SOURCE: Baker, Jeffrey S. “Amerikkka Uber Alles: German Nationalism, American Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar Movement in Gravity's Rainbow.” Critique 40, no. 4 (summer 1999): 323-41.

[In the following essay, Baker considers Gravity's Rainbow by situating the text within the dual contexts of 1960s American radicalism and 1940s German imperialism.]

Across Pynchon's body of writing, there is an abiding concern with the radical democratic politics of 1960s America. That concern manifested itself as early as “Entropy,” Pynchon's self-professed “Beat story” (Slow Learner 14), in which the reader is left, finally, with two distinct and contradictory images: On the one hand, we see Callisto's ineffectual paralysis, as he holds the dead bird and stares at the window that Aubade has just shattered; on the other hand, we see the image of Meatball Mulligan attempting to “try and keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” by giving wine to the sailors, separating the morra players, introducing the fat government girl to Sandor Rojas, helping the girl in the shower to dry off and go to bed, and calling a repairman to fix the refrigerator (97). As Tony Tanner recognized, Pynchon's story provides a metaphor for a classic epistemological dichotomy as old as Plato and the Sophists. Tanner writes:

In that composite image of the pragmatic man [Meatball] actively doing what he can with the specific scene, and the theorizing man [Callisto] passively attempting to formulate the cosmic process, Pynchon offers us a shorthand picture of the human alternatives of working inside the noisy chaos to mitigate it or stand outside, constructing patterns to account for it. Man is just such a two-storied house of consciousness, and in the configuration of that shattered window and Callisto's paralysis, Pynchon suggests the peril of all pattern-making.

(18-19)

Tanner's analysis points up a radically pragmatic political agenda for social change (as reflected in the Beats' anarchic rhetoric), as well as a pragmatic suspicion of the theoretical and an affirmation of the experiential or particular. Both of those impulses embody a radically democratizing Emersonian politics that characterizes nearly all of Pynchon's major writing. The Beats' criticism of “Moloch” eventually gave way to the hippies' indictment of both “the system” as represented by the American government and an American middle class status quo. Similarly, Pynchon's writing has progressed from the relatively mild accusation in “Entropy” of Callisto-like American complacency to a more radical indictment of such countercultural concerns as two separate and unequal “Americas,” revealed in The Crying of Lot 49 by means of Oedipa's odyssey through the labyrinthine W.A.S.T.E. system.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon echoes an escalating countercultural critique of the Establishment's repression at home and murderous imperialism abroad. That work reveals the pragmatist's idealist tradition as a European “death-structure” identified with Nazi imperialism and “planned society”—a formulation that Pynchon clearly connects with America's Cold War rhetoric and war economy in the Vietnam era. Finally, in Vineland, Pynchon's radical impulse is reduced to an almost wistful recollection of the radical and anarchic mentality of the 1960s. That book portrays a Reagan-era fascism not only accepted but embraced by the American middle class. It points up that 20 years later society demonstrated the limited success of 1960s radicalism.

Pynchon, then, is a writer of and about the 1960s; and most of his writing, from “Entropy” to Vineland, is caught up in the egalitarian and democratic ideals of the radical countercultural movement. Eric Meyer has written that, on rereading Gravity's Rainbow today, with the benefit of critical distance, “it is possible to see […] how much it is a product of its particular historical situation.” For Meyer, the novel is “a text of ‘The 60's,’” not only because it is “about that now mythic period,” but also because its many themes reflect the same “anxieties of an America at War both at home and abroad” as prevailed during that troubled period in American history (81). Across his body of writing, Pynchon has advocated turning away from recognized authority and affirming a democratization of power based on the individual's intrinsic worth, the same ideas that drove 1960s coalitions such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Philosophically, SDS based much of its politics and ideology on the pragmatic writings of C. Wright Mills, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although few scholars have attempted to trace the influence of Dewey and the pragmatists on 1960s radicals in the United States, there is no question that the pragmatists had great influence on the radicals' “revolution.” Tom Hayden, one of the founders of SDS, had written his master's thesis on Mills, and the influence of the pragmatic strain of American thought on the first SDS manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement,” is clear. As Stewart Burns has recognized, protopragmatist Emerson, pragmatist Dewey, and Dewey's pupil Mills were seminal influences on the democratically based old guard of SDS, whose early manifesto became a rallying point of radical democracy for a generation of demonstrators and activists (57).

Similarly, as most critics who have addressed the issue agree, Pynchon's writing aims toward a kind of “activism.” Edward Mendelson has written, “Gravity's Rainbow is a book which hopes to be active in the world, not a detached observer of it. It warns and exhorts in matters ranging from the ways in which the book itself will be read, to the way in which the whole surrounding culture operates” (10). Mendelson's notion that “Pynchon's book tries to fulfill a public function” (5) is reiterated by Craig Hansen Werner's insistence that “Pynchon forces the resolution [of conceptual] modes off the page and into our lives, where it belongs” (191). Similarly, Marcus Smith and Kachig Tololyan insist that “It is the extraordinary ambition of GR [Gravity's Rainbow] to help its readers toward […] freedom” (152), and J. S. Hans writes that the goal of Pynchon's novel is “to get us so actively involved in the view that we cannot escape the recognition that it is our world, the one in which we fully participate, and the one for which we share full responsibility” (278). Mendelson's point that the text of Gravity's Rainbow means to be active highlights one of the many convergences between Pynchon's politicized aesthetic and the emphasis of the 1960s radicals on active political involvement. Like Meatball attempting to work within the chaos that surrounds him, both the pragmatists and 1960s radicals favored action within the tangled, muddy, and complex world over the platonic theorizing that characterizes Callisto's modus operandis. Thus the “activity” that Mendelson attributes to Pynchon's novel is in keeping with an American pragmatism in which the aesthetic, situated as it is within culture as well as human activity and experience, is always political; art is always either reinforcing or challenging (as do “Entropy” and Gravity's Rainbow) the cultural values and practices that help produce it.

