The Rocket and The Bomb

[jody boy]

Welcome to the CounterOrganizing Principle, C.O.P. ("force" is out of Vogue
this time around). Civil society, not to mention family life, seems to need
these types of beliefs- think of the emergence of religion at the dawn of
human-hood, or more relevantly, Roger Mexico's mother just after Pirate's
dream. Gnostics might argue that Mr. Rocket is the "new testament" version
of that old time gal, with The Bomb just being the the means to turn us all
into ghosts, holy or not. I find Chris Hedges a bit irritating, but he has
a point.

Gravity would be the most likely candidate for the office of
Organizer-in-Chief, from an over-all, Hamiltonian-type formulation, in the
Pynchonian Universe. So, from whom or what does C.O.P. originate? It might
be like Mach/Einstein with some Doonesbury thrown in, which sort of
dovetails with the Orwellian zero sum notion of opposites exactly
cancelling each other out, and, naturally, excluding any sort of middle
ground. Not really so appealing to those of us trying to cop a little peace
of mind.

Anarchy,  at first, seems attractive. It certainly appeals to my personal
inertia. But we really are all in this together, and it would seem likely
that given the current state of affairs there might be a need to single up
all lines and pull in the same direction, at least for the near term. I
don't have any answers about how to organize that sort of thing, but I can
certainly appreciate your call to "try something else."
I'm leaning more toward the "Small is Beautiful" type of approach, with the
emphasis on decentralized energy production and water purification. Thank
you for sharing your past.

