Keeping Kool with Krugman, recalling FDR who faced a bigger threat

[Monte Davis]

Reflect on blackness in GR, the most enlightening exploration of that
darkness by a white man since Melville and Conrad. It's most often cast
explicitly as a German fear, linked back to Sudwest atrocity and Teutonic
mythology, analyzed and exploited by experts at the White Visitation -- but
via Malcolm, King Kong, and Major Marvy, we USAns know who's *really*
afraid of the return of the repressed. Cf. also Slavic Hordes, Yellow
Peril.

Now reflect on all the totalizing rhetoric from 9/11 to Paris, conflating
"global war on terror" and "we are at war with radical Islam." They hate
our freedom! They don't value human life! Their heaven is a Hefner fantasy!
Go back to the archetypes and stereotypes laid out in Said's Orientalism,
via H.A. Loaf's (and Pirate's) "Arab With A Big Greasy Nose" if you like:
"what should develop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode:
vaulting lazily and well over the fence and sneaking in to town, to the
Forbidden Quarter. There to stumble into an orgy held by a Messiah no one
has quite recognized yet, and to know, as your eyes meet, that you are his
John the Baptist, his Nathan of Gaza, that it is you who must convince him
of his Godhead..."

We got Osama bin Laden, but as Pynchon readers we should know how much we
still years for that Messiah, that Nat Turner / Fu Manchu / HitlerStalinMao
in a black balaclava with an AK-47. All the threads -- from Saracens 1000
years ago and Ottomans 500 years ago, through bad conscience for the past
century of coziness with any sheikh or shah who'd keep the hydrocarbons
coming and the Russians out, to our current bewildered shock -- what's
this? WE are the licensed exporters of ideology and violence, dammit!-- are
being twisted together. The talk is the talk of geopolitics and strategy,
but the voice is the voice of our nightmares.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I could FEEL the fear mongering yesterday.....i have a cold...not
> doing any work because (at moment)....read news and turned on
> TV to hear Obama---terrif q &  a and speech, imho---THOSE QUESTIONS
> from the press core....disgraceful (after the first)..
> Andrea Mitchell....false, willfully or blindly false......then the
> Others......
>
> Yes, I had reverberations of post-9/11 wars but now, I mostly felt
> those long sections in ATD where Pynchon so magnificently
> works the drumbeats of WW1 war into the text....
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Commenter Rob Rushin at Charlie Pierce's blog, re the GOP fearmongering
> on
> > the Sunday shows:
> >
> > "I'd pay good money to never hear or see the dimwitted words 'existential
> > threat" ever again. I do not think that word means what they think it
> means.
> > Unless we are under attack by Zombie Sartre. Then it's ok."
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 10:56 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/fearing-fear-itself.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
> >
>
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