Grabar

[Otto]

> on 11/9/04 4:19 AM, John M. Krafft wrote:
>
> > Grabar wrote a
> > dissertation called "Analogies between Nazi culture and American
> > Culture" (2003) on Pynchon, Percy and DeLillo? Only in light of
> > this week's propaganda piece might a reader of her dissertation's
> > abstract suspect some skepticism or other reservation in her use
> > of phrases like "Pynchon promotes the thesis" and
> > "Percy likewise implies." So, did she betray her life-long patriotism
> > in writing her dissertation just to get past a nasty committee of
> > America-hating bullies, or has she recently betrayed her scholarly
> > self for reasons I won't speculate about?
>
> http://www.techcentralstation.com/090804F.html
>
> While her article is appalling and her comments about GR are a travesty
> I don't think it's necessarily a "betrayal" or flip-flop on her part. She
> mentions being "upbraided" at her dissertation defense because, I assume,
> in it she hadn't agreed that "the U.S. government was a fascist regime
> during the 1960s." I take it from her remarks that that had been one of
> the interpretations of GR the "popular professor" promoted in the class,
> that it was an interpretation of the novel she accepted as accurate (it
> isn't, of course, despite Pynchon's vaudevillian parody of Richard M.
> "Zhlubb" driving along the L.A. freeways in his "black Managerial
> Volkswagen"), but that it is a historical assessment she dismisses as
> false.
>
> One could also imagine that in her dissertation she had been hostile to
> what she sees as "Pynchon's claim that, rather than being *liberators*
> of the Nazi concentration camps, the U.S. was a major player in the
> regime's inception." (Of course, GR shows that "the U.S." -- or
> interconnected interests originating therefrom -- was in fact both
> these things.) I don't find it improbable that her dissertation might
> have adopted an antagonistic attitude towards what she sees as
> the false analogies between "Nazi culture and American culture"
> which she argues are being made in the works of Pynchon, Percy
> and DeLillo.
>
> The real irony is that while she is slandering American academia as a
> fascist-style conspiracy which has "deliberately set out to undermine the
> tenets of Western civilization, and attempted to destroy independent
> thought by systematically undercutting the idea of reason and logic",
> I take it that her dissertation was ultimately accepted, she has ended
> up as a "college professor" in the U.S. herself, and, thus, freedom of
> thought and speech and opportunity have been seen to prevail yet again

She says in her article what made her a "convert" to Republicanism:

"my conversion was solidified by 9/11" (...) In fact, there was a certain
schadenfreude expressed in (...) editorials and e-mail messages after 9/11.
Many protested sending troops to Afghanistan after 9/11 and were critical of
the way that campaign was conducted. But this anti-Americanism did not begin
with the war in Iraq."

So being critical of actual US-politics in her opinion is
"anti-Americanism" -- hardly a point promoting free speech. We all have seen
those accusations of Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy after
9/11 as being anti-American (even on this list), while in fact they were
only pointing to the real causes of terrorism which are more than just the
crimes of "diabolical promoters of an ideology" as she simply calls the
terrorists, without being interested at all in the real causes of terror.

> as they also obviously
> had for her "popular professor" spouting off about U.S. governments and
> society being a "fascist regime" from his tenured lectern.
>

We only have her word for that kind of "lectures" -- and I don't buy it. It
seems to me that it is what she wanted to see in it. I consider her
perception of "anti-Americanism" as wrong, why should I take her word as
correct that these lectures and her dissertation defense happened the way
she describes them? It's only a speculation that a more Pynchon-critical
diss wouldn't have passed. We would need the names of her "popular
professor" and the dean who "upbraided" her to ask them for their
impressions. The way she connects past 9/11-anti-Americanism and "Gravity's
Rainbow" in the article makes me want to read her diss. Maybe it's just been
considered as weak by that Dean and his question was some kind of a
provocation to force her to deliver some reasonable response under stress
because she had omitted that discussion of structural similarities between
the nazis and the US-government in the 60's in the diss?

>
> That brand of extremism and propaganda is shown to be just as
> bankrupt as Grabar's.
>

Shown were and by whom?

Her article clearly shows the level of intolerance and dangerous patriotism
that has put the world under the threat of an everlasting war on terror
(WOT) which is surely what those corporations benefiting from the war (such
as Boeing) want to see. But this isn't limited to the US as the latest
example of the effects of the WOT (in this case Putin's Chechnya-politics)
in Beslan shows.

Otto
"Mundus vult decipi--the world wants to be cheated."