Because much of the radical Left in the United States during the 1960s relied on the writings of American pragmatists for its democratically oriented ideological underpinnings, it seems appropriate to base any reconstruction of that radical critique in Pynchon's work at least partially on the work of those pragmatists. In examining their “idealist tradition” (from Blicero's romantic quest ideology through Dewey's critique of Nazi idealism during World War II), I place Blicero's obsession with his “Destiny” and the Nazi affinity for destiny, as expressed in the imperialistic notions of Weltpolitik and Lebensraum, in the same context. Looking at the analogies that the 1960s radicals made between American imperialism and brutality at home and abroad and the German Reich's earlier imperialism and brutality through Dewey's critique of German idealism, helps to place Pynchon's novel in the context of that time and that ideology.

We learn in Gravity's Rainbow that Major Weissman, while at Nordhausen serving the Nazi as “Schutzhäftlingsführer” at the Rocket works, is “enchanted” by the name of the adjoining town—Bleicheröde. That name, as Enzian recognizes, mimics the early German word for death, “Blicker” (GR 322). The early Germans saw death as “bleaching and blankness.” Enamored of that signification, Weissman assumes it as his SS code name, later Latinized to “Dominus Blicero.” Blicero's “love for the last explosion,” his nihilistic pleasure at the prospect of even his own possible annihilation (GR 96), points up his death obsession and the aptness of the name that he takes as his own. In the context of the novel, Blicero's fascination with a transcendent “Destiny” and his increasingly self-centered maneuvers to realize that destiny represent both the death-directed idealist tradition in European thought and the German romanticism that can be associated with the Nazis' own imperialistic weltanschauung.

The romanticism of Major Weissman-Captain Blicero is best understood in terms of his affinity for the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, especially the Duino Elegies, and what Richard Locke has called the “German Romantic echoes in Nazi culture” (2). In Blicero's mind, Rilke's impassioned “Want the change. O be inspired by the Flame” becomes tied to the Germans' own great “Destiny” (GR 97). Blicero's interpretation of Rilke's Tenth Elegy reflects the underlying imagery of the quest narrative: “Of all Rilke's poetry it's this Tenth Elegy he most loves, can feel the bitter lager of Yearning begin to prickle behind the eyes and sinuses at remembering any passage of […] the newly dead youth, embracing his Lament, his last link, leaving now even her marginally human touch forever, climbing all alone, terminally alone, up and up into the mountains of primal Pain, with the wildly alien constellations overhead. […] And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny. […] It's he, Blicero, who climbs the mountain, has been so climbing for nearly 20 years, since long before he embraced the Reich's flame” (GR 98).

Blicero's obsession with Rilke is representative, in a larger sense, of a German Romanticism associated with Nazism, as critic Charles Hohmann has written:

Pynchon's account of pre-war Germany, although pushed to extremes, is not unwarranted considering the way Rilke was read during the days of National Socialism. While a minority of anti-Nazi Germans read Rilke's poetry as a solace in their inward emigration, Nazi readers of Rilke either reinterpreted his life and works in terms of party guidelines, attributing what they considered his weaknesses to fin de siècle decadence or, having overcome their enthusiasm for his poetry, rejected it as degenerate thus rationalizing their initial rapture as a necessary transitional phase on the road to their ideological commitment to the party.

In his portrait of Cpt. Blicero, alias Major Weissman, Pynchon recreates the prototype of a German Rilke adept who evolves through the successive phases of unconditional mystical adoration, national socialist appropriation and inward emigration.

(334-35)

Hohmann's association of Blicero's romanticism with the Nazi proclivity for an ideology of romantic quest in the name of a transcendent moral and nationalist teleology echoes Dewey's earlier association of National Socialism with the idealist tradition in European thought. In “The One-World of Hitler's National Socialism,” Dewey wrote in 1942 that “Hitler's philosophy, or world outlook, is that the identity of the ideal with hard fact may be effected here and now, by means of combining faith in the ideal to which destiny has called the German people with force which is thoroughly organized to control every aspect of life, economic, cultural, artistic, educational, as well as military and political” (430). Robert Westbrook has written that the point of Dewey's discussion, “while not minimizing the distinctiveness of Hitler's ideology, was to link Nazism to the idealist tradition Dewey had held substantially accountable for German militarism during World War I. […] Although Hitler glorified brute force and one could not overlook this aspect of his regime, Dewey stressed Hitler's own emphasis on the need to subordinate force to ‘spiritual’ ideals” (522).

