Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret by Paul H Rosenberg

As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the United States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (South End Press, 1991). Bellant's exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany's World War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements among the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukrainians aren’t Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.

Your book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, exposed the deep involvement in the Republican Party of Nazi elements from Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukrainians, dating back to World War II and even before. As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in the last few weeks, there have been scattered mentions of a fascist or neo-fascist element, but somehow that never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. I can’t think of anyone better to shed light on what’s not being said about that element. The danger of Russian belligerence is increasingly obvious, but this unexamined fascist element poses dangers of its own. What can you tell us about this element and those dangers?

The element has a long history, of a long record that speaks for itself, when that record is actually known and elaborated on. The key organization in the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN], or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas [OUN-B]. They’re the group behind the Svoboda party, which got a number of key positions in the new interim regime. The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s, began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them.

As World War II approached, they made an alliance with the Nazi powers. They formed several military formations, so that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at the time, where their base was, Lvov, or Lwow, it has a variety of spellings [Lviv today]. They went in, and there’s a documented history of them participating in the identification and rounding up Jews in that city, and assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. They were also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine during the war.

Without getting deeply involved in that whole history, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to this day defend their wartime role. They were backers of forming the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was the all-Ukrainian division that became an armed element on behalf of the Germans, and under overall German control. They helped encourage its formation, and after the war, right at the end of the war, it was called the First Ukrainian division. They still glorify that history of that SS division, and they have a veterans organization that obviously doesn’t have too many of members left, but they formed a veterans division of that.

If you look at insignia being worn in Kiev in the street demonstrations and marches, you'll see SS division insignia still being worn. In fact, I was looking at photographs last night of it, and there was a whole formation marching, not with the 14th Division, but with the Second Division. It was a large division that did major battle around Ukraine, and these marchers were wearing the insignia on the armbands of the Second Division.

So this is a very clear record, and the OUN, even in its postwar publications, has called for ethno-genetically pure Ukrainian territory, which of course is simply calling for purging Jews, Poles and Russians from what they consider Ukrainian territory. Also, current leaders of Svoboda have made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks that call for getting rid of Muscovite Jews and so forth. They use this very coarse, threatening language that anybody knowing the history of World War II would tremble at. If they were living here, it would seem like they would start worrying about it.

Obviously these people don’t hold monopoly power in Ukraine, but they stepped up and the United States has been behind the Svoboda party and these Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, the US connections to them go back to World War II, and the United States has had a longstanding tie to the OUN, through the intelligence agencies—initially military intelligence, later the CIA.

Your book discusses a central figure in the OUN, Yaroslav Stetsko, who was politically active for decades here in America. What can you tell us about his history?

Yaroslav Stetsko was the number-two leader of the OUN during World War II and thereafter. In 1959, Stepan Bandera, who was head of the OUN, was killed, and that’s when Stetsko assumed the leadership. Stetsko was the guy who actually marched into Lvov with the German army on June 30, 1941. The OUN issued a proclamation at that time under his name praising and calling for glory to the German leader Adolf Hitler and how they’re going to march arm in arm for Ukraine and so forth. After the war, he was part of the key leadership that got picked up by the Americans.

There’s a number of accounts I’ve seen, at least three credible reports, on how they were in the displaced persons camp—the Allied forces set up displaced persons camps and picked up tens of thousands of these former allies of Hitler from countries all over the East—Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania. There weren’t Polish collaborators; I think most people know the Germans heavily persecuted and murdered millions of Polish residents—but Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and so forth, Belorussia. They had them in these camps they built and organized them, where the Ukrainians were assassinating their Ukrainian nationalist rivals so they would be the undisputed leaders of Ukrainian nationalist movement, so they would get the sponsorship of the United States to continue their political operation, and they were successful in that regard. So when Bandera was out of the picture, Stetsko became the undisputed leader of Ukrainian nationalists.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 under German sponsorship organized a multinational force to fight on behalf of the retreating German army. After the battle of Stalingrad in ’43, the Germans felt a heightened need to get more allies, and so the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and others with military formations in place to assist came together and formed the united front called the Committee of Subjugated Nations, and again worked on behalf of the German military. In 1946, they renamed it the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN. Stetsko was the leader of that until he died in 1986.

I mention this in part because the OUN tries to say, Well, during the war we fought the Germans and the Communists. The fact of the matter is that they were the leadership of this whole multinational alliance on behalf of the Germans the last two years of the war and in the war thereafter. All the postwar leaders of the unrepentant Nazi allies were under the leadership of Yaroslav Stetsko.

What happened when Stetsko, and others like him from other German allied forces, came to the United States?

In the United States, when they came, his groups organized "captive nations" committees. They became, supposedly, the representatives of people who were being oppressed in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries by the Soviet Union. They were, in fact, being given an uncritical blank check to represent the voices of all these nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact, when in fact they represented the most extreme elements of each of the national communities.

The Captive Nations Committee in Washington, DC, for instance, was run by the person who headed the Ukrainian organization of nationalists; that was true in a number of places. In my hometown area near Detroit, as well, they played a major role. In the early 1950s, when they were resettled in the United States, there were at least 10,000 of them that were resettled, when you look at all the nationalities. They became politically active through the Republican National Committee, because it was really the Eisenhower administration that made the policy decision in the early 1950s, and brought them in. They set up these campaign organizations, every four years they would mobilize for the Republican candidate, whoever it would be, and some of them, like Richard Nixon in 1960, actually had close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron Guard, and some of these other groups.

When Nixon ran for president in 1968, he made a promise to these leaders that they would—if he won the presidency, he would make them the ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis, so they wouldn’t be a quadrennial presence, but a continuing presence in the Republican Party. And he made that promise through a guy named Laszlo Pasztor, who served five years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity. He was prosecuted in 1946 by the non-Communist government that actually had control of Hungary at the time (there was a period from ’45 to ’48 when the Hungarian Communist Party didn’t run Hungary). They were the ones who prosecuted him. He had served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin; he served in the Berlin embassy of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. This is the guy that got picked to organize all the ethnic groups, and the only people that got brought in were the Nazi collaborators.

