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

[Joseph Tracy]

Actually most of them are directly related to Pynchon’s fiction. The comments about the cuban missile crisis are also just honest shakiness over how strange things get, but I think the connections that Thomas Eckhart makes to this are plenty solid. IMO There is no such thing as a neutral world view from which to talk about literature or the realities taken into consideration by litereature. Everyone interprets events differently. Facts are facts; whether or how we let them into our world view is part of what discussion is about for me.  

> On Mar 2, 2016, at 11:01 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Most of your comments have nothing to do with Pynchon's fiction. Your world view is yours. Ish's views likewise. Arguments in search of validation.
> 
> David Morris 
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> On Wednesday, March 2, 2016, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> First, I definitely blew it in my recall,  thinking Ernie was Maxine’s husband rather than her Dad( I read BE as a library book and didn’t have a copy to check). So Ernie was not a “prophet of the Market”, that was Horst. My bad. But my real question was about the internet and this post adresses that in a very satisfying way. It also refutes brilliantly Ish’s characterization of Ernie’s role, particularly in regard to this internet issue where he(Ernie) sees the direction of government surveillance and fascist death-wish infused tendencies behind it.  It is not long before Maxine comes to discover, through her own tough minded investigation, her  naivete about the corruptibility of the internet by both government and corporate interests.
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>    Anyway thanks for several enlightening historic details.
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>  I am still dumbfounded by the implications of the fact that only a stong-willed President Kennedy stood between the world and home grown American madmen calling for an all out nuclear first strike. We tell ourselves certain things can’t happen, but this shows how close those things have been to the minds of the most powerful people around. There shouldn’t be anyone that crazy with that kind of power.
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> As we  hear calls for rebuilding the nuclear arsenal, watch a formerly unthinkable drone program spread, see mass surveillance on an un-dreamed of scale, all bi-partisan, I, for one, feel there is little to bring the continuity of cold war madness into question.
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> I  question the Chabon take that this book is all about the endurance of family. What I see is family and decency in the last outpost of retreat before the succsexy-death-wish- one finds lurking behind doors, on rooftops, in the Ice-see basement, following the numbers,  falling from the sky and anyplace else one isn’t supposed to look.  Maxine does look( as many real citizens did) and must shut her mouth because the society provides no safety for  whistleblowers.
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> > On Mar 2, 2016, at 4:37 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> >
> >> 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?
> >
> > As I stated before, I believe the main political theme of the novel is the continuity of cold war structures after 1989. Ernie's statement is highly relevant in that context ("(...) and don't think anything has changed, kid.").
> >
> > As you wrote in an earlier post, "This question about a collective death-wish for the planet runs like a cold shiver through all Pynchon’s writings."
> >
> > Why the internet?
> >
> > First, the facts as far as I can sift the wheat from the chaff:
> >
> > Ernie's statement that Arpanet was an element of Continuity-of-Government-planning after a nuclear attack is controversial. Sez Ernie:
> >
> > "Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets." BE, 419
> >
> > This is from a randomly chosen website:
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> > "It was not, however, created as part of any command and control system. Nor was the notion of surviving a nuclear attack a consideration according to statements from those who were in charge at the time (...)"
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> > http://www.alphr.com/features/369490/top-ten-internet-history-myths
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> > The RAND Corporation, however, referenced on p. 419 of BE, supports Ernie on this:
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> > 'US authorities considered ways to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. How could any sort of "command and control network" survive? Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, offered a solution: design a more robust communications network using "redundancy" and "digital" technology.'
> >
> > http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html
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> > Ernie, in what I believe is a conscious reference to JFK's speech on P's part (I had not thought Kennedy was much different from other US Presidents until I read James Douglass' brilliant "JFK and the Unspeakable", the "unspeakable" referring to nuclear Armageddon), takes the relation to COG planning for granted. The rhetorical flourish of the "bitter-cold death wish for the planet" may be interpreted psychologically or spiritually but I prefer to see it as P's trademark technological Gothic. The internet is being anthropomorphized -- "It was conceived in sin, the worst possible." -- a child out of a horror movie.
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> > The real meaning of this develops in the course of the conversation between Maxine and Ernie. It starts with Maxine's observation "Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody's in control of the internet." BE, 419.
> >
> > If there is any satire here, and I believe there is, it is surely directed against Maxine. Just listen to her:
> >
> > "And look how it's empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom." BE, 420
> >
> > Understandably Ernie gets a little annoyed:
> >
> > "Call it freedom, it's based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you've got a total web of surveillance, inescapable. (...) What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law." BE, 420
> >
> > Neither P nor Ernie are obliged to present a coherent argument. If I try to make sense of Ernie's various points, it would go something like this (see http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm for further background information): We remember that VL on the political level was also concerned with COG planning and martial law in the US. The internet now makes total surveillance possible, and thus brings fascism ever closer to our doorsteps -- put bluntly: total surveillance makes it possible to pick out the dissenters and card them off to the camps (REX 84 made it clear that this is not a conspiracy fantasy). Fascism also brings us closer to nuclear Armageddon because the people in charge then may just be MAD enough to think it is in their interest to finally initiate the nuclear first strike against Russia that the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned for at the beginning of the 60s -- when JFK openly opposed them.
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