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

[Mark Kohut]

Smoke,

You're too much..sometimes. 

Take care.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 28, 2017, at 2:04 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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