BEg2 ch31 references

Tue Jul 12 15:35:34 UTC 2022

  OK , first step back into Bleeding Edge read,  ready for anything. Kudos to Michael for keeping it going. 

  My personal sociopolitical summary of chapters 30,31 of BE
CH 30
P contrasts semblance of unity presented by Bush War on terror( soon to be directed to Iraq and afghanistan neither of whom provided direct support to 9-11 attack) with internet skepticism  and contrasts that with NY Times who hyperboically  calls 2 towers ground zero with a general pupose “ to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.”  
 Describes muslim pushcart  vendors disappearing from streets, mobile polce centers near mosques, Arab embassie. “Likewise, ships with no visible flags, pretending to be cargo vessels, though with more antennas on them than booms, appear out in the Hudson, drop the hook, and become, effectively, private islands belonging to unnamed securityagencies and surrounded by stay-away zones.”
Anyone know if these ships are documented?
Igor calls about Reg’s video after he finds hidden track of previously unseen footage of entry into Ice office building where yung Arab men are working on Vircator, a device whose pulse wreck local electronics.
Eric and Driscoll move in with Maxi. 
Heidi writing paper arguing that Irony is being blamed for paving the way to 911, making people insufficiently cautious and realistic about threats; “everything has to be literal now”.  Maxi sees 3 youthful school kids turn the next day to older, “these were the same kids, the same faces, only forty, fifty years older. Worse, they were looking at her with a queer knowledgeable intensity, focusing personally on her, sinister in the dimmed morning air.”

Ch 31
Shawn notes 2 towers like 2 Buddhas in Afghanistan, that we are returning to religious wars  with capitalist faith as dangerous as others. Maxi tells about 3 kids on corner. Shawn mocks with referencece to zombies. …”
suppose these “kids” are really operatives, time troopers from the Montauk Project, abducted long ago into an unthinkable servitude, grown solemn and gray through years of soldiering, currently assigned to Maxine expressly, for reasons never to be made clear to her. Possibly in strange cahoots also, and why not, with Gabriel Ice’s own private gang of co-opted script kiddies . . . aahhh! Talk about paranoid jitters!

 “OK”, soothingly, “like, total disclosure? It’s been happenin to me too? I’m seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can’t be here but they’re here.”  “

(Shawn)Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”

 “You’d prefer retail?” 

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window . . . that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.” 

“And what we’ve always been is . . . ?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs . . . planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”  “

    Justin shows up tells Maxi about how Princeton random number generator stops being random on sp10- and few more days, then returns to random.

Eric is sure Ice is helping CIA get money to people planning to overthrow governments of Muslim countries. He is attempting digital sabotage on Ice despite risks.

My thoughts/comments:  So in some pretty direct ways Pynchon  in these chapters is venting some dark  and unpatriotic thoughts in response to 9-11 and its immediate cultural impact, to the effect that western culture is being cooked in its own predatory sauces. Core institutions like the press and CIA, High tech corporations and Education are being weaponized and corrupted to keep people ”Cranked up, scared, and helpless.” in order to create zombie-like social conformity to one of the allowable servants of the empire. Evidence like the airliner stock trading and nonconforming first responder accounts( one f the non fictional parallels to Reg’s stinger video) will be buried in the new war on terror, the tech companies will take up military contracts, and the dangers of independent views criminalized. A huge wave of anti muslim xenophobia will be the new enemy for as long as that serves the MIC.  Then, as we now know, it wil be on to Russia and China.

> On Jul 12, 2022, at 2:25 AM, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Eric messing with Ice’s computers:
> “meantime not only have I been corrupting his malloc(3), I’ve turned it out
> trickin in the street, years of therapy before it’s straight again.”
> 
> 
>         “Please just watch your ass….”
> 
> 
> https://m.economictimes.com/definition/memory-corruption/amp
> 
> So I guess you request an address beyond the usual memory limit & write
> something in there (graffiti opportunity) - it’s a C thing, I wouldn’t
> understand…maybe like the good old “ping of death” but more so?
> 
> 
> But Maxine’s caution is certainly warranted. Lots of money on Ice’s side to
> pay people to watch for that kind of thing!
> 
> 
> 
> “Someday, Eric, they’re going to have the time machine, we’ll be able to
> book tickets online, we’ll all get to go back, maybe more than once, and
> rewrite it all the way it should have gone, not hurt the ones we hurt, not
> make the choices we made. Forgive the loan, keep the lunch date. Of course,
> at first tickets’ll be an arm and a leg, till the product-development costs
> get amortized . . .”
> 
> 
>         “Maybe there’ll be a frequent-time-traveler program, where you get
> bonus years? I could pile up a lot of those.”
> 
> 
>         “Please. You’re too young to have that many regrets.”
> 
> 
> - Ah, age has nothing to do with it, right? The overexamined life can
> happen at any age!
> 
> https://youtu.be/RY7S6EgSlCI
> 
> 
> 
> Note how it’s “*the* time machine,” as in AtD.
> 
> 
> 
> Think I already mentioned this, but “Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship”
> isn’t findable - not really surprising…
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l