VLVL 4: the George "Bush vet"

[pynchonoid]

--- Tim Strzechowski <dedalus204 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I must admit, I've been a resident of the United
> States and a native speaker
> of English for almost 38 years, and I've *never*, in
> my life, heard of
> something called a "Bush Veterinarian." [...] 

You got that right, Tim. T-bird is blowing more smoke.

Given the way that Pynchon repeats the story of Bush I
and his CIA and illegal drugs trafficking, it might
make more sense to creatively interpret "Bush vet" as
a former soldier in Bush's war to keep drug profits in
the hands of bad guys willing to do dirty work for the
US (specifically, during the Vineland days, helping
bad guys in Central America earn money to fund their
death squads and kill labor leaders, Catholic nuns,
and others who were working to improve life for common
people and not the multinational corporations). Bush
II continues his daddy's policy in Afghanistan, where
the warlord who have taken over in the wake of the
failed US war on Afghanistan have pushed opium
production back to pre-Taliban highs, pun intended.  

Continuing the speculation, it makes much more sense
for RC to change his name and erase his trail in an
attempt to cut himself off from his former spook
buddies adn background.  I've never met a Vietnam
Veteran (and I have met a lot of them in the past
nearly 40 years -- unfortunately too many of the
people I went to high school with were killed over
there and didn't make it back, so I didn't get to talk
to them anymore) who went to such extremes to hide the
fact of military service in Vietnam -- but that's
exactly what former spooks do when they tire of or
otherwise have to leave that business.  Even the
deserters I've met up in Northern California haven't
been ashamed to admit they fled the US's criminal
enterprise in Vietnam -- although it would come as no
surprise to know that ex-spooks would, in that
subculture, want to keep their past private.


P.S. Bush I didn't invent the strategy of using
profits from illegal drugs trafficking to support US
foreign policy goals, of course.  The US used it to
help support renegade Chinese warlords and the
fledgling Taiwan government in the wake of the 
liberation of China and establishment of the PRC --
the beginning of the notorious "Golden Triangle"
heroin business; see _The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia_ and _The Politics of Heroin: CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade_ by by Alfred W.
McCoy:

[...]From Publishers Weekly
Nearly 20 years ago, McCoy wrote The Politics of
Heroin in Southeast Asia , which stirred up
considerable controversy, alleging that the CIA was
intimately involved in the Vietnamese opium trade. In
the current volume, a substantially updated and longer
work, he argues that pk the situation basically hasn't
changed over the past two decades; however the numbers
have gotten bigger. McCoy writes, "Although the drug
pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth
in global heroin supply could be traced in large part
to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the
DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert
operations." He readily admits that the CIA's role in
the heroin trade was an "inadvertent" byproduct of
"its cold war tactics," but he limns convincingly the
path by which the agency and its forebears helped
Corsican and Sicilian mobsters reestablish the heroin
trade after WW II and, most recently, "transformed
southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a
major supplier of heroin." Scrupulously documented,
almost numbingly so at times, this is a valuable
corrective to the misinformation being peddled by
anti-drug zealots on both sides of the aisle. First
serial to the Progressive. 
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.[...] 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/155652126X/ref=pd_sim_books_1/104-1810149-3767141?v=glance&s=books>


and  _Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press_ by
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair:

[...] Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair take
the revelations of the links between the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Nicaraguan Contras, and the
Los Angeles crack market that journalist Gary Webb
exposed in 1996--revelations that are the basis of
Webb's book Dark Alliance--and use them as a
springboard for a tale of the U.S. government's
involvement with the illegal drug trade that extends
much further back than Webb's tale.

The specific revelations are not, perhaps, entirely
new; many know, for example, that even before there
was a CIA, the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services
enlisted the aid of gangster "Lucky" Luciano in
arranging support among the Sicilian Mafia for the
American invasion of Italy, or that the CIA was
actively involved in the Southeast Asian opium trade
during the Vietnam War. But Cockburn and St. Clair
persuasively argue that the traditional explanation
for such events--"rogue elements"--is deliberately
misleading, and that the mainstream "liberal" press
plays an active role in this obfuscation (noting, for
example, that Webb's three biggest attackers were the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington
Post). By providing an overarching narrative rather
than treating these incidents as isolated, the authors
present a damning indictment of the CIA--but one that
fully admits that the agency was not acting on its
own, but was merely fulfilling the mandates of the
American government. [...]
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859842585/qid=1062445055/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-1810149-3767141>

P.P.S. 
For the T-bird:  how does Pynchon's inclusion of
information about what his characters do for a living
differ from the way other authors routinely offer such
info about their characters, as RJ suggested awhile
back? Work is a part of just about every novel I've
ever read, and I've read more than a few. I have tried
reading all of your rambling posts on this topic, and
find that you haven't made a very clear case for how
Pynchon makes this common authorial practice into
something special for Vineland.





__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com