The Ivory Dentist Dance

[alice wellintown]

Paul said,
> Anyone in the employ of the CIA who in any way aided and abetted the
> development of the Internet (even accidentally), thereby setting the path to
>  effective keeping of secrets through easy encryption, needs to have his
> cloak and dagger taken away from him.

I'm not sure if I read this in something Fredric Jameson wrote or if I
made it up; the CIA employee, excepting GHW Bush Skull and Bones &
Co., is a member of what some Marxists call a temporary phase in the
grand struggle betwixt Capital and Labor.  That is, what some call the
post-industrial and post war "middle-class interregnum" phase of late
capitalism, a period that permitted the "Professional Managerial
Class" or PMC, including academics, to foreground the sufferings and
alienation of suburbanites, while ignoring the economic sufferings of
their Laboring class brothers and sisters, who, because they, like the
city landscapes they occupied after the suburban PMC workers took
trains back to the suburbs, were rendered invisible. Oedipa journey
into the mind of watts, Zoyd's, and even Larry's, is but glimpse, no
journey at all;  Routinized mental labor and, WASTE.

When the Dude loses his temper, his buddy's self-centered bowling for
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, one can't help but feel that Goodman is
good actor and that his character is now a victim of satire. Giving
him a copy of DeLillo's Libra would only add insult to injury.