To cut to the chase ...

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks!  A-and not to mention that military-industrial complex, the ascendance
of multinational corporations beyond the nation-state, the space race ... and
take into consideration what WWII represented at the time, esp. in the US o' A,
"The Good War" ((c) Studs Turkel),  vs. Vietnam, war in general ("Make Love, Not
War," "War is Bad for Children and Other Living Beings," "What if they Threw a
War and Nobody Came?"), hence the increasing nigh-unto-absurdism of such various
treatments thereof as Dr. Strangelove ..., Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, How I
Won the War, Kelly's Heroes, Garvity's Rainbow (Stalag 17, The Great Escape and
The Dirty Dozen I tend to put in that "existential prison film" genre, inc. Cool
Hand Luke, Papillon, The Longest Yard) ... but GR in particular stresses the
continuities betwixt "Good" War and Cold War and Undeclared War and Nuclear War
... will be back on this ...

Otto Sell wrote:

>        Pynchon's Second-World-War is just a slightly disguised Vietnam-War
> Doesn't the way the soldiers act in GR resemble more on Vietnam than on
> WW-II? Drug use, Sex?
>
> Does "Dear Mom. I put a couple of people in Hell today. ." (537) sound like
> a letter from Europe in 1944/45 or from Vietnam say 1970/71? The undeclared
> US-war in Vietnam was not a war of decolonization but has to be seen in the
> context of the "rollback" of communism.
> And wasn't it Nixon who ended the war Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who was
> sitting in office by "virtue of death" like Harry T., lead the US too?
>
> Hiroshima is mentioned several times:
> "I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I'm there, never to
> leave Hiroshima again. I think you'd like it there. It's a city on Honshu,
> on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect size, big enough for city
> excitement, small enough for the serenity a man needs." (480) sez Morituri
> and, later the narrator:
> "We must also never forget the famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting
> by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger
> poised right on Miss Enoly Gay's atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000
> little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of
> fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland
> sea. . . . " (588)  - Plus the mentioning down on p. 642 and p. 693-94.
>
> Considering what has been done to this city can drive you to tears. Okay,
> like Hamburg, Lübeck and Dresden it helped to end the war sooner but taking
> such a decision. . . . It's to remember Young America that a civilized
> country very easily can fall back into barbarism, like Germany and Japan had
> and America was (at least it seemed so in the sixties and seventies) on its
> way to.
>
> Auschwitz cannot be mentioned because these things later became obvious for
> the public.
>
> Elvis is singing *Good Luck Charme* on the radio. . . .
>
> Otto