re VLVL Pynchon's eye for detail

[Dave Monroe]

It's odd that posters continue to use such stuffy,
stilted, and loaded phrases as "it's odd that" ...

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> It's odd that readers continue to direct our
> attention to the obscure allusion to Rex84 as the
> example in the text that proves that Pynchon
> set out to criticize reagan-bush policies domestic
> and foreign....

Richard did no such thing.  He simply asked about it,
is all, and was unfortunately disappointed not to find
it taken up in the archives.  Fortunately, it had
been, and we could ultimately help him out ...

> the critique of reagan-bush policy (i.e. central
> american policy and domestic war on drugs policy)
> is so very obvious ...

It's odd that denials nonetheless continue to be
posted here, but ... 

> ... that the allusion to the "conspiracy"
> theorist's darling (that is, rex84) is rather
> beside the point. 

In Pynchon's second-shotest novel?  What else then is
"beside the point," in any of the novels?  It's odd
that anything would be considered extraneous in a
Pynchon novel, if only because ceratin excesses seem
almost to BE the point at times.  But from Thoreen ...

"And we should notice the novel's insistence on
personal responsibility. Whether or not Congress is
controlled by PACs, whether or not the President is in
the pocket of some group of individual or corporate
manipulators, our democracy is predicated on a chain
of command that leads up to the President. While power
may be diffuse, responsibility is not. When Pynchon
writes that 'Reagan had officially ended the
"exercise" known as REX 84, and what had lain silent,
undocumented, forever deniable, embedded inside,' we
should not fail to hear his indictment, an indictment
not so much of a system of governing as of a personal
ethic aimed at obfuscating personal responsibility and
maintaining deniability."

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm#23

> pynchon has an eye for the ny times.  the rex 84
> story, like so much of what ends up in pynchon
> novels, was printed in the ny times.

Indeed.  Though I can't find the referencs,
refereences imemdiately here.  Help!  Thanks ...
 
> again, VL doesn't set out to confirm the left's
> views of reagan-bush or preach to the prairie, but
> to chastise the left for their betrayals and
> their turns.

I do not disagree.  But this does imply, and quite
correctly, I think, that he feels perhaps personally
betrayed.  One on the Right would not feel "betrayed"
by the Left, not in the manner I believe you might
mean.  Vineland's critique of the Left is not
delievered from the Right.  It's odd that readers,
potsers, might tend to imply otherwise here, but ...


	
		
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