Freedom is Slavery: from the top down

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Pynchon, Thomas, 1990, _Vineland_, Little, Brown and Company.

    What he seemed to want was to talk business. He had 
    drafted, sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan 
    to destabilize and subvert PR^3 with funding from one of 
    the DOJ discretionary lines. "It's a laboratory setup," Brock
    argued, "a Marxist ministate, product of mass uprising, we
    don't want to invade- how then to procede?" His idea was to
    make enough money available to set them all fighting over
    who'd get it It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as
    a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole
    country might cost. (p. 212, Penguin)

    ...almost breathless, looking like a boy, "I watched all the
    film footage, too, but never saw anything about his spirit.
    That's what I want to hear about sometime. I want his
    spirit, hm? I'm happy to leave the body to you. (p. 213, Peng.)

    Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of
    the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged
    desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth rev-
    olution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were
    accepting this story, Brock saw the deep- if he'd allowed
    himself to feel it, sometimes touching- need to stay children
    forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The
    hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being
    halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to
    develop. They'd only been listeningto the wrong music, 
    breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities.
    They needed some reconditioning. (269, Peng.)

Yes, well, times change, but eerie how they stay the same in some
ways, and impossible, almost, to predict what might supervene from
the seemingly mindless interactions of individuals. I guess that's
why we still need prophets- given the reality of the imagination.

respectfully