Emile grows up, renounces sex, drugs, and R&R ...repressive tolerance

[terrance fitzgerald]

VL is a disappointment, in part, because Zoyd hasn't grown up and Pynchon has. Pynchon has a great deal of fun with Zoyd and Rex and the rest. But looking back is always easier than looking down the barrell of a loaded gun. When P sat us in the theater/theatre under G's Rainbow, the bomb, the violence so great, as pitiless as the sun, was hanging over our heads. #####Marcuse was advocating violence.##### Emile was just a forever young, eternal youth being overemphasized at the time because the bomb had brought an end to the violence and the silent baby boom began to consume and consume and consume and as long as the Americans could continue to produce, repression of the libido (for a Marxist-Freudian) was unecessary. If it's sex and drugs and rock and roll that you need, want, well ...  you shall have it. And check out the legs on this mechanical bride in the slick automobile! Affluence & Freedom, Freedom & Apathy. Yes, young man, young chick, here are the keys to the
 highway, to the super high way to live. Have fun!  We need you. We need all of you. We're tolerant. We can dig your dance, your groove, your kool. It's all good, bad, whatever. There's room for everyone under the Rainbow, over the Rainbow, in the Rainbow. Black, White, Brown, Red, Yellow. We're tolerant, we want to keep you in the Good Hands of the All inclusive State. Here at the Establishment we let you be who you be, thus is the vast majority of the population placated, fabricated, masturbated, situated, unreceptive to the Rad. But we gonna give Old Rad some air time. We gonna let the dumb and the smart, the Left and the Right, the Loose and the Tight, get they message out to you. We're not gonna hold nothing from you. We gonna put vital information on the same show with the wasted words of drugged up and labotamized professors. We gonna show you fire bombs droppin on Vietnam and Tiny Tim singing tip-toe on the same damn show. Cause, ya see, when the trivial is
 justaposed to the tragic, when the exotic and erotic is sitting right there next to the unmitigated horrors of modern war, we know that fragmentation and waste are functioning as they should, making sure that each and every person is free to indulge his/her flavor of the month desire. And if it gets to be too much for your pretty little head don't fret, this is not the Soviet Union, all of our products are produced and packaged with built in, at no additional (real) cost to the consumer, habits and attitudes, as seen on TV, that are sure to halp you connect with us on an emotional and psychological level. You see, we know that you are misunderstood. That you have needs. We know how difficult it is to have so many choices. Why you can't, shouldn't be forced to, decide for yourself. 
   
  But Herbert was an advocate of Violence. 
   
  Pynchon, I suspect, is an advocate of non-violence. We may get caught in a trap ... and all attempts to get out may lead us in an S&M dance round and round, but so be it. Find a place in the trap and love your neighbor. 
   
  To discuss tolerance in such a society means to reexamine the issue of violence and the traditional distinction between violent and non-violent action. The discussion should not, from the beginning, be clouded by ideologies which serve the perpetuation of violence. Even in the advanced centers of civilization, violence actually prevails: it is practiced by the police, in the prisons and mental institutions, in the fight against racial minorities; it is carried, by the defenders of metropolitan freedom, into the backward countries. This violence indeed breeds violence. But to refrain from violence in the face of vastly superior violence is one thing, to renounce a priori violence against violence, on ethical or psychological grounds (because it may antagonize sympathizers) is another. Non-violence is normally not only preached to but exacted from the weak--it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong. 
   
  (Is the case of India an exception? There, passive resistance was carried through on a massive scale, which disrupted, or threatened to disrupt, the economic life of the country. Quantity turns into quality: on such a scale, passive resistance is no longer passive - it ceases to be non-violent. The same holds true for the General Strike.) Robespierre's distinction between the terror of liberty and the terror of despotism, and his moral glorification of the former belongs to the most convincingly condemned aberrations, even if the white terror was more bloody than the red terror. The comparative evaluation in terms of the number of victims is the quantifying approach which reveals the man-made horror throughout history that made violence a necessity. In terms of historical function, there is a difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence, between violence practiced by the oppressed and by the oppressors. In terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman
 and evil--but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying them at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it.

 		
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