does Pynchon support the war?

[MalignD at aol.com]

<< It astonishes me that anyone -- much less an obviously intelligent and 
often sensitive Pynchon reader like "jbor" -- would persist  in trying to 
rewrite Pynchon as a war monger.  >>

You might consider that WWII  was not Korea was not Vietnam was not 
Afghanistan and that one might support the policies behind one or several or 
all of these conflicts without being a warmonger.  Your fallacy is ascribing 
your own monolithic point of view to Pynchon.

<<Look no farther than GR to see how foolish this is -- a novel that 
questions the WWII project (which has been held up as the shining example of 
the Greatest Generation for our generation to follow, in one of the most 
impressive propaganda efforts of recent memory), presenting WWii as a sham 
designed to benefit
multinational corporations that profit from supplying both sides in a 
conflict while ordinary people are sucked in through propaganda and lies to 
support the war, and die fighting it or as innocent civilian casualties and 
victims of genocide. >>

This statement misrepresents GR.  GR indeed shows multinational corporations 
benefitting on both sides of the conflict, a situation reflecting actual 
agreements between Standard Oil of NJ, Royal Dutch Shell, and IG Farben.  But 
that is not at all the same as saying that GR sees the entirety of WWII as a 
"sham designed to benefit" those corporations; it nowhere argues that 
pacifism should have been the response to Hitler; and there is certainly 
nothing in the twenty-five-year-old book that argues one way or another as to 
whether its author would support the present actions in Afghanistan.

<<It astonishes me that anyone -- much less an obviously intelligent and
often sensitive Pynchon reader ...>> would persist in such tunnel-visioned 
analysis.