Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

pynchonoid wrote:
> 
> --- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Is HAL profitable.
> 
> Was Enron? Certainly for the profiteering crooks who
> milked it dry of billions.


What's your point? 

> 
> Profit margins for Pentagon contractors have always
> been high. I trust the arms merchants, Bechtel,
> Halliburton, and the others to know that they will
> make money off their activities in helping the US blow
> up and rebuild Afghanistan, Iraq, the next target,
> etc.

Can you imagine if things worked this way? 

I mean, portfolio manages would be out of business for starters. 
I mean, who would need them. Just put all your money on the arms
merchants and 
let that pony run.  Yeah, what the hell, they are public companies, we
can buy them. 
Put your IRA money, your 401K and your life savings in them. I mean,
it's a fixed game. It's rigged. I'm gonna sell my house in town, oh Doug
you are my new financial bodhisattva. Hey, look it me, I'm rich, I got
the house on the hill, I got the women and wine, I got the Steely Dan
T-Shirt. 


> 
> No doubt that war is a drag on the world economy, but
> that doesn't stop countless individuals and
> corporations from profiting from the war on Iraq or
> any other.

Countless? So I should tell all my unemployed friends not to worry? 
Hey, we're no bungled and botched, we've been saved. We're among the
countless profiteers. 


Can you imagine a journalist actually trying to get this passage into
any repectable newspaper or journal? Not that it isn't one of my
favorite passages from GR, but geee wiz.....


> 
> "Don't forget the real business of the War is buying
> and selling. The murdering and the violence are
> self-policing, and can be entrusted to
> non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is
> useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
> diversion from the real movements of the War. It
> provides raw material to be recorded into History, so
> that children may be taught History as sequences of
> violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
> for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a
> stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to
> try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still
> here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
> markets." (Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105)
> 
> =====
> <http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
> http://search.yahoo.com