New Pynchon novel. What happened to the list?

[Joseph Tracy]

No thoughts on Shadow Ticket?  No group read? Have the remaining Pynchon 
fans moved to reddit ?  I have been tentatively listening to the audio 
version for free through the Library system, contrary to my original 
instincts and still don't know what I think, but impressive work of 
genius is not, so far, among the options. Entertaining after a fashion 
but a lot of the same old, same old.

Is anyone else less than thrilled with the new slew of doggerel torch 
songs with syllables that don't fit any conceivable melody? Does /Shadow 
Ticket /have too many stereotyped Hollywood movie roles: effete anglos,  
urban street toughs, hollywood nazis, untrustworthy curvaceous dames? 
Maybe it's too many acronyms,  too much hollywood-noir dialog. Can't 
someone in this Pynchon novel talk or think like a real person? Maybe 
the detailed references to  gun, auto, motorcycle, clothing and jazz 
arcana have managed to wear out their ability to give us a sense of 
place and time and are just part of the shtick.  Was he thinking Quentin 
Tarantino to direct his next movie?  Will Hind Rajab be reanimated by 
Elon Musk's   trans-human, post-mortem biotechnology  in order to get a 
starring role as a  secret Nazi collaborator, discovered and located by 
loyal zionists  and stopped in her deadly attack on innocent Jews in 
which she used her bullet riddled body to besmirch the heroism of the 
IDF.  Why this cartoony version of the lead up to WW2? Is it all a set 
up for some really funny cheese riffs?

Somewhere betweeen this paragraph and the next I listened to the last 5 
or so chapters.

Of course there is the revelation near the end of the novel that we are 
in a different timeline from traditional US history, an alternate 
universe where the planned Wall street coup against FDR that tried to 
recruit Smedley Butler for a popular prospective President succeeds, in 
this case putting General Douglas MacArthur in the presidency as the 
first POTUS of  a Fascist America.   From this peculiar and ominous 
divergence one could persuasively derive a  different, more satiric and 
slant intent, and could  move the events of the novel's  approaching 
world war to our own time. It wouldn't be that hard actually. Substitute 
college students demanding an end to bombing hospitals for 1930s union 
workers demanding wage justice. Substitute violent Fascists at home and 
in Israel ready to carve out their destiny as empire  and ready to 
defend the occupying empire to the last Ukrainian, Iraqi, or Iranian, or 
even throw in American soldiers in a sordid  replay of Normandy with 
zero element of surprise.

The essential trajectory of fascism is to move from industrialized and 
militarized nationalism to regional or global empires. If you substitute 
the planting of US or perhaps joint US, Euro, Israeli, South American, 
Arab and African military bases around the globe supported by compliant 
nations ( usually military strong men with large Swiss bank accounts)  
The front lines of the modern techno-reich can easily be swapped  for 
the WW2 variety of Fascist axis  war machinery and global occupation. 
Wherever you go there is always someone to scapegoat.  It is easy to see 
that Palestinians murdered in hospitals and food lines, or immigrants 
sent to prisons in El Salvador, or racially inferior boat operators in 
the Caribbean, or a girl's school in Tehran will all do  quite well as 
the the current version of  Jews Gypsies and Commies. Socialists will do 
fine  as socialists. Finally, there was no shortage then or now of hired 
killers,  intensely  loyal either to their imaginary national and racial 
identity, or to the private sector, or to both, sort of.