CoL49 (5) Cammed Out

[Robin Landseadel]

 From "A Journey Into The Mind Of Watts":

	While 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. The two cultures
	do not understand each other, though white values are
	displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens, and
	though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to
	miss from atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must
	drive at least twice every working day. Somehow it occurs to
	very few of them to leave at the Imperial Highway exit for a
	change, go east instead of west only a few blocks, and take a
	look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of beginning. But
	Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted miles
	further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.

	http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/watts.html

	She debated, driving north, whether to stop off at home on the
	way to Berkeley or coming back. As it turned out she missed the
	exit for Kinneret and that solved it.
	PC 80