I’m madder than Richard Levin on speed at a union rally at how our self-righteous miser Mr. University has been giving its workers the Shifty Screwdriver — they screw you up, then they screw you down! I say screw them!
Folks, patriotic Americans around the good U.S. of A. have been turning their sanctimonious energies toward evildoer transvestite (Weekly World News, 3/11/03) Saddam Hussein and the frogs. And rightly so. But in sleepy New Haven our blue-, white- and red-collar workers have been battling a different set of hairy-pitted crazies — Yale’s administration!
People have been sending me letters and mail-bombs saying I should go easy on Yale, not to mention the French. All right buckaroos, I’ll apologize — when polar bears dance a mazurka in hell!
Even after 4,000 workers stood up and played hooky in the streets like Dennis the Menace during a carnival, Yale’s head honchos still refused to send their top-notch bargainers or significantly change their puny offers. The ball’s on your table, amigos, and the court wants a seat!
We’ve already got monuments to veterans and lipstick — why not one to the million-trillions sitting in the molten underground lava pits where Levin’s greed brews! Happy Birthday, Mr. President. There’s no ‘I’ in Yale, but there is one in ‘give’ — as in contracts, benefits, and hugs!
I heard students to my left and my right complaining about the lack of picketers during the five-day strike. Wake up earlier, Dracula! We could bear that disruption without too much claws for concern, but the prospect of a strike that could go on until Noah’s ark sails headfirst into Atlantis is a whole different ballgame, sister! A strike as an interruption of reality is like Lara Flynn Boyle compared to the 6,307-pound marsupial that is a strike as normal life! Yikes!
Niels Bohr is buried in Yale’s big ole cemetery — we don’t wanna have to dig him up to teach science sections instead of our fearless graduate students. Or maybe that’s how you get your kicks!?
Cuz folks, that’s what we’re faced with. If Yale continues to treat its employees like whining babies and not Eastern European strongwomen, we’ll see more pickets than there are white picket fences in this great land of milk and honey!
Doggone it, people have been talking this jive about “Well, if grad students want a union, they should file for one! Only reason they don’t is because they don’t have a majority!” Not true! Levin’s been telling the graddies to go ahead, but you, I, and the Man in the Moon know that the second they push that button he’s gonna object and have those votes impounded (he asked NYU to do the same and doesn’t believe grad students are workers) for something like three years to stall and hope that the movement dies down or the NYU precedent is overturned. That tactic’s as old as France!
Last week I saw a dog walking around this campus. That dog had a shirt on it. On the shirt the dog had written “4 legs, 4 unions, 4 contracts.” I didn’t think I’d see the day when dogs would write on their own clothing, but that’s not the point. The point is that Eli Yale would smile his dead white grin on that dog’s derriere. Cause Mr. Yale was an American, and if there’s one thing that Americans are for — other than liberty cabbage, freedom fries and cars with cupholders — it’s democracy.
Democracy is what the United States so generously doled out to China (1945-53), Korea (’50-53), Guatemala (’54), Indonesia (’58), Cuba (’59-60), Guatemala (’60), Congo (’64), Peru (’65), Laos (’64-73), Vietnam (’61-73), Cambodia (’69-70), Guatemala again (’67-9), Grenada (’83), Libya (’86), El Salvador and Nicaragua (’80s), Panama (’89), Sudan (’98) and Afghanistan (’98), to name a few. And Uncle Sammy will give the Iraqis a heaping portion of what those lucky savages go. They should be kissing our cheeks, not firing Anti-Patriot missiles at us!
Tell me now, do you think it’s a coincidence that demo-c-racy starts like demo-nstration and ends like Dick T-racy? No! Would John Wayne sit on his hardworkin’ duff while a stuffy old administration with a fist of graphite sits on a goldmine? No! Did not Honest & Able Lincoln’s gruff beard conceal a smooth feminine countenance (Weekly World News, 2/15/01)? All together now: No! Yale’s unions are fighting to get what they deserve, like all good Americans (unlike those sour-power Commies), and to keep our fair republic twirling, twirling, twirling through liberty and equality! Have your pets spayed and neutered.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is a junior in Davenport College. His column is modeled after the writing of his favorite columnist, Ed Anger of the Weekly World News.