VL-IV: Chap 10

[Joseph Tracy]

I think it is easy to forget the tremors that were sent through the  
system by those who turned the cameras toward the police and to those  
who voiced dissent, and that brought the attention of the country to  
bear on the violence and lack of civil freedoms promised. This was a  
generation very aware of the power of media and particularly tuned to  
film and TV.  TRP in turn points the camera here at 24fps as a  
paradigm of the courage, threat and failures of the student/ 
counterculture.  There is a Gandhian point where 24fps realizes the  
danger of their actions, in the sense that Gandhi said only when  
fighters for peace were as committed as armies in confronting  
injustice can they succeed.  The pressures get pretty intense and  
Frenesi turns. Years later the heat has cooled a little and maybe  
there is a sense in which the remnants of 24fps are keepers of a  
scrapbook of the days they took on the empire, but Prairie is getting  
a picture of the various strands of a heritage that includes a pretty  
titanic struggle. I don't get the sense that Pynchon is judging these  
people harshly. They are mostly slogging on.
The picture he creates, at first glance seems comical and exaggerated  
but   to my mind he really gets at the difficulties and cosmic  
disappointment of the attempted American revolution revisited in the  
60s.

Several neocons were once serious lefties.
On Feb 15, 2009, at 4:41 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> "Paying attention, in a quite different usage, is a positive Zen 
> (like) attitude.
>
> If they (we) had learned to pay the (right) attention....would we  
> be more like Lew
> Basnight or Cyprian?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Josiah Miller <josiahthemessiah at yahoo.com>
> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2009 11:45:27 AM
> Subject: Re: VL-IV: Chap 10 - p. 195
>
>
>
> "When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into  
> that most sensitive memory device, the human face.  Who could  
> withstand the light?  What viewer could believe in the war, the  
> system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into  
> these mug shots of the bought and sold?  Hearing the synchronized  
> voices repeat the same formulas, evasive, affectless, cut off from  
> whatever they had once been by promises of what they would never  
> get to collect on?"
> ...
> "'...because too many of us are learning how to pay attention.'"
>
> This is a great piece of writing here where Frenesi answers the  
> question the narrator asked.  What viewer could believe...?  Once  
> broadcasting was able to  reach a larger and larger audience, the  
> biased media used this to their advantage and now we have 24 hour  
> cable news networks like Fox and MSNBC getting such high ratings  
> with their clowns imposing their views onto the public who watch  
> this.  In Chomsky's book "Language and Responsibility, he discusses  
> the media in Chapter 1 entitled Politics.
>
> "What you face here is a very effective kind of ideological  
> control, because one can remain under the impression that  
> censorship does not exist, and in a narrow technical sense that is  
> correct.  You will not be imprisoned if you discover the facts, not  
> even if you proclaim them whenever you can.  But the results remain  
> much the same as if there were real censorship.  Social reality is  
> generally concealed by the intelligentsia."  (Chomsky p. 31)
>
> I believe this is the problem that Frenesi and her group are  
> facing.  And there are only a handful of people out there like  
> Frenesi.  I believe Chomsky says also in the book that if you want  
> to make a change that you have to start changing the media.
>
> Josiah
>
>
>