Pynchon tracking Nixon, Misc.

[Doug Millison]

Excellent! One of the things that drew me to Pynchon when I first read  
him, GR in '73 while I was in the Army in the Republic of Korea a  
stone's throw (but too stoned to) from the DMZ, was the way he went  
after Nixon who was slimy from the start, a true American pervert and  
the insincere smiling face of the 50's and 60's in my mind.  http://oc.metblogs.com/files/2009/06/dopey-nixon.jpg

Talk about a moment when hope surged in the good ol' USA:  the night  
that Kennedy defeated Nixon and took the Presidency. And even when  
Kennedy wound up sending in the Marines, I was too young, my Mother  
thought, to have to worry about the draft and Vietnam, but in 1972,  
after all, Nixon sent me a letter drafting me into the US Army, and  
there I was reading GR and loving the way Pynchon depicted the  
President who had put me there.

V. Nixon looks kind of like a rat, too. Mickey's nasty cousin.

Now, let's find Bush in Gravity's Rainbow.  I think he may be in there.

-Doug

Mark the K:
> In 1953, the year TRP graduated from high school (at 16) and started  
> at Cornell, Nixon publicly used a 'shooting rats' [Commies]  
> metaphor. He was tapped to diss McCarthy for "going too far" [when  
> he went after the Army]
> so spoke of having to "shoot rats directly' not scattershot.
>
> Also in 1953, after much extensive globe-trotting for reasons  
> unknown but suspected by many, the political cartoonist Herblock did  
> one of a crowd
> awaiting Nixon who came bounding UP FROM A MANHOLE [Sewer] with  
> heavily-festooned travel stickers on his luggage.
>
> Rats and the sewer are not exactly the most original metaphors but  
> they both appear in "V."--although not literally about Nixon---as we  
> know. Nixon of the famous awkward V sign...
>
>