Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

Tue Aug 7 17:35:24 CDT 2018

Paranoia as "heated exaggeration", yes. Not necessarily right-wing, 
according to Hofstadter, yes.

Here is the opening paragraph of Hofstadter's essay that Kakutani is 
referring to:

'American politics has often been an arena for
angry minds: In recent years we have seen angry
minds at work mainly among extreme rightwingers,
who have now demonstrated in the
Goldwater movement how much political leverage
can be got out of the animosities and passions of
a small minority. But behind this I believe there
is a style of mind that is far from new and
that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the
paranoid style simply because no other word
adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
that I have in mind. In using the expression
"paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical
sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other
purposes. I have neither the competence nor the
desire to classify any figures of the past or
present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea
of the paranoid style as a force in politics would
have little contemporary relevance or historical
value if it were applied only to men with profoundly
disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid
modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the 
phenomenon significant.'

Note that Hofstadter uses the term "conspiratorial fantasy" which is 
much better than "conspiracy theory". The meaning of the latter has 
developed over time as to include both reasonable theories about 
conspiracies and mad fantasies about chemtrails and reptiles, thereby 
making it possible to dismiss the one along with the other.

Hofstadter's main subject with regard to the political situation of his 
time is right-wing paranoia -- McCarthyism, the Birchers, "Reds under 
the beds" etc. He provides some interesting examples. Some of these 
people even claimed that there was irrefutable proof that Eisenhower was 
a Communist agent:

'Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch
an insight into affairs that is given to few of
us. "For many reasons and after a lot of study,"
he wrote some years ago, "I personally believe
[John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent."
The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of
Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers was
"merely a cover-up for Burns's liaison work be
tween Eisenhower and some of his Communist
bosses." Eisenhower's brother Milton was "actually
[his] superior and boss within the Communist
party." As for Eisenhower himself, Welch
characterized him, in words that have made the
candy manufacturer famous, as "a dedicated,
conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy"-a
conclusion, he added, "based on an accumulation
of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable
that it seems to put this conviction beyond any
reasonable doubt.'

You couldn't make it up.

At around the same time, however, a different kind of paranoia began to 
spread. There were people who did not believe the official narrative of 
the Kennedy assassination (even without having been able to see the 
Zapruder film which went straight into Henry Luce's vaults on November 
23, 1963, only to be shown to the public for the first time in all its 
glory in 1975 thanks to Robert Groden and Geraldo Rivera). These people 
started to claim  in public that they thought that their democratic 
institutions were lying to them about the death of JFK and that the 
report of the Warren Commission was a whitewash. In response, the CIA 
introduced the term "conspiracy theories" as a term of denigration, 
using it for the first time in its modern sense. A highly successful 
operation, and a gift that keeps on giving.

The CIA also made some proposals of what to do to counter these "fake news":

"Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our 
organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald 
worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material 
countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so 
as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries."

"3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination
question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where 
discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:
a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts
(especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren
Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that
the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that 
further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the 
opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to 
be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use 
their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.
b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the
critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate 
for this purpose."

http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html

When we encounter paranoia in the political sense as a theme in P (not 
the philosophical, psychological or religious aspects of it), it is this 
second kind of paranoia, a distrust of the state and its institutions 
and the self-serving narratives they create, in particular a distrust of 
law enforcement and the secret services. The kind of thinking, in other 
words, that makes the CIA point out to their "friendly elite contacts 
(especially politicians and editors)" that you are a "conspiracy 
theorist" -- even if you do not propose a theory about a conspiracy but 
merely point out that the official narrative cannot possibly be true. As 
an example: In VL COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, REX 84 provide the 
political/parapolitical context. At some point, these were all subjects 
of "conspiracy theories", and in some places they are still treated as 
such. Not so. Even if some of the details may be subject for debate, 
these are conspiracy facts. Alfonso Chardy, Robert Parry, Seymour Hersh 
(on Operation CHAOS, the Angleton/CIA equivalent to COINTELPRO) and 
others wrote important articles and books about it. As it says in VL: 
Look it up, check it out.

The McCarthyite kind of right-wing paranoia, as addressed by Hofstadter, 
and its impact are of course portrayed highly negatively in VL and BE.

Am 05.08.2018 um 14:25 schrieb Mark Kohut:
> In Michiko Kakutani's new book---entitled what appears after the "&"--
> Pynchon is one of the few writers quoted---many writers of fiction
> name-checked and alluded to though . She quotes
> the words from Gravity's Rainbow about how "religious--comforting" paranoia
> can be and---"there is
> still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything---a
> condition not many of us can bear for long."
> 
> A Pynchon fave, John Le Carre, supplies a chapter epigraph: "Without clear
> language, there is no standard of truth."
> Orwell throughout this chapter.
> 
> And, she quotes Roth [American Pastoral] as defining anew--like an
> artist--Hofstadter's "paranoid style in America":
> "this counternarrative Roth entitled "the indigenous American berserk"." I
> think of another great American writer, Charles Portis, with this phrase.
> 
> Michiko says that Hofstadter's original essay was
> "spurred by Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it."
> It's seen then in Lot 49.
> 
> (From another source, a scholar says
> that the modern bashing of the mainstream media--liberal bias and more-- by
> the Right began then (and even with Goldwater's
> book, I believe,he says, but I'm not looking anything more up).
> 
> She focuses on Hofstadter's words: paranoia characterized by "heated
> exaggerations" and more words but seeing these two
> in quotes put Woods on Pynchon's "hysterical realism" into my head.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> 