Thank Goodness

[tyro tortoise]

--- Otto <ottosell at yahoo.de> wrote:

 Why does he insert theoretical
> speculation
> > about race and power in this paragraph? 
> > 
> 
> Because race/power relations are present in his
> fiction.

And that's why he skips into theoretical speculation
about race and power? 
It reads a lot like that vague metaphor about the new
left. It's vague. It doesn't fit in with what he has
been discusssing. 

He's talking about "Lowlands." He's talking about his
language and a set of assumptions (sexist, racist,
neo-fascist) that he grew up on. Not unlike Grover in
TSI he grew up reading racist, sexist, neo-fascist
books. Unfortunately, it seems, young Tom was not boy
genius enough to see that the adventure books and
comics he was reading were racist, sexist,
neo-fascist. 
He seems to have lacked not only Grover's intellectual
revulsion to racism, but Tim's "low brow" humanistic
intuition. 

By the time Pynchon writes TSI and the Watts essay he
has realized that he has been loaded up with racist,
sexist, neo-fascist language and attitudes. 

His half excuse half apology, that it was common to
talk that way, that these were the attitudes of the
day, that he grew up reading James Bond (Dave M.
thanks for the notes on Bond/England/JFK) and that the
Cold War soon to be Kennedy militartism had every boy
in America wanting to kick some third world ass and
fly to the moon is bull shit. You couldn't talk that
way where I come from, brother. But at least he's
being candid about it. That is, until he introduces
that rediculous theoretical speculative half excuse
about racical differences and power. 

On race and class, Tom Swift was a Slow Learner boys
and girls. I admire him for addressing this in the
Introduction. TSI and the Watts essay, while still
blockheaded, are at least attempts to reverse his
racism and look deeper in and out. But this statement
in Introduction, in addition to its being out of place
and vague,  is disturbing because it tells me that Tom
hasn't really learned much about race at all. 


The unfortunate thing about newspaper adventure strips
is that their artistic heyday was probably in the
1930s and 1940s and, like Golden Age comicbooks
themselves,
it means that they reflect antiquated attitudes. With
Terry and the Pirates set in the exotic Far East, you
can't avoid noticing an underlying racism. Right in
the opening strip we meet a series regular, Connie --
Terry and Pat's comic-relief Chinese manservant.
Connie, unlike everyone else, isn't drawn particularly
 alistic; with his huge teeth and big ears, he's a
caricature. Dimwitted and goofy, he's more
uncomfortable that amusing. Though, to be fair, he is
portrayed as having a good heart. Which is better than
most of the other Asian characters, who are drawn less
grotesquely, but are generally villains. Throw in
ostensibly good guys occasionally using racial slurs
and it's enough to make most modern readers cringe...
If we dismissed every book or movie that was tainted
by racism (or sexism), we'd eliminate 60 percent of
stories told prior to, say, the mid-1950s at least. 

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