TPPM Watts: (13) All kinds of scrap and waste

[Paul Nightingale]

"An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years ... converting a
little piece of the neighbourhood along 107th Street into the famous
Watts Towers."

I shan't duplicate Roger's post on "the famous Watts Towers". All I wish
to do here is note the narrative function of this particular passage.
Certainly the idea of found objects as art appeals to the author of MMV,
and one might even begin to think about the more sophisticated
multi-narrative (VL, M&D) as "a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris".

However, in the Watts essay, paragraph 9 sees the reference to Rodia and
the Watts Tower interrupt the description of poverty, much as the
extended description of Raceriotland itself has marked a change of
direction.

An implicit assumption of political reformism is that the poor need to
be rescued from a culture of poverty--which thesis necessarily blames
the poor themselves for their condition.

See: Arnold Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology and Public Policy in America
(1988)

"It is a simple and powerful concept: The poor are responsible for their
own condition; they have weak values, which differ from the superior
values held by the successful; these weak values constitute a subculture
of poverty, which is passed on from generation to generation; the only
way to help the poor is to get them to change their values; external
situational interventions will not do any good, because the problem
originates within the individual and the group." (17-18)

In particular, the culture-of-poverty thesis is associated with Oscar
Lewis.

See: Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image
of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (1997)

"Unlike most social scientists, Lewis was a pathologist. He believed
that within the lower class in a modern society there existed a segment
of the population that had a pathological culture, a culture of poverty.
In 1959, taking seriously the relationship between culture and
personality, he argued in his study of the poor in Mexico City that
'most of the characters in this volume are badly damaged human beings.'
Unlike most pathologists who delved into culture, Lewis emphasized the
enduring, intractable nature of the pathological subculture. He
understood culture as 'a design for living which is passed down from
generation to generation.' The poor, he believed, developed designs for
living in poverty that they passed on to their children through the
socialization process. By adapting to poverty, the poor, besides being
damaged, effectively closed the door on social mobility. 

"Within the social sciences, Lewis's culture of poverty theory ignited a
fierce opposition. Anti-pathologists rushed to put forth competing
images of the poor. In a study of lower-class black families in
Washington, D.C., Hylan Lewis argued that the poor shared mainstream
values. Remaining true to his Chicago School training, Lewis argued that
poor children fell prey to the social environment. While Hylan Lewis did
much to oppose the culture of poverty argument, Elliot Liebow, one of
the researchers on Lewis's project, insisted that the poor were well
aware of the values of the mainstream. One of Lewis's intellectual
allies, Elizabeth Herzog, an administrator with the Children's Bureau of
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, wrote a series of
articles defending the behavior of the poor. In one, she defended
unmarried mothers against the charges of low intelligence, being from
broken homes, and suffering psychological problems.

[...]

"In the heat of the struggle against the culture of poverty theory,
class-conscious liberals began to counter the notion of permanent
pathology by emphasizing the strengths of the poor."

[...]

"The class-conscious liberals' view of the poor as resilient if damaged
was more than a defensive response to the idea of pathology as
permanent. Rather it was a crucial assumption that underpinned their
class-based theories of social change and policy recommendations. In the
late 1950s and early 1960s, the advocates of the poor, as scholars have
long noted, believed that poor people must step up and participate in
the institutions that governed them. If the poor were permanently and
severely damaged, they would not be able to participate." (142-144)

This struggle over the meaning of culture is an important context to the
watts essay; not least one might begin to appreciate, as Pynchon did,
the importance of considering the way class and race intersect
discursively.