They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all political stripes. There were no African-Americans or Jewish affiliates either. It was just composed of these elements, and for a while they had a German affiliate, but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained.

Your book was researched and published in the 1980s. What was happening by that point in time, after these groups had been established for more than a decade?

I went to their meetings in the 1980s, and they put out material that really made clear who they were. One of their 1984 booklets praised the pro-Nazi Ustashi regime in Croatia; these Ustashi killed an estimated 750,000 people and burned them alive in their own camp in Croatia. And here they are praising the founding of this regime, and acknowledging that it was associated with the Nazis, and it was signed by the chairman of the Republican National Committee. You couldn’t make this stuff up! It was just crazy.

I interviewed the Cossack guy; he showed me his pension from service in the SS in World War II, and how he was affiliated with free Nazi groups in the United States, and he was just very unrepentant. These are the umbrellas that were called "Captive Nations Committees" by these people that Stetsko was over, and was part of, too. The Reagan White House brought him in, and promoted him as a major leader and did a big dinner. Jeane Kirkpatrick [UN Ambassador during the Reagan administration] was part of it, George H.W. Bush as Vice President, of course, Reagan—and Stetsko was held up as a great leader. And proclamations were issued on his behalf.

When Bush Senior was running for president in 1988, he came to these, basically one of the leading locations of the Ukrainian nationalists in North America, which is just outside of Detroit, a suburb of Detroit, to their cultural center, and one of their foremost leaders in the world is headquartered out of there. At the time, he got Bush to come there and they denounced the OSI, and Bush just shook his head; he wouldn’t say anything about it.

The OSI was the Office of Special Investigations. It was investigating the presence of Nazi war criminals in the United States, and deporting those who were found to have lied on their history when they applied to come into the United States after the war. They had deported a number of people from all over the United States. They had a lot of open investigations, and all these émigré Nazis were trying to bring all the political pressure they could to stop these investigations, including the Ukrainian nationalists.

So they denounced them, the OSI investigations, in front of Bush. Bush nodded his head, but he wouldn’t say anything because he didn’t want to sound like he was sympathetic to the Nazi war criminals, but at the same time he didn’t want to offend his hosts by disputing the issue with them. So, the issue of World War II was still being played out over four decades later, in the politics of the presidency, and unfortunately Bush and Reagan continued to be on the side that we defeated in World War II.

What was the response when your book came out, with all this information? How was the information received, and what was the political reaction?

Prior to the book’s publication, Washington Jewish Week had done a story about some of the ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign and their history, like denying the Holocaust, or being involved with these émigré Nazi groups. They named a couple of them that weren’t part of the Heritage Groups Council, but they were part of the Bush campaign.

Then, when I published the book, it brought out a lot more names, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe did stories on them. It got to the point where when a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer would call them about one of their ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign, the standard response was, he’s no longer part of the campaign, and they’d say that almost as soon as the name would get mentioned. So that they would call that person—and I’ll give the example of Florian Galdau, he was, he ran the Romanian Iron Guard in New York City. He had a wartime record. [Romanian Archbishop Valerian] Trifa himself was implicated in the mass killing of Jews in Bucharest in 1941, I believe. Galdau’s record is clear, because when Trifa was prosecuted he was one of the people targeted by the Office of Special Investigations, and he was forced into deportation in the 1980s, but in those records, they identify Florian Galdau as one of his operatives, so his history is known—except, apparently, to the Bush campaign.

So when he was identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer, they immediately said he wasn’t part of it, so the Inquirer called Florian Galdau, and he said, “No, I’m part of it. They never said anything to me. As far as I know I’m still part of the campaign.” And that was the pattern.

The Republican National Committee said after the election that they were going to put a blue ribbon committee together and do an investigation of the charges in my book. I was never contacted, nobody affiliated with the book project, the publisher wasn’t contacted. None of the sources I worked with was contacted. And after about a year, with nobody raising any issues or questions about it, they just folded it up and they said, well, we have not had the resources to investigate this matter.

I did publish an op-ed in The New York Times about two weeks after the election was over, and I think that was the last time anybody said anything publicly about it that got any kind of forum. I think they were allowed to just die and wither away—that is, those leaders. The Republican idea was probably to bring in another generation of people who were born in the United States as these émigré’s died off, but they never did anything about this history that Nixon had bequeathed them with. The Reagan White House had really made deep political commitments and alliances with them. They didn’t want to look like they turned their back on them, and Bush wanted them for his re-election campaign, so he wasn’t going to turn his back on them either.

If you want an anecdote, I know that 60 Minutes was working on a piece that Bradley’s team was working on. Nancy Reagan herself called the executive producer and said that we would really like it if you wouldn’t do this story, and they killed it. Because, basically, it’s not just about Nazis and the Republican National Committee and the White House. It inevitably raises the question of, who are they, how did they get here, who sponsored them? And it goes back to the intelligence agencies at that point. And some people don’t like treading there; if it’s tied to an intelligence agency, they prefer to just stay away from the subject. So, some people at 60 Minutes were frustrated by it, but that’s what happened. I think that they were able to effectively kill the story when people tried to cover it. They were able to persuade news managers to not delve into it too much.

What’s happened since you wrote your book, and most of the World War II generation died off? What have the OUN and its allies been up to since then that we should be aware of?

Once the OUN got sponsored by the American security establishment intelligence agencies, they were embedded in a variety of ways in Europe as well, like Radio Free Europe, which is headquartered in Munich. A lot of these groups in the ABN were headquartered in Munich under the sponsorship of Radio Free Europe. From there, they ran various kinds of operations where they were trying to do work inside the Warsaw Pact countries. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a number of them moved back into Ukraine as well as the other respective countries and began setting up operations there, and organizing political parties. They reconstituted the veterans group of the Waffen SS, they held marches in the 1990s in Ukraine, and they organized political parties, in alliance with the United States, and became part of what was called the Orange Revolution in 2004, when they won the election there.

