Anybody interested in Project Paperclip should probably stay away from the Jacobson book

Fri Mar 7 11:36:07 CST 2014

What the heck is "the conspiricist stance?". As far as I can see there are quite a few conspiracies in Pynchon books and precious few conspiricist stances. There are anti -plutocrats and a couple anarchist bombers,  there are also anarchist golfers and music historians; then there are people trying to escape the fascists  and people trying to uncover crimes and often uncover a network of co-conspirators. 
 Also, trying to blame potheads for the growth of the far right is a stretch, and I don't see how they are any more escapist than suburban college professors, drinkers, or pop culture TV addicts.  Did those who continued to resist the right make a big difference?  I guess one can look at feminist theory and action, civil rights, environmentalism and see some scant progress in slowing the tide, but it is slim .  What they did, Pynchon included, was fight where they could, contribute to the withdrawal from Vietnam and document history from a different moral perspective. They kept the debate alive while the country drifted further into militarism and plutocracy. 
 I think where we agree is that finding someone to blame is not the most important thing and  that no one is pure or has all the answers.  Personally all my human contacts seem to indicate there is a large percentage of thoughtful moral flexible citizens who want something much better than what either party is offering, and that this group includes many of the smartest  people alive who collectively represent the best ideas for a better future . What is hard is imagining a social mechanism by which they might coalesce into a united political force.  

On Mar 6, 2014, at 12:59 PM, Monte Davis wrote:

