Modern world and paranoia

[Antonin Scriabin]

Full credit to "AbeMartin", of course.


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130424/84dc428b/attachment.html>