Boomer myopia

[Monte Davis]

> Pynchon's WW-2 is in a way Vietnam too...

"In a way," yes... but there's 760 pages of room between that and Gessen's
reductive GR, "ostensibly about World War II [but] actually about American
Cold War hegemony and Vietnam." GR gives World War II its own full
historical weight *as well as* inviting and provoking thought about the
causes and conduct of *all* wars since the rise of technology, industry, the
nation-state and the corporation.  

The _volkerwanderung_ of displaced persons in mid-1945 is itself, part of a
ghastly march that began before Sargon of Akkad and continues today, in
Congo and Darfur as well as Iraq -- not just a code for South Vietnamese
villagers displaced to Saigon or Hanoi residents relocating to the
countryside.

The victorious great powers at Potsdam are themselves, not placeholders for
the players in SE Asia in the 1960s. Ensign Morituri is *not* going home to
a former French colony where outside powers' proxy games were overlaid on a
war for independence and a civil war; he's going home to a great power
aspirant that kicked Russian, Chinese, French, British, Dutch and American
ass (and killed millions of other Asians) before it was scorched and blasted
flat... and the difference matters morally as well as factually. There
really *was* Soviet hegemony at play in Tchitcherine's Kirghizstan, just as
there had been Imperial Russian hegemony for generations before -- and that
would have been the case whether or not the US became a hegemon after WWII. 

The warhead descending on Richard M. Zhlubb's movie theater at the end is
*not* a B-52's bomb in 1972. Or at any rate it's much more than that,
because it has traced the *entire* Cold War 
parabola from the moment in 1945 when it became inevitable that long-range
rockets and nuclear weapons would combine in a a new _ultima ratio regum_.

Of *course* current events inflect how every generation's writers and
readers see history and their place in it. Of *course* Pynchon can't write
(or we read) about AtD's anarchists without thinking about today's idiots
and idealists on all sides of the "global war on terror." But for me, a
great part of Pynchon's value is in the very long, trans-national and
trans-cultural perspectives he opens up. He helps me get *over* the myopic
human tendency to "it's all about us," for parochial values of "us."

If Gessen's pat formulation were correct, I wouldn't look forward to the day
when my sons get around to reading GR, because Vietnam is as remote for them
as the Anschluss and Spanish Civil War were for me. But I do, because the
book's ambition and achievement are so much greater than "here's a 1945
parable about the USA in the late 1960s."