Upside down

[Otto Sell]

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: Pynchon-L <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 8:43 PM
Subject: Re: Upside down


>
>
> Otto Sell wrote:
> >
> > I admit that German society is sick, but I get the increasing feeling
that
> > we and the US (and GB, France, Russia and so on) are much sicker then I
ever
> > thought and because of political correctness nobody dares to say . . .
>
> In America we dare to say (although free speech is now a
> legalism that permits not only the correct and incorrect to
> say what they please, but to do as they wish with impunity)
> too much. Like Hamlet's guilty Mother we protest too much
> and we consent too much.
>
You say what are we doing too much but what are we not doing enough?
>
> Take education, we spend billions of tax dollars on
> education, education for
> all, the foundation of democracy, justice, freedom,

I bet it's just a small percentage of the Pentagon-money, and the second
half of the sentence is a sympathetic wish. But I don't wanna sound
cynically. We're doing this here partly because we believe and share the
idea of the Aufklärung. Even with many intrinsic faults I see no better way.

>
Bush
> says no child shall be left behind, Gore calls for
> excellence. And yet, most of our children are being left
> behind or promoted when they shouldn't be and when
> excellence shows up  we charge it with elitism.

"They hate you if you're clever and they despite the fool.
A Working Class Hero is something to be."
(John Lennon)
But what elite? Is Bill Clinton elite? There's a difference between an elite
by education, knowledge and proven abilities and a group of electi-families
who believe they deserve political power as a birthright.

And most people simply have not time enough to take care for their children
as they should. If you wanna be successful today you're obliged to spend
most of your time for the company. It was not much different, even harder in
former times. Remember what Pynchon tells about Mason's family, his father,
his sons.

I think what we have in mind as a good education is some
kind of bourgeois ideal - which I share in a way and this "bourgeois" is
thus meant in the most positive socialist non-ideological way I am able to
say it.

>
We deplore,
> we condemn, we weep over the  sexual promiscuity of our
> children because children born to children in a cycle of
> poverty and violence is a bad batch of smack on the streets
> of our democracy, oh how our children shoot each other up,
> with AIDS, with bullets, with all sorts of garbage, but the
> television, the movies, the media promotes the violent,
> pornographic, pop you, pop her, pop him, pop lyrics from the
> Tube rocked cradle to the rapper's grave,  and this is all
> in the name of freedom,  the free, the free market of ideas.

It's the cultural "industry" of America that is dominating the market, but
the explanation "blame it on the media" is too simple. And besides, if you
cut the freedom of ideas you get the problem of who is in charge of the
control. If you got the control you get the problem of correct feedback (as
we have learned from rocket technology) if your decisions were right or
wrong. No one gives you a real feedback but you get only feedback from
people who know that they are reporting to the boss.

Having lived a sexual promiscuous youth myself I cannot condemn the young
for having fun but I can see your point within that
"children born to children in a cycle of poverty and violence"-thing about
underprivileged families. We've got a high unemployment rate and are faced
with that problem too, but the cuts in the social spendings, in education
too
we saw in the last 15 years have not helped the situation of kids
traumatized by family poverty and all that occurs along its way.

> The Bush family is as filthy as the Gore family and as dirty
> as the Clintons hope to be in three generations. The Nation
> is not sick, is not mad, such Freudian Marxism, Norman O.
> Brownism, Marcuse and Learyism is wearyism on the soul of
> America after 1969. Welcome to the middle, where nothing is
> excluded, and the absurd is only one step down on the way to
> decadense.

What is the middle then - filth?
Sounds as if we're moving towards a new kind of feudalism . . . people trust
the name which has been king already.

What is the Soul of America?
To come back to literature (we're deep in Pynchon-territory) which has, in
our romantic education ideal, the task of pointing out to things which are
going or have gone wrong, make us aware again of things we have forgotten. I
trust Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" (really, I admit, I do) there remains not
much to be proud of. The novel shows in an ironic view how sick and absurd
the birth of the nation was from the beginning, directed and conducted
mainly by money interests.
Let me add that if we see "The Tin-drum" as the post-war birthnovel of my
country that way, written from within a nerve clinic, I can only repeat the
last sentence. War-traumatized people passing on their traumata to their
kids, even in times of peace.

"Central to Pynchon's conception of how the past inhabits the present is the
notion of trauma."
(James Berger: Cultural Trauma and the "Timeless Burst": Pynchon's revision
of Nostalgia in Vineland, at:
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html)

Otto

ps ... from the same url:
(A hippie, Reagan said, was someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like
Jane, and smells like Cheetah" (Cannon, 148), and he promised to "clean up
the mess at Berkeley," in particular the "sexual orgies so vile I cannot
describe them to you")