Some NYTimes articles
Mar. 23rd, 2008 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on the modern Students for a Democratic Society
To the Ramparts (Gently)
By BEN GIBBERD
ONE March morning two years ago, a Pace University freshman named Brian Kelly and a dozen or so friends piled into a few cars and drove to the university’s Westchester County campus in Pleasantville, to attend a speech by former President Bill Clinton.
After the speech, which was part of the university’s centennial celebration, they submitted written questions for Mr. Clinton, as they had been invited to do.
Toward the end of the session, when they did not hear their questions asked of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Kelly tried a different tack.
“A friend and I got up and interrupted as a question about peace and democracy was being put to him by the university president,” he said. “And we said: ‘You’re a war criminal! What about Iraq and Bosnia and so forth?’ ”
Mr. Kelly and his friend were swiftly plucked from the auditorium by Secret Service agents and questioned for nearly an hour in a back room, he said.
Mr. Kelly speaks out a lot about politics these days, and not surprisingly. People like him are the new face of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical group that made headlines so often at the end of the 1960s.
On April 23, 1968 — 40 years ago next month — students at Columbia University, most notably S.D.S. members, took to the streets in the first major protest over the school’s plan to build a gym in Morningside Park; later in the spring, protesting the Vietnam War, the students seized several university buildings. By the time the demonstrators were forced out by the police, more than 700 students had been arrested and 150 had been hospitalized.
In the past few years, S.D.S. has re-emerged. But despite Mr. Kelly’s affiliation with the group and his actions during Mr. Clinton’s speech, he and other members of the new generation of S.D.S. approach politics in a strikingly different way from the firebrands of 1968. Mr. Kelly, for example, who spends much of his time hunched in front of his computer, sometimes sounds more like an earnest sociologist — the subject is his major — than a campus radical intent on scaling the ramparts.
“Society is made up of institutions, and institutions are built on consent,” Mr. Kelly said one recent morning during a wide-ranging conversation at a Starbucks cafe near Union Square. “And if you get people to say, ‘We withdraw our consent, we want new institutions, we want better policies,’ that’s how movements are built.”
The Stereotype, the Reality
“The mass media, with a little help from the older liberals, have painted a tyrannizing caricature of the ‘Student Rioter,’ ” the journalist Jack Newfield wrote in The New York Times in May 1969 in his review of “The Strawberry Statement,” James Simon Kunen’s account of the unrest at Columbia. “He has long dirty hair, an insatiable libido, and a four-letter word vocabulary. He is violent, irrational, anti-democratic.”
Sitting in Starbucks, Mr. Kelly, a clean-shaven, neatly dressed and highly composed 21-year old with close-cropped hair, hardly resembled the stereotypical radicals of 1968. Only the small pin on the lapel of his light brown jacket, depicting a bomb with a red line through it, and another on his shirt, reading “sds,” hinted at his politics.
He chose his words slowly and with a politician’s care, and his lean physique and wholesome demeanor suggested a track team member or an Eagle Scout — both of which Mr. Kelly was when he was growing up in Orange County, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city. His father is a computer programmer, his mother sells real estate, and both, he says, have been accepting of his political activities.
“They were a little hesitant after the Clinton thing, but they never asked me not to do anything,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think they understand.”
In high school, he was a student activist who engaged in what he described as “general liberal politics — blood drives, food drives, stuff around Darfur, that kind of thing.”
As a freshman at Pace’s main campus in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Kelly joined the school’s chapter of the Campus Anti-War Network, a national group opposed to the Iraq war. After S.D.S. was revived in January 2006 by two high school students, one from North Carolina, the other from Connecticut, the antiwar chapter became the Pace S.D.S. chapter. Other city schools with S.D.S. chapters include Queens College, New York University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute and New School University, most with about 25 members.
When the Pace chapter was born, Mr. Kelly’s activism really took off and he became, as he put it, “basically a full-time organizer” for the revived S.D.S. But when it comes to his attitude toward the violence of the ’60s, Mr. Kelly will never be mistaken for some of his predecessors.
