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]

Just  being emphatic about what Rorty calls plausible extrapolation. I am hardly alone or apart from many serious analysts and journalists.  Let me point out that it was not long ago several p-listers were sure Mueller was going to expose Trump collusion with Russia while I and Journalist thinkers I admire said it would fizzle for lack of evidence because it was built out of a Hillary psyop. Plenty of crimes for Trump or Bush or Obama to account for but that was obviously a dead end if you looked at the quality of the evidence. 

> On Oct 29, 2021, at 1:13 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Puzzling to me from you, Joseph, with all the powerful stuff you find and say in Pynchon. But, as we know, I don't understand you. 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 1:11 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net <mailto:brook7 at sover.net>> wrote:
> The correlation between how politicians vote and who funds their campaigns and the direct hand of corportions in writing legislation makes it the only plausible explanation. Rueful acquiescence seems accurate.  Even our children for sale without much of a fight.
> 
> > On Oct 29, 2021, at 8:56 AM, Heikki R <situations.journeys.comedy at gmail.com <mailto: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
> > 
> > On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 1:14 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com <mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >> “I should like to make it sound attractive by dubbing it ‘American’,” he
> >> writes with his usual dash of irony, “construing it as the idea common to
> >> Emerson and Whitman, the idea of a new, self-creating community, united not
> >> by knowledge of the same truths, but by sharing the same generous,
> >> inclusivist, democratic hopes.”
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>
> >> 
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l <https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l>
> 
> 
> 
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