Genoa (was Re: Who provokes whom?

[Doug Millison]

This is like arguing with my father about the anti-war riots in the 60s, and
I certainly don't mean Terrance specifically, but the whole back-and-forth,
for-and-against dynamic of this discussion.  No wonder Pynchon felt such
despair, and rage, and sadness -- it's all quite palpable, to me if not to
all readers, as I read the novel -- when he sat down to write Vineland and
tried to come to grips with the 60s rebellion, how and why it failed and
instead helped pave the way for Nixon to morph into Reagan.  How he sawthe
Tube (and other media) feeding the fantasies that co-opted the
counterculture vision of a way to peacefully steer the culture away from its
suicidal path, protected by the police (Brock Vond, illustrating Fascist
tendencies, and Karl Bopp an ex-Nazi), funded and driven by the
corporations, bought into ("sold on suicide" - from GR) by just about
everybody else.  But of course, in the 60s and continuing to the present
day, police do indeed start riots as governments -- impatient with pesky
citizens who seek to harness the energies and wisdom of a tradition of
non-violent civil disobedience that stretches back to the historical Jesus
movement if not prior to that -- bring down the club and, as necessary,
hustle things along with well-placed agents provocateurs (perhaps even
unwitting - Frenesi) to spark the violence that police can react against.
Pynchon manages to bring Vineland to a close with a shaky return to family
as a haven from that madness (and of course family carries its own craziness
and danger) and the Emersonian hope of some ultimate balancing of accounts
-- some progress, in my opinion, from the vision of suicidal global
destruction with which GR seems to end as a result of the unleashing of
these same Fascist/fascist energies. I see him, Pynchon, plunging back into
the whirlpool of despair and hope in M&D, with a nested narrative of how you
can't slay the dragon without being at the same time slain by the dragon in
a violent, suicidal embrace.  Paul M has often reminded us of a cartoon
character I enjoyed in my younger days, too -- Pogo, "We have met the enemy
and he is us" if I have the quote correct, because we are all to some degree
complicit, although the powerless are certainly less complicit than those
who hold and abuse power and the privilege that power commands. M&D ends
with the young boys seduced into that same Romantic dream of discovery
--which  in M&D evolves out of the Enlightenment campaign to conquer and
subdue Nature and the Other, the shadow side of the goodies Enlightenment
philosophy and science also bring.  Pynchon, in my opinion, does manage to
sustain three threads, despite the despair -- the comfort we can give each
other (in family, and community, even if it's no more than an embrace with a
stranger when the final rocket falls), a consistent critique of the forces
(economic, scientific/technological, philosophical/religious) that destroy
holy Nature for profane ends, a consistent critique of the forces which
co-opt human weakness in order to let the powerful continue to oppress the
rest -- in all of his work.

My $.02,
Doug

 Terrance:
How sad, how miserable are these violent events. [...]