BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[ish mailian]

Thomas,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and thanks for reading the passage I mentioned.
I'm not saying it's child abuse. What I'm saying is that one theme in
Pynchon, from TSI to AGTD is that children are subjected to the
political paranoia and anxiety (and I'm in the camp that sees paranoia
as often very positive) of their parents, and that the children often
reject, counter, resent, and are negatively impacted by the deliberate
efforts of their parents to drag them in their Marches and political
battles, to indoctrinate, to acculturate, to recruit, and direct the
future generations, thus, stripping them of their freedom and
independence of thoughts, actions, and passions.

I hope you had a chance to read the Gibran poem, the poem I posted On
Children, it  was quite popular in the counter culture days.


Dylann says, Your sons and your daughters are beyond your
command...etc....arrows shot into the infinite from a stable bow. The
instability of the bow is satirized through the works of Pynchon. But
it is, as the Joe Boulter essay I also posted, explains, about
involving children in a political movement of putting away childish
things.

Thanks, Thomas, I think we are mostly in agreement. I may be making a
bit too much  of the satire of Ernie so that one might get the
impression that the critique of Ernie is from the center or right, but
it is from the Left, a sympathetic satire from the Left of the Left.

see....I ain't got nothin gainst the political readings of books. ;--)

by the bye, do check out Sell Out, a stire of America that must be read.

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Thomas Eckhardt
<thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>
>> 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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