IVIV: chapter seven—Gotcha!

[Robin Landseadel]

Here we are, reading this post on an Internet created by the CIA,  
talking about Pynchon talking about the CIA. A palimpsest of Tom's  
working methods may be here. He may be revealing sources, lines and  
modes of investigation persued while writing the overpoweringly  
paranoid "Gravity's Rainbow. If Inherent Vice serves no other purpose,  
it ought to get a lot of readers to re-read Gravity's Rainbow,  
following bread crumb trails deposited in IV.

Doc goes to visit Fritz over at "Gotcha":

	AS USUAL THESE DAYS, Fritz was back in the computer room,
	staring at data. He had that ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit look Doc had
	noted before in newcomers to the groovy world of addictive
	behavior.

1984/1990's Tubaholism is now replaced by 2009's online addiction.  
It's another ploy frequently developed by Pynchon, where he overlays  
the present on the past, another palimpsest. This echos "Vineland" in  
noting the addictive quality of these out-of-control factories  of  
electronic delight. I love how Nick Tosches describes the initial  
onset of Television:

	RCA had marketed its first television receivers in 1939, and
	now, nine years later, there were still fewer than a million sets in
	America, and almost half of those were in New York. Those who
	had them had not been able to see much. But now those ugly
	little devices were beginning to hum and flicker with gathering
	gales of gray insect fury, joy and plague, mediocrity and
	madness, from that vast funhouse maw of metastatic delights.

If ever there were a vast funhouse maw of metastatic delights, it  
would be the internet. When Doc gets his Lysergic weather report a few  
pages on—to the dulcet tones of Tiny Tim singing "The Ice Caps Are  
Melting" he becomes a time trespasser to 2009 and back into the stoned  
age, Lemuria and environs, like those time trespassers in Against the  
Day. A few pages we meet up at the Belaying Pin with the Plasticrats,  
a foreshadowing of events that led to the massive cash grab we just  
witnessed from majors like AIG and Bank of America. There's many  
overlays of 2006/2009 throughout Inherent Vice.


Because Fritz has an Arpanet connection, he already knows that Shasta  
split the country onboard the same "Golden Fang" Doc and Sancho were  
eyeballing at the Belaying Pin. Earlier Doc asked Sauncho if by chance

	". . .  everybody got back okay, nobody pushed over the side,
	nothing like that?"

	"Well strangely enough, my source in the federal courthouse
	claims he did see something go over the side. Maybe not a
	person, it looked to him more like weighted containers, maybe
	what we call lagan, which is stuff you sink deliberately so you
	can come back and get it later."

But Shasta and Mickey seem to have reached their destinations without  
becoming Lagan themselves.

Fritz, being all wired up to the proto-net, gets a lot of his info  
from government/CIA or government/big business allied sources. It's  
noted that the Golden Fang is a countersubversive ship of interest.  
The file Doc is looking at comes from a private intelligence operation  
known as the American Security Council, active since about 1955. Web  
searches on the American Security Council leads to the American  
Security Council Foundation, a minor change of name but apparently the  
same organization. Looking at the "SourceWatch" website one finds that

	"The origins of ASC date back to 1938. The inner circle which
	would form the Council was originally composed of Henry Luce
	and Clare Boothe Luce, Jay Lovestone, Hughston McBain,
	Theodore V. Houser, Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane and Lady
	Malcolm Douglas Hamilton. They all brought in new people to
	the inner circle, but the key to their success was working
	together for a common goal in a bipartisan manner."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Security_Council

The "SourceWatch" site has many dead ends—the links lead to servers  
that don't operate and sites for sale. But the list of prominent  
members on the "SourceWatch site includes many of the "usual suspects"  
and sounds a lot like the "Them" of Gravity's Rainbow:

	Founders. . .

	. . .  Some of the more familiar names on the list are:
	• Ray Cline, Ph.D.
	• Governor LeRoy Collins (D-FL)
	• Walt Disney
	• Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT)
	• W. Averell Harriman
	• Theodore V. Houser
	• Senator Henry M. Scoop Jackson (D-WA)
	• General Douglas MacArthur USA
	• Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX)
	• Nelson A. Rockefeller
	• Eugene V. Rostow
	• Senator John G. Tower (R-TX)
	• General Nathan Twining USAF
	• Admiral Elmo Zumwalt USN

In any case, the ASC files gave Doc [and us] a brief potted history of  
the CIA, explicitly tying the Golden Fang to the CIA:

	There was a brief history of the schooner Preserved, of keen
	interest to the countersubversive community for her high-seas
	capability. At the time of her reappearance in the Caribbean, for
	example, she was on some spy mission against Fidel Castro,
	who by that point was active up in the mountains of Cuba. Later,
	under the name of Golden Fang, she was to prove of use to
	anti-Communist projects in Guatemala, West Africa, Indonesia,
	and other places whose names were blanked out. She often
	took on as cargo abducted local "troublemakers," who were
	never seen again. The phrase "deep interrogation" kept coming
	up. She ran CIA heroin from the Golden Triangle. She
	monitored radio traffic off unfriendly coastlines and forwarded it
	to agencies in Washington, D.C. She brought weapons in to
	anti-Communist guerrillas, including those at the ill-fated Bay of
	Pigs. The chronology here ran all the way up to the present,
	including Mickey Wolfmann's unexplained day trip just before
	he vanished, as well as the schooner's departure last week
	from San Pedro with known Wolfmann companion Shasta Fay
	Hepworth on board.

