Again, dealing with the prologue. I feel like a lot of passages really allude to the aura of the Cold War without being painfully obvious. Or I’m trying too hard to look for Cold War references. Anyway, I like that it’s subtle.
When the engineer is talking through the blanket to the “other side”, I thought about Russia and the US, talking to each other but often not seeing each other really, blocked off by some sort of ideological blanket….but that might just be me….that’s on pg. 26.
On page 27 the line “nothing is the same”…well, it jumped out at me. Hoover hears about the bomb, and nothing is the same.
Frank Sinatra says, jokingly “Seems to me we’ve all made our true loyalties known. Shown our heart’s desire…” he’s talking about the teams, of course. But as he jokes about the G-man meaning Giants, and says “Fess up, Jedgar” it reminded me of the Red Scare, of the McCarthy trials.
I might just be Cold War happy right now, though.
The baseball game seems to be one big cold war allegory shot through with allusions like those above. Two that I found particularly frightening: first, when J. Edgar Hoover admits that he "has no rooting interesting. Whoever wins ... that's my team" (29) he betrays the real mentality of the people with geopolitical clout. Of course it's not about markets over central planning, for Hoover; it's only ever been about power. To channel Pynchon, "They" don't care whatsoever which ideology the masses subscribe to, just as long as people do so with blind zealotry. Second, when Hoover probes the collective mentality at the baseball game, concluding, "all these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction," and finally concedes that he himself has "that side of him, that part of him that depends on the strength of the enemy" (28). This, for me, embodied the stark atavism of the Cold War landscape - give people the strong enemy to rally against, or the rival team to mount an eighth or ninth inning comeback against, and you've got them under your thumb. We're used to hearing this kind the-masses-are-sheep rhetoric; the power of Hoover's admission is that it takes it to the freshly disturbing territory of the enemy within as an actual lifeforce. It's one thing to like private property and defend that view adamantly; it's quite another to thrive on your position of entrenchment within a binary structure - how do we even get to this point?
The fact that Hoover, deep down, digs the picture of death is also disturbing. I'm trying to think about this book through the published time frame as well...as in "okay, beyond the cold war...what is this all saying?" but I'm not doing so well. Perhaps it's a bit early for that.