> Last paragraph in previous post: "My sons, about the same AGE when..." :-)
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> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:35 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've no answers for either of you about better tactics or democratic mechanisms, nor any very inspiring successes to show for my own efforts along those lines.
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> Let me put it in terms of Pynchon rather than of history and policies and politics. His books are full of conspiracies and paranoia, and there is a school of interpretation that takes that at face value: TRP is himself a "conspiracist," one who believes that consensus history is a shadow play and that sinister cabals are really pulling the strings.
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> I couldn't disagree more strongly. I think TRP is a moralist and satirist in the line of Dante and Voltaire and Mark Twain, who treats the conspiracist stance as a symptom, not a cure, even -- or especially -- when it's embraced by his most sympathetic characters.
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> In GR, for example, consider the flaws of spirit and vision that took us from the London missile in 1944 to the Los Angeles missile in 1972. Are they all summed up in that crass, cruel, yee-hawing racist Major Marvy and in the big shots at the Potsdam conference? Or are there hints of them even in sweet, innocent Tyrone? Was it only the covert manipulation of Dr. Jamf and the SOE and the White Visitation that got him playing his special part in Opration Paperclip? Or -- maybe, just maybe -- could his all-American worldview, built (as Pynchon reminds us a hundred times) of Westerns and detective stories and Hollywood ("old fans, who've always been at the movies (haven't we?)") and friendship with that cool, dashing Cold-Warrior-to-be Jack Kennedy --  could that have been part of the problem, too?     
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> In Vineland: Is Zoyd Wheeler a victim in a vacuum, at the mercy of conspiracies of Reaganite power freaks and greedheads? Or -- maybe, just maybe -- did his withdrawal into weed and the woods after those fabulous Sixties, paying no attention, make things a lot easier for the Brock Vonds of this world? 
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> One reason I value Pynchon is that my gut tells me he agrees with me about who's in the big bad conspiracy and who's in the poor victimized preterite. But over time, I've come to value him even more because he cuts *nobody* any slack. 
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> Including seven-year-old me, watching Dr. Wernher von Spacefuture display models of yet-to-be-built Moon and Mars craft on Disney programs (along with 40 million other Americans), enthralled by how *totally cool* the American remix of the Raketenstadt was going to be. 
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> And hardly thinking at all about those other models lined up on the credenza behind him: Redstone, Jupiter, Thor, Atlas... all of them already built, deployed, and ready to make fireballs of Minsk and Rostov and Smolensk and Kiev, should the defense of freedom and democracy require it.
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> I suspect that in 1944, seven-year-old Tom Pynchon was enthralled by the impending victory over the Axis of Evil (version 1.0), and looking forward to the shiny world of peace and prosperity (a-and ROCKETS! just like in the comix!) that the triumphant United Nations would create. Gravity's Rainbow -- so rich in Slothrop's childhood memes -- is, among other things, Pynchon's way of not cutting himself, or me, or anybody else, any slack for the way *that* turned out.
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> And my sons? About the same edge when the Mosaic and Netscape browsers began bringing them all the information and music and video they could ever ask for, for FREE? Just for letting the web servers and Verizon collect a little user data here, plant a little cookie there? They get their turn in Bleeding Edge -- and if you think that book cuts anybody any slack, dividing the world neatly between us innocent surfers and the evil Ice/Windust/NSA conspirators, I suggest that you're missing something.         
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> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:48 AM, Michael Bailey <mikebailey at gmx.us> wrote:
> But I didn't want them (Them) to do any of these nasty things! 
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> Somebody made those decisions against my protests. Whenever given a chance I vote against them. I do what I can to choose other courses.
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> So it's interesting to read about the concerted efforts of those who are working in the other direction...and whose party I refuse to think of as "we"...those fuckers are not one of me and I'm not one of them. 
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> I do wish them well in all respects, and the best wish I have is they will learn the joys of peace....the error of their ways as it were...
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> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, by "our own vast moral failure" I mean building nuclear weapons and delivery systems far beyond any rational need. During WWII we and the UK had already taken "terror bombing" of cities to a scale far beyond what we'd called horrible when enemies did it to Guernica, Chinese cities, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London. In the decades that followed, we spent several trillion dollars systematically equipping ourselves to do a thousand times worse.
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> That the equipment has not yet been used (and that it has been modestly scaled back since the 1980s) does not make it less of an abomination. The decisions that led to that were made by Americans, not by German emigres. Millions of Americans (including young Tom Pynchon, cranking out Boeing technical documentation and company magazine articles) took part in the process. Details of bombs and rockets were secret; that we were gearing up for mass murder -- only if forced to it, of course! -- was not a secret, not a conspiracy. 
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> One of the central concerns of GR (and the reason for its arc from a missile in 1944 to a missile in 1972) is to ask: "Given all the destruction and horror of the Zone, and 1945's opportunities for a fresh start... was Mutual Assured Destruction really the best we could do by 1972? Why did we fuck up all over again, only bigger and shinier?"
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> Wernher von Braun and his team brought the experience and technical _virtu_ to make one part of the process somewhat faster for the US. They brought their own guilt -- which as far as I'm concerned, is lost in the enormity of the larger enterprise. The process as a whole would have been very little different if Paperclip had never happened and they'd all been hanged. They weren't; neither were thousands of other Germans whose war efforts depended on -- and who spent years managing -- horrific slave labor operations.
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> Listen,  Joseph: against the enormity of what we (and the USSR, and the UK, and France, and China, and Israel, and India, and Pakistan, and...) have chosen to live with quite openly, I DON'T FUCKING CARE about Paperclip as a conspiracy, about Sekrit Nazis REVEALED!!! (for the 12th time since that Sekrit Gallup Poll in 1946). Or that (gasp) senior officers and statesmen LIED about it!!! 
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> Paperclip is an acid-etched little bit of historical irony, rich in symbolism... and that's all. To the extent that we keep rediscovering it, and keep emphasizing (against abundant evidence) how Very Very Hush-Hush Top Secret it was, and that Now It Can Be Told, we're reassured that we've found the hidden root of evil.
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> Does everybody remember Pynchon's earlier title for GR? "Mindless Pleasures"? I don't believe he intends us to understand that historical conspiracies go on while we're distracted by mindless pleasures.
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> I believe he intends us to understand that a focus on conspiracies *is* another mindless pleasure, one that distracts us from what's staring us in the face.
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> In the mirror.
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> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> I don't really see the logic of what you are saying. 1st point) "our own vast moral failure". 'Our own' meaning the majority of citizens who did not want to import Nazi scientists? Or some other us who have the power to ignore public opinion and the stated policy of the President and do as they wish?
> I agree that most of our national problems are plainly visible, but isn't the fact that powerful policy makers in defense and intelligence wanted  to skirt legal accountability for war crimes and bring in Nazi science and policy people and wanted to do so against popular will and against important opposition voices indicative of  something other than a united expression of national will? Doesn't the fact that they went ahead secretly also indicate how policy is made in the US regardless of democratic process?
>    We talk about the cold war as a battle with Soviet Russia and China but big enemies are always a psychological part of totalitarian systems and can be convenient cover stories.   Meanwhile all the actual fighting we engaged in apart maybe from Korea was to continue colonial projects.
>  Part of what GR is about is the tendencies within the culture of the western allies toward the generation of systems of totalitarian control which are parallel to the axis madness . It also points out the tendency to override moral restraint and ignore human rights in the interests of a paranoid strategic priority. This is what a conspiracy is  and there are thousands of examples from Abu Graibh to the gulf of Tonkin to the Tuskeegee syphilis  experiments to cointelpro to operation paperclip. The idea that all have been exposed is naive.
>   A modern parallel to operation paper clip is Total Information Awareness, proposed by Dick Cheney publicly, roundly rejected, and made operational secretly, and in contradiction to public statements, by Barak Obama.
>  So Mr Le Carre is all wrong. There is no deep state, there is no deep state, there is.....
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> On Mar 5, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Monte Davis wrote:
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> > I liked some of Blowback, but also found in it some of the tacit "Nazi magic" attitude I object to in l'affaire von Braun: in Simpson's book, that our stance toward the postwar USSR was corrupted by a relative handful of Germans with their own _parti pris_ and axes to grind; in von Braun's case, that we don't have to think about our own vast moral failure in missile/nuclear strategy, or the Cold War origins of the space race -- because hey, there were NAZIS providing a technical leg up at White Sands and Huntsville.
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> > In both cases, there were so many other, broader causes at work that when I ask myself: "Would US choices and policies have been materially different if Paperclip had never existed?" the answer is "no."
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> > On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> > I enjoyed, if that is the right word, Christopher Simpson's "Blowback."
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> > Thomas
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> > Am 04.03.2014 10:11, schrieb Mark Thibodeau:
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> > Here is what some "serious" conspiracy minded people think of Ms
> > Jacobson and her work...
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> > http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37827
> >
> > YOPJerky
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