VL-IV (15) Tubal Nuances, pages 355/356, 370/371, 377/378

[Robin Landseadel]

On Apr 21, 2009, at 11:05 AM, rich wrote:

> Reagen fired the all the striking air traffic controllers in 1981,
> considering the importance of such a job a pretty reckless thing to do
> beyond the union busting
>
> rich

Good catch. Don't forget that this is all happening in the midst of  
Rex 84:

	In April 1984, President Reagan signed Presidential Directorate
	 Number 54 that allowed FEMA to engage in a secret national
	"readiness exercise" under the code name of REX 84. The
	exercise was to test FEMA's readiness to assume military
	authority in the event of a "State of Domestic National
	Emergency" concurrent with the launching of a direct United
	States military operation in Central America. The plan called for
	the deputation of U.S. military and National Guard units so that
	they could legally be used for domestic law enforcement. . .

http://uweb.txstate.edu/~lf14/conspire/rex84.html

	. . .such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to
	apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their
	refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it
	relates. There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter
	Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape
	at once,"  the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement
	so carefully interwoven into the exposition of Vineland and
	which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent
	fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is
	inVineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some
	glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the
	sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized.

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm