American Death (and hope?)

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Good posts from Paul and hg, w/ hg wondering :

>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....


For me, reponding in partial agreement w/ whoever it was who first mentioned 
this--warning--theme,the emphasis was more on the closeness to this death 
schema we'd already approached.  So the idea of--warning--for me means simply 
that TRP has not lost all hope for America.  I think this accounts for the 
pseudo-WWII setting of GR; we might closely map onto these guys, but there's at 
least a delta-t of difference. This is, for me, the Americanness of TRP's work, he still 
believes somehow (his books still believe in some way) that there is the chance of 
redemption.  This unkillable belief in some way out or back is harder to see than 
the indictments, so real, so brutally true, but I think it's there.  Like in the end of 
VINELAND, Desmond may only  *think* he's home, but he's still somewhere.

john m