Illuminatus reading group, Week Eight

This week: Page 73 ("Suddenly tired and discouraged") to Page 82 ("Mavis pointed to a door that looked like an entrance to an elevator.")

This section might be entitled, "George Dorn meets the libertarians." He also gets to encounter a yellow submarine!

"Sudden tired and discouraged .... " Page 73, James Joyce fans will recognize this paragraph as a kind of parody of the famous scene in the "Nausicaa" section of Ulysses.

"Heroes of fiction ...." Page 73. But of course, Leopold Bloom does. Dorn does not not think of Joyce until a couple of paragraphs later.

"And then the explosion came ..." Page 74. Compare with the explosions Gerty is watching during her "sex scene" with Leopold Bloom: "And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!"

"Earwicker, Bloom and Craft," parody of Ewige Blumenkraft.

"Schlangenkraft," page 75,  is German for serpent power. For RAW on serpent power, go here. "Hanf" is German for cannabis, so the slogan Dorn is reading is "Yesterday pot, today pot, always pot."

"Yossarian," page 77, hero of Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

"I believe that government governs best" etc., Page 78. Mavis is a free market anarchist, still the most radical wing of the libertarian movement. The movement encompasses right wing Ayn Rand types (hence Mavis mentions Atlas Shrugged) and left wing types.

George Dorn, by the way, is getting a full dose of what it's like to encounter a libertarian; Wilson and Shea are offering an affectionate, not entirely satirical portrait of a type they knew well. (When I first took Bryan Caplan's "Libertarian purity test," I scored as only a moderate libertarian, but the answer key said, "Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.")

It's worth noting that this section was written in the early days of the Libertarian Party, which fielded its first presidential ticket in 1972.  It holds up rather well as a portrait of the movement today.

"Your kind of capitalist woman was a Nixonette in 1972, and she believes in that half-ass corporate socialist bastard fascist mixed economy Frank Roosevelt blessed these United States with." Page 79. Liberarians hate being associated with big government, corporatist capitalism, hence the vehemence.

" ... material that was gold in color." Page 79. As a hard core libertarian, Mavis embraces the gold standard in an intimate, personal way.

"It was a submarine — a golden submarine ..." Reference to a quintessential Sixties tune; Lennon and McCartney wrote it, but Donovan helped.

Scene from the Libertarian Party's 1996 national convention, as depicted in the Onion.  

For more on the roots of Robert Anton Wilson's libertarianism, see Brian Doherty's excellent Radicals for Capitalism.  For my commentary on the meme among RAW's leftist admirers that Wilson wasn't a libertarian,  see my blog post (and please see the comments, also). 

(Next week: Page 82, "You go that way," she said, to Page 92, "the funny business that he and Simon had in mind ...")