pynchon-l-digest V2 #2760

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Maybe it's not such an easy choice. Especially in our society.  War is
glamorized in America.  Look at the Movies.  Look what's on the News.  Not
the real horrors, limbs being torn from torsos, just the technology,
distance, accuracy rates. Honored deployments (who, by the way, are really
going to help, to hand out food!).  "We're the strongest nation AND we care
he most."  I hear the parents all the time on the local station--"We're so
proud of our son, fighting for Freedom, defending our nation!"  It's hard
not to think of Gottfried. Poor fucked-over-by-the-powers-that-be Gottfried.
Yes, it really is perverse. War is a virtue in America just as much as it is
in Islam-abad.

Maybe the answer is $52 billion in Government contracts and a fancy PR
firm--brainwash 'em back into believing peace is good and left is right.
Then I guess that could get perverse in its own right.

But it wouldn't take that much.  Just let third parties candidates in
debates. Let Michaels Moore and Parenti on the Good Morning America circuit
once in a while.  Invite folks like them to promote their books on TV.  See
what doesn't come alive in the People then.

Whatever we do, it'll take money.  We have to build a war chest of our own.
We'll  need enough to march on Hollywood.





----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 7:18 AM
Subject: Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #2760


>
> >
> >I think the immediate answer is tell as many people as we can about the
real
> >business of war.  Then when we have peoples' attention, we can ask again,
> >collectively, what the answer is.
>
>
> Barbara,
>
> We could choose peace instead of war, too.  Both these action-oriented
> responses, however, undercut the ironic, world-weary,
> there's-nothing-we-can-do-about-it, the-Devil-made-me-do-it,
> just-let-the-War-go-on-and-we'll-all-profit-from-it-somehow-attitude that
> enables Americans to sleep-walk from one war into the next.
>
> -Doug
>
>
> "Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The
> murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to
> non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many
ways.
> It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War.
It
> provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be
> taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more
> prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just
> ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while
> they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
> markets."
> Gravity's Rainbow p. 105