CoL49 Chapter 4

[J K Van Nort]

Part of the reason that I've become intrigued with the use of military language/jargon is that Pynchon writes CoL49 with Eisenhower's Farewell Address fresh in the country's mind. From the beginning, Oedipa's reference to bathrooms as latrines rang hollow. What kind of Cornell graduate and housewife talks like that without having served in the military?

As I was rereading the farewell address, some of the lines below follow Fallopian, Koteks, and later Oedipa in San Francisco's thoughts:




"a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the people of this earth.




Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.




This world in arms …is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.




The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.




We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people….




This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."




In solidarity,




James


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