Ratfucker

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Nick Lowe: "Time wounds all heels."

         "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness": 
         Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day

         Bernard Duyfhuizen 

         In a novel so devoted to anarchist activities, the reader 
         might also expect to encounter the Tristero, the 
         underground postal system from The Crying of Lot 49. 
         If it is here, it too is undercover, operating on some of 
         the mail that finds its recipients even at times when the 
         normal channels seem to be down. The spat between 
         Ewball Oust and his stamp-collecting father may also 
         suggest the Tristero's presence in Against the Day:

         It seemed that young Ewball had been using postage stamps from the 
         1901 Pan-American Issue, commemorating the Exposition of that name 
         in Buffalo, New York, where the anarchist Czolgosz had assassinated 
         President McKinley. These stamps bore engraved vignettes of the latest 
         in modern transportation, trains, boats, and so forth, and by mistake, 
         some of the one-cent, two-cent, and four-cent denominations had been 
         printed with these center designs upside down. One thousand Fast Lake 
         Navigation, 158 Fast Express, and 206 Automobile inverts had been 
         sold before the errors were caught, and before stamp-collector demand 
         had driven their prices quite through the roof[.] Ewball, sensitive to 
         the Anarchistic symbolism, had bought up and hoarded as many as he 
         could find to mail his letters with. (978)

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2duyfhuizen.html      

Nick Lowe: 1/2 a boy and 1/2 a man  

          We'll go no more a-Rove-ing
          Sidney Blumenthal

          Rove promoted the Bush campaign for president in 2000 
          as a national extension of his realignment of Texas politics. 
          He cast Bush as William McKinley and by inference himself 
          as the political boss Mark Hanna. Rove's historical analogy 
          was either the autodidact's self-inflated misreading of history 
          or a shrewd manipulation of a gullible and careerist press 
          corps, or both. Whatever Rove's pretension, Bush lost the 
          2000 election, unlike McKinley in 1896, which was a major 
          victory of the Republican Party. There was no parallel except 
          in the name of the party: One election marked a genuine 
          realignment of Republican support, firmly consolidating its 
          uncertain majority since the Civil War. The other was a gift 
          handed to the loser of the popular majority in a decision 
          not so contrived since Dred Scott. George W. Bush is less 
          William McKinley than Rutherford B. Hayes

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/08/13/karl_rove/

         "The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness":

         These "center inverted" stamps ("inverse rarities" to recall 
         one of the readings of Pierce Inverarity's name) turn out 
         to be real (the four-cent invert is even considered by 
         some philatelists to have been made deliberately rather 
         than by mistake).

         In typical Pynchon fashion, however, the passage 
         resonates with the text's overall theme of anarchism, 
         especially the anarchism stemming from United States 
         economic policy in the 1890s. McKinley was a key player 
         in establishing the gold standard in United States monetary 
         policy of the 1890s, specifically the repeal of the Silver Act 
         in 1893. Much of the trouble in the Colorado mining 
         industry, which helps propel Webb Traverse into his 
         dynamiting ways, was the result of the Repeal and the 
         subsequent devaluing of silver mining interests. 
         Additionally, the Pan-American Exposition, a follow-up 
         to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago that 
         figures so prominently in the opening section of the 
         novel, was powered by Nikola Tesla's invention of 
         mechanisms for the long distance transmission of 
         alternating current from generators at Niagara Falls. 
         Ironically, the medical facilities at the Fair, where 
         McKinley was taken, did not have electricity, and 
         apparently no one thought to use the newly invented 
         x-ray machine on display at the Fair to look for the 
         assassin's bullet. Of course, in a Pynchon novel, such 
         connected allusions prompt, more often than not, 
         thoughts of nefarious conspiracies to manipulate 
         the transmission of "political" power.

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.2duyfhuizen.html   

>From the p-list archives, Richard Romeo passing along:

August 15, 2006
Guest Columnist
A Distant Mirror By THOMAS FRANK

Matthew Josephson was a man of the left, but "The Politicos" is not a
reassuring tale of liberal triumph. The figure who towers over this
dialectic of graft as it roars to its consummation is the greatest of
19th-century political commanders, the industrialist Mark Hanna, who managed
the 1896 presidential campaign of William McKinley. Hanna was famously
quoted as saying openly what his contemporaries would say only privately:
that we were ruled by "a business state," and that "all questions of
government in a democracy were questions of money."

