VLVL Brock and PREP

[jbor]

on 11/4/04 2:54 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

>> Terrance:
>>> Back in the book Vietnamese and Salvadorians are replacing the kids in
>>> Brock's Camps. So many kids were joining the army of justice, the Reagan
>>> administration did a study and  shut down the Camps. But the refugees
>>> from Vietnam and El Salvador are flocking to the Camps. Why do the
>>> refugees go to the Camps? Not a question most readers here want to
>>> discuss. But there it is, in the book.
>> 
>> Hector tells Frenesi what happened to "Brock's own baby":
>> 
>> "Yeah, PREP, the camp, everythín, they did a study, found
>> out since about '81 kids were comín in all on their own askín
>> about careers, no need for no separate facility any more, so
>> Brock's budget lines all went to the big Intimus shredder in
>> the sky, those ol' barracks are fillín up now with Vietnamese,
>> Salvadorians, all kinds of refugees, hard to say how they even
>> found the place. . . . " (347)
>> 
>> There's certainly dark irony in the fact that refugees from U.S. imperialist
>> conquests are finding their way to Brock's camp (cf. Blood and Vato hooking
>> up with "Vietnamese bitch" at Pendleton in 1975, p. 182), but more
>> interesting is the way the kids are lining up to join the program, which is
>> pretty much how Brock diagnosed the situation (269). It's a bit reminiscent
>> of those "docile" students back at College of the Surf listening to Mike
>> Curb Congregation records and running off to ring the police at the first
>> whiff of marijuana (204-6).
> 
> The "kids" queuing up to join the program is one of the novel's major
> themes.  The New Left is responsible for the defeat of the New Left.
> The kids are turing to the government because their parents have given
> them nothing but bitter shit and lies to live with.  Obviously (Otto's
> argument), the government's  abuse of power is paramount, but the novel
> focus is on the personal abuse of power and the Turning of individuals
> within organizations and movements and families.

Yes, I think that's all fair enough.

> If I'm right about P being a conservative (and obviously I'm not talking
> about a Nixon-Reagan-Bush republican party or political right wing
> conservative of any stripe) his harsh critique of the limited success of
> the New Left makes perfect sense. Doesn't it?  P's critique of
> "political family" tells us quite a lot about his own political
> attitudes. Doesn't it?

But where is there a normative endorsement of "conservative" values and
attitudes needed to substantiate the claim? The critiques by themselves
don't necessarily mean that he supports a particular alternative. What of
the suggestion that in his criticisms of the "official Left" he is endorsing
a stance which might be described as "dissident Left", that his personal
politics are somewhere "to the left of the Left"? (I acknowledge that these
categories are problematic.)

> Why are  refugees of US imperialism finding their way to Brock's
> left-over Camps? 
> How do they find them? How do they know that these CAMPS exist? Do they
> have a map? Or is their some deeper (religious even) reason why they
> want to be encamped inside the boarders of their imperialist masters?
> 
> Dark Irony, indeed.

I take your point, but in my experience most refugees and asylum seekers
don't have many choices at all when they first arrive in a country. That
Hector doesn't know how they found their way to the camp doesn't necessarily
mean that there wasn't some government resettlement initiative at work:
domestic Immigration policies and deals would operate well outside DEA or
DOJ jurisdiction. Note also how the camp in its earliest guise went from
being the site of "an old Air Force fog-dispersal experiment" to a "holding
camp" for "urban evacuees" (in the event, one might assume, of a nuclear
attack occasioned in large part, perhaps, by the success of the U.S. Air
Force's own "fog dispersal experiment").

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