NP? why we fight

[cathy ramirez]

> 
> 
> "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


A celebration of markets. The business of buying and
selling what? 

Oil and drugs, stupid. Follw the money. 

Yeah right. 

Extrapolations and misapplications of this sort do
violence to the text, destroying its "progessive
knoting[s] into" by applying conspiratorial theories
and neglecting the  paranoid/anti-paranoid musings of
the fiction. 
 

 This passage from GR was written in the 1960s or
1970s. It is a passage that can not be divorced from
the WWII setting of the novel or the Cold War/Vietnam
period when it was published.  Although it certainly
implies that the celebration of markets (including the
oil markets) continues to be (1970s) the business of
war (the Vietnam war and others), if one wants to
argue that the novel is an anti-war novel (I've no
problem with this approach) and as such is an
appropriate text to study today as the world knots
itself into other wars in the post cold war and global
market world of the 21st century, I suggest that the
one should avoid the the stupid oil/drug machinations
of the 
popular press and dig a little deeper. 





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