The Fall of the House of Labor AtD.93 Republicans?

[Carvill John]

Your argument is interesting, for its frshness of perspective. I'm not sure I 100% get what you're saying, but surely you can't deny the presence in ATD of *some degree* of criticism of Dubya Bush and his cohorts?



Most specifically, and famously, there's the Governor of Jeshimon, as mentioned here, in Peter Vernon's excellent article on Cricket & ATD:


Pynchon, as in his other works (V. is an obvious example), examines a swathe of history at the end of the nineteenth-century, when the Imperial Powers were falling into decadence, and uses that history to criticize the contemporary period, in which society is equally out of joint. G.W. Bush is evidently referred to when the Chums' assignment to the Nation's Capital is recorded as The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit (5). Bush is again portrayed as the Governor of Jeshimon: "Though he believed that the power that God had allowed to find its way to him required a confident swagger, his gait was neither earned nor, despite years of practice, authentic, having progressed little beyond an apelike trudge" (212). Post- Thatcherite, Blairite, soon to be Brownite Britain is seen in a "Tory despotism of previously unimagined rigor and cruelty" (230). Beyond, or below the game of the book, is the sense of something serious going on.

 
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cricket_in_Against_the_Day


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> Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2009 09:50:30 -0400
> Subject: The Fall of the House of Labor AtD.93 Republicans?
> From: alicewellintown at gmail.com
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>
> This is not a condemnation of Bush. Pynchon is, as is his wont, taking
> pages straight from history books and putting them in the mouths of
> characters. Webb is giving a long talk about the problems as he sees
> them through his paranoid and gnostic glass darkley. The Republicans
> mentioned in the passage are not in Washington but in the State
> Capital. The paranois of the gnostic-Union zealots like Webb is the
> target of the satire in the passage. There is not even an oblique jab
> at W. Why bother punching shit in the face. Also, the terms "Left" and
> "Right" do not help us understand this work. Waste of time.

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