SLSL Intro: Pynchon on class barriers WAS Re: SLSL Intro "Chicago School"

[MalignD at aol.com]

Millison:

<<All well and good, as far as it goes, but Pynchon's insistence on an 
analysis based explicitly on class is what takes him out of the US mainstream 
which refuses to acknowledge that elephant in the living room.  TRP places 
himself in a long line of people who find fundamental flaws in US culture and 
criticize it sharply in an effort to help it live up to its democratic 
promise -- the kind of patriotic social critics that some propagandists have 
always termed "America haters".>>

An example of the sort of thing one finds annoying in so many of Millison's 
arguments:  a truism blown up into political diatribe and demagoguery, 
off-putting to people who might otherwise--at least in part--agree with him.  

Of course there is class bias in the United States.  It's distorting rhetoric 
and a strawman argument claiming the "US mainstream" (whatever one might 
intend by the term) refuses to acknowledge it.  

<<If class differences and class barriers are real -- as Pynchon says they 
are in the SL Intro -- then the "American Dream", that anybody can be anybody 
and do anything, all free and equals, is a sham.>>

Relieved to hear sage TRP confirms it.  But the "American Dream," using now 
that not very useful term to mean "a greater degree of self-determination and 
opportunity than one is likely to find elsewhere," isn't a sham.  It's quite 
real.  Higher levels of achievement and success are generally more difficult 
for minorities, for people of low income; many manage nevertheless to 
surmount the difficulties, which are numerous (if not particularly 
mysterious), and success certainly requires greater inputs of self-initiative 
and resolve of the poor than of the wealthy, one reason many in the "US 
mainstream" support social programs to make things easier, although many 
don't.  Some that don't are themselves minority and former low-income 
achievers.  It's a pretty available and public debate for anyone interested.

<<Pynchon rises above the propaganda -- the media fog that, in the face of 
massive evidence to the contrary, insists that class barriers don't exist in 
the US. ...>>

More of the same;  wildly exaggerated, if not patently false (e.g., the media 
(?) insist that class barriers don't exist?).  

None of the above meant to belittle Pynchon's heroic rising above ...