The Rocket and The Bomb

Thu May 4 06:15:19 CDT 2017

In the recent election for POTUS only Sanders enthusiastically supported
the SANE Act.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s831

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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