Paul Goodman Buried

Posted on March 22, 2004 in Culture

There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called “anarchist.” It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems. — Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman: buried in white noise and caburetor growls.

I just went looking for Paul Goodman’s Five Years, a book that demonstrates what I just spoke about in the article about my poetry notebooks. It’s out of print. So is Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd and Compulsory Mis-Education, and the Community of Scholars.. A man who may have the most to say about our age and time is silenced by the modern marketplace that he criticized.

The rats are just getting home from the office. I can hear their garage doors opening automatically, their Cuisinarts whirling, their televisions misdirecting them. They call this the Land of the Free.

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The murder of Goodman’s anarchism was completed, I think, by two forces: Fashion which spat out bizarre creations that no sane person would wear in the name of blazing new frontiers and the Arms Industry which promoted the idea that if something was worth having, it was worth shooting someone over.