Pynchon's Preterite

[Steelhead]

Stumbling through Robert Proctor's startling book, *Racial Hygiene:
Medicine Under the Nazi's*, I came across the following two quotes, one an
astounding  assertion from Pynchon's ideological mentor Bertrand Russell,
the other a chillingly droll call for state-sanctioned murder from a
professor at Cornell during TRP's tour of duty there.

First Russell, from Marriage and Morals, 1927:

"It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to
white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that
their extirmination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly
undesirable."  Love that "apart from questions of humanity."

Now, Cornell Prof. Dr. Foster Kennedy writing in the Journal of the
American Psychiatric Association, where he called for the killing of
retarded children, whom he refers to as "those hopeless ones who should
never have been born--Nature's mistakes."

Steely

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"It is in this *other world*, encircled by the sacred powers of labor, that
madness would assume the status we now attribute to it." M. Foucault