NP: If only someone had *told* us about all this surveillance

[Joseph Tracy]

Checking in again
Excellent. Fascinating and moving journalistic work.  The whole idea of the CIA and NSA was being publicly  questioned at the time being recalled and with powerful constitutional arguments, whistleblowers, and a social revolution and antiwar movement that scared and revealed the nature of the postwar empire.  Yet it is only in the complexity and specificity of personal experience that we see this in a meaningful way.  This article said more to me than the entire BE novel. 
   There is an ongoing argument/discussion that has been a theme of the list concerning paranoia and actual vs. perceived conspiracies. In this article it is the shifts from left to right, right to left, from spy too counterspy from moral voice to self serving grandstander that seem to make this a LeCarre-like exploration of this turf and give it its powerful charge.. The pressures on those who actively resist are real but also beget a destructive and often delusional paranoia.    
 As far as Bleeding edge, Maxine never goes as far as Perry Fellwok but does opt for the same personal resolution to the personal fears and pressures of trying to stop or even expose accurately a  multi-headed juggernaut. It is scary, each head with its own idea of what it is up to and each defending itself in its own antinomian style.   She opts for private low danger family life, albeit troubled and in some ways far phonier than the sentimental crap some reviewers have attached to it. This niche is what remains of the American dream.  Maybe that is what Pynchon is saying.  It's a little too Maggie Thatcherish to me


To be honest I think it is a fucked up niche and I'm in it myself. I too have spent many of my recent years in greater contentment than much of my life, but I feel in my gut that this niche is like Anne Frank's parents who  nurture a child  with dreams of a kinder humanity, but know what is most likely on the way to my door and/or my children's door. 

There is no future for the American dream.  When your own napalm is burning you up, you aren't chicken little, you're Kentucky Fucked and Fried.

 




On Nov 13, 2013, at 3:39 AM, Monte Davis wrote:

> ..in an appropriate venue and at a suitable time, I mean. Not in some irresponsible  fringe leftist rag forty years ago
> 
> http://gawker.com/after-30-years-of-silence-the-original-nsa-whistleblow-1454865018
> 
> linking to
> 
> http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-elint.htm

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l