“I actually think violent action isn’t radical at all,” he said firmly. “Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to change society. Violence doesn’t change society, and if it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, it’s not radical.” Mr. Kelly paused. “I don’t know what it is,” he added, “but it has nothing to do with what I want to do.”
Drama, Yes. Violence, No.
Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two years ago during a protest on Pace’s Manhattan campus, and once a year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither arrest led to any charges.
No charges grew out of Mr. Kelly’s brief face-off with Mr. Clinton either, although the encounter had its unnerving moments.
“We were about 100 feet or so away from the president,” Mr. Kelly recalled. “And it all happened so fast I don’t remember being scared — more kind of nervous. These guys in generic suits just came toward us.”
Although he and his friends were not arrested, Mr. Kelly said that the Secret Service agents who grilled him and his friend called them “clowns” and said they might be held for 72 hours and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Their cars were also searched without their consent, Mr. Kelly said, and their S.D.S. colleagues were questioned.
(Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said of the episode, “We have great respect for individual freedoms, specifically freedom of speech, and do not set out to engage individuals who do not pose a threat to protectees. However, that determination in many cases cannot be made without simply speaking to people first.”)
Despite the events of that day, Mr. Kelly said he had never experienced hostility on his campus. “Disagreement among some people,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a New York City campus, so a lot of people are progressive. Or a lot of people are just disengaged with politics. I’d say those are the typical reactions.”
His main goal, he said, “isn’t to take over a building, it isn’t to block a recruitment center. It isn’t to do any of these tactics that people kind of zero in on from the ‘60s. Our biggest goal is to get more people who are politicized, who are progressive, who want to join in a mass movement to help change the world.” Amid the chatter of the cafe and the piped-in music of Sheryl Crow and Frank Sinatra, Mr. Kelly’s phrase hung in the air, a momentary echo from another, more idealistic age.
Cerebral Activism
Once upon a time, radical politics was a physical, messy and often violent undertaking.
“You’re playing with fire and fire burns, baby,” Mr. Kunen wrote in “The Strawberry Statement.” “I mean this. I mean it well. Hear me: you’re going to get human or your stinking bodies are going up against the wall. I don’t get mad easily but I’m mad now and I’m going to stay mad until things change.”
These days, such undertakings are much more reasoned and cerebral.
“The majority of what I do is just talking to people — it’s about consciousness-raising,” Mr. Kelly said as he nursed his coffee. “A lot of people have this view of radical revolutionaries who want to overthrow this or that, but that’s not how society works.”
Instead of confrontations, he said, he and his colleagues are focused of persuading a critical mass of people to join them.
“It’s getting 50, 60, 100 million people,” he said. “It’s not small groups of people taking action. It’s masses of people taking action.”
This grass-roots approach means that today’s S.D.S. spends much of its time getting the word out.
Mr. Kelly, for example, works on the national S.D.S. Web site, studentsforademocraticsociety.org, which was created by Tom Good, a prominent activist from the ’60s. Mr. Kelly also holds meetings on campus and travels to other colleges and high schools to help advise new chapters. S.D.S. estimates that the organization currently has about 120 chapters and 3,000 members in the United States.
Mr. Kelly, who lived last year in an apartment in Alphabet City and is staying with his parents while he looks for a new apartment, also spends ever more time on his computer and his cellphone, fielding calls from activists around the country. He tends his own personal Web site, too, walkingbutterfly.com, which he describes as “a blog to strategize and envision how we escape the institutions which clip our wings.”
Recent items on the site included news of a forthcoming union strike against the Iraq war; a video, “Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene”; and a link to an article about superdelegates who might support Barack Obama.
“If this is true, it would be very relieving and good — the age of the Bushes and Clintonian Democrats seriously needs to end,” Mr. Kelly wrote on his Web site about the article.
“Obama’s policies are not what I want,” he said, “but the language that he’s using, I think the progressive movement can take that same language and build a popular movement around it.”
Just as opposition to the Vietnam War energized the young radicals of the ’60s, the war in Iraq has proved to be a major catalyst for Mr. Kelly and his peers.
