VLVL2 (14): The Lone Ranger That Prairie

[Terrance]

> 
> Interestingly, by calling Hector "Keemosobby" (sic) Zoyd places
> himself in the role of Tonto to Hector's Lone Ranger.  Isn't Zoyd the
> morally upstanding, "lone" one here?


No, like so many of Zoyd's expressions it's just Tube-talk. Zoyd is
shlemiel/schlimazel--the comic Ippie bum. 

What do you make of the way in which Sasha manipulates him after he has
been set-up, locked-up, humiliated, and beaten by Brock, Hector, Ron?
Sasha knows that Frenesi hasn't been up to the reunion since high
school. And she knows that there is no chance  of Frenesi getting back
together with Zoyd, but she tells the poor pothead that Frenesi may
return. 

It will be a while before Zoyd actually gets the Letter Of Agreement and
Divorce, stipulating that he must stay in Vineland and do something
crazy each year, but Hector, Frenesi, Brock, and I think Sasha too, know
what the deal is.  Sasha, it seems to me, would like to keep Prairie for
herself, but she can't,  so she sends Zoyd up to Vineland because she
wants to keep Prairie away from Frenesi, the lesser of two evils. 

Zoyd takes off and the dark irony (S&M irony) turns up again in that the
refuge from government, in that delta where the farm workers were
organizing and where Zoyd grew up,  happens to be lodged in the heart of
a region wide network of military installations theat include
nuclear-weapons depots and waste dumps, mothball fleets, submarine
bases, ordinance factories, and airfields for all branches of the
service from SAC down to the Marines, whose flying stock, none of it
equipped with noise suppressers, roared overhead without letup day and
night. Trees? Vineland the good? The lone morally upstanding figure in
this novel is Prairie. She, still a child in this society,  is leading
Zoyd to safety, back to the good earth, what's left of it.