rose-colored specs...

[Otto]

I'm not sure if he condemns anything, but if, it's not only the "hypocrisy
of big business" -- the Rathenau-séance seems to indicate to me that it's
P's opinion that this isn't just puritan hypocrisy but an inevitable
structural device of modern capitalism. And that's what it is.
A system where elected governments are just tools in the hands of others,
supranational structures that naturally can't be controlled by national
controlling mechanisms like parliamentary democracy. A system that is going
to kill itself by it's own structure.

I don't think that it is so easy to put P in a special political corner, and
you don't need "ironist PoMo pap" to say that nowhere in his writing he is
promoting violent demonstrations and aggression against anybody but the
contrary. Personally I have my doubts about the effectiveness of these
demonstrations. It's not the Sixties and different times require different
strategies.

I've got the impression that globalization as an American concern is only
about making money a good way, but opposing everything that affects
America's sovereignty like the Kyoto-agreement, treaties about Germ warfare
and reducing the weapon production or setting the rules for social
standards.

As a Dutch commentator from the "Volkskrant" on Genoa had put it last week:
if Mongolia wants to join the global trade it has to accept Pizza Hut in
Ulan Bator -- but what for? And what have they that could interest our
economies in return? Because there is no equality between the "partners" you
cannot call it free trade with good reason (met goed fatsoen) to force the
poor nations to open up their economies:
This is trade ruled by the stock exchange that concentrates increasingly
power and wealth in less hands of less corporations:

"Dit is echter 'beursgestuurde' handel, die steeds meer macht en rijkdom
concentreert in minder handen van minder bedrijven."
(Marco Visscher, De Volkskrant, Wednesday, July 18, 2001, p. 7)

If Henry could explain about the "stirring song of the good guys now, a
combination of the Internationale and Deutschland Uber Alles" a little?

Otto

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-----
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.
--
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>