VL-IV some more oddments - I love this book...

[Michael Bailey]

210 -- "Some wanted to declare war on the Nixon Regime, others to
approach it, like any other municipality, on the topic of revenue
sharing" - something that I didn't remember from the time but recently
read, was how Nixon had at one point seriously proposed setting a
national minimum income.  That would've been pretty cool, some might
say.
Anyway, despite Watergate and of course Vietnam, Nixon was not nearly
so stingy with government largesse as later Republicans would learn to
be (remember Reagan saying ketchup qualified as a vegetable in school
lunches?), and he did also institute the EPA.  Back then, of course,
rivers catching fire was making the news.
The precedent for PR3 seceding and still getting government funds was
set by Native Americans, who as Bush [I caught a glimpse of a tabloid
headline tonight at the store that read "Bush suicidal" - poor guy...]
said, "Tribal sovereignty means that. It's sovereign. You're a …
you're a … you've been given sovereignty and you're viewed as a
sovereign entity." - but they do get (insufficient, laggardly,
demeaning) US gov't moneys...

217 -- "At some point he must have gone drifting off to sleep, and she
hadn't noticed.  She watched over him, hers for a while, allowing
herself to shudder with, even surrender to, her need for his bodily
presence, his beauty, the fear at the base of his spine, the prurient
ache in her hands...at last, so swept and helpless, she leaned in to
whisper to him her heart's overflow, and saw in the half-light that
what she'd thought were closed eyelids had been open all the time.
He'd been watching her.  She let out a short jolted scream.  Brock
started laughing."
worse, much worse than I24's fat talk.  this is serious scorning, than
which hell hath no fury worse than the object of.  Maude
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068103/ used to say to Walter, "God'll
get you for that."  It's horror.

in general: anarcho-syndicalist literature and perhaps some socialist
and communist stuff as well refers to the "myth of the general strike"
- they actually use that word.  If it is a myth, we can reason, so is
the state.  So, certainly, is religion... although "capitalism" is
perhaps a different category of entity.  Anyway, the general strike
(Sasha came into San Fran in the heady aftermath of a general strike,
a-and PR3 is actually a general strike, similar to the Events
mentioned in the Rex passage) came dangerously close to really
happening at PR3 but the students didn't really have any notion of the
change they were seeking.
I'm taken aback, though, by the rather cynical thought process
involved in developing this "myth".
PR3 vs Brock is worked out in _Vineland_ almost as a specific
response, even a debunking, of this general strike myth.

216 -- "...time was rushing all around her, these were rapids
[Frenesi's still thinking in terms of Brock's logjam metaphor], and as
far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock's stretch of the
river..."
just briefly want to note that Brock's metaphor didn't include the
rapids, did it?

216 -- "another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into
adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering,
that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and
often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children."
we can sympathize, but she's moving into a martial state of mind, an
emergency consciousness, and beginning to believe that anyone who
isn't on that wavelength is childish.  This is similar enough to, or
perhaps is, paranoia, it's a self-perpetuating loop...
anyway, setting life EQUAL to soldiering is wrong, imho...better to
say that life might INCLUDE soldiering...then it can be avoided (like
in her next equation, "soldiering includes death" - well yeah, but
it's understood that a good soldier tries mostly to avoid it --- just
so, I would suggest, it's natural for a good living person to mostly
try to avoid soldiering)

jeeze I'm a frickin windbag





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