Eliot X & the UHURU (Rex's car.2)

[Terrance]

When we read VL we simply can not ignore the fact that Pynchon has
deliberately focused his narrative on Work in America and on the latter
two periods in the 20 year cycle of the rise and decline of Communism
and the working class in United States. The novel opens in 1984 (the
allusion to Orwell's novel is obvious enough, but Pynchon has recently
published an Introduction to Orwell's classic), Reagan, the King of the
anti-Communist, is President. Turning back, Pynchon looks at the fall of
the working class after JFK or  the failure of the college students and
labor to get together. In the brief history sketches of partners
Frenesi  and DL, Pynchon connects the post-JFK period and the Reagan
1984 period with the post W.W.II or Cold War anti-Communist purge, then
the Hoover FBI period that begins in 1924. 

  Although government involvement is the most visible part of
anti-Communist history in America, Pynchon is not too interested in what
is visible and obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes and a good
book on the American Working Class (and excellent Introduction, _Who
Built America_ http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/books.html). The Business
community took advantage of anti-Communist surges to discredit labor and
roll back the gains workers made during the periods of labor's rise. And
Labor too, played its part in the anti-Communist periods and the
concomitant decline of the working class. 

Motivated by white guilt (Rex) and hate of White America (the Pisks),
the New Left wrongly attached themselves to Black Militants (BAAD) and
artificially transposed to America the "exemplary acts" of Ché Guevara's
rural guerrillas (24fps). Unwilling to work in White Communities
(Trasero County) in a long, slow, and difficult organizing process that
was necessary in view of the unreceptive attitude of the majority of the
American Population, they allied themselves with  what they, in their
ignorance of American Labor history, believed, was a world wide
revolutionary movement, but  had been the agent of violence and
polarization in the USA in three pervious struggles, the Communists.