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

[Michael Bailey]

 Carvill John wrote:
>
> This is one of those threads where someone (Alice in this case) *seems* to be talking about >the same subject as me, but I struggle to understand exactly how what she is saying relates >to what I am saying. I don't have any big point to make or axe to grind so I'm not too > > bothered. But Pynchon undeniably does deal with contemporary political matters in ATD.
>

perhaps, as Austin Powers said of Mini-Me, a historical novel is a tripod:

leg 1 - the author's grounding in the period, which we learn from and
test against what we
know and think reasonable including his choice of what to highlight,
what theories to elucidate (and in whose mouth to place them)
leg 2 - references to current events, which of course his
contemporaries see immediately, but in 500 or  a thousand years become
footnotes themselves (if I read a really good Roman satire, it's
probably not because I want to  see Caesar Augustus lampooned,
although knowing that will add to my appreciation of the text, eg)
leg 3 - the fictional inventions and how they are used

I think there's a strong case for Jeshimon as specific indictment of
what Texas became
under Bush, but perhaps there're other points being made.

Every time I try to elaborate on this I end up with something clumsy like this:

a) Jeshimon is where the bounty hunters take Webb to kill him -
someplace where misrule
is evident.  He's been behaving as if the legal system is completely
corrupt and there is no recourse - he ignores the less-radical
unionists who have in fact gotten a toehold in Colorado and he acts
out his principles as a vigilante.  Deuce and Sloat take him to a
place where vice has in fact triumphed.  ("Jeshimon is where bad
anarchists go to die" type of thing)

b) Jeshimon is almost mythically bad.  Partly because we see it thru
Reef, who despite
his sophistication is still young and naive; but also it's got to be
some kind of commentary on places where evil is in charge, on
autocracy - it's an archetypal banana republic of the sort that we
still see today festering all over the world, wherever one person -
often with US aid -  isn't subject to checks and balances.  If you
read _The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao_ by Junot Diaz, you see a
Jeshimon much more realized than Bush's Texas...

c) one thing that crosses my mind, too - is it supposed to, in the
author's vision,
I wonder? - is that he makes a point of the Governor being a bad shot.
 If this is the
case, why doesn't a henchman knock him off?  This feeds into my notion
of how the
evil of any regime certainly isn't the sole property of its
figurehead, and in fact the
major evildoers may be on the sidelines; and in fact even minor
players use custom
to excuse doing things they know are wrong

d) then there's the detail on
the numerous churches in Jeshimon, apparently none of them socially activist,
and having no effect on the surrounding miasma...while this certainly fits
with the militaristic Right's courting of the religious Right, it also
fits in with
churchly impotence against injustice thru the centuries - or perhaps is meant
as a sidelong commentary on such...





-- 
"My God, I am fully in favor of a little leeway or the damnable jig is
up! " - Hapworth Glass