Pynchon's Beliefs

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

"Faith and Fascism"

VL Chapter D in my busted Penguin.118-121

"The war then approaching was never mentioned directly, BUT (my caps), "Well,
what'll I get to shoot?" Moody wanted to know....
"Whoever they tell you. Interesting thing about that, way I see it, you don't
have nearly the legal problem."

Moody "way down in the hole." (T. Waits)

"He felt himself about to go crazy in this deep overcrowded hole, but he hung on,
he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding
Jesus--Moody saw, like the comics or Bible illustrations, a succession of scenes
showing him the way he had to go, which was to imagine the worst and then himself
be worse than that. He must torture the violent, deprive the greedy, give the
drunks something to stagger about. he would become a Military Policeman, be as
bad as he had to be to make it, using everything he knew from those rounder
days....Shaftesbury Avenue..."snowdrop."   "Hmm-mm" says Frenesi as she drools
over Moody's snapshot--"showing Moody in his full-dress uniform,"...."he beat
your mother?"  Best Norleen could ever do was "It's his job,"...."You mean there
telling him to?  "Everybody darlin," "Somebody was lookin' out for me." And by
then DL was able easily to sit attentive, pressures, through the Christer
commercial that followed,,,She was finally able to acknowledge her mother's soul,
one more side benefit of a life in the martial arts....she would discover that
all souls, human and other wise, were different disguises of the same greater
being--God at play. She respected Norleen's love of Jesus even though she'd had
her own way to go since she was a girl, even before the Department of Defense,
that well-known agent of enlightenment, ever thought of cutting Moody's orders
for Japan.
This was during the LULL (my caps) between Korea and Vietnam,"


Foreign violence and expansion, domestic violence and repression, and Jesus save
your soul!

Peace is despair'd, For who can think submission?
War then, war Open or understood, must be resolv'd."
                                                               --Milton PL BK I

http://pubpages.unh.edu/~cbsiren/mythold.html

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html



DudiousMax at aol.com wrote:

> Dudes,
>            I was reading in VL and in it, as you all know, TRP uses the word
> fascism a lot.  People are calling each other "fascist" for high crimes, like
> the murder of Weed Atman, and misdemeanors, like telling the kids to brush
> their teeth.  So I started looking up terms like fascism, totalitarianism,
> liberalism, (secular) humanism, and The Enlightenment.  I offer them here.
> We know TRP occasionally has thoughts about these things (more overtly in
> VL), but they certainly are floating around in GR.  And, I sometimes cobbled
> together items found in some definitions with others.  The results are:
>                 Fascism: Political philosophy wherein all power resides in
> the party and its leader.  Individual is very subordinate to the state that
> can intrude at any level on the individual.  The Leader is infallible, as are
> State and Volk (race).  Typically, the mechanics of the government are
> centralized and autocratic, headed by the dictator.  Socially, the people are
> coerced into extreme social and economic regimentization.  Any opposition is
> met with severe and violent suppression.  Benito Musolini wrote (1925), that
> Fascism could take any economic form (capitalist or Marxist), could have any
> form of legislature (uni or bi-camaral), with or without a Supreme Court
> (which would be rubber stamp).  The governmenet could even be judged a
> bourgeois democracy, and still be fascism, according to him.  It seems to me
> the key concept is "totalitarianism."
>                 Totalitarianism: that political philosophy that holds the
> absolute state authority is super ordinate to everything; religion, family,
> and most particularly, the individual, in all aspects of life.  In seeing
> that this goal is achieved, the state is empowered to use extreme coercive
> measures (censorship, terrorism, prison, and state murder).
>                 As opposed to these philosophies of governance there is
> Liberalism, and Secular Humanism.
>                 Liberalism: that political philosophy that believes in the
> essential goodness of man, progress, the autonomy of the individual, and the
> protection of political and civil liberties.
>                 Secular Humanism: that political philosophy that sees the
> individual of primary value to the state.  It holds the secular
> characteristics of the Renaissance as primary, stressing individual's dignity
> and worth, and capacity for self-realization through reason.  It is
> characterized by an anti-authoritarian approach to institutions (believing
> they exist to serve the individuals), and it rejects supernaturalism
> (religion), hence its secular nature.
>                 The Enlightenment: the eighteenth century philosophy based on
> rationalism and the "brotherhood of man," that rejected the social,
> religious, and political ideas of the time.  It was reflected most vividly in
> the French Revolution.
>                 Well that's about it.  Thought I'd toss that into the soup.
>                                             Max