What was that _Against the Day_ about? Cowart provides one answer worth reading

[alice malice]

And if I may be allowed to return to my Defense of Horst here....let
me quote from this oft debated and discussed passage from AGTD,
wherein Vibe is engaged in obnoxious gringo speach, the kind of
lecture VP Dick Cheney might give to his hunting buddies...and notice
that the rhetoric, examined here by Cowart, is figurative, though
threatening to slip out into the literal experiences of the exploited
preterit, from the satirical and romantic to the naturalistic and
realistic, but that it is framed by the mechanism that makes of men
harnessed beasts, slaves in agricultural production massed to the
Jungle of the Killing Floors of Sinclair and Norris, but that the
Horsts are harnessed by the inexhorable science/technology of the
Elect. So Horst is not part of global capital, of Vibe's evil
machinations, but is a harnessed slave who slips the shackles, by
fortune and wit. He exploits not a one. He defends himself as best he
can, with humor, with his wits, and his luck. It almost runs out. But
P saves him from the towers. He is, in the end, getting into Chinese
Chemistry trades, not good, but he is still a Local, a trader for his
own account. he resists the the massive forces of global capital and
the technology wave. He makes out better than Zoyd. So maybe things
are getting better?

Vibe's gloating, complacency, and trenchant locutions place him with
Lot 49 's Pierce Inverarity, who revels in his ''role of the rich, obnoxious
gringo''; with the munitions magnates who convene toward the end of
Gravity's Rainbow ; and with Wade LeSpark, the arms merchant of Mason
& Dixon.17 All participate in enterprises directing human energies only
into channels that fill private coffers and enlarge the satanic kingdom of
capital. In its violence, Vibe's discourse constantly threatens to slip the
bonds of metaphor. In ''harness,'' workers become little more than sentient
draft animals, laboring under ''inhuman loads.'' One discerns in the
diction here (''harvest,'' ''gleanings'') ironic reminders that industry has
co-opted an older, agricultural order less given to the dehumanizing of
toil. Characterizing the exploitation of labor as a pleasurable perversion,
Vibe represents the body of the worker as subject to the gratification of
appalling appetites, among them the voyeurismserved when ''we . . . photograph
their degradation.'' Referring, presumably, to photojournalism,
which ostensibly documents horrific working conditions and moves others
to sympathy and outrage, Vibe expects his fellow plutocrats to remember
that they own themedia and employ those who take the pictures. Shocking
photographs of sweatshop conditions sell newspapers. Throughout this
apologia, Vibe pays less attention to the delights of lucre than to the perverse
baronial pleasures that an attention-arresting verb like ''sodomize''
can only approximate. It suggests a whole world of unnatural practices: in
the benighted Sodom of our factories and mines workers suffer unspeakable
violation.
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