by Gouda » Tue Dec 06, 2005 4:13 am
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>How ironic, then, that McCarthy and McCarthyism became bywords during the postwar period for accusing others of being traitors: McCarthy was on the side of Forrestal and the Dulles brothers...From Dulles, "both [then-Representative] Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy received volumes of classified information to support the charge that the Truman administration was filled with " 'pinkos' " (Loftus 222).<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>In her night journey through San Francisco, Oedipa meets an old acquaintance, Jesús Arabal, a member of the CIA, "Standing not for the agency you think, but for a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuración de los Insurgentes Anarquistas, traceable back to the time of the Flores Magón Brothers and later briefly allied with Zapata" (119). Even if calling the group the CIA is a joke, mentioning Flores Magón brothers and Emiliano Zapata opens another can of historical worms, and is no joke. The Flores Magón brothers published anti-government broadsides, were clapped into prison, and eventually fled to the U.S. Zapata was an Indian land-reformer, in whose a contemporary Mexican land-reform movement in Chiapas province has recently bloc active. A populist during the early decades of this century, Zapata was betrayed and killed in 1919. In a curious mixture of religion and politics, Mexicans venerate his grave as a holy place to this day. How ironic —or cynical— it was, then, that George Bush named his CIA-front oil company Zapata Petroleum (Loftus 367-6<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> .<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Oedipa's revelations come to her from Cohen (a priest), Thoth (a god) and Jesús (the son of God). With increasing insistence, the allusions on the underside of Lot 49 use the metaphors of revelation and hierophany to point to historical figures and political conflicts. Minor players are glossed in offhand ways (Darrowlike, Beaconsfield Cigarettes). Major figures are often indicated by half-names (James and Foster, Wendell). Figures behind major international historical events like the rise and fall of empires —the Rothschilds, the Morgans, the Rockefellers— are never named outright. We have to pursue references to Thurn and Taxis, Jay Gould, Emiliano Zapata into extra-textual sources to find the biggest players. The struggles among industrial cliques and the tensions among the social philosophies they represent are the stuff of recent history, and they are what Pynchon writes about.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Implicit in Pynchon's fiction is the view that events in recent American history have led to a virtual constitutional crisis, a challenge to the supremacy of the presidency by the intelligence community<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Though it smacks of post hoc fallacy, many people —journalists, filmmakers, critics of the Warren Commission Report, maybe even J. Edgar Hoover— believed the CIA had some hand in Kennedy's assassination and the coverup. Lot 49 hints that the CIA had something to do with the assassination and the coverup. If it had, the CIA was again demonstrating that the presidency was subordinate to the CIA<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Ironically, the link between Eisenhower's struggle with the CIA and Kennedy's is Lee Harvey Oswald, history's all-time patsy...In a very short time, two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, ran afoul of the CIA...To this day, the president has never again challenged the CIA, though the agency has made its share of egregious errors. With the election of former CIA director George Bush, the presidency and the CIA effectively merged.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Diocletian was a Roman emperor (284-305 CE) whose reign marked a change in government. Under Diocletian, local autonomy disappeared, the taxing system compulsorily tied the country people to the land, the Senate became weak and ineffective, the army grew much larger and stronger, and the mercantile class was taxed to the limit. Diocletian established a military dictatorship.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
