Bartleby and Occupy and short hist of sit-ins

[Joseph Tracy]

Very thoughtful reply. I have a further thought on homelessness and housing. The bank bailouts primary goal was to artificially underwrite the false value that had been placed on housing. Without the money from TARP and the fed  a great deal of real estate would have come on the market to pay off losing speculative bets.  This would have generated huge market forces to lower housing costs to match real incomes.  New speculators would have jumped in, but it would have ultimately lowered US debt  for the majority of citizens, made more affordable housing available, and made big energy guzzling houses and buildings less attractive.  Disruptive?Highly. But transferring ever more wealth into speculation and exploitation is what we got and it sucks even more. 
The banks and industrialists put Hitler into the chancellorship, same spirit,  same denial of bill of rights, same wars, same evil other, same horrible gamble on an impossible future. 
On Jan 4, 2012, at 11:16 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:

>> 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