Intro to THE YANKEE COWBOY WAR, or, why all Pynchon fans should read Oglesby

[Mark Thibodeau]

Yankees and Cowboys: A Perspective on the Dallas-Watergate Decade

The assassination of John Kennedy and the downfall of Richard-Nixon
have both been viewed as isolated moral disasters for American
democracy: Kennedy's murder as a demonstration of our continuing
national inability or unwillingness to cope with violence; Nixon's
downfall as a demonstration of the failure of our democratic
institutions to overcome the abuses of secret intelligence and
electronic surveillance at the seat of national power.

But these two events represent neither isolated disasters nor a
generalized failure of American institutions but something almost
beyond the ability of ordinary people even to see, much less control.
The two events - Dallas and Watergate - are actually concrete links in
a chain of related and ominous events passing through the entire
decade in which they occurred and beyond. And this chain of events
itself represents only the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of
rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys.

This book proposes to show that Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically
linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and countercoup which
represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere, and
"invisible government," capable of any act in the pursuit of its
objectives, that sets itself above the law and beyond the moral rule:
a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state.

We see the expressions and symptoms of clandestine America in a dozen
places now-the FBI's COINTELPRO scheme, the CIA's Operation Chaos, the
Pentagon's Operation Garden Plot, the large-scale and generally
successful attempts to destroy legitimate and essential dissent in
which all the intelligence agencies participated, a, campaign whose
full scope and fury are still not revealed. We see it in the
ruthlessness and indifference to world, as well as national, opinion
with which the CIA contracted its skills out to ITT to destroy
democracy's last little chance in Chile. We see it as well, as this
book argues, in the crime and cover-up of Dealey Plaza, the crime and
cover-up of Watergate.

How could the clandestine state have stricken us so profoundly? How
could we - as we might have fancied, "of all people" - have given way
with so little resistance, in fact with so little evident
understanding of what was happening? What accounts for the way the
various organs of state force-defense and security alike-became so
divided - against each other? CIA-Intelligence against CIA-Operations,
the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the presidency at one time or
another against each other-what is this internal conflict all about?
Why should the country's premier political coalition, formed after
Reconstruction and reformed by Franklin Roosevelt, have begun to
destabilize so badly in the 1960s and 1970s?

The intensification of clandestine, illicit methods against racial and
antiwar dissent as a "threat" to the (secret) state precisely
coincided with the intensified use of such methods in conflicts for
power and hegemony taking place within the secret state, against a
background of declining consensus.

The Dallas-to-Watergate outburst is fundamentally attributable to the
breakdown taking place within the incumbent national coalition, the
coalition of the Greater Northeastern powers with the Greater
Southwestern powers, the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction
coalition, the coalition of the New Deal, of Yankees and Cowboys.

This is the theme, at bottom, of the entire narration to follow.

***

See what I mean? And he makes good on the promises of this
introduction! Just email me and I'll send you the text of the book as
a Word doc.

Now, TELL me such a book won't enhance your appreciation for and/or
understanding of both Vineland and (to a lesser extent) Gravity's
Rainbow!

Cheers!
Yer Old Pal Jerky
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l