The Adenoid

[Mark Kohut]

I differ mightily....Thanks for playing...

On Sat, Apr 5, 2025 at 1:59 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I just wanted to focus, though focus maybe the wrong word here, on the
> extry-weird Adenoid episode. You know, the fiendish Adenoid with a master
> plan and its assault on London , and how in Pirate’s dreams and the
> ‘minds’  of the Firm, the strange dreams of Lord Blatherard Osmo ,channeled
> through the unique talent of Pirate Prentice,  portend disaster in the
> Balkans.  Only PP can communicate. With the Adenoid, albeit with difficulty
> in muddy snufflings.
>
> Ok let’s stop there for a moment. Throughout the history of war and the
> build-up to war there are 2 distinct patterns recorded by military and
> political historians: 1) one is that nations and empires tend to see future
> conflict through the technological and historic lens of the last war; 2)
> the second is that those with cultural clout, those of paranoid disposition
> toward a perceived enemy, will amplify that paranoia to he point where huge
> military resources are prepared against an enemy that is not the real
> source of danger and may even embrace the enemy as friend because of shared
> fears and hatreds. In this case Pynchon is satirizing that pattern with the
> Adenoid. A real adenoidal inflammation cuts off air and makes it hard to
> breathe. This is what is  metaphorically happening here. Western nations ,
> dominated by the interests of industrialists, bankers, inherited wealth,
> and colonial holdings, embraced fascism, Hearst Papers published a regular
> column from Mussolini, praised Hitler as a new model to hold social justice
> movement and labor organizers in check.  This willful ignorance of  real
> dangers  wildly  distorts the West’s  ability to keep oxygen and basic
> common sense  flowing to their brains and the  newspapers and leaders
> reflect this mind numbing inability to ability to see that the axis powers
> want to do to them what they have been doing in their colonies and that the
> global economic crash is a result of believing in the myth of something for
> nothing via ‘capital markets’ . They have become kings and forgotten about
> the bloody French, Protestant, South American   and Haitian revolutions.
>
> Speaking of adenoidal snufflings and their dubious content, the Firm cuts
> to the chase and snuffs out Osmo in a tub of tapioca, thus in their
> imagination,"“Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon
> the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not
> from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate
> only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up,
> but not enough for it to poison him.”
>
> The propagandists(PP) must not be allowed to consider peace as an option
> except as the  endangered personal comfort of those rich servants of
> eternal vigilance and secret intelligence.
>
> Oddly, as the novel unfolds Prentice’s  magical ability fails to penetrate
> the dreams or thoughts of Slothrop who is a next major assignment, and most
> of his efforts are traditional spy-craft. The way I read this is that PP
> represents the propagandistic  paranoid delusions generated by a nation or
> empire and their high degree of inaccuracy. These delusions  are the attack
> of the martians in the War of the World as a model of generating fear and
> controlling people and of falsifying history in the favor of the
> propagandists. In the minds of some people Churchill  and America somehow
> won WW 2, while in fact the majority of the German army was killed by
> Stalin led Russia at enormous sacrifice of over 25 million Russians.  Not
> the way Hollywood or network TV tells it then or now.
>
> GR was published toward the end of the Nixon years and the paranoia about
> communism had taken a deep toll on the country and devastated hundreds of
> thousands in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Chile, and too many others.
> Bloated paranoia and heroic wars based on lies were a natural target of P’s
> satire, but there are few novels to take on the unreflectively
> ahistorical  self congratulatory demeanor of the winners of WW2 with the
> depth of GR.
>
>
>
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>
> --
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>