating the Dear Leader's inability to negotiate contracts that kept pace with inflation, Segal has sent passionate e-mails to all of his campus colleagues—always in his own name, and without quotation marks around his words. But as we were reading the distinguished Professor Segal's e-mails, we were struck by a feeling that we had read his words somewhere before. So we headed over to the New Caucus website, and. . . Voilà! There were the very same words—paragraph after paragraph after paragraph—that Dr. Segal had presented to his colleagues as his own. Professor Segal, it seems, is the ideal New Caucus apparatchik. He's technically proficient, having mastered the "cut-and-paste" operation on his computer keyboard. And he's so inspired by the Dear Leader's rhetoric that he was moved to present it as his own! After all, in the Dear Leader's version of a "democratic" union, CUNY faculty must uncritically accept Barbara's ideas, however harebrained. A prediction: we rather doubt that Dr. Segal will be using the KCC e-mail to discuss the Dear Leader's $40,000 annual bonus—a total that's 80% or so of the annual salary of Dr. Segal and his fellow assistant professors around the university. There are some things, it seems, that even the most sycophantic follower can't defend.
Sharad Karkhanis, Ph.D.
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