NP Orwell's politics

[Swing Hammerswing]

>You could always talk about Orwell's obvious influence on Pynchon --
>Vineland set in 1984, for starters, and it's possible to see GR in many 
>ways
>as a response to Orwell, too.
>

I thought GR was a response to T.S. Eliot's *The Idea of
a Christian Society* and Norbert Wiener's *God and Golem*,
as sure as Eliot rejected our America, the great
compromise, so compromised in Protestant American "ethic(s)"
and "individualism" --corruptions by the Gospel according to  capitalism-- 
he did not see fit to offer such sound criticisms of
traditionalism, that stodgy old fertil ground where anti-semitism and all 
manner of evils were still clinging
to the medieval ideal "christian" society, "in which
the natural end of man--virtue and well-being is community--
is acknowledged for all," nor did Mr. Eliot's Anglican
Church distinguish itself historically by devotion to this ideal, but
camels have found a way through the eye of the needle, even
in the Church of immigrant flocks, where those poor, praised
for their catholic poverty, were also judged shifless and worthless and 
damned by the elected sons of Puritans and their brothers in
alms and charity. "Render unto man the things that are
man's and unto the computer the things which are the
computer's," say Wiener. Now tell me, when is the last
time your computer had a virus caused by a deadly sin?
As Mumford once observed, "all but one of the seven deadly
sins--sloth--became virtue" in the technolocial age, Greed,
avarice, and envy are but other words for ambition;
gluttony, luxury, and pride but emblems of sucess.
Well, as Roger Mexico could calculate, religion may be
the "opiate" of the "critical masses" but consolidation
and destruction and reconstruction of the means of production
is plotted with poisened distributions and the mechanized
and sychronized movements of men. "Every civilization,"  (Freud thought so 
much of religion he didn't bother to distinguish it from civilization), 
Freud argues in his "Future of Illusion,"
rests on the compulsion to work (better check Brown and Marcuse on this) and 
a renunciation of instinct and therefore inevitably
provokes opposition from those affectedd by its demands."
And, "It has become clear that civilization cannot consist
principally or solely in wealth itself and the means of
acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution;
for these things are threatened by the rebelliousness
and descrictive mania of the participants of
civilization."

"I prefer not to, sir. "

Turn off the lights, protest the energy crisis, I say you are
part of the crisis, but it will give me a magic cloak, I will
be fixing the machine.

T/B uttle





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