Lurker Rants, Too!

[Greg Montalbano]

At 11:42 AM 2/25/97 -0500, you wrote:
     
>You and I can discuss the merits and demerits of free-markets and killing and 
>saving Jews whenever you like.  But 54 million other people came away from
that 
>movie thinking about nothing even REMOTELY close to that level of analysis.
>
>I'll bet my left nut on that.  There's nothing wrong with your level of 
>intellectuallism (read previous post: it's why I'm here lurking in the first 
>place)--but you've got to step down for one god-damned minute.
>
>You must be out-of-that-high-mind-of-yours if you think that any more than a 
>tiny percentage (or even less than a percent) of the viewership came away from 
>SL thinking that "free market capitalism is the best safeguard again 
>totalinarianism".  They probably didn't even think of the words "free"
"market" 
>and "capitalism" in the same sentence.  Granted, _you_ did, and a bunch of
other
>people, but not 55 million.
>
>The other 54.9 million saw something that made them wonder about simpler
things:
>how'd that happen?, what if that were me?, do we know anybody who was
there? why
>are they doing that to them?
>
>Is this so hard to understand?  Fact of the matter is that _your_ film
about the
>fuelling and milking of Free Market Capitalism leading toward a Jewish
Holocaust
>probably wouldn't be seen by 1/100th of the people that watched SL Sunday
night.
>
>Sometimes you have to make concessions for the better of the population at 
>large.  This is one of them.  Take it or leave (it).
>
>I'm done.  Thanks for letting me have the floor.
>
>/mark/
>/nyc/
>

Getting back to Pynchon (remember him?) -- I quote from pg 105 of GR:

...Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.  The
murdering and the 
violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.  The
mass nature of
wartime death is useful in many ways.  It serves as a spectacle, as
diversion from the
real movements of the War.  It provides raw material to be recorded into
History, so that
children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after
battle, and be more
prepared for the adult world....
...The true war is a celebration of markets.


--And if that's not enough, there's always the Proverb for Paranoids:
If They can get you asking the wrong questions, They don't have to worry
about the answers.

~Greg
_____________________________________________
"We've all heard that a million monkeys, banging on
 a million typewriters, will eventually reproduce the
 entire works of Shakespeare.  Now, with the Internet,
 we know this is not true."
       -- Robert Wilensky, ILP 1996