Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[alice wellintown]

> Since we're talking on P-list: Didn't Pynchon - by putting the
> real-world-events of Operation Paperclip and MK Ultra into his novels -
> himself make a certain connection between Nazi Germany and the US?

A certain connection? In a novel where everything is connected or not?
I suggest that the best approach to this question is Pynchon's
Foreword to Orwell's 1984. We might extrapolate and thus give our
conjectures connection to the author's non-fiction where we are more
likely than not (Pynchon's fiction are quite ironic and nake extensive
use of ambiguity so discovering his ideas there is more difficult) to
discover his ideas. In that famous Foreword the author discredits the
kind of one-to-one alegorical reading of Orwell that camps on the Left
and Right have eployed to advance their own propaganda. There is, of
course, irony in this fact and Pynchon, a keen observer of the ironic,
directs his reader to the irony.

>
> Isn't GR's Weissmann/Blicero in fact designed to represent the real Wernher
> von Braun?
>
> Of course it is "absurd" to equate the US and Nazi Germany; nobody did.
>
> According to my impression, however, it was Pynchon's intention to criticize
> his very own US society of the 1960s and early 1970s by intermingling
> patterns of domination common to both systems.
>
> Not that he's a Germany lover or something ...
>
>
>
> On 08.01.2012 02:25, Michael Bailey wrote:
>
> said alice -
>
> Well, it is absurd to equate Nazi Germany and the US.
>
> JT brought up some points of comparison.
> to which one might add, the proportion of the national enterprise
> dedicated to murderous endeavor was -- I'm pretty sure -- much higher
> in the 3rd Reich
> but US adventures in the old ultra-violence have been taking place
> over a much longer time so that cumulatively...
> Even so, there are important philosophical and procedural differences
> that I, for one, cherish.
>
>