Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 103 (896)

 Lew understood that this business would not end with him walking out the door tonight and over to the El and on to some next assignment.

* * * * * * * * * *

I'm reading this sentence in two ways. First, once Lew walks out of this meeting to go about his other business, nothing will have changed. The people in the meeting still need to fight for their rights. They will continue to strike and to bomb factories and to make as much of a ruckus as they can so that their plight can no longer be ignored by the dumb, content masses. Lew couldn't stop it if he wanted to.
    But the other way to read this—the more important way, I suppose—is that Lew can never go back to the life where he could say he didn't know or care about these kinds of issues. They have broken his heart with their music and their need, with their humanness and Americanness, and it is "unmendable." This business is now his business and he can't ignore it anymore. He'll leave the meeting and he'll go back to White City Investigations and he'll do his assignments. But he can't go back to simply thinking that his assignments do no harm. He'll no longer be able to simply follow orders. He once lived a life where he was able to keep himself from caring. But that life is no more. He can't not care now. He's seen the way things are and he, unlike many other Americans, cannot pretend it's different so that he doesn't have to pay the price of caring.

This experience Lew just had reminds me of Franz Pökler's realization in Gravity's Rainbow about how he allowed himself to not see or care about the concentration camps in Germany:

"Pökler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp: he could see—the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uniforms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp. But it wasn't till August, when the furlough arrived as usual in its blank kraft envelope, and Pökler rode northward through the gray kilometers of a Germany he no longer recognized, bombed and burned, the wartime villages and rainy purple heath, and found her at last waiting in the hotel lobby at Zwölfkinder with the same darkness in her eyes (how had he missed it till now? such swimming orbits of pain) that he could finally put the two data together. For months, while her father across the wire or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoner only a few meters away from him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . . If he must curse Weissmann, then he must also curse himself. Weissmann's cruelty was no less resourceful than Pökler's own engineering skill, the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring. They had sold him convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting."

"The inconvenience of caring." That's what Nate and his coworkers and his clients are all selling. But Lew, having experienced the songs and the meeting and Moss Gatlin's words, has now, and forever after, been inconvenienced.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 102 (895)

 Yet here they were expressing the most subversive thoughts, as ordinary folks might discuss crops, or last night's ball game.

* * * * * * * * *

Nothing more subversive in America than talking about how people are going to force employers to treat their employees like human beings.
    Once again, Lew cannot help but separate the people at this meeting from what he sees as "ordinary folks." At least exposure to the people who have only been defined by rumor and innuendo before this night will soften him to their plight.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 101 (894)

 But here was this hall full of Americans, no question, even the foreign-born, if you thought about where they had come from and what they must've been hoping to find over here and so forth, American in their prayers anyway, and maybe a few hadn't shaved for a while, but it was hard to see how any fit the bearded, wild-eyed, bomb-rolling Red description too close, in fact give them a good night's sleep and a square meal or two, and even a veteran detective'd have a hard time telling the difference from regular Americans.

* * * * * * * * * *

We see how Lew has simply integrated the bias of the capitalist system when he still, at the end of his observation of how human and American the people fighting for workers' rights seem, regards them as separate from "regular Americans." Just what is a "regular American" if not someone who simply wants to earn their fair share for their labor so that they can provide food and safety and a future for themselves and their family? Who are the "regular Americans" if not these people trying to make America a better place, not just for themselves, but for all of those who would come to its shores in search of a better life? Does Lew consider only people who own a home "regular Americans"? Only people who have a certain amount of money in the bank? Only people who can buy and sell other poorer, less fortunate, people? Who are these "regular Americans"?
    If you ask the modern media, I'm pretty sure they'd say "regular Americans" are white people living in the heartland of America (and I mean the neutral definition of "heartland" which means "the center of the United States" and not the part of the definition that says a "heartland" is the most important part of a region. Most people, especially reporters, don't seem to understand that those two definitions aren't one and the same. But pretty convenient for those living in the middle of the country, isn't it? Maybe the West Coast should craft a new definition of West Coast that also means "the smartest and biggest dicked part of the country").

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 100 (893)

 There was a kind of general assumption around the shop that laboring men and women were all more or less evil, surely misguided, and not quite American, maybe not quite human.

* * * * * * * * * *

This is what is called othering people. You delude yourself (and others) into thinking a person is sub-human or evil so that whatever you do to them can be ethically justified. It's what Fox News and right wing talk radio have done to liberals and why so many Conservatives truly believe that they'd be justified in running over or shooting anybody protesting for equality in this country.
    Now, you might think, "Oh look. You're othering Conservatives!" But here's the thing: I see the way they act and guess what? I still want this country to be a better place so that they can also partake in it. Why they want to make the world worse for so many people, I'll never understand. But if we make the country and the world better, everybody will benefit. Us liberals aren't just out here trying to make a grand paradise just for ourselves. We want all y'all conservatives to realize you don't have to be so angry all the time. Chill out, man! Stop listening to those yogurt-brained motherfuckers on the AM dial!

