from Citizen by Claudia Rankine

/ 

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.

You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

/
 

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in 
silence you are bucking the trend.

/
 

When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

Now there you go, he responds.

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.

/
 

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off  by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.

The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.

/
 

The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

/

Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow: The V-2 Rocket Cartel as Multinational Corporate Conspiracy by Dan Geddes

Introduction

Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violences, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. The true war is a celebration of markets. (Gravity's Rainbow, 105)

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is an encyclopedic novel, delving into subjects as diverse as rocket science, organic chemistry, Rilke's poetry, Pavlovian psychology, and Tarot cards. Some critics have marveled at the multidisciplinary erudition shown in the novel. Others have avoided it, or set it aside as unreadable, despite it having won the National Book Award.

It remains a difficult novel to critique (or even to read), not only because of the myriad subjects it covers, but also due to the lack of an obvious storyline. Critics often focus on Gravity’s Rainbow as a “text”, or on its meta-textual effects. Its “plot” is difficult to summarize. It is clearly not a traditional novel. However, despite its unusual structure and density of language, clearly one of the main themes that emerges in Gravity’s Rainbow is the prevalence of corporate power and its attendant technologies. Corporate power crosses national lines, even (especially?) during times of war, even during World War II.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon suggests an international corporate conspiracy, working for both the Axis and Allied powers during World War II. Suggestions of this type in a historical novel are obviously not the same as claims made in historical works. It is doubtful that Pynchon is baldly asserting that companies such as GE and Shell brazenly profited from both sides (though his narrator suggests it and some of his characters believe it). Pynchon, or his narrator, hedges.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a work of fiction, largely informed by historical research, especially about the history of IG Farben. Many of the historical statements in Gravity’s Rainbow are clearly meant to be accepted as fact. Pynchon is clearly interested in sharing the information with his readers, and making it interesting. But it’s hard to tell how much of the historical data (some of which is true) is true. Perhaps Pynchon only hopes to interest people to do their own research, rather than make actual historical assertions about particular companies, individuals, or nations.

Pynchon also casts doubt on these suggestions of conspiracy, for example by suggesting that Lazlo Jamf, whose long career ties together many of the corporations, is only a figment of imagination. Or that Slothrop’s map of London (indicating the location of his sexual assignations, and matching perfectly with a map of where the V-2 rockets landed) is fanciful. Pynchon giveth, and Pynchon taketh away. While the subjective nature of human perception is an interesting topic for fiction, when the subjective nature of history is the subject of a historic fiction, there is something unsatisfactory about not even knowing what the author himself happens to be claiming (if anything) about actual historic events, other than their indeterminacy. This is not the case in scholarly historical works, where the historian must assert his or her vision of events. If Pynchon were only meditating on the nature of paranoia, it would not be necessary for him to supply such detailed background information in an authoritative narrative voice.

The nature of the conspiracy in Gravity’s Rainbow itself remains shadowy in any case. Of course, the conspirators (in the novel) try to conceal themselves, so as readers we only see glimpses. Yet Pynchon does not leave us stuck entirely in Slothrop’s paranoid subjectivity (as perhaps he could have). He, or the narrator(s), share such ample background material, and even utilize omniscience to provide us scenes with characters who are involved in the conspiracy, unseen by Slothrop or other principle characters.[1]

In the end, it’s difficult to determine whether Pynchon is asserting that cartels in general work together on both sides of war; or whether there really was an illegal corporate collusion in World War II. In any case, this is at least a major theme of Gravity’s Rainbow, and one found in one of the obvious literary influences on Pynchon, Joseph Heller’sCatch-22.[2]

Gravity’s Rainbow cannot be reduced to Slothrop’s gradual discovery of the international rocket cartel, but this strand is a main plot thread, upon which so many other strands hang upon. It seems clear that Slothrop, if anyone, is the main character, and so it makes sense that the main storyline would follow him and his odyssey of discovery. Starting in Part 2, Gravity’s Rainbow follows Tyrone Slothrop on his journey through war-torn Europe to learn about the V2 (really the A4) rocket, and its many surprising connections to himself.  While researching the A4, Slothrop learns about disturbing connections between the largest corporations on both sides of the war: IG Farben's interlocks with Shell, ICI, GE, Du Pont, and so many others.

