VLVL 24fps and "the Movement"

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> I think that Pynchon satirises the American Labour movements (Jess and Eula,
> Sasha and Frenesi), as much as he satirises everything else in the novel,
> and that he emphasises the failures and sellouts they accrued. 

Of course he does. This is a novel about Work & Betrayal. Eliminating
Communists from Labor was a symptom of the Sick Crew that America had
become in the name of national security during the cold war.
Politicians, like Nixon, government agencies, like the FBI and the IRS,
religious organizations, like the RC Church, AND the Labor Movement
itself played major roles. Yes, Anti-Communist unions in both the AFL
and the CIO cooperated with government and industry in the hunt for
Communists at the work place. By the time Frenesi was ten, the merged
AFL-CIO was unquestionably, the most anti-Communist and Conservative
Labor Movement in the world. Pynchon shows Frenesi growing up in the
accruing failures and sellouts. Both of her parents Turn. Moreover, Hub
sells out Sasha's friends and Sasha sells out hers. Eventually, they
Turn on each other. 

None of the
> Vietnam vets are explicitly anti-War, but Vato and Blood are cartoon-likable
> even despite their treachery and profiteering in Vietnam, and have redeemed
> themselves somewhat by sponsoring Thi Anh Tran; Ortho Bob is young, clueless
> and food-obsessed; and RC is a shadowy figure with something in his history
> that has made him dissociate himself totally from his Vietnam past. They're
> not satirised so much as made to represent a range of experience amongst the
> returned "bush vets" (i.e. not veterinarians); but they're all as apolitical
> as Zoyd and Van Meter are (like Sale, Pynchon neglects that veterans'
> against the War lobby group altogether).

I disagree. 

> 
> So, I don't think that Pynchon is parodying Sale's thesis on the '60s
> students. 

Again, we disagree. 


I think that what he's portraying in _Vineland_ is the collapse of
> "the Movement" in 1969-70 (see below), following Sale's line that "the
> Movement" and SDS were synonymous. After the rout of PR3 the Pisk sisters
> abandon 24fps and go off to join a bomb-making commune which is an analog
> for the Weathermen; Rex will disappear and throw his lot in with a more
> radical political group, maybe those Paris agitators "to the left of Ho Chi
> Minh" he's been "in contact with" (i.e. possibly supporters of the Khmer
> Rouge). Pynchon, like Sale, focuses on the way "the Movement" turned, and
> was turned, away from the causes and methods it had embraced in the early
> and mid '60s.
> 
> By the time of the main narrative's setting (1968-9) the anti-War cause
> seems to have been lost along the way (again, following Sale's thesis),
> along with the Civil Rights cause (fragmentation of "the Movement", BAAD)
> and free speech (where is there any mention of that in the text?). We're
> told that the rebellion at College of the Surf is "not much by Berkeley or
> Columbia standards" (208), and it isn't, but there is no satire in the novel
> of these earlier days of the student "Movement", only of what it had evolved
> into by 1968-9. (Cf. Oedipa's visit to Berkeley in _Lot 49_, pp. 71-2.)
> 
> I think that 24fps, the Pisks especially, are depicted as part of the
> problem. They've been around since those early days at Berkeley but they
> don't seem to have any consciousness at all of how "the Movement" has
> shifted ground, of how the original causes have all been forgotten and lost
> in the dance and thrill of protest. They're into dressing up in battle
> fatigues and pretending to be martyrs and spray-painting violent slogans,
> but what political or social causes do they actually support, what do they
> ever actually do? They make films of hippie chicks dancing, chain smoke and
> play three tvs at a time while they work, and have sex on the beach. They
> like driving around in flash cars with state-of-the-art CB radios, getting
> stoned, and mouthing off about martyrdom and anarchy and setting off bombs.
> But their biggest gripes are about shopping and food. By the time of College
> of the Surf it's all become just image and hot air, protest for the sake of
> protest.
> 
> Pynchon calls it the "Nixonian Reaction" (239). The point of that is, it
> seems to me, that "the Movement" brought on the backlash against itself by
> its own excesses and loss of direction, all the violence and violent
> rhetoric (the Pisks' slogans about martyrdom and terror tactics), its
> abandonment of legitimate causes (they don't even lobby for the
> decriminalisation of marijuana, seems to be the point of the CAMP
> juxtaposition in the next chapter), its descent into self-indulgence (sex,
> drugs and rock and roll), and because of infiltration and sell-outs within
> its own ranks. But while Pynchon's satire is critical of 24fps and PR3 (and
> the Wobblies and the anti-HUAC lobby), that doesn't mean that he's a
> neo-conservative or that he's waving the flag for Nixon, Reagan, Bush etc
> (nor Kennedy or LBJ for that matter). Far from it.
> 
> ****
> 
> [...] Why is it necessary to pinpoint the existence and decline of "the
> movement"? For years, research on sixties protests has been dominated by
> histories of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), perhaps because the
> group's rise and fall provided such a compelling narrative. In 1960, a small
> group of committed student activists, influenced by the Civil Rights and
> peace movements, founded SDS. Fifty-nine SDSers met at Port Huron, Michigan,
> in June 1962 to draft the organization's "Port Huron Statement," a prescient
> critique of postwar American capitalism. SDS quickly became the key focus of
> New Left radicalism in the United States, attracting young Civil Rights and
> antiwar activists. Its ambitious Economic Research and Action Project
> (ERAP), launched in 1963, sought to "mobilize white wage earners around the
> issues of job security, better housing, and racial solidarity and to provide
> them with some means of expressing community grievances." Estimates of SDS's
> size vary, but by the late 1960s its own membership rolls boasted 100,000
> members. The organization collapsed in the summer of 1969 as a result of a
> devastating political split between two ultraleft sects, Progressive Labor
> and the Weathermen.
> 
> The story of SDS is critical to our understanding of the period, but its
> significance has been inflated by sixties scholars for the purpose of
> establishing a consensus history of the era. [...]
> 
> In the past twenty years, the literature on sixties protest movements has
> mushroomed. The current state of sixties research owes much to SDS
> histories. The genre began with Kirkpatrick Sale's seminal SDS (1973) [...]
> 
> Not surprisingly, SDS histories argue, with almost complete unanimity, that
> the sixties ended with the collapse of SDS in 1969-1970. Perhaps the
> clearest example of SDScentric sixties history is found in Kirkpatrick
> Sale's SDS. The era ended on March 6, 1970, Sale argued, when a faulty pipe
> bomb destroyed a Manhattan townhouse, killing three radical members of the
> Weathermen. A militant, ultraleft sect, the Weathermen represented one of
> the last surviving fragments of the moribund SDS. Sale wrote: "The explosion
> on West Eleventh Street was the ultimate symbol of SDS's tragic and ominous
> demise, and of the decade which had shaped it."(6) According to Sale and
> other SDS histories, the vigorous spirit of reform which captured so many
> imaginations in the early 1960s, and inspired countless youths to embrace
> "participatory politics" and fight for Civil Rights and an end to the
> Vietnam war, collapsed into a tragic paroxysm of violence and despair by
> 1970. [...]
> 
> http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2005/1_33/56027322/p1/article.jhtml?term
> =
> 
> best