On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 4:43 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Gravity’s Rainbow begins with air-raid sirens. It ends by linking a mad,
> perverted, transcendence-seeking rocket launch in 1945 to the dT instant
> before detonation of a warhead -- right here, right now. Its title
> signifies both a ballistic parabola and a remix of Noah’s rainbow: God’s
> promise of no more floods (but the fire next time).
>
>
> That has special resonance for Baby Boomers like me, who were born and
> grew up between Gottfried's flight and Richard M. Zhlubb's resignation. You
> post-Boomers know the big picture if not the details: the US that we grew
> up in was enjoying (if "we" were white well-educated Anglo males, of
> course) its most prosperous, world-dominating years. It was also, in the
> Cold War and nuclear arms race, vulnerable and frightened in ways it had
> never been before. Disneyland meets “duck-and-cover” drills, Conelrad tests
> between Elvis songs on the AM radio, yada yada.
>
>
> Since joining the P-list almost 25 years ago, I’ve periodically nattered
> on about how the linkage of the Rocket (throughout) and the Bomb (peeking
> from that scrap of newspaper Tyrone finds), connecting GR’s first and last
> pages, is among the most central of P’s patented “offstage but central”
> historical elements – like the Holocaust (and most of the war itself) in
> GR, the foreshadowings of the US’ western expansion and the Civil War in
> M&D,  the Chums’ glimpses of WWI from above the clouds in AtD, etc.
>
>
> Current events involving various rockets, bombs, and Scarsdale Vibe’s
> wayward grandson Donald -- along with some other exchanges here and on FB
> W.A.S.T.E. -- got me thinking about this again. Instead of big-picture
> blather, here are one Boomer’s personal snapshots that may explain why I
> just can’t quit the topic:
>
>
> 1960, a precocious 10-year-old read John Hersey's _Hiroshima_.  Both my
> parents had been Marines in the Pacific, and I’d never questioned the need
> to defeat those Very Bad Japanese. But as I read I thought: “This is just
> wrong. Pearl Harbor, Bataan death march, atrocities in China – I don’t
> care, nothing makes this right." Not because the A-bomb was uniquely
> horrible, but because annihilating cities and civilians just didn’t *fit*
> with the proud narrative I wanted, of soldiers and sailors and pilots
> fighting their counterparts. Over the next 15 years, on my way towards
> writing brief pop histories of WWI and WWII in the 1970s, I’d learn about
> how little the "strategic" bombing of Japan and Germany actually
> contributed to victory. Before WWII began we’d committed ourselves to heavy
> bombing as a doctrine – and when it turned out to be incapable of
> paralyzing war production and logistics as planned, we turned to attacking
> cities on a much greater scale than the earlier Axis "terror bombings" of
> Guernica, Warsaw, London, Chungking etc. And when at last it *did* seem to
> work in August 1945, we decided that would be a pillar of our national
> security. No more Blitzes, no more Holocausts, because we’d be equipped to
> do both much bigger and faster – purely as a deterrent, mind you.
>
>
> 1962, the Cuban missile crisis. A space & rocketry nerd, I knew nerdy
> stuff about missile technology -- including the fact that very soon,
> inevitably, the USSR would have hundreds of ICBMs (intercontinental) at
> home, far more threatening than a handful of IRBMs (intermediate-range) in
> Cuba. I was scared. I was angry at Khrushchev for gambling to fill the
> interval ("OK, you have rockets and bombers close to us in Europe and
> Turkey and Japan and Korea, we'll put some close to you"). I was also angry
> at Kennedy for going to the brink when the best possible outcome would make
> us a bit safer for two years or so. Afterward, I was angry at all the Free
> World pundits for treating a dick-waving contest as a triumph of resolute
> courage.
>
>
> 1964, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
> Bomb.’ In its black-humor slapstick approach to Very Serious Matters, this
> was Gravity's Rainbow _avant la lettre_ for me. All the deserved praise for
> its bold satire seemed to fall short, because satire implies exaggeration –
> and with its B-52 bombers approaching the USSR for hours while statesmen
> frantically conferred, the movie wasn’t half as extravagantly insane as the
> truth. Outside the theater, our dawdling aircraft had already been
> reassigned to “follow up” our missiles, which would arrive 25 minutes after
> launch from Missouri and the Dakotas, or in half that time from a Polaris
> submarine. Talk fast, President Muffley!
>
>
> 1967, a summer job walking the streets of Harlem and Spanish Harlem for
> the Army Corps of Engineers, surveying building basements as potential
> fallout shelter sites to be stocked with food and water and filtered
> ventilation kits. This was late in a decade-long, nationwide program that
> was supposed to save millions of lives if "the balloon goes up." But
> civil-defense drills had tailed off years before -- and there was *no
> fucking trace* of the extensive planning and frequent practice that would
> be essential to actually get people into these shelters on panicky short
> notice. Like the man sez in GR, "The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's
> all theatre."
>
>
> 1982, I admired Orville Schell's 'The Fate of the Earth,' which described
>  the possibility that all-out nuclear war might cause a mini-ice age that
> could kill most if not all of humanity. I was happy that it revived
> pressure for disarmament. But I also wondered: “Jeez, *this* is what it
> takes to get our attention now? The familiar prospect of just killing a
> billion people quickly and kicking civilization back to 1900 or so wasn’t
> enough?”
>
>
> 1983, Reagan promotes SDI ("Star Wars"). Overwhelmingly, those who
> understood the technologies quickly concluded that (1) with enough money
> and time we might be able to intercept 100 or even 1000 warheads, but that
> (2) it would take the USSR less money and time to add another 2000 or 5000
> warheads and decoys. The response from SDI advocates was, and still is,
> essentially high-tech Mr. Micawber: "Something will turn up."
>
>
> (A few years later, it emerged that only when visiting the Strategic Air
> Command after his first election had Reagan realized that we didn’t *have*
> a defense against ICBM attack – only deterrence and retaliation. For
> roughly twenty years, a rising GOP star on his way to the Oval Office,
> speaking often about the Red menace and the need for more defense spending,
> had simply not known the most central fact of the matter. And you worry
> about Trump?
>
>
> Lately, less worried about nukes in the former Red menaces (or the UK and
> France and Israel and India and Pakistan), we’ve indulged in vapors over
> Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. “Sure,” say the Very Serious People, “we told
> you in 1949 about how dangerous it was for a brutal dictator in Moscow to
> have The Bomb, in 1964 about how dangerous it was for a brutal dictator in
> Beijing to have it, in 2002 about the brutal dictator in Baghdad who --
> oopsie! But trust us, those guys in Tehran and Pyongyang are different.
> They're *crazy.* Maybe we can cut deals with Moscow and Beijing to help
> restrain them..?"
>
>
> Meanwhile, President Obama – the one who made us feel there was adult
> supervision – signed off last year on a 30-year, trillion-dollar commitment
> to  “redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers,
> submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs and production plants.” Not
> more nukes (and there *are* a lot fewer than in the 1960s), just a
> technological upgrade of the 2016 status quo. To maintain deterrence,
> because without it the world would be a more dangerous place. Does Obama
> regret it? Very likely. Was he more able to just say “no” than his
> predecessors since Harry Truman? No.
>
>
> Thomas Pynchon didn’t make all this up -- but it really sounds like him,
> doesn’t it? .
>
>
> +++
>
>
> Based on no evidence at all, I like to imagine that Berlin 1948 and Suez
> 1956 and Berlin 1961 and Cuba 1962 affected young Pynchon the way these
> affected me… that maybe working at Boeing was for him what the
> fallout-shelter survey was for me. Spend a little time in some corner of
> the belly of the beast, and it stays with you.
>
>
> Based on more evidence, I believe that throughout his books, he's trying
> -- among many other things -- to get at *what kind of crazy we are* to keep
> acting this way… digging back past the 20th century, to the Industrial
> Revolution and calculus and Calvinism and the Age of Exploration and
> mythology, to Adam’s goddamned Fall, to trace all the roots.
>
>
> To suggest, maybe, with savage and compassionate artistry, that after all
> these years of dealing with our fear of death and submission by building
> ever grander systems of death and domination, we might want to try
> something else.
>
>
>
>
> [image: https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
>
>
>
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