Vineland

[davemarc]

Andrew Dinn writes, in part:

"I'm recalling a point made in Vineland where the onset of the Reagan
years is claimed to have qualitatively changed the nature of the
security services' (FBI/CIA) task. Rather than having to `turn'
youngsters through disillusioning them of their youthful faith in
rebellion, the flat-foots and spooks find that the young are queueing
up to join The Force."  

I'm recalling how, at the reunion, the family elders debate "the perennial
question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist
twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago." 
My interpretation of this is that it represents an underlying process in
Pynchon/Vineland--pondering the question of whether the US is fascist but
not arriving at conclusions.  I assume that when we talk about Nazi
Germany, we are certain that it was fascist.
> 
> Surely no one in China is naive enough to take blatant, direct
> propaganda at face value. If it works it is because it is a constant
> reminder of the lack of opportunity to decide upon one's own fate. You
> have to accept this because in practice there is nothing else on
> offer, so let's just recognise how little control you have as an
> individual and much worse it will be for you if you try to resist. 

That, I think, is actually the main thrust of much propaganda:  not to
convince all of its recipients that all of it is true, but to present a
mountain of deception that amounts to intellectual aggression.  Absorbing
lies all the time, while dissent and debate are violently suppressed, chips
away at intellectual morale.   Lively understanding rarely comes from
dictation; it tends to come from exploration, which is stifled in places
like China--and which was also stifled in Nazi Germany.  There is much more
opportunity for the stuff in the US.  

> In
> the US the propaganda of advertising works much better because it
> leaves people feeling that they are making their own choices whilst
> ensuring at the same time that any such choices are selected from a
> severely restricted and carefully controlled palette. Like giant
> supermarkets which offer shoppers a choice of half a dozen types of
> lettuce only its the same choice across a whole continent and the
> result of promoting such a narrow section of available produce at such
> high intensity is to remove all possibility of botanic diversity. 

You say "potatoes," I say "manifestoes."  There's a problem in the US
concerning widespread misunderstandings about choices (and the source of a
lot of products, which happens to be China), but the difference between
Chinese propagandizing and the US advertising as described above shouldn't
be ignored.  US citizens, as a whole, simply have more choices than Chinese
ones.  Now, I happen to think that an area where the US should show more
responsibility is in the way it "uses" the Chinese economy like slave
labor, but, to get back to the points you made originally, that situation
is debated more openly here (not enough, though) than in China, and that's
the kind of point I was making.  The propaganda apparatus is much more
monolithic, a la Nazi Germany's, in China than it is in the United States. 
If I wanted to find an inheritor of Nazi Germany's propaganda system, I'd
look at China's--and many others--before the USA's.  Now, if I were to look
for a precedent for the Nazi system, I might look more quickly at the pre
WWII US, and, even moreso, the pre WWI US, and even moreso, the pre Civil
War US, and even moreso, the pre US under Great Britain (the amount of
advertising declining steadily as the regression into the past continues),
but I still think that other governments might provide even better analogs.

> US
> TV/advertising does not need to employ the strident hard sell of older
> propaganda. It's already won the war. The choices it presents, the
> questions it gets you to consider are predictable, institutionalised
> (remember get them asking the right questions and you don't need to
> worry about the answers).  Just like in Vineland people's minds have
> alreday been washed and the only requirement is for advertising and TV
> to sweep the corners now and again to remove the occasional cobweb of
> doubt. 

I guess I mostly take issue with the remark that the war's over.  I think
that's your opinion about what's going on in the US, but not what's in
Vineland, which I think is more concerned with pondering the state of the
war.  I think there's some humility in Vineland (and Pynchon in general)
regarding the ability to state accurately and authoritatively "how things
are" or even "how things were."  Pynchon does a great job of visualizing
history, but it's significant that he does so through a fiction that is
full of distortions and questions.

> Yes America is different. It's the same old story - the rich
> using their wealth to deny opportunity to the poor - only in the US it
> has been refined and refined to the point where it is a pushover.

Is that it?  Is that the whole story?  That's what I'd call a short short
short story.  I think it's worth at least a couple of sentences more. 
Pynchon himself has written over a thousand pages on it so far.  Would he
have bothered if it were that simple?

davemarc