VLVL(6) Ch 10 Commentary

Peter Petto ppetto at apk.net
Wed Dec 2 13:09:05 CST 1998


Through the eyes of a daughter looking to learn about a mother she's never
known, this chapter connects the activities of a revolutionary cell during
its glory days to its members past and their present. Ditzah and Zipi show
their roots in New York hubris and their present suburban circumstance:
divorced, comfortable, and nostalgic.

I felt a real sense of excitement as 24fps's equipment, tactics, and goals
were described -- the same rush of adrenaline I've felt during moments of
(what seemed at the time like) social upheaval and political friction.

The so-far-beyond-the-point-that-it's-ridiculous^max arguments about theory
theory theory righteous theory really are a chuckle. I always know that if
the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party USA ever got
within a football fields length of concurrence on anything, that the
Spartacist Youth League would show up and nanoseconds later you'd hear
nothing but shouting and the echoes of decades of shouting.

Righting serious wrongs is the purported purpose, and never far from view.
But everyone, even the police, seem to have only one thing on their plate:
the hope of getting laid.

The tension that propels this high wired act is the balance between the
centripetal force of sex & drugs and the momentum of all the individuals'
vectors of desire. Organizations that don't have paychecks for glue must
rely on a sense of common cause. In practice it's provided by charisma,
charming each particle into its own strange but attractive groove. Though
the chant is one of opposition, the difference between the greed opposed
and the appetite within is obscured is obscured from the camera's sight. 



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