"EVERYDAY FORMS OF RESISTANCE MAKE NO HEADLINES."

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1985) ("The fact is that, for all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions, let alone peasant 'revolutions,' are few and far between. Not only are the circumstances that favor large-scale peasant uprisings comparatively rare, but when they do appear the revolts that develop are nearly always crushed unceremoniously. To be sure, even a failed revolt may achieve something: a few concessions form the state or landlords, a brief respite form new and painful relations of production and, not least, a memory of resistance and courage that may lie in wait for the future. Such gains, however, are uncertain, while the carnage, the repression, and the demoralization of defeat ate all too certain and real. It is worth recalling as well that even at those extraordinary historical moments when a peasant-backed revolution actually succeeds in taking power, the results are, at the very best, a mixed blessing for the peasantry. Whatever else the revolution may achieve, it almost always creates a more coercive and hegemonic state apparatus--one that is often able to batten itself on the rural population like no other before it. All too frequently the peasantry finds itself in the ironic position of having helped to power a ruling group whose plans for industrialization, taxation, and colletivization are very much at odds with the goals for which peasants had imagined they were fighting." Id. at 29. "Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. Just as millions of anthozoan polps create, willy-nilly a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts if insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever , to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible, It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts see to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority i the countryside--neither of which the sovereign state finds in its interests. The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicates silence that all but expunges everyday forms of resistance form the historical record." Id, at 36. Perhaps there is a lesson here for legal scholars and law students: perhaps the official records (e.g., judicial opinions) and unofficial records (e.g., news reports) do not inform us as to what is really and truly going on in society, at least not at the 'lower' end of society. So, we miss the things which are simmering below and may eventually bubble up. Yet, how does one get to the real facts?).