Gately keeps having these dreams, or rather, nightmares, about Orientals (begins on page 809) while he's lying in the hospital bed. In his dream he is robbing an Oriental man and he tries to blindfold him using twine (which is clearly too thin) and so the Oriental keeps looking back at him, "blink inscrutably." When I read this I kept thinking, "Why is he using twine?" but that maybe it was supposed to be because Gately had the idea that Asian eyes were so small that they could be covered with twine. He also mentions that the Oriental was wearing "a silk robe and scary sandals, and had no hair on its legs." First of all, why is the Oriental sexless? Why does Gately use the word "it" to describe the Oriental? I guess the biggest question I have is why is Gately apparently so afraid of Asians? I thought maybe it was supposed to represent the pervasive ethnocentricity that Americans believe in. For example, even though O.N.A.N. has united three different countries, tensions between these three nations seem to have risen. I remembered laughing about 100 pages back, during the fight between Gately and the Canadians, it says that a ton of "anti-Canadian slurs" were uttered from the residents of Ennet House. The concept of anything being anti-Canadian is absurd to me. Basically, I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas as to why Gately is so afraid of other cultures?
Does it have anything to do with a kind of belated Monroe Doctrine? I vaguely remember something about the U.S. drawing itself out of international affairs in an effort to "clean itself up." This could be another period of isolationism, in which other people of different origin are just suspicious.
This passage reminded of GR when Slothrop is given the truth serum and differentiates between (presumably white) "shit" and "nigger shit." This seemed odd, given that excrament is pretty much as close as it comes to unequivocally universal. Why do we want so badly to differentiate between things that even in the context of homogeneity we "heterogenize" by looking for divergences? One of the reason why postmodernity is hard to cope with, I think, is that our comfortable dualities have been called into question and begun to unravel, yet we still want to hold fast to them. It is in this sense that you can get someone to say, for instance, that racism is pernicious or even that race is constructed, but you get them drunk and they start spewing off racial epithets. I think this is basically what's going on with Gately. Strip away the PC socialization and you get an ugly look at raw racism. Who knows whether Gately "actually" hates Asian; the marginalization of minorities is so prevalent in our sociocultural heritage in the West that as a white man he is always operating in such matrices of power.
I wonder if maybe it has to do with Fackelmann's death. He has the dreams about the Orientals while he is in the hospital, but after these dreams he begins to recall how Fackelmann was murdered in his prescence. Gately talks a lot about how Bobby C brought a bunch of Orientals with him to kill Fackelmann. I think he might just associate the Orientals with the horrible murder of his ffriend.O