Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins

[Ian Livingston]

> Surely we need to expose bad government, bad
> history, bad business, bad education... But exposure, the camera is a
> gun, the mob is a statement, protest is a position, has inherent vices
> that we must guard against. Exposure is a limited means not an end.
> And it is hardly the only method people can employ to resist tyranny
> and corruption and all manner of abuses of power. The sit-in, the
> staying put at the work station, but stopping or slowing down or
> sicking-out production, is a form of control. Give it with exposure
> and new forms of control will relace it. see Zinn PHUS

Okay, I'll bite.

Yes and no.

Exposing bad stuff is important, focussing on bad stuff perpetuates
it. Resistance increases force. What needs exposure is
solution-oriented thinking. To quietly turn away from the temptations
of merely personal gain and choose to work for the good of all
includes working for what is good for the self. The error of
interpreting Bartleby as a sort of hero makes someone else a villain.
Bartleby just drops out, chooses nothing, is lost in nihilist
unimportance. It is of far greater value to subvert the force of bad
ideas by generating impetus behind good ones. It's easy enough to see
what's not working. Read history in balanced doses, philosophy and
religion the same, and fiction. The trends in social evolution are
apparent enough. What works is plain as feces on a sidewalk; what
doesn't is the whole damn street where the traffic'll run ya down.
Like a bull terrier, Alice, once you have your teeth sunk into a
muffler, that's all you seem to be aware of. Zinn is only one among
many. Unclench, get out of the street, look a little further.

Strikes work, but at an enormous cost. Buying from retailers who do
not buy from corporate beasts works even better. If you want to kill a
giant, you have to sap it first. Don't work for 'em, don't buy from
'em--especially not stocks. Buy locally produced goods wherever
possible. Grow, make your own when you can. All that stuff you already
know. It's unfortunate that computers are a significant part of the
problem, because they are also an important part of the solution. But,
rants about the nasty-ass traffic in the middle of the street do
nothing affirmative; letting people know there are options to chasing
cars can, however, be helpful. The Occupy movement started out saying,
"hey, look at all the traffic you're chasing. That's fucked up. We'll
sit here like feces on the sidewalk and point out some alternatives."
The press successfully derailed the early movement by focussing on the
homeless who became attached to the camps with the onset of winter and
portraying the movement as being composed of the homeless and
feeble-minded, without even a nod to the fact that no one needs to be
homeless, however feeble-minded, when there are more vacant homes than
there are homeless souls. The solution to homelessness is simple, put
working folks in homes and give up their empty apartments to the
homeless. Find jobs for people. People used to get paid to clean up
the streets. That helped keep otherwise unemployable people working
for the greater good. It is clearly useless to increase unemployment
and homelessness....



On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Could be a defense of Pynchon's vision of privacy, yes?
> Nice.
>
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2012 6:26 AM
>
> Subject: Re: Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins
>
>> Maybe not educate as much as expose.
>
>
> Haven't we enough exposure? Is not the Public too much in the public
> eye; we have become a nation of exhibitionists & voyeurs, a nation of
> sloganeering revisionists who call themselves historians, a nation of
> Jersey Shore Yahoos subjected to the analysis of Jerry Springer arm
> chair psychologists, a nation of Margaret Mead's peeping in on
> Polynesians life over the trailer park fence, a nation driven by the
> primitive intinct to reach out and touch and groom clansmen, but a
> nation that has fallen in love with shadows of narsisisstic
> communication.  Expose this. Expose what? Expose yourself. It is not
> capital or the system that makes automatons of free people. It is
> exposure. The extra ordinary human contact,  that humans need, it's
> that private investigation. The Inherent Vice, our peeping and
> exposure, while a natural vice, has evolved at an un-natural speed and
> has grown to big brother proportions. Look at me. Look at you. Look at
> what they are doing now. Surely we need to expose bad government, bad
> history, bad business, bad education... But exposure, the camera is a
> gun, the mob is a statement, protest is a position, has inherent vices
> that we must guard against. Exposure is a limited means not an end.
> And it is hardly the only method people can employ to resist tyranny
> and corruption and all manner of abuses of power. The sit-in, the
> staying put at the work station, but stopping or slowing down or
> sicking-out production, is a form of control. Give it with exposure
> and new forms of control will relace it. see Zinn PHUS
>
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant