VLVL(7) - Rex Vs Weed

[Paul Mackin]

My eyes and ears pricked up at David M's commentary on the differences
between Rex and Weed and what the two  respectively "stand for." When I
myself came to these passages in the book I was kind of baffled. I wanted
to place these two individuals in terms of the actual radical student
controversies of the time that I  remembered. I couldn't do it. I do
remember there were the consensus builders vs the action faction. Don't
recall that  even the action faction ever considered  the use of guns.
(Bombs maybe latter on by small groups)  More commonly the activists would
be the ones engaged in taking over campus buildings and such things.  
The smart money of course always said the distinction between
consciousness building and action was false. The way you built radical
consciousness was was going out to do something against authority that
would be repressed by some kind of force. This would radicalize people and
build a new class. It was hard for the middle class students to really get
to feel that they themselves could personally be very inconvenienced by
capitalism and such things. If you went South you might get your head
bashed in by a sheriff but up North for a long time nobody thought
affluent white kids would be in much danger. The Chicago Convention
changed this complacency somewhat. Plus of course some of the movement
kids (like Frenesi) had radical working class backgrounds and at least
knew second hand what police clubs could do to the the not so well placed
in society. Anyway I'm glad David brought this up. Gave me a chance to
wonder again what Pynchon is up to here. I certainly don't see him trying
to reproduce the radical student situation as it existed. Of course I may
just be remembering things wrong.

				P.
 
On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, David Morris wrote:

> 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.
>