H. R. Kedward reinforces Dewey's notion of the Nazi regime as one invested in high-flown “spiritual” ideals; he argues that part of the Nazis' attractiveness to the German volk rested in their appeals to a mythic German past “as rediscovered by the German Romantics from Herder to Wagner; to myths of past and present—the Jewish ‘plot’ and the supremacy of the Aryan race; and to myths of the future—the creation of a New Order in Europe. Hitler and his colleagues were the Teutonic heroes reborn, and Germany was seen as determined by its history to be the agent of a new and greater European civilization” (225). Relying on the ideas of Alfred Rosenberg, the “self-appointed philosopher of the Nazi movement,” who argued that the German's task of the century was to “create out of a new myth of life a new type of man,” Hitler and his followers hoped to conquer Europe in the name of this mythic folk consciousness—a spiritual and cultural ideal that was seductive to Nazis and their sympathizers.

In John Dewey and American Pragmatism, Westbrook stated that in Dewey's view the German idealistic philosophy “played an indispensable ideological role in German politics by allowing the nation's elites to pursue Realpolitik under the banner of ‘an unconditional obligation to fulfill an historic mission as organ of the Absolute,’ hence freeing them from the need to justify their actions in terms of consequences. ‘The prevalence of an idealistic philosophy full of talk of Duty, Will, and Ultimate Ideas and Ideals, and of the indwelling of the Absolute in German history for the redeeming of humanity,’ Dewey observed, ‘has disguised from the mass of German people, upon whose support the policy of the leaders ultimately depends for success, the real nature of the enterprise in which they are engaged'” (200).

A large part of that “enterprise” was the Nazis' will for empire in the name of the various “ideals” by which they justified their imperialistic juggernaut and the savagely brutal methods they employed to fulfill Hitler's dream of European, even global, domination. Enzian describes Blicero as a man “in love with empire” (GR 660), and that love of conquest is reflected in the Nazi drive toward imperialism.

The concepts of Weltpolitik and Lebensraum, which encompassed the German will to empire, had been decades in the making, dating from at least the Wilhelmian era. The Nazis subsumed those concepts into their own ideology, but crucial circumstances strengthened the Nazi ideology over that of the Wilhelmian era and Weimar republic: German economic instability during the 1920s and early 1930s, which helped the Nazi cause inestimably, and a devastatingly effective Nazi propaganda machine that linked the concepts of German imperialism with both idealist German folk myths and a growing anti-Semitism (Smith 52, 83-84, 232-33).

Like the hegemonic, exploitative uses of the “system” in Pynchon's novel, the Nazis relied on the “idealist” tradition in the form of a cultural Absolutism to gloss over and justify the self-serving ends of their imperialism. Pynchon reinforces the relationship between the Nazis' “idealist” or “transcendent” posturings and Weissman-Blicero's own obsession with his “Destiny” by describing the colonel's form of “transcendence” in terms of the cruel spectacle of the “Oven,” represented by the Rocket 00000, which constitutes the “Flame” that might enable him to “transcend.” Yet that Destiny shows itself to be the only kind of transcendence that the Rocket can give—that is, transcendence in the form of death. “It's been going on for much too long, he has chosen the game for nothing if not the kind of end it will bring him, nicht wahr? too old these days, grippes taking longer to pass, stomach too often in day-long agony, eyes measurably blinder with each examination, too ‘realistic’ to prefer a hero's death or even a soldier's. He only wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven's warmth, darkness, steel shelter […]” (GR 99). Thus, just as the Hereros Enzian and Ombindi come to see the equation between “transcendence” and death, so Blicero's primary desire at the end of his life is to “escape the cycle of infection and death” through the “transcendence” that the Rocket system offers (GR 724).

Blicero launches the 00000 from the Lüneberg Heath, with Gottfried (with his own dreams of transcendence) as its payload, on or about Easter 1945. Through Pynchon's narrative prolepsis-analepsis, the 00000 appears to be the same Rocket that is converging (its payload “magically” transformed into a nuclear warhead) on the Orpheus Theater in Los Angeles, circa 1970. The Rocket thus travels, through Pynchon's narrative technique, across the span of twenty-five years, “over” the self-satisfied American 1950s and their increasing ideological and technological proliferation of Cold War mentality and military sword-rattling, past the more hopeful days of the early Kennedy administration, and into the heart of Nixon's America at the height of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment and the mass demonstrations that accompanied it. Few satisfactory critical speculations have arisen regarding Pynchon's narrative “bridge” between those two eras. Yet Blicero himself offers a significant clue to Pynchon's intentions in a speech that he delivers to Gottfried immediately before the 00000 is launched:

“America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper—into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. […]

“In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceana, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis.”

