LSD, JFK, CIA?

[wood jim]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> on 8/8/01 6:03 AM, Doug Millison at
> DMillison at ftmg.net wrote:
> 
> > The point is not was LSD secret.
> 
> But Oedipa doesn't seem at all non-plussed about
> Hilarius's use of those
> various hallucinogens in "the experiment he was
> helping the community
> hospital run." (10) 

She doesn't trust him. She doesn't want to take
the meds. She doesn't know what is inside the pills 
the doctor has given her to take. She knows that he
wants her to participate in the experiment. She
doesn't
want to. 

She can't trust her shrink. 
Why? 

Maybe she is very paranoid. Maybe her shrink is a good
doctor and she is halucinating and having paranoid
delusions? Maybe not. Maybe he is a bad doctor. 

This is the point, I  suppose. 


The point certainly doesn't seem
> to be that the use of
> LSD, cactus juice, mushrooms etc was being kept
> secret by anyone either. 

It wasn't. So this can't be the point. Even if it
were, 
how would Thomas R. Pynchon know? 


I
> think the image which immediately follows (Uncle Sam
> as a junky) doesn't so
> much indict the C.I.A. for the irresponsible use of
> mind-altering substances
> in research as it does the mainstream of American
> science and govt. (cf. Who
> put the coke in Coca-Cola in _GR_?)
> 
> best
> 


Is Uncle even an addict here? Isn't this actually how
he looks in those old well-known portraits? And the
coke in the coke is not an indictment, as far as I can
tell. Pynchon's narrator in that section of GR is
completely mad, his paranoid conpiracies are tripping
over one another. 

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