VLVL What is Pynchon's attitude towards the college kids?

[jbor]

on 7/1/04 11:27 AM, jbor wrote:

> Pynchon's sarcastic description
> of the College of the Surf kids themselves -- "boys loosening their ties,
> even taking off their jackets, girls ... hitching their skirts up as far as
> their knees, a thousand students ... drinking milk, eating baloney- and-
> white-bread sandwiches, listening to Mike Curb Congregation records on the
> radio, talking about ... the new Nixon monument"

Note also that the college kids aren't the offspring of the wealthy
inhabitants of the nearby "ultraconservative counties" at all:

    Ostensibly College of the Surf was to be their own private polytechnic
    for training the sorts of people who would work for them, offering
    courses in law enforcement, business administration, the brand-new
    field of Computer Science, admitting only students likely to be
    docile .... (204.27)

The comedy of errors which culminates in the student "revolt" -- the
"fateful joint", the presence of "surfer undesirables" bringing "stems and
seed" onto campus, the eventual advent of some "'extremely potent'
Vietnamese buds" which were probably "brought in by somebody's brother in
the service", and how some of the students began to freak out while others
called the police as a result (205-6) -- exemplifies (as it does in _GR_)
the bidirectionality of that daisy chain linking oppressor and oppressed.

best