Moral Idiocy

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Yeah, I heard some dudes talking on Howard Stern the other day, and they said they were as pissed off at the stupid turn-the-other-cheekers holding candles out on the streets.  Isn't that something: Pissed off  at the people who aren't pissed off.  Looks like some folks is just plain pissed off. Howard really bummed me out that day.  Barbarians out of the closet is right.
But not all's bad in the world.  I turned off the radio, and now I see there's really a lot of love and support and patriotism in the air.  (Not just the American air either, but the air everywhere.)  I joined in two public PC prayer circles  (one at a kids' soccer game and one at a State picnic), and the sentiments were both positive and uplifting: If you want to experience peace, make peace for others; if you want to experience love and compassion, show love and compassion to others; if you want to heal your sadness and anger, seek to heal sadness and anger in others.  People are wearing red white and blue everywhere, buying up all the flags up in the stores; kids are ringing on doorbells collecting for the RedCross; blood banks are turning people away; churches are ringing bells at noon; mosques are dedicating Friday prayers to America.  It's not just the barbarians getting shook out of the closet. We've all been shook out.  Our Heart lies wounded and exposed in the rubble.  I wonder how each of us will choose to heal it: dismantle and re-design/re-Think or add a bigger warhead?  It's a terrible tragedy, but it offers us a Great opportunity for Reflection.  I wonder what we'll make of Ourselves. 


Page 871 of Gravity's Rainbow:

"He is the father you will never quite manage to kill.  The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible.  There is no dignity.  The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date.  The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail....So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent if for death."




  

  
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: CyrusGeo at netscape.net 
  To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
  Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 3:46 PM
  Subject: RE: Moral Idiocy


  Mark Harris <mark_r_harris at yahoo.com> wrote:

  >All the jibber-jabbering on this and other Internet
  >message boards by people who are more distressed over
  >what the United States *may* do than outraged by what
  >the terrorists *have* done strikes me as the sheerest
  >moral idiocy, and quite as offensive as the comments
  >of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

  I don't think these words describe anyone on this list. As far as I know, everyone here was shocked and disgusted by what happened. That said, what's wrong about worrying about the future? Don't you care what happens next? Do you feel no apprehension watching the situation develop as it does? Moreover, what does morality have to do with any of this? Leaving aside the perennial problem of definition, criminal acts are not moral, are they? But, then, neither is politics. Or war.

  Cyrus


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