Please, no politics or current events -- this is the Pynchon list!

Wed Nov 7 09:27:53 CST 2001

"As for violence, in a pocket of reality such as Watts, violence is never
far from you: because you are a man, because you have been put down,
because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Somehow,
sometime. Yet to these innocent, optimistic child-bureaucrats, violence is
an evil and an illness, possibly because it threatens property and status
they cannot help cherishing.
They remember last August's riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from
the realistic viewpoint of Watts, was so abnormal? "Man's got his foot on
your neck," said one guy who was there, "sooner or later you going to stop
asking him to take it off." The violence it took to get that foot to ease
up even the little it did was no surprise. Many had predicted it. Once it
got going, its basic objective -- to beat the Black and White police --
seemed a reasonable one, and was gained the minute The Man had to send
troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardly a person in
Watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it
happened--unless he lost somebody.
But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of precardiac
Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are
up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order
regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an
enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as
the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it
is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about
violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting
money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying
charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far
from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who
you really are."

"In science fiction, where entire worlds may be generated from simple sets
of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world are routinely
transcended. In each of these cases we know better. We say, "But the world
isn't like that." These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact,
fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label
"escapist fare."
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the
decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of
literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as
important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more
important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had
been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years.
Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction
also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for
those of Luddite persuasion.
By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was
the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended
to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and
the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy
to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and
before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply
out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes,
unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust
running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those
who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies --
conventional wisdom. [...] The word "Luddite" continues to be applied with
contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear
kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and
vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D.
Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power
establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us
average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it
quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on,
even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less
possible to fool any of the people any of the time."

"The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a police car,
requesting over his loudspeaker that a civilian car blocking his way move
aside and let him past, all the while addressing the drive of the car
personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though people I tried to share
it with only shrugged, assuming that of course the driver's name (along
with height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained from the Motor
Vehicle Department via satellite, as soon as the offending car's license
number had been tapped into the terminal -- so what?
Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the end of an era still
innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially
explode upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of computers around
then, but they were not quite so connected together as they were shortly to
become. Data available these days to anybody were accessible then only to
the Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or what to do with it.
There was still room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country, inhabited
only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest details
of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet
undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to arise of how to
avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of
control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom
that computer-folk were imagining then -- a question we are still asking.
Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to
grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us that is not in some way
tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital
in nature? Does anybody know the way to William Gibson's "Republic of
Desire?" Would they tell if they knew? So forth."

"In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated
everywhere, both as el cólera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in
terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la cólera, defined as choler or
anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare. Victims of one, in this
book, are more than once mistaken for victims of the other. War, "always
the same war," is presented here not as the continuation by other means of
any politics that can possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague,
whose only meaning is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground,
lives, so precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of
resistance, even of sworn opposition, to death."

"In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a
failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and
30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
Reagan-Bush years are not far behind."

"power is as much our sworn enemy as unreason"