Profit and loss

[Phil Wise]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: Profit and loss


>
> ----------
> >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.

Yeah, there's another factor, what Debord calls the spectacle, which has the
effect of making populations passive, as they are by 1984.  You're right, it
is more complex, but Pynchon's narrator does say that PR3's people made the
basic revolutionary mistake by investing in a cult of personality.

>
> > 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.

As were the revolutionary and reactionary selves of the young PR3ers before
and after they were turned by Vond.  Pynchon's implied author clearly
regards one as a totum of failed promise, the other as fascism.  Why can it
not be the same with laissez faire capitalism?  How can it be the archetypal
expression of democracy when many of ther most powerful figures cannot be
held to democratic account?

>
> 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
>
>
Not best: this makes me mad.  I'm surprised that someone with enough nouse
to read Pynchon well can read a simple posting to an email list so poorly.
I didn't label anything anything - I explained some similarities I
perceived, explained that they made me nervious.  I was quite careful to
explain where I was coming from.  The tone was: put my mind at ease, because
I'm sure history is full of bad consequences of actions of basically good
people.  This sort of response, and the fact that there is largely an
absense of responses to concerns of where exactly democracy figures in all
of this, anywhere, does nothing to address my nervousness.  I certainly
resent "inflammatory rhetoric" - using that term is just as bad as calling
Bush a Nazi (historically wrong - he may or may not be fascist - Our Man
Pynchon was perfectly comfortable to call Reagan one).

Phil



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