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

[alice wellintown]

And, so we are surprized that several critics have discussed the book in
their Pynchon books and essays.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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>
>> *To:* pynchon -l <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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