a euphemism... Real Scars

[Paul Mackin]

On 11/2/2012 2:46 PM, Markekohut wrote:
> Paul M. Asks:
>
> I thought of that robber baron capitalist from my city, Andrew Carnegie. Who also gave a fig about human improvement while he believed driving down labor costs was best way to more profit....libraries for all...if you survived poverty and the life-shortening work.
>
> I was reminded of Carnegie & Frick very often in this section.
>
> And here we have TRP showing us how we can self-justify our inhumanity.

An excellent case in point, Mark

Andrew Carnegie was at that time the leading philanthropist of the 
world, with a reputation in this regard that was  the envy of any 
capitalist.  If there was any way to justify the accumulation of vast 
wealth, even ruthlessly, Carnegie exemplified it.

Pynchon draws Vibe (comically in my view) as the exact antithesis of a 
Carnegie.  Vibe didn't just practice "survival of the fittest" he 
undertook to actually  ideologize it before an audience.  Vibe's 
expressed views were anti-philanthropic in the extreme.  Compare them 
with Carnegie's approach, which was to build schools, colleges, 
hospitals, art institutes, libraries, parks and many other 
institutions.  These institutions were for everybody, not just for those 
folks AC wanted to survive in order to improve the race.

Of course there WERE social thinkers of the time who advocated policies 
that a Vibe might have seen as having praiseworthy results, but the 
Vibes themselves wouldn't have wanted their own tried and true methods 
seen as a part of this social engineering project.  Except in a Pynchon 
novel, that is. What can we expect from a guy who depicts Colonel George 
Washington smoking hemp while being entertained by his slave Gershom, a 
kind of prototypical Sammy Davis, Jr?

P


>> Doesn't it seem quite incongruous for a capitalist of that era to pretend to give a fig about the improvement of the race?
>>
>> In other words, are we meant to accept the passage at face value?
>>
>> Just wondering.
>>
>> P
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ciao mc otis ps I hope all you east coasters are well. ________________________________ From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> Sent: Thursday, November 1, 2012 2:17 AM Subject: Re: a euphemism for P's poorest prose: warm excrement flowing from a pathetic puppet's mouth No, come on...it reads like a Simpsons character, like MB, owner of the Nuke plant, no, not even, more like the sycophantic Smithers, who, like MM in Disney's Fantasia is an apprentice sorcerer...like I said, it is as if Zinn wrote it for his graphic novel...we know that the character here is saying something he would never say, not in an address to anyone, not even to a mirror or to the devil. Greed is Good! Oh, for a clip of Wall Street! Or...a song from Finian's Rainbow...a Blicero with a strap on cunt. Jeez, Tom, maybe this one is vice for Thanatoids who bend the neck out of their bodies to push thru to page 1000 On Wednesday, October 31, 2012, Michael Bailey  wrote: i think - heck, i'll take a chance and say I'm pretty sure - that
>>>> everything vibe says in his speech was said sincerely by some robber
>>>> baron or right-wing ideologue - and is being echoed today by
>>>> Thanatoids under the same aegis