NP but Richard Rorty, yet could gloss (some of) visionary Pynchon, yes? (This from a review in LA Review of Books about new collection of lectures)

[Joseph Tracy]

Corporate and military interests are getting contracts, increasing budgets, protecting profits, externalizing costs, reducing taxes. It isn’t that shadowy apart from CIA operations to cripple and malign any country that wants sovereignty. Plenty of information without turning to crackpots, small libraries really. Maybe the reason some of you do not like Vineland, IV and BE is because these are major topics and P is lifting the veil.
 The structure of these novels has strong similarities. A woman raised to question authority seduced by money power and fascist strong man types and how that plays out. This could be seen as america looking for change and settling for security. It is probably not intended as a male female archetype but an inner struggle.   The details satirize the real politics and money games of our time. 

> On Oct 29, 2021, at 3:10 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> the only thing I would question is that this shadowy, behind the scenes
> government knows what it's doing. the true crackpots seem to think they 
> know what they're doing. Frankly, I'm not sure which is worse
> 
> rich
> 
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 8:58 AM Heikki R <
> situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Rorty, however, seemed to regard Pynchon as something of an
>> anti-Emerson/Whitman/Dewey...
>> 
>> "Snow Crash capitalizes on the widespread belief that giant corporation,
>> and a shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an agent for the
>> corporations, now make all the important decisions.  This belief finds
>> popular expression in popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The Manchurian
>> Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more ambitious works like Thomas
>> Pynchon's Vineland and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view that the
>> visible government is just a false front is a plausible extrapolation from
>> the fact that we are living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
>> have been startled by the shamelessness with which our politicians now sell
>> themselves. Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's are novels
>> not of social protest but of rueful acquiescence in the end of American
>> hopes...."
>> 
>> From The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil and Bernstein, Wiley-Blackwell 2010, p.
>> 373
>> 
>> /pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>
>> 
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>