Manson Cult; was Golden Fang

[Dave Monroe]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 3:52 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone noticed how often the Manson murders have been referenced
> in IV?  Isn't this contrary to his usual absence of the huge elephant?
>  Holocaust in GR?...
>
> The Manson Murders in IV have been pushed to the front in IV many
> times without any obvious story-relevance.

Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files (New
York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 1, "Conspiracy/Culture," Section II,
"Vineland and Visibility," pp. 57-75 ...

"The hidden depths and concelaed realms which might encourage
countercultural fantasies of a
conspiratorial 'We-system' (as Gravity's Rainbow termed it) have thus
all but disappeared in the world of Vineland.  Everything has become
exposed (to use a film metaphor to which the novel itself is highly
attuned) ....  On this reading, then, the final failure of the 1960s
underground culture comes about not through any of the conspiratorial
fanstasies of apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but
because there is nowhere left to hide.  Everything is visible, and
everything is connected, producing a situation in which a routine
sense of paranoia is paradoxically both no longer necessary, and more
vital than ever." (p. 73)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706

Manson, the LAPD, Nixon, the drug war (not to mention the Internet)
avant la lettre, Vietnam ...