“When the United States invaded Iraq, I remember sitting in a classroom and some teachers came in and put the news on a television,” Mr. Kelly said. “I was sitting by the window and the TV was just going on about ‘shock and awe’ and I couldn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense.
“I just remember at that moment thinking that the United States had attacked a third world country for no reason, and that I was on the wrong side of the line. And it consciously clicked in my mind that I never wanted to be on that side of the line again.”
Through a Lens of Politics
The line between Mr. Kelly’s activism and the rest of his life has blurred, as it has for many deeply committed people. Even his main escapes from politics — hikes in Prospect and Central Parks or in the Appalachian Mountains — are often spent talking issues with like-minded friends.
In explaining his deep focus, Mr. Kelly gave one of his considered pauses, then leaned forward in his chair to put a little distance between himself and the cluster of noisy high school students behind him.
“Have you seen ‘The Matrix’?” he asked. “Do you know the scene with the red pill and the blue pill? You choose one or the other, and then you fall down the rabbit hole. It’s kind of like that, I think. Everyone sees the world through a different lens. For me, I guess that lens is of politics.”
Such dedication is not easy to sustain unaided. Mr. Kelly has several mentors, including Michael Albert, a founder of the S.D.S. chapter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who now oversees an array of radical magazines and Web sites for a group called Z Communications. (“The spirit of resistance lives,” the Z Web site declares.) Mr. Kelly sought out Mr. Albert a few years ago, and they now talk to each other frequently.
Mr. Albert, who lives on Cape Cod, sounded amused rather than rueful when describing the differences between the radicals of his day and those of Mr. Kelly’s.
“All that was required in the old days,” Mr. Albert said, “was to point out the causes of pain and suffering — which was the system — and that could instantly be converted to anger and then channeled into activism. Now, you point out how bad things are, and everybody already knows it. So it’s not cynicism we’re up against, it’s reasoned disillusionment. And Brian and some of the others are very good at countering that.”
•
Perhaps the most powerful emotion that sustains Mr. Kelly is hope, an emotion that his radical forebears, for all their differences in style, would find remarkably familiar.
“I am optimistic for the future, very optimistic, actually,” said Mr. Kelly, who plans to continue his activism after graduation. “Youth movements around global warming are everywhere, and are going to explode in the next year. I think that organizations working to end the war in Iraq are going to see a tremendous surge in membership.
“The empire that Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich and all those Republican strategists and pollsters and leaders built in the last 40 years is going to blow up in their faces, and they’re really scared.” he continued. “I mean, I actually think that’s going to happen.”
One on the rise of haggling
Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone
By MATT RICHTEL
SAN FRANCISCO — Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling.
A bargaining culture once confined largely to car showrooms and jewelry stores is taking root in major stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and Home Depot, as well as mom-and-pop operations.
Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing.
The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable.
“We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot.
In the last year, she said, the store has adopted an “entrepreneurial spirit” campaign to give salespeople and managers more latitude on prices in order to retain customers.
The sluggish economy is punctuating a cultural shift enabled by wired consumers accustomed to comparing prices and bargaining online, said Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School.
Haggling was once common before department stores began setting fixed prices in the 1850s. But the shift to bargaining in malls and on Main Street is a considerable change from even 10 years ago, Ms. Koehn said, when studies showed that consumers did not like to bargain and did not consider themselves good at it. “Call it the eBay phenomenon,” Ms. Koehn said.
“The recession is helping to push these seedlings to the surface,” she added. “It’s a real turnabout on the part of the buyer and the seller.”
John D. Morris, an apparel industry analyst for Wachovia, said that the ailing economy was not necessarily forcing all retailers to negotiate. But he says he believes that when there is an opportunity for negotiation, the shopper has the upper hand.
“This is one of the periods where the customer is empowered,” Mr. Morris said. “The retailer knows that the customer is enduring tough times — and is more willing to be the one who blinks first in that stare-down match.”
While tough times give people more incentive to change their behavior, it is the wealth of information about products made available on the Internet that gives consumers the know-how to try it. People now can quickly amass information on product availability and pricing, helping them develop strategies to get the best deal.