The prime minister [a reference to Viktor Yushchenko, president of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010] was closely allied with them. They worked with the new government to get veterans benefits for the Ukrainian SS division veterans, and they started establishing the statues and memorials and museums for Stepan Bandera, who was the leader of the OUN, and who I should say were despised by other Ukrainian nationalists because of their methods, because they were extreme and violent toward rival Ukrainian nationalist groups. So Bandera wasn’t a universal hero, but this group was so influential, in part because of its US connections, that if you go online and you Google "Lviv" and the word "Bandera" you’ll see monuments and statues and large posters and banners of Bandera’s likeness and large monuments—permanent erected monuments—on behalf of Bandera so they made this guy like he’s the George Washington of Ukraine.

That government was in power until 2010, when there was another election, and a new regime was elected with a lot of support from the East. Ukrainian nationalist groupings around the Orange Revolution were sharply divided against each other, and there was rampant corruption, and people voted them out. The United States was very aggressive in trying to keep the nationalists in power, but they lost the election. The United States was spending money through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was pumping money into various Ukrainian organizations, and they were doing the same thing in Russia and many other countries around the world as well. We’re talking about many millions of dollars a year to affect the politics of these countries.

When the occupations came in Independence Square in Kiev late last year, you can see Svoboda’s supporters and you can hear their leaders in the Parliament making blatant anti-Semitic remarks. The leader of the Svoboda party went to Germany to protest the prosecution of John Demjanjuk, who was the Ukrainian who was settled in the United States who was implicated as a concentration camp guard in the killing of innocent people. The German courts found him guilty, and the Svoboda leadership went to Germany to complain about convicting this guy. The reason? They said they didn’t want any Ukrainians tainted with it, because they live a lie: that no Ukrainian had anything to do with the German Nazi regime, when history betrays them, and their own affiliations betray them. But they don’t like that being out there publicly, so they always protest the innocence of any Ukrainian being charged with anything, regardless of what the evidence is.

Your book was an important revelation but was not alone. Your book notes that Jack Anderson reported on the pro-Nazi backgrounds of some of the ethnic advisors as far back as 1971, yet when your report came out almost two decades later, everyone responded with shock, surprise and even denial. What lessons should we draw from this history of buried history? And how should it influence our thinking about the unfolding crisis in Ukraine?

I don’t believe it’s ever too late to become familiarized and educated about the history of this phenomenon—both the wartime history and our postwar collaboration with these folks. There were a number of exposés written about the émigré Nazis. There was a 1979 book called Wanted, and it did a number of case stories of these people being brought into the United States, including the Trifa story. Christopher Simpson did a book called Blowback that discussed the policy decisions; it’s an incredible book. He’s a professor at American University, and he did years of research through the Freedom of Information Act and archives, and got the policy documents under which the decisions were made to bring these folks together, and not just into the United States but to deploy them around the world.

Like my book, it didn’t get the attention it deserved. The New York Times book reviewer was negative toward the book. There are people who really don’t want to touch this stuff. There’s a lot of people who don’t want it touched. I think it’s really important for people who believe in openness and transparency and democratic values, who don’t want to see hate groups come back to power in other parts of the world, to know what happened.

There aren't very many Americans who really even know that the Waffen SS was a multinational force. That’s been kind of kept out of the received history. Otherwise people would know that there were Ukrainian Nazis, Hungarian Nazis, Latvian Nazis, and they were all involved in the mass murder of their fellow citizens, if they were Jewish, or even if they were co-nationalists that were on the other side of the issue of the war. They were just mass murderers, across Eastern Europe. And that history, those facts, aren’t even well-known. A lot of people didn’t even know this phenomenon existed.

I think all Americans have a responsibility to know what their government is doing in the foreign policy in Europe as well as elsewhere around the world, as well as Latin America, as well as Africa. Since our policy was to uphold apartheid in South Africa, why weren’t Americans challenging that more? They began challenging that in the '80s, but the apartheid regime was run by the Nazi party. They were allied with Germany in World War II. They were the Nationalist party and they took power in 1948 and the United States backed that for decades. We backed the death squads in Latin America, even though they massacred tens of thousands of people—200,000 people in Guatemala alone. Americans aren’t being attentive to what their government is doing abroad, even though it’s being done with their tax dollars and in their name, and I think we just have a general responsibility.

I went to these meetings, I went to these conferences, I went over a period of years. I met with them directly, most of the people I wrote about, I met with them personally or in group meetings. People can’t afford to do that on their own, timewise, but there’s enough literature out there so they can read about it. They will get enough of a handle to get what the real picture is, to demand change. I’m not totally partisan: I think the Republican Party was extreme on this, but the Democrats folded and didn’t challenge this when they knew it was going on.

There is an old Roman poet who once said truth does not say one thing and wisdom another. I’m a believer in that. Tell the truth and wisdom will follow.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/179057/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret#

Bolaño’s Abysses by Mark O'Connell

Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño

Originally published in Stonecutter Issue 2

Roberto Bolaño’s introduction to a 1999 Spanish edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with one of those great and flagrant generalizations for which, among many other things, his writing is remarkable. “All American novelists,” he announces, “including those who write in Spanish, at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon. These books represent two paths, two structures, and above all two plots. Even sometimes: two fates. One is Moby-Dick and the other is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The fact that the piece, which is included towards the end ofBetween Parentheses, is entitled “Our Guide to the Abyss” is only the first clue to Bolaño’s readers that he is writing at least as much about his own fiction here as he is about Mark Twain’s (the abyss, the empty presence of absence itself, is a symbol as central to Bolaño’s work as the labyrinth is to that of his great hero Borges). Bolaño goes on to outline precisely what these oppositional pillars of the American novel represent:

The first is the key to those realms that by convention or for the sake of convenience we call the realms of evil, those places where man struggles with himself and with the unknown and is generally defeated in the end; the second is the key to adventure and happiness, a lesser-known land, modest and unassuming, in which the character or characters set the quotidian in motion, start it rolling, and the results are unpredictable and at the same time recognizable and close at hand.

