Eliot X & the UHURU (Rex & Talleyrand)

[Terrance]

"On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such exotic developments as
the religious wars with which we have become all too familiar, involving
various sorts of fundamentalism. Religious fanaticism is in fact
strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion in the
Party."  

    --Foreword Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pynchon 2003

Rex manages to place his protégé, Weed Atman, in the emerging junta.
However, Rex is a bit frustrated with Weed right from the start. At the
steering committee meeting for the newly formed ADHOC, Weed just milled
around. 

Rex, admonishes his protégé with a quote from none other than the
infamous Turn-coat & French Roman Catholic Priest Diplomat
Politician, Talleyrand. 

Interesting choice. Don't you think. 


Rex's fanatical and paranoid obsession with the BLGVN is described in
religious terms. 

In his increasingly deeper studies he  had become obsessed with the fate
of the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam, a section of the Fourth
International that up until 1953 had trained in France and sent to
Vietnam some 500 Trotskyist cadres,  none of whom, being to the left of
Ho Chi Minh, were ever heard from again. What remained of the group was
a
handful of exiles in Paris, with whom Rex, in paranoid secretiveness,
had begun
to correspond, having come to believe that the BLGVN had stood for the
only authentic Vietnamese revolution so far but had been sold out by all
parties, including the Fourth International. What it stood for in his
own mind was less simple. The men and women, few of whose names he would
ever know, had become for him a romantic lost tribe with a failed
cause,  likely to remain unfound in earthly form but perhaps available
the way Jesus was to those who "found" him--like a prophetic voice, like
a rescue mission from elsewhere which briefly entered real history,
promising to change it, raising specific hopes that might then get
written down, become programs, generate earthly sequences of cause and
effect. If such an abstraction could have for a while found residence in
the mortal world, then--of the essence to Rex--one might again....

  So did he envision himself counseling and educating Weed Atman, a
dialogue in which together they might explore American realities in the
light of this low-hanging Eastern lamp--but Weed, much to dismay, turned
out to be all but silent. 

Rex quoted Talleyrand 


Moreover, Rex perceives the revolution in religious terms. He tells
Weed, 

"You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking
crusades, retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian
Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation,
living inside their power, convinced they're immune to all the history
the rest of us have to suffer. They are bad, bad's they come, but that
still doesn't make us good, not 100%, Weed."

Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive abstinence, in
which you began by giving up acid and pot, then tobacco, alcohol,
sweets--you kept cutting down on sleep, doing with less, you broke up
with lovers, avoided sex, after a while even gave up masterbating--as
the
enemy's attention grew more concentrated, you gave up your privacy,
freedom of movement, access to money, with the looming promise always of
jail and the final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of
pain.

Rex is a fanatical extremist who Turns and Turns. He murders his
protégé.