Michael Roskell, 33, a technology project manager from Jersey City, N.J., said he and a friend from high school periodically visit electronics stores. While Mr. Roskell expresses interest in buying an item, his friend acts as though he is dissatisfied with the price and threatens to leave.
“We play good cop, bad cop,” Mr. Roskell said.
In February, he said, the friends got $20 off a pair of $250 speakers at 6th Avenue Electronics in the New York area. Earlier, he and the same friend negotiated to buy two 46-inch high-definition Sony televisions at P. C. Richard & Son, a New York-area electronics chain.
List price: $4,300. Price after negotiation: $3,305.50.
“My parents never did this,” Mr. Roskell said. “But once you get it, you realize there’s a whole economy built on this.”
The strategy can even work when buying pants. At least it did for David Achee of Maplewood, N.J., who said he went to a Polo Ralph Lauren store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan last month and became interested in a pair of pants on the clearance rack for $75. He told the salesperson that he had seen a similar pair on the Internet for $65, adding that he thought the pair on the rack looked worn (even though he did not really think so). He got the pants for around $50, he said.
Among his other tactics, he said, he sometimes threatens to walk out of a store and go to a competitor, as he did recently to get a price break on a drum set at a music store. But, mainly, he relies on researching prices and coming armed with information — prices he finds on the Internet and in ads from competitors.
“You can negotiate, but you have to do your research,” said Mr. Achee, who works for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “When I’m bargaining, I’m bargaining with information.”
Information from the Internet helped Amber Kendall, 24, and her husband, Matt, when they shopped for a camera last October. The couple, who live in Boston, found the Canon camera they wanted online for $350, then used the Internet price to bargain with Ritz Camera, where the price was $400. Then they used the Ritz Camera offer to get the same price at Microcenter, where they preferred the warranty offer.
The technological influences are not just on the consumer side. Retail industry analysts said corporate retailers have begun using computer systems that let them do real-time pricing and profit analysis. Such systems tell a company what price it can set and still make money, and they illuminate the trade-off between lowering prices and raising sales volumes, said Andy Hargreaves, a retail industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.
Mr. Hargreaves did a little negotiating himself recently. At Best Buy last November, he bargained down the price of a 50-inch Samsung plasma television.
“They gave me a number. I gave them another number, and he gave me a final number,” he said, noting that he got a $100 price break in addition to the $200 sale discount. “A lot of people don’t realize you can go into Best Buy and ask them for a lower price.”
Frederick Stinchfield, 23, was a Best Buy salesman in Minnetonka, Minn., until last January. He said about one-quarter of customers tried to bargain. Much of the time, he said, he was able to oblige them, particularly in circumstances where a customer buying electronics (like a camera) also bought an accessory (like a camera bag) with a higher markup. He said the cash registers at Best Buy were set up so that prices could be reset at checkout.
Salespeople and managers had the latitude to drop prices, though some were more likely to do so than others.
His advice for bargainer hunters? “If you get denied once, go looking for someone else who looks nice,” said Mr. Stinchfield, who now works for the federal government in Washington. He added: “Come armed with information, and you will be rewarded.”
Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said that retailers willing to haggle were making a calculated gamble that acceding to lower prices means establishing customer loyalty. The retail mantra is “customer lifetime value,” meaning any single sale might not be that profitable, but an enduring relationship with a shopper would be.
There is just one problem with the theory, Ms. Raghubir said. It does not prove true over time.
Rather than retaining customers, the rise in haggling is making shoppers highly price-conscious and loyal ultimately to the least expensive offer, not to a brand or a retailer.
Home Depot, among others, begs to differ. Ms. Gallagher, the company spokeswoman, said that by allowing salespeople and store managers to make some pricing decisions, the company was creating a friendly environment that feels more like a local store than a monolithic corporate superstore. (She declined to say how much leeway individual salespeople or managers have.)
Ms. Raghubir says that retailers are realizing that customers are going to keep pressing them on price, because whatever reticence customers had about bargaining has evaporated.
“In the past, when you tried to get yourself a deal and it was an embarrassing thing — the kind of thing you did if you couldn’t afford to pay,” she said. “Now it’s about being a smart shopper.”
