Ever since his first novel V. came out in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has been a master architect of the “and so forth,” and we can count on him to roll pineapples and memos underfoot along the path to it. I remember from my teenaged years trailing after Mrs. Oedipa Maas in bewildered joy through that mirror-walled prison maze The Crying of Lot 49, then essaying Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero Tyrone Slothrop was “obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it,” hence with meticulous dream-logic kept unconsciously calling Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs down on the sites of his recent, well, you know. 

As for the mysterious heroine of V. … — but like Pynchon himself, I digress, if not quite all the way to the haunted castle called And So Forth. The point is that you and I, caught up in Shadow Ticket, his latest novel, are now in Milwaukee, 1932, with another blizzard of pineapples about to fall, Prohibition still in hypocritical force and Al Capone’s heirs blowing up the competition. Although every now and then some sage may see fit to remark that “this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it,” for next year Hitler will become Chancellor, and he has sympathizers right here in the American heartland (if you don’t believe me, try bowling at New Nuremberg Lanes, where the doggerel is a cheerfully, idiotically vicious as anything out of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Hold yer flag up high, yeahh, / Let’s swing it, for the Nah-zis—”) — yep, dear old 1932! 

Our protagonist will be Hicks McTaggart, who for money used to crack strikers’ heads, because “at the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management,” so that Hicks almost resembled one of Adolf’s Brownshirts, except that they kick ass gratis, for righteousness’s sake. Well, Hick surprised himself by getting softhearted. And rather like Slothrop not (consciously) knowing the baleful power of his penis, Hicks simply felt relieved when his sap somehow misplaced itself (nothing to do with him) just before it would have split some little Bolshevik’s skull. So he became a private eye. Now won’t that be just the ticket?

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You can’t steal a Cossack’s soul

By William T. Vollmann

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown — and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly” — for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal. 

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples. We may discover ourselves “haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street” and believe in what we see, but what about when two fortune-telling penny scales in a row print out consistently insistent bomb warnings about the Christmas package received by Hicks from two of Santa’s elves? 

We can now commence tiptoeing or maybe goosestepping over bowling balls and rolling pineapples on the way to the “and so forth”. For this, you see, is a genuine “Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally” — I just bet they do. And there are many ways to get in trouble in Milwaukee, so why on earth would Hicks ever want to depart? But what happens in Milwaukee does not infallibly stay in Milwaukee, because Boynt Crosstown has handed him that real lulu of a ticket, whose invisibly inked purport reminds me of a certain refrain: “… oh get away / from me, you — /ol’ mid- / night… in Milwaukee…” Hence halfway through this thumb’s thickness of smooth, sly pages, Hicks will be glumly making the best of interwar Europe.

Reader, what gives you your get-up-’n’-go? Are you a Jane Austen character hunting for marriage, a money-starved Dreiser protagonist, a Thucydidean demagogue, or would you rather get your love ticket punched? In Shadow Ticket there will be dancings, rubbings, copulations, flirtations, and yet we are far from the romantic mystifications of V.: Hicks’s heart does ache, but it’s more jealous than committed. In short, the motive power of his personal narrative, however greased up by dalliances, will not be his dancehall girl April Randazzo, because not only does he stay uncommitted, but the gangster Vumvum soon breaks it to him that she is the willing moll of a mobster titan. And if you still hope against hope that Shadow Ticket will turn into Love Story, let Vumvum set you straight: “Padrino, this far down the chain nobody gives ungazz about that emotional stuff.” — April stays behind to marry Don Peppino. What snatches Hicks out of Milwaukee is that lulu of a work ticket from Boynt Crosstown. And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate.

