I feel so dirty.

[d-m-c at worldnet.att.net]

At 01:02 PM 1/1/1999 +0000, you wrote:
>In message <368BE00B.576B at gte.net>, Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net>
>writes
>
>>The fact is, materialism DOES have it limits.  The hippies were one
>>expression of that realization, and look how much a couple thousand of
>>them scared the bejezus out of the big cigars, until a new wave of
>>bc-wannabees showed how readily hippiehood and its spin-offs could be
>>marketed to the millions.  


It was already being spun off and marketed  before the new wave came along.
 And, as someone else said--you even implied--anti materialism is parasitic
on materialism.  That doesn't mean that I dismiss this; rather, I merely
want to point out that moral superiority can't rest on that sort of binary.
 Not for long anyway.  There has to be a firmer ground upon which to stake
those claims.  Otherwise they're driving pylons into shale.

And I expect a whole hell of a lot more from the simplicity crowd because
they ought to damn know better, since those I've run across consider
themselves lefties.

It  is rilly rilly annoying when some upper middle class people who've hit
stumbling blocks in the trajectory of their careers  wax effusively about
the joys of the simple life, cotton, growing their own vegetables, picking
berries in the wild and making their own jam, Sally's Boutique, the wonders
of composting, bartering, not buying a new wardrobe each season, and
washing out Zip-loc bags.  For I'm impelled to say in reply:  "Why you
should meet my grandma, she'll teach you a thing or two; she taught me."
It's like they fucking discovered it, while all around them the people
they've been blind to--or rather the people they've felt superior to for
other reasons their entire lives--have been doing quite the same their
entire godamned lives.  They should know better.


>It's one thing to have the have-nots revolt against a system that
>exploits them and denies them satisfaction.  It's far more devastating
>to have the heirs of affluence turn their backs and say the game is just
>a waste of time.  It delegitimates the whole affair from a truly
>unexpected direction.


Did anyone say it was a waste of time?  Huh?  I said that I didn't care for
their moral superiority, for they're lack of any sophisticated theoretical
reasons for doing what they do other than as a not-well-thought out
response to the crises of late capitalism:  specifically the Time Bind and
downsizings here in the US.  When a woman tells me about how she's dropping
out of the rat race in order to simplify her and her family's life I'd say
that she's misdirecting her efforts just a wee bit.  She's failing to ask
why is it a fucking rat race, why is it she must work more and more, why
can't she find decent daycare, why do the schools suck, why her husband by
the way isn't picking up his godamned share of the second shift.  And
worse, from my own experience, those very same women often were once the
very ones to denigrate stay-at-home moms, failing to realize that staying
home for a lot of women hasn't always been a choice.  What choice is there,
say, if you make minimum wage; it is much simpler and cheaper to stay home.

Besides when simplifying your life becomes a regular feature on Oprah and
similar sorts of talk shows, then I think we have damn good reason to be
suspicious.

Oh I'll not say this anymore, as I wouldn't want to deligitimate their
efforts toward revolutionary change.

Voluntary simplicity is generally not that voluntary when you get right
down to it.  It does little to change things, it simply makes capitalism
more damn efficient by creating a new sort of reserve army of the under-
and unemployed, people who accept their situation since they think it's a
fucking choice.  Now, were these folks to demonstrate to me that they have
more sophisticated reasons for doing all this, then yeah, I'd applaud it.
I'd still be critical, but much more sympathetic.  Shutting up because I
might delegitimate the positive features of their efforts hardly seems the
appropriate response.  And, for me shutting up vitiates the very project of
critical theory.

Kelley