BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[ish mailian]

Sure, parents and children, and maybe more important are siblings and
now that most are growing up without them, peers, and no reason not to
toss most of nurture out and, as Eric Roberts sez in The Pope of
Greenwich Village (1984), put all our money on the genes in this horse
race: "It's all in the genes, Charlie."

But in Pynchon the parents don't just raise the kids in functional or
dysfunctional families.
The involve them in their their politics.  So, the chapter you
referenced, Thomas, wherein Max wakes up and then sits with Erni in
front of the Tube where the comic opera plays, has a companion chapter
I've been alluding to. Chapter 10. What do you make of it? Howzabout
that last bit where Ernie is telling bedtime horror stories to the
kids?

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 2:48 PM, Thomas Eckhardt
<thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> We are all influenced by our parents and influence our children in manifold
> ways. In my view, there is nothing particularly dysfunctional about the
> Tarnows, and there is nothing to indicate that Ernie is trying to impose a
> paranoid political Weltanschauung on Maxine when he talks to her about the
> origins of the internet.
>
> Granted, there is this common motif of women being seduced by fascists (as
> an aside, I note that Maxine, unlike Frenesi, does not change sides, and
> that Windust is a more complex character than Brock Vond). As for how this
> female equivalent to a hardon for fascism may be linked to Maxine's
> upbringing, you raise an interesting point about Maxine's mother that I
> agree with. I just see no textual support for your claim that we shouldn't
> take serious what Ernie says. In fact, I believe that we are supposed to
> take Ernie's words very serious indeed.
>
> More generally speaking, I would argue that P's view of family gets more
> realist, and less damning, from VL onwards.
>
> You are quite averse to political readings of Pynchon, no?
>
>
>
> Am 28.02.2016 um 17:56 schrieb ish mailian:
>>
>> Does Ernie's belief that television cop shows steered his daughters to
>> the careers and mates they chose hold water?  Or was it his
>> anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist, anti- neoliberal, anti-neocon stories
>> that drove these decisions? Maxine wonders. Maybe her mother, who so
>> adored Windust for his shoes and style, though Maxine didn't take him
>> down in the dirty carpet like a dog because she shared her mother's
>> fashion lusts, had more to do with her attraction to Horst, her career
>> in fraud? Maybe she it's Maybellian? Maybe, as Gaga sez, she was born
>> with it. This guy is something of an expert in media or cultural
>> history. He sure does bring his job home. Pushes his attitudes on his
>> family hard. Seems his politics dominate his private life, like what
>> opera to see, what tv to let the kids watch, but it seems to have
>> backfired or, at least, to have failed.   Does the novel think it
>> foolish to involve one's kids in Marches?
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l