To maintain narrative suspense I have sworn not to tell you that Hick’s not-quite-friend Stuffy Keegan has recently escaped gangsterous assassins thanks to an Austro-Hungarian U-13 submarine that snuck in beneath the midnight ice of Lake Michigan, which disappearing act a certain ominous new breed of policemen inexplicably threatens to blame on Hicks himself. Hence he accepts Boynt Crosstown’s dragooning of him into returning to her fiance and Mommy (Daddy being on the lam) Daphne the Airmont cheese heiress, whom Hicks once rescued from a mental asylum. Now this may be tricky to close out, because she would rather be in Europe with her mercurial boyfriend. Boynt does hint at a potentially generous expense allowance. He further advises Hicks to “better just be yourself — with you, not the perfect option, I agree…”

Well, so off goes our hero to the Airmont mansion, in what is almost a quasi-semi-parody of noble gumshoe Philip Marlowe meeting his fat cat employer at the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and in both books we know everything will become more sinister and complicated, because that’s what all discerning readers demand. Here for instance is one of Shadow Ticket’s complications: Cheese turns out to be “self-aware… maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation… Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin”. And coincidentally, Daddy Airmont, forenamed Bruno, is “known in the industry as the Al Capone of cheese”. A Viennese policeman (who might be something else) refers to him “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”. I am sorry to say that the battles and extortions of the Internationalist Cheese Syndicate run out of laughs, as do such easy digs at Nazi “culture” as “an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither”.

But those are my only cavils with Shadow Ticket, and having made them I had best hasten on by padding out this essay with plot summary: drugged in New York, poor Hicks wakes up on an ocean liner bound for Europe, about which place one of his fellow passengers and mysterious keepers inspires him as follows: “With the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “OK, maybe this ticket is takin’ longer than it should, but that don’t mean—” Sorry, Hicks, but oh yes it does: routine ticket, runaway heiress ticket, extra ticket, unknown ticket, fishy ticket, shadow ticket…! “Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.” Another secret I promised not to tell you is that pretty much every Pynchon novel entails cruises to and from Shadowland, as in the very first pages of The Crying of Lot 49: “I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.” If you distrust ambiguity and are masochistic enough to read this author regardless, why, sure, he knows how to project bright stillness, just to trick you — imagine an interrogation cell, or maybe a superego’s lightbulb glaring inflexibly in the prison of your very own frontal lobe —: “a good enough vision,” says Gravity’s Rainbow, “of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t”. But noons never last very long for the hag-ridden victim of a shadow ticket. As Gravity’s Rainbow has it: “So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.”

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Pynchon passes out shadow tickets left and right, just as God does, because that’s how life goes, right? We all long to know what the rules are, in order to stay out of trouble by following them or else get ahead by breaking them. For instance, why did those two sleazy Christmas elves present Hick with a ticking package? — “In the business,” a bomb-cooker explains, “we understand that an explosive… is actually somebody with something to say… a message we aren’t so much receiving as overhearing” — because had Hicks been exploded, the message could hardly have been to him (no more Hicks to receive it) but about him. But what is it? It garbles itself, on purpose, or maybe gets parasitized, à la William Burroughs, by unimaginably alien cipher-mongers, and so the shadowless noon turns shady, then as opaque as cuttlefish ink; until, just as in the very last sentence of V. the Mediterranean Sea “showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day,” namely THE END, so Hicks McTaggart sleepwalks blind in blackness, wondering where the next pineapple will catch him. What can he do but keep pretending compliancy? 

To cope with alogical, amoral and possibly inescapable shadow tickets, The Crying of Lot 49 advises “silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance,” which will be Hicks’s exact way of getting by in Europe’s fear-spiced “desire for what has almost arrived… [in] a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna,” which I take to mean Berlin. The foreplay includes a kind of paranormal pre-Cold War between Nazis and Soviets, while Ustasha terrorists and Hungarian Jew-killing “Vladboys”, “small, nimble, predatory, full of pep”, operate between Pynchon’s lines. 

Meanwhile, where the hell are we? In a line which could have been lifted from Philip K. Dick retails the possibility of getting “thrown by some occult switchwork into an alternate branch line…, where Stalin and crew are no longer possibilities…” It almost seems as if this could happen to anyone, even you and me! What if it did? Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas still waiting for answers, Gravity’s Rainbow with another rocket about to come down on us, and in V. we never find out for certain who V is; while right back here in Shadow Ticket, when the cheese monster Bruno Airmont gets kidnapped onto Stuffy’s submarine so that he can be safely exiled instead of bumped off, they take him to a New York whose Statue of Liberty has become now someone else. “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.” That sounds slightly unnerving but not necessarily worth dreading, for at least we’re not trapped in William Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded. 

The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away,” Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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By Remi Adekoya

The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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By Michael Tracey

Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?