Regarding them Traverses...

[Mark Kohut]

The Plot Against America is a novel about how fascism almost came to
America...see Pynchon....
Did you ever see the trailer for Bleeding Edge where Pynchon pays homage,
and teases him for his overt wanting of the Nobel Prize,  to Phiip Roth?,,
There is some evidence in P's letters that he read early Roth at least, if
I remember correctly....I will bet he devoured every one.

*American Pastoral* is one of the best novels embodying the WEather
Underground and Roth knew why, pragmatically but metaphorically too as
fiction does...
an
And, last, This line: That "Gravity's Rainbow emerged out of the same
Zeitgeist as the Weather Underground" means nothing,nothing....so did
Nixon, and Woodstock
and Helter Skelter and the Beatles and Dylan and on and on.....that is one
of the more famous logical fallacies, look it up.....and Pynchon himself
shows that line up
with the Traveses in his longest look at America....violence goes way back
to them, the Traveses and Pynchon did that because of a larger vision of
America than
this worst of the sixties-seventies.....just about everyone, every
historian and most writers and artists see the Zeitgeist of the time a lot
broader than you expressed...


On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 4:28 PM Hübschräuber via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

> Very well said. The hypocrisy relates to "how the United States
> understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it", as
> Harold Pinter put it.
>
> Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me> schrieb am Mittwoch, 1. Juli 2026
> um 01:13:
>
> > In the LARB piece, Emmett Rensin's clear target is the evident hypocrisy
> of the liberal worldview. It feels to me as though what upsets liberals the
> most about Trump is his obvious grotesqueness and lack of decorum, rather
> than his leadership of American empire. It is as if Trump represents the
> return of what liberals repress about their own worldview.
> >
> > "We learned from Amerikan history about policies of exterminating an
> entire people and their magnificent cultures—the Indians, the blacks, the
> Vietnamese. We are making plans to resist with all of our creativity [...]
> We are building a culture and a society that can resist genocide" – Weather
> Underground, 1970 (from the collection Sing a Battle Song).
> >
> > "In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its
> order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered
> [...] The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the
> name of life, have gone on despite everything..." (GR 737).
> >
> > Part of what makes Gravity's Rainbow so powerful to me—emerging out of
> the same zeitgeist as the Weather Underground—is the urgency and sense of
> pervasive and imminent violence in the moment, that something must be done
> and yet it is much too late.
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>