Modern world and paranoia

[Antonin Scriabin]

I happened to see this nice comment on HuffPo, thought it would add
something:

*"The documents indicate Curtis had been distrustful of the government for
years."*
I can't for the life of me, understand how he could be distrustful about
the government.  Afterall, this is the same FBI, with its vaunted forensics
laboratories that falsely accused Dr. Bruce Ivens of manufacturing
aerosolized anthrax and mailing it to government offices and officers.
 And, then decided he had not.    And, this is the same FBI, that went
after Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a respected scientist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory accusing him of espionage because he had attended a scientific
meeting in China and then after dragooning him into accepting a plea deal,
admitted he was not a spy.
And, this is the same FBI that targeted and arrested Olympic security guard
Richard Jewel for planting a bomb, even though it turned out the actual
bomber was abortion doctor murderer Eric Rudolph.     And, this is the same
FBI, which forty years ago decided the James Earl Ray, an inept career low
level criminal, who had spent most of his life in prison, had
single-handedly assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a single,
extraordinarily aimed rifle shot and managed to escape, by plane first to
Canada and, using fraudulently obtained Canadian passports, to England,
even though he had no source of funding.  And, never found his accomplices.
And, this is the same FBI, which when notified that a group of middle
eastern men were attending flight school to learn how to pilot jets, and
notified that bin-Laden was planning to use commercial aircraft as weapons
did not follow up on the leads, which directly led to the deaths of more
than 3,000 men, women and children, when Atta and his pals highjacked and
crashed four jets.
This list goes on and on.
Most of the men and women who work in the FBI are extremely conscientious,
well-trained and hard-working individuals who do their jobs with great
effectiveness.
However, at the very top, Director Robert Mueller and above him, the most
recent Attorneys General Ashcroft, Mukassey, Reno, Gonzalez and Holder,
switched into investigative feeding frenzies every time there is a high
profile terrorism case.  Except, too often, in their anxiety about
delivering a perpetrator to the avid press, and so, avoid getting
keelhauled by some politically motivated Congressional grandstander in a
star chamber investigation, they grab the wrong person.
Well, now Paul Kevin Curtis knows, first hand that the warning in
*Catch 22*by Joseph Heller,
*"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you" * *
* is sadly, too often true.


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:03 AM, Tom Beshear <tbeshear at att.net> wrote:

> Judging from How Fiction Works, Wood's ideal is Henry James, which means
> he prizes psychological realism above all else. And that's not what
> Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace, Vollmann, etc. etc., are doing.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bekah" <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "Matthew Cissell" <macissell at yahoo.es>
> Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:08 AM
> Subject: Re: Modern world and paranoia
>
>
>
> Sounds to me like Wood gets confused between what he likes and what is
> good. Just because a reader doesn't personally like a book doesn't mean
> it's not fine lit.   Paranoia could be a part of 21st century realism the
> way religion was often a part of Victorian lit.  I tend to appreciate Wood,
> too - but I think he's stuck in the early 20th century about some things.
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2013, at 2:29 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
>
>  Nowadays it doesn't take anytime at all to form a conspiracy theory. Go
>> ask Gene Rosen who helped some kids on his driveway the day of the Newtown
>> masacre, poor man.
>> And now we have Boston. Several witnesses have identified the supect as
>> the perp, video footage, and now an admission of guilt - and people claim
>> it is a conspiracy; check out the movement to protect poor little Dzokhar
>> from THEM.
>> So given all this we must address James Wood's claim (in his essay on
>> DeLillo from the Broken Estate): "Indeed, Underworld proves, once and for
>> all, or so I must hope, the incompatability of the political paranoid
>> vision with great fiction." Further along he says that paranoia is bad for
>> the novel. Hmm.
>>
>> I readily admit my admiration for Wood's erudition and critical prose,
>> however, my admiration ends there. In trying to advance his mission
>> (reshaping the view of literature through his choice of lens) he goes too
>> far out on a limb that will not support the weight of his ego or inflated
>> ideas.
>>
>> Now I suppose Alice might bring me up on all that but I can handle it.
>> Waddayathink AL? Is Jimmy Wood right about paranoia and the novel?
>>
>> ciao
>> mc otis
>>
>
>
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