Von Braun in the Rainbow

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

And yet, at the end of the day there are good guys and bad guys and morals to be 
learned. And Werner von Braun is not one of the good guys. It's not that TRPV is 
incapable of depicting moral shades of grey---There's Polker, Mason & Dixon 
figure out their work will ultimately fuck things up, Frenesi Gate's moral compli-
cations spill off into another novel, another history. And then there's obviously 
bad guys, like Weissman and the Pointsman. There are folks who appear as 
"good guys" like Geli Tripping and Prairie Wheeler. There's a pattern. There's 
moral tales Tommy Boy's pumping out. Pynchon's working off the the main seam 
of Satire and if you can't see that, then you're just blind. It's not a "neat little 
framework", it's Menippean  Satire, but it's still Satire and you can't have Satire
without "Obvious Targets", sorry.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Monte Davis" <monte.davis at verizon.net>
> Kai sez: 
>  
> >  It's also the whole project  [WvB] stands for. All that
> > Leary-like grandiosity madness about colonies in space and such. ..
>  
> One mighht note that Leary had wigged himself out long before latching onto
> space . .. but any stick will do to beat a bad dog, eh? 
>  
> >Who is providing the rainbow? The earth and its elementary powers. 
>  
> Live and learn; silly me, all these years I'd been under the impression that
> 
>  
> (1) the (emblematic, Judeo-Christian) rainbow was a promise from YHWH, Mr.
> Sky God and Written Lawgiver par excellence, pretty much the opposite of the
> chthonic and intuitive powers that the creators of the Old Testament
> rejected and condemned
>  
> (2) the (scientific, analytic) rainbow is produced by sunlight and airborne
> water droplets, not as far as I know by the fecund mud of Bad Karma
>  
> To me, Gravity's Rainbow is about the *perversion* of transcendent impulses
> (Rilke's gone wrong in the "apolitical" wandervogel youth every bit as much
> as Oberth's gone wrong at Peenemunde). That's much richer and more
> interesting to me than root-and-branch condemnation of the impulse itself. .
> 
>  
> By the same token, I think there's more to be learned from the von Braun who
> enthralled Rotary Club luncheons in New Mexico and Alabama, who fit so
> perfectly into the quintessentially American medium of Walt Disney TV, than
> from righteous indignation at the War Criminal Among Us.
>  
> I find it hard to believe that Pynchon has absorbed and pondered all that
> science and technology simply to proclaim that it's eeeevil, and we've got
> to get ourselves back to the garden. I think he is so eloquent and
> provocative about the von Braun "project" in GR (like the Enlightenment
> "project" in M&D, the modernist "project" in AtD, etc.) precisely because he
> feels and acknowledges their promise as much as he mistrusts it. Why anyone
> would want to shoehorn that into a neat little framework of Them (mad
> scientists) vs. Us (good humanists) escapes me.