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

[Terrance]

The reasons for the successes and failures of the New Left have
discussed by many observers and historians. What Pynchon describes is
the Turning of the New Left student movement toward revolutionary
rhetoric, militant and romantic ideologies, factionalism resembling that
of the Old Left of the 1930s in America, ending in frustration,
desperation, militancy, and "fratricide." 

Like the Turning of the movement itself, Rex becomes frustrated (with
the failures of his protégé, Weed, with Frenesi, with Eliot X, with the
People), becomes desperate, picks up a gun, kills his brother. There is
bitter irony in the fact that Weed tells the People that now is not the
time to take up arms against the Man. The Man, Weed argues,  will only
blow you away with a Rocket. Some readers, too quick to blame the Man
for every human weakness, fail to see the parallels in Ortho Bob's
desire for revenge and how Vato and Blood betray their brothers in arms
and are directly  responsible for the deaths of the fellow soldiers. 

While being indoctrinated into the Government's version of the War in
South East Asia, Rex, a middle class conservative white student at
College of the Surf, discovers that the Government's version about
what's going on in SEA, is a lie. As a graduate student at the  the
stodgy polytechnic, where students study law enforcement, business
administration, computer science, and prepare themselves for careers at
places like IBM, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Bank Of America, Prudential, Met Life,
DEA, DOW, Occidental Petroleum, RJR, Union Carbide ... Rex understands
what he's up against. Fearing reprisal, he keeps his mouth shut. Well,
not exactly. You see, Rex is a fanatic. Rex is a very dangerous and very
sick man. Rex is an extremist. He's in love with his car. Exposing his
latent homosexuality, he names his car Bruno and begins carrying a
purse. OK, nothing wrong with that, I suppose, although this is a
Pynchon novel and homosexuality, like abortion, and sex with machines,
is symbolic of gnostic anti-life decadence and the worship of Death &
Pornography in Pynchon's novels.  Rex puts his penis in the car's
carburetor and has sex with it. What's more, Rex's fanaticism is
religious in  nature and is Atheistic. Not a good combination in a
Pynchon novel.