Today's discussion question

[Joseph Tracy]

This is the shallow stuff sold by Time magazine. We, meaning white Euros, because of the BOMB, are all safe now from the wars which still seem to fall hellishly from the sky on Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chileans, Iraqis and Iranians, and Afghans because of the terrible threat they pose to Friedmanism and Ronny Reagan.   As far as I can tell, the ever expanding word war goes on, and it is always the same contest for resources, cheap labor, military dominance and who's the fairest of them all.  

I was not trying in any way to sum up GR with the Corporate Leninism remark, but your willingness to do so with the entire body of Pynchon's work reminds me of those twenty something music critics who speak condescendingly of Dylan. Amusing.


On Aug 14, 2013, at 3:28 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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?