lit-critters and politicos need not apply

[Terrance]

it's not the political pyn-heads or the lit-crit pynheads that 
ruin the list. no, not at all. in fact, while the political minded
subscribers are bitching that i'm lit-critting them to tears, the fact
is that brownlie's book is a political study of pynchon's novels and so
is patell's book. it is difficult if not impossible to argue that
pynchon is not a political novelist. now, this can be said to be  a good
thing and  it can be argued that it's a bad thing, but it is certainly
something worth talking about. however, what the so called politicos
here want to do is talk about whatever current events are streaming at
them on the www and cnn, start flame wars, and get us all yahooed up
with googled links. that's not right. it's not fair. it's not what we
subscribed for. it's not why the list was set up, why it is maintained,
why it continues to attract new subscribers. if the list really cares
about pynchon it should focus on pynchon. how else are we going prevent
this list from becoming a clique? 
the method employed by certain politicos here is not working. what they
do is to try to label others bush supporters, fascists, neo-nazis, and
so on so, creating a battle of strawmen entrenched on either side of a
pynchon quote taken out of contexts and propped up in no man's land as
they sit at their machine guns with their fingers on the yahoo trigger
ready to fire a google at the dummy that runs out to drag the dying
quote back to his side.