VL-IV 1: Time for the kissoff story pgs 14/15

[Robin Landseadel]

Zoyd & Prairie in a state of tubal ecstasy. Zoyd’s annual act of  
transfenestration gets the treatment reserved for “silly news”, like  
Countdown’s “Oddball” or Kent Jones “Just Enough”, a subset of news  
slipped in at the end of the broadcast that you’re just supposed to  
laugh at. The name “ Skip Tromblay”—skip and tremble, a fey name just  
on the edge of stuttering—underscores Zoyd’s act as a a ”silly season”  
item, slapped on the end of local news and sports to fill in just  
enough time to for the broadcast to bump right up against the edges of  
the ad-buys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4RHNUlydY

“local laughing-academy outpatient” hints at Ronald Reagan’s  
dismantling of the mental health system in California during his  
tenure as Governor and extending into his presidency.

From—Ronald Reagan and the
Commitment of the Mentally Ill:
Capital, Interest Groups, and the
Eclipse of Social Policy
by Alexandar R. Thomas:

	The concerns of the general public
	were also mobilized in the context
	of fear over the possibility of a patient
	committing a violent or otherwise
	anti-social act. Media attention paid
	to the problems of the mental health
	system tended to concentrate in two
	areas: the growing homelessness
	problem of the early 1980s and the
	possibility of criminal acts committed
	by deinsitutionalized patients. Throughout
	the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of
	thousands of mentally ill people
	concentrated in the inner cities. With t
	he rise of gentrification during the 1980s,
	many of them became displaced from
	their relatively affordable housing and
	were unable to find new
	accommodations. Many of these patients
	had lost contact with family members and
	were unable to work, and many did not
	have health insurance. Thus, they were
	unable to receive mental health services
	in the private sector. Media coverage of
	the growing homeless problem helped
	to pressure legislators in many states to
	rewrite commitment laws to extend the
	net and make the streets "safer.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html

From: Cultural Trauma and the "Timeless Burst":
Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland by James Berger

     The figure of Zoyd at the Log Jam brings together parodies
     of feminism, gay activism, and senseless 80s violence all
     as progeny of the old 60s hippie.  And this is precisely
     the Reaganist view of the 60s: a source of political and
     especially sexual violence and chaos.  As this opening
     scene of “Vineland” suggests, Reaganism had (and the New
     Right continues to have) an overriding interest in
     subsidizing and perpetuating the memory of the 60s in these
     terms.  And so the 60s enter the 80s in “Vineland” as
     the Reaganist 80s would want to see them, as an aging
     hippie wearing a dress hurtling through a window for the
     local news.

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.595/berger.595

“TV 86 Hot Shot News” repeats the theme of being “86’d” or tossed out.
Its etymology is lost in the mists of time:

	To get rid of, originally for killing someone.
	The phrase "80 miles out and 6 feet under"
	was reserved for someone who had to dig
	their own grave 80 miles from civilization
	and then get shot execution-style. All
	 terms for 86'd originated from this, be it
	alcohol or eliminating.

	It's supposed that Jimmy Hoffa was 86'd
	under the endzone of Giants Stadium.

	Chumley's, a famous and OLD New York
	speakeasy, is located at 86 Bedford St.
	During Prohibition, an enterance through
	an interior adjoing courtyard was used, as
	it provided privacy and discretion for
	customers.

	As was (and is) a New York tradition,
	the cops were on the payroll of the bar
	and would give a ring to the bar that they
	were coming for a raid. The bartender
	would then give the command "86
	everybody!", which meant that everyone
	should hightail it out the 86 Bedford
	enterance because the cops were coming
	in through the courtyard door.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=86'd


That “ Alerted by a mystery caller” repeats the theme of “snitching”,  
a theme we’ll see a lot of in these parts.

	“ Wheeler's deed, which last
	year was almost featured
	on 'Good Morning America’ ”

. . . underlines out how media saturation via The Tube now controls  
the dialog, much as Republican talking points in the age of Karl Rove,  
Blackberries and Fox News controlled the political dialog for the last  
decade or two.  As ‘Cultural Trauma and the "Timeless Burst" ‘ points  
out, funds taken away from government sponsored mental health programs  
are now funneled into propaganda, supplanting the Left’s history of  
activism and union/community organizing with a revisionist history of  
crazed, violent sexual perverts. Out with Woody Guthrie, “Saint  
Stephen” and Wavy Gravy, in with Charles Manson, Mark Chapman and the  
right-wing’s dark fantasies regarding William Ayres.

I’m not sure how Zoyd would pick up San Francisco TV up in the greater  
Garberville/Crescent City/Trinidad area so Pynch might stretch  
plausibility here, but:

	. . .in Tubal form he was pleased to
	see that the dress, Day-Glo orange,
	near-ultraviolet purple, some acid
	green, and a little magenta in a
	retro-Hawaiian parrots-and-hula-girls
	print, came across as a real attention-
	getter. Over on one of the San
	Francisco channels, the videotape
	was being repeated in slow motion,
	the million crystal trajectories smooth
	as fountain-drops, Zoyd in midair with
	time to rotate into a number of
	positions he didn't remember being in,
	many of which, freeze-framed, could
	have won photo awards someplace. . .


. . .if nothing else, points to how much of an ego investment Zoyd has  
in this stupid, self-destructive game he’s been playing for so many  
years. Prairie gives a big thumbs up to this year’s performance:

	"Give you a nine point five, Dad,
	your personal best - too bad the
	VCR's busted, we could've taped it."

	"I'm workin' on it."