hyperbole and ad hominem

[Doug Millison]

Terrance:  "The GR Holocaust Opening would be Doug Millison's reading."

For accuracy's sake, I don't believe I ever put forth the notion that 
the screaming in the sky might be from Holocaust victims, although I 
don't see why such a reading should twist anybody's panties in a knot 
-- it's hardly less believable than the notion that the sound might 
be poor Gottfried, defying the laws of physics so his screams might 
somehow penetrate the vacuum of space and Earth's atmosphere. I did 
dare to suggest that the breaking glass of the crystal palace falling 
might be read as an allusion to Kristallnacht, and I pointed out 
several other allusions in GR's opening sequence that might refer to 
the Holocaust. I'm still quite certain that these allusions are 
present in the text and germane to a discussion of GR, and I earlier 
noted that other readers and Pynchon scholars have also dealt with 
this material in their discussions of this and other Pynchon novels. 
For reasons that remain obscure, this interpretation was thoroughly 
castigated by rj, whose rhetoric became increasingly shrill when I 
later noted that, contrary to rj's assertion that the Holocaust was 
absent from the novel, we see Pokler's very personal encounter with 
Holocaust victims in one of the novel's most gut-wrenching episodes, 
at the center of the novel. rj, previously an advocate of free speech 
on the Internet, shouted all the louder at each juncture in a rather 
obvious attempt to force such discourse out of the Pynchon-L forum, 
and began to target other P-listers who, rather courageously in the 
face of rj's acid attacks, couldn't help but notice that GR is, in 
fact, full of references to Nazi war crimes and Holocaust victims & 
etc., and that these references can be seen to relate rather directly 
to the novel's most important themes and motifs.  When I dared to 
suggest that rj's denunciations -- particularly his  insistence, 
repeated with all the manic fervor of the crank historian (especially 
in his smarmy emails to the Holocaust scholar who briefly joined our 
discussion and who  immediately pointed out that rj was using 
Holocaust denier hair-splitting logic and definitions,  after another 
P-lister suggested this as a way to get some disinterested 
third-party input), that the V-2 factory slaves were not Holocaust 
victims -- carried *echoes* of Holocaust denier rhetoric, well you 
should have heard the dogs barking at that one, and some of you were 
doing the barking.  I'm sure rj can apply his toolbox of 
pomo/deconstruction Cliff's Notes cliches -- and his obviously 
well-thumbed thesaurus (too bad rj didn't take TRP's warning on that 
score in the Slow Learner intro to heart) -- to this discussion once 
again if he wishes, but it won't make any more sense than it did in 
his earlier efforts to suppress this topic.

Why bringing in Baudelaire and Benjamin into the rather wide-ranging, 
if sometimes anemic, P-list discussion of V. warrants calling the 
person who mentioned Baudelaire a Nazi, or calling me a Nazi for 
earlier arguing that the Holocaust plays an important role in GR, 
remains a mystery to me, not to mention being more or less completely 
incoherent and illogical (which is nothing new in rj's style of 
argument, of course, as he cheerfully abandons logic when necessary 
to troll for flames and start new arguments). Maybe rj, the only 
person who has consistently argued for a reading of GR that would 
ignore or suppress Holocaust references (he continues, today, in his 
rewriting of Pynchon to support his own revisionist views), can 
explain, but I'm not holding my breath, and I'm not interested in 
further discussion of this point. I will speak up as necessary, 
however, in the face of future slander.  Why some of you choose to 
tolerate rj's ad hominem slurs and attack instead my (possibly) 
hyperbolic response also remains a mystery.  But of course you didn't 
speak up when rj was leveling anti-Semitic slurs at a respected 
Pynchon scholar last fall, nor did many if any of you speak up when 
rj hounded Pynchon scholar Charles Hollander out of this forum prior 
to that.

P.S.  If you don't think there's a link between neo-Nazism, 
globalization, and the rise of corporate hegemony (as reflected in 
Bush Sr.'s successful theft of the U.S. presidential election so he 
can, among other things, move forward once again with the Star Wars 
missile defense boondoggle), well, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell 
you.  Call it hyperbole, if you will, but you could do worse than to 
read _The Beast Reawakens_ by Martin A. Lee and begin to educate 
yourself on those links.  Add in _Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the 
Press_ by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, and perhaps _Acid 
Dreams:  The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, 
and Beyond_ by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain and you'll also be in a 
better position to understand the political dimensions of GR and 
Pynchon's other novels, discussion of which has been more or less 
systematically squeezed out of this forum by rj and his neoliberal 
ilk with their consistent avoidance of any discussion of Pynchon's 
politics and their shrill outcries each time such discussion 
re-emerges.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>