(GR 722)

In Blicero's anachronistic view, the United States has come to represent the same impulse toward death and imperialism that was embodied in the “structures” of the idealist European tradition. Those “European lies-against-time” employed by the Nazis to gain and justify their power are now used in the name of an American imperialism that has adopted its “old metropolis'” death-directed ideology. The connection between the imperialism of Nazi Germany and that of the United States in the Nixonian era is reinforced by Blicero's “Tarot” near the end of the novel. Steven Weisenberger's reading of Blicero's cards suggests that the Two of Swords signifies “a slide into conformity, equipoise, and business. The narrator's comment is particularly striking: ‘If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisors, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors’ (V749.9-12). […] Weissman's Tarot points up the end of his romantic desire and its translation into business, into conformity, into the cartelized state of postwar, into the threat of nuclear winter. Recall that Weissman survived the April apocalypse and was seen as late as May. This effectively underwrites the denouement of GR, where the prolepsis to Los Angeles and the Nixon epoch infers a new transmogrification of Weissman's apocalyptic desire. Blicero slips out of the Zone, but his spirit presides over contemporary America” (309-10).

As Weisenberger recognizes (15), von Braun's ascension to the directorship of NASA points up the grim irony of Pynchon's having chosen von Braun's remarks that preceded the July 1969 Apollo moon launch as the epigraph to part one of Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon, thus, has connected the idealist tradition that helped to inspire the Nazi rocket program with the military motivations for the accelerated development of the American space program during the 1960s.

Perhaps to reinforce the connection between the Nazi regime and American repression at home and imperialism abroad during the 1960s and early 1970s, Pynchon also allows us a glimpse of Slothrop's Tarot. Slothrop's “future” is not so desirable: we are to look for Blicero among the successful wielders of power, but for Slothrop we should look among “the Humility, among gray and preterite souls” (GR 742). In setting up this dichotomy between the “Elect” such as Blicero, and the “Preterite” like Slothrop, Pynchon has established the same distinction between what he would later call (in the Introduction to Slow Learner) “the succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945” and “the rest of us poor sheep” (18-19) who live at the mercy of the controlling elite in contemporary America.

The comparison between the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust and the later “police action” of Vietnam may seems glib, but such comparisons were being made by the so-called “radical counter-culture” that helped to spearhead the antiwar movement. Looking back on that phenomenon, antiwar activist and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) member Todd Gitlin describes the comparison from his point of view as a child of the 1950s:

[T]o me and the people I knew, it was American bombs which were the closest thing to an immoral equivalent of Auschwitz in our lifetimes. When the time came, we jumped at the chance to purge ourselves of the nearest thing to the original trauma. And then atrocities committed by innocent America rang the old alarms—even if the parallels were drawn too easily, overdrawn, with crucial differences obscured.

(24-25)

Although the comparison between Nazi Germany and American involvement in Vietnam may have been exaggerated, nonetheless, to place Gravity's Rainbow within its historical context, it is necessary to understand how many antiwar radicals were led to draw that analogy. It is that America, at war at home and abroad, which helped to shape Pynchon's novel. In that light, much of the narrator's commentary on both “the War” and the development of multinational corporations (or cartels), assumes a significance that points to what those 1960s radicals would call, in an all-encompassing denunciation of its capitalistic imperialism and its repressive domestic policies, “Amerikkka.”¹

In 1965, 25,000 American troops were stationed in Vietnam; in 1966, that number rose to 385,000; by June 30, 1967, the total was 448,000. In 1969 alone, nearly 10,000 Americans died in Southeast Asia. By the time the war was over, the conservative toll of Vietnamese casualties showed more than 850,000 “enemy” dead, 400,000 civilians dead, and 1 million wounded (Gitlin 220, 378, 435). At the time of those final totals, the United States had dropped “twice the bomb tonnage on Indochina as in World War II and Korea combined. Nixon had ordered over half of it—four million tons” (Burns 114). During a seven-month period beginning in February 1973, Nixon ordered 250,000 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia, “50 percent more than the tonnage dropped on Japan in all of World War II” (Gitlin 437).

By introducing the historical figure of Nixon, in the form of “Richard M. Zhlubb,” at the end if his novel, Pynchon has called up a host of counter-cultural bugaboos that the symbol of the ill-fated president would automatically be associated with, particularly in 1973. Not surprisingly, Pynchon's portrayal of him (in Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland) is anything but flattering. Aside from the goofy-sounding name with which Pynchon endows him, “Zhlubb” has chronic adenoid problems that account for his stuffed-up speech (“I'b dot afraid to dame dames”). Because of that particular affliction, his “friends and detractors alike think of him as ‘the Adenoid'” (GR 754). Readers will recall from Pirate Prentice's description the “lymphatic monster [that] had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo” (GR 15) terrorizing London at the beginning of the novel. “The Adenoid,” grown to monstrous size, attempts to execute its “master plan” by swallowing up “certain personalities useful to it” (GR 15)—a megalomaniacal obsession that Pynchon obviously wants us to associate, here at the end of the novel, with Nixon's own machinations.

