Harpers April 2016. Something Big: The legend of the Watts Towers

[Michel]

Nice article in Harper's this month: Geoff Dyer on the Watts Towers.

Quote:
Within a year of the [Watts] uprising, [the Watts Towers] had become, 
according to a reporter for the New York Times — Thomas Pynchon, no less 
— a "dream of how things should have been." The tense is crucial. Not 
how things might or will be in the future but, with more than a touch of 
regret — even of nostalgia — "should have been." It’s almost a corollary 
of the way that the towers are always putting one in mind of something 
else: whatever one says always needs qualifying. Even loyal admirers 
would not claim them as an unqualified masterpiece. Unless . . .

And in the same issue, Vineland-related: the cover story is on drugs, 
Legalize it All, and quotes Ehrlichmann in 1994 interviewed by the 
author of the article, Dan Baum:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had 
two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m 
saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war 
or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with 
marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, 
we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid 
their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night 
on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of 
course we did."


-- 
Michel
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l