What is Pynchon up to (WAS california scheming ...)

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

Actually, the naivete' was not all that different at Columbia and
Berkeley. Mark Rudd was kind of lame. Many who were clustering
around him were fairly clueless. Despite that, the majority of the
"radicalized" students, within a few weeks of serious demonstrations,
knew way more than yer average "silent majority" types, who
basically knew whatever the government told them, and were
satisfied with that. If the government was right, they were right,
if not... Anyway, I think that Pynchon IS being satirical to some
extent (sarcastic might be a better term) when the narrative
states that the C of S demo was "not much by Columbia and Berkeley
standards, institutions which certainly had their share of very
conservative students and faculty, despite the media hype which
everyone chooses to remember. Although, the atmosphere did become
very polarizing at those schools, and probably more from the attention 
of the mainstream press, as much as anything. Look what happened to 
Ted Kazynski, who otherwise might have gone on to become a brilliant, if 
eccentric- not to say neurotic- mathematician, instead of "The Unabomber."

respectfully

In a message dated 1/17/04 8:20:09 AM, lycidas2 at earthlink.net writes:

<< The massive expansion of the military-industrial complex during the Cold
War era also encompassed American universities. In California
particularly, institutions such as the University of California and the
California Institute of Technology trained engineers, physicists,
chemists and nuclear scientists to insure America's technological
supremacy. California universities, in part re responsible for creating
the H-bomb, were deeply involved in the Cold War. As institutions, they
tacitly promoted the interests
and ideals of the established powers in society. 

Pynchon's College of the Surf is Columbia University and Berkeley. See
Sale's SDS. 
But it's not Columbia or Berkeley. No, not at all. What is Pynchon up to
now?  >>