Douglas Rushkoff vs. Wall Street

[Michael Bailey]

relating this to Pynchon in several ways --

a) we sensitive readers shed some of our (frequent, like Zoyd's, or rare
like Mondaugen's) tears at the misery contained in some massive public
events...Mondaugen wept at the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, Zoyd
cried in his beer about how the fascist appeal of Brock Vond and his power
in the new social structure unwove the charm of his beautiful wedding ("do
you think that love can save anybody?  you do, don't you?")

b) the possession of the correct political and economic theory by which to
interpret big public events is in constant dispute - blessedly, Pynchon's
characters view these things sidelong (mostly, with a big exception for the
Traverse family), and through eyes which by nature and habit don't really
perceive things in terms of theory at all, most of the time - like the
students at PR3 they don't really engage in any analysis, or like Benny
Profane, when they think in terms of theory it is both extremely general
(love is better than money) and extremely personal (leading to a hard-on in
Benny's case, which in turn leads him to Rachel and gainful employment) - or
like Slothrop, in whom a deviant tendency becomes the catalyst for a quest
for self-knowledge leading him away from adherence to any particular
ideology and toward an existential freedom --- in any case, while Pynchon's
plotting ensures that we don't (if we are any kind of thinkers) strive to
emulate those characters, his writing has made a case for the most
compelling and interesting things about life, and people, being something
other than their ideologies...

c)
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-15/wall_street/30029418_1_goldman-sachs-goldman-first-swaps
Greece's plight has not been helped by Goldman Sachs.  Other things to
ponder are the steering of persons of color to subprime loans, even when
qualified for better ones (1,270,000 results for
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=african+americans+steered+to+subprime+loans
),
and, oh, a host of ills -
http://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/

 These things - do they just happen, or, as Sasha might ponder, "the
injustices...she began to see them more directly, not as world history or
anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here on the
planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and petty,
one by one against other living humans"

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