Paranoia & Pleasure: It's the video games, stupid

[Joseph Tracy]

I for one, don't buy this. It is a self serving generational oversimplification as stupid as the shit-head who said don't trust anyone over thirty. Alice hates Vineland and interprets it to accord with that spite. Is Prairie's friend really a violence enthusiast or just another all american entrepreneur.? Who does he injure? Which rocker doesn't want success? Every art form is also a business enterprise and most art forms and many serious and respected artists deal with the violence motif.

I don't like violent fantasy games. I think they are dangerous , but I have heard some powerful rebuttals of my discomfort , essentially that fantasy is better as an outlet than real violence for intractable human urges. If it's the video games it is also movies, TV  an entire entertainment culture built around violence.
  I agree that we are faced with the erosion of the democratic concept of the universal rule of law, but it is far more the work of real-politik enthusiasm for the violently obtained pleasures of capitalism backed by high tech war, than it is some particular generational corruption which amounts to the old bullshit complaint about the coming generation.   
Anyway I thought some oppositional thoughts and questions were in order.  

On Dec 24, 2012, at 3:01 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> I like this.....one might say that in Vineland the 60s boomers gave up acting as full Jeffersonian-ideal, 60s ideal, citizens
> and fell into an either-or life....
>  
>  
> 
> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> a
> Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
> Sent: Monday, December 24, 2012 1:42 PM
> Subject: Re: Paranoia & Pleasure: It's the video games, stupid
> 
> These interpretations are interesting, and seem to have merit.  Too bad the novel doesn't speak so clearly.  Should we really need a Brurket to divine Pynchon's intentions? 
> 
> On Monday, December 24, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:
> In a smart essay on Vineland, Richard Brurket argues that VL insists
> that the combination of paranoia and pleasure is no accident, but is a
> cultivated and solicited response to the force of law in America. The
> post-60s crew suffer from a sickness far more insidious than the one
> that Benny and Stencil searched for and avoided, an approach that is a
> close cousin to the paranoid pleasures of the post 60s boomers and the
> violent and cynical enthusiams of their children, and it share a
> family resemblance to the mindless pleasures of Slothrop's paranoid
> trippings through the zone, but it is darker because it involves a
> resignation, a surrender to the forces of and violent abuse of law.
> This cynical certitude, a sense that the law is what is, a violent
> force that one can more avoid nor challange, causes the boomers'
> children to reject the movements, peace, civil rights, feminist...of
> their parents and join the violent supression of those who would
> challange the violent enforcement of law. So King and Park, though not
> present in the novel, are tossed under the bus. Popular culture,
> delivered by the Tube solicits and manufactures a consent, a paranoid
> pleasure in the voyeur who watches the violent abuse of others by law
> enforement. Prarie's boyfriend, the violence enthusiast who has his
> finger on the pulse of the young generation sees this trend not a a
> danger to democracy or to civil rights but as a business opportunity.
> Yes, it's the video games.
> 
>