TRP and this weird smelling Paranoia what's been going around

[Smoke Teff]

I've been going back to a lot of liberalish media coverage of the 2016 US
election and of some of the other--what you might call--crises in western
politics. As people try to cohere the different crises into a single
comprehendible moment/current, a lot of them, for a couple years now, have
been talking about (in addition to a lot of other obvious things to do with
racism, [white] nationalism, nationalism in opposition to globalism, income
inequality, loss/lack of economic opportunity, etc.) a growing mistrust of
public institutions.

This is difficult for me to totally come to grips with, as I sense that I
have--in general--a mistrust or an unmutable skepticism of many/most/all
institutions. Though obviously for whatever reason/s (via whatever
privilege/s) I don't conflate that skepticism with some of that more
sinister political bullshit the way ~45% of my (strange) ballotfellows in
the US do.

I sense there's some kind of tension here. I know this is open-ended but I
thought I'd see if any of you have any thoughts on this matter.

A) How do you see Pynchon('s work) fitting into this growing trend of
public mistrust?
B) Does it give you any pause to note the skeptical kinship of i) Pynchon's
general paranoia and mistrust of collectivized/corporatized human endeavor
and distributed systems of power (and the media!) and ii) the activate-able
sentiments of the voting bloc/s behind some of the more odious (evil, if
you like) forces in western politics today?

Maybe you say some right-wing politicians have seized on some of the same
currents of public mistrust that Pynchon captured/catalogued/cultivated but
to their own vastly different ends--which are not actually to obliterate or
to humanize corporatized institutions, but to do the opposite, and to
ultimately perpetuate a system of power that's dangerous both in
distribution and concentration...

Maybe you say this is a natural part of populism, which is itself a kind of
neutral rhetorical tool, which maybe Pynchon incorporates usually earnestly
and humanly into his fiction but which politicians put to other ends...

But it does feel like this political moment is one in which I need to
re-interrogate some of my most basic political assumptions and paranoias,
even if ultimately to strengthen them.

As I hear politicians in my country call the *New York Times *biased or
fake, for instance, and I sense a hundred million odd people agreeing (to
the extent they pay attention), I sense myself resisting, thinking it's
ludicrous.

But then I try to disentangle or decontextualize myself from this present
moment and I think, well, yeah, sorta.

Do I actually mistrust the media? Do I actually mistrust the government?
Are there different parallactic axes of mistrust (spoke-like lines of sight
& hiding), and is it easy to find yourself on one you wouldn't have
initially chosen?
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