was Re: VLVL (6) Brock

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 10:35 AM
Subject: was Re: VLVL (6) Brock

> on 29/9/03 11:39 AM, Don Corathers at gumbo at fuse.net wrote:
>
> > Student radicals, by the way, are not, strictly speaking, hippies.
> > Hippies are by definition apolitical.
>
> "[B]y definition", are they? My dictionary (Oxford) defines "hippie" as an
> "unconventionally behaving person who is (thought to be) using
> hallucinogenic drugs and rebelling against organized society." This seems
> to
> me to fit the student radicals Pynchon depicts in _Vineland_ pretty well,
> right down to that ambiguous parenthetic "thought to be".
>

The dictionary definition leaves out everything that would explain the
motivation of the hippies or rebel students in the 60's. These are explained
by the novel quite well on p. 38.18-20:

"War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black
neighborhoods torched to ashes and death (...)."

Which is why hippies, yippies (political hippies), left radicals, draft
resisters and blacks went together to Chikago. They were all thinking of a
better society without an illegal war and murder as a political instrument.

This is what my dictionary (Britannica) says:

"The hippie movement of the late 1960s in the United States--tied up with
Vietnam War service and anti-Vietnam War protests, the Civil Rights
Movement, and sexual liberation."

> Suffice to say, during "the Vietnam era", which I don't think you can
> legitimately stretch back to Eisenhower or French colonialism or the Ming
> Dynasty or whatever (seriously, are you sure you're not just tossing a
> bucketload of slurry out the back of the boat?) in this particular
> context,

I don't know much about the colonialism of the Ming Dynasty but I know a lot
about the history of the Vietnam war, which has been in fact taken over by
the USA from the French. Nobody can deny that like nobody can deny that it's
been a genocide.

> a lot of the student radicals were hippies, and vice versa. The "failure
> of
> public will" during "the Vietnam era" which Pynchon alludes to in the
> 'Sloth' essay maps on to "the failure of college kids and blue-collar
> workers to get together politically" in the late '60s which he addresses
> in
> the _SL 'Intro' (p. 7). And it's the same turf he ploughs in the novel.
>

This is the point were you're in error. The "failure of public will" during
the Vietnam-era of the Sloth-essay isn't "the failure of college kids and
blue-collar workers to get together politically" of the SL-Intro. "Public"
means more than the opinions of a small subculture. While the hippies and
radical left were against the war the blue-collar workers largely supported
it. The Sloth-essay calls the Reagan-Bush years a semi-fascist time ("not
far behind"), something the blue-collar workers weren't aware of.

Otto