VLVL "closed ideological minds" (232)

[jbor]

>>> "You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking
> crusades,
>>> retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian
> Capitalist
>>> Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living inside
>>> their power, convinced they're immune to all the history the rest of us
> have
>>> to suffer. [...]" (232)

>> I don't think that Rex is ranting against WASPs, the Pilgrim Fathers or
>> America specifically, or singling them out. He's a Communist, so he
>> repudiates religion along with capitalism. He is making a historical
>> connection between Christianity, Capitalism and political control,
>> certainly, and Protestantism is one branch of Christianity, but I think his
>> intolerance and dogmatism is wider-reaching than that.
>> 
>> Ironically, with Rex, you're also up against a "closed ideological mind",
>> and he ends up murdering Weed because his own "True Faith" is so unyielding.
>> The exact same criticisms Rex is making about Western capitalist states
>> could be levelled equally (if not more so) at Socialist states and ideology.
>> The murderous dictatorships in South-East Asia (Ho Chi Minh's, the Khmer
>> Rouge) referred to or alluded to in connection with Rex's quest are a part
>> of the novel's context which cannot be ignored.
>> 

> Rex may be a Communist of some theoretical stripe

Obviously he is. He rants against the "Christian Capitalist Faith" (232),
and the narrator tells us that he "was heading for the land of the May
Events" (232). When he is introduced into the narrative by Pynchon we are
told that he had become "obsessed with the fate of the Bolshevik Leninist
Group of Vietnam" which he believed stood for the "only authentic Vietnamese
revolution so far but had been sold out by all parties, including the Fourth
International". Thus, he's to the "left" of Ho Chi Minh, which puts him in
the same league as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In the novel his quest is
deliberately given an ironic religious spin by Pynchon -- to him, the BLGVN
is a "romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in
earthly form but perhaps available in the way Jesus was to those who 'found'
him" (207-8). His version of a "True Faith" leads to him murdering Weed; in
historical terms this sort of "closed ideological mind" leads directly to
the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

> but he is 
> primarily a teaching assistant or at least on the
> faculty.  

This is incorrect. He's a "graduate student in the South East Asian Studies
Department". I think you're getting Rex confused with Weed.

> He's also a purist willing to cleanse the group of
> impurities.  

Interesting use of euphemisms.

> My copy of Vineland was bought without a copy of
> SDS attached or any other material the likes of which seem to
> be implied in the above post.  If we let VL be the final
> authority, we'll just have to drop the suppositions and stick
> to what we know about Rex  -- purist, concerned about tenure,
> weirded out about a car and not suckered into giving up the car
> so much as easily manipulated.

And a bizarre (and seemingly deliberate) misreading of the novel, this.

best