I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Spoiler Alert: JFK gets shot.

But seriously, might not want to read ahead if you haven't done tonight's reading.

Over the course of the past several Libra readings, we have seen the pieces of the JFK assassination fall into place relatively quickly. They're aren't many scenes that don't pertain to the movement of the plot towards the morning of November 22, 1963. The location changes from Miami to Dallas, Raymo, Frank, and Wayne make the drive to Dallas, Lee gets a job at the depository, and there are a couple of scenes with Ferrie convincing Lee to take the shot, and then we have the lengthy section detailing the events of the assassination. I watched the Zapruder film after completing the section, and I was shocked at the time in which DeLillo spends depicting the events of six seconds. Gone are Everett's musings about the nature of secrets. The speed of the novel pointedly picks up right before the assassination.

Speaking of Everett, gone is Everett, in general. His careful planning stages seem to be totally irrelevant at this point. His person out of paper certainly is unnecessary; there's no need to create Oswald -- he already exists. But Oswald isn't really necessary, either. He isn't even the one who kills Kennedy -- it's Raymo who hits him.

The way all of this turns out reminded me of one of the most crucial sections in the beginning of the book: the description of the way that the CIA operates.

"He and Larry Parmenter had belonged to a group called SE Detailed, six military analysts and intelligence men. The group was one element in a four-stage committee set up to confront the problem of Castro's Cuba. The first stage, the Senior Study Effort, consisted of fourteen high officials, including presidential advisers, ranking military men, special assistants, undersecretaries, heads of intelligence. They met for an hour and a half. Then eleven men let the room, six men entered. The resulting group, called SE Augmented, met for two hours. Then seven men left, four men entered, including Everett and Parmenter. This was SE Detailed, a group that developed specific covert operations and then decided which members of SE Augmented out to know about the plans. Those members in turn wondered whether the Senior Study Effort wanted to know what was going on in stage three. Chances are they didn't. When the meeting in stage three was over, five men left the room and three paramilitary officers entered to form Leader 4."

Mackey at this point has taken over control of the actual execution of the operation. Everett's (and Parmenter's)  role reminds me more of Senior Study Effort or SE Augmented -- they decide what needs to be done, but don't actually do it, or necessarily know the specifics of how it's being done. Mackey would be SE Detailed and Leader 4, the one who is carrying out the plot. This section is crucial because it establishes the foundation for how conspiracies and plots spin out of control, take a life of their own. Even in this little example, with relatively few players, we see how the higher-ups (Everett) don't know the full extent to what is going on (e.g. that Kennedy will be hit).

Somewhat unrelated: I was reminded of a popular line from the A-Team during class discussion

Or, perhaps you'd like to hear it in Liam Neeson's lovely Irish accent in the slightly-better-than-average 2010 action movie

The Angst Manifesto

First of all, I'd like the preface this post by saying that I'm thoroughly committed to the exercise of reading Libra as though I don't know how the story ends -- as though I have no idea who Lee Oswald is at this point, or deducing what parts of Everett's plan must change in order for Kennedy to be shot in the manner that he is. At this point, I'm doing my best to believe that the assassination attempt will be in Miami and that he will be shot by an (ex) CIA operative and a ghost-assassin will be framed. (Although that sentence contained an implied cheat upon my exercise, and of course this sort of reading blinds one to many of the intellectually interesting aspects of the novel, so I'll be dipping in-and-out of my elected oblivion, but that is neither here nor there).

That being said, I will begin the process of laying out my impressions of Lee regardless of what I know about his future, which is probably the fairest way to treat him as a character. My initial impression is that he is an insufferable little dipshit, part of which can be written off to the fact that he's a fifteen-year old boy. More on that later -- I'll argue with myself in a couple of paragraphs.

My first, and probably strongest, argument for why Lee pisses me off is that he's a complete jerk to his mom. Some of his greatest hits from the last couple night's reading include

• "I'm your son. You have to do what I want" (35).
• "[My brothers] are in the service to get away from you" (35).
• "You just go to work like any other day" (6).

Not to mention all the times Marguerite acknowledges that he yells at her for food, although, annoyingly, she often qualifies it with the phrase "like any other boy." Probably this is her trying to save face on behalf of her son in the court she is apparently testifying to -- perhaps Warren himself? Furthermore, with this repeated line, DeLillo dares us to stop for a moment and consider as 2016-readers the extent to which Lee isn't like any other boy (but we're not going to do that, because that ruins our suspension of prior knowledge). 

