Fw: Re: BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1

[Hübschräuber]

> > 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.
>
>
> Yep.
>
> > 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.
>
>
> Which essay? One of the most pervasive, and controversial as it is often
> perceived as sexist, features of Pynchon's novels is the trope of the need for the
> strong man, the fascist.
>
> In BE, it is not only about people seeking out strong leadership when
> threatened. This is always the case, as Hermann Göring knew very well:
>
> "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a
> farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it
> is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
> don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter
> in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a
> country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
> drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictorship,
> or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the
> people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
> easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
> denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
> country to danger. It works the same in any country."
>
> In BE the narrator talks about a "purpose":
> "The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up,
> scared, and helpless." It is about the conscious manipulation of public opinion.
>
> Whose objective does it serve to get people "cranked up in a certain
> way"? It is the objective of those who repeat the phrase "'Ground Zero'
> over and over." Of those who want the war they had been planning for.
>
> The people have earlier been blamed by March, who includes herself in
> this indictment, for allowing "Bush and his gang" to go on their
> "rampage". This is an interesting passage. It is from March's weblog and
> written in what she calls her "old-lefty tirade mode":
>
> "'Just to say evil Islamics did it, that's so lame, and we know it. We
> see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar's look, the
> twelve-stepper's gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know
> they're guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who's in any
> hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans
> were back in 1933, when Nazis torched Reichstag within a month of Hitler
> becoming chancellor. Which of course is not to suggest that Bush and his
> people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It
> would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a
> screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the
> possibility that that terrible day would have deliberately been
> engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian "war" and the
> emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that
> thought.
>
> 'But there's still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need
> for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the
> national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us
> who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith
> and the rest of them--we who called down the sacred lightning of
> 'democracy' and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the
> switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And
> whatever happened then is on our ticket.'"
>
> BE, 321-322
>
> While the first paragraph is well aligned with what we know about March,
> the second is distinctly Pynchonian. And it blames everybody for the
> election of George W. Bush.
>
> (This said, I have to admit that I am not quite sure how to parse this second paragraph.
> What do we need to be true? The official narrative? Then why would we at
> the same time need to feel betrayed? If we need it to be true, and
> consequently perceive it as true, then why would we feel betrayed?
> Betrayed by Bush and his gang? But there is no "we" that March belongs
> to that would have voted for GWB. Perhaps I am just being thick. Can anybody explain?)
>
> Further below on the same page, Heidi, like Cherrycoke, voices support
> for narratives from the margins:
>
> "'No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,' it seemed to
> Heidi, 'these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or
> television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad
> dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.'"
>
> (https://www.nsfwyoutube.com/watch?v=HrQgVRGvLkQ)
>
> > 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.
>
>
> As regards the mouse dream: I love that "not that loudly"...
>
> > 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.
>
>
> There are enough well-researched facts of "official history" in the
> Reverend's tale for ten doctorate theses. So indeed, his admonition is
> to be taken with a huge grain of salt. What Pynchon takes issue with is, I suggest, the narrowing down of possibilities to one and only one narrative - a process behind which are interests that must "ever prove base".
>
> As an aside: Still, Pynchon's approach can be
> highly irreverent. His use of the Montauk story/history/conspiracy
> theory, in particular the adaptation of the Montauk Project/Montauk Boys
> conspiracy theory still puzzles me.
>
> An article on the Montauk Project that I found interesting:
>
> https://allthatsinteresting.com/montauk-project