VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 8:42 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement


> > 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)
>

I think you overrate this sentence. This is just one day, and we get it told
from Zoyd's perspective -- a hippie, not a member of a specific group of the
movement, most likely highly intoxicated at that time.

>
> The abandonment of these causes went hand in hand with the Movement's
> collapse.
>

This seems speculation to me; at any case I'd like to see more textual
evidence from the novel. What I did get from the novel is that the Movement
has been destroyed by snitches, inner contradictions and betrayal.

> 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
>

I agree, this was the major between difference between black & white
"revolutionaries" in the sixties. You can change your conviction, your
habits and behaviour, but you can't change the color of your skin.

> 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.
>

More exactly: he knows that the official version is a lie. This knowledge
got him into the Movement. His insight into the character of the other side
as well as the truth that the Movement isn't automatically "good" *because*
it opposes the "Bad" is remarkable. But it is also the source of his
fanaticism because he believes that in order to fight the real bad guys
successfully you have to become a real clean good guy. Sounds somewhat
Jesuit- or Puritan-like to me. That he himself is unable to recognize the
religious character of his own political quest is the tragedy of his story.
In the end all political and religious fanatics are the same.

> > 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
>
>

I absolutely agree, but at the same time he seems to advocate traditional
American values like family, privacy and home, from an angle that critisizes
interference by the state as being done in the war on drugs and the *anti*
anti-Vietnam-Movement FBI-efforts.

The right winged claim that the anti-Vietnam Movement was directed against
the USA, was anti-American is rejected here. People like Jerry Rubin  ("Do
It!," chap. 11) had to appear before the HUAC. By the way, he got paid seven
cents for every mile between California and Washington D.C.-- in fact he
could live on the extra money for two months, the Revolution was paid by the
Government.

Otto