VL-IV (15): This Is Not A Test, pages 339/240

[Robin Landseadel]

There's a revelation/apocalypse/blinding light thread that runs  
through The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland. In CoL49  
a whole lot of liturgical language points us in the general direction  
of impending revelation in a courtroom [oddly pointing back to a Perry  
Mason [the TV series] thread that runs through the book] , along with  
the threat of destruction of the ego that goes along with "the  
blinding light." In GR, we're waiting in a movie theater [more light]  
in L.A., having a singalong with William Slothrop right after the  
screen went blank. What we have here, in Vineland the good, is a  
little slice of law making/abusing already on the books in a scene  
that issues forth from the Tube [more of that blinding light],  
including the moment ". . . when he saw the screen go blank, bright  
and prickly". That little red "Christer" pin is very much a part of  
the overall layout. This is all too on-point to excerpt:

	But why right now? What did it have to do with Brock Vond
	running around Vineland like he was? and all these other weird
	vibrations in the air lately, like even some non-born-agains
	showing up at work with these little crosses, these red Christer
	pins, in their lapels, and long lines of civilians at the gun shops
	too, and the pawnshops, and all the military traffic on the
	freeways, more than Hector could ever remember, headlights
	on in the daytime, troops in full battle gear, and that queer
	moment the other night around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., right in the
	middle of watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy
	Story, when he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and
	then heard voices hard, flat, echoing.

	"But we don't actually have the orders yet," somebody said.

	"It's only a detail," the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a
	service voice, "just like getting a search warrant." Onto the
	screen came some Anglo in fatigues, about Hector's age, sitting
	at a desk against a pale green wall under fluorescent light. He
	kept looking over to the side, off-camera.

	"My name is—what should I say, just name and rank?"

	"No names," the other advised.

	The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and
	he read it to the camera. "As commanding officer of state
	defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD
	#52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, I am authorized—what?" He
	started up, sat back down, went in some agitation for the desk
	drawer, which stuck, or had been locked. Which is when the
	movie came back on, and continued with no further military
	interruptions.
	VL, 339/340

There's an odd cheeriness of Vineland different from the apocalyptic  
tone of Pynchon's  three previous novels, and this time there is a  
revelation, in this case a fictional clampdown via Presidential  
directive delivered via tube and cut off just before it could be put  
into effect, an unearthing of governmental options in the time of  
Reagan, violations of the Posse Comitatus Act and suchlike. Just like  
the Prairie/Brock Vond scene, something pulls away from the awfulness  
at the last minute—it's all very deus ex machina, very much in the  
comic tradition.

Just before that gnostic little moment we've got "Sean Connery in The  
G. Gordon Liddy Story," a fictional made for TV movie about a  
Republican operative whose history lines up neatly enough with the  
Brock Vond model. Timing is everything, "The G. Gordon Liddy Story" is  
broadcast in the midst of Hector's planning for a made-for-TV movie  
about Fresesi [eventually you figure out that we've been reading a  
made-for-TV movie about Prairie]—who doesn't know about Hector's plans  
yet, but ends up going for it anyway. In any case, Liddy's got some  
history with hippies:

http://tinyurl.com/cdgnbe

He's done other c.r.e.e.p.-y things as well:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2139290

But to get right down to cases:

	Until the late 1960s, the "drug menace," despite the apocalyptic
	metaphors associated with it, served mainly as a rhetorical
	theme in New York State politics. The addicts arrested in
	occasional police sweeps were almost always booked, for the
	statistical record, then released in what became known as
	"revolving door" arrests. G. Gordon Liddy, however, foresaw a
	more durable purpose in the drug menace: the public's fear of
	an uncontrollable army of addicts, if properly organized, could
	be forged into a new instrument for social control. . .

	. . .He even foresaw that if citizens' fears about drugs were
	properly stimulated, "there would be reenacted at Millbrook the
	classic motion picture scene in which enraged Transylvanian
	town folks storm Dr. Frankenstein's castle." Even though Liddy
	was mixing his myths up a bit (Transylvania was the haunting
	place of the vampire Dracula, not of Frankenstein's monster).
	He correctly perceived the connection in the public imagination
	between the drug addict and the medieval legend of the living
	dead. And it was this connection of fears that Liddy set out to
	exploit with his midnight raid. . .

	Agency of Fear, Opiates and Political Power in America
	By Edward Jay Epstein

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/agency/chap3.htm

The NSDD are National Security Decision Directives (NSDD), issued by  
President Ronald Reagan concerning National Security Affairs. NSDD 52  
is from 1982 and is really "Future Political Status of Micronesia Palau"

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-052.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palau

On a curiously timely note:

	President Barack Obama is ordering the release of nearly a
	quarter of a million pages of records from the Reagan White
	House that were kept from the public during a lengthy review by
	President George W. Bush.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21121.html