Science Against the Day Labor

[alice wellintown]

AGTD is about work and Education. So is "The Secret Integration", and so P
has come back to this theme. Grover is smart enough to figure out that the
Swift books, books he admits he is addicted to reading, are full of the
prejudices of adults, that the syndicate is conspiring, along with the
adults in his community, against the poor working classes, and particulary
and most insidiously aganst the African Americans. But Grover crosses his
connotations, confuses integration in mathematics with integration of
races. He fails and in the end the boys abandon their project. Of course,
Carl is only a dream boy, a secret integration, a robot and toy playmate
that the boys control. He has no voice or volition. But one adult in the
community, a junk yard man explains how Carl is contructed from the waste
of the community, how science, technology and automation, the machines, the
cult and ideology that, of course, includes racist politics, is inexhorably
altering the meanings of words and ideas. This short story is also about
the bomb. In the end, the boys are coming of age, and are never safe again.
The dream of a secret integration, that might one day become a dream of
real integration, and even a reality, is lossed.


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:13 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Late in his career, in perhaps his greates work (AGTD),  P returns to the
> boy-books of his youth,  to Tom Swift Adventures, to his parody of Twain.
> Early in his career, P wrote about a boy who reads the Swift books, books
> that were the product of the *Stratemeyer Syndicate. *
> **
> **
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 5:05 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> **
>> **
>> *E = MC2*
>>
>> Morris Bishop
>>
>>   What was our trust, we trust not,
>> What was our faith, we doubt;
>> Whether we must or not
>> We may debate about.
>> The soul, perhaps, is a gust of gas
>> And wrong is a form of right-
>> But we know that Energy equals Mass
>> By the Square of the Speed of Light.
>>
>> What we have known, we know not,
>> What we have proved, abjure.
>> Life is a tangled bowknot,
>> But one thing still is sure.
>> Come, little lad; come, little lass,
>> Your docile creed recite:
>> "We know that Energy equals Mass
>> By the Square of the Speed of Light."
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 11:55 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> The urge to dominate and control supersedes all mankind's efforts.  That
>>> is more Pynchon's message than Science Vs. Madonna.  GR (&V) is more about
>>> a different S&M.
>>>
>>> Poelker's sin was to whore himself for his love of scientific pursuits.
>>>  He had no ideology, only his own obsessions.
>>>
>>> Pointsman's sin was self advancement.  He used his method as a tool to
>>> dominate others, not for ideology.
>>>
>>> Even school children know that technology can be a blessing and a curse.
>>>  Cults are the tools of people, and cultist and their leaders are
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thursday, April 18, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>> Science is not simply a method, like technology it comes with an
>>>> ideology, and as we speak that ideology, driven by science, is, as several
>>>> here have confirmed, beyond reproach. Science is a culture. While it is
>>>> also a method, and in this sense it is like math, it is also a ideological
>>>> force, as it has been in bed with industry and agri-industry, and now with
>>>> business industry and tech-industry, and is the cult that capital has made,
>>>> and this cult is in direct conflict with labor. So, it is OK to resist
>>>> technology and the science cult? Absolutely.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:25 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> "Empirical Practice" starts when a child reaches into a hot flame.
>>>>>  Even amoebae recoil when hurt.
>>>>>
>>>>> Do you imply that Religious Practice isn't reality based?  Religion
>>>>> knows how to control as a primary goal.
>>>>>
>>>>> Science doesn't have a mind of its own.  It ain't the anti-sacred.
>>>>>
>>>>> David Morris
>>>>>
>>>>> On Monday, April 15, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> If God does not, as Milton sez in his famous sonnet, exact day labor
>>>>>> light denied, this hasn't prevented men from exacting day labor from men,
>>>>>> light, and even life, denied. Science was not much around to make safe the
>>>>>> lives of the working men and women we read about in AGTD. Empirical
>>>>>> practice was the method adopted, trial and selection, the railroad, the
>>>>>> mines, the textile mills, these had not science, and many lives were lost
>>>>>> because safety valves were not devised or employed to protect workers from
>>>>>> exploding steam machines. Sure, science would have made things safer,
>>>>>> better, if not for the workers, for the bosses  and their bosses, but for
>>>>>> safety it was the men who worked the mines the factories who improved the
>>>>>> work, the conditions, the safety. Even the laws of mechanical motion were
>>>>>> not trumped by these pragmatic and practical men who worked, for the most
>>>>>> part, without math or the scientific method. But once science began to
>>>>>> apply its method, like a man with a hammer who sees a nail in every grain
>>>>>> of sand, science applied its "scientific" method to every inch of man and
>>>>>> to every hair and every grain of sand. And so, science, systematically,
>>>>>> took over, from religion, from all other institutions of culture, and to
>>>>>> all inquires, to thought itself, to every mode of investigation, and it
>>>>>> claimed to have a better method for advancing all human persuits and
>>>>>> objectives, even the destruction of all human pursuits and objectives.
>>>>>> Moreover, not satisfied with using tools, extensions of human power, to
>>>>>> improve the human lot, to add human tools and science to the existing
>>>>>> patterns of life, as, say a farmer with a tool in his hand, science
>>>>>> fashioned organisms, including man, for machaniisms, for machines. So, the
>>>>>> huge farms, where science applied its method to plants and animals, and the
>>>>>> huge hospitals (white visitation) where science applied its methods to
>>>>>> human minds, and the huge, world wars where it applied its killing
>>>>>> machines, machines that a man might fly in, if he were fashioned to it and
>>>>>> not the other way round. This is Blicero's launch!
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>
>
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