Lyndon LaRouche Mystery Theater

Writing about the LaRouche Youth Movement finally allowed me to use some of the research material piling up for a novel that's never quite come together.

Maybe it was the anxiety of influence. Lyndon LaRouche always seemed like a character right out of Thomas Pynchon.

It's not just that line in Crying of Lot 49 about "the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself."

All the psychosexual strangeness in Pynchon, from V. through Against the Day, has its analog in polemics like "Beyond Psychoanalysis" and "The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party" that LaRouche wrote in the early '70s, back when he was known as Lyn Marcus. (Everybody thinks that name was supposed to mean that LaRouche believed he was "Lenin and Marx" rolled into one. But that, alas, seems to be an urban legend, as I mention in the column.)

Maybe one of the kids now recruited into the LaRouche Youth Movement will actually write the work of magical realism that its bizarro world so richly deserves. One former member, who left in the mid-1970s, put together a pretty amazing study in the intellectual history of some of LaRouche's doctrines, part of it available here.

It is interesting, but I still think this subject requires the skills of a novelist. Or at least of H.P. Lovecraft.

POSTSCRIPT: Chances are pretty good that it will turn out I wrote my article as a lackey of British arms manufacturer BAE Systems, and that I am, in fact, a paid asset of the Anglo-American covert intelligence operations of Baroness Elizabeth Symons.

Assuming that this is true, I am going to invite all of you to a really big party, once the check clears.