Rocky, fella

[Dave Monroe]

For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the
political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to
attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim
we wield over American political and economic institutions.

Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the
best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me
as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world
to build a more integrated global political and economic structure –
one world, if you will.

If that’s the charge, I stand guilty and I am proud of it.

--David Rockefeller, Memoirs (2002)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rockefeller#Bilderberg.2C_Council_on_Foreign_Relations_and_Trilateral_Commission

For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous holocaust, a cataclysm of 40
million souls, resulting from a competition among technologies. The
old dynasty, the J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the technologies
of coal, steel, and railroads; the newer Rockefeller dynasty on the
technologies of oil (petrochemicals, plastics), aluminum, and
aircraft. Pynchon says that World War II was a corporate war
reflecting those technologies, that for many their “first loyalty,
legal and moral, is to the estate [corporation] she represents. Not to
our boys in uniform [the nation-state], however gallant, whenever they
died” (  Lot 49,  53).

[...]

.... In Pynchon’s hands Rocketman is  Raketemensch  is Rocketfellow is
Rockefeller.

Slothrop leads us to the Rockefellers much as a proverb from Ben
Franklin transforms into a quote from Mark Hanna leads to old John D.
Rockefeller, whose schoolchum Hanna was. Hanna was not a “nickel
magnate” as Pynchon slyly asserts; if he was any kind of “magnate” it
was in Great Lakes shipping. Most definitely he was John D.
Rockefeller’s boyhood pal, and later, at the turn of the century, he
was US senator from Ohio. He was a leader in Republican politics,
known as Rockefeller’s political fundraiser and king maker.

We should remember that Ohio was the hub of Republican politics during
the period, and that Cleveland was the seat of the Standard Oil Trust.
Mark Hanna was responsible for the political careers of both McKinley
and Taft, and his machine was largely instrumental in having each
become president.

The closeness of the name Rockefeller and the word rocket allows
Pynchon to construct many puns and combinations. Indeed, the
Rockefellers use their own name in like manner. They own Rockefeller
Center, where the Rockettes dance. They also own Rockresorts,
Greenrock Farms, Winrock Farms, Ven-Rock Inc.

 Pynchon is leading us to the Rockefellers throughout Rainbow with
combination words, puns, and corruptions, Numerous characters call
Slothrop Rocky and fella, though never Rocky, fella. Just as the
Tristero leads to Thurn and Taxis leads to the Rothschilds leads to
the Morgans leads to Pynchon & Co. and to DISINHERITANCE; the
Harrimans and the Whitneys (28), Allen Dulles (268), Winthrop (630),
Thomas E. Dewey (636), Mark Hanna (664), Richard M. Zhlubb (754), and
“Standard Awl” (565) point to the DISINHERITORS. Though he never names
them, Those Who Know, know.

[...]

In his way Pynchon has a lot of fun at the expense of the
Rockefellers, and who could better afford it? In Lot 49 he has a
character named Winthrop (among other things, a Rockefeller, one-time
governor of Arkansas) Tremaine as the operator of a “Swastika Shoppe,”
and in V. he has one Matilda Winthrop running a whorehouse. In Rainbow
Captain Geoffrey “Pirate” Prentice reminds us of one Ezra Parmalee
Prentice, the husband of Alta Rockefeller. At one point in Rainbow,
appropriate to nothing in the dramatic action, Pynchon introduces a
scene from a long ago Clark Gable film just so he can call William
Powell, as the governor of New York (Nelson A. Rockefeller at the time
he was writing), a “condescending jerk” (516)

[...]

 While Pynchon has fun at the expense of the Rockefellers, he also
fears them as much as Byron the Bulb fears the “hit man from the
Committee on Incandescent Anomalies” (651), as Tchitcherine fears the
sinister “Ripov of the Commissariat for Intelligence Activities”
(700). We know that Allen Dulles was once a Rockefeller lawyer and
became the director of the CIA, that his brother John Foster Dulles
was once the director of the Rockefeller  Foundation and became
secretary of state; but does that mean that Pynchon really fears
assassination at the hands of the CIA for his jokes at the expense of
the Rockefellers?

Aren’t the Rockefellers secure? Haven’t they been pretty influential
for three or four generations now? Don’t the oil companies control the
country, its government, its corporations, institutions, etc.? Aren’t
they now the establishment, as pervasive at the J.P. Morgan group was
from the Civil War through World War I? Is there an opposition, even a
loyalist opposition? If recent elections are any indication, there
doesn’t seem to be any.

[...]

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm