Foreword, when is a homeland not a homeland?

[jbor]

on 9/5/03 7:03 AM, s~Z wrote:

> Why is it preferable to read the passage as an allusion to Bush as opposed
> to a general statement about what happens in any country when the homeland
> is attacked? Granted the word 'homeland' is in our faces after 9/11, but why
> would a gifted writer use 'bombs falling' if he wants to make a point about
> 9/11? Why would he use Churchill as an example instead of Bush? I don't for
> a minute interpret the passage as an allusion to Goebbels. That speech just
> shows the universality of the dynamic TRP is writing about in the paragraph.
> And what better example than a fascistical speech. For me, the "9/11
> allusion reading" is too limiting to what TRP is addressing.

And it seems far less likely that Pynchon intended any allusion to 9/11 or
the Patriot Act when the paragraph is read in its full context. Churchill
used the word "homeland" in speeches throughout his political career,
particularly in his continuing support for the Balfour Declaration (1917)
and the creation of a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine, but throughout WW II
to refer to England and Germany as well. If Pynchon is making that
particular analogy in that particular paragraph then he's setting Bush
beside Churchill, and World War II beside September 11, and I don't think
he's that much of a numbskull. People "listening ... for the air raids to be
over and the all clear to sound" precisely describes the experience of
Londoners during the Blitz, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the
experience in New York on September 11 2001. The paragraph deals with the
contingency measures introduced by Churchill, measures which were brought in
while the Conservative Party and British Labour were in a coalition
government, and it follows on from Pynchon's discussion of Orwell's
opposition to the British Labour party. The following paragraph continues
with "Orwell's critique of England's official Left was to undergo some
modification in July 1945", the whole sequence moving from "prewar thinking"
through "Churchill's war cabinet" to the immediate post-war period when the
"British electorate ... put in a Labour government".

The "homeland" case by itself is pretty thin. The only sentence which could
have more general ramifications is the "unseemliness" one. If that's meant
as an attack on Bush then it's as weak as water.

best