M&D's absent "revolution", control in GR, etc.

[Doug Millison]

Thinking about the discussion that's taken place off and on regarding the
"absence" of the American Revolution in M&D, lost in between the 1760s of
the American adventures of the eponymous pair and the 1780s of Cherrycoke's
telling of the tale, and discussions of the relative absence of blacks,
TRP's treatment of the Indians, etc., in M&D, as I finally get around to
reading _A People's History of the United States_ by Howard Zinn.  "The
inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society,
the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new
nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the
Revolution," Zinn writes. "With the English out of the way, it could now be
put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution
of the United states...."

Re Roland Feldspath and Control in GRGR(11), I suggest Deborah L. Madsen's
article in the new _Pynchon Notes, "The Business of Living:  _Gravity's
Rainbow_, Evolution, and the Advancement of Capitalism" -- "I want to
pursue this connection between modernism and the kind of totalization
Pynchon's cartels desire, and the postmodern alternative of a highly
contingent, chaotic economy inhabited by schizophrenic corporations,"
Madsen writes. I don't agree with all she has to say -- I've seen quite a
bit of the contemporary management theory in action that she refers to, and
suggest she might be a bit too prone to take some of the hype at face value
-- but it's a very interesting reading of what GR has to say about the
evolution of capitalism. She discusses Feldspath in particular, his message
about "the illusion of control" (GR 30).

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