Word: kramer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kramer feels all-too-keenly that he is writing as an outsider. He feels compelled to justify, presumably to his radical readers, not only the appropriateness of his writing but also his decision to move to the country. The result reveals much of the psychology shared by Movement people of the last college "generation"--those...
...Kramer was born in Brooklyn, educated at Brandeis and Columbia. His roots are middle-class and urban; he was ripe for Movement politics. The end of the sixties found him writing for the Liberation News Service in New York, immersed in the same moral and political confusion shared by radicals who realized they couldn't manipulate the world into justice. He discovered, as he implies repeatedly, that you're no use working for others if you don't feel you're working for yourself. He moved to the country to restructure his life; he is doing good work and being...
...KRAMER SEEMS to feel guilty. He thinks pious altruists of the Ralph Nader ilk, like the archetypical Jewish Mother, will look at him scoldingly for not working harder to get what he wants. The radicals of five years ago will think he's sold out. Radicals today may not understand his confusion; most current organizers for domestic self-determination movements never really thought of themselves as ascetics. Unfortunately, Kramer doesn't distinguish between the kind of Movement politics that was getting him and most people nowhere in the sixties and the present prospects for constructive Movement politics, in which country...
Toward the end of Mother Walter, Kramer writes...
...Kramer is saying you can't force people to do what you want, he's right. If he's trying to justify his own retreat from over-immersion in a kind of political action that had very little immediate effect, he needn't bother. If he's trying to say that you can't figure out how to make correct revolution, he's wrong. And the problem is that I don't think he believes himself either. As "curator" of a way of life which besides its narrow cultural horizons also, in Kramer's eyes, embodies creativity, cooperation, close contact...