Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Paul Mackin]

> -- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > 
> > 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.....

An on-line journalist might, but the correct answer is NO because
everyone knows the real business of the big one(WW II) was survival of
Britain, France and possibly Western Civilization. All of which is not
to say the passage is a lie. There is truth is the assertion that the
real business of War is buying and selling for the simple reason that
the real business of Life is buying and selling.  We buy what we need to
survive and hopefully to enjoy. We pay with the always-scarce
wherewithal at our disposal or which we can put at our disposal by fair
means or in dire circumstances foul. In time of War lives will of 
necessity have to be lived on the very Edge. Those directly engaged or
those merely stranded in the path of the War may be forced by the War's
course to pay for their  own or a comrade's survival  with the life of
another.  Ask Katje. She knows. She herself has asked (a few lines
earlier) what is the exchange rate between lives and information. Jews
sent East, information wheedled from lonely airmen. Katje's own exchange
worth had declined because even she has limits on the amount of
information she will reveal.

But an interesting thing about the paragraph for me is that it starts
and eventually finishes respectively with two hyperbolic sentences about
the real or true nature of war, but all the intervening stuff is about
apparently secondary though not entirely insignificant things that war
is used for.


So it goes.  

P.

> > > "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)