Two weeks previous, beside a black-water river of the Deep South, with the Chums attempting to negotiate a bitter and unresolved "piece of business" from the Rebellion of thirty years previous—one still not advisable to set upon one's page—Chick had appeared one night at their encampment in a state of extreme fright, pursued by a band of night-riders in white robes and sinister pointed hoods, whom the boys recognized immediately as the dreaded "Ku Klux Klan."
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I have often wondered how American conservatives can enjoy any kind of storytelling entertainment (books, movie, comics, television, music . . . you know, all of it, really) when the protagonists of those stories are often fighting against everything the American conservative believes in. At least, I had often wondered this until recently when I realized right wing talk radio and right wing television news programs became a thing to fill the entertainment vacuum for American conservatives. No wonder they watch and listen to the propaganda spewing assholes all day long because other forms of entertainment constantly remind them that they are the villain to be fought against. Of course you'd want to watch something that told you that your values were those of the hero and that the other people were terrible socialist monsters who wanted to destroy you and your family and, most especially of all, your precious guns.
For those who still wanted to be entertained, you would have to come up with a different tactic than simply immersing yourself in right wing propaganda and that would be attacking media entertainment outlets for getting too political in their stories. You would then argue that stories used to be non-political and simply entertaining after which you would not point to any past examples because those don't exist. All stories are political when the politics you've chosen are selfish, cruel, and without any sacrifice for the greater good. All stories appear political when you constantly see yourself as the villain. Instead of engaging in self-reflection and thinking, "Am I the baddie?" [Thank you, Mitchell and Webb], they simply condemn the thing that made them feel bad. And then they paint that as some new form of political correctness gone mad instead of realizing that the little guy fighting back against injustice has always been the core of most stories. They just didn't see it that way until they embraced the injustice. All of a sudden, every story was an attack on them.
The only protagonist an American conservative can identify with is Ebenezer Scrooge and he's tormented until he gives up his American conservative values! The greatest and most uplifting look at Earth's future is Star Trek: The Next Generation and it's a socialist utopia where they don't even have money! I don't know what they're always gambling for when playing poker but I assume every chip can be redeemed for oral sex. How do they see inclusivity and universal health care and the elimination of poverty and helping anybody who needs help as terrible acts that will destroy our country? Oh, I think that question answers itself. Those things will destroy what they think of as their country. They might support the same thing American progressives support but they only support those things for certain people. Some people are deserving of life; some people are not.
And that's sort of what sent me on this tangent: the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan in this line by describing them as "dreadful." They're bad guys and Pynchon doesn't need to waste any space showing the reader why they're bad. We just know it. Here are some people described as chasing a boy through the night in sinister hoods and when it's revealed that it's the dreaded Ku Klux Klan, the reader just thinks, "Yeah. Of course it is. Jerks." That line is a lot like the movie Get Out. It's revealing in how the audience reacts to it. The story isn't telling you what to think or feel; the way you wind up thinking and feeling tells you how true the story is. Who reads this line and thinks "Hey wait a second now! The Ku Klux Klan had some good programs and ideas!"? A terrible person, that's who. And who can watch the final scene of Get Out and not feel the tension and despair and fear when the cop car pulls up, a scene that has been played over and over in white horror movies as a way to release tension and to say, "Everything is safe now. The horror is all over"? A person who is defending terrible ideologies and denying reality is who.
Now that that's out of the way . . . what is this unresolved "piece of business" that the Narrator feels is still, thirty years on, inadvisable to make a Chums of Chance book out of?! What are they up to?! This reeks of conspiracy! And a conspiracy that must revolve around slavery! I demand a Chums of Chance book about this post-forthwith even if the other Chums of Chance books don't actually exist! This book could blow the doors off the General Lee! And you know how hard that would be seeing as how they were welded shut!
This line also humanizes Chick a bit more. Rather than seeing the aloof, rebellious loner who doesn't quite fit in, we see a young boy scared for his life seeking help from others. The very antithesis of who we, the readers, thought he was! I love Chick so much more now (and I loved him—or her, maybe—a lot already).
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