GRGR(4) Re: TS's session, X and a Spengler ?

[Paul Mackin]

My reply to Max was in regard to WWII, which was what he was emphasizing. I
didn't really think he meant to imply what I suggested. Mine was a rhetorical
(?)question. About Doug's applying the mad scientist stuff to the 60s I
suppose it's impossible to read what went on at the White Visitation without
thinking of the LSD experiments on those unwitting subjects of later times. I
don't think for a minute however that the real perpetrators ever dreamed of
anything as outlandish as Pointman and company did. Anything's possible
though.

I don't object to projecting GR onto the 60s if you allow all other decades in
as well.  P's writing about the universal folly of mankind. (well who knows
what he's writing about)

                                                                P.

Doug writes:

> At 11:36 AM -0400 6/20/99, Paul Mackin re Max's fine post:
> >I see what you're saying and of course agree. However you don't literally
> >mean, do you, that  Pynchon or his book promotes or intends to pro
> >kind of belief  that  mad scientists were prevalent in or typical of  the
> >historic Allied war effort with respect to psychiatry or in general?
>
> If you accept the notion that one of the things TRP is doing in GR is
> writing about the 60s (the extended cultural sixties which back a bit into
> the 50s to catch the post-war Cold War and ahead a bit into the 70s, not
> the calendar's decade) but shifted back into a WWII setting, then the
> depiction of psychologists/psychiatrists as mad scientists might be more
> palatable than the picture Max paints. It was known, in certain hepcat
> circles in the 50s and 60s, that CIA experimenters were giving massive
> doses of LSD to unwitting subjects, to see how LSD might be used for mind
> control, for intelligence and military purposes.  See _Acid Dreams The
> Complete Social History of LSD:  The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond_ by
> Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain (1992, revised edition).
>
> d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com