Thomas Pynchon Gone Truther?

I have never read any Pynchon, although I have had a copy of Gravity's Rainbow sitting on my shelf next to my 1933 edition of Ulysses. In Pynchon's defense, I am not aware of him ever claiming any of this is anything but fiction, and he has always had a reputation for the theater of the absurd abstract novel, but if he is a Truther, at least the award winning author writes significantly better than the God awful dreck of Steve Alten.

Crackpot paranoia has always been meat and drink for Mr. Pynchon, of course. When "Gravity's Rainbow" implies that the 20th-century European wars were manufactured by an international missile cartel, the book is mutating a commonplace distrust of power structures into an ad absurdum parallel realm. It's the violently mechanized modern world gazed at during an acid trip; evil and perversion seem to crawl like spiders over everything.

"Bleeding Edge," though, merely regurgitates the smugly earnest talking points of 9/11 Truthers. Thus we're told that before the attacks there was an unusual amount of short selling of United and American Airlines, as well as of Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, suggesting a "foreknowledge of a decline in their stock prices." Even terminology is evidence: "Ground Zero" was a Cold War phrase referring to nuclear strikes, so the purpose of reusing it "is to get people . . . [c]ranked up, scared, and helpless." Wake up, sheeple!

This does, however, speak to a point I have made a couple of times in the past. One of the reasons conspiracy theories are so popular is that they present an intriguing literary and historical puzzle for people to solve. As Dan Brown as shown, even the most mediocre talent can turn a hint of a conspiracy into a popular cultural event. Even I (and yes you can start the mediocre talent jokes) have added a bit of conspiracy into an as yet unpublished novel I have been working on. People just like unveiling secrets, it is part of who we are as humans.