It's about time. . . .

[Monte Davis]

> Fine groovy, and all that but---
> Why the focus on I.G. Farben in GR? Or is that the wrong question?

Umm... Because it was a real industrial conglomerate in Germany, with many
real patent and marketing and price arrangements in the 1930s with Esso and
Dupont and ICI and Shell and...? Which fed nicely into "the Firm/the Force,"
GR's shadowy entity -- in its fullest extent all of industrial capitalism
worldwide -- for which WWII was a continuation of businesss as usual
(including the slave labor at Farben's synthetic rubber and oil plants, and
its subsidiary's Zyklon B).

This is not a discussion I want to spend time on. I'll say simply that I
think the Firm/the Force -- for all its facticity -- is a metaphor, and that
I don't think Pynchon "believes in" it, or wants us to, in at all the same
way that the creators of "Zeitgeist" appear to believe, and want its viewers
to believe, in their prime movers of history.
And leave it at that.