re VL is about work (Frenesi at the college of the surf)

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 1:55 PM
Subject: re VL is about work (Frenesi at the college of the surf)


> The college KIDS claimed that the American Worker was at best, bought
> off by the
> System and, at worst, part of the problem.
>
> You gotta love Frenesi, Working hard, blue eyed, long legs and mini,
> filming the farm worker strike.
>
> So why did she end up at the college of the surf?
>
> Sasha says the War (W.W.II) changed everything.
> But she's wrong. W.W.II was only the half of it.
> The Wars (W.W.II &  Cold War) changed everything.
> Frenesi is born a little after W.W.II and she grows up (not exactly a
> red-diaper baby) in the Fifties and on the fringes of the political
> struggle in Hollywood (Cold War).
>
> And she hated the political fights (brought home by her parents from the
> job, in the neighborhood, at school, in her home) the paranoia and
> surveillance, the fakery and phony names. Her mother and father were in
> and out of work and they blamed other workers (scabs, company unions and
> so on) for their unemployment and they fought and acted like the worst
> kind of kids and the kids (not knowing why their parents were betraying
> their friends or being betrayed by them), being typical kids, leaned to
> act like the worst kind of kids too.
>
> None of these kids was doing any analysis.
>
> The great paradox of the American labor movement is that it is (what is
> left of it) and has primarily been, especially since the 1920s, a
> working-class movement outside of the broad stream of socialist thought.
> Put the rhetoric aside and AMerican Unionism is and always been a "pure
> and simple" economic unionism. A conservative tradition that even the
> Marxist leaders of the Left-wing unions embraced, a business unionism
> that accepts private property and the market as fundamental, and largely
> beneficial, pillars of economic life. Capitalism, while fundamentally
> desirable, had to be tempered by more humane institutions capable of
> minimizing the negative effects of unrestrained individualism and
> extreme concentrations of economic  power. The labor movement in the
> United States was one such institution.
>
> But the Kids were convinced that labor was part of the problem.
>

Right, partly because of the ecological aspect that in the early seventies
became evident and partly because "labor" did not say anything against the
war, in fact the economy was benefiting from it.

"(...) this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre
(...)."
(GR 521)

Otto