Not Pynchon but Anniversaries again.

[Mark Kohut]

I don't know why EVERYONE is not reading this book slowly, slowly. Just
overstatement for effect, so chill.

But there is this: The NYT stories of one day, late 1967,  December but
after Christmas---the season in which the refrain and campaign to REMEMBER
THE NEEDIEST has
been mentioned more than once, the Times runs a story of the guy who
invented napalm...with an interview with him saying he is not in the
position of commenting/judging morally on its use in Vietnam....after which
we get the novelistic consciousness asking almost gratuitously....Is napalm
used against fascists?....and, in that same newspaper, there is quoted
a Russian bureaucratic flunky asking a Russian physicist that in this year
of 1967, after so long in power,  "is it not the case that every decision
made by the ruling Russian Politburo must be the correct one? "

The decade when science/technology moved from pure apolitical joy and
world-discovery (in the US, at least) to being the handmaiden of a
perceived politically compromised use. When it's value-freeness dissolved
like a sand castle at high tide.

And, P's theme of the twinningness of the two superpowers. Then.

That Johnson. He could see clearly, comprehensively, with a compassionate
satiric vision.  And dead at 50.