To the Ramparts (Gently)
By BEN GIBBERD
ONE March morning two years ago, a Pace University freshman named Brian Kelly and a dozen or so friends piled into a few cars and drove to the university’s Westchester County campus in Pleasantville, to attend a speech by former President Bill Clinton.
After the speech, which was part of the university’s centennial celebration, they submitted written questions for Mr. Clinton, as they had been invited to do.
Toward the end of the session, when they did not hear their questions asked of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Kelly tried a different tack.
“A friend and I got up and interrupted as a question about peace and democracy was being put to him by the university president,” he said. “And we said: ‘You’re a war criminal! What about Iraq and Bosnia and so forth?’ ”
Mr. Kelly and his friend were swiftly plucked from the auditorium by Secret Service agents and questioned for nearly an hour in a back room, he said.
Mr. Kelly speaks out a lot about politics these days, and not surprisingly. People like him are the new face of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical group that made headlines so often at the end of the 1960s.
On April 23, 1968 — 40 years ago next month — students at Columbia University, most notably S.D.S. members, took to the streets in the first major protest over the school’s plan to build a gym in Morningside Park; later in the spring, protesting the Vietnam War, the students seized several university buildings. By the time the demonstrators were forced out by the police, more than 700 students had been arrested and 150 had been hospitalized.
In the past few years, S.D.S. has re-emerged. But despite Mr. Kelly’s affiliation with the group and his actions during Mr. Clinton’s speech, he and other members of the new generation of S.D.S. approach politics in a strikingly different way from the firebrands of 1968. Mr. Kelly, for example, who spends much of his time hunched in front of his computer, sometimes sounds more like an earnest sociologist — the subject is his major — than a campus radical intent on scaling the ramparts.
“Society is made up of institutions, and institutions are built on consent,” Mr. Kelly said one recent morning during a wide-ranging conversation at a Starbucks cafe near Union Square. “And if you get people to say, ‘We withdraw our consent, we want new institutions, we want better policies,’ that’s how movements are built.”
The Stereotype, the Reality
“The mass media, with a little help from the older liberals, have painted a tyrannizing caricature of the ‘Student Rioter,’ ” the journalist Jack Newfield wrote in The New York Times in May 1969 in his review of “The Strawberry Statement,” James Simon Kunen’s account of the unrest at Columbia. “He has long dirty hair, an insatiable libido, and a four-letter word vocabulary. He is violent, irrational, anti-democratic.”
Sitting in Starbucks, Mr. Kelly, a clean-shaven, neatly dressed and highly composed 21-year old with close-cropped hair, hardly resembled the stereotypical radicals of 1968. Only the small pin on the lapel of his light brown jacket, depicting a bomb with a red line through it, and another on his shirt, reading “sds,” hinted at his politics.
He chose his words slowly and with a politician’s care, and his lean physique and wholesome demeanor suggested a track team member or an Eagle Scout — both of which Mr. Kelly was when he was growing up in Orange County, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city. His father is a computer programmer, his mother sells real estate, and both, he says, have been accepting of his political activities.
“They were a little hesitant after the Clinton thing, but they never asked me not to do anything,” Mr. Kelly said. “I think they understand.”
In high school, he was a student activist who engaged in what he described as “general liberal politics — blood drives, food drives, stuff around Darfur, that kind of thing.”
As a freshman at Pace’s main campus in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Kelly joined the school’s chapter of the Campus Anti-War Network, a national group opposed to the Iraq war. After S.D.S. was revived in January 2006 by two high school students, one from North Carolina, the other from Connecticut, the antiwar chapter became the Pace S.D.S. chapter. Other city schools with S.D.S. chapters include Queens College, New York University, Columbia University, Pratt Institute and New School University, most with about 25 members.
When the Pace chapter was born, Mr. Kelly’s activism really took off and he became, as he put it, “basically a full-time organizer” for the revived S.D.S. But when it comes to his attitude toward the violence of the ’60s, Mr. Kelly will never be mistaken for some of his predecessors.
