BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[ish mailian]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 12:28 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ernie is a fool. Not a bad person or anything, a cool old guy who can
> keep the children amused and tell cold war stories, but a fool who,
> like so many of his political and paranoid persuasion, applies a
> paranoid political analysis to his family and parents his children and
> grandchildren by an analysis that, while theoretically handy for
> global and national, political, social and cultural stuff, the
> zeitgeist, the times that are a changing, is useless and even
> dangerous when applied to one's own life, to one's family and
> neighborhood. We might think of P's satire of Ernie as a critique,
> from the Left of the Left's use of Doctor Spock and the debate he was
> dragged into over the Vietnam War and Resistance to it.
>
> Ernie's parenting, his politics, his paranoid politics, about Cop
> shows and the like, the text makes clear, was what, in large measure,
> as he admits in this chapter, and as is developed throughout the book,
> drove his daughters to fascists and pigs.
>
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>> Ernie on the internet in BE:
>>
>> "'As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in his heart a bitter-cold
>> death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.'"
>>
>> BE, 420
>>
>> John Kennedy on the search for peace:
>>
>> "We must, therefore, preserve in the search for peace in the hope that
>> constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach
>> solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a
>> way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace.
>> Above all, while defending our vital interest, nuclear powers must avert
>> those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a
>> humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the
>> nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy -- or of
>> a collective death-wish for the world."
>>
>> http://www1.american.edu/media/speeches/Kennedy.htm
>>
>>
>> Kennedy also said:
>>
>> "In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and
>> its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in
>> halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the
>> Soviet Union as well as ours -- and even the most hostile nations can be
>> relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those
>> treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
>>
>> So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct
>> attention to our common interests and to means by which those differences
>> can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can
>> help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most
>> basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the
>> same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
>>
>> Quite impressive.
>>
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l