Profit and loss

[jbor]

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>From: "Phil Wise" <philwise at paradise.net.nz>

>

> In Vineland P asks why the sixties failed; the answer is
> the participants mirrored official power, and so were not up to the
> challenge of democracy.

I think the depiction of the labour radicals (Frenesi's parents) of the 30s
and 40s sitting around and watching old Hollywood movies on the Tube in the
50s and 60s and abusing the "scabs" -- "scab garbage ... "scab carpentry" --
who worked while they were starving for "the cause" needs to be factored in
as well. (81-2) It shows just how ineffectual the actual boycott was, how
much the old radicals have been seduced by the *product* anyway (the crew
credits come at the *end* of the movie ... all those neighbourhood
television screens flickering "silent blue in the darkness"), how petty and
personal their resentments have become.

> Their "basic revolutionary mistake" was a libinal
> attachment to Weed Atman, an attachment that suggested they needed someone
> to tell them what to do.

There's more to it than this in the novel, surely? Zoyd too stoned ...
Frenesi selling out ... Brock Vond ...

> The implied Pynchon would seem to be closer
> politically to a version of the sixties movements that doesn't make the
> basic revolutionary mistake; a democratic Pynchon.

Surely laissez faire capitalism is the archetypal economic expression of
democracy? They both, in their modern guises, derive from the same general
time and place and sequence of events.

Labelling "globalisation" as a "totalitarian movement" in order to scare
people off is just semantics, like calling George W. Bush a Nazi. Foax just
ain't that dumb, or else they've become desensitised to such inflammatory
rhetoric (and understandably so) and thus it fails to achieve its desired
effect anyway.

best