IVIV: Inherent Loss

[Robin Landseadel]

I remember reading "THE PRESIDENT'S EMERGENCY WAR POWERS AND THE  
EROSION OF CIVIL LIBERTIES IN PYNCHON'S VINELAND" by DAVID THOREEN  
during the Vineland group read.

	 Postmodern assertions aside, historical trends do exist, and
	they are not merely the manufactured cabals of subjective and
	subjectivizing personalities. Nowhere is this more clear than in
	the history of executive aggrandizement in this country. In
	theory, this trend is a two-way street, whereby the legislative
	and judicial branches are capable of redirecting or even
	reversing the flow of power to the executive. In practice,
	however, the traffic along this street during the twentieth century
	has been conspicuously one-way.

	Pynchon is acutely aware of the steady encroachment in the
	twentieth century of the executive branch on the legislative,
	and, in Vineland, he has documented some of the attendant
	threats to our individual civil liberties. Seen from this
	perspective, the scope of the novel is considerably larger than
	previously recognized, reaching back to arguments over the
	separation of powers made before and during the
	Constitutional Convention and looking forward to the present
	day, the late 1990s, a period in which an increasing number of
	city and county governments balance their budgets with
	proceeds from the auction of assets seized in the War on Drugs,
	and in which an increasing number of police departments
	across the United States have established paramilitary units
	deployed with increasing frequency

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm

My portal into Pynchon owes a lot more to the Firesign Theater than  
Nathaniel Hawthorne—though it's pretty clear that Pynchon's family  
history plays very heavily in all his works. I found looking into the  
Pynchon family's history a very valuable route of entry into deeper  
levels of his fictions, levels that help to illuminate the literary  
traditions being toyed with and trampled on in these novels.

At the same time there is a political critique in the Firesign  
Theater's best work that is very similar to Pynchon's political  
critique—an examination of the role that Television plays in the  
erosion of liberties.

Though unmentioned in Inherent Vice, the album "How Can You Be In Two  
Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All" has its role to play  
in Pynchon's "Psychedelic Noir." Very much like Pynchon's novels the  
FS records are a melange of high and low, art 'n idiocy. "How Can You  
Be" offers up Joyce and bilocation while simultaneously tossing out  
big gooey lumps of stoner humor.

http://www.rhapsody.com/firesign-theatre/how-can-you-be-in-two-places-at-once-when-youre-not-anywhere-at

Central to whatever level of popularity these bozos briefly enjoyed in  
the late sixties and early seventies is Nick Danger and the early  
development of the figure of the Stoner P.I.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5XfXECpU6w

Anyone who was paying attention to Raymond Chandler had to notice his  
embrace of drink in most of his work, followed by "The Long Goodbye"  
and a more critical look at alcohol and alcoholism.  "Cut 'em Off At  
The Past" was and is everybody's favorite FS routine in large part  
thanks to all the dope references. For a while spouting little hunks  
of Nick Danger was the moral equivalent of rapping on the speakeasy  
door and giving the bouncer the "word."

For a brief moment in 1970 the Firesign Theater were relevant.  
Particularly relevant were the two follow-up records by the FS: "Don't  
Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers"

http://www.rhapsody.com/-search?query=don%27t%20crush%20that%20dwarf%20hand%20me&searchtype=RhapKeyword

and "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus."

http://www.rhapsody.com/-search?query=I%20think%20we%27re%20all%20bozos&searchtype=RhapKeyword

Both records were speaking of the erosion of liberty and general  
disconnection from the commons that addiction to the Tube provides. At  
the same time they were [during their moment] the apogee of stoner  
humor, the record of the moment in many smoke filled living rooms.

In "Don't Crush", much as in Vineland, we have a character who wishes  
to become a television character. In "Crush" our protagonist takes a  
form of Television communion and becomes a character in a 1950's  
"Archie" parody that simultaneously points to the shooting at Kent  
State.

"Bozos" is a fantasy about hacking into and re-routing the "future",  
it's centerpiece is the monkey-wrenching of a government machine with  
a mouthpiece in the form of an animatronic, interactive Richard Nixon.

What is notable about these three records [and the works of Monty  
Python, starting coincidently around the time "How Can You Be" was  
first issued] is their ofttimes black and surrealist humor, with an  
attendant breaking of certain taboos of expression in that moment.  
Tthe social context shifted. Manson wasn't the only thing that monkey  
wrenched the hippie dream—Pynchon always wrote about shady land deals  
from shady land dealers, "Pynchon v. Stearns" comes into play here.  
TRP's father being both a land surveyor and a big Republican wheel  
obviously relates. So paving paradise and putting up parking lots has  
lots to do with the particular players in Pynchon's novels. And then  
there's cybernetic spying and parodies of thrillers and their  
conventions. FS and TRP share many of the same paranoias.

The tone of both Vineland and Inherent Vice is more like the work of  
the Firesign Theater in part because the language is simpler than the  
fatter books and the subject of marijuana flows more naturally into  
the plots of these novels. Vineland and Inherent Vice both read much  
like the Firesign Theater sounds. Dig into the Deeper layers of the  
Firesign Theater and you'll find concerns and fears for civil  
liberties that sound very much like Pynchon's.