Re: Cap's bad old days :)

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 21 Mar 1999 17:54:24 +1100 

Jim wrote:
> No, that's not the case, Camille.  Capitalism doesn't mean the banning of
> theater.  It means theater is left to survive on its own, and theater
> patrons and their money is what supports it.  This means the death of
> bad, poorly produced theater and the thriving of good theater, in
> general.

So ... just because I have no money to produce my plays, they aren't any
good? Because my books are not designed to be picked up in an airport for
someone to read between New York and Vegas, it's no good? Because `The
Wizard of Oz' took twenty years to recoup its original costs, it's not
good? That's a lotta crap, in all examples. But that's the way capitalism
works - it's *not* a case of `the best stuff rises to the top' - more often
it's `the blandest, least challenging and least frightening rises to the
top'.

> Firing production workers is just a fact of life, and if you had ever
> been near those kind of decisions you realize what motivates them.

Yes, I have been and I do. My father quit his own managerial position only
a few years ago because he did not agree that firing people who had been
working at the firm for 25 years and making the remainder work twice as
hard was a very nice thing to do. They probably had benefits coming out of
their ears but what's it all come to? A heart attack at 47 from the stress.
That ain't living.

> Your statements about the homeless sound to me like the words of someone
> who's never bothered to try to help them :)  I mean, really tried.

You're right. I haven't. But that's not the point I was making - and you
simply can't stick 100% of them into the `drug addict' or `likes it that
way' pile. The truth is, in the eyes of capitalism, homeless people don't
exist. And I don't like any system where homeless people don't exist.

It's clear you don't and won't ever agree with me on this topic, and that's
OK if you're happy with that. It just saddens me that so many artistic
people are complicit in a system which, given its own way, would assign
each of us to a lousy cable sitcom until we're too old and stupid to write
poetry, if it allowed us to exist at all other than to facilitate the old
axiom of Bread and Circuses. It's a system that likes to hoodwink people
into believing they're enjoying what is ultimately an unfulfilled and
unsatisfying materialistic life.

Anyway, back to the TOTALLY NON POLITICAL annals of Salinger. Let's leave
this discussion to alt.capitalism.com

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest