rose-colored specs...

[Musashi Miyamoto]

Pynchon, does not, of course, "support what the police have done in the
streets of Genoa," but I don't get the impression that he would support
the juvenile, first reincarnation, with us or against us, black or white
naïve rhetoric that DM has written below. It doesn't take a clever
critic to remember the tree's answer to Slothrop. 

Pynchon didn't "condemn international cartels." He condemned the
hypocrisy of big business profiting from both sides of the big war and
involvement in the inhumanity of the Nazis in particular. Pynchon, as
far as I know, chooses to live in NYC (as do many angry P-Listers), a
place that wouldn't exist without the system "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." Your online "journalism"
isn't exactly the self-sustaining roving pressman father of Slothrop's
pig-fest love; it's fueled, and necessarily so, by extreme entropic
control. I love being in the country, but you can't take the city out of
the boy.

Sure, mean people suck. Now what? Keep the bad guys local and the good
guys global? Ah, I can hear that grand, stirring song of the good guys
now, a combination of the Internationale and Deutschland Uber Alles.

Holier than thou,

Henry M

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Doug Millison
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2001 2:32 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: rose-colored specs...


...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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