It is one of the measures of Bolaño’s sheer expansiveness as a writer that, in his own fiction, he followed both of these paths to their wildest, strangest conclusions. The Savage Detectives, with its crazy exuberance and successive celebration and lamentation of youth, freedom, friendship and poetry, is—as he himself once pointed out—a kind of Latin American Huckleberry Finn. His blood-dark posthumous masterpiece 2666, meanwhile, channels the death-seeking obsessions of Melville’s masterwork. And that is the curious, crossbred beauty of Bolaño’s work: he is both Huck and Ahab, as sure a pilot of a riverboat as he is of a whaler on black and bottomless waters.

Between Parentheses collects Bolaño’s essays, criticism, speeches and miscellaneous sketches from between 1998 and 2003, and all are translated by Natasha Wimmer, whose part in the crusade to bring the whole of this writer’s sizeable oeuvre to English-speaking readers is nothing less than heroic. In these pieces, it is primarily the Huck Finn side of his persona we meet; only rarely do we glimpse the visionary Ahab of 2666. The bulk of the collection is composed of a huge number of Bolaño’s columns, written first for a regional paper in his adopted home of Catalonia,Diari de Girona, and then for Las Úlitimas Noticias in Chile, the country of his birth. These columns begin in 1998, which was a watershed moment in Bolaño’s tragically truncated life. The Savage Detectives was published in Spain that year, and Bolaño quickly went from being a relatively obscure Latin American immigrant writer to being one of the most celebrated novelists in the hispanophone world. Bolaño was a very big deal by the time he started publishing these articles, and it’s pretty clear that he was given editorial carte blanche to write about whatever the hell he felt like writing about. The pieces are extremely short—around five or six hundred words each—and Bolaño flits, from one installment to the next, between any number of topics. Sometimes he’ll review a new book, sometimes he’ll go off on a whimsical reverie about an old friend or acquaintance, and sometimes he’ll grab his readers by the lapels and tell them they absolutely have to get themselves a book by some or other novelist or poet he’s just been re-reading.

The result is fragmentary, disjointed, capricious, and yet absolutely compelling (an observation that could just as accurately be made of his fiction). It’s a bit like reading an unusually interesting and well-written blog, where there’s no obvious thematic thread linking one entry with the next, but where the writer’s persona, the magnetism of his or her style, keeps you pushing on through the pages. In a strange sort of way, reading the columns is reminiscent of reading the fiction (though the visionary intensity of the latter is replaced in the former by an easygoing chattiness). A kind of cumulative fragmentariness, after all, is one of the chief formal characteristics of Bolaño’s work. Think of the long, harrowing middle section of 2666, in which one short and flatly descriptive account of a raped and murdered woman’s corpse is piled mercilessly on top of another, and then another (and then another), for a full 300 pages. Or the extraordinary middle section of The Savage Detectives, in which glimpses of the lost years of poets Arturo Belano and Ulysses Lima (based on the author and his friend Mario Santiago) are provided via snatches of recorded interviews with a vast array of friends and acquaintances. Or the brief, Borgesian portraits of imaginary writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas. Bolaño’s best work exploits the peculiar potency of the partial, the frustrated, the disconnected. After all, 2666, which is perhaps his most powerful and haunting work, not only resolutely refuses to cohere in terms of its disparate sections, but remains literally incomplete in the sense that its author died before he was able to finish it.

One of the main pleasures of reading the book is in spotting the raw anecdotes and various preoccupations that were later to be transfigured into fiction. The second of Between Parentheses’ssix sections is entitled “Fragments of a Return to the Native Land”, and it contains a number of reflections, written for various newspapers and journals, on Bolaño’s first return to Chile following a 23-year absence in the wake of the Pinochet coup. There’s a relatively long piece here called “The Corridor with No Apparent Way Out” that relates a bizarre and horrifying incident which happened at a gathering of literary types in Santiago during the Pinochet dictatorship. The evening is hosted by the intellectual wife of a right-wing American who is working for the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate and is “possibly also a CIA agent.” In the cellars beneath their massive suburban house, the American interrogates and tortures left-wing political prisoners before they are removed to other detention centres, or “added to the list of disappeared.” The literature-loving wife holds frequent meetings for writers in her living room, there being few other places to go at night due to the curfew. At one of these meetings, a guest who has had too much to drink goes looking for the bathroom and gets lost in the vastness of the house. He ends up descending a flight of stairs to find a door at the end of a hallway (“long like Chile”). He opens the door. “The room is dark,” we are told, “but even so he can make out a bound figure, in pain or possibly drugged. He knows what he’s seeing. He closes the door and returns to the party. He isn’t drunk anymore. He’s terrified, but he doesn’t say anything.” This story appears more or less unchanged in By Night in Chile, Bolaño’s stunning satirical novella about the complicity of a Catholic priest and literary critic (and the intellectual establishment embodied by him) in the Pinochet terror. In an oeuvre scattered with moments of silence and terror, this is possibly the most chilling, and it is fascinating for readers of Bolaño to see its factual, or at least anecdotal, origins.

Among the many other modes it occupies, Bolaño’s fiction is characterized by a recurring strain of the elegiac. The Savage Detectives is about poetry, but it is, more specifically, about how poetry gets lost, how it subsides without trace into the void of time. The novel starts out as an exuberant celebration of life and literature, but devolves into a sort of lament for lost and forgotten things, for vanished people and their works. This melancholy assessment of the fate of two Latin American writers of Belano and Lima’s generation is given by one of the tragic chorus of voices toward the end of the novel:

They discovered their literary callings early on, of course: the Peruvian wrote poems and the Cuban wrote stories. Both believed in the revolution and freedom, like pretty much every Latin American writer born in the fifties. Then they grew up and experienced the full flush of success: their books were published, all the critics unanimously praised them, they were hailed as the continent’s top young writers, one in poetry and the other in fiction, and although it was never spoken everyone began to await their definitive works. But then the same thing happened to them that almost always happens to the best Latin American writers born in the fifties: the trinity of youth, love, and death was revealed to them, like an epiphany. How did this vision affect their works? At first, in a scarcely perceptible way: as if a sheet of glass lying on top of another sheet of glass were shifted slightly. Only a few friends noticed. Then, inescapably, they headed for catastrophe or the abyss.

The key word there isn’t so much “abyss” as it is “inescapably”: everything and everyone in Bolaño’s world winds up sinking, sooner or later, into an unavoidable void. Literature itself is a reaction against oblivion—a triumphantly futile shout into an endless emptiness—but it can’t ever provide an escape.

Throughout Between Parentheses, though, a much more cheerful Bolaño goes about bolstering and resurrecting reputations left, right and centre. Any number of Spanish and Latin American novelists and poets are declared pivotal figures of their generations. Most Anglophone readers will have to take his word for it on a lot of these. He is a hugely generous and indefatigable praiser of other peoples’ books—an admirable quality in a friend and a distinguished novelist, naturally, but not necessarily something you look for in a literary critic. An awful lot of the columns begin with an announcement that some or other cherished old friend or colleague has just published a new book, and end by telling the reader to buy, borrow, or steal it as soon as they can. Many more of them are impromptu commendations of writers he just decided to bang out a few hundred words on. If he’s not up to much as a rigorous literary critic—and to be fair the form doesn’t really permit proper criticism anyway—his wild eloquence and enthusiasm for the books he loves makes up for it. In the ten or so days during which I was reading the collection, I bought two books on Bolaño’s recommendation—Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (very good call) and Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis (too soon to say).

One of the aspects of Bolaño’s character that comes across most clearly through this collection is his tremendous loyalty to old friends, his tireless championing of literary underdogs that is often revealed as a curious compound of stoic resignation and staunch belief, a kind of passionate fatalism. It’s worth remembering that Bolaño was terminally ill with a liver disorder during the time when he was writing many of these pieces—a period that roughly coincided with his working on the gargantuan and thanatocentric 2666—and so the various iterations of the consciousness of the abyss have their origins very close to home. In the probing and playful interview with which the collection closes (published in the Mexican edition of Playboy in July 2003, the month of Bolaño’s death, and previously included in Melville House’s Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview) this comes across in interesting and even amusing ways. When asked what his favourite soccer team is, Bolano replies that he no longer has one. Then he slightly revises the statement: “The teams that drop quickly through the divisions down to the regionals, and then are gone. The ghost teams.” And when asked what he thinks paradise is like, he replies that it is “Like Venice, I hope, somewhere full of Italians. Somewhere that’s used well and used up and that knows that nothing lasts, not even paradise, and in the end it doesn’t matter.” That is a terribly sad and lovely and witty thing for a person to say in the last days of his own life, to suggest that even paradise itself might be a sinking city, beautiful and condemned, and that that abyss might be something worth hoping for.

As exuberant as Bolaño can sometimes be, he seems to me to be essentially a tragic writer, or at least an elegiac one. Even when he is at his most enthusiastic, his most effulgent with passion for poetry and life, he is never far from reminding us that everything will be lost, and that nothing will matter. Whether he has his back to it or whether he is staring straight into it, in other words, he is always on the verge of the abyss. In a piece on the young Argentine poet Neuman, entitled “Neuman, touched by grace,” Bolaño is at once richly approving and typically despairing:

When I come across these young writers it makes me want to cry. I don’t know what the future holds for them. I don’t know whether a drunk driver will run them down some night or whether all of a sudden they’ll stop writing. If nothing like that happens, the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.

This is obviously poignant but, whether it wants to be or not, it is also funny. (At least for me it is: I couldn’t help thinking of, say, Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes praising Zadie Smith or some other youngish writer by saying that she was certain to grow into an extraordinarily important figure as long as she didn’t get knocked down by a bus first, or give up writing out of despair or futility.) Like a lot of funny things, though, it’s only funny until you think about it properly, and then you wonder how you ever laughed at it in the first place.

Between Parentheses is a series of fascinating glimpses into the enthusiasms and preoccupations of one of the most compelling figures in contemporary literature. Above all, it’s a pleasure to witness Bolaño holding court, like the smartest and most garrulous drunk at the bar, on whatever he feels like talking about. It contains, too, one of the most memorable definitions of writing—or descriptions of what it should be— that I have ever come across. “So what,” he asks, “is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all the dead writers.” As with many authors, when Bolaño appears to be offering thoughts about literature in general, he is nearly always also referring to his own work. He wrote from the edge of the precipice without ever sinking into the ethical and aesthetic void of nihilism. In his fiction, he stared death––physical death, moral death––straight in its impassively grinning face, but always with the warmth of life at his back. This was the nature of his own peculiar greatness.

Pynchon's Vineland: The War on Drugs and the Coming Police-State by Dan Geddes

Vineland is a politically engaging, darkly hilarious novel. Vinelanddescribes America as "scabland garrison state," where organized political dissent is monitored and ultimately destroyed by the federal government. The Repression, as Pynchon calls it, takes many forms, including naked police power, political infiltration of the resistance, and the War on Drugs. The American culture pre-empts dissent; Hollywood and the Tube even weakens people's intellect and powers of resistance. The American economy, as seen in Vineland, is barren; workers provide each other with "services" like law enforcement, drug enforcement, as well as Hollywood movies and TV shows to feed the Tube.

Pynchon's view of America is unflattering, yet more realistic other writers, many of whom write dystopias. Pynchon convincingly depicts hard power: drug raids, paramilitary assaults, and the dark corridors of the military and corporations. Some reviewers, looking for another literary tour de force, were disappointed by Pynchon's straightforward tale of Sixties radicals undermined by COINTELPRO, the federal government's notorious program of infiltrating the counterculture.

Pynchon’s main goal is to dramatize the American government’s repression of its people in the early 1980s. The outlines of the Repression have been clear for a long time. The problem is that the struggle seems long lost. Re-reading Vineland during the steady loss of civil liberties during the George W. Bush regime, we are reminded of the long genesis of the repression: police used as strike-breakers in the 19^th century, and in Hollywood in the 1930s, the COINTELPRO activities, and the 1980s war on drugs (mainly marijuana) in the novel.

