The Adenoid

[J Tracy]

I overstated PP’s role in watching Slothrop; not so much a "major assignment” , and not even a sense that he knew what the  Firm’s interest was. He did his small part as he does his part considering the information coming from other psychics like Eventyr.

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