the debate

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2003-05-10 at 11:47, pynchonoid wrote:
> I have to agree with Quail, this is one of the dumbest
> P-list debates yet, and there have been some dumb ones
> in the past.  And the silliest part of it is the way
> that a few P-listers have repeatedly insisted that
> readers who observe the 9-11/Homeland Security/etc
> reference in Pynchon's choice of the word "homeland"
> and the "fascistic disposition" paragraph are denying
> other meanings and references of the word "homeland"
> in the text. That's not true, of course, since nobody
> on Pynchon-L has said anything like that.All readers
> in the present discussion have agreed on the more
> general references of "homeland", while a few have
> insisted that Pynchon cannot be referring to 9-11 and
> the post-9-11 scene,and have used this restrictive
> reading as a springboard to insult those who read it
> this way.

You sound like you're saying someone was accusing someone else of
denying that homeland means the place where one's (or a people's) home
is. This could only be a misunderstanding at best. You DO love to throw
in red herrings.

Isn't what people of a certain mind were saying was that there isn't
textual reason to take homeland as referring more emphatically to the
post-9/11 American homeland than to homelands under siege anywhere,
since Britain in WW II was the only homeland specifically mentioned. An
argument that 9/11 America might have had special status in the
paragraph based on timeliness could of course be advanced. Also the
argument that Bush's rhetoric used the word homeland. The
counterargument was the fact that homeland was a term everyone used down
through the ages plus the lack of proportionality between America's
danger from Osama in 2001 and Britain's danger from Hitler in 1940.


  I'm not sure what these voices gain by such
> a stragey, except to transform a simple disagreement
> into an argument -- par for the course on Pynchon-L,
> of course. 
>

And you always end up in the thick of it.

P.