the postmodern condition

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "pynchonoid" <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 4:40 AM
Subject: the postmodern condition


> [...] It's all so beautifully postmodern: all of the
> Bushies' lies are true. Technically. [...]
>
> http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0623-09.htm
>

You've quoted only the last sentence of the article, but I don't see *any*,
not even the slightest connection between the "reasons" for going to war (as
many others I have strong doubts that they were justifying the attack on
Saddam Hussein) and postmodernism. There's no reference at all to "the
postmodern condition" in the whole article. In fact it is mainly about the
spin of the Bush government regarding the "terrorist threat" from Iraq, the
second big pack of lies after the WMD-fairytale.

"In the fall of 2002, fewer than a third of Americans believed that Iraq
posed a threat to the United States. So George W. Bush developed a strategy
for selling a war to a recalcitrant public. In statement after statement,
Administration officials created the impression that Saddam Hussein was
responsible for the September 11 attacks."

This is not only statistics but fits to the impression many Europeans had
won when the invasion began (ses my other post from today). But I don't
believe that many people had to be "convinced" by official statements. The
larger part of the American public wanted to believe that Saddam Hussein was
responsible too, like Bin Laden. The Brits were exposed to nearly the same
propaganda but never could be convinced by those weak arguments and obvious
falsifications their Prime Minister had presented.

But again, the term "the postmodern condition" as you've called this thread
doesn't appear in the article. It is absurd to claim that what has happened
after September 11 has anything to do with philosophical postmodernism or
that anything like a "postmodern condition" has enabled the neo-cons to do
what they're doing. George Bush II is a fundamentalist Christian who calls
for crusades, draws lines in the sand between good and evil and believes in
the literally truth of the Bible -- nothing could be more
anti-postmodernist, it is even pre-modern. Bush junior following his father
into the Oval Office even has something medieval and feudalist. Remember
that Rex-quote about the "Warriors of the True Faith" from "Vineland" I had
posted during the group-reading.

Postmodernism as a literary strategy to decode texts is very helpful to
detect official lies and spin, in the statements of neo-cons as well as in
the ones of Muslim fundamentalists.

Ted Rall, the author of a book with the interesting title "Wake Up, You're
Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right,"  has it about
"fuzzing up" things in his interesting article I really liked to read -- 
until his last sentence fuzzed up things too. It is obvious that the guy
hasn't read Pynchon's "1984"-Intro. Furthermore it is obvious that he's not
aware of what postmodernist critical theory is about.

Otto