Pynchon and the current situation

[Paul Mackin]

The "real business of war" passage is a wonderful riff on the control
theme--how "They" control "Us" in deucedly clever ways we may not be fully
aware of and at least partly (as the passage makes clear) for our own
little-guy well-being. But, stop me if I'm wrong, no one could possibly
think it is any kind of left affirmation that WWII, Vietnam, Infinite
Jestise have been invented in order to create demand for munitions and other
goods and services thus providing enhanced profits for capitalists. The
passage addresses markets, competition, and human nature including human
aggression in a far more encompassing manner than what one normally thinks
of as profits or war profits. If one reads the passage only literally it
doesn't make a great deal a sense. But as I say it is wonderfully evocative
of the control theme.

The above may be all too obvious..

I think I generally agree with Terrance's viewpoint--even about W being
smart, provided one defines smart very broadly. A friend of mine who was in
college with him described him as not having too much upstairs but being
head over heels at the top of the class in people skills.

That being said I think the rhetoric of this "war" is godawful. Way too self
congratulatory. In an hour of obvious failure one needs to stress one's
essential strengths in order to keep spirits up. But in anything but the
very short run this is utterly counterproductive. So it might be well to
play down our weath and our freedoms for a while. No doubt the dispossed and
disgruntled of the earth hate us for our sins and failures but they hate us
but even more for our successes. (excuse the "us" and "our"--I mean us
Americans)

            P.





----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: "Otto" <o.sell at telda.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2001 1:29 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon and the current situation


>
>
> Otto wrote:
> >
> > Terrance:
> > I think VL is a novel that addresses the current situation better than
> > GR.
> > I disagree with Doug's analysis; of the current situation and of GR.
> >
> > I don't see that the following is limited in meaning to one or a special
> > war:
> >
> > "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." (GR 105)
>
> Read the entire passage and think about it. It's  WWII, not Vietnam, not
> the Gulf War, not whatever we are headed into now.
>
> "Don't forget the real business of **THE** War..."
>
> THE WAR. Not war, any war, a war on terrorism, a war on drugs, but THE
> War.
>
> It's a character  in the theatre of THE war.
>
> Of course one could, for example,  read "All Quite On The Western Front"
> and apply it's lessons or themes or ideas to the Vietnam War. And this
> is exactly what happened here in schools all around America in the
> 1960s. On can read Shakespeare's Henry and Richard Plays and apply them
> to the Kennedy, Nixon, Ford Presidencies. So on and on. And there are
> lessons in GR that can be applied to the current state of affairs, but
> how one goes about applying GR to the current situation is open to
> criticism. My criticism of Doug's post stands.