Nixon & GR

[alice wellintown]

Another reason to reject the slick and nasty little beach novel,
Inherent Vice, is that it is a mindless pleasure that its readers,
those that will put up with its stupid pussy jokes and the reast,
unlike, say, the viewers of Casablanca, are shown a world that the
author only parodies for his own amusement, a world that has no hope
of reform, of comic relief, of anything other than surrender to the
cycnical turns of the wheel...to a satire that shoots at its targets
from behind a concrete pillbox, and has poor aim.

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:57 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> One could write a book on this subject, and perhaps some ambitious
> young scholar will do so....as we wait for this we might consider how
> Nixon fits into the networks that GR explores, and how the old
> network, the setting of the romance, the War, functions as the Puritan
> American period does in The Scarlet Letter or in the Cruciable, but
> the novel is about, its contemporaries and the lives in the balance,
> and so the new network, and, of course, the new money; yes,  P's
> concern is with new money and the Nixon period, not with the old
> money, though readers have often focused on the Nazis and the Standard
> Oil, ICI, and IG Farben Octopus, but just as P explains how Orwell has
> been misread as saying something about the past, or as a propher, he
> is neither, and neither is P prescient, but only writing about his
> world, the new money world of Nixon, so of aerospace and defense
> contracting, of oil, and natural gas, and of the alliances, yes, the
> military industrial complex alliance,  formed around these domestic
> opperations, in contrast with the international IG Farben and Standard
> Oil and so on of the War Period...of the setting of the novel's
> historical events, so we need to look, to a zone actually, but that
> zone is not European History, but American Expereince circa 1970, and
> so, as TSI and CL49 suggest, we need to look at real-estate operations
> during the postwar period, and the new money invested there, in the
> sunbelt, where the population explodes and so....Nixon.
>
> To argue that the book declines as it brings this into focus, or
> foregrounds it, is to engage in a selective misreading, as the
> evidence of the theater that is America circa 1970, as aopposed to the
> theatre that is the War in Europe is there from the very first
> page....and when we meet Malcolm X, or Little, and as we read on into
> the post-Invisible Man Nixonian  American Experience, there can be no
> mistake as to where we are: in Nixonland.