WARLOCK and Loss

[Mike Weaver]

>Rebellion against the System is futile and would be rebels
>KNOW that Their power is based in large measure on the
>collaboration of fellow victims "as schizoid, as double
>minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest
>of us" who can go ahead and "deify" the "T" in technology
>"so as to feel less responsible" while they take what they
>can get from the System for their own personal benefit.
>Slothrop wont pull the clutch because this would reveal his
>real helplessness. The Firm no one has ever escaped is only
>at the mercy of Murphy's Law and the fact that we are all in
>it together and it's so Big it will collapse only of its own
>weight.  The State will not be brought down by
>revolutionaries. It is in fact, not not a  capitalist
>system, it's not an economic system at all. It's much
>deeper--something religious!


Well reification is a common enough concept in political theory, but 
deification, not sure I've come across that one.

There is no resolvable debate here.  You, Terance, have your fatalist 
religious outlook filtering your reading of Pynchon and that's that. 
Meanwhile those of us who feel it important to resist will continue to do so.

Yes, revolutionaries alone will never bring down the State. Revolutionaries 
in the end are midwives, encouraging, in our times, the birth of a new 
system, the dialectical supersession of capitalism (Al Kooper on keyboards).

>This is only my opinion, but it's supported by the texts.

In response to your call for textual support, with my radical political 
tradition filter in place, I was also going to refer to pages 712-13, for 
me the bottom of the well where the gold is to be found.

Yes the Man has an agent in each of our brains, but resistance isn't futile.
Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will. That's the phrase Gramsci took 
as a core of his outlook, and it remains IMO a necessary component of any 
radical's mental make-up. If you can't see what's going on how can you do 
anything about it?

Pynchon not talking about capitalism? who are "those massively monied" then?

Remembering that you described GR as a very American book I'd suggest that 
he is describing the lot of the middle class U.S. radical. "We will help 
legitimize them" - Cointelpro etc. Luckily for the real world 
resistance  U.S. radicals are only a very small part of its makeup.


So live on as Their pet if you wish. Myself I still think Pynchon champions 
resistance to the Man.
(This is only my opinion, but it's supported by the texts.)

I intend to remain an untameable
Weavercreature