Watts article

[Malignd]

Having just read the Watts article again (first time
in a while), what was most striking to me is how poor
it is as a piece of journalism — biased, subjective,
lacking in rigor, filled with crude generalities about
both black and white culture.

Most disturbing is a hack’s trick he uses numerous
times of phony quotes.  E.g., this, from "others,"
(baby):

… -- or, as others are putting it:  "Make any big
trouble, baby, The Man just going to come back in and
shoot you, like last time."

This – including the “man,” attributed to "They,"
assumedly speaking all at once:

"There was a time," they’ll tell you, "you’d say,
'Take off the badge baby, and let’s settle it.'  I
mean, he wouldn’t, but you’d say it.  But since
August, man, the way I feel, hell with the badge –
just take off that gun."

This from somewhere or other:  

"Time was," you’ll hear, "man used to go right in,
very mean, pick maybe one kid out of the crowd he
figured was the troublemaker, try to bust him down in
front of everybody.  But now the people start yelling
back, how they don’t want no more of that, all of a
sudden The Man gets very meek."

This doubly qualified ("likely"; "on the order of")
"quote" from "them":  

You are likely to hear from them wisdom on the order
of:  "Life has a way of surprising us, simply as a
function of time.  Even if all you do is stand on the
street corner and wait."  

This from "others," or "they," including the "cats":  

Others remember it in terms of music: through much of
the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable
empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on
certain nights:  everybody knowing what to do and when
to do it without needing a word or a signal:  "You
could go up to anybody, the cats, could be in the
middle of burning down a store or something, but
they’d tell you, explain very calm, just what they
were doing, what they were going to do next.  And
that’s what they’d do; man, nobody had to give
orders."

As well, the social analysis is both remarkably
shallow and painful to read, trafficking in ironies
subtle as a hammer to the skull; e.g., this trenchant
bit of telling it like it is:

"But in the white culture outside, in that creepy
world full of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream
insults at one another only when the windows are up;
of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the
standing order regardless of whose executive back one
may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest
caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise
as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much
well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to
understand how Watts may truly feel about violence."

Or this:

"The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is
conditioned to believe so much in escape, escape as an
integral part of life,  because the white L.A. Scene
makes accessible to him so many different forms of it.
 But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality,
looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some
calm, some relaxation.  And beer or wine is good
enough for that.  Especially good at the end of a bad
day."  (Tonight, let it be Lowenbrau.)

Or:

"But he was busted all the same, perhaps because
Whitey, who knows how to get everything he wants, no
longer has fisticuffs available as a technique, and
sees no reason why everybody shouldn't go the Niceguy
route.  If you are thinking maybe there is a virility
hang-up there, too, that putting a Negro into a
correctional institution for fighting is also some
kind of neutering operation, well, you might have
something there, who knows?"

Perhaps.  Maybe.  Who knows?  Baby.






		
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