Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

Lenin did not live to see WWII.
Mencken did.

So much of the critique of cartels and the exploitation of the soldier
and worker by a decadent and corrupt artistocracy, a Dracula Firm, a
They and Them, a System in which Little Men of Science, must be
contered, is still a force to counter after WWI, and during the Second
War, so that the war that never ends theme, a positive paranoia that
exposes the alliances made and un-made at the expense of the workers,
the soldiers, the preterit, the proles,  and of course the fact that
the novel is not about those old conflicts exactly,  but about those
conflicts and how they to counter them circa 1970.


After the First War, the need to spread and to popularize knowledge,
rational thinking, hard and natural science, to rid the world of the
deep and profound irrationalities that had manifest itself in the
eagerness and alacrity with which the people in Europe took to
Nationalism was the object. But could education, could rational
thinking, save the world from another great war? No. But by 1970 all
is, as Yeats says, changed by a terrible beauty--the bomb. That P
imagines that the bomb may land on the a theater near You, makes
wonderful fiction in 1973, but it's mistaken if we read it as prphecy
or history or anything other than fiction. The bomb is never launched.
And the freedom, of thought, of action, that comes to people, to an
ever expanding population, does not wipe out conflict, but it, and the
threat of holocaust do prevent another world war. So the War that
never ends, ends. And P has little left to say. He turns political
with VL. He shoots rubber bands at Nixon's ghost and Reagan's smiling
fascism, but the Rainbow fades, the bomb is a nightmare soon forgot.
The Chicago School of Economics will win the day for a while as Big is
Better ina Global market, where international cartles are prevented by
Natture not by tarrifs or organized workers. But if all that was in
the air  when P was forming his ideas, Adams, Russell, Wittenstein,
are but footnotes now, his fiction remains, provided we appreciate
art, while not right, beautiful.


> Lenin said all political power comes from the barrel of a gun. That is a
> truth I have never been able to reconcile myself with. It constitutes the
> hard fact behind a lot of B.S.  Is Gravity's Rainbow at least partly
> describing the emergence of corporate Leninism?