VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: <Bandwraith at aol.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 4:19 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement


>
> In a message dated 2/21/04 9:06:14 AM, ottosell at yahoo.de writes:
>
> << I'm wondering why you always leave out the state's agents role.
> > > Here we  have
>
> an example of "murder as an instrument of American politics" -- without
>
> Brock Frenesi wouldn't have become a traitor and Rex wouldn't have killed
>
> Weed. So we can add to the above list of crimes America's war against her
>
> own children. >>
>
> Brock is a United States Attorney, a federal prosecutor with
> almost unimagineable power and resources compared with
> Frenesi. He, or people like him, have made the the life of the
> Gates family miserable for as long as Frenesi can recall, and
> still have Sasha under surveillance. They can pop her anytime
> they want to, like Zoyd gets popped.
>

I agree, but of course especially because of her family history I cannot
understand fully her fondness of men in uniforms.

What's shocking is that people like Brock are able to use their "almost
unimagineable power" against nearly everybody. I hope this is more fiction
than actual US-reality, but when I think of Guantanamo Bay I'm not so sure.

> Brock doesn't ask Frenesi to take an unmarked gun and put it
> within Rex's reach, in so many words, he tells her to do it, just
> like he forces her hand down on it against her will. It's against
> her instincts, but she's trapped- nothing left to negotiate with-
> and she's hoping her faith in the magical ability of the camera
> to transcend the falsity of Vond's creepy vision of reality will
> somehow save the day- make Weed come clean and control Rex.
> At the crucial moment, when Rex returns earlier than expected
> and provokes a confrontation with Weed, Frenesi is indisposed,
> on the phone with DL. She doesn't even get the chance to allow
> Weed to come clean on camera and then include Rex in the frame.
> By the time she gets back, it's too late, the confrontation is out
> of her control.
>
> Most likely she and her faith in the camera's magic would have proved
> to be inadequate to save Weed, but motivation is important.
>
>
> << The real *real* issue of the day was Zoyd's and Frenesi's famous hippie
>
> wedding, not politics. Zoyd has no idea that he's just a disguise and it
>
> wasn't Frenesi that made the guests forget about Vietnam & Watts:
>
>
> "the visible worls was a sunlit sheep farm." (38) -- this, followed by the
>
> part you've quoted sounds to me like a paraphrase of the later
>
> Bhagwan-motto: Be Here & Now (ganz entspannt im Hier & Jetzt).
>
>
> So in my opinion Pynchon here questions what had become of the movement
> when the hippies had married the revolutionaries that had betrayed the
>
> revolution. It has become obvious that the movement will be unable to stop
>
> the war and the repression. Love & Peace -- that doesn't fit well into a
>
> violent revolution, and so the marxist terminology by and by was exchanged
>
> for esoterics. Karmic explanations instead of political analysis. What
would
>
> old Osho (Bhagwan) have said: how can you dare to try changing the world
as
>
> long as you're unable to change yourself. How can you speak of peace as
long
>
> as your heart is full of hate.
>
>
> Otto >>
>
>
> But "heroes" like John Kerry returned home disillusioned to find
> the streets filled and the campuses in upheaval, and joined the
> people, and the war did end.

Well, he knew what the war had been about, and that the protests against it
were legitimate and not an attempt to overthrow the liberal American
democracy and turn the US into a communist state. Kerry's example (and there
were lot more like him) made clear the criticism wasn't anti-American but
directed against a wrong policy.

> NIxon, pretending to be oblivious to
> the growing protest movement, turned out to be deeply obsessed
> with it, monitoring its every aspect, becoming more and more
> paranoid, and setting into motion a series of illegal activities which
> would finally result in his disgrace and departure.
>
> rspectfully

On Nixon I'm split -- one thing I can't forget is that he did end the war
finally, the other side is what I read about him in Robert Coover's "The
Public Burning" and what I know about his later activities. Of course he's
been a ruthless criminal like Brock Vond.

"Nixon appealed to what he claimed was the "silent majority" of moderate
Americans who disliked the "hippie" counterculture and civil rights and
peace demonstrators. Nixon also promised "peace with honor" by his "secret
plan" to end the Vietnam War. He proposed the Nixon Doctrine to establish
the strategy to turn over the fighting of the war to the Vietnamese. During
the war, on July 30, 1969, Nixon made an unscheduled visit to South Vietnam
and met with President Nguyen Van Thieu and with US military commanders. The
war ended during Nixon's term, but only after four more years of strategic
bombing and defeat on the ground, and the withdrawal of US troops, leaving
the battle to the South Vietnamese army.

The Nixon administration's massive bombing campaigns of Cambodia and its
support for the overthrow of the neutralist royal government of Sihanouk by
the rightist military dictator Lon Nol drove much of the peasant population
of that country into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist revolutionary
movement that would kill 1.7 million Cambodians after taking power."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon

Otto