IVIV1: Introducing Pynchon's burgher

[Michael Bailey]

Why is a repo person automatically heinous?

People buy things on credit, but fail to pay --
"what's a mother to do?"

He carries the bag but never uses it.  That's laudable.

He has a specific mission - to get the goods (as the IWW saying
goes, "direct action gets the goods") and - unless all of contract law
is to be thrown out as inadmissible impositions of The Man -
he is performing a real service.

...yeah, yeah, buy-on-credit places
jack up the price, and easily available credit leads people to live
beyond their means, so forth, but these are systemic ills and have
much more to do with inherent flaws in capitalism, or, to avoid that jargon,
with areas where the human ability to interact gracefully is
still developing (sort of like, hey, where was language or algebra
a few thousand years ago - they didn't even have a word for
antidisestablishmentarianism in Egypt, nor did Greek math have a zero,
so I suspect there's some unknown right now that will make a huge
difference in the spreading of wealth sometime, when it takes hold
("the reds are talking hold" - Hunter S Thompson)) so forth, than with
the legitimacy of private collection efforts in any individual case...

but we've established his efforts were non-violent, right?

His private-enterprise role pretty much prevents him being corrupt
to any great extent: collude with one deadbeat and his job is pretty much
toast.  He has to get the car, or whatever, back.

OK, he can occasionally let one of his skip-tracees slip, in theory,
but again, private enterprise reduces the worth of that service since
the seekers can just send somebody else.  And it won't look good
on his quarterly review.

Now, having defended the noble repo person / skip tracer,
(pretty much sincerely)...

One of the things I think is going on in IV as well as most
noir fiction is sorting out the PI's stance on the cops.

I'd call the PI - cop relationship a fairly good approximation
of the dilemma of citizen v state writ small, which I bet somebody cleverer
and better-read has already noticed...but it's sorta new to me...

Nobody's perfect - as somebody in Doc's profession certainly notices.

Cops have such a broad mandate, a fuzzy agenda, that it's much
easier for them to cover up malfeasance and stay employed.

Cops have more power, are expected to stay busy all the time,
they are supposed to enforce a rule of law, while it's human nature
to be loyal to buddies, bosses (to some extent), to favor people
who are like unto oneself....

I could go on and on, but although I think I was onto something 3 paragraphs
back, I'm pretty sure I'm spinning my wheels now!  Where did I go wrong?

I did want to defend the humble repo person - check
I did want to say I relish an interplay of forces between cop and pi - check

I wanted to say nice things about cops (to some extent)
- if a cop isn't bent or brutal, he or she is certainly a valuable
part of society!

Fnord


-- 
"Furthermore, in the postmodern usage of Menippean satire it is
considered appropriate to abbreviate concepts, but not to omit
articles." - Keith