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 99 (892)

 Nate Privett, everybody else at W.C.I., needless to say most of the Agency's clients, none had too good of a word to say about the labor unions, let alone Anarchists of any stripe, that's if they even saw a difference.

* * * * * * * * * *

Come on, Pynchon. I already covered all of this while carefully considering all of your other sentences one at a time! I guess this is for the readers Pynchon knows aren't paying particularly close attention. Maybe this means I'll be able to write less and less about every sentence as the book goes on because I'll already have anticipated every character's reaction to every possible situation in which they might find themselves! I bet I'll have about seven thousand blog entries where the only thing I type after the asterisk break is "Grandmaster Literature Reader!"

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 98 (891)

For something here was striking him as what you'd have to call odd.

* * * * * * * * * *

That odd feeling is witnessing the truth of something that you've been told was something else for far too long.

Is the use of the word "strike" here considered a pun?

Chapter 1: Section 6: Page 50: Line 97 (890)

. . . moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break Lew's heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove unmendable. . . .

* * * * * * * * * *

I've mentioned before that I know nothing about music or the language of music. I know saying something moves from the minor to the major communicates emotion to those who understand music (not to mention understanding what the heck a "Picardy third cadence" is!) but it means nothing to me. Which means I'm lucky that Pynchon concludes the statement by describing how the movement makes Lew feel.

"prove unmendable"
Nate sent Lew to this meeting expecting him to be hard and cold and to reinforce the idea that these Anarchists are monsters causing pain and destruction with no purpose or reason. Instead, Lew's heart is touched by their singing and their passion. As I figured, sending Lew to this meeting has backfired on Nate. Lew has found himself sympathetic to a cause which, prior to meeting Nate, he expressed having no interest or opinion on.

Chapter 1: Section 6: Pages 49-50: Line 94-96 (887-889)

And another which went,

Fierce as the winter's tempest
Cold as the smoth'ring snow
On grind the mills of Avarice
High rides the cruel-eyed foe. . . .
Where is the hand of mercy,
Where is the kindly face,
Where in this heedless slaughter
Find we the promis'd place?
Sweated, despised and hearthless,
Scorned 'neath the banker's boot,
We freeze by their frost-bound windows—
As they fondle their blood-bought loot—
Love never spared a sinner,
Hate never cured a saint,
Soon is the night of reckoning,
Then let no heart be faint,
Teach us to fly from shelter
Teach us to love the cold,
Life's for the free and fearless—
Death's for the bought and sold!

* * * * * * * * * *

"And another which went,"
A song that wasn't "Jerusalem." And since Lew shouldn't have been hearing "Jerusalem" at this Anarchist meeting, this is probably something by The Cure from 1979.

"the cruel-eyed foe. . . ."
Capitalism, probably. See how it encompasses the mills of Avarice which grind the workers down? Which freezes them and saps their strength as surely as winter's tempest would?

"Where is the hand of mercy,
Where is the kindly face,"
Nowhere because Americans who will scream at you that this country is a Christian nation never act in Christian charity. Not that Christians ever actually care about charity or mercy or kindness. To them, telling somebody they're going to Hell if they don't accept Jesus into their hearts is the greatest kindness. Not because it saves a soul from eternity but because it's the least they can fucking do for their fellow man.

"Where in this heedless slaughter
Find we the promis'd place?"
The heedless slaughter of the immigrants and the poor who were promised something greater by the idea of the United States of America. When people tell you "Freedom isn't free," they mean it literally. If you can't pay, you don't deserve the grand and equitable American dream.

"Sweated, despised and hearthless,
Scorned 'neath the banker's boot,
We freeze by their frost-bound windows—
As they fondle their blood-bought loot—"
In America, life must be earned. And once it is earned by American standards, you never again need to worry about the poor. You earned yours; do they expect you to just give them theirs?!

"[the rest of the poem]"
This entire poem was pretty self-explanatory, right? I really didn't need to waste my time writing about it. It's just I wanted to point out how much I despise rich people and Christians. Oh, and here's the thing: if you're a true Christian with mercy and charity in your heart, you won't be offended by my saying I despise Christians. Because you know exactly who I'm talking about.
    Anyway, the rest of the poem basically states that the poor and oppressed are ready to rise up and take their freedom by force, killing all those who let things into their saddles to ride them like the unethical, uncompassionate bastards they always were.