Fwd: The Influence of Pynchon's Paranoia or Postulations for Paranoid

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nushra MohamedKhan <nushramkhan at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:20 AM
Subject: Re: The Influence of Pynchon's Paranoia or Postulations for Paranoid
To: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>


You've obviously misread the author here; she describes post-9-11
paranoia and how it suspended common sense and the rule of law, not
only in NYC and Washington and Penn. or where the strikes were, but
also in the United States generally and in the World.
Imagine the fear YOU experiences as USA Strealth Aircraft, a Drone, a
B52 Carpet Bomber rips the sky above your neighborhood followed by
horrific tales of the deaths of thousands of innocents. Imagine that
Your neighborhood is a Telluride of organized back-stabbing payed for
with blood money intrigue, assassination, skulls in the windows,
saints hung from the lightpoles, and burning red skies at morning a
warning rising on the tides of blackest smoke-dust wings spread
satanically across the horizon. The boy next door, home from the
extended tour, no job, no comfort,  lost in a nightmare, building a
bomb to blow up your local bank, recruiting young Islam brothers to go
fight their American brothers. A boy from Brasil just going to work,
shot in the Tube by English soldiers. Think his brothers migh find
friends in the IRA?

AGTD is a beautiful and tragic song to Richard Farina & Co. It's not
just a police state. It's a paranoid police state. A Battle Royal
(read Chapter One of Ellison's IM, at least read Chapter One,
published as a Short Story). Who's paying for your education? Who are
you working for? Who can you trust? Are you too old to trust yourself,
Bob Dylan.

Ah, but I was much older then, I'm younger than that now.

"My God, did I write that line?" He smiles. "I was in my New York
phase then, or at least, I was just coming out of it. I was still
keeping the things that are really really real out of my songs, for
fear they'd be misunderstood. Now," with another smile, "I don't care
if they are." Like, he had all the answers, then. If we can get rid of
the Bomb nobody will fight any more. If we integrate the schools every
one will love one another. It was so simple, he was so much older
then.

"No, I'm not disillusioned. I'm just not illusioned, either. The civil
rights and protest songs, I wrote when nobody else was writing them.
Now everyone is. But I've found out some things. The groups promoting
these things, the movement, would try to get me involved with them, be
their singing spokesman - and inside these groups, with all their
president vice-president secretary stuff, it's politics, all politics.
Inside their own pettinesses they're as bad as the hate groups. I
won't even have a fan club because it'd have to have a president, it'd
be a group.""


If it's a hard rain, let it be over there.  The son ain't yellow, its red.