Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/12/kids-r-alright-2.html
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InB4CaneShaking
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Just don’t shake the little guy too hard.
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My kind’a RESISTANCE!
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Yes, but are you resisting right now!
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If there’s not going to be dancing at the revolution, then I’m not coming.
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Roger That!
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https://radicalreference.info/book/export/html/476
The quote is actually a paraphrase. An explanation, w/the original quote + context, is Alix Kates Shulman’s article “Dances with Feminists” – via the amazing Emma Goldman Papers site.
In her 1931 autobiography, “Living My Life”, she put it like this:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world–prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.
[Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]
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You know where else there’s dancing? Hell, that’s where.
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Sign me up!
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- Yeats
Yeats, eh? Orwell would like a word with you…
How do Yeat’s political ideas link up with his leaning towards occultism? It is not clear at first glance why hatred of democracy and a tendency to believe in crystal-gazing should go together. Mr Menon only discusses this rather shortly, but it is possible to make two guesses. To begin with, the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that “all this”, or something like it, “has happened before”, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes for ever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny. Yeats is by no means alone in this outlook. If the universe is moving round on a wheel, the future must be foreseeable, perhaps even in some detail. It is merely a question of discovering the laws of its motion, as the early astronomers discovered the solar year. Believe that, and it becomes difficult not to believe in astrology or some similar system. A year before the war, examining a copy of Gringoire, the French Fascist weekly, much read by army officers, I found in it no less than thirty-eight advertisements of clairvoyants. Secondly, the very concept of occultism carries with it the idea that knowledge must be a secret thing, limited to a small circle of initiates. But the same idea is integral to Fascism. Those who dread the prospect of universal suffrage, popular education, freedom of thought, emancipation of women, will start off with a predilection towards secret cults. There is another link between Fascism and magic in the profound hostility of both to the Christian ethical code.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Yeats’s poetry. But using it to try to smear politically involved youth is a strategy you’d be prudent to reconsider.
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Good for them.
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The kids are allright.
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Something something rough beast something something slouches towards Bethlehem to be born…
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So, wait, you’re telling me that they tried to run a whole school with a handful of underprepared substitute teachers, and the kids ended up dancing in the hallways?
/grows misty-eyed and hums The Internationale at the labor-movement solidarity of it all
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That’s a fun Orwell quote, but it’s even better if you imagine him saying it while dancing.
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On the one hand, substitute “lessons” probably do suck.
On the other, students will gladly skip class because “hey, that…uh…leaf looks sad.”
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