"Whatever else may be wrong in a political way -- like the inadequacy of the Great Depression techniques applied to a scene that has long outgrown them; like old-fashioned grafter's glee among the city fathers over the vast amounts of poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to them -- lying much closer to the heart of L.A.'s racial sickness is the co-existence of two very different cultures: one white and one black. While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly -- the economy of the area in fact depending on it -- the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen -- and can afford -- to ignore. ... - Thomas Pynchon: from A Journey into the Mind of Watts, in New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966"
Tom Clark
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