The Anatomy of the Corporate State (The Greening of America 35 Years Later)

[alice wellintown]

Was blowin in the wind when P was writing about technology, science, Them,
the Corporate State.

Does read, today, as the Skinner analysis explains, like a naive and
idealistic screed that sees in the young hope springing eternal, but, isn't
this what we read in P, even in his later prose?

The passage from GR can be, as the various readings but the P-industry
prove, read or mis-read as either confirming the critiques of the insidious
alliance of science/technic circa 1970 or as ridiculing such critiques.



On Tuesday, July 9, 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:

> I did not read this book when I was young....by hearsay thinking it
> superficial...
> but I have read it within the last few years.....and it is good....as
> said.....
>
>   *From:* alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com <javascript:_e({},
> 'cvml', 'alicewellintown at gmail.com');>>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'pynchon-l at waste.org');>>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 9, 2013 6:34 AM
> *Subject:* The Anatomy of the Corporate State (The Greening of America 35
> Years Later)
>
> "It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all
> theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...secretly, it was
> being dictated instead by the needs of technology...by a conspiracy
> between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the
> energy-burst of war [...] The real crises were crises of allocation
> and priority, not among firms [...] but among the different
> Technologies [...] Yes but Technology only responds [...] Go ahead,
> capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less
> responsible--but it puts you in with the neutered, brother [...]" 521
>
> But among the overheated, overreaching, radical books of the late ’60s
> and early ’70s, The Greening of America stands out, not only for its
> sweeping ambition and meteoric popularity, but also for its winning,
> energetic style. Greening distilled much of the radical literature
> that preceded it, from Karl Marx to the beatniks and the alienated New
> York intellectuals, with a naive joy and earnestness all its own.
>
> And it had this interesting angle: Reich was no overgrown hippie, but
> a former Supreme Court clerk, an Ivy League professor, a presumptively
> serious person. He was also an adult, 42 when the book was published,
> which reinforced his credibility with adult readers to whom he
> ventured to explain the behavior of the young–in many cases, the
> readers’ own children. With the young themselves, Reich had less
> credibility, for he chronicled the new generation and its
> psycho-social-sexual-political revelations not as an insider, but as a
> self-appointed spokesman and enthusiast. He was a fan of the
> long-haired, dungareed kids he met on campus, and he believed they
> were onto something big.
>
> THE GREENING OF AMERICA argued that the United States was in the midst
> of an all-consuming spiritual and political crisis, for which the only
> cure was a new kind of revolution, “a revolution by consciousness.”
> War and poverty, uncontrolled technology and the destruction of the
> environment, the Corporate State and bureaucracy, the artificiality of
> work and culture, the absence of community–all had conspired to
> produce the most “devastating” impoverishment of all, the “loss of
> self, or death in life.” Yet there was hope, for the crisis was
> calling forth its own antidote: a movement to reclaim “a higher
> reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual.”
> That movement–which Reich predicted would eventually grow to include
> all Americans–was none other than the youth culture of the 1960s.
>
>
>
>
> http://davidskinner.org/2012/07/25/oldie-from-the-dec-19-2005-weekly-standard/
>
>
>
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