Infiltrating the Resistance Movement

Pynchon's tale of fascist America is realistic and historical, rather than allegorical or overtly dystopic like Animal Farm or 1984. Pynchon describes characters who, however silly some of their names and situations, are emblematic of the 1960s resistance to state power. Yet the state successfully undermines them all.

Zoyd Wheeler, an "average doper," after being framed as a pot dealer in the late Sixties, is reduced to accepting mental disability checks. Although Zoyd is not politically active, his alternative lifestyle is considered mentally defective by the government, much as Stalinist Russia treated political dissent as a psychological problem.

The central co-optation of the novel is Frenesi Gates' rather inexplicable drift into becoming a "snitch," apparently out of lust for the novel's villain, Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor. While Frenesi's lust attempts to explain her individual betrayal of the Movement, through her story Pynchon describes federal infiltration of dissident groups. The often hilarious episode of the People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a small California college town that turns countercultural and secedes from the union, is emblematic of the Sixties campus rebellions. The PR³ as it is called, is led by an unlikely leader, Weed Atman, a mathematics professor spontaneously proclaimed leader on account of his height. Brock Vond, who doesn't want to destroy the PR³ through simple invasion, sees it as a "scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost." His plan is to plant money in the PR³, and get everyone fighting over it.

Frenesi’s betrayal of the movement is the pivot, but remains unconvincing. Pynchon tries to explain it in turns of her fetish for men in uniform, apparently inherited from her mother. Frenesi's treachery weakens the movement, leading to the end of Frenesi's filmmaking career, 24fps, and the People's Republic of Rock and Roll. Frenesi's betrayal of the movement is the least convincing action of the book. Frenesi seems so strong to us, has such an illustrious leftist pedigree; and Brock Vond, despite being described as a handsome man in uniform, is one of Pynchon's incredibly crazy characters (Hector, Takeshi, and Brock are three of the crazier ones here). So this explanation is deterministic, and so unsatisfying, but we sense that explaining Frenesi’s change of sides in the struggle is not the central mystery of the book.

Instead, Frenesi’s love of Vond lends itself more to “symbolic” interpretation. We meet Frenesi in 1984, married to Flash, and later on film, as the director of 24fps. But Zoyd and Prairie, DL and Takeshi, Sister Rochelle, and even Hector, among other characters, register more clearly and memorably than Frenesi. Perhaps, Frenesi is representative of the press, or at least video journalism. She moves from exposing the predations of the unchecked governmental power to actively working to undermine the resistance. The media at large now beats the drum for the police, in countless TV shows and movies that glorify policemen, and military men. The media has fallen in love with men in uniform just as Frenesi has. Frenesi remains shadowy, the object of Prairie's search, of everyone's search, as the search for the meaning of the Sixties.

Frenesi’s decision to become an informant marks the end of the resistance. After that, 24fps is disbanded, and the counterculture no longer documents the government’s repression on film. Although Vond sets up his PREP camps to breed informants, by the early 1980s, as Hector tell Frenesi, the funding is cut off because young people are volunteering for it. The quelling of the resistance has succeeded.

The Repression: America as Garrison State

Pynchon shows us the severity of The Repression, perhaps too spooky for some to countenance. A steady stream of police and military encounters punctuate Vineland. The most recurring crackdown is that of CAMP, the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, which includes video surveillance and military assaults against marijuana growers. For Pynchon, The War on Drugs has been a pivotal battle in the government's war on civil liberties, and so is worthy of exposure. Pynchon shows the human cost of the War on Drugs within the circle of his characters. Zoyd is a "good" character, a caring father, engaged in simple honest toil and music making. He builds his own house, and yet has it seized unjustly, because of Brock Vond’s mad lust for Frenesi. Frenesi could have been describing Zoyd when she mentions "targets so powerless compared to those who were setting them up that some other motive, less luminous than that of the national interest, must have been at work." (72) Whose interest, and what is the motive?

Pynchon never satisfying answers this question. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it is merely Them. In Vineland, it is "the Real Ones, [who] remained year in and year out, keeping what was desirable flowing their way." (276) It is they who are engaged in “some planetwide struggle [that] had been going on for years, power accumulating, lives worth less, personnel changing, still governed by the rules of gang war and blood feud, though it had far outgrown them in scale.” (146)

Dissidents are targets of the Real Ones, but so are average guys like Zoyd. As Mucho Maas says: “…soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses…" (313)

Whoever They are, Pynchon also shows us naked police power in action. The PR3 is finally destroyed by a military style assault captured on film by Frenesi for 24fps.

By morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it. (248).

Frenesi is arrested and later rescued by DL from an underground detention center, accessible only by secret FEER (Federal Emergency Evacuation Route) roads. The center was "intended as a holding area able to house up to half a million urban evacuees in the event of, well, say, some urban evacuation." (249).

Even in the novel's present time, set in the year 1984, DL and Prairie discover a crude bugging device. And it seems that three members of the old 24fps gang have recently disappeared. DL and Ditzah are panicked. "It only begins to assume some nationwide pattern here, right?"

In the olden days we called it the last roundup," DL explained. "Liked to scare each other with it, though it was always real enough. The day they'd come and break into your house and put everybody in prison camps. Not fun or sitcom prison camps, more like feedlots where we'd all become official, nonhuman livestock."

"You've seen camps like this?"…

"Yep, I've seen 'em, your mom was in one, you'll recall, but better than us reminiscing and boring you, go to the library sometime and read about it. Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go. Reagan's got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out." (264)

It is easy to believe that DL's thoughts are Pynchon's own, and perhaps her encouragement for Prairie to research these things, is also aimed at the reader.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Hector, the Tube crazed DEA agent recalls an ominous moment he had watching TV the other night.

…he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices  hard, flat, echoing.

"But we don't actually have the orders yet," somebody said.