It's not so hard to imagine Mickey Wolfmann, a generous Reagan  
contributor, being involved with the ASC. But Shasta? This leads to  
that great line: "I am, like, overthinking myself into brainfreeze,  
here."

Before I overthink myself into a brainfreeze, a few notes. It seems as  
though Pynchon's novels pop up during political nodal points. Note  
what is mentioned here—"  The phrase "deep interrogation" kept coming  
up. " That mirrors and echos the problems the CIA is having now, with  
the threat of exposure of it's overt illegal activities—Geneva  
Convention anyone?— threatening to emerge as of late.  "CIA Heroin  
from the Golden Triangle", is mentioned in Pynchon's usual "well,  
everybody knows about this shit anyway—hey, check out these pies!—"  
tone, and turns out to be a major element of the book's plot. All this  
corruption seeping in feels like a variation on:

	If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no
	proof against its magic, what else?

If the major crimes are being committed by the Law Enforcement  
agencies, than what use is this Knight of Deliverance called Doc? One  
of the central themes of Chandler's mysteries is how corruption goes  
all the way through government/business alliances, where "Every cop is  
a criminal and all the sinners saints." Push it far enough and you  
eventually wind up with "Travis Bickle—Public Detective." "Bay  
City" [Santa Monica] is not only a web of corruption, it is also the  
center of defense activities in Southern California, circa 1940.  
Gordita Beach [Manhattan Beach] is Bay City updated. The defense  
contracts have moved over from the Navy over to the Air Force and  
NASA, to Lockheed and TRW. But the corruption has deepened.

More from the SourceWatch website. Note that the link to Russ  
Bellant's work in a University of Colorado May 1996 posting no longer  
exists. Plausible deniability, that's all you really need in this world:

	The American Security Council -- "The Cold War Campus." "The
	Heart of the Military-Industrial Complex."

	"Its boards are filled with retired senior military officers,
	executives of major corporations, including some of he largest
	military contractors, and some New Right leaders....focuses on
	foreign policy, military and intelligence issues... clearinghouse
	for U.S. political rightists on arms control, aid to the contras, new
	weapons programs, and lobbying for special projects.... In its
	specialized areas, the ASC probably has more influence with
	the Reagan Administration than the well-publicized Heritage
	Foundation.... The ASC is in some respects more extremist than
	the RHGC (see below). It...served as a connecting point
	between Nazi collaborationists and fascist on one hand, and
	Reagan Administration policy makers on the other.... [First
	staffed by former FBI agents they produced a] dossier system
	modeled after the FBI's, which was intended to weed out
	employees and prospective employees deemed disloyal to the
	free enterprise concept" (Bellant).

	"Works with officials from the Pentagon, National Security
	Council, and organizations linked to the CIA discusses cold war
	strategy with leaders of many large corporations, such as
	United Fruit, Standard Oil,Honeywell, US Steel, and Sears
	Roebuck. CIA-linked Foreign Policy Research Institute... Aircraft
	Industries Association (worked to bring Nazi rocket scientist into
	the country, Werhner von Braun and General John Medaris)...
	National Association of Manufacturers, Chambers of
	Commerce... political figures of the anti-Semitic extreme right:
	Mark Jones, head of National Economic Council, Martin Blank
	(Who financed Hitler identified members of this crowd as "the
	most powerful secret organization of big business that existed
	during the Weimar period"), and Baron Frederich August von
	der Heydte, co-founder and ideological leader of the Christian
	Democratic Union (recently has formed an association with
	Lyndon LaRouche's neofascist cult group). ASC administers the
	IAS... played a role in political indoctrination of the military...
	Eisenhower warned of their power in his farewell address in
	1961, and Senator William Fulbright and President John
	Kennedy began to be concerned when it became clear that
	liberalism itself was under attack. They were quite obviously
	correct." (Bellant)

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Security_Council

Here's the ASCF's current list of ratings of members of Congress:

http://www.votesmart.org/issue_rating_detail.php?r_id=2518

	For the past five decades, the National Security Studies
	Program (NSSP) has been the educational focal point for the
	American Security Council Foundation (ASCF). The program
	began with annual conferences in the 1950s and expanded
	steadily over the years. It now includes fall, spring, and summer
	semesters and is called The Latin America Studies Program
	(LASP).

	The LASP is a leadership development program that supports
	the mission of the ASCF by introducing a group of carefully
	selected students to Latin American issues regarding both
	security interests of the United States and improving the lot of
	the peoples of Latin America. The better off they are – in terms
	of democratic government, safety, and standards of living – the
	better off we are. Students are selected based on academic
	achievements, extracurricular contributions to their community,
	and indications of strong character and leadership potential.
	Meaningful diversity in the class is important, including political
	beliefs. Some knowledge of Spanish is desirable, but not
	necessary.

http://www.ascfusa.org/programs/index

	The American Security Council Foundation (ASCF) is a non-
	profit organization that seeks to influence United States foreign
	policy by "Promoting Peace through Strength".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Security_Council_Foundation

	He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him
	away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must
	sound to a nonAmerican. Later he will recall that what surprised
	him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force
	but on the rightness of what they planned to do ... he'd been told
	long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially
	from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this
	pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of
	John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are,
	funny you never noticed before) screaming "BANZAI!"
	GR, P 259