Sure sign of madness, wasRE: globalization & Pynchon?

[Doug Millison]

I read Pokler's story (or, I can read it this way, sometimes I look at it
from other perspectives) as paralleling Slothrop's.  Is Slothrop a
"victimizer who participates completely in his own duping"? I wouldn't call
him that.  He's been conditioned since birth to behave the way he behaves,
he's been manipulated, he's been a pawn in somebody else's game. A reader
can sympathize with Slothrop because of the way that Pynchon has gauged
Slothrop's discoveries such that a reader can imagine him or herself
discovering the real story behind the scenes of a world she thought she knew
-- in that sense, Pynchon (it seems to me) has captured very well the
process of stumbling on truths that, sometimes, happens as a person grows up
and gets out of the world, as well as the doubts  re whether one has gotten
to the bottom of things after all, the fear that "Everything you know is
wrong," who to trust, the adults have fucked things up and lied all these
years.  Pokler, too, is conditioned by years of propaganda and movies and
other media (Rilke), manipulated by the Rocket program officers who need his
talents and who have figured out how to get the most from him, driven by
sexual urges beyond his control.  At the same time, Pynchon makes clear that
Pokler does to a certain degree know what's going on with the slave labor
but chooses to ignore it, hoping things aren't as he fears they may be.
Where Slothrop gets the bliss of merging with nature and having his epiphany
sanctified by the rainbow covenant, Pynchon drops Pokler into the hell of
Dora and knowing the dimensions of the crime in which he has been involved.
I sympathize with Pokler -- just doing his job, ignoring the scary shit at
the edges, afraid to look too close because he may see that he ought to
choose something else, in this Pokler is very much like most of us, I
suspect. 

"Richard Fiero":
Wha. . .  Pokler is no victim. Pokler is the victimizer who 
participates completely in his own duping.