Bleeding Edge

[Mark Kohut]

Just reread this AM the middle section of BLEEDING EDGE, the cop stuff
between Maxine and Heidi.
It is worth all of us rereading, but, of course I always think that. Law &
Order we [some, many, most?]  want, more than
creative anarchy. Our escape from freedom to allude to the title of that
book that influenced the Pynchon
of GR so much.

But this short BE post is to remind and accentuate the pervasive unreal
world, the world of fantasy in our
daily lives which perverts our dreams, which distorts our 'getting'
reality;which perverts our sexual and romantic
lives.......in BE....what late capitalism does. Shows TRP in BLEEDING EDGE.

Bleeding Edge, a premonition of Trump's America, a gently surreal portrait
of the Unreal America that had come to exist.

And money, that unreal current of fantasy that runs everywhere. So much of
it that Gatsby's Unreality is as chump change.

On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 2:28 AM <jbloocher at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am just about to read the Moira Dunegan article. Thanks Mark. Plus,
> fortuitously have read a whole lot about women (very literally) loving
> fascists, the last few days- in very strange and superficial sources
> (apologies). Just chiming in now, before time (more apologies) to say how
> disturbing that photo at the top of the article is. I can’t quite put my
> finger on it. Only just getting my brain in gear. It’s very dark.
>
> JB
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On 12 Nov 2018, at 20:37, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, I missed the attribution. My response, then, is to Moira.
> >
> >> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 12:32 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Here's the whole article by Moira Dunegan. (last time I send only a
> >> section---in quotes---and give directions
> >> AT THE BOTTOM on how to access the whole thing. You see, I say, had I
> sent
> >> this, no one would have
> >> read it. No one would have become engaged in a dialogue. I say.  (Some
> >> other friends on the 'racism' narrowness, my my)
> >>
> >> Thanks Laura.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/09/white-women-vote-republican-why
> >>
> >> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 10:48 AM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Plath wasn't making a political statement about women, and Pynchon,
> with
> >>> his predilection for very young women, is hardly a go-to source for
> >>> theories about women of any race. His wonderful character Oedipa knows
> that
> >>> excluded middles are bad shit. Republican=racist, Democrat = not
> racist.
> >>> Nothing in between. Is that what you're saying? White women who vote
> >>> Democratic aren't racist? I can conceive of white women voting
> Republican
> >>> who are no more racist than their Democrat-voting counterparts. To say
> that
> >>> white women vote Republican because they're racist and/or they adore a
> >>> fascist seems presumptuous.
> >>>
> >>> Not everyone has their own, developed worldview. A significant chunk of
> >>> Americans adopt the worldview of their places of worship, whether that
> >>> means rabid anti-abortionism, single-minded votes for pro-Israel
> >>> candidates, voting for Democrats so long as they're not gay, etc.
> Another
> >>> very significant chunk boils everything down to what they perceive is
> their
> >>> financial interest. Union workers voted for union-buster Reagan
> because he
> >>> promised to lower their taxes. The super-rich will vote for Trump again
> >>> because he did lower their taxes. Then there's us - educated, aware,
> who
> >>> read and vote pretty much in lock-step with each other (barring the
> >>> occasional Hillary dispute). The rest of the people are pretty much
> winging
> >>> it, and not having been trained in logic, or even the necessity of
> logic,
> >>> they come up with various voting strategies:
> >>> "I hate black people, but Obama is awesome." "My friend said Hillary
> is a
> >>> murderer." "Trump is a disgusting pig, but the Democrats will force
> women
> >>> to have abortions." "I loved Trump on The Apprentice - it would be a
> hoot
> >>> to see him in the White House." "My boyfriend said he'll beat the shit
> out
> >>> of me if I don't vote for Trump." "What the hell, eeny meeny miney
> mo." "My
> >>> union said not to vote for him, and I agree with everything they said.
> But
> >>> they also say that immigrants work for low wages, and that NAFTA is
> bad. So
> >>> it seems like voting for Trump makes a lot of sense."
> >>>
> >>> If you can speak about white women as a group then so can I, a white
> >>> woman. So here it is: White women want Beto for President in 2020!
> >>>
> >>> Laura
> >>>
> >>>> On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 7:30 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> "What is wrong with white women? Why do half of them so consistently
> vote
> >>>> for Republicans, even as the Republican party morphs into a
> monstrously
> >>>> ugly organization that is increasingly indistinguishable from a hate
> >>>> group?
> >>>> The most likely answer seems to be that white women vote for
> Republicans
> >>>> for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist. Trump,
> >>>> with
> >>>> his raucous rallies and his bloviating, combative style, has offered
> his
> >>>> supporters an opportunity to savor the pleasures of being cruel. It is
> >>>> likely that the white women who voted for him in 2016, and who will
> vote
> >>>> for him again in 2020, find this racist sadism gratifying. It is fun
> for
> >>>> them.
> >>>>
> >>>> But there is something else at play, something more complicated, in
> white
> >>>> women’s relationship to white patriarchy. White women’s identity
> places
> >>>> them in a curious position at the intersection of two vectors of
> >>>> privilege
> >>>> and oppression: they are granted structural power by their race, but
> >>>> excluded from it by their sex. In a political system where racism and
> >>>> sexism are both so deeply ingrained, white women must choose to be
> loyal
> >>>> to
> >>>> either the more powerful aspect of their identity, their race, or to
> the
> >>>> less powerful, their sex. Some Republican white women might lean into
> >>>> racism not only for racism’s sake, but also as a means of avoiding or
> >>>> denying the realities of how sexist oppression makes them vulnerable.
> >>>>
> >>>> In her book Right Wing Women
> >>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/women>, the feminist Andrea
> >>>> Dworkin wrote that conservative women often conform to the dominant
> >>>> ideologies of the men around them as part of a subconscious survival
> >>>> strategy, hoping that their conservatism will spare them from male
> hatred
> >>>> and violence. It doesn’t work, she says. They suffer sexist oppression
> >>>> anyway. But the strategy continues. “Most women cannot afford, either
> >>>> materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt
> offerings
> >>>> of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry
> >>>> little
> >>>> gods around them.” Participating in racism does not exempt white women
> >>>> from
> >>>> sexism, as much as they might hope that it will. It merely corrodes
> their
> >>>> souls in the process.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> White women’s identity places them in a curious position at the
> >>>> intersection of two vectors of privilege and oppression."
> >>>>
> >>>>                                 ----put couple sentences into Google
> or
> >>>> Bing exactly to get the whole larger article.
> >>>> --
> >>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >>>>
> >>>
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>