Watts article

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: Watts article
>
> And, as always, the article is specific to a particular time and place,
>

Couldn't disagree more. One has to be very blind eyed to read this as
limited to Watts 1965-66 while this "pocket of bitter reality" is only one
among others all over the land:

"The verdict, to no one's surprise, cleared the cop
of all criminal responsibility. It had been an accident."

"(...) the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized
folly--the economy of the area in fact depending on it--the black culture is
stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence
and death, which the whites have mostly chosen--and can afford--to ignore."

"In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for
example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from
a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness,
violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are."

Of course there's no "simplistic analogy between race and class" but to
claim that the race problem was/is not primary a social problem, a problem
of property, money and class is just as wrong, given the statistics. And in
this, as the Guardian-article shows, little has changed between the sixties
and today.

Otto