IVIV: Hughes & the Bomb

[Robin Landseadel]

Like I said earlier, I know I have to go to multiple sources and  
actually spend time reading them before I would have real  
comprehension of the specific targets of this book. Being as this is a  
book by Thomas Pynchon, it's going to have multiple levels of meaning,  
that's always been his M.O. so the chance of him switching gears this  
late in the game is ziltch.

Why Manhattan Beach? Why Vegas, spring of 1970? What happened that  
might give us insight as to why he thought he needed to write this  
piece of crap, point us in this direction? Why this sky? This long  
road? This empty room?

I suggested there must be something autobiographical about Inherent  
Vice.

I've only just opened "Citizen Hughes", by Michael Drossin. I looked  
it over briefly—a biolographical reporting of Howard Hughes'  
handwritten interoffice memos, heisted on June 5, 1974 by some group  
of plumbers at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood. followed soon  
thereafter by the resignation of Richard Nixon, President of the  
United States, on August 9, 1974. What Howard Hughes wanted to do,  
more than anything else during the moment of the spring of 1970, was  
to get Richard Nixon to stop testing nuclear weapons in the Nevada  
desert only 100 miles north of the Strip & The Desert Inn, where  
Hughes lived, naked & stoned, the richest man on the planet. I'll get/ 
give more details in time, but the gist of it was that there were CIA  
operatives who were devoted to Howard Hughes more so than to Richard  
Nixon. I suppose the Plame/Wilson/Rove/Cheney matter could be trotted  
out as a representative example of that sort of thing save that in the  
Nixon/Hughes match-up the odds were much higher. the story was  
effectively buried in the rubble of Watergate & Hughes oddly ends up  
on the side of the angels, for once. Nixon's failure to accept Howard  
Hughes offers of massive bribes and other favors in exchange for a  
cessation of nuclear tests in Nevada meant that Nixon was attempting  
to cover up the awful toxicity of these tests—if Hughes had his way,  
it would most likely result in far fewer nuclear tests, less poisoning  
of the planet, fewer bombs  . . .

Of course, we all knew what happened.

Pynchon seems to be consciously tracking CIA folks back to the places  
where he rubbed elbows with them in the first place; Gordita/Manhattan  
Beach, heir apparent to Bay City/Santa Monica—R & D centers of the  
military Industrial Complex where as of 1970 aerospace technology was  
quickly turning into spy satellite technology. Pynchon probably worked  
with some of the folks at TRW, back in the days when he worked at  
Boeing.

If there was one mammoth take-away from Gravity's Rainbow, it was "The  
Bomb!", writ large 'cross the sky like it was our collective  
tombstone.  What Nixon & Hughes were up to must have been up in the  
air during the time and at the place where Thomas Pynchon wrote  
Gravity's Rainbow.