VLVL (6) Working for the Man

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Nightingale" <isread at btopenworld.com>
To: "'Pynchon-L'" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 7:01 PM
Subject: RE: VLVL (6) Working for the Man
>
>
> > > Long Binh Jail was a US military jail. You might argue that any prison
> > > system is a product of society; certainly Long Binh was a product of
the
> > US
> > > presence in Vietnam. Interesting, therefore, that Pynchon's list
should
> > > start here.
> >
> > What's interesting about it? Robert misspelled the name, but he made the
> > same connection you make here, to Vietnam. This is a list of independent
> > contractors.
>
> Without the US presence in Vietnam there would have been no Long Binh jail
> in which to incarcerate military personnel: I think that's pretty obvious.
> It follows that the US presence in Vietnam actively produced the crimes
for
> which those individuals were locked up (they weren't locked up for the
> greater crime of waging war on the Vietnamese people, of course). Having
> done no research on this occasion, my shaky memory tells me something
about
> Long Binh being considered a measure of the poor morale of US troops in
> Vietnam.
>
> What's interesting is that the list of so-called "independent contractors"
> on 87 begins here, with a state crime, the occupation of Vietnam, being
> masked by the crimes of individuals.
>
> To put it another way, the juxtaposition of 'small' to 'big' crimes is,
> structurally one key to understanding the chapter as a whole.
>
> What's interesting is reading what's on the page.
>
>

I agree, all those independent contractors on the Flash-list are only little
criminals compared to the illegal (according to the US-constitution) war in
Vietnam that has killed more than a million people, Vietnamese and
Americans.

Otto