When confronted by a groundswell for the earnest reformer William Jennings
Bryan, Hanna used every weapon available to make an example of the upstart.
While his lieutenants portrayed Bryan as an anarchist, Hanna enlisted the
financial support of industry for McKinley, going so far as to levy an
assessment on the capital of large corporations. He may not have rewarded
his supporters with honorifics like "Pioneer" and "Ranger," as did his
modern disciple Karl Rove, but by the end of the contest Hanna had outspent
Bryan by 10 to 1, much of it on "floaters" compensated for their votes.

Hanna's methods were corrupt, yes. "But his corruption was rational,"
Josephson tells us. "It flowed from the very nature of our society and its
laws."

http://tinyurl.com/2kwl29

           Hanna, Mark (1837-1904)
           979; his "miserable stooge" President McKinley; Marcus Alonzo 
           Hanna, best known as Mark Hanna, was an industrialist and 
           Republican politician from Cleveland, Ohio. He rose to fame 
           as the campaign manager of the successful Republican 
           Presidential candidate William McKinley in the U.S. Presidential 
           election of 1896, in what is considered the forerunner of the 
           modern political campaign, and subsequently became one of 
           the most powerful members of the U.S. Senate.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=H

           From People's Weekly World:

           A history lesson for Karl Rove

           Karl Rove, Bush’s chief propagandist, likes to think of himself 
           as a new Mark Hanna. Who was Mark Hanna, and is Rove right? 

           Karl Marx once wrote that the U.S. represented a “pure” form 
           of capitalism, without the feudal hangovers that would hinder 
           class development. Mark Hanna was an example of the “pure” 
           form of capitalism. Hanna, a prominent Cleveland industrialist, 
           became involved in politics to protect his interests and those 
           of his class. And he did so by organizing first the Ohio and then 
           the national Republican Party as a political machine, selling 
           candidates the way the newly emerging giant businesses sold 
           beer or soap. 

           In 1896, Hanna managed the presidential campaign of his protégé 
           William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, the candidate 
           of debt-ridden farmers, who used left-wing evangelical rhetoric to 
           appeal to the poor (typified by Bryan’s speech at the Democratic 
           convention that year, which included the famous lines: “You shall 
           not impress upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall 
           not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”) 

http://www.pww.org/article/view/6216/1/243/

Somehow the Mark Hannah/Karl Rove parallels [and who is Foley Walker anyway?]
point me towards Jesus Arrabal's "Anarchist Miracle" in The Crying of Lot 49.

           In an all-night Mexican greasy spoon off 24th, she found a piece of 
           her past, in the form of one Jesus Arrabal, who was sitting in a 
           corner under the TV set, idly stirring his bowl of opaque soup with 
           the foot of a chicken. "Hey," he greeted Oedipa, "you were the lady 
           in Mazatlan." He beckoned her to sit. 

           "You remember everything," Oedipa said, "Jesus; even tourists. 
           How is your CIA?" Standing not for the agency you think, but for 
           a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuration de los 
           Insurgentes Anarquis-tas, traceable back to the time of the 
           Flores Mag6n brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata. 

           "You see. In exile," waving his arm around at the place. He was 
           part-owner here with a yucateco who still believed in the 
           Revolution. Their Revolution. "And you. Are you still with that 
           gringo who spent too much money on you? The oligarchist, 
           the miracle?" "He died." 

           "Ah, pobrecito." They had met Jesus Arrabal on the beach, where 
           he had previously announced an anti-government rally. Nobody 
           had showed up. So he fell to talking to Inverarity, the enemy he 
           must, to be true to his faith, learn. Pierce, because of his neutral 
           manners when in the presence of ill-will, had nothing to tell 
           Arrabal; he played the rich, obnoxious gringo so perfectly that 
           Oedipa had seen gooseflesh come up along the anarchist's 
           forearms, due to no Pacific sea-breeze. Soon as Pierce went off 
           to sport in the surf, Arrabal asked her if he was real, or a spy, or 
           making fun of him. Oedipa didn't understand. 

