VL--IV, "a gig of death" or Don't Take the Piano Player!

[Mark Kohut]

Robin wrote:
The central element in this scene is Karma, much like the peyote scene in Against the Day. Frank [Ewball, really] saves the brujo El Espinero. In return, Frank gets a vision that aims him towards Sloat Fresno, enabling Frank to clear that bit of business off his plate. Onboard Kuhuna Airlines, Zoyd [really!] saves Takeshi. As a reward Zoyd gets a a little "amulet" that turns out to be a variety of a "get out of jail free" card for Prairie.
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Yeahp. Keyboard Player not piano player, fer sure...(I was just tryin' to have fun with "Don't Shoot the Piano Player" motif and it stuck.)

Kahuna, yeahp, all those meanings...

And, yeahp, I can see karma in Takeshi's 'Adjustments' and it passing down to Prairie....BUT

 whatever BIG THINKING Frenchman's THOTS we use, it is fake, fakiness, phoniness, inauthenticity everywhere at Kahuna Airlines, as if TRP had just overlaid The Recognitions on The Tibetan Book of the Dead or, of course, kept touching bottom with his vision of fakeness in Vineland America--- even in its Eastern Religions since the 60s ? 
 
This, I suggest, is NOT anything like the serious concept of Karma in AtD, say; this is OBA satirizing it, as almost everything in Vineland is satirized.

Is our beloved author, full of overarching connections, with that hidden allusion to Deep Ocean, Japan's first external intelligence agency, linking some fake Eastern religiosity by Americans with that world of spies and deception which permeate GR and AtD? Takeshi is IN GR, right?  I say Takeshi may be from the Deep Ocean, which morphed into the Japanese mafia, which links to Wayvone and the American mafia. 
 
I did not gloss "the insurance" that Kahuna Airlines could not pay. "Insurance" against something bad happening being one word for mafia protection. Is this Deep Ocean Society linked to the American Org after Frenesi---and all? 
 
Today, I want to argue that this episode (and others) link Vineland to TRPs lifelong focus on government/military/industrial complex surveillance and control.