AtD (37) p.1048 great picnic, "the real America"? mayonnaise

[Mark Kohut]

Paul Mackin sez:
The state picnics are well done.  Been to a number of them.
 
Monte Davis wrote: 
"I have only Texas, Maine, and mid-Atlantic picnics to go on, but the
potato-salad paragraph on p. 1048 is pitch-perfect in both dialogue (OK,
multiple mayonnaise monologues) and narration. It's up there with the best
of Mamet or Elmore Leonard for American voice on the page."

MD notices mayonnaise! I didn't. Cf. the mayonnaise motif (perhaps from its origin in Brautigan?) elsewhere.   Is mayonaise
Mid-America [P's word] metaphorically?? Therefore the real America?

Great, grrreat bit on theories of potato salad, imho. Beautiful love of food writing....

Feels like this is part of TRPs vision of life in a community....lively, even sometimes, screaming, discussions about something --food---that matters to all, by all parties. Are community picnics,
as so wonderfully captured herein, the vision of harmonic, small village America out of De Tocqueville, Hofstadter or, in the practicing, the theories of the Founding Fathers? P's baseline of love for the best of America? That 'old time America'?
 
Merle, paranoid, {fearful]...."P.E." Pacific Electric--bad shit---
Any photo [of someone in real life] can be run through the rig [?] and their life since the taking to the present can be known..????

Uh, wow, yes?....runs through time past and ends in the present time with a PICTURE of where the person was RIGHT NOW?....like a movie of their real life?..[reel life?].........enough to make anyone paranoid....what one photograph can do; no wonder Pynchon might fear getting his picture taken.......(like how some computer programs can 'age' a face [Which program the NYTimes Book Review did with the famous Pynchon photo last year, got an aged Pynchon and, cruelly, less-than-thoughtlessly the editor/writer threw about the worst stereotype out (as a stupid joke, I guess.)]) I won't repeat it, being earnestly humorless about it.

Only more than a computer simulation....the past CAUGHT.  

Imagine what spies could do with this.......

What's it mean here, I ask????