Pynchon and the current situation (quote)

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Another pertinent reading from the train:

"...What more do they want? She [Katje] asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives.  Well, strange to say, there is.  Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department.  Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling.  The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.  The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways.  It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War.  It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.  Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up.  The true war is a celebration of markets.  Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere.  Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet inside their antiseptic marble chambers.  But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.  So, Jews are negotiable.  Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars.  Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals..." (GR p.122)



Original Message:
-----------------
From: Doug Millison nopynching at yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 10:40:09 -0700 (PDT)
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Pynchon and the current situation


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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