“Zhlubb,” who drives a “Managerial Volkswagon,” is obsessed with the repression of subversive individuals like “Steve Edelman,” who, attempting to “play a chord progression on the Department of Justice list” on his harmonica, is arrested for “Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument,” and is, at the time of narration, “currently in Atascadero under indefinite observation” (GR 755). The “Manager's” obsession with control and repression is in his reaction to the “freaks” who are running amok on the Santa Monica Freeway. But Nixon-Zhlubb has a plan for them, too: “Relax,” he tells the narrator, who is riding with Zhlubb in his Volkswagen, “There'll be a nice secure home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to Disneyland” (GR 756). Zhlubb's reference here to this “nice secure home” is echoed in Vineland, where DL is explaining to Prairie the significance of Federal Attorney Brock Vond's invasion of Zoyd and Prairie's home: “‘In the olden days we called it the last roundup,’ DL explained. ‘Liked to scare each other with it, though it was always real enough. The day they'd come and break into your house and put everybody in prison camps. Not fun or sitcom prison camps, more like feedlots where we'd all become official, nonhuman livestock.” At this point in the explanation, Prairie is shocked: “‘You've seen camps like this?’” And DL answers: “‘Yep, I've seen ‘em, your mom was in one, you'll recall, but better than us reminiscing and boring you, go to the library sometime and read about it. Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go” (264).

If there is a chilling echo of German “work camps” in this Nixonian America, it is ascribable to the counter-culture's view of Nixon, especially during the last years of the Vietnam War; Pynchon's portrayal of him reflects this viewpoint and is consistently negative. In Vineland, the Nixon presidency is referred to variously as the “Nixonian reaction” (239), the “Nixonian Repression” (71), and the “Nixon Regime” (210). There is also reference to FBI infiltration of the radical community (Vineland 24), as well as their COINTELPRO operations (within whose files the subversive Weed Atman's name appears) (210), all of which occurred under the Nixon administration. Real-world evidence of Nixon-sanctioned counterintelligence operations bears out this Pynchonian paranoia. Todd Gitlin writes that “it was widely—and, as it turns out, accurately—surmised that the FBI, military intelligence, and Police Red Squads in cities like New York and Chicago, were busily tapping phones, recruiting informers, and occasionally planting dope on activists. Rumors began to fly that the government was going to prepare—had prepared?—concentration camps for use in a hypothetical national emergency” (314). This same theme of the Nixon administration's determination to snuff out the radicals' “movement” is reflected in Stewart Burns's Social Movements of the 1960s:

The climate of intentional violence, much of it instigated by government provocateurs, was just the rationale Nixon needed to intensify the surveillance, harassment, and prosecution of black and white activists, culminating in the notorious Huston Plan, which lifted restrictions on wiretapping, mail opening, surreptitious entry, and other illegal measures and provided for direct White House control over the jumble of federal intelligence units. It was never officially approved because J. Edgar Hoover balked at losing FBI autonomy, but most of it was carried out informally.

(109)

To place Gravity's Rainbow in its historical context, it is essential to recall how the war divided the country during the 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, the administration's self-satisfied attitude toward its (often violent) repression of antiwar activism only served to exacerbate the radicals' sense of outrage at what they perceived to be government hypocrisy and even fascism.

For example, the killing by National Guard troops of four college students who were demonstrating against the war at Kent State, Ohio, on May 4, 1970 caused the radicals to speculate, as Gitlin writes, that “Perhaps, then, the political power of the Nixon administration—its power to compel acquiescence if not campus enthusiasm—ultimately grew out of the barrels of its guns? Techniques of repression and intimidation were by now profuse” (413). Radicals and demonstrators alike could only conclude from such governmental and military deployments against them that “the government is willing to shoot you” to maintain control (Gitlin 414).

The Kent State killings were among a series of events in the course of the antiwar movement that led the radicals to associate the increasingly brutal and repressive Johnson and Nixon administrations with the fascism of Hitler's Nazi Germany. During the “siege” of the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 (which Norman Mailer immortalized in his “novel as history” Armies of the Night), the non-violence that antiwar activists demonstrated was offset by the brutality of United States military personnel and U.S. marshals on the scene for crowd control. “The MPs and U.S. marshals had beaten and arrested people sporadically all evening, but late at night, with the TV cameras gone, the troops formed a flying wedge and fiercely attacked their unarmed foes, thrashing them with clubs and rifle butts. Women were singled out for the cruelest treatment” (Burns 82).

In Grand Central Station, on March 22, 1968, fifty New York policemen, “quivering in formation,” rushed a crowd of demonstrators, “smashing people with nightsticks.” As Gitlin describes the scene, “People fell trying to run the gauntlets; cops kicked them where they sprawled. A soda bottle flew out of the crowd; five cops grabbed one seventeen-year-old—the wrong one, according to a reporter eyewitness—and started beating him with their sticks—an action which elicited the cries of Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! from the crowd” (238). In the wake of a student takeover of a building at Columbia University on April 23, 1968 “the Underground paper The Rat published a picture of a “swastika'd helmet resting on a colonnaded building,” with a headline that read “HEIL Columbia” (Gitlin 308).

Perhaps the most egregious examples of violence were during the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 25-30, 1968. As Burns has written, “For many radicals the lesson of Chicago was that from now on violent tactics would be a legitimate recourse to meet the ‘fascism’ of the enemy …” (90).

The murder of James Rector and the wounding of at least a hundred others at People's Park in Berkeley only confirmed the “establishment's” willingness to go to any lengths in its determination to maintain control over civilians who disagreed with its policies. Fully a year before the killings at Kent State, many radicals felt that their cause had become unwinnable: the government's tactics had become too brutal, and its firepower too persuasive, to overcome. At home and abroad, the hypocrisy of the Nixon administration was clear to the radicals (Gitlin 361). “Even as he [Nixon] and his friends were shaking their heads over our violent language, condemning permissiveness and loose morality, celebrating law and order and the virtues of civilized restraint, they were killing and horribly maiming millions of people abroad, and systematically violating the rights of millions more—of all of us—at home. The continuing Watergate/ITT/Berrigan/Camden/Gainesville stories, among others, suggest that the radicals of the '60s, for all their riotous rhetoric, tended to behave with a touching propriety and probity—while the official guardians of law and order were capable of anything” (qtd. in Howard 500).

