GRGR(5) Katje: take two

[Doug Millison]

I love the way that TRP suddenly shifts gears, pulls out of this episode's
most literate high camp S & M spy story, how he moves away from the long
and cadenced diction when a different narrator (perhaps TRP himself)
interjects in short and simple declarative statements a passage that by its
sharp contrast with the rest of this long and dramatic episode
distinguishes itself and delivers the pungent political truths that
motivate Katje, the same core philosophical beliefs -- everything is buying
and selling and spectacle -- that motivated the 60s movement that TRP here
projects back onto WWII, and later laments in Vineland.

"She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between
information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the
Manual, on file at the War Department. 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 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. Organic
markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up
everywhere. [...] the truer currencies come into being." (105.24)

Compare Katje's sexual theater in the service of this truth with the Vroom
girls' antics in M&D and the way TRP slips in the stark acknowledgement of
slavery's basis in commerce and control; it bears comparison as well with
Brock & Frenesi's twisted pairing.