TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?

[barbara100]

Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine addresses this connection between
fear and racism. Trying to analyze America's obsession with guns, compared
to that other countries, he proposes the idea that white Americans are so
afraid and so trigger happy because they've traditionally been oppressors.
First Natives, then Africans. And oppressors are naturally fearful because
the oppressed eventually rise up and fight back. As they did in Watts. And
as they're doing now in the Middle-east.


--- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btopenworld.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2004 6:26 AM
Subject: RE: TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?


> Holdt makes a connection between racism and fear, which is another way
> of saying, as I did in my first post, that the culture clash isn't one
> of equals. The 'haves' fear the 'have-nots'; and the 'culture clash' is
> about power as much as anything. While reading the Watts essay I've been
> thinking more and more of Orwell's Wigan Pier, another (more ambitious)
> attempt to describe working-class poverty to a middle-class audience. It
> was this that I had in mind when I equated documentary realism to
> street-dirt: one purpose of the text is to offer the reader/tourist some
> kind of vicarious thrill. Avoiding this relationship between reader and
> text is key to the Watts text, I think, which is why the Rodia passage
> 'interrupts' the street-dirt description: the signifiers of poverty are
> transformed into something else.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
> > Behalf Of Otto
> > Sent: 26 September 2004 12:44
> > To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> > Subject: Re: TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?
> >
> > I think this misunderstanding is inevitable. It has to do with the
> fact
> > that
> > the white middle-class isn't exposed to those "terms of strict
> reality"
> > like
> > "disease, (...) failure, violence and death" which the overwhelming
> part
> > of
> > the blacks cannot afford to ignore. But it has been (it is?) American
> > reality:
> > http://www.american-pictures.com/english/jacob/luck.htm
> >
> > Otto
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btopenworld.com>
> > To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Sent: Saturday, September 25, 2004 4:54 PM
> > Subject: TPPM Watts: (9) Culture clash?
> >
> >
> > > "The two cultures do not understand each other, though white values
> are
> > > displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens ..."
> > >
>
>
>
>