BE -- "death wish for the planet" why the internet?

[Joseph Tracy]

These thoughts resonate with me. Each reference is to a closed system of thought where death has a central  purifying role. I see ordinary US  and particularly consumerist culture caught in a similar death spiral based on the equally desperate and insane attempt to avoid, negate and deny death and tune in to the eternal world of youthful beauty. We deny collective responsibility for war and ecological suicide. We are appalled by Muslim violence but ho hum about innocent victims of anonymous drone killings.  Having come via science to believe in the finality of death in every sphere, in the universe as a mechanized machine and life a random event eqivalent to any other, do some respond with a secret wish for all things to end, to prove to the empty universe the correctness of our thesis. Did we really find black holes in space or are they in us? Both?  

Why is Pychon using Ernie, a kind of prophet of the market to draw attention to a death wish contained in the internet? Why the internet in particular?     

> On Feb 27, 2016, at 2:26 AM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Agreed. Very much so. It also is chilling, to me, as a student of post-Enlightenment aberrant thought, in the sense that there are certain "new" habits or ways of thinking that seem almost tailor made to circumvent these heretofore considered universal and natural laws of self-interest and self-preservation. I see this perverse, willful, spite-like death-urge that is present in both the so-called medievalist manifestations of Modern Islam AND a lot of end-game capital-M Modernism's nigh unto psychotic, narcissistically self-aggrandizing suicidal abnegation of the totality of meaning in life... this Cosmic Horror that all the kids seem to be grooving on these days.
> 
> I dunno. Does that make sense at all?
> 
> Jerky
> 
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:02 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> Ernie on the internet in BE:
> 
> "'As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in his heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.'"
> 
> BE, 420
> 
> John Kennedy on the search for peace:
> 
> "We must, therefore, preserve in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our vital interest, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy -- or of a collective death-wish for the world."
> 
> http://www1.american.edu/media/speeches/Kennedy.htm
> 
> 
> Kennedy also said:
> 
> "In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours -- and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
> 
> So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
> 
> Quite impressive.
> 
> 
> 
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> 

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