Very Pynchon

[Allan Balliett]

For me, this i "Puritan" crap is the true horror unveiled in DEMOCRACY IN
CHAINS. I've always been happy to interpret the Koch Donor Networks
meddling in Government to be solely motivated by maximizing their own
profits. While I still prefer to think that any faith-based morality their
manipulations are shrouded in as camouflage for this greed , Nancy Maclean
herself appears to accept that they often act out of a yet to be be fully
described "paternalism' and are actually motivated in creating a country
that would meet their ideals of holding successful entrepreneurs as blessed
by the divine, where no one would benefit from anything they (or their
family) hadn't actually earned through the market.  As I believe Rand Paul
let out of the bag a while back, it's really ok with the Koch Right  if
some 'takers' die because the don't have access to  government supported
health insurance.

Chapter 7 "A World Gone Mad" demonstrates how Buchanan designed and Koch
later implemented the change of public institutions of higher learning from
their centuries old standards of academic freedom to corporate training
mills where the tenure system has been destroyed, and the Liberal Arts
departments have been gutted. Tuitions have been raised and financial
support for low income students has become increasingly difficult to get
because the engineers of the modern higher education system believe that
educating lower income people "who may not have what it takes" to get into
management may use their collegiate insights to destabilize the workforce.

Urgh

-Allan in WV who is still emotionally upset today from a conversation he
had yesterday with a self-described Christian Libertarian

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 6:02 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Great writers, great artists, are great because, among other qualities,
> their vision touches bottom. [ concept gotten from Louis Zukowski on
> Shakespeare, decades before Bloom repeated it and elaborated] The vision
> gets reality and pierces it with a
> deep vision. Their constant tropes and themes are profoundly true over
> time, don't 'date', reveal as long as always.
>
> An unoriginal lead from me to another example of why Pynchon is a great
> writer, whose vision is still as alive as you and me. Puritanism,
> Calvinism, on the Elect vs the
> Damned; the Saved vs the Not [Preterites] is so yesterday historically yet
> lives sea-changed, redefined maybe all the time. Maybe it is a kind of
> inherent vice, dunno.
>
> BUT, in the aforementioned DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS there is this about the
> still alive, still donating money---his name is SO BIG as one of the
> sponsors of Burns' VIETNAM WAR, Charles Koch (and lesser known as the
> sponsor of the recent BROOKINGS' INSTITUTION (!!) 'junk science'
> "polling"--an opt-in loaded poll--of college students in summer of 2017 and
> their supposed stupidity and disbelief in free speech and worse. A study
> quoted as if true in the Wa-Po and by a NYT columnist and elsewhere all
> over) :
>
> "From Ludwig von Mises, Koch had learned that entrepreneurs were the
> unsung geniuses of human history, deserving of a kind of reverence
> reminiscent of the old Puritan doctrine that equated earthly success with
> divine favor". --p134
>
>
>
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