IV Reet's pleats

[Doug Millison]

Zoot suit with a reet pleat! Reminds me of LA latino hipsters.  From  
the Pynchonwiki:

http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pages_249-269

249.5 & 6 Anglo vigilantes from Whittier


Whittier High School and Whittier College is where President Richard  
M. Nixon, President when GR was published, hailed from. [[1]]

This literary device tying Nixon to race riots and social repression  
works on literary license only, and in reviewing the historic  
situation it appears that the riots were not so much white vigilantes  
from Whittier attacking Zoot Suiters, as much as drunken Navy men gone  
wild and finding an easy target in Mexican American youth.

This seems doubly galling on Pynchon's part:

First, Whittier, CA, was and largely remains a Quaker community, named  
after the Quaker Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Quakers  
are among the most pacificistic of peoples. In addition they embody  
many of the values Pynchon seems to support: egalitarianism, heirarchy- 
less assembly, the notion of a God available to all people unmediated  
by a priesthood or the elect, etc. Violence is not part of their  
program.

Second, Pynchon is throwing the blame for the riots on Whittier (this  
contributor has never been to Whittier) instead of what appears to be  
the true cause of the riots -- nasty, drunken, sailors -- those guys  
TRP hung out with for a while -- and then other service branches  
joining in the race baiting. Please see the PBS American Experience  
website and program for more information: The Zoot Suit Riots.

Richard Nixon, however, remains at the center of this Navy-Violence- 
Whittier-Quaker venn diagram. A Quaker from Whittier who in WWII  
served in the Navy. I, for one, could never figure how a Quaker  
president could bomb Cambodia or deal in such political slime.