Happy Thanksgiving -

[Michael Bailey]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 9:08 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you think if I give thanks to god the P-List might talk some
> Pynchon?

thanks for that opening...or what-you-may-call-it...

a) mass delusions and the madness of crowds in Pynchon...

  i) M&D the revival in Philadelphia a sort of 9 days wonder in which
a new election and preterition were determined by different values,
for a change...and then things sort of reverted back to normal...
seemingly confirming Marx about control of the means of production
being the determining factor even for spirituo-aesthetic life
(although that's the Marxian premise I'm least likely to embrace,
being a bit of an escapist in those matters)

 ii) PR3 of course, although its localization made it easier to
subdue...and its expectations were much less clearly defined.

Like PR3, the OWS is an ad hoc movement; like the Philadelphia revival
in M&D, they do not control the means of production and thus their
influence will be limited to the sum of the individual acts of
ingenuity of the participants, and whatever synergy the random factors
confer, plus the appositeness of their protest to the disaffection
that is *eminently* reachable in *ever so many* Americans - - -
divided by the insistent counter-demagoguery of the murdoch-media (to
quote IV - "they are in place")



b) -- what ties the economic protest of OWS to the civil rights
movement is probably the Citizens United case:
http://movetoamend.org/publications-talks/hightower-lowdown-citizens-united-against-citizens-united-grassroots-campaign-res

"a Hart Research survey in January--a year after the Court's edict was
issued--found that public opposition remained fervent, with 87 percent
of Democrats, 82 percent of Independents, and even 68 percent of
Republicans favoring passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn
Citizens United and to make clear that corporations do not have the
same rights as people."

Isn't it true that the original decisions setting up corporations as
tantamount-people took place after Reconstruction, as horrible
twistings of the 14th Amendment?  And those decisions were in tandem
with the horrible twistings of justice denied former slaves, whose
rights the 14th Amendment was intended to protect?  So Citizens United
is a continuation of that horror...

Which leads to something I think you, alice, might have something to
say about...which is how the treatment of what in times gone by might
have been called "the Negro question" is not very prominent in the
novels, but does find a nuanced treatment in "The Secret Integration"
(not to mention the Watts essay...) - so nuanced that I'm not
absolutely sure I have plumbed the emotional center of it.  Basically
Carl goes back into folklore with the deposed East European monarch?
The parents, hypnotized by the government-controlled media, drive the
parents out but the kids, who are a little more perceptive, place him
where he won't be completely forgotten...roaming the grounds of the
estate occupied by the shades of that ruler and his servant...

or, if there really was a Carl that came along with the black couple,
the kids, in the fogs of youth, forget him even more completely than
the parents and make him a myth?

or, if there really wasn't a Carl and they just made him up in the
first place, their imaginations that were leaping forward ("New
Frontier") have been flummoxed by their encounter with the jazz
musician, whose martyrdom at the hands of the local police reflects
the Kennedy martyrdom...

and that's only the nuances I can think of right now...

but basically what I'm sort of thinking is how the hope and change of
the Obama administration are like the jazz musician in TSI, and the
Citizens United decision is a lot like the desk clerk calling the cops
--- "We'll take care of him, all right" (or words to that effect)


yours in Pynchoisticism

Mike Bailey
"posting balderdash, hoohah and whimsy since 2005"