Pynchon and the current situation

[Doug Millison]

Terrance:
> How will this work? 

The way it always has worked.  The U.S. government
pays for weapon systems and the infrastructure that
supports war and "homeland security".  That money goes
into the coffers of the companies  that provide the
products and services necessary for War and "homeland
security". These companies spend it by hiring people,
manufacturing weapons and other products.  Economic
development over the past 60 years is more complex
than any analysis you or I could provide in a 3k email
message of course, but I'm confident that  a study of
the U.S. economy over the past many decades will
demonstrate that the military-industrial complex
expands with war and preparations for war and pushes
the U.S. economy along with it, despite the occasional
cyclical aberration.


Terrance:
> If we want peace we will need to understand that we
> are not living in a
> Pynchon novel. 

But we are.  Pynchon's novels are not books you can
leave on the shelf while you get on with a "real life"
that's somehow distinct and separate.  This is where
the PoMo readers have it right.  Go back and re-read
that Zizek email that Kurt forwarded to the P-list
last week.  There is no boundary between the literary
and other artistic fantasies that we erect and project
and the rest of the world in which we live.

Terrance:
> We are living in a very complicated world. Pointing
> political fingers,
> calling people names, re-writing history, is not a
> very  constructive
> way to build a peace movement.

I call it the way I see it, my friend. As their
counterparts were when they escalated the war in
Vietnam, the members of the current Administration are
cold-hearted defenders of the right of American
businessmen to profit from War, and advocates of
America's sacred duty to somehow "make the world safe
for democracy" even if you have "to burn the village
to save it." The same American yahoo apocalyptic
illustrated by Slim Pickens riding that bomb down to
trigger the Doomsday Machine. Their belligerent
rhetoric aims to co-opt love of country in the name of
flag-waving support for the coming military strikes. 
I  protested this during the Vietnam War, the Gulf
War, and again now. I speak out for tolerance, but not
tolerance of more violence, that we must protest and
act against, peacefully and non-violently, the same
way that anti-war activists helped bring an end to the
Vietnam War, the way Ghandi and his non-violent
followers brought an end to British oppression in
India, the way that the Rev'd Martin Luther King Jr
and his non-violent followers worked to end legal
segregation and racial oppression in the U.S.  


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