[PEN-L:6212] Re: Columbin High: Community Kills

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas Kruse wrote:

> Here's a very healthy anti-dote to much of the spin on Columbine High.  As
> a non-jock whose school was divided between athletes and non-athletes, this
> rings true.  By pointing attention to the collective culture, it also helps
> to see how the enemy is in us, not "out there", in the families or psyches
> of a couple of kids, and without simplistic recourse to video games and tv
> as expalantory variables.

I think a fairly commonplace marxist explanation is possible here. The
Community Tom criticizes is a "willed community," one without any
material basis. I think that the two most dramatic images of community
with a material base are two persons working with a two-handled saw
and a chain-gang. A physical activity compels some unity of thought
and feeling (the saw will buck like hell if the two are not in some sense
"in tune," even *simpatico* as in Spanish). Similarly with chain gangs,
the rhythm of whose work has created some wonderful songs/poetry
in the 20th century.

In contrast what I call a "willed community" (in an advanced capitalist
state) merely reinforces the *lack* of any social ties that bind. One
can see this in all the touchy-feely efforts at building "community in the
class room" that emerged in the '60s. My guess is that most of the
professors who really went for this did what one friend of mine at
ISU did: retired early because he was so bitter that students given
"freedom" didn't perform just as his dream said they should. There are
bound to be large numbers of people excluded from such a community,
and a large amount of bitterness flowing from that exclusion.

Most of the politics I call anarchist (and this is doubtless unfair to some
who call themselves anarchist) assume a mystic community arising
from the concordance of individual souls with no material basis.. Milton's
heaven is like that.

Carrol