AtDTDA 212 Spoiler/Political Spam

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

 --- robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> "The Governor of Jeshimon" is political writing.
> It is about George W. Bush. He is portrayed in 
> Against the Day as a total monster, as a villain's
> villain. There is no other side to this coin. 

                    Dave Monroe:
                    Any thoughts on ...

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_1984.html


Yep: "like first drafts of a terrible future", possiably ours.

                    Now, those of fascistic disposition—or merely those 
                    among us who remain all too ready to justify any 
                    government action, whether right or wrong—will 
                    immediately point out that this is prewar thinking, 
                    and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall 
                    on one’s homeland, altering the landscape and 
                    producing casualties among friends and neighbours, 
                    all this sort of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not 
                    indeed subversive. . . .


                    . . . .What in Keir Hardie’s time had been an honourable 
                    struggle against the incontrovertibly criminal behaviour 
                    of capitalism toward those whom it used for profit had 
                    become, by Orwell’s time, shamefully institutional, 
                    bought and sold, in too many instances concerned 
                    only with maintaining itself in power. . . .


                    “For somewhat complex reasons,” he wrote in March of 
                    1948, early in the revision of the first draft of 1984, 
                    “nearly the whole of the English left has been driven to 
                    accept the Russian regime as ‘Socialist,’ while silently 
                    recognising that its spirit and practice are quite alien to 
                    anything that is meant by ‘Socialism’ in this country. 
                    Hence there has arisen a sort of schizophrenic manner 
                    of thinking, in which words like ‘democracy’ can bear two 
                    irreconcilable meanings, and such things as concentration 
                    camps and mass deportations can be right and wrong 
                    simultaneously.”


                     “What it is really meant to do,” Orwell wrote to his publisher 
                     at the end of 1948—as nearly as we can tell early in the 
                     revision phase of the novel—“is to discuss the implications 
                     of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of Influence’ (I thought 
                     of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran conference)...”


                     This grouping of Britain and the United States into a single 
                     bloc, as prophecy, has turned out to be dead-on, foreseeing 
                     Britain’s resistance to integration with the Eurasian landmass 
                     as well as her continuing subservience to Yank interests—
                     dollars, for instance, being the monetary unit of Oceania.


                     Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the 
                     will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen 
                     its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own—the 
                     corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power 
                     were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the 
                     Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour 
                     party—like first drafts of a terrible future. What could 
                     prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the 
                     United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

                     There is always some agency like the Ministry of Truth to deny 
                     the memories of others, to rewrite the past. It has become a 
                     commonplace, circa 2003, for government employees to be 
                     paid more than most of the rest of us to debase history, trivialize 
                     truth and annihilate the past on a daily basis. Those who don’t 
                     learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those 
                     in power could find a way to convince everybody, including 
                     themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a 
                     way best serving their own purposes—or best of all that it 
                     doesn’t matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV 
                     documentary cobbled together for an hour’s entertainment.