VLVL II: "What is Fascism?" (fwd)
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Wed Feb 18 07:41:40 CST 2004
The "New Left," whatever one may say it about it, was clearly never a
coherent analysis of what was "wrong" or strategy for how to "fix" it.
In VL we have a parody of the implosion of SDS and the American New Left
Student Movement (1967-1970). Pynchon mixes up the socialists,
anarchists, communists, humanist liberals, separatist militants,
visionary hippies, blacks and whites, surfers and panthers, and so on,
not only because the diversity of the New Left is a fact of history, but
to show how a Movement which abandoned its common causes and its common
set of values, was easily crushed by a reactionary government and ended
up bickering itself into fragments and blowing itself up. The false
notion that the novel takes sides, for example, that Pynchon agrees with
Eliot X's ridiculous argument about the Man's gun, while clearly
targeting blacks, is not also killing whites, misses the point. Rex is
trying to get people together and Eliot X is bickering. He's divisive.
The New Left in America started out with an American Democratic and
Pragmatic Perception of the gap between the actual reality of daily life
in America and the potentiality of the human spirit existing in the
people.
VL doesn't claim that Nixon was a fascist or that Reagan is a fascist,
but it exposes the contradiction between the brutal and dehumanizing
reality of advanced corporate capitalism and the liberating potential of
the democratic institutions that might have saved us from fragmentation
and specialization and meaningless service economy toil, from
cybernation and automation and alienation. Of course, the urgency that
VL lacks, the bomb of GR, deflates its claim that our humanity is at
stake. Or does it?
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