re Re: Vineland and MDDM Washington

doug:
> There you go.  Who said *the only* point of Vineland is to compare
> Reagan-Bush America to Nazi Germany

jbor:
>Well, no-one. What I said was that you're the one making that simplistic
>comparison, not the novel.

There you go again. I guess we should just take your word for it and ignore
the text (head-in-the-sand denial as interpretive strategy) which links
Nazi Germany and Reagan-Bush America. Tip of the iceberg:

"Brock [...] leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that
decorate fascist architecture." (Vineland, p. 287)

"all working under contract to CAMP and being led by the notorious Karl
Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer"
(Vineland, p. 220)

And the novel doesn't make a "simplistic comparison" between the two, it's
nuanced, layered, the way Pynchon shows America yielding to fascist
impulses. What's simplistic is the brain-dead denial of the fact that the
novel makes the comparison explicit.

jbor:
>Well, he couldn't very well have depicted him as not a slave-owner, could
>he? That *would* have been revisionism.

Pynchon's portrait of Washington goes against the grain of the hagiographic
treatment the Father of Our Country usually gets in the national myth,
which, in case you didn't know, fails to present Washington as a
pot-smoking, slave-owning, real estate scam artist.  A certain class of
American will still express disapproval of the ivory tower academics who
dared to tarnish Washington with factual assertions such as, he never
chopped down that cherry tree.

jbor:
>Your arguments about an "evil" GW in
>_M&D_ are very weak.

And your arguments to refute it were, what exactly? It's difficult to keep
them in mind, as insubstantial and muddled as they have been. There's a
mountain of textual evidence to climb over that doesn't disappear just
because you dance around it.