Zoyd's Work

[Terrance]

>Essentailly you're saying that "the government" has coopted the TV for the
>purpose of distraction.  I don't buy it, not that in might not be a part of the
>schema of the book.  

VL doesn't buy it either. Neither does the implied author of VL. Neither
do most of the narrators. But it is part of the schema of the book. It
is, for example, Zoyd's part: It's what the Tube is for and Rock and
Roll and so on. But of course Zoyd's paranoid way of thinking about the
government and the tube (i.e., Reagan/RayGun) is
schlemiel-rationalization.  


>I think more specifically it's Brock's way of displaying
>his superiority by yearly forcing Zoyd's (a 60's remnant) public humiliation. 
>Although at this point it seems the celebrity status bestowed via the power of
>TV has given this humiliation some side-benefits.

BV doesn't force Z to perform public acts of insanity and/or self
humiliation. 

I don't even think BV had anything to do with this part of the deal. Did
he? Wasn't the the idea to track Z with mental-disability checks another
one of Hector's crazy ideas? Maybe we're not told, but it sure makes
sense in terms of the Hector-Zoyd love affair just as the broken "love
triangle" (Deleuze-Guattari-Reaganomics ) makes sense in terms of
Zoyd-Brock-Frensesi (and all her "female" doubles--including Prairie). 

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.