NP: DeLillo on Trump's America

[Mark Thibodeau]

I think the reason why so many of our best thinkers and artists and
other people who have previously proven to have useful and
enlightening opinions are having such a hard time getting their brains
around this historical moment's realpolitik is because their very
respectability and reputation precludes them from letting their minds
wander into the territories where today's most successful
sociopolitical and economic gamesplayers are operating.

The paranoia of the 70's (and of GR, the Senate Hearings on
Assassinations, Oglesby's Yankee Cowboy War theory, etc) is probably
the only paradigm equipped to provide an adequate diagnoses for our
present ills. Actual, literal sinister conspiracies, shaped by
fanatics of the occult and the Grand Design, with armies of
cult-of-violence Gammas as devoted foot-soldiers... start talking
about these things and you're relegated to the funny pages, mocked for
the rest of whatever you're allowed to retain of your career.

I mean, for Pete's sake! Look at what happened when Delillo DARED to
write his JFK-conspiracy-adjacent novel, LIBRA! Is it any wonder he'd
be a little
gun-shy about wading into these reeking, Satanic fever swamps?!

Maybe in two or three decades we'll be allowed to look back, like we
looked back on Strangelove not so long ago and realized "Holy shit...
Kubrick and Southern were more right than wrong about EVERYTHING." And
then maybe reputations will be rehabilitated (post mortem for most of
'em)... and we can all go on being superior and snide again about
whatever fresh Hell we'll be enduring by then.

Jerky
On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 12:02 AM Thomas Eckhardt
<thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/nov/05/don-delillo-trumps-america-love-lies-bleeding
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l