Fwd: anarchy....the non-violent kind that guess believes in....

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Hey, stick around, we got upper maths too.

I guess I'm talking about this whole notion of 'Good Wars' vs. 'Bad Wars'
that discussion of WW II still brings up. Much of the point of Gravity's 
Rainbow was that WW II was not simply a 'Bad War' [thus swimming 
against the tide of most tellings of 'The Greatest Generation' Master 
Narrative] but awful in a way previously inconceivable. Against the Day—
in particular in the section we are in right now—points to where that 
awfulness was conceived. Monte Davis gets to the heart of it in post a 
couple back:

          I'm suggesting that Pynchon asks us to look deeper, 
          to take a stroll among the bombed ruins -- anybody's 
          ruins -- smelling the rotting bodies, just like a Nazi 
          death camp, and say "I don't care who did it, I don't 
          care why: this is a crime and a horror, this is a shame 
          to our species. We simply can't go on this way." Picasso's 
          Guernica, Hersey's Hiroshima, and Vonnegut's 
          Slaughterhouse Five do that explicitly. I believe GR does it 
          in its passing glimpses of the bombed-out acres of London, 
          the bombed-out square miles of Berlin, and the mushroom 
          stem over Hiroshima. And I believe its hallucinatory last 
          hundred pages or so, on the way to the last picture show in 
          1973 plus some delta, are the most powerful statement 
          ever that

          WE (the species) BLEW IT, FOAX: we *did* go on that way.

          Only a dozen years after the Zone, the rationalizations of 
          Peenemunde and the rationalizations of Los Alamos would 
          be combined in sleek new packages, with a Verdun or 
          Stalingrad or Auschwitz worth of death in each. And six 
          decades after the Zone, with our many thousands of 
          packages patient in their silos and in their submarines, 
          we're all a-twitter about what some new players might do 
          with a handful of them... or even a less sleek package in a 
          panel truck. We've reached some meta-stable, mutually 
          deterred understanding with the post-Stalinist crazies and 
          the post-Maoist crazies, but those guys in Pyongyang and 
          Tehran, not to mention in some cave in North Waziristan -- 
          they're *really* crazy. 

          Not like the rest of us.

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> On 10/11/07, robinlandseadel at comcast.net <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> >
> > There simply cannot be a good war, war is theft, war is murder.
> >
> 
> And puppies and kittens are all cute and soft... and good.
> 
> Wow.  The things you learn on the P-list.