Moloch

[Jane O' Sweet]

In the USA we have an advanced monopoly capitalism at the
base and a small business network that drives an very
flexible, dynamic, domestic economy. In his prose and in his
fiction Pynchon warns of the dangers of  increased
specialization and rationalization. 

But is he against Capitalism? 

Calculations, time, product production, mechanization, the
Brave New World social order, where individuals are not
manufactured in a baby bulb factory so much as pressed into
prefabricated molds carved out by the family social class
and stratum, makes standardization, rationalization of the
product, checked by quality assurance and quality control
engineers and statisticians, a "nature" that is the "nature"
or the business of that System controls production,
distribution, use, against the nature of the human because
it manufactures and demands and sustains reactions and
responses automatic and predictable, specialized and
rationalized.   

Smile you're on candid camera. 

Ronald Ray-Gun was a master of the system because he was no
less an inventor of it than Ford or Edison. Smile for the
people Jack. Nixon, dark and brooding, his shoulders
creeping up his neck, his brows bushy awnings suspended over
the suspicious darkness behind the windows to the soul, the
swollen baggy jowls, the countless trips to the best
endocrinologists could not remove the obstruction to normal
breathing to compete with Kennedy. Jack, talking to
reporters while doing laps in the pool could make Nixon
sound like man drowning in a sea of his own phlegmy
troubles. 

Test, test them again, measure them, measure the mind, the
imagination, the will, the faith. This was unthinkable to
Newton, to Lincoln, to Shakespeare. 

If you want people to fly Happy air you have to smile girls,
now smile, that's it, put your cheerful voice on and smile
girls, smile, that's it, your mood, your attitude, your
mother's mastectomy this morning, your lumpy silly-cones
have no rights here, smile. 

I know it's not art, but our study of color, we paid them 50
Geeez  for that study and it says if we paint giant taxi cab
yellow suns rising over suburban swimming pool blue
mountains our sales will increase by 10%

It's the latest thing Charles, if we don't buy one we are
nobody. 

And who/what is behind the curtain, behind the emptiness,
the degradation of the human factor? Is it the rational and
specialized  moral bankruptcy of Capitalism? 

This is the argument of the radical 1960s Left. It's a
conclusion one can easily draw from Pynchon's known sources,
Weiner, Mumford, McLuhan, Weber, Marx, Marcuse, but it's not
Pynchon's position. Not GR, not in any Pynchon text.