Nixon & GR

[rich]

I always liked Coover's take on Nixon more so than Pynchon's. The
Public Burning Nixon is actually I won't say sympathetic but it's alot
more nuanced a portrait than its normally given credit for--all folks
remember if they've read the book is him getting fucked by uncle sam
but there's alot more going on. His Gloomy Gus novella is similar.
counterfactual? yes but i would argue pretty insightful.

rich

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 10:04 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> O Yes, and Nixon's deeply American sanctimoniousness..Eternal Puritan type ( no prescience here. Just the insight of an artist.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jan 16, 2013, at 9:48 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> This may all be true and I, for one, like it a lot....but I will defend my " prescience" observation
>> In the context I laid in....( as you said, there is a book in this topic).....that is the context of
>> Postwar self-sabotaging of the America that was coming into being. (See GR)....mcCarthyism
>> ruining idealistic lives with ginned-up lies.....baking fear into the culture....spying ala FBI on each other.........
>> One small bit of prescience is to have seen the hated Nixon, virtually, as an embodiment of this culture of self-spying and lies.......the Watergate cover-up as a metaphor for all that P thought he saw. And had.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On 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.