What to make of TRP's conspiracies

[Monte Davis]

I meant that as on offlist message to John Krafft, to elicit his comments
before a revision and P-list posting, but WTF: there are no accidents,
right?


On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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