Re: VL-IV (15): Ché For Children, pages 325/327

[Robin Landseadel]

On Apr 8, 2009, at 9:53 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> . . . Pynchon wisely chose to explore, and quite ingeniously, how  
> youth was fatally complicit, for reasons they could neither  
> understand nor control,  in sustaining the Power they wanted to  
> rebel against.  Pynchon was able to make Drugs as means to youth  
> power a positive, at least at a jocular level,  but at the same time  
> quite a negaive as well.

I'm not so sure here about your comment concerning the shadow side of  
drugs in Vineland. Pynchon seems to separate marijuana and  
psychedelics away  from Coke and Speed, Alcohol and all the rest of  
the ways of getting rilly, rilly wasted.

On the other hand, that fatal complicity that you speak of is directly  
on point. So much of that complicity is unwitting—Pynchon points to  
the creation of the consumer species, a new electronic species created  
via the Tube, the creation of a zombie nation.