What does Pynchon do?

[MalignD at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/8/03 5:57:07 PM, prozak at anus.com writes:

<< Basically, people lived under the Bomb too long and accepted it as 
background noise (much as people living under threat of death, such as the 
elderly, HIV patients or 
Palestinians, have come to accept imminent death as part of their milieu). >>

I'm sorry if I seem to be going out of my way to disagree with you; I'm not.  
That said, this seems to me a particularly poor analogy.  I "lived under the 
bomb " throughout almost the entirety of the bomb's existence as something to 
be lived under.  Neither I, nor anyone I knew "lived under the bomb" (Duck 
and cover!) in a way remotely comparable to someone for whom life daily 
threatens to cease.  "Living under the bomb" was not an inescapable situation 
one dwelled on; it is a cliche of literature about the era.