           "You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another 
           world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist 
           peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like 
           the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. 
           Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, 
           and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to 
           work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And 
           yet, sena, if any of it should ever really happen that 
           perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. 
           Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we 
           fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, 
           redeemed one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, 
           unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing 
           to an Indian."

           In the years intervening Oedipa had remembered Jesus because 
           he'd seen that about Pierce and she hadn't. As if he were, in some 
           unsexual way, competition. Now, drinking thick lukewarm coffee from 
           a clay pot on the back burner of the yucateco's stove and listening 
           to Jesus talk conspiracy, she wondered if, without the miracle of 
           Pierce to reassure him, Jesus might not have quit his CIA eventually 
           and gone over like everybody else to the majority priistas, and so 
           never had to go into exile. 

           The dead man, like Maxwell's Demon, was the linking feature in a 
           coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesus would be exactly 
           here, exactly now. It was enough, a coded warning. What, tonight, 
           was chance? So her eyes did fall presently onto an ancient rolled 
           copy of the anarcho-syndicalist paper Regeneracidn. The date was 
           1904 and there was no stamp next to the cancellation, only the 
           handstruck image of the post horn. 

           "They arrive," said Arrabal. "Have they been in the mails that long? 
           Has my name been substituted for that of a member who's died? 
           Has it really taken sixty years? Is it a reprint? Idle questions, I 
           am a footsoldier. The higher levels have their reasons." She 
           carried this thought back out into the night with her. 
           Col 49, 96---98

           The Absurdist Heroine:
           A Wildean Critique of Pynchon's Uncertain Aesthetic

           By James R. Wallen

           The encounter is with Jesus Arrabal, an anarchist Oedipa 
           met with Pierce in Mexico. Jesus represents the subtlest 
           and most seductive of the dangers threatening Oedipa’s 
           Quest: like Oedipa, Jesus projects a We-system against a 
           They-system. Jesus, however, sustains his We-system 
           through a belief in miracles that keeps him “a footsoldier” 
           who still believes “the higher levels have their reasons”. 
           Talking with him, Oedipa wonders whether Jesus’s 
           unwavering faith in “an anarchist miracle” would still exist 
           “without the miracle of Pierce to reassure him”. Oedipa 
           knew Pierce (at least partly) to be simply “play[ing] the 
           rich, obnoxious gringo,” but to Jesus the manifestation 
           of this “oligarchist, the miracle” represented an absolute 
           confirmation of his beliefs (much like meeting Satan would 
           confirm a person’s belief in God). To preserve the resiliency 
           that allows her to bounce unharmed between binaries, 
           Oedipa will later have to reject such a revelatory miracle 
           that would have tied her irreversibly to “ones and zeroes.”

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_wallen.html

          Rove's saga is a rags-to-riches success story of a political 
          serial killer. His first involvement in a political campaign was 
          to conduct a dirty trick against a candidate running for Illinois 
          state treasurer. After Rove dropped out of the University of 
          Utah, his promise was recognized and he was appointed 
          executive director of the College Republicans. Donald 
          Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President 
          of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called "ratfucking," 
          recruited Rove. Rove conducted one session training young 
          Republicans to sift through the garbage of opponents. In the 
          Watergate scandal, Segretti was sentenced to prison for forging 
          campaign literature. The FBI questioned Rove, but dropped its 
          investigation of the small fry. Yet he would become the greatest 
          rat fucker of them all. The new chairman of the Republican 
          National Committee, George H.W. Bush, named Rove chairman 
          of the College Republicans and, even more fortuitously, appointed 
          him as a handler of his obstreperous older son. It was love at first 
          sight, at least from the nerdy Rove's point of view. "Huge amounts 
          of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, 
          just charisma -- you know, wow," he said later.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/08/13/karl_rove/

If "Flagg" is Gonzales, perhaps "Foley" is Rove. With a minor adjustment or two.

P.S. "The Zombies" are pretty good stand in-s for the Paranoids.