The Whole Sick Crew

[Lisa Stanward]

Regarding the WSC...

To me, the significant word is sick.

(The term, to me, means nothing more than "The gang's all here", as in "Here 
we are, the Whole Sick Crew")

Assuming the group coined the phrase to describe themselves, the word sick 
suggests that self indulgent angst which seems to mark the life of young, 
middle-class, well-off, urban Westerner.  Enjoying the good life but 
imagining they are hugely oppressed, the crew consider themselves affected 
by a malady which allows them to see "the Truth" about the world.  They 
lament the obliviousness of those outside the crew to life's futility and 
paint cheese danishes to throw off the chains of oppression they suffer as 
WASP males.

It seems that Pynchon is mocking the self-indulgence of the group to 
consider themselves somehow plagued by their higher ken of the world's 
affairs when, in fact, should they choose to travel outside their Manhattan 
lifestyle, they would discover they knew nothing of life or of hardship.  It 
is a thing of youth, which Maijstral recognises in his early poetry, a 
pretension which P himself acknowledges in his own work in his introduction 
to Slow Learner.

It brings to mind DeLillo's White Noise.  A professor of Hitler Studies 
whose course skirts around the issue of the holocaust!  These well off, 
white Westerners don't know jack about hardship, untouched by the 
implications of poverty, war, race hatred, and yet suffer a floating anxiety 
(represented by the Airborne Toxic Event) which they have to turn to drugs 
to suppress.  Is this the fate of the WASP?  To suffer no hardship but to 
feel tormented nonetheless?

Just a thought,
L.
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