VL-IV (15) False Raptor 369, 375/376

[Robin Landseadel]

Those of us who have camped in the redwoods feel in some way that we  
have found home. There is a grounding in the redwoods, a deep comfort.

	. . . she was already on her
	way, on into the trees till she reached a piece of the woods that
	she'd never seen, a small clearing inside a grove of Sitka
	spruce and alder, where she spread her bag and, enjoying the
	solitude, must've drifted off to sleep.
	VL, 375

We are back into recurrent echos of the Vietnam war:

	 . . . The beat of helicopter
	blades directly overhead woke her. As she stared, down out of
	it, hooked by harness and cable to the mother ship above,
	came Brock Vond, who looked just like he had on film.
	VL, 375

. . . in a "shot" that would only come from a movie, the p.o.v. of  
seeing someone dangle above you, held only my a long metal string.

	. . .Brock,in flak jacket and Vietnam boots, posing in the gun
	door with a flamethrower on his hip, as steep hillsides, thick
	with redwoods, the somber evergreen punctuated with bright
	flares of autumn yellow, went wheeling by just below, as the
	rotor blades tore ragged the tall columns of fog that rose from
	the valleys.
	VL, 375

Sounds like something out of "American Dad."

The Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker/ Emperor Palpatine showdown gets a nod  
gets a nod in this scene:

	. . .She lay paralyzed in her childhood sleeping bag with the
	duck decoys on the lining and saw that even in the shadows his
	 skin glowed unusually white. For a second it seemed he might
	hold her in some serpent hypnosis. But she came fully awake
	and yelled in his face, "Get the fuck out of here!"

	"Hello, Prairie. You know who I am, don't you?"

	She pretended to find something in the bag. "This is a buck
	knife. If you don't—

	"But Prairie, I'm your father. Not Wheeler—me. Your real Dad."

	Nothing that hadn't occurred to her before—still, for half a
	second, she began to go hollow, before remembering who she
	was. "But you can't be my father, Mr. Vond," she objected, "my
	blood is type A. Yours is Preparation H."
	VL, 376

Again, this is lighter stuff than Gravity's Rainbow if only in a  
greater willingness to be goofy for the hell of it.

This reminds me a lot like Maureen Dowd's exegesis on Star Wars and  
the previous administration this week in the New York Times:

	Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” had told me that I had gotten
	Dick Cheney completely wrong, that Cheney was no Darth
	Vader. I felt awful. Had I been too hard on Vice?

	Lucas explained politely as I listened contritely. Anakin
	Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark
	side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. “George
	Bush is Darth Vader,” he said. “Cheney is the emperor.”

	I was relieved. In “Star Wars” terms, Dick Cheney was more evil
	than Darth Vader. I hadn’t been hard enough on Vice!

	Lucas was on his way to Europe and didn’t have time to
	elaborate in person. But he sent me this message confirming
	our conversation: “You know, Darth Vader is really a kid from
	the desert planet near Crawford, and the true evil of the
	universe is the emperor who pulls all the strings.”

	http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/opinion/19dowd.html

In Vineland the evil emperor, fortunately, takes out Darth Vader. But  
in the longer view, it's only Karma after all. Jess Traverse quotes  
William James quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson:

	 " 'Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when
	disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam.
	All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in
	vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more
	the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star
	and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.' "
	VL, page 369

In this story, Vond's comeuppance comes in the form of Reagan's big  
budget cutbacks:

	By the time Brock figured out the complex insult, he was also
	feeling mixed signals through the cable that held him.
	Suddenly, some white male far away must have wakened from
	a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over. . .
	VL, page 376

That is to say, that the original, previously cited, REX 84, that full- 
scale workout of FEMA, that actual, documented and plausible reason to  
be good and scared of the powers of the US Government and its chain of  
command, that frightening enterprise of the Reagan Administration—

	. . .The message had just been relayed by radio from field
	headquarters down at the Vineland airport. Reagan had
	officially ended the "exercise" known as REX 84, and what had
	lain silent, undocumented, forever deniable, embedded inside.

—all that is de-funded right at this moment, just before Brock Vond  
was about to snatch up Prairie and carry her away to god knows where.

	. . .his authorizations withdrawn, now being winched back up,
	protesting all the way, bearings and brake pads loudly
	shrieking, trying to use his remote but overridden by Roscoe at
	the main controls.
	VL, page 376

. . . more string pulling, and about as deus ex machina as the scene  
could possibly be designed. Of course, we are not quite done with Brock.