von Braun in the Rainbow
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
robinlandseadel at comcast.net
Thu Jan 3 21:29:17 CST 2008
I couldn't agree more with Robin that "when
you close the book, you're left with The Bomb."
Which means we're really not that far off.
Second, WvB is a hot button for me because I've
spent the last few years trying to understand the
history of rocketry, space programs, and changing
attitudes toward space since the 1950s.
As a child, my fantasy was to go to space. I watched Walt Disney's
programs all the time, being as I was 5-14 from the start of the manned
space program to eventually landing on the moon, just in time to remind
us all that "We blew it.". My teacher in the first second grade realized I
wasn't "developmentally disabled" when she discovered I was following
the John Glenn story in the papers, the school staff figuring out that I was
a very quiet student and an advanced reader. I read plenty of "Space Opera"
Science Fiction, knowing one day I'd be traveling through deep space.
> b) --- why would the mere characterization of the review
> as insufferable discomfit Monte so greatly...
First, that word "insufferable" suggested condescension,
which was confirmed by Rich's bland "I realize Dyson is
a physicist by trade and his opinions may be clouded..."
In other words, those physicists are just shallow suckers
for technical virtu and can't be expected to have our fine
sensibilities. After that, any "disavowal of ad hominem
scorn" rings kinda hollow.
Knowing that Freeman Dyson is involved in the Union of Concered Scientists,
knowing that he's both thoughtful and well informed concerning the potential
disaster that awaits us deserves consideration. And yet, and yet. . . .
"Without polio, Jonas Salk is a putz."---Lenny Bruce
Not to mention, as Don DeLillo noted in "Underworld":
"WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!"---Lenny Bruce.
Still, I used to have a subscription to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, back
when Ronnie [Mr. Clean Electric Living] Reagan was re-deploying nukes in
West Germany and I was getting arrested at mass protests at Livermore
Labs, thrown into an ad-hoc internment facility with the likes of Daniel
Ellsberg and Wavy Gravy. So I'll give credit where credit is due.
. . . .WvB is a hot button for me because I've spent the last few
years trying to understand the history of rocketry, space programs,
and changing attitudes toward space since the 1950s. That entailed
learning a lot about von Braun, and thinking about the changes in
his reputation. I concluded that the prevailing view today (basically,
"how did that evil Nazi ever pull the wool over our eyes?") is every
bit as partial and inadequate as the the benign, confidence-inspiring
Dr. Space peddled by the Disney Tomorrowland shows, and later by
NASA PR. . . .
. . . .a thread that Pynchon follows explicitly in Gravity's Rainbow, what with
the linking of Disneyland with obvious influences from Germany, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II
and Mad Ludwig's Neuschwanstein castle.
So the real question -- a much more complicated and interesting
one, IMHO -- is how and why we in the US collectively, willingly
pulled the wool over *our own* eyes. What was the mental
mechanism that let us keep the "bad Wernher" partitioned off
(with a few safe, court-jester jabs from Tom Lehrer and Mort Sahl)
for so long, while he was helping us develop our own holocaust
machinery, and then rediscover him? Or let us award his teammate
Arthur Rudolph a fistful of medals and honorary doctorates in the
1950s and 1960s, and then "discover" in 1982 that he'd been
WvB's lieutenant at the Mittelwerk ("oh...gee... THAT Arthur
Rudolph?!?!"), and hound him out of the US?
The point (as Neufeld makes clear in the biography) is *not* that
WvB wasn't deeply implicated in an evil enterprise; of course he
was. The point is that those mental mechanisms -- the ways the
US found it comfortable and convenient to think about WvB in the
1950s and 1960s -- are disturbingly similar to those WvB and his
peers lived by at Peenemunde. It does not excuse anything WvB
did to recognize that there's abundant bad faith and bad
conscience to go around.
And here I am in concord with Mr Davis. "Vineland" demonstrates the
downstream effects of all the Mindless Pleasures that distracted us,
our co-conspiracy to tune out that sword that constantly hovers over us.
Third: for me, all this ties into GR because the book devotes a
lot of effort (obviously in Pokler's story, less obviously in a lot
of other ways) to the many avenues of attraction that pulled
people into a Peenemunde, and the many modes of rationalization
that could sustain them there. In that breathtaking vault from
Slothrop's dissolution and the launching of rocket 00000 to Richard
M. Zhlubb's 1973, it's implicitly asking: OK, now you've had the
funhouse ride through 1945: did you learn *anything*?
And if not, is there anything good on the tube tonight?
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