Atdtda29: Bureaucrats at play, 806-814: on toy maps (more speculation)

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

         monte.davis:
          Mark Kohut sez:
          the false "history" that spy novels, boys' adventure 
          novels, etc.assume/create in readers.. 
 
          For values of "etc." including history books and 
          textbooks, seminars and symposia. . . .

Movies, Television, The Tube, our myths about power and 
heroism run amuck. . . .

          Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen           
          would act as broom to sweep the room clear of all 
          spirits, Frenesi now popped the Tube on and 
          checked the listings. There was a rerun of the 
          perennial motorcycle-cop favorite "CHiPs" on in a 
          little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory 
          dampness. Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi 
          knew there were living women, down in the world, 
          who happened, like herself, to be crazy about 
          uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on the 
          freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she 
          was planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to 
          Ponch and Jon reruns on the Tube, and so what? 
          Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this 
          uniform fetish from her. It was a strange idea even 
          coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose 
          Parade up till the present she'd felt in herself a fatality, 
          a helpless turn towards images of authority, especially 
          uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on 
          the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, 
          or maître d's in restaurants, not to mention waiters 
          and busboys, and she further believed that it could be 
          passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in 
          a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and 
          initiation into the dark joys of social control. Long 
          before any friend or enemy had needed to point it out 
          to her, Sasha on her own had arrived at, and been 
          obliged to face, the dismal possibility that all her 
          oppositions, however just and good, to forms of power 
          were really acts of denying that dangerous swoon that           
          came creeping at the edges of her optic lobes every 
          time the troops came marching by, that wetness of 
          attention and perhaps ancestral curse.
          Vineland, p. 83

Of course, staying hooked up to the Tube means a constant
drain on the grid:

http://tinyurl.com/ytt4ma

And doubtless disconnecting---breaking free of the Tube can
improve your life and the life of the planet:

http://tinyurl.com/yuplrn

A huge, huge theme in Against the Day is the development of
Pulp Fictions of all sorts, those dramatic formulations that
might have started out as Tom Swift and Sherlock Holmes
but end up as Jason Bourne and Harry Potter. With an occasional
Electric Lovematic Grandpa or two.