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

[Terrance]

> 
> It's interesting that, for RC and Moonpie, the past has been "erased"
> (35). That is, whatever happened to them in the past is now 'lost'. This
> might mean 'forgotten'; it might mean 'of no relevance whatsoever to
> their lives today'. In fact, their lifestyle invokes nothing so much as
> another kind of (pre-industrial) past, when families worked as a unit
> and the modern state didn't exist. Of course, this work services yuppie
> restaurants: here, the novel, as so often will connect primary and
> tertiary sectors of the economy. The crawfish sideline is made possible
> by current socio-economic developments, just as the tertiary/service
> sector as a whole can only be sustained with the low-wage employment of
> teen-workers like Prairie.

Yeah, seems like child labor is no longer a thing of the past.
Reaganomics tried to erase the New Deal, including the Child Labor Laws.
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. Where is RC? The Bush Vet is not on
the farm. He doing chores. That's kids work. 

Another important theme is the dependence on Asian credit. W is the
Manchurian candidate. How did he come to be so dependent on Asian credit
to fund his wars? Ask Nixon. What?