Shutting down New York

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: Shutting down New York

> Why is the press and the academic publishing industry buzzing with all
> this 1968 stuff again?  Kerry, Dean, Bush, where were you when the
> communists and the militant radicals tried to destroy liberal democracy
> in the US in 1968-1969?

This is the neocon pov -- the reality was that the government was breaking
the law. If this democracy was liberal why were young men forced into the
armed services, fighting a war that hadn't even been declared? The
demonstrators were only disturbing the public order, the napalm bombs
destroyed lives. Why were young people jailed for smoking dope while the
much more dangerous drug alcohol was at the center of various social
activities and rituals.

> Do we need more books on this subject? Do we
> want them?

Yes.

> Maybe we do, but right here we've got Pynchon's Vineland and
> we don't even open it up and read what's in it. It's not a sympathetic
> portrayal of the Lefty-America at all. It's a very harsh satire.
>

Indeed it is, but for being too selfish, to easy to get by agent
provocateurs. Like it was in reality the novel tells how the first guns in
revolutionary hands came from agents of the state. The novel is telling how
dangerously close to fascism America was at that time.

> Pynchon goes straight to the Red hot heart of the problem: the
> communists and militants.
>
> 1968 was the year that SDS's program read as follows:
>
> 1. elections are a fraud, the only action available to the people is
> direct action

The 1968 Elections in the USA were a fraud, because none of the ruling
parties did offer an alternative. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans
had any intentions to stop the war. Nixon did end it finally because the US
had lost the public support for the war. It had become too expensive and it
couldn't be won by military means.

But you forgot to mention that the Chikago-protesters of August 29, 1968 -
Rubin, Hoffman, Cleaver, Hayden etc.  were critical of the CSSR-intervention
too that had happened a week earlier (August 21). That's why Hoffman is
speaking of *Tschechago* in his book.

> 2. we support people's war in Vietnam (the communist cause)

First and foremost it's been a criticism of a post-colonial, genocidal war.
The support of the communist cause was the big, but maybe inevitable error
of that time. By the way a much smaller error than the historical error to
let Stalin get away with whole Eastern Europe in 1945-56, or the historical
error to take over that war in Indochina from the French.

> 3. we support the right of  black people to liberate themselves

Of course.

> and form
> their own state by any means necessary and the necessity for police to
> be disarmed and the militants to be armed.

Where did you read that? On a pamphlet?

> 4. we support violent armed struggle and a militant revolutionary youth
> movement (teaching HS kids how to drop explosives into the plumbing
> systems of schools, etc.)
>

Violent armed struggle against a government violating the constitution by
having started the violence against the people within and outside the US.
That's been the perception some parts of the young generation had in 1968.

But that's not what we read in Vineland, we don't get a story of the
Weathermen, we get the story of some hippies infiltrated by snitches, the
infiltration of a lefty film collective by even meaner snitches and
generally the story how easily revolutionary movements can be destroyed by
using their inner contradictions and personal weaknesses against them.

>
> NOTES
>
> Morgan Spector, New Left Notes
> SDS constitution as revised at 1967 convention, printed in New Left
> Notes, June 10, 1968
> Guardian, Jan 6, 1968, p. 9.

Notes from the Underground:
J. William Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine
Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time
Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation
Jerry Rubin, Do It!