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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