What to make of TRP's conspiracies

[Monte Davis]

John: I don't know if you've followed any of the Project Paperclip thread
on the P-list,  but it got me thinking about all the conspiracies in all
the books. Below is a rough-draft, outrageously simplified rundown of what
I see as the "conspiratorial" questions posed by the novels.

Now... I happen to believe that they are, in fact, the
MacGuffin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin>s
of the novels; that Pynchon is less likely to be telling us "Beware
conspiracies" than "Beware our penchant for projecting (and blaming)
conspiracies." But that's for later. What I'm asking now is: do these
strike you as reasonable distillations? Any reactions, corrections,
suggestions much appreciated.

--

V: Henry Adams worried about the headlong dynamism of history, gathering
speed via technology towards the end of the 19th century. Has that
destructive energy "come alive": taken substance in V., a woman (or
feminine principle) who appears at critical moments from the 1890s to the
1950s as Victoria Wren, Veronica the rat, Venus/Vheissu, Vera Meroving, the
feminized city of Valletta, and Veronica Manganese?

CoL49: Is every kind of communication in 1960s America compromised --
blocked, distorted, turned into entropic noise -- by a secret,
centuries-old struggle between the Trystero and "official" channels?

GR: Were the "political" WWII -- and implicitly, the Cold War and nuclear
arms/missile race -- just covers for rearrangements of power within a
single global Force, most clearly seen in multinational corporations in
oil, synthetic chemistry, and other industrial technologies?

Vineland: In the 1960s, activists campaigned against the war in Vietnam,
and the government took secret steps to infiltrate and suppress their
groups. By 1984, has that grown into a full-scale fascist apparatus, ready
to impose (or unveil) a police state, target and round up even former
activists who've taken refuge in the woods?

Mason & Dixon: Were all hopes for a fresh start in the New World doomed by
the "bad habits" -- slavery, land-grabbing, imperial/colonial power games
-- brought or copied from the Old World? e.g., did simply measuring and
mapping a magical wilderness along the Mason-Dixon line carry the seeds of
the Civil War schism along that line? How much was that fostered by secret
schemes of small groups: the Royal Society, Dutch East India Company,
Jesuits, Sons of Liberty et al?

Against the Day: At the turn of the 20th century, were all the
possibilities and energy of new politics (anarchism, organized labor), new
ideas (in art, science, mathematics) and new technology (photography,
electricity, aviation, movies) foreclosed by industrial plutocracy and by
preparations for WWI? Were the Chums of Chance, living out a dozen genres
of pop fiction, "above" all that -- or serving an unnamed power that was
bringing all that about?

Inherent Vice: Behind the noir + Cheech & Chong mashup, one question about
the end of the 1960s: "Was it possible, that at every gathering -- concert,
peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East,
wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music,
the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they
could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?"

Bleeding Edge: Information technology and the Internet serve both
centralizing organization and decentralizing, community-building
creativity. DeepArcher -- an anonymous, potentially utopian virtual world
-- is created, then corrupted and "colonized," just before and after the
blowback catastrophe of 9/11, when the "freedom fighters" the US had
fostered in Afghanistan in the 1980s returned as Al Qaeda "terrorists" (or
so we're told). Is that coincidence -- or were a few schemers such as Ice
and Windust instrumental in both?
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