VLVL2 (15): "the old reliable names"

[dedalus204 at comcast.net]

371.31:  "And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows.  One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began -- some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia -- Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath."


This is a beautiful passage that not only maintains the foliage imagery introduced earlier in the paragraph (beginning with "perennial" and concluding with the final image of the "blackly fermenting leaf"), but also questions the nature of the Tube (do I hear "a thousand points of light" in the distance?) and its relation to the American perception of the figures and organizations catalogued above.  Some questions come to mind:


Why is their interweaving "tragic"?  Does mention of people like Hitler (or Hoover or the Mafia, for that matter) sully a name like "Roosevelt"?  Or was that name sullied heretofore of its own accord?


What IS "the last unfaceable American secret"?


What is Pynchon suggesting lives "virilent, waiting, just beneath"?  


The "blackly fermenting leaf" and the "random soles" (what a great pun!) are metaphors for what?