Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

Peculiar talk
Not if you’ve been where we have. 40 years ago in SudWest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the will of God theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsy and not without guilt. Search and destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years.

“well, I think we’re here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain— it knows it’s there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even— the slightest shift in the probabilities and we’re gone—

for the zone Herreros it has become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe a little mystical. Though he recognizes the letters. K E Z V H, the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car— he doesn’t let on to Enzian.

Any Berliner these days know enough to boil water before drinking, though some then proceeded to brew it with various things for tea, such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out that the center of the bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop—or Rocketman, …— thought he might warn them about things like tulip bulbs. Bring in a little American enlightenment.

Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn and his heart was never ready. He will see it just before Dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon living in stifle mineral sleep a kilometer below his back. As a shadow of the tall rock rising to a point, dances west to east, D Q tends him, anxious as a child and doll…

The first thing he learned is how to vary his index of refraction. He can choose anything between transparent and opaque. After the thrill of experimenting is worn off, he settles on a pale, banded, Onyx effect.
“ too late. You’re not part of what he’s (Tchitcherine) got coming not anymore.”

He could smell Death on it.

We know them, and we can control them. But, ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. ‘compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘ tolerance’? ‘ dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks.

Surely there is something in Marx and Engels,” soothe the customer, “ to cover this. A demand like ‘addiction,’ having nothing to do with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor… we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously… machine machines in the factories, industrial accidents, … these are quantities tied directly to the economy

Pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic.