IV Random thoughts

[Ian Livingston]

Shit, no Like button.


On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Many reviewers and some listers have majored on a Cheech and Chong,, ha ha
> dumb stoners playing detective, approach to IV.  Ok, maybe, but the way
> Sportello unpacks his multilayered investigation of  LA/West Coast/
> American entry to the  70's cosmos is pretty damn sophisticated and
> Sportello in some sense represents the intelligence of a generation that
> may have been smoking some serious shit but saw through the war propaganda,
> and was correctly skeptical about the Nixon/ Reagan  economics, and Father
> knows best kill the commies psychology and the whole package of tube-fare
> anaesthezia  that facilitated the rise of the criminal far right into the
> center of world power and ended whatever remained of a politically
>  anti-fascist progressivism in the US. ( I am using fascism here as
> Mussolini used it to describe an aggressive world seizing union of
> government and corporate power)
>
> I would argue that  the stoner jokes are  a smoke screen for a serious
> attempt to use what might be called the soft boiled or possibly sunny side
> up detective genre to look at some of the real criminality of the cultural
> period it explores. Sportello ends up pointing at some real issues that are
> with us still. The revival of a  McCarthyist police state, the hollowing
> and financialization of the economy, a war on drugs run by a government
> funding its secret police with heroin money, the power of ultra rich
> capitalists like H Hughes to assassinate and silence opposition, the war to
> control the internet, the violence against whistleblowers, the flow of
> wealth to the 1%, the inherent child abuse of much american culture, the
> omnipresence of porn and pop during a period of supposed cultural
> conservatism and return to family values. All this and underlying
> everything, debt, lies and violence.
>
> Most reviewers don't talk about these things, not because they are not in
> the novel, but because most reviewers never talk about anything politically
>  or socially substantive or potentially abrasive, preferring to stay safely
> in the domain of  apolitical humanist literary talk. This timidity infects
> writers too.  Shut up, shut up, don't talk about anything not safely
> trivial.
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