Informers get no respect in Santa Cruz

[Jan Klimkowski]

Keith - thanks.

That reads like an agent provocateur scene from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, though entirely without wit, intelligence and thanatoid insight.

Good on Santa Cruz Indymedia for exposing these stooges who think, ahem, they don't have to smell like the street, and that it's "chill" to ride home from a demo with cops.

:creep:

Whether they know it or not, Kao and Carrie appear inspired by Vineland's creepy Federal drug prosecutor, Brock Vond, who philosophises as follows:

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. [...] They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning. (p. 269) [...] the long-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends' fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in their eyes ... the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who'd feel, let's face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline.

From Vineland, Thomas Pynchon