Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[pynchonoid]

--- pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> --- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > In the Foreword he hooks it up with anti-Semitism,
> > which might imply that
> > he's referring to the long-standing conflict in
> the
> > Middle East.
> 
> That leaves the US out of the mix, where right-wing
> Christian fundamentalists shape, to a certain
> degree,
> policy towards Israel (Judaism, including some
> extremely conservative elements that may or may not
> be
> considered "fundamentalist" in some way) and its
> neighbors (Islam).  With its insistence on the
> present
> moment, "circa 2003" (as Pynchon repeats several
> times), the Foreword also refers to that same US
> Christian fundamentalist clique as it confronts
> Islam.

...as it confronts Iraq, I meant to say.

> 
> Moving farther afield, the other confrontation
> that's
> been in the news India's right-wing Hindu
> "fundamentalism" V. Pakistan's, as the two countries
> play nuclear "chicken". 
> 
> 
> > If he is,
> > it's not really "fundamentalism" or a "religious
> > war" like, say, the
> > Crusades were religious wars.
> 
> I guess it was Bush, or one of his cue-card writers,
> who first referred to the War on Terror as a
> "crusade."
> 
> > It would have been an opportunity to [...] but he
> >doesn't do
> > that at all.
> 
> [...] 
> 
> > > Too bad P didn't say more about this.
> 
> Pynchon could have written a lot of things, but
> didn't. An infinite number of Forewords that he
> didn't
> write lie waiting to be imagined and critiqued.
> 


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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