pynchon-l-digest V2 #1796

[Jane Sweet]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Pynchon goes way beyond showing Nazi's roots in the earlier German
> romantic movement and sounding an alarm -- he shows American
> interests helping to water that diseased plant, and he shows the
> plant blossoming in the U.S. GR and Vineland both feature Nazis who
> are alive and well (one real, one fictional) and very much a part of
> the U.S. scene in the 60s as Pynchon writes GR and in the 80s as he
> writes Vineland.  Von Braun -- eminence grise of both the German and
> U.S. long-distance rocket programs -- introduces GR, which centers on
> a rocket program very like the U.S. aerospace campaign of the 50s and
> 60s, the U.S. post-WWII technology program made possible in large
> part by the Nazi scientists brought back to the U.S. (along with the
> Nazis who played such an important role in CIA's Cold War
> counter-inteligence program), a historical fact which Pynchon brings
> into the story line of his novel; by introducing GR with von Braun's
> quote, Pynchon puts that reality in your face from the moment you
> start reading the novel.  

What is the example here Doug? Nazis in the CIA? I'm not
disagreeing just asking for the example. 

Then there's the ex-Nazi Karl Bopp helping
> to execute Reagan's domestic policy in Vineland. 

Page? 


 I'm sure I'm
> forgetting the Nazis (or allusions to them) in COL49 -- Dr.
> Hilarious, probably, who is certainly alive and well and evangelizing
> LSD psychotherapy in that novel, which I guess might be intended to
> recall the Nazi aviation scientists who researched mescaline for the
> Nazi war effort and later became part of the CIA research program
> into the possible use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs for military
> and counter-intelligence purposes, whence LSD made its way into the
> wider world. 

Hilarious and LSD right, but I'm not sure he is connected to
aviation scientists. Is he? 


In Pynchon's world (the flesh world in which he writers
> and his fictional reflection of it),  Nazis are in fact part of the
> American establishment, on the technology front and on the domestic
> police front.

For example? Von Braun is picked up and we know his
biography but we never see him in the USA in Pynchon's
fiction, do we? What other Nazis are part of American or USA
establishment? 



> 
> "Jane":
> "I think he also admonishes his readers to be cognizant of
> the fact that the sickness  of idealism and  race and blood
> religiosity, the romantic nationalistic  dreaming of
> transcendent national teleology that infected Nazi Germany,
> the fact that the sickness  of idealism and  race and blood
> while it is only a potential and NOT a reality in the USA,"
> --
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>