Does this sound familiar
PLAYBOY: The assumption behind the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of the middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?
ALINSKY: Conservative? That's a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can and will go either of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming terminal.
They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.
PLAYBOY: You don't expect them to beware of radicals bearing gifts?
ALINSKY: Sure, they'll be suspicious, even hostile at first. That's been my experience with every community I've ever moved into. My critics are right when they call me an outside agitator. When a community, any kind of community, is hopeless and helpless, it requires somebody from outside to come in and stir things up. That's my job -- to unsettle them, to make them start asking questions, to teach them to stop talking and start acting, because the fat cats in charge never hear with their ears, only through their rears. I'm not saying it's going to be easy; thermopolitically, the middle classes are rooted in inertia, conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock the boat. But they're beginning to realize that boat is sinking and unless they start bailing fast, they're going to go under with it. The middle class today is really schizoid, torn between its indoctrination and its objective situation. The instinct of middle-class people is to support and celebrate the status quo, but the realities of their daily lives drill it home that the status quo has exploited and betrayed them.
PLAYBOY: In what way?
ALINSKY: In all the ways I've been talking about, from taxation to pollution. The middle class actually feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor do. And this creates a situation that's supercharged with both opportunity and danger. There's a second revolution seething beneath the surface of middle-class America -- the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives -- for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right, making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them scapegoats for their misery -- blacks, hippies, Communists -- and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But we're not going to abandon the field to them without a long, hard fight -- a fight I think we're going to win. Because we'll show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country -- the true beneficiaries of Nixon's so-called economic reforms. And when they swing their sights on that target, the sh-- will really hit the fan.
PLAYBOY: In the past, you've focused your efforts on specific communities where the problems -- and the solutions -- were clearly defined. But now you're taking on over 150,000,000 people. Aren't you at all fazed by the odds against you?
ALINSKY: Are you kidding? I've been doing this for 30 years now, and the odds haven't bothered me yet. In fact, I've always taken 100-to-one odds as even money. Sure, it's true that the middle class is more amorphous than some barrio in Southern California, and you're going to be organizing all across the country instead of in one city. But the rules are the same. You start with what you've got, you build up one community around the issues, and then you use the organization you've established as an example and a power base to reach other communities. Once you're successful in, say, Chicago -- one of the cities where we're organizing the middle class -- then you can go on to Cincinnati or Boston or Dubuque and say, "OK, you see what we did in Chicago, let's get movin' here." It's like an ink-blot effect, spreading out from local focal points of power across the whole country. Once we have our initial successes, the process will gather momentum and begin to snowball.
It won't be easy and, sure, it's a gamble -- what in life isn't? Einstein once said God doesn't throw dice, but he was wrong. God throws dice all the time, and sometimes I wonder if they're loaded. The art of the organizer is cuttin' in on the action. And believe me, this time we're really going to screw the bastards, hit 'em where it hurts. You know, I sort of look at this as the culmination of my career. I've been in this fight since the Depression; I've been machine-gunned, beaten up, jailed -- they've even given me honorary degrees -- and in a way it's all been preparation for this. I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back. I never gave up faith at the worst times in the past, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now. With some luck, maybe I've got ten more good productive years ahead of me. So I'm going to use them where they count the most.
--- snip ---
I have that issue at home....strange, I never knew Playboy had articles :-)
guess this is how an interview with satan might read.
Funny...he started “agitating” to improve the slums of Chicago...70 years later, they’re still crap holes.
bttt
I can now say I read a Playboy article
They're the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"
...or in English:
GO PALIN!
Cheers!
Alinsky ping. The place to go if you’ve ever wondered what community organizing is.
Sounds a lot like an educated Charles Manson.
Regardless, he was a loyal son of his father, the Devil.
Reading the scam he pulled on restaurants, and then taught to others, I couldn’t help but think about ACORN teaching the “pimp and ho” how to scam the system.
Too bad this article was only in Playboy. Too few people, who got the magazine, seem to have “read the article”, or, if they did read it, their minds were too distracted to grasp the significance of someone like this being lionized and promoted.
Millions of others wouldn’t buy a Playboy for the articles OR the pictures, and most “journalists” who reported on what Alinsky had to say would do so selectively, and in a way that would legitimize and promote him as well.
There still are people today who don’t have a clue what’s going on around them, because the people who are trained to be journalists were trained at the feet of people with Alinsky’s agenda. They “love” this “blankety-blank” country, doncha know? Trouble is - just like Alinksy - they are “loving” it to death.