In light of this common (by 1968-69) perception of the Federal government and of the North American status quo, Gravity's Rainbow can be read as a kind of parable, in which Blicero's launching of the 00000 from a Nazi rocket works into Nixonian America is tantamount to the analogy that so many radicals made between Nazi Germany and the “fascist” Johnson and Nixon administrations. It is fitting that Blicero, in the bitterest of Pynchonian ironies, comes to characterize the United States as the site for Europe's “Kingdom of Death”: for as Blicero's romanticism can be seen to represent the idealist tradition that the Nazi war machine employed as justification for its goal of world domination, so the treatment of war in Gravity's Rainbow comes to be seen as critical of the American war machine and the interests that kept American men and women in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades. Any reading of Pynchon's novel that would attempt to place it within its time must recognize the metaphorical quality of these war critiques, which in great measure only ostensibly address the Second World War and, in a larger sense, the phenomenon of war. When Pynchon refers in Vineland to “the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom” (195), it is necessary to understand that he is, ultimately, a writer from and of the American 1960s, championing the antiwar, antifascist position of the radicals. When in Vineland he refers to the Vietnam war as “murder as an instrument of American politics” (38), he reflects the radicals' view of the hypocrisy and lies of a government that had betrayed their trust.

That same feeling of betrayal is visible in a somewhat cryptic passage near the end of Gravity's Rainbow. Earlier in the novel, Pynchon had written that “The War” expedites “barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity […]” (GR 130-31). Inserting that passage after my discussion of the Vietnam era obviously makes one question what war Pynchon was writing about. The answer, I think, is clear in the following passage taken from the end of the novel:

[Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all … the worst part of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by your tireless Typhoid Marys, cruising the markets and the stations. We did manage to ambush some of them. Once we caught some in the Underground. It was terrible. My first action, my initiation. We chased them down the tunnels. We could feel their fright. […] Two of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971. I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this part in?]

And, a bit later.

[The true sin was yours: to interdict that union. To draw that line. To keep us worse than enemies, who are after all caught in the same fields of shit—to keep us strangers.

We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends, we cherished.]

(GR 739)

That passage, which has usually been referred to in the context of Pynchon's metafictional concerns and the rhetoric surrounding the “cause-and-effect” binary systems referred to elsewhere in the narrative, also points up a very specific historical context (1966-1971). Pynchon's earlier assertion that “The War” serves to divide and separate individuals is clearly repeated in this authorial aside in reference to the radical counterculture “movement” (the “Underground”) of the 1960s. In that context, the “yours” whose “true sin” was to interdict the union between the “friends” whose blood was “cherished” must refer to the biggest enemy the “movement” faced—the United States government, whose repressive brutality at the Pentagon, in Grand Central Station, in Chicago, and in People's Park eventually served to demoralize and separate the radicals from their cause, as well as from each other. Pynchon's cryptic question, “Do you want to put this part in?” addressed apparently to those “editors” whom he claims to know so well, is appropriate in the sense that “this part” shifts the focus of the entire novel from its apparent setting of World War II to one that transforms Gravity's Rainbow into a political tract that rails against the American government of the Vietnam-Nixon era.

Ostensibly, the involvement of the United States in the decades-old Vietnamese civil war was, as Mailer has written, the result of an “intellectual troth” that had been pledged by “the most powerful middle-aged and elderly Wasps in [post-World War II] America,” who had “sworn with a faith worthy of medieval knights that Communism was the deadly foe of Christian culture. If it were not resisted in the postwar world. Christianity itself would perish” (Armies 204). Thus to defend this “ideal,” to make the world “safe for democracy,” those in power argued, the Communist threat of Red China had to be stopped at all costs. The “domino theory,” which insisted that Vietnam was but a stepping stone for the Reds into the rest of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, then Australia, Japan, and India, made it clear that such global expansion had to be stopped at its very beginnings—that is, in Vietnam. It is essential to note that the overarching reason for American participation in the “Vietnamese conflict” was idealistic in nature. The defense of democracy, indeed of Christianity itself, hung in the balance, so the argument went. However, as the war continued to escalate through the early 1960s and into the second half of the decade, many antiwar radicals became increasingly convinced that there were other, more economically oriented motives. That suspicion of the radicals finds its way into Gravity's Rainbow in the form of Pynchon's complex “history” of the development of multinational capitalism. Pynchon's critical “history” also reveals the greatest misuse in the novel of the “idealist” tradition as it is used to defend the exploitative practices of a self-interested elite.

For example, the following passage from Mister Information, who is explaining “The War” to Skippy, reveals much in the way of this “history,” and much, too, in the way of Pynchon's critical approach to it:

“Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War can't use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's sad, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn't it, Skippy?”