"It's only a detail," the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a service voice, "just like getting a search warrant." Onto the screen came some Anglo in fatigues, about Hector's age, sitting at a desk against a pale green wall under fluorescent light. He kept looking over to the side, off-camera.

"My name is — what should I say, just name and rank?"

"No names," the other advised.

The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and he read it to the camera. "As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD #52 of 6 April 1984 as amended, I am authorized — what?" He started up, sat back down, went in some agitation for the desk drawer, which stuck, or had been locked. Which is when the movie came back on, and continued with no further military interruptions. (339-340).

Rex-84, the national security exercise alluded to, was a real occurrence. These aren’t literary games. The US federal government pre-empts dissidence, and in the last resort, restricts it and attacks it. 

The Reagan-Bush Repression: The War on Drugs

The War on Drugs in Vineland is shown to be the latest chapter of the government's Repression, which stretches far into the past, but grows in intensity over time. It is here that Pynchon is politically engaging, for how many novelists have been willing to address this perpetual war against civil liberties? Many find it difficult even to criticize the War on Drugs, perhaps because the "debate" has been framed in such a way that those opposed to it are seen as condoning drug use. The mainstream press joins the chorus of praise for drug busts, instead of discussing the loss of civil liberties, or criticizing government excesses.

The CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) offensive of the government is disturbingly portrayed. In the past Zoyd was set-up by Hector with a huge monolith of pot planted in his house. The War on Drugs is so prone to abuse by police power, precisely because mere possession of controlled substances is an offense, and so easy to orchestrate, to “plant the evidence.” Its villains, notably Brock Vond, are irrational tools of the powerful.

The victims of the War on Drugs are people like Zoyd, an average doper of the Sixties, depicted as an honest, hard-working caring father and musician, who smokes pot all the time. Zoyd even builds his own house, bit by bit over the years, only to have it confiscated by the government under civil RICO. After he is framed for growing marijuana, he seeks legal counsel, and is told:

“What about innocent ’till proven guilty’?”

“That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land.”

“Wait — I wasn’t growin’ nothin’.”

“They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?” (360)

Not only does the government frame suspects, bribe informants, burn marijuana plants, seize property, the final irony is that they are a ultimate source of drugs. Agent Roy Ibble, tells Flash that:

notice how cheap coke has been since ’81?…Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you figure it out? (354)

The “you figure it out” recalls DL’s admonition to Prairie about the detention centers, to “check it out.”

So the War on Drugs in Vineland is shown as a perpetual attack by a corrupt government upon its people. Agent Ibble is even seen gambling with government money. 

Although Pynchon cannot resist satirizing the counterculture along with its fascist oppressors, there is no doubt on which "side" he is on the struggle. Many of the main characters take drugs, including Zoyd's marijuana use, Takeshi's amphetamines, Ernie Triggerman and Sid Liftoff’s cocaine use, even Hub and Sasha's Benzedrine inhaler. (290)Vineland's cover shows a burning forest, suggestive of the government's attempt to stamp out marijuana use, a great nation’s war on a botanical species.

Vineland is the story of the repression of the counterculture, and the origins of the wider culture wars. The War on Drugs is central to the current repression, and an important battlefield on which civil libertarians must defend their liberties.

The Tube

The drug of choice for nearly everyone is the Tube. The main characters watch the Tube, exhibit intimacy with it, and even see the world in terms of the Tube. Some are extreme Tube watchers, including especially Hector, an escapee from Tubaldetox (where inmates sing a house hymn before supper called “The Tube” (336)), as well as the Thanatoids, for whom it is their favorite activity.

The Tube helps consolidate the Repression in many ways. It is a daily distraction from life. Characters in Vineland watch a lot of TV movies, often biographies about TV personalities, such as The Frank Gorshin Story, or The Bryant Gumbel Story. Frenesi masturbates to the Tube, to the show “CHIPS”, and its images of police authority. (83) The characters also pick up the habits of TV characters. Prairie buzzes like a game show when Zoyd gives an unsatisfactory answer to her question. Hector’s everyday personality attempts to mimic the actor Ricardo Montalban.

Isaiah 2:4 even blames the Tube for the end of the 1960s revolution. He tells Zoyd:

“Whole problem ’th you folk’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like the’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap…” (373)

TV is now used to trivialize people. Zoyd’s annual jump through the window to do something “publicly crazy” is televised. The Tube is also his last recourse for the trumped-up marijuana charges against him; if found guilty, he intends to try to get on 60 Minutes. Examples of the corrosive impact of the Tube on the characters occur throughout the book. Interestingly, books are seldom mentioned or referred to inVineland.

The Tube is now the historical record of our time. When Prairie watches the 24fps archives, a “true” record of the sixties, she is surprised by

an America of the olden days she’d mostly never seen, except in fast clips on the Tube meant to suggest the era, or distantly implied in reruns like “Bewitched” or “The Brady Bunch.” (198)

It is significant that Brock ultimately destroys the 24fps footage, an echo of Winston Smith’s alteration of history in 1984. History inVineland is also written falsely as it happens. For example, the mainstream “official” press is docile after the PR³ crackdown. At Brocks’ press conference, "the media toadies present" ask a few polite questions. But

Somebody from the radical press must have infiltrated. "You mean they're on the run?" Are there warrants out? How come none are listed as federal fugitives?" The reporter was led away by a brace of plainclothes heavies…(248)

Sheriff Willis Chunko of Vineland country is seen on the Tube “gleefully slashing into yet another patch of mature [marijuana] plants.” (373)

The Tube is becoming our governing authority. For many it is our only contact with elected officials. It is even the source of orders. When Hector sees the accidental military interruptions to his movie, he suspects a silly national emergency "As if the Tube were suddenly to stop showing pictures and instead announce, "From now on, I'm watching you."” (340)

The influence of the Tube in the world of Vineland cannot be overstated.

Corporations and Workers

Pynchon’s sketch of America shows a decline into a barren service economy. America has become a “scabland garrison state.” A lot of union jobs have been lost, resulting in Zoyd, for example, working as a “gypsy” roofer. How many people in Vineland are engaged in productive labor? Zoyd is a hard worker, who puts together a day’s work out of odd jobs, and even builds many additions on to his house. (Yet he also receives a mental disability check from the government.)