“I actually think violent action isn’t radical at all,” he said firmly. “Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to change society. Violence doesn’t change society, and if it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, it’s not radical.” Mr. Kelly paused. “I don’t know what it is,” he added, “but it has nothing to do with what I want to do.”
Drama, Yes. Violence, No.
Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two years ago during a protest on Pace’s Manhattan campus, and once a year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither arrest led to any charges.
No charges grew out of Mr. Kelly’s brief face-off with Mr. Clinton either, although the encounter had its unnerving moments.
“We were about 100 feet or so away from the president,” Mr. Kelly recalled. “And it all happened so fast I don’t remember being scared — more kind of nervous. These guys in generic suits just came toward us.”
Although he and his friends were not arrested, Mr. Kelly said that the Secret Service agents who grilled him and his friend called them “clowns” and said they might be held for 72 hours and forced to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Their cars were also searched without their consent, Mr. Kelly said, and their S.D.S. colleagues were questioned.
(Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said of the episode, “We have great respect for individual freedoms, specifically freedom of speech, and do not set out to engage individuals who do not pose a threat to protectees. However, that determination in many cases cannot be made without simply speaking to people first.”)
Despite the events of that day, Mr. Kelly said he had never experienced hostility on his campus. “Disagreement among some people,” he acknowledged, “but it’s a New York City campus, so a lot of people are progressive. Or a lot of people are just disengaged with politics. I’d say those are the typical reactions.”
His main goal, he said, “isn’t to take over a building, it isn’t to block a recruitment center. It isn’t to do any of these tactics that people kind of zero in on from the ‘60s. Our biggest goal is to get more people who are politicized, who are progressive, who want to join in a mass movement to help change the world.” Amid the chatter of the cafe and the piped-in music of Sheryl Crow and Frank Sinatra, Mr. Kelly’s phrase hung in the air, a momentary echo from another, more idealistic age.
Cerebral Activism
Once upon a time, radical politics was a physical, messy and often violent undertaking.
“You’re playing with fire and fire burns, baby,” Mr. Kunen wrote in “The Strawberry Statement.” “I mean this. I mean it well. Hear me: you’re going to get human or your stinking bodies are going up against the wall. I don’t get mad easily but I’m mad now and I’m going to stay mad until things change.”
These days, such undertakings are much more reasoned and cerebral.
“The majority of what I do is just talking to people — it’s about consciousness-raising,” Mr. Kelly said as he nursed his coffee. “A lot of people have this view of radical revolutionaries who want to overthrow this or that, but that’s not how society works.”
Instead of confrontations, he said, he and his colleagues are focused of persuading a critical mass of people to join them.
“It’s getting 50, 60, 100 million people,” he said. “It’s not small groups of people taking action. It’s masses of people taking action.”
This grass-roots approach means that today’s S.D.S. spends much of its time getting the word out.
Mr. Kelly, for example, works on the national S.D.S. Web site, studentsforademocraticsociety.org, which was created by Tom Good, a prominent activist from the ’60s. Mr. Kelly also holds meetings on campus and travels to other colleges and high schools to help advise new chapters. S.D.S. estimates that the organization currently has about 120 chapters and 3,000 members in the United States.
Mr. Kelly, who lived last year in an apartment in Alphabet City and is staying with his parents while he looks for a new apartment, also spends ever more time on his computer and his cellphone, fielding calls from activists around the country. He tends his own personal Web site, too, walkingbutterfly.com, which he describes as “a blog to strategize and envision how we escape the institutions which clip our wings.”
Recent items on the site included news of a forthcoming union strike against the Iraq war; a video, “Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene”; and a link to an article about superdelegates who might support Barack Obama.
“If this is true, it would be very relieving and good — the age of the Bushes and Clintonian Democrats seriously needs to end,” Mr. Kelly wrote on his Web site about the article.
“Obama’s policies are not what I want,” he said, “but the language that he’s using, I think the progressive movement can take that same language and build a popular movement around it.”
Just as opposition to the Vietnam War energized the young radicals of the ’60s, the war in Iraq has proved to be a major catalyst for Mr. Kelly and his peers.
