44 Here Comes Coy to Save the Motherland

[Michael Bailey]

you stress the somewhat dystopian elements of the picture...
not unrightfully, perhaps, although for me personally the
musician/artist mindset is several settings away from the
student-activist mindset...

and student-activism often
falls prey to some form of love's labors lost, while devotion
to music is more profitable for the soul if not always for the wallet

-  So the loss of Harlingen's prospective activism
due to junk doesn't seem as poignant as the waste of his talent
on the uncongenial genre of surf music, and the waste of his
substance in the dope habit...

junk wasn't an unmitigated disaster.  Admittedly it was very bad,
but it was what brought them together
in the first place.

I was interested to note that Coy's version of the story was
very different from Penny's conjecture, about setting up credibility
for Coy among militant antiwar circles...
unless he's not being completely candid with Doc.

He does seem confused, and his wife might not have
fully informed him about the deal she'd made, so when he
fell in with the vigilantes his natural sense of pitch is what
alerted him to how out of tune their plans are, rather than
any form of political analysis.  I don't think there's anything
in the text about Coy being in SDS...

True, there's not any parallel drawn between musical intonation
and politics (Plato had some ideas about it, but I'm with
Gaddis in thinking Plato a bit of a fascist) - so perhaps the real
source of his antiwar thinking is the sympathy he's learned by being
a junkie, and the recognition of the same syndrome w/r/t Vietnam.



On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 12:46 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> The term, motherland, while sometimes synonomous with fatherland, has
> the connotation of one's country of birth and growing up, with the
> country respectfully being viewed as a benign mother, nurturing the
> citizens as her children.
>
> When Doc visits Hope, Juicegirl, daughter of Junkies Hope & Coy, after
> realizing tha the adults were not going to read to her, races to the
> Tube to watch one of the most violent post Itchy and Scratchy cartoons
> ever produced and marketed to toddlers. At the end of the chapter she
> rushes in to the room where DOc and Hope are drinking coffee and
> talking about surf music and heroine and she recites the famous Mighty
> Mouse, "Here I come to Save the Day." We learn that Hope, although she
> was told that her child could be born addicted or addicted through her
> breast milk, ignored that advice, but through some Grace, the child is
> heroine free. Hope, with her new set of teeth and her tan, is also
> free of junk. So is Coy. But sometimes when folks free themselves of a
> monster they feel compelled to save the world from it or even take on
> even bigger beasts. Coy, we could call it the big chill projection of
> those Port Huron college boyz who grew up in comfort and moved onto
> campuses, after making himself a slave to avoid the "slavery" of
> suburban white middle class homogeneity, is not ready to save his
> motherland from her addiction to mainlining her children up the dragon
> to the heart of darkness and Apocalypse Now.
>
> What a pair, this Coy Hope; a pair of ragged claws scuttling in and
> out of bathroom through suburban doors and silent sleaze.
>



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