I feel so dirty; NOI; Middle-class crimes

pms laflame at mindspring.com
Sat Jan 2 16:27:17 PST 1999



>The voluntary simplicity crowd do have sort of a point in questioning what
>should be the goals of our society. Should the highest priority be providing
>the widest possible range of goods to choose from? The newspaper The Onion
>had an interesting graph recently that showed how product "diversity" has
>recently past by bio-diversity.
>
>Peter
>
>
VS has come up between me and my therapist in the past. Getting someone to care about money enough to survive and flourish, when they've got that anti-capitalist excuse to fall back on, must be annoying.

I've made dismissive remarks about the VS crowd, but now I feel bad, cause I just realized that Callahan must consider herself a part of that crowd. I know that she conssiders her "creative" mode of accumulation, thrift stores, yard sales, as a way for her to accept a good portion of her clients on a very flexable, sliding scale.

I also know that she put herself through school, and continues to operate a cleaning service, and I wonder how much value she adds to the service, and how much she extracts. If someone feels incapable of hiring themselves out to clean homes, is it exploitation to make money by doing it for them? And why would someone be unable to market themselves?

All in all, I think VS is better than no VS. Still, in Callahan's neighborhood the admittedly narrow choices in footwear boil down to, over-priced "vintage", Birkenstocks and Doc Martens. You gotta go to the very edge to find a Payless.

*************************

If you want to understand why a million men showed up to the Farrakhan
>spectacle, then you should ask why many walked away as he began his
>numerological analysis; we can talk about how leaders can be made by media
>attention--positive or negative;

I remember sitting down to watch Farrakhan on Donahue. He got only bad press then, but nothing really specific, as in later attacks on anti-semitism. I half assumed that racism was the reason he was attacked.

He was sensible, insightful, and articulate. Then, in the last 20 minutes or so, he started talking like one would imagine some facist militiaman would go on. Thought the US military should conquer a part of Africa to give American blacks, as I recall. Mainly I just remember thinking, this guys a nut, he'll get a lot of media attention.

I think part of the reason he's so popular, relatively speaking, is that he's the only voice that reveals the imperialist emperor's nakedness, especially since Jesse Jackson found a career path. I've read the NOI's paper, and I usually find an article or two that I could have found in The Progressive, exposing some abuse of power that is generally unreported in the mainstream.

I also have fun just calling the guys over to the car. Sometimes being white is amusing.

I used to live in a complex, where i was the only white, and one of my downstairs neighbors wore the tie and listened to those tapes all the time.

I was friendly with his roommate, Timothy, but he refused to speak, or even really look at me. I thought it was a shame, as I imagined we had some intersecting interests.

*************************


>I have never understood why the argument that "some of your grandchildren
>are going to be working-class" isn't decisive. Because most of them are...
>
>
>Brad DeLong
>
>
When I first read this, I thought, EUREKA! I know even I'm tired of the "fairness" rap. But then, it's hard enough to get the working-class to realize they are not middle-class, would they or the middle-class ever accept that their heirs will not do better, all evidence aside?


>Using stolen credit cards isn't a middle-class thing. Transfering houses to
>your kids so that the federal government doesn't get them when you do the
>Medicaid spend-down is...

Well, I know. So this should be a mantra, along with similar crimes, like millions of small biz owners with SEP's, etc, who don't offer these plans to employees even though that was written into the laws that afforded them this priviage. Aren't we trying to out-influence the "personal responsibility" PR machine?

Rainy night in Georgia-pms



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