NP? Earth's excrement, purged

[Doug Millison]

It's hard to forget Robert Duvall's ode to napalm in Apocalypse Now, but
most people misquote it: "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. The
smell, that gasoline smell. Smells like victory." We leave out the middle
line, which is odd, given our love of gasoline.

continues at:

Addicted to Oil: Confronting America's Worst Habit
Ryan Singel, LiP Magazine
June 17, 2002


http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13392


....the rape of the earth to feed an addiction to profits from
petroleum-based products is an important issue in GR, of a piece with the
concern Pynchon shows for the environment, and a distaste for corporate
exploitation of the natural world, throughout his novels and other
writings.

"Earth's excrement, purged out for the enoblement of shining steel. Passed
over. [...] But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is
not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.
[...] You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing,
organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The
more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows.
Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of
original waste over greater and greater masses of city. [...] The
persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more
death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and
overlaid with more strata -- epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined
city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator. [...] If you want the
truth -- I know I presume -- tyou must look into the technology o these
matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules--it is they after all
which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the
shapes of towers [...]"
(GR 166-167)

Did somebody say towers?