rose-colored specs...

[Musashi Miyamoto]

First, thanks for calling me "Henry," Otto. My point about those stirring anthems is that both the Nazis and the Socialists were globalists of a sort; many good people/workers bought into each, not realizing the fascism inherent in any single-party government.

,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_

₪ Henry Musikar

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Otto
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 6:34 AM
To: Pynchon List
Subject: Re: rose-colored specs...


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.
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