If they can get you asking the wrong questions...

[lectrobyte]

A plug for Pynchon, for those who might take a break from the internet and read a dead-tree book:

http://www.newpartisan.com/home/literature-for-the-age-of-unease-reading-pynchon-today.html

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers,” runs one of the Proverbs for Paranoids in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. That weird little morsel of advice offered thirty years ago remains relevant today, as American society careens with grim surety towards the Pynchonian vision of freedom as an illusion and democracy as a script already written by those clever enough to recognize the fault lines of exploitation. Since Word War II, no novelist has been more relentless in parsing out “the engineered character of history” (in the words of the historian Erik Davis) and also, of the troubled present, that such a manufactured history must inevitably portend.

[ThomCat]

1. I've always loved that quote. Refer to it often.

[Squeech]

2. Good luck

getting people, even DUers, to read that book. It's the single hardest novel I made it all the way through. (I should admit I've only finished one Russian novel in my life, and never made it to the end of any book by James Joyce.)

But I agree, that's probably the key quote in the book-- if not "Ficht nicht mit der Raketenmensch!" :-)