P's Parents and the Parents in "yhe Secret Integration and Ernie in BE too

[ish mailian]

So recently a thread about P's parents repeated the same old slaner
about his mother and father, the same old stupid gossip heard decades
ago about how his mom, a catholic,  hated Jews and how she drank and
how his old man was a Nassau county conservative and how he may have
come to forgive them their politics, good church going boy that he was
and all.

But the fiction does deal in parents and in kids a lot. Not just the
so-called family stage of his career but all of it. And one common
enough theme is how the parents try to impose their political
ideologies on their kids throug education and books and media. And the
treatment of young minds as childish, and the treatment of Blacks and
Others as Objects, as Problems, as pawns in the game.

I mentioned this TSI essay, a damn fine essay on the subject so here
is the citation.

Boulter, Joe. "Children and Slaves in the West: Imagining Fraternity
Among Outlaws in 'The Secret Integration'."Oklahoma City University
Law Review 24.3 (Fall 1999): 518-533.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l