Wavelengths & Wernher

[Monte Davis]

Like Brett Coley, in considering Litza Stark's questions I didn't find any specially 
resonant connection betyween Pynchon's concerns, or his style(s), and the 
Internet. But thinking about it *did* surface another connection:

There are long stretches in GR that to me are like nothing so much as twirling the 
radio dial late at night... preferably in a car, far from home, so you have no Hertzian 
landmarks... possibly even in a chemically altered state, in which 
what you hear on one station seems to be eerily related to what you just 
heard on another... as if it were somehow, impossibly, One Big Program. That 
experience is alluded to in CoL49, but in GR you live it.

Which leads inevitably, for those of a certain age, to the Firesign Theater, who on 
radio in 1968-75 -- and especially the "Dear Friends" album -- raised that 
experience to a comic and more than occasionally paranoid comic art form. Anyone 
else hear the same echoes? I suggest no more (and no less) than synchronicity.

Another departure on the Good/Bad/Neutral Science front:

As a space-mad and science-fiction-reading kid in the 50s and early 
60s, I was encouraged to adopt Wernher von Braun & co. as heroes. Later, I came to 
mistrust my government's official stories, but not *that* one in particular.

By the time GR came out, having done some writing about WWII, I was generally 
aware of the scramble by the US and USSR to round up as many V-weapons and 
rocket scientists as possible, and (at least here) to do whatever was necessary to 
clean up their records. For those who don't know, it's now well established that 
that nice square-jawed Wernher (and others such as Arthur Rudolph, who headed 
the Saturn rocket design team and was finally busted in the 1980s) had in fact 
visited the Nordhausen slave-labor works repeatedly. The same traveling crane 
that carried rocket shells, and figures in GR's monkeyshines, was used for 
exemplary slow hangings of troublemakers among the workers. As Allan Neufeld 
pointed out in "The Rocket and the Reich" a few years ago, the V-2 was a unique 
weapon: more people were killed building it than it killed.

Forgive the jump ahead, Andrew, but GR's visit to Nordhausen -- cream pies, rocket 
limericks, Nibelungs and all -- crystallized my own growth in understanding... all the 
more effectively for the slapstick. Looking back on the sequence, I felt that They 
had certainly had me asking the wrong questions: I'd been Poklered, and Pynchon  
brought me to acknowledge certain complicities in a way no amount of 
technocritique could have done.

***

>From the historical prologue to "Journey to Tranquility," a history of the Apollo 
program:

"No one really controlled the gangs of squabbling dons, civil servants,  
military sleuths and ambitious generals who romped around Germany looking
for enemy scientists in the early summer of 1945."  
                                                                        
"Romped"?

"ROMPED"??!!??

-Monte <I couldn't make that up, foax>