Boomer myopia

[Monte Davis]

> I guess from your tone, Monte, that your strong reaction to
> this stuff is coloured to some extent by your existing attitude to the 
> 1960s, Vietnam, and of course to the 'boomers'.

I *am* a boomer, born 1949, one who thought Vietnam was a horrible blunder
-- as did my father (USMC 1941-1945), my mother (USMC 1943-45), and my
leading-edge-of-the-boom older brother (USMC Vietnam 1968-69, having
accepted a NROTC scholarship in 1963 that didn't seem like such a bennie by
1967). So, honestly, I'm not trying to open rhetorical space between
"Pynchon, writer I like" and "critique of Vietnam."

Nor do I deny that a lot of the marvelous manic energy of GR reflects the
cultural energies at work in the 1960s -- anti-war energy as well as civil
rights, sex & drugs & rock 'n roll, and all the rest.  

But there's abundant evidence in the early stories and V that *before*
Vietnam was a central issue, *before* the 1960s acquired their
self-congratulatory mystique, Pynchon was already culitivating a broader,
deeper critique of *all* the American promises betrayed and unfulfilled...
and even broader and deeper, a critique of the hopes placed over the
centuries in science and technology and Enlightenment and industrailization,
in communism as well as capitalism and nationalism and imperialism and
fascism, in Europe and Asia and Argentina as well as in the US. Certainly
that critique flourishes in M&D and AtD. I'm pretty sure it would have done
so without either Vietnam or The 1960s As We Know Them. 

For me, the heartbreak of the Zone in GR is a lot deeper than Major Marvy
foreshadowing Gen. Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove" or LtCol Kilgore in
"Apocalypse Now," or GE gobbling its way to the Utgarthaloki banquet table
alongside IG Farben and ICI. The revolution's betrayal of Tchitcherine...
and Blicero's betrayal of whatever better self Rilke might have made him...
and what Broderick and Nalline did to young Tyrone... and Slothrop's failure
to grow up and love fruitfully -- they all draw a lot of blood, too. 

Most of all, the Zone (with its outposts in Hiroshima and Katyn, Auschwitz
and Nanking) was a time and place when -- if ever in history -- people
should have looked around and said "Enough-- we can't go on like this." Then
they proceeded to go on like that, developing the A4 into machines that
could crank out a dozen WWII's in half an hour. And those machines are still
out there, still telling every little dictator on earth "this is how the Big
Kids play the game. *That's* the fucking heartbreak.

I agree 110% that Pynchon is a political writer. But I also think his
politics are the politics of original sin, operating on a moral and
historical scale at which the USA in the 1960s was a blip: just another
among many examples of some holy fools and their mindless pleasures, getting
a glimpse of grace and then fumbling the follow-through.