American Death (was: Plastics!! (and coal tar))

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Paul Mackin writes:
> Concerning GR p. 722 and thereabouts:
[...]
> For Europe, America is a way of RETURNING (an opportunity
> to go around the cycle one more time). Somehow Europe refuses.
> Does Europe, like Blicero, "want to break out--to leave this cycle of 
> infection and death"? 
> 
> There is the idea that sin is passed by inheritance from parent
> to child (old world to new world, Blicero to Gottfried), rather than
> being an acquired characteristic. (Some early theologians spoke of
> Original Sin in this light.)  Pynchon seems not to want to preclude 
> the possibility that what applies to the original also applies to the
> subsequent in spades. (bridge, anyone?)

The reference to Amerindia, Oceania etc. seems to indicate that TRP 
is simply talking about colonialism. Europe establishes its kingdom of death 
throughout the world, including America. Columbus et al fucked up, 
refusing the chance to begin again (Subsequent Sin*). America (meaning 
the US) has bettered, maybe perfected the structures of death to the 
point where only the structure is left (making humans superfluous) 
and is now in turn colonizing Europe. American Death is thus a more 
efficient death than European death. The Nazi bombing of London and 
the bombing of Dresden, as well as the entire war, are merely a 
necessary convulsion, a mating ritual, configuring the stratified 
European landscape for American Death. (Remember "the unmistakable 
long look that said hurry up and fuck me" - p216, the new, postwar order 
taking shape in the German night sky - p566, etc, etc). Thus Hitler, 
Churchill, Eisenhower, Stalin and others are mere bit players in a 
restructuring, the bodies being played by - rather than playing - 
their roles. 
Or something like that. 
That's why I asked, in the light of this fairly straightforward and obvious 
reading, how one could possibly read GR as a "warning" to America. It 
seems to me if one wants to read it _as_ something it would make more 
sense to read it as a history - of the Enlightenment project, of Western 
'Civilisation', of rapacious, impersonal, inanimate global capitalism if you're 
so inclined, whatever....

hg
* Modern Analysis is not Original Sin, merely its latest name.
hag at iafrica.com