Obiter Dictum

In the epic post-modern novel, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” American writer Thomas Pynchon wrote:

The real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Script, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But, out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.

I could wax analytic and explain to you what I think Pynchon is getting at in that passage, but I believe it would lose some of its power. This passage, by the way, occurs fairly early in the book. Yet it shines like a beacon, illuminating the subtly shaded ‘market transactions’ which the author has placed in our path like so many barrier islands which me must navigate as we approach understanding.

Instead, I kindly suggest that you re-read the quote above. I will not be so crude as to also suggest that you keep in mind William Mark Felt, Sr.’s famous quote, “Follow the money.”