On Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

Mania is stretching vinelike across this country and I'm having trouble slipping past its knots, but if ever there was a novel to provide context, "Gravity's Rainbow," by Thomas Pynchon, does marvelously.

"Gravity's Rainbow" is an infinite numbers of things (among them a masterpiece), and I'll write more about those things when I'm deeper than my current 123 pages into its nearly 800, but today belongs to its stunning moral clarity: War is a loathsome and ruinous market-driver that renegotiates our lives on inhuman terms. It drives us to perversion, it hushes love, it feigns "purpose" and assigns its dictation to voices it silences, it tricks us into volunteered bondage—our most cruel, vulgar set-making still belongs to us, absorbing our minds away from Chance's sovereignty on war—it even makes us question cause and effect: Did your death instruct the missile where to land?

What's most captured me about "Gravity's Rainbow," though, is its overlap, because my goodness, doesn't this all feel so familiar? Are we not, today, renegotiating lives strictly in power's benefit—to keep Mahmoud Khalil detained on non-charges, to fund the forced starvation of Palestinians and to remove blame from a broken cease-fire which a genocidal architect calls "just the beginning," to cut HIV and AIDS medication from foreign nations?

Some will defend these as "good" things, but these people are committed to a laughably weak American experiment that, much like the Nazi war machine, can run only on blood (including the blood of its defenders). In a country built on suffering, these markless pre-mortem corpses seek martyrdom and thrash at our refusal.

This insight doesn't ease conditions, and we still have an opposition party committed to, uhh, shitting its pants, but beyond moral arguments, beyond legal, beyond strategic and reputational, is a blade against all this vinework: Fuck these losers who I hope choke on tar.