BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Am 18.05.2022 um 06:00 schrieb Michael Bailey:

 > Paragraph 1:
 > “If you read nothing but the Newspaper of Record, you might believe
that New York City, like the nation, united in sorrow and shock, has
risen to the challenge of global jihadism, joining a righteous crusade
Bush’s people are now calling the War on Terror. If you go to other
sources—the Internet, for example—you might get a different picture. Out
in the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of
self-resonant fantasies, dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.”

 >Paragraph 2:
 > “The plume of smoke and finely divided structural and human debris
has been blowing southwest, toward Bayonne and Staten Island, but you
can smell it all the way uptown. A bitter chemical smell of death and
burning that no one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and
which lingers for weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been
directly touched one way or another, for much of the city the experience
has come to them mediated, mostly by television—the farther uptown, the
more secondhand the moment, stories from family members commuting to
work, friends, friends of friends, phone conversations, hearsay,
folklore, as forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize
control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and
dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter centered on “Ground
Zero,” a Cold War term taken from the scenarios of nuclear war so
popular in the early sixties. This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear
strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat “Ground Zero” over
and over do so without shame or concern for etymology. The purpose is to
get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.”

BE, 326-327

Thank you, Michael. These are important quotes. They should be read
alongside the following paragraphs from M&D:

“Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever
a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History
is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,-- nor is it Remembrance,
for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to
the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,-- her
Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc,
spy, and Taproom Wit,-- that there may ever continue more than one
life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in
forever,-- not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose
us All,-- rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short,
weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their
Destination in common.”

M&D, 349.

And, coming after a mention of Jack (Jean de) Mandeville, Captain John
Smith, Baron Munchausen, Herodotus, who are (in)famous for liberally
mixing facts and fiction:

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in
Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left
within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her
Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs
rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and
counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of
Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech
nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of
Government."

M&D, 350.

The first quote is historiographical, the second is poetological.
Perhaps it is the most important poetological statement in Pynchon's
works. It beautifully describes what he himself does or tries to do -
tendering history lovingly and honourably but always nimbly enough to
keep it beyond the desires of government.

What Pynchon describes by way of example of the NYT in BE is history in
the making - the immediate emergence of an "official narrative", cause
and effect, the creation of a national myth. This official narrative
serves the interests of Power as BE's narrator spells out with unusual
candor: "forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control
of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play". As in M&D,
history is narrowed down to one, and only one, line.

The official narrative has an objective (even a telos, if you will): Get
people "[c]ranked up, scared, and helpless." In other words, get people
to go along with everything the government does in order to get revenge,
remedy, consolation. This is the objective of every Strategy of Tension,
regardless whether there has been a terror attack under a false flag, as
was the case in the original Strategy of Tension, or whether the powers
that be use a genuine terrorist attack in order to implement their
goals: Get people to unite behind their government.

This way fascism lies, and in its concern about the danger of fascism in
the US, BE is closely related to VL.

Juxtaposed with the official narrative of the "Newspaper of Record" are
alternative narratives, other explanations, different possibilities in
the brandnew online world.

I suggest that there can be no question where Pynchon's sympathies lie.

I'll add that the use of "Ground Zero" here is quite remarkable: First,
there is a simple, rational assessement: As horrible as events on
September 11 were, they were "nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on
downtown Manhattan" (cf. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/). Secondly,
"Ground Zero" is a perfect term for the narrowing down of possibilities,
both literally, as the phrase evokes thermonuclear war, and
figuratively, because by evoking thermonuclear war it serves to justify
any and all measures the government might take against that danger.
Thirdly, it relates to the various references to planning for the
Continuity of Government in the Cold War era in BE.

We might remember that Vineland's REX84 also was a CoG measure and that
CoG measures were initiated on September 11 and have, to the best of my
knowledge, never been rescinded.