Chabon on BE

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks, Charles.

Unfortunately I have not yet come around to read a novel by Chabon but I 
am very fond of the movie version of "Wonder Boys". I also very much 
enjoyed his take on Power Pop/Big Star (to be found here: 
http://michaelchabon.com/uncollected/musical/tragic-magic/).

I also found his review of BE perceptive in many ways (his take on 
Pynchon's so-called flat characters, as Monte Davis said, is 
particularly good) Nevetheless, I think this --

'His scorn for all this weak sauce is most sharply evident when it 
dribbles from the lips of an otherwise affectionately rendered old-lefty 
liberal New Yorker who sententiously repeats a baseless canard:

You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It 
started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of 
geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios. Attaché cases and horn-rims, every 
appearance of scholarly sanity, going in to work every day to imagine 
all the ways the world was going to end. Your Internet, back then the 
Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to 
assure survival of US command and control after a nuclear exchange with 
the Soviets.'

-- is hopelessly wrong. DARPAnet and Continuity of Government are not 
'baseless canards', and I do not believe the author (or the implied 
author, if you are, as I am, a nitpicking narratologist) views them that 
way.

In fact, I believe that Marge (like Maxine's father later on) 
articulates one of the basic themes of the novel: The continuity of, let 
us say, unlawful actions (e.g. black ops in Central and South America, 
Iran-Contra, MK-Ultra, the in itself as well as for the novel highly 
important Inslaw/PROMIS scandal, which all are at least alluded to in 
BE) of the US government from the cold war until today.

Referring to Chabon's Marge quote above: In the deep political 
background here, as in "Vineland", the spectre of "Continuity of 
Government" raises its ugly head. Peter Dale Scott has something to say 
about this with regard to September 11: 
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3362

At the very least this provides some context for Marge's "weak sauce." 
And Chabon did not -- could not, I assume -- provide any passage where 
the narrator is making fun of crazy old Marge.

Thomas

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