November 01, 2025

Punching Pynchon’s "Shadow Ticket": Al Capone of Cheese, Chicago Milk Wars, Lactic Colonialism, Dairy Labor Racketeering, and Sewer Socialism in Cream City

2 hours 56 minutes

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The Klonny has Returned from his podcast-sabbatical as a motorcycle diarist in Latin America to guide you through a decryption of Pynchon’s likely swan song Shadow Ticket, sifting through the subtext to surface the loaded deep political index-names that will help us construct the text-within-the-text (or perhaps ParaPower Map, better yet). In this episode, we synopsize the Milwaukee and Chicago sequences that make up the first half of the novel, zeroing in on the Prohibition era para-parastatal underworld of speakeasies, bootlegger tunnels, and subterranean dynamiter labs and the adjacent rhizome of socialist saloons, Galleanisti anarcho-clubhouses, and union locals in Cream City. We examine how Pynchon’s Reformed Detective Shadowing Cheese Heiress mystery is partly a cipher for the ways in which Capone’s Chicago Outfit and their Milwaukee Mob affiliates sought to complete “transformismo” and earn assimilation into the white color criminal realm of the ruling elite during the Depression’s socioeconomic crisis and contraction, gaining favor through the loyal rendering of anticommunist strikebreaking and labor racketeering services. This tacit deal between the ChiTown upper and underworlds is a minor skeleton key to much of 20th century deep politics by way of the Outfit’s Joe Kennedy ties, the JFK assassination, Sam Giancana’s involvement in the Fidel Assassination Prank Show, GLADIO, and beyond. We start to coalesce theories for why Pynchon is pointing us in this direction including the blatant 1930s - 2020s encroaching fascism parallels; the less-traveled counterinsurgent history of the Pinkertons, J. Edgar Hoover’s early proving of mettle circa Palmer Raids, and the First Red Scare and the way in which there are telling deep event continuities to be traced from the early 1900s to McCarthyism and Cointelpro, early experiments in the strategy of tension playbook; the Bureaus of Investigation and Prohibition and their Wars on Alcohol, Crime, and the Left (including the anti-immigrant and anti-communist targeting of proletarian taverns) and how the Interwar Period gave rise to the modern surveillance and carceral apparatuses; and the secret colonial histories and conflict economies buried inside mundane commodities like cheese and milk.

Incomplete List of Sources (may update):

Gus Russo - The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in The Shaping of Modern America

James B. Jacobs - Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement

Tim Weiner - Enemies: A History of the FBI

Lisa McGirr - The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

Robert Tanzilo - The Milwaukee Police Station Bomb of 1917

Gavin Schmitt - The Milwaukee Mafia: Mobsters in the Heartland

Nathan Ward - The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett

Bryan Burroughs - Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

Alfried Schulte-Bockholt - A Neo-Marxist Explanation of Organized Crime

Music (ALL COPYRIGHT FREE BC OF PUBLIC DOMAIN, YOU HEAR ME, SPOTIFY? GODAM*T!):

| The Ambassadors, Frank Sylvano - “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” |

| Biltmore Trio - “Love Me or Leave Me” |

| Bessie Smith - “Homeless Blues” |

| Jack Hylton and His Orchestra - “Happy Feet” |

...more

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By Klonny Gosch

4.9

6161 ratings