Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[jbor]

>> can the claim be
>> made that Pynchon
>> believes Orwell's Oceania evokes the U.S.A.
>> post-9/11? This, after all, *is*
>> the claim which is being made

on 20/5/03 11:42 PM, pynchonoid at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:
 
> The issue under discussion has been whether or not
> Pynchon's Foreword evokes 9-11 and the post-911 scene

Yes. It's a Foreword to the novel _1984_ by George Orwell.

> -- you've shifted that quite a bit in your formulation
> above.  If you want to talk about whether or not
> "Pynchon believes Orwell's Oceania evokes the U.S.A.
> post-9/11?"  that's a different issue.

Not really. It's pretty obvious that Orwell's Oceania does not evoke U.S.
society "circa 2003". It's also plainly obvious that Pynchon does not refer
to 9/11 or Bush in the Foreword he has written. These facts do have quite a
bearing on the discussion.

>> Do the
>> society and experience
>> depicted in _1984_ truly evoke life in America since
>> 9/11, or "circa 2003"?
>> For anyone? 
> 
> There are some parallels. Bush has thousands of people
> secretly detained at present, without due process of
> law, as potential enemies of the State.  Bookstore and
> library records are being investigated to learn what
> people are reading, in order to identify more
> potential enemies of the State. Bush has launched a
> never-ending war on "terrorism". The distance has
> never been greater -- and it's growing larger --
> between a small group of  ultra-rich and the rest of
> the people, with a steadily increasing number of
> people living in poverty.
> 
>> and it's being made,
>> even if only by a
>> certain lunatic fringe hereabouts, in order to
>> assert that America really is
>> just like Oceania and Bush really is just like Big
>> Brother.
> 
> Puff that Straw Man up real big now, then knock him
> down. 
> 
> But don't kid yourself, nobody has made these claims.

Which is funny, seeing as how you've just repeated the exact same claims
with your "parallels" above. Delete and filter as one might, your daily,
sometimes almost hourly, "allusions" to Bush as a nineteen-headed fascist
tyrant and U.S. capitalist democracy as a corrupt and soul-destroying
behemoth, and your similarly constant attempts to enlist Pynchon and his
work to your rabid vendetta, are hard to avoid. Do I think you're an idiot
for carrying on as you do? Why yes, yes I do. But what's really funny is
reading Pynchon's Foreword and then seeing you clutching at straws because
it doesn't say what you expected and so desperately wanted it to say.

best