[barbara100 at jps.net]

Jbor:
>I don't think the tense shift in the middle paragraph signifies a change in
Pynchon's "train of thought". He's referring to how people during WWII (and
people today - "those among us") did and do respond to Orwell's criticisms
of Churchill's coalition government.<


I don't know. I'm a little doubtful. Who among us (except a select super-smart few) knows shit about Orwell's criticism of Churchill's coalition government? Up until this Foreword came out, "most people were content to read [1984] as a straightforward allegory about the melancholy fate of the Russian revolution," right? Knowing your average reader, which I bet Pynchon does, it's much more reasonable to think he's referring to what's happening today in the United States in that "fascistic disposition" paragraph. 
About the "bowdlerisation" I can't say. I copied it that way from the Guardian.   


---- Original Message ----
Barbara:
>> I mean, why switch tenses if he was only continuing along the some
>> old of train of thought?

Jbor:
>I think it's probably reasonable to infer from this passage, and others,
what Pynchon's attitude to Bush and the Patriot Act and whatever might be,
but he isn't making an explicit reference here. The later comments about
"the present day United States" are explicit, however, but his particular
targets there are three arms of the American system of government which were
around long before 9/11.

It's interesting that the quote provided below is again a bowdlerisation of
Pynchon's text. Does the _Guardian_ edit leave out the paragraph which is at
the bottom of p. 10? If so, it's a telling omission.

best<


> 
> Foreword:
> 
> Now, those of fascistic disposition - or merely those among us who remain all
> too ready to justify any government action, whether right or wrong - will
> immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, and that the moment enemy
> bombs begin to fall on one's homeland, altering the landscape and producing
> casualties among friends and neighbours, all this sort of thing, really,
> becomes irrelevant, if not indeed subversive. With the homeland in danger,
> strong leadership and effective measures become of the essence, and if you
> want to call that fascism, very well, call it whatever you please, no one is
> likely to be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over and the all
> clear to sound. But the unseemliness of an argument - let alone a prophecy -
> in the heat of some later emergency, does not necessarily make it wrong. One
> could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet had behaved on occasion no
> differently from a fascist regime, censoring news, controlling wages and p!
> rices, restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to self-defined
> wartime necessity.
> 

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