Fact and friction

[jbor]

on 1/6/03 3:10 PM, Otto wrote:

> It can be read merely as
> a foreword to a dated book without any actual references, but at the same
> time it can be read as a commentary to things going on in our liberal
> democracies who are at war after September 11, 2001.

If so, then it can most certainly also be read as a commentary on those very
real "totalitarian" regimes, self-defined as "'Socialist'", which exist
"circa 2003", on the "tyrants" who rule them, like Castro, Saddam, Mugabe,
Kim Il Jong and others (many of them with "goofy mustaches" of their own),
"professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism but in
reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power",
on those "phony antifascists" who condone, either by silence or overt
apology, these fascist states and their dictators, "in the face of the
overwhelming evidence of the evil nature of the regime[s]", and on those
"real antifascists" who are dedicated "to fighting on the side of the
oppressed" people living in Iraq, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba ....

As well as, indeed, about long-term hypocrisies and injustices in U.S.
foreign and domestic policy, and about the Internet as a potential tool for
"social control". 

> This oscillation makes
> it a great text in my opinion.

There's a sting in that final sentence as s~Z has pointed out, one which
resonates with some of the ambiguities relating to our current global
situation addressed at several points earlier in the essay. Pynchon can
envisage himself, and his reader, like Orwell's Winston, and like Orwell
himself, perhaps, "for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done
to keep" our children's world, a world of "human decency", from being
"betrayed". By the Stalins and Saddams, and their proteges, he would seem to
be implying, much more so than the Churchills or Bushes.

best