pynchon-l-digest V2 #2158

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<... they called protesters against the Vietnam war all kinds of names, too. 
 Funny thing, the protesters turned out to be right and the war hawks were 
wrong, and history has proven it so.  Turned out the U.S government was lying 
to Americans and the rest of the world about that war, covered up war crimes, 
destabilized the entire region, the whole nine yards.   The U.S. has a long 
history of putting dissenters and protesters in jail, too, and an equally 
long history of intimidating all kinds of people who don't go along with the 
majority. The Rev'd Martin Luther King Jr. comes to mind, perhaps you've read 
his letter from the Birmingham jail.>>

This is more or less true, but typical of Millison's sweeping disregard for 
specificity ("the U.S. government," would have to include the Congress, would 
it not, which included many who were against the war--Kennedy, McGovern 
notably).

Furhter, it folds the two (three?) hundred year struggle for civil rights and 
the Vietnam war into an undifferentiated same thing and offers no argument 
for how these events of (at the time Millison refers to) forty and thirty 
years ago have anything remotely to do with the destruction of the World 
Trade Center and the situation we're in now.  In short, it's propaganda.

<<right-thinking early Americans gave Quakers a hard time for being  
unwilling to butcher Native Americans ...>>  ditto.

<<I read in the paper today, heard the lady herself talking on the radio just 
awhile ago,  a group of women who have been protesting regularly for many 
years in the San Francisco Bay Area, against mistreatment of Palestinians, 
FBI goons are bullying them now, they're bullying a lot of people who have 
spent the past many years working for peace and justice in places like 
Palestine. >>

What "paper" would that be?  I seem to recollect your undifferentiated 
discrediting of the "corporate press." 

Further:  Comparing Rob Jackson to McCarthy is an astonishing act of chutzpah 
from one whose prose runs to such phrases as drooling cretins, cowboys, gang 
rapists, etc.

And further: the reference to Susan Sontag is worthless and deceitful in 
attempting to prove the point Millison's trying to make.

Sontag was given free reign by the New Yorker to say what she thought.  The 
outraged response was from readers of that magazine and other correspondents, 
both professional and not, who disagreed with her.
  
No one has tried to censor her or those who reacted in words to her.  Indeed, 
she was given the forum to respond--Salon--which you cited.

More generally, It should be noted that the anti-Vietnam war protest was 
(among other strange and not-so-strange bedfellows) a wedding of pacifists 
and others who were against the Vietnam war  specifically.  E.g., George 
McGovern fought willfully and bravely in WWII.  I mention this to bring focus 
on the fact that Millison's wrapping himself as a pacifist in the robe of 
Vietnam protest is at issue with others who protested that war--me, for 
one--for whom that war was wrong but who believe, however regrettably, that 
war is sometimes necessary.  My feeling thusfar is that this is the case in 
the present instance.  I reconsider daily and, of course, take exception to 
being labelled on that basis a drolling cretin.