Read all About it: Latest "TRUTH SERUM" produces major shit storm!

[Joseph Tracy]

 Section 10
pg. 61 The return address tells us we are in St. Veronica’s again. This implies to me that Dr. Spectro was playing Pointsman in section 8 ,  disapproving of PP2’s proposed research not from research ethics, as he said,  but because he wanted Slothrop to himself.  Wanted to use his drugs, his mind probes on the subject with the prophetic penis, though it is hard to see what he is learning to begin with, if there is anything happening under his supervision beside the dredging up of painful, “dollful" and piteous cries. Is he purging pain or just recycling it?  

 Even here the slippery Slothrop finds a route of evasion, escapes the rapacious assault on his inner life by diving so deep into the subconscious there is little for Spectro to see but dingleberries and a word puzzle composed entirely of multiple permutations of a single phrase.  This Kenosha Kid trope  is Foucaltian linguistics as the insurmountable barrier to perfect systems of control, to AI, to spying as a means to accurate information.  The inscrutability and multi-valence of language is not just the monkey wrench in the system, it’s the shape shifting  monkey in the monkey wrech. 

If there really is a truth drug, would we want it? What truths would it reveal? Psychedelics including the mind produced and plant produced DMT are discredited as unsafe. Unsafe for who? This despite current research showing MDMA the most promisng drug therapy for PTSD. What if healing makes soldiers into non soldiers?  If the truth of the toilet incident is that Slothrop smoked dope( probably some stong shit) at the Roseland Ballroom and had a rape fantasy springing from his fear of black men and lost his lunch and harmonica down the toilet, is the dope induced fantasy part of the truth that a truth drug would uncover? How much would it revover? How much of experience, smell, fantasy, dream translates into the form of narrative language anyway and what part is more like personal or cultural digestion? 

It is my sense that Pynchon is mocking the idea of a truth serum that produces usable information, but not necessarily the idea of any value for drug therapy. This drug was a failure both as a truth serum and as a therapy for PTSD.  Extinction is equally fraught in eliminating a conditioned response. 

"sho nuff” -
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l