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

[John Bailey]

>From what I understand of Putin's regime, a very pointed and specific
goal is to put out so much bluster, contradiction, claims of lying and
corruption etc that people lose faith in *any* institution and become
suspicious and even fearful of their society as a result. This is the
ideal environment for a charismatic and authoritarian leader who
promises very simple solutions. It is a tactic that has been taken on
by the current US president. Pointing out the internal inconsistencies
of his own claims misses that point, which is to generate an
overwhelming climate of discursive bedlam.
But yeah, I find it fascinating/unsettling trying to reconcile this
with the carnivalesque aspects of Pynchon's writing, and the
celebration of chaos and anarchy and a generally anti-institution
spirit. Although there is some perhaps melancholy fondness for
collective utopianism, grassroots action, the hippie dream. I suppose
if you look at 60s and 70s Pynchon, this was a time when any vaguely
progressive, left-ish leaning American would do well to heed
encouragement not to trust The Man, the government, corporations, even
the Academy, and this was the context of V and COL49 and GR. Even
those novels warned against the 'wrong' kind of conspiracy thinking,
though - "if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't
have to worry about the answers" - and you could argue that the looney
right today have fed the wrong questions through the right channels,
so that issues of pizza parlor horrors take precedence over
harder-to-grasp politics.
When Bleeding Edge casts shade on the NYT, for instance, it's far from
calling the news 'fake'. Doesn't mean you can criticise editorial
shortsightedness, bias, poor journalistic form etc.


On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 8:18 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l