(GR 645)

Mister Information's chilling gaiety, as he describes a totalitarianism in which all of the uncooperative, subversive elements of this society have been eliminated completely, reflects the fears of radicals like Gitlin who foresaw in the move to demoralize the counterculture movement an “impending fascism” that would go to any lengths to eliminate dissension. Moreover, the notion that the war is “keeping things alive” also implicates an American corporate liberalism that many radicals felt was the underlying (economic) motivation for American involvement in Southeast Asia, despite the Cold War rhetoric of “democracy” and “freedom” that was used to justify the American presence.

In a speech in Washington on April 17, 1966, SDS president Paul Potter admonished the New Left to “name the system” that was driving American involvement in Vietnam. “We must name it” he said, “describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it. For it is only when that system is changed […] that there can be any hope of stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam” (qtd. in Gitlin 184). The “system” that radicals would eventually identify (with regard to American imperialism overseas) had been foreseen decades earlier by pragmatist William James, when he wrote, “Every up-to-date dictionary should say that ‘peace’ and ‘war’ mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the ‘peace’ interval” (Writings 663). James is referring to the development of a permanent war economy, which Pynchon would echo years later in Mister Information's speech to Skippy.

This highly cynical (and paranoid) “conspiracy-theory” of War is evident as well in the much-quoted passage of Gravity's Rainbow in which the narrator describes Enzian's realization that the War “was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, just to keep the people distracted […] secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology […] by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy burst of war, crying ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,’ but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, ahh more, more […] (GR 521). Revealing the idealistic justification (in the form of nationalism) for a materially oriented enterprise, Pynchon here reflects the same insight as the pragmatist C. Wright Mills displayed in “Culture and Politics”: that in the “Modern Age” of national and corporate economies the two had become tied to warfare. In that essay, Mills wrote,

The power structure of this [American] society is based on a privately incorporated economy that is also a permanent war economy. Its most important relations with the state now rest upon the coincidence of military and corporate interests—as defined by generals and businessmen, and accepted by politicians and publics. It is an economy dominated by a few hundred corporations, economically and—politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decision. These dominating corporation-hierarchies probably represent the highest concentration of the greatest economic power in human history, including that of the Soviet Union. They are firmly knit to political and military institutions, but they are dogmatic—even maniacal—in their fetish of the “freedom” of their private and irresponsible power.

(qtd. in Howard 79)

Implicit in Mills's essay is the name of the system, which Potter had encouraged members of the New Left to identify; and it came to be known as American corporate liberalism, or, as Pynchon would later characterize it in Vineland, a “Christian Capitalist Faith” that has been passed from generation to generation of “ruling elites,” “living inside their power, convinced that they're immune to all the history the rest of us have to suffer” (232).

In that sense, the “Interregnum” that develops in Pynchon's “Zone,” in which Russian, British, and American “high-level tourists” (GR 295) scuffle for the best leftovers of German Rocket technology in the Mittlewerke, can be viewed as a phase in America's ascent to its position as an imperialistic world power. This development, or “history,” begins with German bureaucrat Walter Rathenau, who was “prophet and architect of the cartelized state” (GR 164). The narrator describes Rathenau's contribution to the development of Germany's “cartelized state” during World War I:

From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father Emil Rathenau had founded the AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir—he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority—a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War.

(GR 164-65)

Laying the philosophical groundwork for what would come to be known as the planned society, Rathenau was the first to develop and implement a structure of state that Pynchon in Vineland associated with a succession of power brokers beginning with Hitler and Roosevelt, and including Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Reagan, and Kissinger, who led the United States along the same path that Rathenau had begun in World War I Germany (Vineland 372). Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism or, The Culture of Late Capitalism, concurs with that historical dialectic that associates the Rathenau-based, cartelized state of Nazi Germany with Roosevelt's New Deal, both of which include “(1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control […] and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business (‘state capitalism’) such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems […]” (xviii).

That association between the “planned society” of Rathenau and FDR's New Deal policies is continued by the fictitious American Lisle Bland (whose involvement with Hugo Stinnes, the “Wunderkind of European finance,” begins to expose the way in which the multinationals had already begun to transcend political and even national allegiances long before the second World War). Aside from Bland's “un-American” investments, which suggest a disregard for national boundaries even in wartime, his character also allows Pynchon to demonstrate the calculated “control” of American big business over a generally unsuspecting American population and to suggest the ideological affinities of both business and government leaders for the “planned society” of Rathenau. The narrator reveals American big business's manipulation and control of the people through “the Bland Institute” and “the Bland Foundation,” which (we're told) were responsible for sitting on the patent for the “100-mile-per-gallon” carburetor, as well as for the great “Killer Weed advertisement campaign of the thirties,” working hand-in-hand with the FBI (GR 581). Psychological studies become Bland's “specialty,” and he employs those studies both to predict and manipulate the behavior of the American people, an activity that appears to culminate in what the narrator calls FDR's “election.” Once again pointing up the imbrication of the New Deal with the Nazi cartelized state, the narrator tells us,

Though many of his colleagues found a posture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through the motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail, Harriman and Weinberg: an American synthesis which had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities—all grouped under the term “control,” which seemed to be a private code-word—more in line with the aspirations of Bland and others. A year later Bland joined the Business Advisory Council set up under Swope of General Electric, whose ideas on matters of “control” ran close to those of Walter Rathenau, of German GE.

