NP: DeLillo on Trump's America

[Mark Thibodeau]

For some reason, my reply seems to have come out all choppy, with the
bottom paragraph missing.

Not to repeat myself, but here is what I TRIED to write:

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

PS - As for what happened to Delillo after publishing Libra, he was
savaged for months in various venues by such literary luminaries as
George Will, who called the novel "an act of bad citizenship", and
other right-tilting sources. I remember the clash and tumble, being a
fan and in university at the time.

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 4:07 PM rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Delillo went minimal after the brilliance of Libra Mao II and Underworld. Zero K is probably the end of that run. it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with.
>
> as for depicting the lunacy of a particular American way of viewing the world (and its violence) currently I can't help but think of the Uncle Sam character in Coover's the Public Burning. It's too bad the novel is old. Sean Hannity and other Fox notables surely would be among the revelers in Times Square.
>
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-coovers-70s-novel-the-public-burning-eerily-anticipates-trump
>
> It’s in the “god” of The Public Burning, Uncle Sam, that Coover most strikingly foresees Trump and his public. Based partly on Sam Slick, the Yankee peddler, Uncle Sam pretends to be a populist strong man defending American Christianity and protecting the little people from domestic and foreign evil, but in fact Sam is an “incorrigible huckster, a sweet-talking con artist,” a protean shape-shifter, the impure principle of performance and entertainment, controlling characters and events to perpetuate his power to control characters and events. It is Sam who moves the execution from the prison at Sing Sing to Times Square where he assembles entertainers, officials, and celebrities to create a ceremony that will bind Americans together in a spasm of hate and vengeance, a festival that takes to extremes the violent and vile emotions elicited in Trump’s rallies. Like Trump, Sam is consistently vulgar in act and speech. He strings together others’ phrases, slogans, clichés, and dog whistles from centuries of American jingoism, racism, and misogyny. And also like Trump, Sam has no respect for facts: History, he tells Nixon, “is more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation’s seen since the Gold Rush—the fatal slantindicular futility of Fact! Appearances, my boy, appearances! Practical politics consists in ignorin’ facts! Opinion ultimately rules the world!”
>
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 3:31 PM Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>
>> I am curious. What happened to DeLillo after he published "Libra"?
>>
>> Kubrick and Southern were, of course, right about everything.
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l