BtZ42, Vp.41 (the real thing)

[Monte Davis]

[Please excuse the previous version, sent prematurely]

Roger & Jessica's life in the evacuated town "is marginal, hungry,
chilly—most times they’re too paranoid to risk a fire— but it’s something
they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than
propaganda has ever asked them for."

What propaganda "asks them for" is outlined a paragraph earlier: "it’s
better to-gether, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki,
steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a
fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert
love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death."

Restated later, p. 177: "Damned Beaver/Jeremy *is* the War, he is every
assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and
government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams,
the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found
among the idle and mindless hours of the day . . "

Question: what exactly is the "more" that R&J will take on to keep what
they have? What do they do to themselves that is somehow *like* and
*beyond* what the collective psychosis of "total war" is demanding?
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