IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?

[jbor]

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>From: Eric Rosenbloom <ericr at sadlier.com>

> 
> Come now, Zwolfkinder is pretty obviously inspired by Disneyland.

Sure (though Scott's point about the place being run by children is an
important one), but that doesn't connect Disney with the Nazis. Zwolfkinder
predates the war, possibly even the Nazi regime; just as, I suspect,
Disneyland (1955) predates the LA aerospace industry. The way Zwolfkinder is
introduced in the narrative (by an externalised voice) gives a pretty direct
clue as to what Pynchon's critique is really about I think:

        In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its
    many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture
    of childhood has proved invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from
    history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even
    embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwolfkinder. (_GR_ 419)

We're well beyond any simplistic Disney = Nazi connection here, aren't we?
Something much more thoroughgoing and insidious has been going on in Western
culture -- maybe *human* culture -- for a long long time. And the Nazi
bureaucracy takes advantage of Zwolfkinder, not the other way around. At
Zwolfkinder there is even a mock-up of Bismarck's elevation ... to prince
and imperial chancellor . . . " Not Hitler, that's *Bismarck*.

And take another look at what Pynchon's vitriol towards Disney hones in on:
"Waly Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how
many carcasses under the snow tonight" (135); and the "illustrations by Walt
Disney [of] screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral,
slant-eyed [ ... ] round black licorice dog-nosed *Japs*" (680).

>
>> Of course there are hidden agendas!
>
> The aim of these reports is hardly hidden: what other agendas might you mean?

The anti-George W. Bush or anti-Microsoft agendas of course. These "reports"
are not the legitimate histories they're purported to be; they're
philippics. Or, at least, that's how they're being exploited, marketed (as
MalignD noted).

>
> True enough, which is why researchers feel it is important to continue
> bringing it up, to warn that the Nazi program was not destroyed but
> instead shared out among the victors: plastics, pharmaceuticals,
> rockets, weapons of mass destruction, restricting human rights in the
> name of anti-communist and anti-capitalist wars, superhighways,
> anti-intellectual fetishization of innocence and purity and the body,
> marketing as a mode of government -- the Nazis gave so much to us.
> People deserve to know. It's very interesting.

But it wasn't the Nazis who invented the multi-national cartels or the
weapons of mass destruction or the plastics or the drugs or the
superhighways or the "official version of innocence" or all the other stuff.

> And I've said it before, Hitler didn't create these evils, so much as
> create a state where they could thrive.

They were thriving pretty much everywhere as far as I can make out. At
least, that's the way Pynchon portrays it.

> They are still thriving.

But trying to freight Bush and Disney and IBM or whoever as "criminal" and
"Nazi" isn't gonna change anything.
>
> This is what Slothrop can't return to, isn't it?

Slothrop can't return to the world of the text because he has been set free
in the world of the reader imo. A gift, of sorts.

best