Poll Leez State?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "umberto rossi" <teacher at inwind.it>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2004 1:55 PM
Subject: re: Poll Leez State?

>
> In data 21 May 2004, verso le 23:38, Terrance si trovò a scrivere su
> re: Poll Leez  State? :
>
> > What Pynchon argues in VL and elsewhere is that business and
> > the interests it dominates have largely controlled American politics for
> > a very long time. Even the liberal socialist politics of the New Deal
> > and
> > the Great Society were manufactured and produced by business interests
> > in order to meet their own economic needs while simultaneously
> > responding
> > to and defusing popular protests.  Labor was defeated by business.
> > VL is the story of Labor's Defeat.
>

I very much agree to this, it fits to Pynchon's words in the SL-Intro (7)
about the "new left" and the blue-collar workers. The critique is on both
sides.

Labor's Defeat is what happened too when the nazis took over Germany
with the help of big business. So what Umberto say is correct too. Let's
not forget Hector's impression:

"Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in '51,
when HUAC came to town, and the years of blacklist and the
long games of spiritual Monopoly that had followed. Did he
give a shit? Communists then, dopers now, tomorrow, who
knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was all the same beef,
wasn't it? Anybody looking like a normal American but living
a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow
-- easy and cost-effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101."
(339.5-13)

> But weren't police forces instrumental in that defeat and what
> followed? Anyway, there is a connection between liberist politics and
> a strongly repressive use of police. Underpaid jobs and unemployment
> lead to crime, crime is answered by repression. Right wing
> governments in the US (and here) insist on the issues of security,
> war on drugs, war on this, war on that. War on anything. Plus social
> control and intelligence. A bigger military apparate and a bigger
> police apparate. A display of destructive and repressive power which
> both Bush & friends and Berlusconi & friends like very much. State
> funds are no more invested in welfare, but in police and defence.
> That what has happened in the US since 1980, and what is happening
> here now. No surprise if "we" are both in Iraq, and George W. and
> Silvio are in love. Basically the idea is "scare people and you'll
> win": Republican electoral strategy, imported by Forza Italia here.
> And that's one of the main issues in Vineland.
>
> umberto rossi
> ___________________
>
> "A mulatto
> An albino
> A mosquito
> My libido"
>
>
>

> "scare people and you'll win"

"In fact, Zoyd is part of a government funded program designed to keep the
memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity, and the opening scene of
the novel is a comic conflation of representations of the 60s in the age of
Reagan: A hippie wearing a dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self-
and property-destroying act which is broadcast live on television."
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html

So "Vineland" indeed can be considered as a warning that you shouldn't trust
a government in a nominally liberal democracy only because it's been legally
elected, and that you shouldn't poison your brain with an uncritical
reception of images generated by the tube.

Silvio's a big tube-manager, isn't he? In discussing media-politics we're
lucky to have someone from Italy here.

Otto