Carrol, Are you saying graffitti is agitational ? Charles Brown >>> Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 04/24/99 05:36PM >>> Jim Devine wrote: > Also, graffitti turns > most people off. There have to be better ways of protesting this war. Jim, I suspect if you will check back over your own experience as well as various history of the last movement (going back to its beginnings in the South in the 1950s) you will find that the expression "turns people off" is almost always a false analysis. All those who say that this that or the other thing "turns them off" are those who were hostile to begin with, would have remained hostile no matter what, but seize on some tactic which "turns them off" as an excuse for their hostility. One does not rally people to a cause with arguments. One's actions rally those who are already (knowingly or unknowingly) at least 75% convinced in advance and whether they know it or not are just looking for someone to be bold enough and public enough to sound as though if you asked them they *could* give arguments. It's true graffitti in themselves don't do much because they are anonymous and don't point to a place of public convergence. You need rallies, pickets, marches, leaflets with names and phone numbers and dates and times and places for that. You need to be prepared with non-off putting arguments when people come to you to be convinced in depth of what in some way or other they have already begun to suspect in their guts. The way I have put this in the past, and if senility and ill health holds off long enough I'll try to develop it in a decent paper, is that the left always (in the old cliche) preaches only to the converted. That it's no use preaching to the nonconverted because they won't even ever know that the preaching is going on. The belief that persuasion and argument comes first, inivitation to action second, is a prejudice of the academic world. (I'm not anti-academic. I usually use the word in a positive rather than pejorative sense, but I do have a sense of the limitations it imposes as a lifestyle.) If what we do is not to some extent off-putting no one will pay any attention. And graffitti have their place in preparing the way. Carrol
