VLVL Count Drugula, or Mucho the Munificent

[jbor]

> What gets him into trouble fifteen years after
> Frenesi has left him are the actions of a criminal, fascist bastard who is
> backed by a criminal government which is committing some genocide in
> Asia at the same time.
> 
> My point is that the 60's drug culture partly was a reaction to these
> political circumstances too, and if you forget this as a general
> background you're inevitably misreading the novel.

<snip>

> I've never denied Pynchon's critical
> view of the 60's counterculture (political or hedonistic, but in the puritan
> America of the sixties hedonism was political), but I see him smiling when
> he wrote it. Compared to the reality of the Sixties he could've been much
> more malignant in writing about the SDS, Weathermen, Black Panther,
> Feminists and Hippies.

Just while I think of it, note the double standard being applied here.
According to the above, even though they're not present in the text, if a
reader doesn't overlay one set of "political circumstances" and a particular
attitude onto the novel then they're "misreading" it. But in leaving out
specific details relating to another set of historical data Pynchon's
apparently "smiling" as he writes about the counterculture.

Why not turn this binary opposition on its head and say that the "Nixonian
Reaction" (its tactics, its popularity) was in large part a response to the
divisiveness, intolerance, violence and terror tactics of radical groups
like the Weathermen and Black Panthers and that if you forget this
background you're inevitably misreading the novel? And that, while accepting
that he's critical of the Ricardo Montalban-mimicking Hector, and the Robert
Kennedy-lookalike Brock Vond, Pynchon was smiling when he wrote about these
characters and that he could have been much more malignant in writing about
Nixon and "Ronnie Raygun"? All you need to do to make these opposite
assertions is to reverse the biases the reader has brought with him into the
text.

best