Pynchon's back catalogue

[Campbel Morgan]

Zoyd, like Ishmael, is one of the crew; he gets involved with her and
she carries the V-force; its sexual--homo/hetero and it's in her genes
or something ...it's Henry Adams and the Start of the 20th Century.
The history of Turning on the organized efforts of the workers runs in
her family so to speak' and she passes it on to her daughter Prarie. P
recycles these relationships in AGTD. But the history is factual.
That's the way it went down, again and again. From the Big Lights and
Cameras and Stages to United Electrical Workers (see Cold War in the
Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers,
Filippelli and McColloch) and through the Cold War. From Berlin 1945
to Berlin 1989.  Parannoia!!!!   From SDS to the Reagan Democrats &
Young Republicans. Why?  Paranoia explains the intensity of the
reponse. The BOMB! THE REDS! National Security! Technology explains a
good deal of the rest (see Mumford Technixcs and Civilization, the
opening scene of GR is lifted and Pynchonized from Mumford). The
immigrants, and inherent weaknesses of Immigrant Labor, see that Intro
to The Jungle by Mark Dickstein that was cited the other day. The
growth of cities. It's history. Read a good book on American history;
not one of these anti-Capitalist Lefty screams from the Peasant in
Monthy Python, and you will get the idea. Read _The Visible Hand_.
Remember too, and this another reason why these kinds of readings
baffle our European friends and even Americans who approach these
historical texts from a Marxist angle, one of the greates paradoxes of
the American Labor movement is and has always been, Outside the broad
stream of Socialist Thought. In rhetoric only, and never as an
opporating principle. American Labor has always practice compassionate
consevatism. "Business Unionism" accepted private property and the
free market as fundamentally benificial, desirable. The Labor movement
tempered the negative impact of unrestrained individualism and extreme
concentrations of wealth. Now, as P notes i SL, it did not prevent the
outcome, as he sees it: poor and powerless people. Each time the Labor
Movement was defeated, it invloved an inside job. And, yes
that's dog bites man. You could find, if you are looking to blame a
class of people, any number of groups, but to blame, for example the
Irish-Americans, and they were quite important to these historical
events, is useless and niot very interesting. The story of Indian
Hating, as Melville tells it, ambiguous, shocking, keeps us engaged
and talking about it. That's not to say that Melville's or Pynchon's
political views; Melville's critique of the abuse of sailors, workers,
blacks, Indians, Others or Pynchon's of Reagan and Nixon, are
interesting, but we could read those kinds of critiques in the
editorials of mewspapers.