BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[Thomas Eckhardt]

> 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?

"At bedtime Ernie used to tell his daughters scary blacklist stories. 
Some kids had the Seven Dwarfs, Maxine and Brooks had the Hollywood Ten. 
The trolls and wicked sorcerers and so forth were usually Republicans of 
the 1950s, toxic with hate, stuck back around 1925 in almost bodily 
revulsion from anything leftward of 'capitalism,' by which they usually 
meant keeping an increasing pile of money safe from the depredations of 
the IRS. Growing up on the Upper West Side, it was impossible not to 
hear about people like this. Maxine often wonders if it didn't steer her 
toward fraud investigation, as much as maybe it's steered Brooke toward 
Avie and his techie version of politics."

BE, 101

Yes, Ernie does involve his daughters in his Cold War politics. This is 
however not depicted as a form of psychological child abuse, as you seem 
to imply. In fact, it seems to me that the narrator/implied author sees 
the fact that Ernie's enemies in a way become Maxine's enemies as a good 
thing.

And I still see no textual support for a "satire of Ernie". There is 
satire here, no doubt. But it is rather openly directed against 
McCarthyites etc.

What Ernie imparts to Maxine is not only paranoia, the value of which is 
surely debatable in P as in real life, but first and foremost a sense of 
justice.


Just before that, we again find the link between the Cold War and the 
present. Ernie about Windust:

"'[T]he Cold War is supposed to be over, how can these people not have 
changed or moved on, where is such a terrible inertia coming from?'

'You always used to say their time hasn't passed, it's yet to come'"

Which is on the one hand wonderfully realistic -- somebody asking a 
question he already knows the answer to but can't help asking, a 
question like "How can people be so stupid?" -- and on the other hand 
quite chilling: What does it mean if the time of Cold Warriors like 
Windust is "yet to come"?


Which reminds me of the fact that we all owe our lives to a man named 
Stanislav Petrov. For those who are not familar with the story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l