TPPM Watts: (5) Malefactors talking

[Paul Nightingale]

"A Negro Teen Post--part of the L.A. poverty war's
keep-them-out-of-the-streets effort--has had all its windows busted ..."

The following overview is taken from: David Zarefsky, President
Johnson's War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History (1986)

"The decision to call the antipoverty effort a war was made at the
Johnson ranch during the Christmas holidays of 1963. Although the choice
of language might seem casual, Johnson maintained in his memoirs that it
was deliberate. He wrote, 'The military image carried with it
connotations of victories and defeats that could prove misleading. But I
wanted to rally the nation, to sound a call to arms which would stir
people in the government, in private industry, and on the campuses to
lend their talents to a massive effort to eliminate the evil.' His
intentions were publicly announced in his first State of the Union
message, on January 8, 1964. Perhaps the most newsworthy element of the
speech was the president's confident assertion that 'this
administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty.' 

"Instinctively, the president sensed the need to inspire and rally the
nation and found in the war metaphor the means to that end. Aroused by
President Kennedy's untimely death, many Americans longed for redemption
through sacrifice. The Harris Poll reported on December 30, 1963, that
Americans massively rejected political extremism and also that many had
'an individual sense of guilt for not having worked more for tolerance
toward others.' Enlisting in the national service during wartime might
expiate that guilt. Before the military conflict in Vietnam called into
question the patriotism of war, the administration could use war against
an ancient, impersonal foe as the means by which to cater to the
national need." (21-22)

"For the most part, arguments about the psychological effect of promises
upon the poor did not derive from information supplied by the poor
themselves. As was typical of the War on Poverty, the poor were an issue
about which others spoke. There is only limited evidence of the actual
effect of the promises upon the poor. For example, the Los Angeles Riot
Study, following the Watts riot, indicated that 42 percent of the blacks
in the Watts area thought that the poverty program would 'help a lot'
and another 45 percent believed that it would help 'a little'. Data of
this sort were scanty and unclear as to their meaning; this fact,
however, did not deter speakers." (70-71)

Hence the importance of speaking to people, which is what Pynchon has
set out to do in the Watts essay. However, at the Teen Post, "the young
lady in charge" wants to "talk with the malefactors, involve them, see
if they couldn't work out the problem together". Such is the redundant
language of reformism: "talk with" means persuading them they're wrong.

Opposition to the War on Poverty came from those who resented public
expenditure. See the discussion of the Model Cities Programme in Flawed
Giant: Lynden Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973 (Robert Dallek, 1998,
317ff). Meanwhile, Brigitta Loesche-Schelle (in Reparations to Poverty:
Domestic Policy in America Ten Years After the Great Society, 1995) has
argued that public spending on poverty increased, not in the mid-60s,
but the mid-70s. Damned statistics, huh! One obvious factor would be the
war in Vietnam, encouraging the view that the War on Poverty was
ideological as much as anything else.

Nb--I hasten to add that references above (and elsewhere) are simply to
texts I have to hand as I draft this. At the risk of stating the
obvious, this is an introduction to the Watts essay, no more.