Otto and davemarc's comments

[Terrance]

Thanks, the problem I have with this kind of reading is that Pynchon
simply doesn't include any of this stuff in the book. You say, in the
novel and historically. But you don't mean in the novel because it's
simply not in the book. 




Yes! I find Otto's comments to be apt, clearheaded, and text based, same
with davemarc.  
 
>In respnse to terrance and jbor: Of course, Pynchon is exposing  and satirizing some of >the immaturity, arrogance and distraction of the counterculture movement. But both in >the novel, and historically, the members of this movement are responding within their >cultural limits to very real  and
>large-scale  corruption of the democratic republic envisioned in the constitution. 

As soon as you try to provide an example from the book, this historical
interpretation falls apart. 


They are faced with ex Mcarthyite presidents,  large scale systemic
racism,  the still strong FBI of J. Edgar Hoover,  The Truman legacy of
world -wide imperialism, A CIA which functions as a private army for the
likes of the Dulles Family, Bechtel, Anaconda Copper the Rockefellers
etc., and a general worlwide assault on the natural environment and the
remaining outposts of cultural and political independence.   True ,
these things are partly a response to the cruel totalitarian
Soviet/Chinese versions
of "socialism",  but the enem! ies in this endless war are largely
chimeras. When soviet style communism  falls it is replaced by
anti-globalism  terrorism,  drug dealers, evil humanist professors,
Islamic fundamentalism, anti-americanism etc. We could all see the
gleeful relief in the faces of
Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney and friends when Bin Laden came on the scene and
managed to stay hidden long enough to get some good wars going  But back
to VL, this is a novel about the cultural changes taking place in the
60s 70s and 80s, and although Pynchon is critical of the counter
culture,  and exposes the human frailty of these characters, I find the
novel to be essentially sympathetic to Zoyd, DL, Sasha, Atman and
"wives", college of surf students,  the members of the film coop, the
Travers Becker clan, and even Frenesi.  In Z and CoL49( I plan to read 
GR this summer) most of the characters seem to be self destructing,
unable to cope with what the! ir searches reveal; family bonds, and
bonds of romantic love&! nbsp; are dissolving, history is a maze of lies
and violence. In Vineland, every family and attempt at community is
under assault from the state(and its concomittant human manifestation in
personal power trips and sexual perversion), but there is a central
image of a counter cultural movement toward a sense of place and family(
I see several parallels to biblical stories of heroic survival), which
with all its foibles and frailty, appears to me to be one of the warmest
and most hopeful places in Pynchon's literature.