BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[ish mailian]

Maxine, who "inherits" his positive paranoia, ends up in a
compromising position with Windust.
How is that?

 She suggests, several times, that her father's politics drove her to,
not exactly turn, as Frenesi does, but to her profession and to men
like Horst and Windust.

And when she decides to "date" Windust (103) she wonders why she is
feeling that she needs parental approval. In this same passage she
says that Ernie still believes the Rosenbergs were innocent. This
implies that she doesn't buy that fairly standard Left position, or at
least the Mrs R was innocent and that the executions were an abuse of
state power. So Maxine hasn't exactly been buying Ernie's politics,
despite the fact that he's been selling it to her since she was a
child. Moreover, she suspects that the hard sale of politics has
caused her to reject some of what Ernie was peddling. THIS, I
maintain, is a major Pynchon theme: the politics of the parents, when
pushed on the children, are often rejected, distorted, perverted, or
cause a turn. Maybe the parents, like Pink Floyd sez, should leave the
kids alone.

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:24 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
<thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> Am 29.02.2016 um 22:07 schrieb ish mailian:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> I'd say it is a gentle poke in Ernie's ribs, nothing more -- and certainly
> nothing to invalidate his post-Cold-War paranoia.
>
> Will check the items you mentioned, thanks.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l