VLVL II: "What is Fascism?" (fwd)

[Richard Fiero]

Terrance wrote:
>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.

Correct but a significant rebalancing was achieved.

>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 . . .

I fail to see any parody or any more than in say, M&D.

>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.

The false notion that the novel doesn't take sides is easily 
repudiated by the current section pp. 268 - 293, although it's 
correct that none of the characters' sides is exactly taken up.

>VL doesn't claim that Nixon was a fascist or that Reagan is a fascist . . .

No, the claim is not made. We are shown that they are time and 
time again (not including the "set of big S's" of Roscoe's 
driving).  Vond is not responsible.  He merely fills a slot in 
a perverse system.

>, 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?

This is our heritage.  C3I, Operations Research, Systems 
Analysis.  Hoover Institute, Naval Research Laboratory and RAND 
(Army, Navy, Air Force). Computer languages Lisp and Ada. In 
the 50's, k-12 school administrators began referring to their 
institutions as "plants," presumably for the production of 
useful citizens.  It made Owsley a rich man before he was 
busted.  Peyote is far more fun than LSD anyway.