gun control

William S. Lear rael at zopyra.com
Sun May 30 07:54:37 PDT 1999


On Saturday, May 29, 1999 at 12:50:56 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>...
>Aside from the lack of constituency (other than foundation program officers
>and dispensers of government contracts), most of the community organizers
>I've talked wtih have no big picture analysis at all - they only care about
>their particular neighborhood, or issue, or demographic group. That doesn't
>make them bad people, but it does help explain why they've been so
>ineffective, and why they're so susceptible to co-optation.

I think this deserves repeating and amplification. This is a crucial point: Parochialism invites co-optation. The reason is simple: you have a particular problem and a rich benefactor offers to help you solve it so you accept the help, without realizing the connection of the benefactor to the underlying causes of this problem and others like it elsewhere.

Connecting this to the suburbanization of the US, suburbs are a perfect sterilizing environment for political action, a very effective geographic barrier to organizing. And, despite opinions to the contrary on this list, the Constitution and myriad state and local laws are also extremely effective barriers to generating a greater breadth of political thought and action.

The question then becomes, why this parochialism of thought? Is it that the over-arching theories of democracy versus elites are too impoverished? Is it because Marxism is seen as the only (unsanitary) alternative to localized political action?

[The recently maligned David Harvey has a very good paragraph on p. 400 of his book *Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference* about the dangers of parochialism which I tried to scan in, but recent electrical storms here have left my HP scanner catatonic.]


>Hardly what I was doing - I was anticipating your reaction to my DMP. I
>think it's rather patronizing to think that the masses are too stupid to
>bear hearing the truth.

Here's a clue: I think much radical scholarship is tedious, irrelevant, self-indulgent, and contemptuous of the capacities of ordinary people. I think that some care is needed in estimating the ability of people to grasp political theories --- abstractions that can transcend the particular struggle of the moment. When faced with a population that is horribly misinformed about almost every conceivable topic, but retains a decent suspicion of power and a relatively sanguine view of how it operates, I think we need to produce basic works that gently elevate into the abstract. I think Howard Zinn's work (to select somewhat randomly) is a decent example of this. Even though he uses examples of the particular, he weaves together enough of them in various times and places, to render a pretty coherent view of the operations of power in the United States. He does this with sensitivity and in plain prose that is very accessible to the Average American.

Bill



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