Is Brock Vond a fascist?

[pynchonoid]

"  'Fortunately [for musician Billy Barf, playing at
an Italian Mafia wedding without knowing any Italian
songs] Ralph Wayvone's library happened to include a
copy of the indispensible Italian Wedding Fake Book,
by Deleuze & Guattari.'

While they weren't authors of books that help
chart-reading musicians fake their way through songs
that they don't know -- though the idea is pretty
amusing, given their occasional attempts to imitate or
"fake" schizophrenic writing -- Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari were the authors of a series of books
about capitalism and schizophrenia, most notably
Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972 with a preface by
Michel Foucault about the book's relevance to fighting
contemporary fascism. In a passage that applies to
them as well as it applies to Wilhelm Reich, author of
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Deleuze & Guattari
write, "Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when
he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part
of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and
demands an explanation that will take their desires
into account: no, the masses were not innocent dupes;
at a certain point under a certain set of conditions,
they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the
desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

Like Anti-Oedipus and The Mass Psychology of Fascism,
Vineland is an attempt to account for the fascist
"perversion of the desire of the masses." There have
been fascists in America for decades. Take for example
someone like Brock Vond, the U.S. Attorney, COINTELPRO
specialist and anti-drug zealot who is the novel's
anti-hero. He's called a "fascist" several times.
Though the word is often used casually and
inaccurately, Brock Vond is a real old-time fascist.
Like the Nazis,

'he was a devotee of the thinking of pioneer
criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), who'd
believed that the brains of criminals were short on
lobes that controlled civilized values like morality
and respect for the law, tending instead to resemble
animal more than human brains, and thus caused the
crania that housed them to develop differently, which
included the way their faces would turn out looking
[...] By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a
quaint, undeniably racist spinoff from
nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in method and
long superseded, although it seemed reasonable to
Brock. '

In the aftermath of what the narrator calls "the Nixon
Reaction" or "the Nixon Repression," which began in
1969, overt fascists such as Brock Vond were able to
find both a home and plenty of financial support in
Washington, D.C. Despite changes in personnel and
Presidents during the 1970s, "the Repression went on,
growing wider, deeper, and less visible," culminating
in Ronald Reagan's "war on drugs," in which -- in
Pynchon's version -- Brock Vond features prominently.
[...]

The year 1984 was in fact the perfect occasion to ask
what Pynchon calls 'the perennial question of whether
the United States still lingered in a prefascist
twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long
stupified years ago, and the light they thought they
saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing
the same bright-colored shadows,' that is, the old
question that brings forth 'the names -- some shouted,
some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good
for hours of contention, stomach distress, and
insomnia -- Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover,
Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of
names and their tragic interweaving that stood not
constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of
light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable
American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper,
again and again beneath the meanest of random soles,
one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that
nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived,
virulent, waiting, just beneath.' "




http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html
Raptor, Rapist, Rapture:
The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas Pynchon's
Vineland 

(Written by Bill Not Bored and originally published in
the May 1990 issue of Art Paper. Substantially revised
September 2002.)




__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/