Today's discussion question

[Monte Davis]

That the US-vs-USSR nuclear war scenario of 1950-1990 didn't take place
hardly justifies "the bomb is never launched" or "a nightmare soon forgot."

There remain more than 4,000 nuclear weapons deployed ready for use; 13,000
more that could be deployed in short order; and, of course, a still-growing
number of national infrastructures capable of making more. Are nations
reliably saner and wiser? Would an India-Pakistan or Iran-Israel nuclear war
be qualitatively "something else" because its participants' grandfathers
weren't in the Zone in 1945? As for "the war that never ends, ends"... we
designated a new one more than ten years ago, and it rolls merrily along.

I've always taken GR's President R.M. Zhlubb, its 1973 and its Damoclean
warhead  to signify a moving "now, " not a falsifiable target of prophecy. 
  
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of alice wellintown
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 3:28 PM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Today's discussion question

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?