VLVL2: Pisks Privileged?

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 09:28, Terrance wrote:
> davemarc wrote:
> > 
> > Just wondering: Does anyone besides jbor and Terrance think that the Pisks
> > are from privileged backgrounds? If so, on what basis?
> 
> 
> What do you mean by  "privileged"? I'm not gonna speak for Rob here, but
> I never said the Pisks were the daughters of the Capitalist Class.  My
> recollection of this thread is that it was, for the most part, not a
> very constructive or productive one. I won't attribute this anything in
> particular, but I think that one of the wrenches in the works was
> language and terminology. I don't much care for terms like "Middle
> Class," "Privileged," "children of the surfing class," so on, but I do
> remember agreeing with some of your more insightful arguments (ethnic
> and cultural characteristics, NYC/California, although I didn't agree
> with the significance you attributed to the "act of naming"). 

I generally agree with this.

> 
> Violence, the social scientists have determined, has been a hallmark of
> twentieth-century America, and it has been a formative preoccupation
> with those who grew up during the period marked by Auschwitz, Hiroshima,
> Southern terrorism, Vietnam, assassinations, urban rebellions, police
> riots, and governmental repression. Kenneth Keniston found that his
> Vietnam Summer Interviewees were immersed in violence from earliest
> childhood: "In the lives of these young radicals, as in much of their
> generation, the threats of inner and outer violence are fused, each
> exciting the other" to the point where " the issue of violence is to
> this generation what the issue of sex was to the Victorian world";
> another survey of SDSers in 1966 found a "special way in which they have
> experienced violence, both directly and vicariously" and determined that
> " this special and intense preoccupation seems to be a necessary element
> in comprehending the predominance of violent dystopian futures
> [projected in essays] among SDS youth." 
> But *origninated* violence characterized none of the early activities;
> they were all victims. Hayden, Potter, and others beaten in the South,
> Gritlin, Gizzard, Booth, and countless others jailed for civil rights
> demonstrations, ERAPers harassed and arrested by local police and
> vigilantes, antiwar marches beaten and gassed, students at Berkeley, in
> several Black schools, and elsewhere clubbed, kicked, shot at, and
> arrested by police. Even with the rise of resistance, in the previous
> fall offensive violence was characteristic only of the Sopt The Drat
> Week and Rusk demonstrations, and then limited to minor property damage
> and bottle throwing; the students at the Pentagon, at Wisconsin,
> Indiana, Brooklyn, Oberlin, San Jose State, and the rest were initially
> victims of police charges, Mace, and tear gas. 
> 
> But resistance taught certain lessons ... Out of resistance, then, there
> grew an understanding of power, an appreciation of the values of
> confrontation, and thence a willingness to initiate violence. 
> 
> Sale, SDS

Admiitedly I haven't read SDS but my impression from excepts  is that
Sale tends to over-dramatize things a little.
> 

> BTW, UHURU may be pacifist on paper or in Australia or Africa (I don't
> know), but in the USA they have been involved in violent confrontations
> with police and others for decades. 

In Vineland they seem completely OPPORTUNIST if one judges by their
relations with the white student radicals. Shaming poor (totally
confused, if not downright stupid) Rex into giving them his flashy
wheels. But who says art must imitate life?

I knew a 60s radical with a Porsche 911. he bought it used for about
$6000.