“When the United States invaded Iraq, I remember sitting in a classroom and some teachers came in and put the news on a television,” Mr. Kelly said. “I was sitting by the window and the TV was just going on about ‘shock and awe’ and I couldn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense.
“I just remember at that moment thinking that the United States had attacked a third world country for no reason, and that I was on the wrong side of the line. And it consciously clicked in my mind that I never wanted to be on that side of the line again.”
Through a Lens of Politics
The line between Mr. Kelly’s activism and the rest of his life has blurred, as it has for many deeply committed people. Even his main escapes from politics — hikes in Prospect and Central Parks or in the Appalachian Mountains — are often spent talking issues with like-minded friends.
In explaining his deep focus, Mr. Kelly gave one of his considered pauses, then leaned forward in his chair to put a little distance between himself and the cluster of noisy high school students behind him.
“Have you seen ‘The Matrix’?” he asked. “Do you know the scene with the red pill and the blue pill? You choose one or the other, and then you fall down the rabbit hole. It’s kind of like that, I think. Everyone sees the world through a different lens. For me, I guess that lens is of politics.”
Such dedication is not easy to sustain unaided. Mr. Kelly has several mentors, including Michael Albert, a founder of the S.D.S. chapter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who now oversees an array of radical magazines and Web sites for a group called Z Communications. (“The spirit of resistance lives,” the Z Web site declares.) Mr. Kelly sought out Mr. Albert a few years ago, and they now talk to each other frequently.
Mr. Albert, who lives on Cape Cod, sounded amused rather than rueful when describing the differences between the radicals of his day and those of Mr. Kelly’s.
“All that was required in the old days,” Mr. Albert said, “was to point out the causes of pain and suffering — which was the system — and that could instantly be converted to anger and then channeled into activism. Now, you point out how bad things are, and everybody already knows it. So it’s not cynicism we’re up against, it’s reasoned disillusionment. And Brian and some of the others are very good at countering that.”
•
Perhaps the most powerful emotion that sustains Mr. Kelly is hope, an emotion that his radical forebears, for all their differences in style, would find remarkably familiar.
“I am optimistic for the future, very optimistic, actually,” said Mr. Kelly, who plans to continue his activism after graduation. “Youth movements around global warming are everywhere, and are going to explode in the next year. I think that organizations working to end the war in Iraq are going to see a tremendous surge in membership.
“The empire that Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich and all those Republican strategists and pollsters and leaders built in the last 40 years is going to blow up in their faces, and they’re really scared.” he continued. “I mean, I actually think that’s going to happen.”
One on the rise of haggling
Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone
By MATT RICHTEL
SAN FRANCISCO — Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling.
A bargaining culture once confined largely to car showrooms and jewelry stores is taking root in major stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and Home Depot, as well as mom-and-pop operations.
Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing.
The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable.
“We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot.
In the last year, she said, the store has adopted an “entrepreneurial spirit” campaign to give salespeople and managers more latitude on prices in order to retain customers.
The sluggish economy is punctuating a cultural shift enabled by wired consumers accustomed to comparing prices and bargaining online, said Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School.
Haggling was once common before department stores began setting fixed prices in the 1850s. But the shift to bargaining in malls and on Main Street is a considerable change from even 10 years ago, Ms. Koehn said, when studies showed that consumers did not like to bargain and did not consider themselves good at it. “Call it the eBay phenomenon,” Ms. Koehn said.
“The recession is helping to push these seedlings to the surface,” she added. “It’s a real turnabout on the part of the buyer and the seller.”
John D. Morris, an apparel industry analyst for Wachovia, said that the ailing economy was not necessarily forcing all retailers to negotiate. But he says he believes that when there is an opportunity for negotiation, the shopper has the upper hand.
“This is one of the periods where the customer is empowered,” Mr. Morris said. “The retailer knows that the customer is enduring tough times — and is more willing to be the one who blinks first in that stare-down match.”
While tough times give people more incentive to change their behavior, it is the wealth of information about products made available on the Internet that gives consumers the know-how to try it. People now can quickly amass information on product availability and pricing, helping them develop strategies to get the best deal.
