This reminded me of the passage in the prologue where J. Edgar Hoover admits that "there is that side of him that depends on the strength of the enemy" (28). It's the classic sort of via negativa thinking: being "American" during the cold war period means nothing more than non-communist, or, similarly in the contemporary world, non-terrorist. It's easy, though, to let a negative rubric subsume any sort of positive criteria - not only does "American" come to mean non-communist, it means nothing more than non-communist. McCarthyism demonstrates this perfectly; residence, citizenship, tax-paying, or anything else we might consider constitutive aspects of "Americanness" are all eclipsed one single negative criterion, non-communist. ( The Democrats, in their infinite wisdom, tried this for a while in 2004 with the "Anybody but Bush" campaign.) The problem is that once we allow not-X to totalize our self-understanding, then in some sense our self-understanding relies on the potency of X. Self-actualization becomes obselete, because you can always fall back on that sole negative criterion. Who am I? Well, I'm sure as hell not a commie, and in the Cold War landscape, that's enough. But that's a rather vacuous, non-introspective sort of self-definition. And once the great binary dissipates, then I might have to actually have to carve out a viable space for myself, realize my potential as an ethical agent in the world, and so on. So it's honest and dependable in the way saccharine 50's sitcoms are honest and dependable: safe vacuity. Reduce away all complexity of ethical grey areas and map everything on to a nice, easy global binary; there's something very comforting in that.

I think this really highlights how existence during the cold war was an entirely unique way of life. The country lived in a cold war mentality, namely a life of fear (fear of communism, of military escalation, etc.), and people built their lives around this world.

It's also interesting that when Brian asks why they weren't talking about nostaligia, cars, and baseball, Marvin says "We're talking baseball. This is baseball." (171) Then he goes on to mention the exact baseball game we read about in the beginning of the book. It really made me think about the parallel news headlines (Giants beat Dodgers vs. Russian A-Bomb), and the idea of "history in the makin". Everything that was important in American culture (including baseball, and that specific game) added to the history of the cold war. Baseball was not a separate and pure American pastime, it was all ultimately interconnected. Politics, sports, life... it's all intertwined. In what way everything is connected... I believe the book has yet to fully explain.

That part was strange to me....it seems like Marvin, as a character, is out of it and paranoid but not someone the reader can ignore. His comments seem illogical and crazy, but there is clearly a seed of truth somewhere in his thinking. I think it's interesting to compare him to Sister Edgar...what do we make of them? What should we get from these characters? It's like they are two different sorts of paranoia...and that perhaps Marvin's "connections" (he does seem a bit what do you call it out of it) are more legit that Edgar's Aids theory (the KGB...what didn't I think of that?)

I thought both Marvin's and Sister Edgar's takes on life were so fascinating. Sister Edgar is clearly a very paranoid, frightened individual-- but she knows that about herself and she has come to terms with it. "She saw herself as the fraidy child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside of her"(248). She also accepts it as being a product of the Cold War. Sure, her theories were silly and depressing, but I found her intuition startling. She absolutely knew that man had AIDS. Marvin's intution was also telling. He knew why Billy had come to visit him, he could read him, and he was very lucid even through his odd babbling. These characters are helpful and entertaining-- I like them!

Protected by her latex gloves, Sister Edgar feels "Safe ... But also sinfully complicit with the same process she only half understood, the force in the world, the array of systems taht displaces religious faith with paranoia" (241). I think that DeLillo sees the Cold War taking the place of religion in the world. Steeped in its very own set of dogma and chain of command, the Cold War strips away a person's freedom and understanding of the world. As faith does for religion, paranoia serves as the force which ties together all the elements of the Cold War. At the same time, it segments and isolates people. Like a synthetic latex, it seals people off from the world, sheltering them from the spectre of its ills but also leaves people behind a milky shroud through which they can neither see nor completely comprehend or even feel a real connection to the world that surrounds them.

Today we were talking about the moment when Marvin Lundy explains that life makes sense when there is an "us" and "them" because it makes us have a purpose. In last night's reading on page 245, the text reads, "Gracie joked about this. But it was not a thing Edgar could take lightly. She was a cold war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with Reynolds rap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout. The furtive infiltration, deep and sleep. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling." All the characters need war to make their lives purposeful, but historically we categorize the Cold War as a war without purpose. It's the same reason that we stayed glued to our TV's after 9-11 happened and why we watch the faily news, which can make anything scary, from bees to "What your child is doing in your basement." We are addicted to fear and paranoia, because if death is looming over us, we must be important.