rose-colored specs...

[Doug Millison]

...are indeed necessary to see as anything less than murderous thugs, 
the forces of evil protecting Bush and the rest of the world leaders 
and their multinational corporate backers and bankers, from 
rock-throwing protesters in the streets in Genoa. The demonstrators 
are protesting against, putting their lives on the line to stop the 
same System that Pynchon rails against throughout his works, the 
System that continues and profits from the War that never ends, that 
rapes Mother Earth, that cuts up what is alive and puts the dead 
pieces back together again and sells it to us -- synthesis, control. 
No way you can create a Pynchon that would support what the police 
have done in the streets of Genoa -- not the Pynchon that has written 
the stories, essays, and novels published under his name -- in 
support of the System that profits from the colonial system and 
slavery, from War, from environmental destruction, a System that 
through its control of media, education, public discourse has the 
power even to blind its too-willing subjects to its suicidal 
tendency.  I realize that a clever critic can take Pynchon's work and 
run it through the lit-crit sausage grinder and produce ironist PoMo 
pap for intellectual amusement only, but only by rewriting Pynchon, 
substituting a biased interpretation for the work itself,  ignoring 
the moral outrage that Pynchon expresses throughout his writing at 
the damage done by the System and the System's supporters (willing or 
not). Blacks protesting in Watts, a new generation of protesters 
zeroing in on the System that makes a Watts possible -- no 
difference, and to suggest that Pynchon's writing supports a 
distinction that lets today's multinational corporations off the hook 
when he condemned international cartels (and the thugs that do their 
dirty work) in GR and chartr'd corporations in M&D, and created Brock 
Vond in Vineland, doesn't take rose-colored specs, it takes tunnel 
vision or blinders.
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