Stockpiled weapons???

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>Hard to tell if he's extolling or making light of the Baby Jesus.<<<
> 
> Baby Jesus really bugs him.

Vaska wrote: 

"And, given the cult of the Baby Jesus in Catholicism, many
a
Catholic boy grows up to (shall we say) resent the
miraculous tyke -- easy to see
why."


But is that what we get in GR?  Christianity, the baby
jesus, is secularized, gnostisized by Them, the christmas
star becomes a rocket plunging to earth [GR.135]. From
Pynchon what we get is an adaptation of Catholic ceremony
(just like in V., where Pynchon merges the Virgin and Venus
genetrix--Henry Adams). The Baby Jesus con-game, the
violation of Christmas, of Easter, of the Transfiguration,
are all THEIR secularized, masculine, technological, death
transfiguring gnostic negations (Rocket 00000, Hiroshima) of
the Christian/Pagan (April Fools, Easter, Slothrop's
Dionysian transformation). 

It's so like Pynchon to situate his adapted Catholicism
outside of hierarchies, elect/preterit dichotomies,
entropies and western waste, and right in the midst of pig,
human, Epicurean, vomit, shit, female fecundity--bananas,
Baby Jesus and the Bugs. The Bugs take us on the Rainbow
(negated by the secularized rocket parabola) back to the
pre-christian. "There must have been evensong here long
before the news of Christ." [GR.135. ]  The bugs work as
does the christ child, to bring peace, harmony, the 
preterite, the children, to the cross or crossroads, where
oral ("wordless") orphic/christian song of praise brings
even Slothrop to a peace, where he thinks of nothing, just
feels Natural. 


More Cuxhafen: 

At an inn near Oberjoch, the Haus Ingeburg, von Braun and
over 100 of his rocket
experts waited for the end. The entire team had been ordered
executed by Hitler to
prevent their capture. Wernher von Braun's brother, Magnus,
however, managed to
contact nearby American forces before Hitler's SS henchmen
could reach the rocket
team. On May 2, the same day Berlin fell to the Soviet Army,
von Braun and his
rocket team entered American lines and safety. 

With the fighting over, von Braun and his team were heavily
interrogated and
jealously protected from Russian agents. V2s and V2
components were assembled.
German rocket technicians were rounded up. In June, General
Eisenhower
sanctioned the final series of V2 launches in Europe.
Watching each of the three
V2s which rose from a launch site at Cuxhaven was a Russian
Army colonel, Sergei
Korolev. Ten years later, Korolev would be hailed as the
Soviet Union's chief
designer of spacecraft and the individual responsible for
building the Vostok,
Voshkod and Soyuz spacecraft which, since 1961, have carried
all Soviet
cosmonauts into orbit. 

Few members of von Braun's team participated in the Cuxhaven
launches. Most
had already begun setting up shop at Fort Bliss, near El
Paso, Texas. Piled up in the
desert near Las Cruces, New Mexico, were enough parts to
build 100 V2s. Von
Braun and his team soon moved to nearby White Sands Proving
Ground where
work began assembling and launching V2s. By February 1946,
von Braun's entire
Peenemuende team had been reunited at White Sands and, on
April 16, the first V2
was launched in the United States. The U.S. space program
was under way!

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/rocket.htm

This presentation will briefly describe the activities in
the German Rocket
Development Center in Peenemünde, and summarize the key
factors that made the
V-2 rocket an effective weapon. The Allied Forces showed,
after the war, great
interest in learning more about this new weapon and its
military applications. The
U.S. War Department decided therefore at the end of the
World War II to bring a
number of German scientists and engineers to this country
for interrogation, as well
as to demonstrate through actual experimentation the use and
operation of these
new systems. About 500 specialists were brought here under
"Operation Paperclip"
for this purpose.

http://www.meaus.com/totheMoon.html