The Aftermath of the D.C. Metro Crash
Also Under Review: a new visual history of the labor movement and classic bookstores and books.
By Daniel Strauss, Jake Blumgart, Emily Rutherford, and Matt Zeitlin
July 2, 2009
Riding the red line after last week’s crash is almost as bad of a train wreck. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Washington Area Metro System
Washington D.C.
Summer 2009
It’s understandable that the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA, to the locals) wants to be extra cautious after the horrific Red Line crash last week. Since then WMATA has been making repairs, trains have been traveling at slower speeds, and a general cautiousness has blanketed the Metro rail’s system. I guess that’s comforting. But at the same time it’s more than a little annoying.
Workday commuters hear a few dozen times that Metro riders should add a half hour to their travel time. Riders also hear far too often that the trains will stop at the end of the platform from now on (probably to lessen the possibility of another crash). The result is a frustrating habit trick in which riders see the train come, watch it stop, step up to the door, then are bewildered as the train starts moving again. No matter how frequently we might ride, there’s still that split second “What the hell?” thought. It used to be an only occasional occurrence, but now it happens every time.
What’s most annoying is the Metro arrival and departure displays have started devoting much more time to pointing out delays and track repairs instead of arrival times. What might be intended as a comforting notice that WMATA is scouring the rails, inch by inch, to smooth out any wrinkles so the riders are safer than ever ends up giving riders a sense of unease.
6 of 10 1000-series Rohr-built cars
-Daniel Strauss
This title is full of exclaimation points.
Agitate! Educate! Organize!
Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher
ILR Press
Published: May 2009
Agitate! Educate! Organize! is a beautiful book. It features than 200 glossy posters from the long history of labor activism in the United States, from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) urging class warfare in the 1920s to the United Auto Workers warning against the dire effects of NAFTA in the 1990s. For the first time ever, such a comprehensive visual history is all in one place.
Although labor posters are an important cultural touchstone documenting the everyday struggles of American workers, little has been done to preserve them until now. Cushing and Drescher have taken it upon themselves to collect labor posters from across the country that were languishing in dusty storerooms of union halls and universities far from the inquiring eyes of, well, anyone.
The posters in Agitate! Educate! Organize! portray both epic struggles and obscure battlefronts. The Exotic Dancers Alliance’s snarky “Like an orgy, it only works if there’s a lot of us” cohabitates with the grim United Farm Workers (UFW) poster of an Aztec crushing fistfuls of bloody grapes over the world famous “Boycott Grapes” campaign slogan. Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s Justice for Janitors posters are particularly striking, successfully dramatizing an often trivialized profession
Activist unions seemed to have produced the most posters and campaign slogans: the UFW, SEIU, and the IWW dominate the pages of Agitate! Educate! Organize! The book also illuminates less wholesome aspects of the movement’s history. I never knew that “The original purpose of the union label was to proudly indicate that only white unionists had worked on the product.”
Agitate! Educate! Organize!’sonly weakness is the writing, which includes a couple ill-advised forays into hyperbole, such as “All workers toil in the martyrs’ shop.” Mostly the prose is too simplistic, which seems odd for a book that will attract a specialized audience appreciative of in-depth analysis over light theorizing about hard hats. But the posters are well worth the price of admission.
8 out of 10 colorful depictions of the class struggle
-Jake Blumgart
Looking for a high-brow bookstore?
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, D.C.
Visited: June 28, 2009
There are several bookstores in Georgetown, but Bridge Street Books (which, to be pedantic, is on the border of Georgetown and Foggy Bottom) is by far my personal favorite.
You won’t find very much light reading in Bridge Street Books, but you will, on the other hand, find the largest selection of Jean Genet I’ve seen in a bookstore. The selection is perfect for a serious humanities nerd: Books that are weighted heavily toward the categories of fiction, poetry, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, gender studies, classics, theology, philosophy, history, and a bunch of other cool subjects that don’t really prepare you for jobs in “the real world.” Bridge Street Books is the kind of bookstore that has more books on poetics than of poetry, more on literary theory than of literature, and more on historiography than of history. I may lack a Ph.D.—or even an undergraduate degree—in the humanities but the vast majority of the academic books I found looked accessible and interesting. Surely the shelves of good literary fiction would be great for anyone, regardless of their academic pursuits.
The major downside to Bridge Street Books is the pricing: all the books are new, and are sold at the publisher’s list price. If you’re used to Amazon prices, these will seem pretty expensive, around $20 for an average paperback. If you’re a college student (or other equally impoverished individual) on a budget, you probably shouldn’t exhibit as much lack of control as much as I did when I bought four books. I’ll definitely be back to Bridge Street Books and probably will spend more money. It’s just that awesome.
10 out of 10 list-price copies of Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide
-Emily Rutherford
Joan Didion’s still got it.
The White Album
Joan Didion
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1979 (but still classic!)
Journalists like Joan Didion are more than rare these days. The White Album, a wondrous collection of essays and reportage written between 1968 and 1978, captures the paranoia, instability, and weirdness of California at the time; the book is interfused with Didion’s own emotional and mental distress. This was a time when traditional social mores and institutions were falling apart. The counterculture and youth movements sought about a kinder, more peaceful, and more just America, but the Manson family’s murderous rampage, among other things, worked to unravel those hopes.
One of these moments is the testimony of Corinne Leonard, a nurse at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, in the murder trial of the Black Panther leader Huey Newton. Newton had been shot in a confrontation with an Oakland police officer and showed up at Kaiser for treatment. Leonard, judging Newton’s injury was “not all that much,” demanded that Newton either show his Kaiser membership or at least sign the admission sheet. Newton refused, citing a right to privacy. It turns out that Newton was a member of Kaiser. Didion kept a copy of the testimony “on the theory that it illustrated a collision of cultures.”
Didion uses carefully chosen details and minimalist prose to evoke a feeling of dread and lost hope. In the title essay, she effortlessly jumps among her own fights with mental illness, the student uprising at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), and the travails of the Black Panthers in Oakland. She always manages to find the choicest details to capture the strangeness, hypocrisy and irony of California in the late 1960s.
10 out of 10 eloquent journalists
-Matt Zeitlin
Daniel Strauss and Jake Blumgart are staff writers for Campus Progress. Emily Rutherford and Matt Zeitlin are an editorial interns at Campus Progress.
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