BEg2 ch25 summary - forgot the most important part

[Mark Kohut]

What he does instead is, amongst other
things, use March Kelleher as a mouthpiece for alternative explanations.
She surely does not mince words (perhaps it is just me, but I find this
very funny):

-- "Its the Reichstags fire," she greets Maxine.
"The what?"
"Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now
they've got it." --

(317)

Not in my reading......She is being typically satirized in the Pynchon
way...She is the Dr. Hilarious of
BE.......

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 6:13 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think Thomas's points are, basically, minor footnotes to the overarching
> visions of TRP book by book....Pynchon
> knows his history and we annotators can find some of it.....PYNCHON is
> never reducible despite many trying to...
>
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 5:30 PM Thomas Eckhardt <
> thomas.eckhardt at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
>> rich wrote:
>>
>> > My point as much as March Keller and
>> > others rant about late capitalism or the horros of the US government
>> abuses
>> > as on the money as they are, there seems to be something bigger going
>> on,
>> > of which even Mr P himself can only allude to. He does it well, dont
>> get me
>> > wrong, and maybe this is just my take on it and Pynchon never thought
>> these
>> > things. But as I read BE again, it disabuses me of the previous notion I
>> > had that Pynchon was more clear about them, the bad dudes in the later
>> > books (well at least the last three and Vineland) being obvious. and
>> > despite so much nonsense in BE and clutter and waste, there are some
>> really
>> > frightening things at the corner of the reader's eye.
>>
>> You are not finally warming to BE, rich? I should very much hope so.
>>
>> Here is a quote on VL that appears to echo your thoughts on BE:
>>
>> -- [S]uch appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to
>> apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to
>> take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates. There has yet to
>> be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow,
>> is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing pattern of
>> executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of
>> Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent
>> fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland
>> something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening
>> force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has
>> simply gone unrecognized. --
>>
>>
>> https://web.archive.org/web/20100607060958/http:/tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm
>>
>> Yes, there are dark and troubling things mixed in with the "clutter
>> and waste" (of course, I don't see it that way). I would say Pynchon IS
>> clearer about them in VL than in BE, and I believe that there is a simple
>> reason for this.
>>
>> I will come to it, but first:
>>
>> Every novel by Thomas Pynchon has a parapolitical, or deep-political,
>> layer that serves as a more or less well-hidden frame of reference (some
>> readers never want to discuss this aspect of the novels at all). In VL,
>> this parapolitical frame of reference includes the
>> Iran/Contra hearings, especially the infamous testimony of Oliver North,
>> COINTELPRO, and Nixon's War on Drugs (a thrilling take on the WoD and
>> its link to the Fascist International is: Henrik Kruger, The Great
>> Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism; I also highly
>> recommend the books of Michael Levine who quit the DEA in disgust after
>> his most important undercover operations against drug kingpins were
>> sabotaged by the CIA).
>>
>> Oliver North and REX 84:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0IL7k3elQ
>>
>> Even if we do not know what exactly was discussed in "closed session"
>> about REX 84, we can say that Iran/Contra was a conspiracy at the
>> highest level of the US government to circumvent the Boland Agreement in
>> order to deliver weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua. To this end, the
>> government was prepared to let the Contras smuggle cocaine into the US
>> and, if the US decided to wage war against Nicaragua, round up
>> dissidents and incarcerate them in FEMA camps:
>>
>> "Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go.
>> Reagan’s got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it
>> out.” (264)"
>>
>> (It should also be noted that these are
>> Continuity of Government measures. CoG also plays a role in BE.)
>>
>> My point is, this is historically proven. The evidence is in. In BE, the
>> case is different. There is no generally accepted historical
>> evidence for alternative explanations of the events on 11 September. On
>> the
>> other hand, the official narrative was controversial from the beginning
>> and remains so today. Pynchon is therefore not in a position to say
>> "Look it up, check it out." What he does instead is, amongst other
>> things, use March Kelleher as a mouthpiece for alternative explanations.
>> She surely does not mince words (perhaps it is just me, but I find this
>> very funny):
>>
>> -- "Its the Reichstags fire," she greets Maxine.
>> "The what?"
>> "Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now
>> they've got it." --
>>
>> (317)
>>
>> I hope to write more on the historiographic aspects of this as we proceed.
>>
>> Meanwhile many thanks to the keeper of the flame, Michael Bailey.
>>
>>