His other grating qualities are a little bit harder to pin down. I'm inclined to question his reasons for his endorsement of communism. I believe that part of the reason is that he's impoverished, and something about a criticism of capitalism would resonate with him. But, also, in 1950s America, a communist was THE MOST hated thing you could be. And Lee revels in being hated. When he's in Robert Sproal's house, he's emboldened by the knowledge that "a parent" is listening to him discuss Marxist rhetoric, raising his voice. He seems to enjoy the role of the steadfast, persecuted outsider -- because he lacks another identity or because he's been forced into that role, I'm not sure. But he's a button-pusher.

Right now, I see Lee as an irritating kid. He's latched onto communism because he's attracted to both the ideas and the way it makes him feel about himself. In some ways, he's behaving like the typical angsty teenager (though I'd be liable for some ... negative reinforcement ... if I pulled the same lines with my mom). But that doesn't mean I have to like him.

Kevin's Racial Attitudes

In Kindred, Butler has done a wonderful job of creating nuanced characters, both white and black, who are extremely difficult to typecast or to put in a box. In particular, her success in producing ambivalence in the reader is evidenced on our conflicting views concerning Kevin.

Kevin is complicated; the environment of the antebellum South doesn't turn into a white supremacist, but when he does have moments that make us wonder. One of the examples that I underlined while reading was when Kevin muses about how the 1800s would be "a great time to live in," and how it would be fascinating to "go West and watch the building of the country," a sentiment which Dana finds to be totally naive. Butler also purposefully draws connections between Kevin/Kevin and Dana's relationship in 1976 to Kevin/Kevin and Dana's relationship in the 1800s. He becomes offended when she won't type for him, he wants her to move in with him and become dependent (think about what would happen if she DID move in with him and then refused to type), and he is physcially compared to both the patroller and to Tom Weylin. But on the other hand, Kevin doesn't completely align himself with the white planters. We find out in last night's reading that Kevin was helping slaves escape to freedom, and he had distanced himself from the Southern whites enough to be run off the plantation after the Denmark Vesey scare.

I think the key to understanding Kevin is inferring his attitude towards race. Somebody at some point (I forget who, perhaps Tom Weylin) said that Kevin "doesn't seem to know the difference between black and white." While on the surface level, I think that statement is to be read in the context of Kevin's 21st century racial conceptions being vastly different than those of the early 19th century, it also serves as a commentary on Kevin's racial conceptions, period. That is to say, Kevin gives off the air of being kind of color-blind; he's not a racist, but he fails to acknowledge that there are differences in the experiences of people of different races. We get this idea again when Kevin fails to understand why his family might have a problem with marrying Dana. He just doesn't get it.

I hypothesize that the apparent changes we see in Kevin once he reaches the antebellum South aren't changes at all -- his more concerning attitudes have always been there, but it took an extreme environment to bring them out; they weren't evident in 1976. Part of what Butler is doing with the character of Kevin is exposing that there are issues with attempting to simply "not see color." I would imagine that in 1976, a decade after the Civil Rights Movement, this sort of oversimplification as a "solution" was more common than it is now, and Butler is attempting to detract from it.

Rationalizing"Embers" and "Slaughterhouse-Five"

The most recent reading from the packet, "Embers: Will a Prideful City Finally Confront its Past?" Packer confronts the metanarrative that the bombing of Dresden was largely a unjustifiable, extraneous act of war on the part of the Allies, as Dresden had supposedly no military significance, and challenges the city to acknowledge it's historical significance in the stories of one of the greatest horrors mankind has experienced. In regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, Packer insinuates that Vonnegut contributes to a misguided "moral [equation]" of Dresden and the Holocaust by quoting dubiously acquired statistics and casting the Germans as largely sympathetic characters:

For many readers of Irving and Vonnegut, the bombing of Dresden scrambled to order of perpetrators and victims in the Second World War and came close to establishing a moral equivalence. Vonnegut's narrator goes even further: because "there hadn't been much publicity," he says of the Dresden raid, "not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima."

