GRGR1 - Giant Adenoid

[Craig Clark]

andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn) writes:

> It may be `Vergeltungswaffen Zwei' to you but it's (and here we have
> the choice of making this alternative an `either ... or' or a `both
> ... and') `Aggregat Vier' to me. When does an Assembly become a
> Vengeance Weapon? There are two rockets, the good rocket, the A4,
> which follows man's guidance (at least until Brennschluss), wants to
> build, construct, control, go to the moon and liberate mankind and the
> bad rocket, the V2, which follows its own ineffable path, wants only
> to decay, rip apart, randomise, to fall, turn on and destroy mankind.
> A-and in the opening it's a rising A which comes with a scream. The
> descending V arrives at the end of the book, that last delta-t from
> its anihilating orgasm.
 
> Are these two aspects of the same thing. Does any striving, any order
> carry within it the seeds of its own destruction. Is the militant
> hierarchical, order-obsessed church-militant of the Archangel doomed
> always to succumb to the populist, eclectic and primitive cult of the
> Virgin. Seems like Tom is as much in agreement with his namesake and
> fellow songster, Tom Lehrer, as with the law of entropy:
> 
>     Whatever goes up must always come down
> 
> the follow-up line to which serves only to emhasise the crassness of
> the sentiment in the motto to part 1.
> 
>     That's not my department says Werner von Braun

Without undermining the general validity of the questions you're 
raising, and while I admire your Thesis of the Dualistic Nature of 
Rockets, I'm going to disagree with you on two points:

Firstly, according to my copy of the Lehrer song, the words are 
" 'Vunce ze rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down?
Zat's not my department," says Werner von Braun."
I'll check the exact wording in my copy of _Too many songs by Tom 
Lehrer with not enough illustrations by Ronald Searle_, but I'm 
pretty sure I'm right...

Secondly, and more seriously, I disagree with your suggestion that 
we're hearing a pre-brenschluss rocket in that opening screaming. An 
evacuation is taking place, suggesting an area on the receiving end 
of a V-2 blitz, not on the sending end.

Otherwise I like the theory... What of the 00000? Is it A4 or V2? 
Saviour or destroyer? And do these categories have the meaning in our 
world they used to have (which is I think one of the Big Questions 
behind GR)?



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"