VLVL (6) Brock

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Don Corathers" <gumbo at fuse.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2003 6:56 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL (6) Brock

> Wait, wait, stop. "Hippiedom" = "a failure of public will" that was
> responsible for the Vietnam War? I don't have the Sloth or Watts essays,
> do
> have Slow Learner, where the one reference to the post-Beat "hippie
> resurgence" is oblique and benign.
>

Right, that's the way how victims are changed into committers. I call it
spin. The hippies never have been a majority group in society, they were
just a small part of the youth. They've been a reaction to the political
system of Republicans and Democrats sharing the power without a real
possibility to change anything in the official policy by elections. Like the
Blacks they were regularly beaten up by the police. Think of the end of
"Easy Rider" -- and remember what Fonda says sitting around the bonfire
with Hopper and Nicholson: "We blew it!"

But when Pynchon speaks of "public will" in the Watts-essay, he's surely
talking about the average taxpayer and not about the drop-outs. I think this
"failure of public will" is more the kind of nationalist insanity to be
proud of dead children killed in an unjust war:

Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

> I'm just a little bit dubious that Pynchon put together the chain of
> causation quite the way you have it. For one thing, the sequence is
> backwards--the war, which had roots running back to the Eisenhower
> administration, had been going pretty good for two full years before the
> Summer of Love rolled around in 1967. I can imagine Pynchon blaming "a
> failure of public will" for allowing the war to happen,

As far as I know the Vietnam-war never has been officially "declared."
Nobody had asked the Congress for allowing the money. According to the
US-Constitution it has been an illegal war, a mechanism of a military
escalation which had begun in 1954 after the Dien Bien Phu desaster.

In fact it had begun even earlier with an increasing support of the French
neo-colonial war, with money no elected council of representatives of the
American people had decided about. The appropriate answer, given the
US-history, would have been the refusal to pay taxes: no taxation without
representation. Contrary to the revolution that had started the USA, the
60's youth-revolution, the "freaking fag"-revolution failed. The average
citizen did not claim his right to revolt against a government that is
breaking the constitution. The campus youth and the blue collar workers
couldn't find a common language.

Otto