Who cares

"Who cares?" Fallopian shrugged. "We don't try to make scripture out of it. Naturally that's cost us a lot of support in the Bible Belt, where we might've been expected to go over real good. The old Confederacy.
"But that was the very first military confrontation between Russia and America. Attack, retaliation, both projectiles deep-sixed forever and the Pacific rolls on. But the ripples from those two splashes spread, and grew, and today engulf us all.
"Peter Pinguid was really our first casualty. Not the fanatic our more left-leaning friends over in the Birch Society chose to martyrize."
"Was the Commodore killed, then?" asked Oedipa.
Much worse, to Fallopian's mind. After the con-frontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery, Peter Pinguid stayed in his cabin for weeks, brooding.
"But that sounds," objected Metzger, "like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn't that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?"

"You think like a Bircher," Fallopian said. "Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the under-lying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Un-derneath, both are part of the same creeping horror." "Industrial anything," hazarded Metzger.
"There you go," nodded Fallopian.
"What happened to Peter Pinguid?" Oedipa wanted to know.
"He finally resigned his commission. Violated his upbringing and code of honor. Lincoln and the Czar had forced him to. That's what I meant when I said casualty. He and most of the crew settled near L.A.; and for the rest of his life he did little more than acquire " wealth."
"How poignant," Oedipa said. "What doing?"
"Speculating in California real estate," said Fallo-pian. Oedipa, halfway into swallowing part of her drink, sprayed it out again in a glittering cone for ten feet easy, and collapsed in giggles.
"Wha," said Fallopian. "During the drought that year you could've bought lots in the heart of downtown L. A. for .63 apiece."
A great shout went up near the doorway, bodies flowed toward a fattish pale young man who'd appeared carrying a leather mailsack over his shoulder.
"Mail call," people were yelling. Sure enough, it was, just like in the army. The fat kid, looking harassed, climbed up on the bar and started calling names and throwing envelopes into the crowd. Fallopian excused himself and joined the others.
Metzger had taken out a pair of glasses and was squinting through them at the kid on the bar. "He's wearing a Yoyodyne badge. What do you make of that?"
"Some inter-office mail run," Oedipa said.
"This time of night?"
"Maybe a late shift?" But Metzger only frowned. "Be back," Oedipa shrugged, heading for the ladies' room.
On the latrine wall, among lipsticked obscenities, she noticed the following message, neatly indited in engineering lettering:
"Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L. A." WASTE? Oedipa wondered. Beneath the notice,