Boeing Matters

[Steelhead]

I've had numerous queries to post more of the interview with the former
Boeing employee.  Unfortunately, there's not much more that most of you'd
find interesting. But here goes, in a slightly editorialized rendering.

Oh, he hated Vineland ("What the hell, happened...too much acid?" Big
surprise, right, though his partner Alan Gottlieb wrote some kind of
ironically favorable review of VL for the Denver Post or some similar
bastion of authoritarianism, which I think was duly P-Noted), couldn't
understand V. ("It's about some woman, who keeps changing her name and her
body parts and a bunch of indistinguishable assholes who can never get
their acts together, right?"  Yeah, well, uh, I admitted I couldn't
understand it either, but, hey, that's the fun!), hasn't read Col49 (no big
loss there, but I told him he's missing out on a lot of Boeing related
stuff, and a rather reactionary political p-o-v that might just be up his
alley--for some reason Oepida Maas reminds me more and more of that Reagan
speechwriter, what was her name, oh yeah, Peggy Noonan--sexy but cold,
almost bloodless--(Speaking of which I came across this book, Apocalypse
Culture by Adam Parfrey (Feral House Press 1990) which has a whole chapter
on this woman necrophiliac--including photos--named Karen Greenlee, from
northern California, who in the mid 80s [TRP's next door, remember!]
admitted having intercourse with 20 to 25 male corpses, she was finally
caught after stealing a corpse and running off with him (it?) in a funeral
hearse.  Sez Greenlee, when asked from her jail cell if she misses working
in mortuaries (she was a "technician"--the appropriate fate of a frustrated
technohead? One does wonder.): "Yes, terribly! Even if I wasn't a
necrophile, I like mortuary work! I enjoy embalming and everything. Except
for obese people. The bodies I hated working on most were obese people.
'Specially, if they'd been autopsied. Their guts would slide out on the
floor...and all this melty fat.  Yeeck!"--and that, believe it or not, is
the most mundane chapter in the book); never heard of Gaddis (I think he'll
quite like JR, though for all the wrong reasons--assuming there _are_ wrong
reasons).

The pretext of the interview had nothing to do with either Pynchon or
Boeing.  It just popped up. Imagine that.

This guy himself is quite a piece of work. A leader, no, more of a guru, of
one of the New Right groups. He's pro-choice, pro-drugs, pro-guns,
pro-Nafta (an important and courageous distinction on his side of the
political spectrum), anti-Militia, anti-FBI, anti-corporate, and slightly
anti-Semitic (though his partner's a Jew), with links to the LaRouchies and
the Moonies (money ties, mainly). --I can sign on for _almost_ all of that,
myself...hmmm, am I approaching 40 or what?--

He's a Lockean capitalist and a college drop out, who corresponds weekly
with Jurgen Habermas, late of the Frankfurt School, now ensconced at
Northwestern, on subjects like the "Project of Modernity" and the
Legitmation Crisis (god knows what his followers, who are mainly rednecks
and racists, think when he brings up the finer points of Habermasian
thought at the annual Ocktoberfest).  This revelation prompted a minor
debate between us, since my hero, Michel Foucault, and, his,  Habermas,
went at it in some fairly vociferous language (strong enough to make the
recent Pynchon list squabble look like so much french kissing among the
Castrati)--more harshly even than Foucault and Sartre's legendary tangles,
from what I can tell.

That whole (power vs. legitimation/luddite-optimism vs. techno-fatalism)
debate might be an interesting way to read VL--assuming Pynchon's read
Habermas--I'm quite convinced he'd read Foucault, at least by the time of
CoL49, if not V. (Madness and Unreason was out by then, wasn't it? Maybe
not. Perhaps they were synchronous.)

The chap looks exactly like Cap'n Ahab and shares his intense
single-mindedness of purpose--which is very scary indeed.

Steelhead