VLVL2 (4) Erasing the past (still a Finesi romance)

[pynchonoid]

T:
> Yeah, seems like child labor is no longer a thing of
> the past.

See the current issue of National Geographic for a
good article by Andrew Cockburn re contemporary
slavery, including child slavery at 
<http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0309/feature1/index.html>

"There are more slaves today than were seized from
Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave
trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal
drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the
destruction of lives."

T:
> Reaganomics tried to erase the New Deal, including
> the Child Labor Laws.

The banal conversation to pursue here is how Raygun
did this in the context of the precursor to the
current hypocritical, neo-con blather about so-called
"family values."

T:
> The kids do the WORK. Now, this brief scene hardly
> justifies my claim
> that Pynchon is coming down real hard on the '60's/
> yuppies here, but
> this motif runs through the book. 

Right, it hardly justifies such a claim. A family farm
doesn't necessarily have to exploit or abuse the
children in a family. 

It's simpleminded to say that P "is coming down real
hard on the '60's/yuppies" in _Vineland_ -- he does
some of that, but Pynchon frames his judgements in the
context of a US government that is systematically
undermining the family and poisoning public morality
with lies, propaganda, injustice. That's part of the
connection Pynchon is making between the society he
describes in Vineland and that of Orwell's _1984_. 



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