Part 1 – Beyond the Zero

Many readers pick up Gravity’s Rainbow only to be frustrated by the dense language and lack of apparent storyline, and so they never finish reading it. Upon first reading, Part 1 does not make it obvious where the novel is going. We are introduced to a dizzying number of characters, and it is not clear how they are connected. In Part 1, more pages are devoted to Roger Mexico and Jessica than to Slothrop. Part 1 serves as an introduction, one that will make sense for many readers (only) upon a second reading. Most of Slothrop’s revelations about the rocket cartel do not come until Parts 2 and 3 (Part 3 alone is nearly half the book). However, upon re-reading, Part 1 begins to make more sense, and we can see how Pynchon introduces his main themes.

The novel begins in London with Pirate Prentice’s banana breakfast, which is interrupted by a phone call. Prentice’s boss, someone in The Firm (British secret service) tells him that there is a message waiting for him at Greenwich. “It came over in a rather delightful way.”(11)[3]. Prentice’s message has come over via the rocket, suggesting it was sent by the Germans, or at least someone at a German rocket firing site. So the collusion of Great Britain and Germany, or at least their intelligence services, is hinted at early on. Slothrop sees Prentice pick up the “graphite cylinder, about six inches long and two in diameter.” (21)When, Pirate opens the message, inscribed GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE, he finds that capsule contains coded instructions for him. “The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels.” (72)However, it’s odd that a British agent would receive his orders from a German rocket fired from Holland to Greenwich. Yet this is how Prentice is ordered to rescue Katje Borgesius from Holland, and later deploy her in the Slothrop surveillance project.[4]

We first see Slothrop, or rather his desk, through the eyes of Teddy Bloat, also a member of the Firm, who has been ordered (by the Firm, presumably) to photograph Slothrop’s map of London. For whatever reason, Slothrop’s map, filled with colored stars, indicating the location of his sexual encounters, corresponds to the map of where the A4 rockets have landed. This correlation is our first connection of Slothrop with the rocket, and our first indication that Slothrop is under surveillance.

Perhaps one of the first hints we see of the rocket cartel is near the end of Part 1 during the Walther Rathenau séance scene, where Rathenau’s spirit speaks about the role and structure of IG Farben. Rathenau tells IG Generaldirecktor Smaragd the massive cartel is just a “very clever robot. The more dynamic is seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows...The persistence, then, of structures favoring death.” (167). Rathenau also hints at international cooperation necessary for the growth of the IG.

There is a link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. (166).

Rathenau’s vision of the IG will become clearer in Parts 2 and 3, where we learn much more about its role and its international interlocks with great corporations from Allied nations, especially Great Britain and the United States.

Finally, Thomas Gwenhidy, a colleague of Pointsman at the “White Visitation” also has paranoid suspicions about the rockets that foreshadow Slothrop’s suspicions in Part 2:

It was known, don’t deny it—known Pointsman!  that the front in Eu-rope someday must develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and known how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend Mexico? look at the densities on the map? east, east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live, that’s who getting it thick-est, my friend.” (173)

Gwenhidy admits that he is paranoid, but still believes there is a pattern to the distribution of rocket attacks.

Part 2 – Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

Part 2 depicts Slothrop’s time stationed on the French Riviera. While there, he begins to discover the international cartel behind the creation of the A4 rocket. He also begins to see the bizarre connections between himself and the cartel, reaching back even to his infancy.

Slothrop’s assignment is to study materials about the A4 program, but of course he is also simultaneously under surveillance by the Firm, as part of Pointsman’s experiment (about the perhaps Pavlovian connections between the rocket attacks and Slothrop’s erections). Slothrop’s research into the A4 rocket program eventually leads him to some startling conclusions.

He shares his suspicions with Hillary Bounce of Shell:

“Are you blokes aware....that Jerry—old Jerry, you know [the German military]—has been in that The Hague there, shooting his bloody rockets at that London, a-and using, the …Royal Dutch Shell headquarters building, at the Josef Israelplein if I remember correctly, for a radio guidancetransmitter? […]”

“I mean,” Slothrop now working himself into a fuss over something that only disturbs him, dimly, nothing to kick up a row over, is it? “doesn’t it strike you as just a bit odd, you Shell chaps working on your liquid engine on your side of the Channel you know, and their chaps firing their bloody things at you with your own…blasted…Shell transmitter tower, you see.”

[Bounce:] “No, I can’t see that it makes—what are you getting at? Surely they’d simply have picked the tallest building they could find that’s in a direct line from their firing sites to London.

“Yes, and at the right distance too don’t forget that—exactly twelve kilometers from the firing site. Hey? That’s exactly what I mean.” Wait, oh wait. Is that what he means?”

“Well, I’d never thought of it that way.”