Of course, I severely doubt Vonnegut intended to make any of these points. But as readers of fiction, it's our job to critique the author's standpoint and to not simply accept his claims because it is 1969 and we love antiwar novels during the Vietnam era, so I'm glad that these sorts of criticisms of the mentality that comes from Slaughterhouse-Five are presented. But I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five should be read as a commentary on the actual events of World War Two. Vonnegut clearly isn't very concerned with historical reality -- he inserts flying saucers and time travel into his narrative. In fact, the image that sticks with me from Slaughterhouse-Five is not the relatively sparse (for their importance) descriptions of Dresden post-bombing, it's the image of the ragtag American P.O.W.'s standing in front of a group of ill-trained, poorly-equipped, unfit German soldiers. Vonnegut sought to prove a much more basic, human point about the complete lack of glamour in war. Unfortunately for him, the only way he knew how to accomplish such a task was to focus of Dresden, which is a complicated bit of subject matter from the historical perspective.

Of course, we shouldn't give him a pass, but I think the most problematic aspect about the Nazi-originated metanarrative of the bombing of Dresden is that, somehow, Dresden was less deserving of being bombed than any other European city --  that because it was supposedly an art, not war, center, we should have preserved it. Vonnegut steers clear of making any sort of political statements about the merit of the bombing of Dresden. He does call it by its pet name, "The Jewel of the Elbe,"and  in his first description of the city, and he does sing it's beauty. But that's not because of Dresden, it's because he's been on the front or in and internment camp for an undisclosed amount of time, and even Vonnegut's awe is explained away with "the other other city I'd seen was Indianapolis, Indiana." So, Vonnegut takes the focus away from the specifics of Dresden as a victim of war and chooses to zoom in on an individual experience of the war in order to make a larger point about the horror of war. And that spares his from some of Packer's criticism.

The Point of the Mu'tafikah Subplot

I am a lover of art museums, so Chapter 23 -- the scene in the Mu'tafikah den -- hit me where it hurts. However, I'm also a lover of the critical nature of postmodernist writings, and Reed makes some very valid points about the artificial and restrictive nature of the Western idea of consumption of art. So, it was a section I enjoyed, even if it was a little painful to read.

One of the concepts that I've been following since before Ragtime is the arbitrary -- or at least, seemingly arbitrary -- nature of what we consider to be noteworthy enough to have some sort of cultural or historical relevance -- what we choose to deem to be important. It's a concept that keeps popping up. In the embryonic stages of the course, we discussed the completely overwhelming nature of trying to preserve one time period, trying to capture even the smallest moment in history, setting us up for critiquing metanarratives, for those are the stories that we have chosen to capture. In Ragtime, the fixation upon the Morgan Library reminds us of how the "notable" items from other cultures shapes our perception of them. In the White readings, we are given some guidelines for determining what matters and what doesn't. And now, in Mumbo Jumbo, we receive perhaps the most forceful statement about preservation of non-Western cultures: that objects are to be placed under the control of the powers-that-be in an attempt to remove their power.

A paradox exists in the Wallflower Order's attitude towards African, Asian, and South American culture. On one hand, they value their art -- masks, sculptures, etc. -- as "treasures," and attempt to display them to the public at the Center for Art Detention. On the other hand, they do everything in their power to stop the spread of a different form of culture that same African culture, Jes Grew. Initially, I thought Reed made a point to illustrate this contradiction with the mu'tafikah, and to portray the randomness with with the empowered groups selects meaningful focal points in the culture of the disempowered group(s). However, upon further examination, Reed has a much different thesis: that the Wallflower Order purposefully displays global artifacts in the C.A.D. as a sort of cultural strangulation; as a way to control them.

Jes Grew is much harder to control because it cannot be popped inside a glass case. The powers-that-be are unable to contain it, which is why they denounce Jes Grew while hailing tribal masks as invaluable. When we think of Reed's analogy of non-white cultures as plagues, the C.A.D. takes on the qualities of not simply a prison, but a quarantine. All the precautions of an art museum --thick glass, no touching of the pieces, standing back __ number of feet -- are reminiscent of precautions taken against the spread of a disease.

Agora Week's reading about the Egyptian equivalent of Mumbo Jumbo's 1920s account of the spread of black culture discussed how the Templar's religion -- Christianity -- "compromised" with the Osirian traditions -- turning Isis into the Virgin Mary, for instance. Here is another example of the Wallflower Orders seeming to have embraced and incorporated some elements of non-white culture with the purpose of controlling the other culture and undermining its spread.

Literary Theory Isn't All Bullshit

It has come to my attention that I misspelled Doctorow somewhere around four times in my last blog post. In the spirit of the passive-aggressiveness that has been pervading this course as of late, I would like to give my thanks to all who helped bring this to my attention.

