VLVL(7) - Rex Vs Weed

[David Morris]

With Rex and Weed we are shown the ideologue Vs the pragmatist in their 
Philosophies of Revolution.  The "Children" ask Weed...:

(229.5)  "Weed, how about picking up the gun?  We know it's supposed to be 
wrong, but we don't know why."
   Once He would have proclaimed, "Because in this country nobody gives a 
shit about human life [...] [A]ttack what matters more than life to the 
regime [...] their money and their property."  But these days he was 
saying, "[...] because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine 
gun."

Both answers are pragmatic.  The first is optimistic, assuming the 
possibility of progress against the "regime."  The second acknowledges the 
futility of beating the man at his own game of power via the gun, thus 
leaving only two options for action: subjugation or flight (as the 
alternative to "fight").

Rex, on the other hand, is the ideologue, with the "fight" option 
consciously moving progressively toward self-martyrdom:

(129.31)  Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive 
abstinence [...] with the looming promise always of jail and the final 
forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain.

Throughout these pages the phrases "these days" is used to contrast the 
virgin days of the Revolution to the now reality-striking present and the 
unpromising future.  Both the ideologue and the pragmatist's views are 
"Kind of pessimistic?" as Weed was to describe Rex.  The cause of this 
pessimism being the looming Giant of the State and all its resources of 
Oppression.