Volume 6, Number 5 · March 31, 1966
After Watts
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?
by A Report by the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots
101 pp., no price
The Disaster and then, after a period of mourning or shock, the Report. Thus we try to exorcise our fears, to put into some sort of neutrality everything that menaces our peace. The Reports look out upon the inexplicable in private action and the unmanageable in community explosion; they investigate, they study, they interview, and at last, they recommend. Society is calmed, and not so much by what is found in the study as by the display of official energy, the activity underwritten. For we well know that little will be done, nothing new uncovered—at least not in this manner; instead a recitation of common assumptions will prevail, as it must, for these works are rituals, communal rites. To expect more, to anticipate anguish or social imagination, leads to disappointment and anger. The Reports now begin to have their formal structure. Always on the sacred agenda is the search for 'outside influence,' for it appears that our dreams are never free of conspiracies. 'We find,' one of the Report goes, 'no evidence that the Free Speech Movement was organized by the Communist Party, or the Progressive Labor Movement, or any other outside group.' Good, we say, safe once more, protected from the ultimate.
Review, 1928 words
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