Many of the major characters are occupied in non-productive work. Brock and Hector are federal agents, Frenesi and Flash their paid snitches; all are federal employees, prosecuting a war against their own people. The Thanatoids only watch the Tube, as does everyone else. Prairie works in food service. Takeshi works in insurance adjustments (later karmic adjustments with DL). Ralph Wayvone is a successful mob boss. 

The great union days, strongly represented by Sasha Gates, Frenesi’s mother, are gone. The labor struggle is something that appears to have been lost by 1984. Frenesi fought some battles for it during the sixties, but there is no sign of it in the novel’s present time.

Corporations are perhaps best seen in the Chipco incident, as actors in a global power struggle unseen by most men. Takeshi is an insurance claims adjustor and sees the “deep actuarial mysteries,” and had “come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond…” (147-48) Takeshi must investigate the destruction of the Chipco research complex. It appears to have been the work of a giant reptile; the insurance adjustors detect a size 20,000 reptilian footprint left behind. Takeshi’s instincts, however, are that it is fabricated, and suspects that Chipco destroyed its own complex and wants to collect the insurance, just one evil act in the “planetwide struggle [that] had been going on for years,” mentioned earlier. “Chipco was in it up to its eyeballs, and it looked like the Professor might have been fading some of the action.”  (146)

Takeshi and DL, as karmic adjustors, are able to keep one step ahead of

the faceless predators who’d once boarded Takeshi’s airplane in the sky, the ones who’d had the Chipco lab stomped on, who despite every Karmic Adjustment resource brought to bear so far had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate… (383)

Business is a key player in the great worldwide power struggle.

Conclusions

Pynchon is a precise chronicler of 1980s America. In less than 400 pages, Pynchon connects situations from 1980s Northern California, and follows family links back to 1940s Southern California, covering the counterculture, federal law enforcement, the military, the film industry, and links it to the American and Japanese mafia, martial arts. Pynchon is at his very strongest in his historical flashbacks, where he can merge history with his own fabrications. He does it all believably, with rich detail, and with his patented style of humor, which is to describe precisely, and to bear merciless witness to violence and artificiality of the world. There is no more able fictional chronicler of where we are and where we are going.

Pynchon’s prime motivations as a writer are to be funny, and to expose what Man Does to Man. Pynchon does encourage us to dream as well, to imagine, but however beautiful his imaginings, Pynchon's fine-wrought language and breadth of ideas is the star of the show. He is not rhapsodic about life, though he clearly values nature, and endows many of his characters with his intelligence (though too often his voice as well).

Pynchon’s sense of humor may be his strongest asset. But his humor is at times juvenile, and sticks out in works that treat such serious themes. Pynchon may trivialize his own points by using his trademark character names, or by being too playful. In a novel with such throwaway characters as the Marquis de Sod, or Count Drugula, or bizarre ones as Hector, are we as readers supposed to be afraid of the repression that Pynchon chronicles? Perhaps the humor is a needed sugar for the pill of his serious themes. I think Pynchon cannot help himself, and such playfulness, such black comedy, even in the face of what he sees to be a fascist state in America, is his response to such an implacable force as fascism.

It is absurd, and so it is funny, even if it is real. It’s not all real either. One very unlikely coincidence is that Zoyd and D.L. both know Takeshi, who moreover closely resembles Brock Vond, a somehow Japanese Robert Redford look-alike. DL and Takeshi, the karmic adjustors, are the happy counterparts to Frenesi and Brock. We are often are aware of Pynchon's characters as artifices, even when he writes strong ones, even when the dialog rings true. The magical realism surrounding the Kunoichi and the Thanatoids also functions outside the realist mode.

Structurally, Vineland's unnamed or numbered chapters generally offer scenes, followed by even more background information about the characters. Here he often works in background characters for a few paragraphs at a time, who often show Pynchon's knowledge of some specialized area, and are good for a laugh.

Although the many flashbacks are seamless, the story’s continuous movement to new things, usually into the past, diminishes Vineland’s impact. So the dramatic tension doesn't build. We somehow lose track of the fact that Brock Vond is hunting everyone down; he somehow doesn't seem to matter and so is trivialized. The same is true of DL and Takeshi’s pursuers. So the novel ends on a note of release, with Brock Vond easily dispatched, and the early Reagan chapter of The Repression ending, just as earlier the Nixonian Repression ended.

Vineland as a whole is warning about the growing police state, so the "happy ending,” is somewhat surprising. A main theme in Vineland is domestic repression throughout the 20th century. Vineland focuses on characters from the Sixties, who in the Eighties experience this in different forms. Pynchon gives us background information on the repression even from the Thirties and Forties.

Perhaps a weakness of Vineland is its "happy" ending. Things turn out about as well as they can for the "good" characters. Brock Vond, poised to descend on Vineland, is yanked from the sky deus ex machine, saving everyone because his federal funding is cut off. It is as if Pynchon was afraid to go for the jugular, after all his many hints, asides, and innuendoes.

Instead of anyone going to jail, in the closing scene of the family picnic, Prairie joins three generations of leftists from Frenesi's side. These are the good guys.

And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began — some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia  — Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random  soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath. (372)

It is perhaps Pynchon's encyclopedic erudition that wows his readers most of all. We know Pynchon served in the navy, and wrote technical manuals for Boeing, and his technical erudition is one his main pillars of credibility. Pynchon describes objects through the characters that use them or make them, so he brings them alive with ample detail. We are aware of the technique especially through his naming, his knowledge of proper nouns. To cover so much ground, Pynchon writes somewhat elliptically. His writing can be so dense that the main lines of the story can be hard to follow. This has made his work inaccessible to many readers.

A close reading of Vineland reveals Pynchon’s concerns about the state of American liberties even during the late 1980s, when he must have been completing Vineland. The erosion of these liberties has only quickened since then, in the wake of anti-terrorist legislation passed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, or the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.