IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?

[Dave Monroe]

Keep in mind, though, that Gravity's Rainbow itself
"postdates" all of this.  And we aren't talking
historical fiction in any conventional sense here, no
matter how accurate GR's radio programming or whatever
might be.  And, even in "conventional" historical
fictions, There are perhaps reasons why certain
"historical" elements, situations are used in given
fiction, resonances, contextual allusions which,
whether or not "intended" by an author, can reasonably
be expected to be made nonetheless.  And I tend to
think that yr "better" authors realize this and make
use of, take responsibility for, such possibilities,
but ...

But, again, no one is positing "simplistic" equations
of Disney (Walt, Studios, Land, whatever) with Nazism,
though Disney is, indeed, as you note, being shown to
have propagated racism/s, and the most notorious
(though hardly the only, as is alluded to, represented
as well) racisms of GR's "historical" contexts were
those perpetrated by the Third Reich, no?  But this is
so obvious it need not be represented in the text,
it's implied strongly enough, while one is not quite
so often confronted by the plank in one's "own" eye,
so ... 

But I do think that this construction of alleged
childhood "innocence" as a possible means of coercion
and control is quite interesting, and, indeed, more
immediately to the point.  There is no small critique
of Romanticism in play across that Pynchonian ouevre,
and, in particular, in Gravity's Rainbow.  But, again,
keep in mind that the Nazis propagated no small
Romanticism themselves ...

It occurs to me, by the way, that Bismarck here
perhaps represents the authorization, the legitimation
of Hitler and his Reich, as heir to the lineage of a
Romaticized, mythologized German past.  Indeed, that
notion of "Germany" alone involve a certain
mythologization, no?  All those former independent
principalities ... that notion of a "nation" alone,
see ...

Anderson, Benedict R.  Imagined Communities:
   Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
   Nationalism.  Rev. ed.  New York: Verso, 1991.

Also reminds me of something I read recently on Nazi
cinema, which, overt propagandization on the order of
Leni Rifenstahl's Triumph of the Will aside, was
largely, and at the Ministry of propaganda's behest,
escapist fare, to the point of avoiding depicting the
Nazis, and, later, the war as well.  See ...

Rentschler, Eric.  The Ministry of Illusion:
   Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife.  Cambridge, MA:
   Harvard UP, 1996.


--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 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).
> 
> 

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