TRP and enemies as mirrors

[Mark Kohut]

So much interlarded bullshit and mosh pit like half-misusing of Pynchon.
Let me count the ways.

A reader who still doesn't get fiction. It's realm of meaning. Something
Pynchon KNOWS so foundationally that he has never tried to "explain' his
work....

On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 7:39 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> TRP and enemies as mirrors
>
> Oh the glory of advanced technology. Humans now have the power to erase
> themselves and much of life with nuclear weapons, or turn our planet into a
> burning hell with global warming.  It would be as though everything we as
> individuals and societies had ever done had never happened.  The missiles
> are poised and the wars escalating. I40 degrees F in Doha. Arctic and
> antarctic ice melting, fires and floods around the globe .  If a nuclear
> war starts will a few seconds of blaming someone be our last consoling
> thought before incineration.  Or will the final thought just be  “No!” A
> ‘no’ that should have sounded through every sane person and society, but
> was stifled, a “no” that might have been, might have prevailed, and was
> clearly needed but wasn’t sounded loud enough, long enough, insistently
> enough.
>
>  One of the powers of art is to mirror the conflicts that threaten us,
> expose the tragic flaw, the healing that can come when the heart turns
> toward humility, love, peace, painful truth, or the destruction that
> emerges from lies, violence, theft.  The artist plucks every string that
> vibrates the soul of an audience, to draw their full attention: laughter,
> wonder, abuse, kindness, adventure, sex, wildness, terror, desire, edge of
> the seat curiosity. One of the forms this drama takes in the human psyche
> is the conflict aroused by the monster, the cruel enemy, the evil spirit or
> conspiracy attacking the given order: Goliath, Beowulf, Satan, Loki.
> Aggressors are just as likely to embrace this mythos as those literally
> attacked. It’s a story with primal human appeal. It is also just as likely
> to be a self serving lie as an accurate picture of what is happening,
> because it so effectively masks less noble motives, allowing the cruelest
> and basest of actions to be seen as the needed defense of the righteous.
>
> Pynchon delves into this phenomena of mirrored enemies as a consistent
> theme. One of my favorite versions of this occurs in Against The Day in the
> characters of professional political thinkers Werfner of Germany and
> Renfrew of England.  Each, like political pundits of today imagining every
> degree and nuance of sinister destructive plans in the other and the enemy
> society.  The mirroring is so complete even their names are the same
> letters spelled from back to front.  In  Gravity’s Rainbow nuclear armed
> rockets mirror each other across time, authoritarians on each side of WW2
> engage in cruel “medical experiments”, pursuing machine like control of
> human behavior, driven by personal ambition and debauchery, driven by
> market forces and the pursuit of more perfect technologies. The central
> character is one of these experiments gone wrong but in a way potentially
> exploitable by the war effort. He has an erection as a chemical response to
> imipolex G used in the V2 rocket and allied spies hope he can be used to
> predict rocket strikes. Probably not the first writer to note a connection
> between the pecker and war. But Slothrop has had enough authoritarian
> control already in his Calvinist background and he flees, moving through
> many visions and variations of the complex relations of sex, killing,
> exploitation, paranoia, addiction, resistance. Over time  the earth pulls
> him to her bosom and he is absorbed into a rainbow.  For those Slothrop has
> left behind, the only rainbow is the sheen of oil and the arc of missiles;
> the psychology  of imperial colonialism and war for dominance  continues
> on. Nazi scientists and secret police  are recruited into new roles in the
> west, and speeding ahead through time nuclear destruction becomes
> immanent.
>
> By the time the imaginary herero missile was about to hit Los Angeles in
> GR, over  in the non-fiction world, Russians, who were most effective in
> defeating the Nazis, had become the new enemy and grabbed their own
> colonial empire called the Soviet Union, taking advantage of the fact that
> most anti fascist resistance had been led by communists.
>
> The cold war was never cold in the colonized world and US colonial wars in
> Africa, the middle east, SE asia and South and Central America gave leaders
> who sided with the US the all purpose excuse or ‘communism' for crushing
> movements for justice , whether socialist or nationalist.  Along with the
> bloodshed, lots of US bribery and “aid” ended up in the Swiss bank accounts
> of our favored dictators. Corruption and repression was also rampant in the
> Soviet empire and Stalin went completely mad with paranoia, power, prisons
> and killing . This burgeoning of corruption and violence  is the history of
> every empire, and  the question of who caused the most suffering  in the
> cold war will be shaped by which victims you are looking at and maybe how
> much hypocrisy is involved.  The problem for the west is that we have,
> until China changed the picture, been the most effective at retaining
> imperial global dominance and that requires constant fear propaganda about
> the evil other while we indebt future generations to pay for weapons, wars,
> and surveillance. In the case of Russia, even after they ended the Soviet
> union, had a devastating fling with US economic criminality, and slowly
> rebuilt their country under the popular strong man Putin, who reined in
> oligarchic corruption and vastly improved the life of citizens, we
> continued to demonize Russia. First allowing the Clintons and Obama to
> corrupt national intelligence to foster Russiagate,  and then fostered a
> coup in Ukraine followed by a proxy war.  The truth is this has been more
> beneficial for american billionaires and politicians than for Ukrainians,
> Europeans or anyone else. Meanwhile our years of demonizing Arabs who don’t
> support Israel and our denial that Jews and Israel can commit crimes like
> humans everywhere has paid off in open genocide, supported by both
> parties.  The truth is that social norms and systems of government are in
> constant flux while the habit of demonizing others has a kind of reliable
> religious durability. Our political debates and elections are no longer
> about what we stand for, but who we hate the most. Our mainstream media is
> a swamp of propaganda that ignores real issues and crimes and feeds self
> righteousness and hate.  These addictions are manifesting as oligarchic
> fascism of the most blatant kind. What Werfner and Renfrew,  and the US
> fear and project on their enemy  is what they are becoming.  Dorian Gray
> comes to mind.
>
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