Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much

On January 3, the Wall Street Journal devoted one of its all-important house editorials, the smaller one in the middle, to a single human being, a person hitherto known only to some on the left, denied tenure.

The editorial, entitled "Bourgeois Anarchy," purportedly seeks to rebut David Graeber's suspicion (nothing more) that he was fired from Yale because of his political activism (Graeber is an anarchist and a member of the IWW), but since it's only a suspicion, there isn't much work to do on that front. So the editors spent roughly one fourth of the space of the column quoting from the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, emphasizing the passages about the workers and bosses having nothing in common and the repudiation of the wage system.

With the self-perceived, smirking cleverness of a pansy prep school debate team, the editorial goes on to ask why Graeber would even "covet" a bourgeois post like Yale, then answers its own question by saying "even anarchists have their bourgeois ambitions," then speculates that Yale's decision was not political.

Besides the obvious way in which the WSJ misunderstands the category "bourgeois," the entire editorial seems out-of-place, Even if it were a slow news day, that wouldn't explain why the WSJ chose to compose this mocking and meanspirited little column. Surely, I think, the folks at the WSJ can't feel threatened by the Wobblies...? And surely there are more pressing things to attack (through mockery or otherwise) than the IWW and a radical professor...?

Unless, of course, there is a lesson to be learned from Graeber's situation that the WSJ thinks we all should learn...?