Dartblog

Today, Dartmouth College experienced A Day Without Immigrants. It is late afternoon now—time for busy collegians to nap—so the festivities have nigh on ceased. Or rather, what existed of them has ceased. The beginning was not auspicious, as merely a handful of the studentry turned out on the verdant Green to boldly and grassrootsily speak truth to power. Power, like Chimpy the Shrub, and the House of Representatives, and The Corporations, and the most racist, imperial, xenophobic entity of them all, 8 U.S.C. § 1325, that smug jerk. At one point, as, in derogation of the protesters’ dicta, I was walking to class, I heard a young fellow on a stage speaking into a microphone (built by The Corporations). His voice was amplified by a pair of large, rapidly-vibrating speaker cones (built by The Corporations) set in the air on a tripodal aluminum contraption (grown organically and cage-free in Vermont’s Green Mountains). The fellow was talking about America being powerful, and bad, and having no respect for non-Americans. There were two parts to his story. The first was he had a long wait at an airport once. The second was a precise legal explication of the current state of bilateral extradition treaties between the United States and the other one hundred and ninety-one nations.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t that at all. It was more him shouting about how, when Americans are arrested overseas, the vasty Western snatch-hand brings them back to this bosomy land and her easy-going kangaroo courts, but foreigners arrested here are made to remain, their homelands denied extradition, and are subjected to that very legal system, which has now turned into a brutish instrument of America’s general xenophobia. I thought about telling him that, while his absolutist exaggeration makes him look like an idiot, it is indeed the case that America is more successful than the average nation in getting its citizens back and it is also the case that she is less likely to give up foreign criminals. And that the imbalance might be due to the current balance of power in the world. Or to the fact that America is in the happy situation of not being motherland to a people who go to other countries and bomb civilians. And in the unfortunate situation of being squarely in the crosshairs of exactly those kinds of countries.

I also mused over mentioning to him that America has the finest, fairest, most professional criminal justice system in the world and that most folks would not, in fact, opt to be tried in the sort of a place where gays are hanged and rape victims stoned. But I feared being accused of not respecting someone else’s worldview, so I kept quiet. Besides, there was a plane flying overhead with the banner “ILLEGALS ARE CRIMINALS—SEND THEM BACK !” and the protesters wanted to bask in the Spring-sweet oppression.

But only a small portion of the protest involved megaphonic rantings and messages from the sky. There was a march, too. The answer to the million-dollar question is, yes, there were signs printed and distributed by the international revolutionary Communist organization A.N.S.W.E.R., although it was not clear if the rally’s student organizers had distributed them or if “members of the community”—by which is meant Hanover’s left-leaning nonagenarians—brought them themselves. To watch over the marchers were Hanover Police Department officers. Good guys. (And one, a sergeant, told me for the record that they were on duty, not commissioned for the purpose.) There was a standard martial shout as the parade marched through campus, but I was unable to make out what it was. The signs not purchased by those intrepid social overhaulers at A.N.S.W.E.R. generally spoke of racism, and of it being bad. Missing were the signs that explained how a nation enforcing her uniformly-applied immigration policy equals racism.

The follies continued during classtime, of course. As Dartblog noted earlier, the posters for this event specifically encouraged all supporters to skip class today. What’s unfortunate about that is that Dartmouth College paid for these activities. The supporting groups—Afro-American Society, National Society of Black Engineers, Dartmouth Taiwanese Society, Dartmouth Coalition for Global Health, Young Democrats, Italian Club, Amnesty International, and a few others—earn their keep from COSO, the Committee on Student Organizations. It is an unelected board which doles out what is at root tuition money to college clubs, with the expectation that they’ll do something edifying, or at least productive. And with what I must imagine is an implicit expectation that the money will not be used to incite mass truancy. Except that the money over which Dartmouth has control was indeed used expressly for that purpose, and it worked. From friends, I have it that some philosophy classes were cancelled, as were many Spanish classes, and the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department may or may not have had a presence in the classrooms today. (One person told me none of its courses were on; others that just a few were cancelled.) A shame, truly.

That’s that. Back to work.

UPDATE: Two more photos of the plane, courtesy of Dan Linsalata. Here and here.