re Re: Politics, Bopp in Vineland, and MDMD Washington

[Doug Millison]

jbor:
>"But I
>think it's a very narrow and distorted perspective to infer from this that
>the point of the novel is the "association of Nazi Germany and Reagan-Bush
>America". Bopp is a *former* Nazi.

There you go.  Who said *the only* point of Vineland is to compare
Reagan-Bush America to Nazi Germany -- it's one thread of many:  the novel
also compares the world we live in to that of a Japanese sci-fi movie, to
Hong Kong ninja movie, parodies the hippie culture of Northern California
and the excesses of the 60s, & etc.  Exposing fascist Amerika is just  one
facet of many.

jbor:
> The point seems to be that after
>1945 the US government invited former Nazis with particular skills and
>expertise to become US citizens. And I'd imagine that this is, historically,
>the case.

No, I think the point is that running that sort of military operation
against your own people is the sort of thing that we'd expect Nazis and not
Americans to do, a measure of the loss of civil rights and the
militarization of the American state in the years since WWII.  The skills
that the Nazis brought to the U.S. are not universally admired, except
perhaps among intelligence and special operations circles (where they were
brought in specifically because of their histories cruelty in suppressing
Communist and other left activism), or in certain research communities with
regard to those scientists who brought the fruit of their horrible
experiments on human subjects during the Holocaust and contributed that
research to the American military-industrial complex.  I'm sure a lot of
them were considered good US citizens, too.

jbor:
>But it's quite clear that
>within the context of his time the George Washington who Pynchon depicts in
>_M&D_ is benevolent and progressive. Comparison with the way the slaves are
>treated and regarded at Lord Lepton's, or at the Cape, in the same novel,
>and with JFK's failures of insight regarding the ongoing oppression of
>African-Americans in the US a century or so after the Civil War, as depicted
>in _GR_, clearly illustrates this point.

I don't agree.  Even in that period there were people of property who chose
not to own slaves because they knew it to be a despicable practice.
Washington's characterization in M&D embodies the insidious, almost
ineradicable sort of racism that persists in the U.S. (and elsewhere) to
the present day -- a singing, dancing, entertaining slave is a happy slave,
only "technically" not free.   It's dehumanizing and degrading. Certainly
there are more vicious slave masters in the novel, but now we're arguing
degrees of evil among practitioners of the same evil institution, unless
you're trying to argue that slavery is OK as long as it's practiced as
Washington does in M&D, and I give you the benefit of the doubt when you
say you don't advocate slavery, despite the muddled argument you present.
That Pynchon makes it a point to include the Father of Our Country among
the spectrum of slave owners who populate M&D is notable -- they all profit
from a system that even in its own day was recognized by many to be evil.
Some are less vicious than others, but they're all slave owners, all
profiting from the institution of slavery that stains American history.

Apart from being a slave owner, many other points of Pynchon's
characterization are unflattering -- real-estate huckster, paranoid
pot-head, framed as a booby, etc.  It's a revisionist portrait through and
through, and not one who inspires reverence for the Founding Fathers.

I'll let your rant about anonymous posters go by the boards, except to note
that coming from somebody who's posted under as many names as you have on
Pynchon-L, it's more than a little hypocritical of you, especially when you
came into Pynchon-L pissing and moaning about free speech on the Internet
and the Pynchonian essence of anonymity.  But if you get your kicks playing
that troll game with Terrance and his personae, please continue.