von Braun in the Rainbow

[Monte Davis]

Dyson had personal experience of how people painted themselves into
impossible moral corners in WWII -- both generally in contriibuting to the
bombing of German cities, and specifically in the calculus of "how many RAF
bomber crew, my friends and contemporaries, died this month per ton of bombs
dropped?" Therefore, I'm inclined to  think that if he sees vB in a
different light than Rich does, it's probably not because of ignorance,
unreflectiveness or moral obtuseness.

And I'm sure that the V-1 and V-2 attacks had a wide range of psychological
effects on different people. But if one is going to generalize about it at
all, I'm inclined to gibve more weight to the generalization of one who was
there in 1944-45 than to that  of a P-lister in 2008.

>I can clearly see 
> that you are much closer to the circle of very influential 
> thinkers whose opinions you're echoing than I can or will 
> ever be. Your take-away will always be 
> to view these sorts in a different light than us ill-informed 
> preterite.

Yeah, right: reading a review in the NYRB and dismissing it as "particularly
insufferable" on a listserv devoted to Thomas Pynchon... that's vox pop for
sure. I know how you love your "tribune of the common man" stance, but why
don't you put it where the sun don't shine and see how it fits?