CoL49 (5) FSM's, YAF's, VDC's [PC 82/83]

[Robin Landseadel]

In part, this scene shows the tidal shift of political activism on  
college campuses. Charles Hollander pays particular attention to:

	Where were Secretaries James and Foster and Senator
	Joseph, those dear daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's
	so temperate youth?
	PC 83

Hollander:

	Next day, walking across the campus of the University of
	California at Berkeley, Oedipa sees evidence of the students’
	seething political activism, and feels both attracted and alien.
	14 She recalls "Secretaries James and Foster and Senator
	Joseph . . . who’d mothered over Oedipa’s so temperate youth"
	(104). Who are these half–named Secretaries and Senator?
	
	U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1944-1947) and Secretary of
	Defense (1947-1949) James V. Forrestal; U.S. Secretary of
	State (1953-1959) John Foster Dulles; and U.S. Senator (R.,
	Wisconsin, 1947-1957) Joseph R. McCarthy. While the public–
	sector careers of Forrestal and Dulles have been extensively
	documented, their private–sector careers are less widely
	discussed. . .

Much more at:

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/magiceye.htm

Using a mode of investigation similar to what Hollander uses, one  
might note this passage:

	It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any
	campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She
	came downslope from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a
	plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair,
	hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, bookbags, swaying card
	tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for
	undecipherable FSM's, YAF's, VDC's*, suds in the fountain,
	students in nose-to-nose dialogue. She moved through it
	carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to
	feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among
	alternate universes it would take.

. . . in particular that line about "undecipherable FSM's, YAF's,  
VDC's" and then reflect on the fictional name on the previous page of  
"J.-K. Sale."  Pynchon's only literary collaboration was with  
Kirkpatrick Sale for the play "Mistral Island" back in those giddy  
school days° at Cornell, somewhere around the time Oedipa was in  
college.

http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/paper_gibbs.html

Kirkpatrick Sale has written on the subject of the SDS:

http://www.amazon.com/SDS-development-Students-Democratic-Society/dp/0394478894

. . . and " has been described as "a leader of the Neo-Luddites" and  
"the theoretician for a new secessionist movement." [Wiki] Here are  
two recent examples of Kirkpatrick Sale's writings:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sale02222005.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/sale02032009.html

After all this political smoke clears, we are left with a notation of  
the decline of these names so central to the development of the  
Central Intelligence Agency. The mood gives way to a sense of  
melancholy [that Jacobean emotion] at the passage of time:

	In another world. Along another pattern of track, another string
	of decisions taken, switches closed, the faceless pointsmen
	who'd thrown them now all transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing
	the skip-tracers, out of their skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic,
	under aliases, dead, impossible to find ever again. Among them
	they had managed to turn the young Oedipa into a rare creature
	indeed, unfit perhaps for marches and sit-ins, but just a whiz at
	pursuing strange words in Jacobean texts.
	PC 83

*a: 103, b: 83 - FSM's, YAF's, VDC's
Free Speech Movement, Young Americans for Freedom, and Vietnam Day  
Committee. The VDC was a coalition of left-wing political groups,  
student groups, labour organizations, and pacifist religions in  
America that opposed the Vietnam War. It was formed in Berkeley in  
1965 and was active through the majority of the war.

http://cl49.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_5

° Judging from the synopsis in http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/paper_gibbs.html 
  , the two must have been pretty giddy at the time.