VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:

MOre Reds under the bed bull shit. 


> 
> > to show how a Movement which abandoned its common causes and its common
> > set of values
> 
> Precisely. And two of the causes which the novel identifies as having been
> abandoned are the Civil Rights cause and the anti-Vietnam War cause.
> 
>         War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American
>         politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and
>         death, all must have been off on some other planet. (38)
> 
> The abandonment of these causes went hand in hand with the Movement's
> collapse.
> 
> The Port Huron Statement of 1962, though not referred to in the text, is an
> case in point: as well as advocating "participatory democracy" it expressed
> concerns about racism, the Cold War, and public apathy. The first half of
> the decade saw Civil Rights and anti-War, along with Free Speech, as the
> common set of values which unified the Movement: the Greensboro sit-in,
> Freedom Rides, Congress of Racial Equality, Mississippi Voter program etc
> etc. In the period the novel focuses on these causes have become (or been)
> marginalised.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Typical straw man attack: no-one has argued that "the novel takes sides" in
> this way. Elliot X's arguments about "[t]he Man's gun" and that "we don't
> have the fuckin' choice" (231) address exactly the same situation Pynchon
> identifies and empathises with in 'A Journey Into the Mind of Watts' (1966):
> 
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html
> 
> Similarly, Rex knows "the truth" about the U.S. invasion of Vietnam (207),
> and is largely motivated by that knowledge. These are important points,
> explicit in the text.
> 
> > VL doesn't claim that Nixon was a fascist or that Reagan is a fascist,
> 
> I think the narrator refers to "the Nixonian Repression" and "the Nixonian
> Reaction" on a number of occasions, and Reagan doesn't cop too many bouquets
> either. I think it's ridiculous to continue to claim that Pynchon, in
> _Vineland_ in particular, is an advocate of American Conservatism -- "the
> Christian Capitalist Faith" (232) -- or to try to imply that he is an
> apologist for Nixon and/or Reagan.
> 
> best
> 
> > 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?