BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1

[Mark Kohut]

"It’s easy and safe to comment on government/military overreach when
it’s in the past, or in foreign lands."---it is also a level of
pattern-finding, of some kind of generalization, loose maybe yet what
fiction does.

And many, many, many comment on government/military overreach when it is
happening as well.
Not usually in hot-off-the-wires fiction, where it is immediately too
particular and polemical and therefore dated from the get-go.

Some of Thomas's non-fiction heroes have done and do this. Seymour Hersh
back in the day and many others.

On Sun, May 22, 2022 at 3:33 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> “I only read the line "There can be no question where Pynchon's
> sympathies lie" and I do not believe it as written.
>
> “Not the Pynchon I read or what many say here as we explore his richness of
> ambiguity and meanings.”
>
>
> If you only read the one line, you missed most of a fine post.
>
> It hadn’t occurred to me to place Pynchon on either side of a
> bifurcation between official prose and poesy -
>
> I figure he’s well read enough to straddle that divide and then some.
>
> He served in the Navy and has never shrunk from contemplation of the
> indubitable facts of ongoing military operations - his essay on how
> people seek out strong leadership when threatened doesn’t actually
> castigate that tendency, but gently points out that overreacting in
> that direction is also dangerous.
>
> I’d argue that while the “aftermath” paragraphs, and the rest of the
> novel, show the nettlesome & expensive annoyances of the official
> response, they are rational, relatively calm, and make well-reasoned
> points against fallacies in *either* the “official line” or any of the
> myriad variations  -
>
> Also, a person “cranked up, scared, and helpless,” is - like Maxine’s
> rodent dream - realizing vulnerability in a way that isn’t unwarranted
> and may not have occurred to them. If fortunate enough to survive,
> they will be alert in a way that they never were before.
>
>
> I admire the part I think is the heart of Thomas’s post, which is to
> put the ch30 comments on narratives and sourcing in a context with the
> “history” ideas from M&D - that certainly seems to “stimmt”
>
>
> It’s easy and safe to comment on government/military overreach when
> it’s in the past, or in foreign lands.
>
> Reverend Cherrycoke found that criticizing current local abuses is
> fraught with peril. He’s the source of the relevant quotes in M&D and
> while Pynchon obviously has a penchant for the fabulistic viewpoints,
> and so forth, I think Cherrycoke only partly reflects his viewpoint.
>
> I think Pynchon is smarter than Cherrycoke, with a time-tested
> critique and method whose partly outrageous nature embraces heretical
> and “accepted” viewpoints, placing them both within a rational and
> factual context that clear thinkers of any political wing cannot help
> but admire.
>
> (Although, like Cherrycoke, he did “ship out” for awhile) (and in
> fairness to Cherrycoke, Pynchon lives in a more accepting time)
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>