1973 Nervous Breakdown

[Dave Monroe]

>From Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown:
Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), Ch. 8,
"Conspiracy Nation," pp. 227-60 ...

   "one of the most probing efforts to construct a
sociological profile of the forces at work behind
Watergate was that of New Left member Kirkpatrick
Sale.  In a lengthy May 1973 article in the New York
Review of Books, Sale advanced the theory of a second
or shadow government operating behind the scenes at
the highest levels.  Nixon's power base, according to
Sale, was found in the Sunbelt region that extended
across the southern half of teh counbtry from Florida
to California.  Relying on a distinction that former
SDS president Carl Oglesby had made between the
new-moneyed 'Cowboys' of the southern States and the
'Yankess' of old eastern money, Sale provided a
detailed anatomy of the 'unofficial but very important
nexus of power behind the acknowledged cicics-textbook
institutions.'  Culturally this region was
characterized by Protestant fundamentalism,
anti-Communism, and patriotism; economically it was
tied to the postwar growth of the defense, areospace,
oil, and leisure industries.  Nixon was a consumate
product of this new configuration of power, and the
Watergate scandal, in Sale's reading, represented a
Yankee counterattack." (p. 241)

   "Sale would later elaborate this analysis ... in
his 1975 book Power Shift....  In Sale's account, the
story of the Nixon presidency had been that of a war
between the Eastern Establishment and the Sunbelt.... 
Was it even possible, he wondered, 'that a wider
conspiracy was at work, an entangled affiar that might
have involved the Rockerfeller interests in New York,
the Yankee bastions like the CIA and the Justice
Department bureaucracy ... as well as other
individuals?'" (p. 242)

Cf., albeit with significant differences ...

We have seen that Pynchon’s family was aligned with
the old order, the J. P. Morgan group, and that
Pynchon. & Co. was brought down at the time of the
stock market crash in a way that cast some suspicion
on the Chase National Bank, one of the Rockefeller
banks. We find Pynchon, not in the mountains leading
insurrection, a modern “El Desheredado,” an American
Che; but at his typewriter seeking revenge.

[...]

   For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous
holocaust, a cataclysm of 40 million souls, resulting
from a competition among technologies. The old
dynasty, the J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the
technologies of coal, steel, and railroads; the newer
Rockefeller dynasty on the technologies of oil
(petrochemicals, plastics), aluminum, and aircraft.
Pynchon says that World War II was a corporate war
reflecting those technologies, that for many their
“first loyalty, legal and moral, is to the estate
[corporation] she represents. Not to our boys in
uniform [the nation-state], however gallant, whenever
they died” ( Lot 49, 53). 

[...]

In Rainbow Tyrone Slothrop begins as plain ole
Slothrop, poses as British correspondent Ian
Scuffling, poses as a Russian soldier, masquerades as
a pig, becomes known as Rocketman (359), Raketemensch
(435), and finally Rocky (741). While this anticipated
the name of a contemporary film, it is also the
nickname of a very influential American family, the
Rockefellers. According to Cassell’s German-English
dictionary, Mensch is the third preference for the
English word “fellow.” Pynchon converts Slothrop to
Rocketman to introduce the ambiguity
man-mensch-fellow. In Pynchon’s hands Rocketman is
Raketemensch is Rocketfellow is Rockefeller. 

   Slothrop leads us to the Rockefellers much as a
proverb from Ben Franklin transforms into a quote from
Mark Hanna leads to old John D. Rockefeller, whose
schoolchum Hanna was. Hanna was not a “nickel magnate”
as Pynchon slyly asserts; if he was any kind of
“magnate” it was in Great Lakes shipping. Most
definitely he was John D. Rockefeller’s boyhood pal,
and later, at the turn of the century, he was US
senator from Ohio. He was a leader in Republican
politics, known as Rockefeller’s political fundraiser
and king maker. 

[...]

   Aren’t the Rockefellers secure? Haven’t they been
pretty influential for three or four generations now?
Don’t the oil companies control the country, its
government, its corporations, institutions, etc.?
Aren’t they now the establishment, as pervasive at the
J.P. Morgan group was from the Civil War through World
War I? Is there an opposition, even a loyalist
opposition? If recent elections are any indication,
there doesn’t seem to be any....

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm 



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