The Influence of Pynchon's Paranoia or Postulations for Paranoid

[rich]

>> Now,  and 9/11. As the second-term Bush administration [End Page 368]
continues to act in
> the name of an ill-founded hypothesis that American-style democracy
> exports readily to Islamic countries, a new form of manifest destiny
> has emerged that builds on a mandate for open-ended war justified by
> an unfathomably deep sense of injury, a conviction that the entire
> life of the world would not be enough to compensate for 9/11.
__________
hyperbole--"the life of the world"--wtf does that mean? the means Bush
used was wrong, he overreached, going it alone, despite the many
different nationalities killed on 9/11, not the sentiment in invading
Afghanistan (which was conducted half-assed).who wouldn't want to see
Bin Laden and Co. w/ their heads on sticks. The Afghan invasion had
popular support. and unfathomably sense of injury? unfathomable?  give
me a break

A group
> psychosis of defense has taken hold, defined by a homeland security
> apparatus committed to invasive forms of domestic policing; economic
> priorities that ensure the diversion of the world's resources to
> military spending; the suspension of civil liberties in Guantánamo and
> Iraq, top-down judicial authorizations of vote-rigging; a rampant
> unilateralism that flouts the Geneva Conventions and the Kyoto
> Protocols; and the cynical use of a "war on terror" to impose "a state
> of emergency" that suffers few legal restraints.
___
do u really feel like you live in a police state?  I don't

>
> Paranoia has returned with a vengeance as the ordre du jour in the
> aftermath of 9/11 ... We have been exhorted by Washington to
> connect the dots, to posit connections between weapons of mass
> destruction in Iraq and the World Trade Center attacks, to see
> "shadowy" global networks of jihadists masking themselves as ordinary
> citizens,
___________
but these fuckheads do exist--london, madrid, shit. forget about iraq,
a total farce. but let's not lose sight of these real threats.

  This logic  condemns you as a paranoid if you suspect that the
> case for war is less than solid,
___________
that would mean a majority of the country is now paranoid


 Ultimately, though, such connect/do-not-connect injunctions
> rely on the same conspiratorial logic of supranational oneworldedness.
> This [End Page 369] is a globalism in which there are no front lines
> in war, in which civilian and military cultures are interchangeable,
____
has she not read the history of the 20th century, a history of
increasing terror perpetrated on civilian populations? I don't see any
conspiratorial logic

> in which quotidian gestures and words invite surcodage ("just some
> alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence" in the
> words of one of DeLillo's characters [DeLillo, Mao II 77]), and in
> which "thinking like the enemy" (to the point of being "thought" as
> the enemy would think you) locks the mind into a loop of
> intersubjective projection that brooks no outside world.6 In this
> picture, as the world expands to include everybody, it paradoxically
> shrinks into a claustrophobic all-inclusiveness. Paranoid
> oneworldedness obeys a basic law of entropy that posits that increased
> disorder diminishes available energy within the confines of a closed
> system.
_______
this kind've gobbledegook reminds me of this piece on what we think of
Lincoln in the New Republic. the author argues that the problem is
that these histories are not written, for the most part, by
historians, who may understand better the nuances of politics, etc.
that the literary critics miss or misconstrue (not that these people
do not have certain insights but they inevitably write bad history)

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2634954a-b287-480e-9fbd-8a4663174031

>
> On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System
> Emily Apter,  Am Lit Hist.2006; 18: 365-389

Rich