Michael Roskell, 33, a technology project manager from Jersey City, N.J., said he and a friend from high school periodically visit electronics stores. While Mr. Roskell expresses interest in buying an item, his friend acts as though he is dissatisfied with the price and threatens to leave.
“We play good cop, bad cop,” Mr. Roskell said.
In February, he said, the friends got $20 off a pair of $250 speakers at 6th Avenue Electronics in the New York area. Earlier, he and the same friend negotiated to buy two 46-inch high-definition Sony televisions at P. C. Richard & Son, a New York-area electronics chain.
List price: $4,300. Price after negotiation: $3,305.50.
“My parents never did this,” Mr. Roskell said. “But once you get it, you realize there’s a whole economy built on this.”
The strategy can even work when buying pants. At least it did for David Achee of Maplewood, N.J., who said he went to a Polo Ralph Lauren store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan last month and became interested in a pair of pants on the clearance rack for $75. He told the salesperson that he had seen a similar pair on the Internet for $65, adding that he thought the pair on the rack looked worn (even though he did not really think so). He got the pants for around $50, he said.
Among his other tactics, he said, he sometimes threatens to walk out of a store and go to a competitor, as he did recently to get a price break on a drum set at a music store. But, mainly, he relies on researching prices and coming armed with information — prices he finds on the Internet and in ads from competitors.
“You can negotiate, but you have to do your research,” said Mr. Achee, who works for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “When I’m bargaining, I’m bargaining with information.”
Information from the Internet helped Amber Kendall, 24, and her husband, Matt, when they shopped for a camera last October. The couple, who live in Boston, found the Canon camera they wanted online for $350, then used the Internet price to bargain with Ritz Camera, where the price was $400. Then they used the Ritz Camera offer to get the same price at Microcenter, where they preferred the warranty offer.
The technological influences are not just on the consumer side. Retail industry analysts said corporate retailers have begun using computer systems that let them do real-time pricing and profit analysis. Such systems tell a company what price it can set and still make money, and they illuminate the trade-off between lowering prices and raising sales volumes, said Andy Hargreaves, a retail industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities.
Mr. Hargreaves did a little negotiating himself recently. At Best Buy last November, he bargained down the price of a 50-inch Samsung plasma television.
“They gave me a number. I gave them another number, and he gave me a final number,” he said, noting that he got a $100 price break in addition to the $200 sale discount. “A lot of people don’t realize you can go into Best Buy and ask them for a lower price.”
Frederick Stinchfield, 23, was a Best Buy salesman in Minnetonka, Minn., until last January. He said about one-quarter of customers tried to bargain. Much of the time, he said, he was able to oblige them, particularly in circumstances where a customer buying electronics (like a camera) also bought an accessory (like a camera bag) with a higher markup. He said the cash registers at Best Buy were set up so that prices could be reset at checkout.
Salespeople and managers had the latitude to drop prices, though some were more likely to do so than others.
His advice for bargainer hunters? “If you get denied once, go looking for someone else who looks nice,” said Mr. Stinchfield, who now works for the federal government in Washington. He added: “Come armed with information, and you will be rewarded.”
Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said that retailers willing to haggle were making a calculated gamble that acceding to lower prices means establishing customer loyalty. The retail mantra is “customer lifetime value,” meaning any single sale might not be that profitable, but an enduring relationship with a shopper would be.
There is just one problem with the theory, Ms. Raghubir said. It does not prove true over time.
Rather than retaining customers, the rise in haggling is making shoppers highly price-conscious and loyal ultimately to the least expensive offer, not to a brand or a retailer.
Home Depot, among others, begs to differ. Ms. Gallagher, the company spokeswoman, said that by allowing salespeople and store managers to make some pricing decisions, the company was creating a friendly environment that feels more like a local store than a monolithic corporate superstore. (She declined to say how much leeway individual salespeople or managers have.)
Ms. Raghubir says that retailers are realizing that customers are going to keep pressing them on price, because whatever reticence customers had about bargaining has evaporated.
“In the past, when you tried to get yourself a deal and it was an embarrassing thing — the kind of thing you did if you couldn’t afford to pay,” she said. “Now it’s about being a smart shopper.”
