World Gone Mad; and a moment from GR

[glthompson]

Toby G Levy wrote:

> Anyone who has kept up with political discussion over the last decade
> knows that neither David Horowitz nor Christopher Hitchens has ZERO
> credibility on any subject except his own celebrity.  The only reason
> these phonies continue to publish is because whatever view they are
> espousing at the moment happens to agree with the money man who owns the
> organ that publishes it.
>
> As shocking as it may seem to some of the wild eyed innocents on this
> list, there is only one truth to all the events that followed 9/11: The
> Bush administration acted politically to take advantage of a grieving
> nation and continue to exploit the situation daily for political
> advantage.

One of the local sports hereabouts seems to involve trying to read current
events through the lens of selected passages from the texts of Thomas
Pynchon. Let me offer one of my own.

Context: Lyle Bland (of the Bland Foundation) has been introduced as the
funding source for NRC studies on sexual anxieties, suppression of the
100-mpg-carburetor, etc. (BTW, anyone who thinks of such figures as Pynchon's
own fictional/paranoid inventions might want to check out Trudy Lieberman,
_Slanting the Story: The Forces that Shape the News_ [New York: New Press,
2000], on the role of groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato
Institute, u.s.w., in getting a particular conservative / business agenda
into the mainstream press.) Pynchon lays a tantalizing trail of Bland links
(Laszlo Jamf, the IG, on down to Franz Pokler's employer Pflaumbaum) to
suggest but not conclusively prove a Conspiracy. [You'll have to provide your
own umlauts . . .]

"We would also have to show some interlock between Bland and the Ufa
movie-distribution people who sent Pokler out with his advertising bills to
Reinickendorf that night, to his fateful meeting with Kurt Mondaugen and the
Verein fur Raumschiffahrt--not to mention _separate_ connections for
Achtfaden, Narrisch, and the other S-Gerat people--before we'd have a
paranoid structure worthy of the name. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was
nowhere near adaquate to that kind of data retrieval. Even if it had been,
Bland, or his successors and assigns, could've bought programmers by the
truckload to come in and make sure all the information fed out was harmless.
Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth,
were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies,
drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction,
absurdity" (582).

Now, I don't think that our own state of data retrieval is quite as bad as
that in Pynchon's 1945--the internet provides us an avalanche of data,
putting the burden of interpreting-and-filtering on the user's end (with that
"user" being in turn constructed from a lifetime of such interactions). But a
lot of what circulates on-line and as hardcopy isn't too far removed from
"dreams, psychic flashes," etc., while a lot of what comes from mainstream /
on-line press is bought information, harmless to the descendents of Bland's
sponsors.

One last idea that occurs to me. Since WWI at least, propaganda and PR have
been seen as part of the war effort, with the last substantial effort being
the corraling of the press into "pools" during the (last) Gulf War as a way
of keeping them away from first-hand evaluation and possibly reporting not in
line with the Pentagon's agenda. But I have an intimation that for the
present administration, the war is at least in part a means to an improved
propaganda / PR effort, rather than the other way around.

Or maybe this is just a psychic flash . . . dancing on a ground of terror,
contradiction, and absurdity.

G