IVIV parody?

[Doug Millison]

Rich, I'm not disappointed by IV for a number of reasons (one of them  
being the way I read Pynchon's novels as chapters in a single big  
work, so I won't be disappointed if one bit is weaker, perhaps, than  
the rest, in my mind I'm still wandering around in the latest update  
of an ongoing oeuvre that continues to satisfy), but what I find  
perhaps most striking is what a bleak picture of "the '60s" IV presents.

Pynchon like the rest of us has had a chance to watch all these  
anniversary celebrations of that generation, Free Speech Movement,  
Woodstock, Sgt. Pepper's, Manson, etc., all the famous milestones, and  
they all either tend to glorify/sentimentalize or demonize the decade.

Pynchon refrains from doing either in IV, and it's not a pretty picture.

Start with Doc, as likeable as some readers seem to find him, he's  
also a guy who's worked with and for the pigs, has kow-towed to them  
as necessary and profited thereby, he disguises himself as a hippie,  
rolls his own dreadlocks, and otherwise acts like lots of those  
"plastic people" and "weekend hippies" Frank Zappa makes fun of in the  
60s.  Yeah, Doc's got a feel for his generation and he is a part of  
the counter-culture at the same time that he works for/with the  
police, and yes he uses the hippie substance of choice - pot - to  
buffer it all, and on acid he goes strange places and has a view of  
"reality" that the straightworld can't understand. However, back in  
_our_ day, whenever somebody came around who might have that kind of  
connection to the police, we didn't trust the dude and would choose  
not to spend time with him if we could avoid it -- I don't care how  
cool a "hippie" somebody might have been, the fact of collaborating  
with the police was not cool, not in my crowd in the 60s (when I was  
still in high school) and '70s.

Add the way that Doc embodies the hypocrisy of the male "hippie" who  
calls for liberation yet treats women as sexual objects, and the  
picture's even less attractive.  Yes I understand that Doc shows some  
other impulses towards women, but the dominant chord here is in your  
face oral gratification of the most impersonal sort.

Thoroughly compromised except *perhaps* in dreams and when he escapes  
this mundane Mobility via LSD  (and I think Doc may be McLuhan's  
digital man personified, his sense ratios and worldview irrevocably  
changed without his knowledge or active participation, by exposure to  
electronic and digital media even before he gets to the drugs,  cf.  
_The Gutenberg Galaxy_;  _Understanding Media_), you can hardly blame  
the guy for fogging out - more or less -  with pot 24/7.

Whatever the Golden Fang represent, ultimately, Pynchon sets IV  
against a backdrop that is as dark as any he's written, I think --  
that whole post-WWII way that the US manipulated international drug  
markets in order to prop up allies (KMT, for ex.) and punish their  
allies' enemies, as part of the larger Cold War, and how that leads in  
a mainline straight to China White coming into the US for resale,  
together with GI corpses in body bags in the retail shipments arranged  
by bored and greedy Graves Registrations personnel, and in wholesale  
shiploads thanks to organizations like the Fang.  Painkiller to keep  
folks numb on this end, so the War can go on, weapons can be  
manufactured and sold and destroyed and replaced…add Internet to the  
Tube, we got our beach  and our cool cars and all the free love/sex  
you can eat (until the AIDS bomb drops), everybody happy.

Front page story in the local paper this morning, 'bout that big  
Mexican drugs cartel the US Feds is after, la Familia the name, I  
think.  Supposedly they forbid their people to get addicted to drugs.   
They bring their operatives, the paper said, out of poverty and all  
kinds of problems and oppression, and many are addicts, they get them  
cleaned up, then put them to the work of the ruthlessly cruel and  
efficient cartel.  A life sentence as an executioner or other kind of  
enforcer, in exchange for getting the monkey off one's back, that's  
their deal, not unlike the one that the bad guys give Coy in IV, I  
might argue (but won't, it's back to work for a few weeks for me after  
this).

"Don't you love it, don't you hate it, life's a ball, TV tonight!"