VLVL re Poll Leez State?

[Otto]

The State Law Enforcement Apparatus as America: Authority, Arbitrariness,
and the "Force of Law" in Vineland
RICHARD E. BURKET, Oklahoma City University Law Review Volume 24, Number 3
(1999)

"In Vineland, Pynchon turns his systems-critical eye to the legal system.
His parody of the logic and operations of the "War on Drugs" offers a view
of the law quite similar to that offered by the Critical Legal Studies
movement. But rather than simply "uncovering" the "real" workings of the
law, Pynchon instead seems more concerned with why the public has come to
not only accept but enjoy and demand more and more police power and the
increasingly forceful, even brutal, enforcement of the law. He locates the
root of this situation in a perverse combination of paranoia and pleasure.
Paranoia that law enforcement can and will arbitrarily target people simply
because it furthers the interests of those who hold the reins of power
breeds complacency and resignation. At the same time, media offer
innumerable spectacles of the law being forcefully applied, turning them
into entertainment which provides pleasurable consolation to the emptiness
of resignation, resulting in demand for more such spectacles. This
combination, Vineland insists, is no accident--those in power actively
solicit and cultivate these responses because it facilitates the maintenance
and extension of their domain and furthers their interests."
http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/burket24.htm