As we moved through our interlude discussions of the links between history and fiction, I found myself incredibly thankful that I had the experience of reading a postmodern piece of historical fiction, Ragtime, under my belt. As they say, seeing is believing, and its much easier to conceive of these ideas when we have had an example of a work that is concerned with the same questions of the subjectivity of the past. So, I will be attempting to look at Ragtime as a work of history and of fiction in a sort of case study to test some of the ideas that we've been discussing in class over the past few days.

One point that White makes that is pretty easy to evaluate is that history needs to use narrativity to increase its appeal to the reader. Obviously, Doctorow weaves his story into narrative form, making his characters compelling in and of themselves, rather than solely as objects of historical study.

When I first began this exercise, it really threw me for a loop. It's hard to give the same amount of credence to Harry K. Thaw flashing Harry Houdini through a set of prison bars as to a history textbooks portrayal of Washington crossing the Delaware. But, from a surface reading of White, that's what he wants me to do. However, upon further elaboration, he does give us a sort of out -- we get some rules as to determine what we should believe. On page 20, he says that events can be considered real "not because they occurred but because, first, they were remembered and, second, they are capable of finding a place in a chronologically ordered sequence." The Thaw-Houdini incident fails both stipulations -- we're told that Houdini tells nobody, and it's pretty safe to assume that the lunatic Thaw doesn't either. So it's not remembered. The finding a place in a chronologically ordered sequence bit is more interesting. (Of course, this is a moot point, because the first stipulation has failed. But let's just go with it). I interpret that to be that it not only makes sense that they happened within the time -- that, for example, there wouldn't have been computerized security systems in the prison -- but also that they fit into a sequence that we care about. We care about the sit-in because they're representative of the larger event of the Civil Right's Movement, which we have deemed to be important. Perhaps I found it so difficult to give historical credence to this weird incident between Houdini and Thaw because I couldn't see the larger context that it fit into.

Additionally, there seems to be a little bit of disdain for the metanarrative in historical education. While thinking about what the "postmodern history" class might look like, it would be tempting to demand the abolition of metanarrative. But I actually think that metanarrative in my historical education has been extremely important in helping me develop a nuanced and critical view. The process of learning and unlearning one's broken ideas of history is a very postmodern exercise. Anyway, Doctorow's use of metanarrative enhances the postmodernism of the book -- his ironic treatment of traditionally accepted ideas about America at the turn of the century resonates with us because we have been educated in those ideas. If the metanarrative indoctrination aspect of history fades away, so will the appeal of Ragtime. 

Tateh's Developments

The analysis of Henry Ford's Model T creation scene is ambiguous, but the case can be made that Doctrow is criticizing modernism and a single-minded pursuit of progress as dehumanizing of the workers. While there is a certain air of reverence, Ford is portrayed as slightly cold, and the reader is left with a feeling of unease at the joy taken from reducing human beings to parts of a machine.

Naturally, critique of Fordism has ramifications for Tateh, who in the previous chapter, strikes it big with the novelty store, agreeing to sell his flipbooks. In class, we discussed Tateh having "sold out"; his artwork being corrupted by his new contract for the "mass production" of a total of four flipbooks, all of which will still be handmade. After all, the happiness of his daughter is much purer a purpose for art than the acquisition of money.

Even though his newly earned money would be used to provide for his daughter. Even though, I image, the Little Girl would rather eat than hold a monopoly on her father's flipbooks. In fact, the argument that, somehow, Tateh is corrupting his artwork by making money off of it is slightly reminiscent of the superficial glorification of destitution that we see in the poverty balls of New York's high society. Which, by the way, Doctrow clearly hated, judging by the scathing irony that he treated them with. I don't blame Tateh for "selling out" on this very minute scale. It doesn't corrupt his art, and the assumption that it's purer when he was poor -- the beauty of the starving artist -- is kind of patronizing.

Now, another layer of his joining the ranks of American entrepreneurship is that he abandons his radical political associations: "Tateh began to conceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class" (131). If any part of his actions have been "selling out," it would be this. However, if we assume that Tateh's driving life's purpose has been to care for his daughter -- and we have no evidence that would challenge that assumption --, then he really wasn't selling out from what really mattered to him at all.

A not directly related point, but an interesting one: it seems that along with Tateh, Doctrow has abandoned the radical leftist political philosophy that is slightly implicit in his portrayals of the slums. As Iulianna noted in her most recent blog post, Doctrow treats Tateh and his situation with a lot more sincerity than he treats the situation in New Rochelle, suggesting a sort of alignment with the slums.