TPPM Watts: (29) Anniversary, mythmaking

[Paul Nightingale]

"As the summer warms them up, last August's riot is being remembered
less as chaos and more as art. Some talk now of a balletic quality to it
..."

Brigitta Loesche-Schelle, Reparations to Poverty; Domestic Policy in
America Ten Years After the Great Society (1995)

"Differing interpretations emerged from ideological premises, but also
from the data available. No riot could be termed purely racial. While in
some cities looters with 'remarkable discipline' stormed only white
stores, and arsonists avoided buildings inhabited by blacks, other
rioters amazed onlookers with their indiscriminate violence and theft
against whites and blacks alike. Poverty could not have been the
exclusive motivation behind all riots equally, either. Two of the four
biggest riots took place in the cities of Watts and Detroit whose slums
were rated among the least run-down ghettos in the nation, having the
lowest incidence of substandard housing and relative economic vitality.
Not even the average rioter was conclusive proof of discrimination or
poverty as a motive. He was somewhat better educated, tended not to be a
recent immigrant from the South and had a similar subemployment pattern
as the overall ghetto population. 

"A closer look at the rioter, the 'new ghetto man,' found him to be more
distinctive from non-rioters in his attitudes than in his actual social.
position. He was politically better informed and less satisfied with his
condition. If there was one cause of riots most writers could agree
upon, it was this frustration of rising expectations that led to a
subjective sense of deprivation even in the light of small objective
advances of the poor. Some would argue that rising expectations are
indispensable and inherent to progress, but other voices swelled that
saw no progress in the disillusion. and disruption caused in the pursuit
of ever-growing expectations. One conservative likened the futility of
trying to ever catch up to these expectations with social programs to a
"mechanical rabbit at the race track." (146)

And one shouldn't forget the direction taken by contemporary
history-writing: 'history from below' (which might be subtitled 'a
journey into the mind of working people') began in the 1950s; its
influence is evident in both the Watts essay and the Luddite essay some
20 years later, not to mention VL. (If nothing else, this should make us
pause before saying the Watts essay, as current-affairs journalism,
investigative or otherwise, is on its own among Pynchon's writing).

See, for an overview: Harvey Kaye, "History and Social Theory: Notes on
the Contribution of British Marxist Historiography to Our Understanding
of Class" in Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Vol 20,
(1983)

"This contribution to historical studies should not be underestimated,
for it influences not only the writing of history, as a corrective to
the historical studies written from the perspective of the elites, it
also influences the conception of the historical process that
accompanies history from the perspective of the elites. That is, history
from below, or bottom up, has restored 'life' to those who have been
viewed for so long as 'dead.' Thus, it has recognized the lower classes
as active participants in history's making -- sometimes accommodating
themselves to, sometimes resisting or even rebelling against, the ruling
order, rather than merely being its passive victims." (183)

Loesche-Schelle is describing what Thompson called the moral economy of
the crowd (as opposed to the pejorative 'mob'). See: "The Moral Economy
of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (first published, 1971)
in Customs in Common (1991).

And cf: "... a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops away from the
center of the action, a scattering of The Man's power, either with real
incidents or false alarms."

Such recollection (or "mythmaking") is, of course, a form of
history-writing.