(GR 581)

Although Bland is a fictional character, it is nonetheless clear that Pynchon would have us associate his high-level machinations with a collusion between the federal government and big business that bore the fruit of FDR's New Deal policies. Thus Jameson's view, that the Nazi system is cut from the same cloth as that of the New Deal, while perhaps heretical to American ears, is nonetheless anticipated by Pynchon here in Gravity's Rainbow. Further, Pynchon's novel also anticipates Jameson's view that “late capitalism” is characterized by a situation in which “nation-states” are secondary entities to the capital that has outgrown them (412). For example, Slothrop found many agreements between ICI (Imperial Chemical, Inc., a British firm) and the IG (IG Farben—Germany's largest cartel during the 1930s) dated before 1939: a situation that suggests that the two cartels were preparing for World War II and its aftermath before England had even entered the war (GR 250). Another example of the multinationals' independence of national or political boundaries occurs in the novel: the narrator tells us that the American Shell Oil Corporation is loyal to “no real country, [and takes] no side in any war” (243).

The collusion between government and big business is reinforced in the novel with the arrival in the postwar Zone of Clayton “Bloody” Chiclitz, the American industrialist who “dreams of generations of cannon fodder, struggling forward on their knees, one by one, to kiss his stomach while he gobbles turkey legs and ice cream cones and wipes his fingers off in the polliwogs' hair” (GR 558). Pynchon's unsavory portrayal of the industrialist reflects an animosity toward the American big business tycoons who, like Bland, manipulate and control the preterite “cannon fodder,” as well as the connection between big business and governmental military development. For when Chiclitz declares that “there's a great future in these V-weapons. They're gonna be really big” (GR 558), it is essential that we read his prophecy as part of the “history” of American ascension to the status of world power. Thus, a few pages later, when Tchitcherine declares that “a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul” (566), we must consider that the multinational capitalism that Tchitcherine foresees is led, by the time of Nixon, by none other than the United States and manifested in both Cold War nuclear proliferation, as well as in an economic-military imperialism best symbolized by American involvement in Vietnam.²

The ideological motivation for German imperialism in World War II differed significantly from the American decision to participate in that debacle and to defeat Hitler's National Socialism. Nonetheless, Pynchon would have us recognize that the United States of the Vietnam era, through a historical process in which big business and government cooperated in the creation of the most powerful war-based economy that the world has ever seen, is not so far removed in either structure or intent from Hitler's imperialistic Nazi Germany. The same “planned society” that the Nazis coordinated, based on Walter Rathenau's World War I German model, has been connected, in Pynchon's novel, with Roosevelt's New Deal policies and the business-government collusion that culminated in the development of the war-based economy of the Vietnam era. Moreover, the same “idealistic” tradition that fueled the Nazi war machine, in the form of a Nationalist consciousness that relied on folk myths and a supremacist rhetoric of hatred, can be seen in the American justification for the Vietnam War in the form of a Cold War ideology that insisted that the evil Communist threat of Red China threatened both “Democracy” and the Christian way of life and therefore had to be stopped before it spread like a cancer throughout the rest of the civilized world. However, in both cases, the idealist tradition that is employed to justify the actions of the imperial powers only masks a more materially oriented enterprise: for Germany, the mythic folk consciousness was used, finally, to cover a megalomaniacal imperial impulse toward global domination. In the United States, the high-flown rhetoric of the Cold War simply glossed over the material interests of a military-industrial complex whose war-based economy would benefit greatly from the war in Southeast Asia.³

Thus, in a most ghastly and unspeakable way (1960s radicals would have argued), the “ideals” of both Nazi Germany and Vietnam-era America were employed to rationalize and justify the inconceivable slaughter of millions of people in the name of “god and country.” If the historical context of Pynchon's highly complex novel is to be comprehended, then his analogy between Hitler's Nazi Germany and Vietnam-era United States must be understood in the light of the comparison between these two imperialist nations that SDS and other antiwar radicals were making throughout the profoundly troubled late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States.

Notes

1. Gitlin's analysis of 1960s radicals, written from a kind of “new ethnographic” standpoint, asserts that this characterization of “Amerikkka” stemmed, in large measure, from the carnage witnessed each night in living rooms across the United States. “Look at TV, Newsweek or Time: Interspersed between the ads for the American way of life, here was this child seared by napalm, this subject tortured by our freedom-loving allies, this village torched by Marines with cigarette lighters, this forest burned to the ground […] a seemingly endless procession of pain and destruction. So much punishment inflicted by one nation against another: the sheer volume of it seemed out of line with any official, self-contradictory, incomprehensible reasons of state. There had to be something radically, irredeemably wrong at the dark heart of “America” (245-46).

2. Jameson, in fact, associates the entire culture of late capitalism with this American military and economic imperialism. He writes: “Yet it is at this point that I must remind the reader of the obvious: namely, that this global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror (5).

3. In 1966 alone, the cost of the war reached ＄20 billion (Gitlin 301). There can be little doubt that much of the impetus for the Vietnam War was economic, particularly in light of the collusion between government and big business that characterizes our culture of late capitalism.

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