Jail, and stock proxies

[scarfman]

In news of the continuing battle between me and Wordpress as installed on the university server, the class's password will not open up my professor's blog for me so I can remind myself what this week's blogging assignment is. Until he responds to my email, a few comments on this week's reading will have to do.

We were to finish off Alinsky's Rules for Radicals this week, including the discussion of the benefit of jail time to the movement organizer as a chance to rest and to write. Now, I'm between jobs this month (last day on the previous job was 9/7, training for the new job starts 10/4). One thing I've done with my first vacation in years (decades?) when I didn't have to go somewhere and/or look after children was I went to the children's section of my childhood library and got out the first five Doctor Dolittle books. The passage from Alinsky, and the passage in Doctor Dolittle's Circus when Dr. Dolittle first spends time in an English jail (previously having only been in African jails), remind me of the sequence in a later book, I forget which one, when Dr. Dolittle is back home in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh and has a book he wants to write. Of course when he's sitting at home all the animals from far and near with medical complaints take up all his time, and he decides the only way he's going to get time to write is if he gets arrested and put in jail. Of course he has a silent comedian's trouble getting into jail on purpose in the first place, and once he's there the local animals ignore his pleas and do their best to get him out; the digging rodents undermining the jail's foundation, and so forth. But what's more subversive than writing a book about how animals are people too? Then we'd have to admit it about the humans who just look different from us.

The next chapter deals with Alinsky's revolutionary idea that the way to implement societal changes is to become proxy for a great number of the stockholders of the huge corporations that are, more and more, becoming our effective government. This from a man who died in 1972. On the other hand, in previous chapters Alinsky admitted that solving one issue always leads to new, unexpected issues ... and I can't help but wonder if this proxy stockholder idea of his isn't what's led to such things as hostile takeovers in today's cutthroat corporate jungle. I wonder whether, in making this idea available to the Have-Nots by putting it into his book, Alinksy didn't also, if not instead, hand it over to the Haves for their ruthlessness in dealing with each other.

Comments

Alinsky and jail

[(Anonymous)]

Alinsky never spent a day in jail, and neither did any of his organizers. Read his biography, "Let Them Call Me Rebel."