Pynchon & The Death of Truth.

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thank you.

Even "The Paranoid Style" alone is highly relevant for M&D, as I 
suggested some time ago -- Freemasons, Jesuits, captive nuns...

Now that you remind me of this posting, I would like to add that I could 
have been more precise. It was not the CIA that first used the term 
"conspiracy theory" in a negative sense. That was, as far as I can tell, 
Karl Popper. But whereas Popper applied the term to what Hofstadter 
correctly identifies as "conspiratorial fantasy" -- the idea not just 
that there are people who conspire to do bad things, which happens all 
the time, but rather that these people are “demonic forces of almost 
transcendent power", in other words, the idea that the Elders of Zion, 
the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Communists, take your pick, are 
behind everything and certainly also under your bed -- the CIA reacted 
to a specific conspiracy theory (the CIA killed the President) regarding 
a specific event.

Am 20.08.2018 um 18:01 schrieb Matt Bormet:
> Tangentially related, Hofstadter's (posthumous) America At 1750 is a good
> read for background on the culture presented in M&D, particularly the Great
> Awakening. Here's the NYT review:
> https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/21/archives/america-at-1750-a-social-portrait-by-richard-hofstadter-293-pp-new.html
>