Pynchon and fascism

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: MalignD at aol.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: Pynchon and fascism
<< Terrance:
<<
<< Why Chomsky and Pynchon and DeLillo and
<< that entire generations of writers,  playwrights,
<< journalists, P-listers are so in love with the F-word
<< is not clear to me, but I imagine it has something
<< to do with the Korean Conflict.>>
>
>> MalinD:
>> I don't understand this sentence.
>

The Threat Is Always Latent

Terrance is joking again. Of course "that entire generation" has been in
fear of the possibility that the US could become fascist simply because the
USA are the highest developed capitalist state of the world. It wasn't the
Korean Conflict, McCarthy and Hoover alone but the illegal Vietnam War that
had turned the US into an openly imperialist state. From this point it's
only one step to fascism, to the "Oven-state" that burns children.

"As in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of modernity in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, the irrationality of fascism is read as the inevitable result
of rational positivism, and the threat of it's recurrence is always latent."
(Denis Crowley:  "Before the Oven": Aesthetics and Politics in Gravity's
Rainbow, Pynchon Notes 42-43, 1998, p. 189)

Now, since 9/11, this fear has returned because of the clearly imperialist
character of US-foreign politics concerning the Middle East, the war on
terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently Rummy's words on Iran and
Syria. The fear has returned because of proto-fascist domestic politics. The
term "Patriot Act" alone should alert us, implicating that everybody who is
critical about it isn't a patriot but a subversive character, or, in the
case of foreigners, is anti-American.

Das da hätt' einmal fast die Welt regiert,
Die Völker wurden seiner Herr.
Jedoch ich wollte,
daß ihr nicht schon triumphiert:
Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch,
aus dem das kroch.
Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel, 1955

Otto