Why don’t we protest?

[Otto]

Why don’t we protest?
Apr 11, 2006, by Mary Grabar

(...)
What is the job description for “activist”? It includes a rejection of 
everything that has come before the “activist” has discovered his own 
profundity—usually by the age of eighteen. Often this youthful wisdom 
matches that of his Marxist teacher. An activist sees violence in a 
positive light, as a sort of aesthetic display. But most activists live 
far away from such violence. From their offices they just like to write 
about the redemptive qualities of violence as Norman Mailer did in his 
The White Negro. In this little known 1957 pamphlet, Mailer presents the 
“Negro” male as the new model for the rebellious white male. It was the 
black male’s “authenticity,” manifested by his propensity to violence, 
that Mailer praised. Thomas Pynchon, literary darling of the 1960s 
radicals, similarly equated a rejection of traditional values through 
violence with manhood.  For the readers of the New York Times Magazine, 
in their penthouse suites, he presents them with his insights in a 1966 
article titled “A Journey into the Mind of Watts”:

As this summer warms them [the residents of Watts] up, last August’s 
riot is being remembered less as chaos and more as art.  Some talk now 
of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful drawing of cops 
away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man’s power, 
either with real incidents or false alarms.

In this article Pynchon shows his empathy for disaffected residents, 
“boys who like to wear Malcolm hats, or Afro haircuts,” who reject the 
job-seeking advice from counselors at government-sponsored programs. For 
Pynchon, “Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to 
communicate, or to be who you really are.”
(...)
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/marygrabar/2006/04/11/193273.html

	

	
		
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