Neither have I, Jackson. Oh, me neither folks… (241)

Bounce himself proudly wears the

… IG Farben Award for Meritorious Contributions to Synthetics Research.  Bounce got that one back in ’32. The industrial liaison it suggests was indeed dozing at the bottom of Slothrop's mind when the Rocket Guidance Transmitter Question arose. It has even, in a way, inspired the present teletype plot. Who'd know better than an outfit like Shell, with no real country, no side in any war, no specific face or heritage: tapping instead out of that global stratum, most deeply laid, from which all appearances of corporate ownership really spring? (GR, 243).

These are moments in the text when we are not certain whether this is the omniscient narrator, or the third-person narrator narrating from Slothrop’s perspective.

The corporate cartel can also be seen in patenting of Imipolex G, a new synthetic plastic, developed by L. Jamf. Slothrop was presumably exposed to Imipolex G as “Infant Tyrone” (hence, the continuing surveillance of Slothrop by IG Farben, and their corporate legatees):

The patent for Imipolex G was thus cross-filed for both the IG and for Psychochemie. Shell Oil got into it through an agreement with Imperial Chemicals dated 1939. For some curious reason, Slothrop will discover no agreements between ICI and the IG seemed to be dated any later than ’39. In this Imipolex agreement, Icy Eye could market the new plastic inside the Commonwealth in exchange for one pound and other good and valuable consideration. That’s nice. (250)

Slothrop begins to draw together these disparate facts:

A few things are immediately obvious. There is even more being zeroed in on him from out there than he’d thought, even in his most paranoid spells. Imipolex G shows up on a mysterious “insulation device” on a rocket being fired with the help of a transmitter on the roof of the headquarters of Dutch Shell, who is co-licensee for marketing the Imipolex—a rocket whose propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to one developed by British Shell at around the same time…and oh, oh boy, it just occurs to Slothrop now where all the rocket intelligence is being gathered—into the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s own son-in-law, who works out of the Ministry of Supply located where but at Shell Mex House, for Christ’s sake… (251)

Slothrop comes to feel that seeing the war as a struggle between opposing nation-states is largely an illusion:

. …never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which "neutral Switzerland" is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm as "liberated France" or "totalitarian Germany," "Fascist Spain," and others… (257)

His discoveries eventually lead Slothrop to go AWOL from his hotel room in the Riviera, and to escape to Zürich, and from there into Germany (the Zone), where he makes further discoveries about his connection to the international rocket cartel.

Part 3. In the Zone

As Part 3 begins, Slothrop reads the documents that connect Lazlo Jamf to IG Farben and ultimately to the Slothrop Paper Company, and thus to himself. Jamf had performed Pavlovian experiments on baby Tyrone (Slothrop, as a baby), involving applying a mysterious stimulant (possibly Imipolex G or one of its forerunners) to his penis. Jamf had invented Imipolex G, and sat on the board of the Grössli Chemical Corporation, later bought by IG Farben.

Slothrop discovers a transaction between Jamf and Lyle Bland, of Boston Massachusetts (his “Uncle Lyle,” a business contact of his father’s). Bland gave contracts to the Slothrop Paper Company to print private currency for Weimar Republic, in cooperation with Hugo Stinnes, a financial wizard who helped precipitate the crash of the German Mark for his own profit.

Slothrop discovers that surveillance duties on him—baby Tyrone—were transferred to different companies as part of merger agreements. Pointsman’s assumption of the surveillance duties of Slothrop (which were once the responsibility of IG Farben) shows how the corporate liaisons transcend borders even during a world war. Slothrop has been under surveillance since Part 1: Teddy Bloat photographing his London map, his transfer to St. Veronica’s for observation (the hospital later being blown up by a rocket), the visits of Pointsman’s operatives (Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo) to locations on his London map, his surveillance on the Riviera and in Zürich, where he finally loses their tail.

Slothrop’s discovery of the Jamf papers is the climax of his own quest for the rocket.

I've been sold, Jesus Christ I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef. Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their observation—m-maybe since was born? Yaahh . . . (GR, 286)

This is the paranoid-vertigo moment of Slothrop’s story. After this, though he has many adventures in the Zone, he makes no further discoveries about his personal connection to the cartel. (What, after all, could top this?)  

He continues to have glimpses. He visits the Nordhausen rocketworks, and escapes with the help of Professor Glimpf, who brings him to Zwitter’s laboratory, where Slothrop wonders “What’s a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his lab intact?” (314), suggesting it had been spared by the Allies. But others, like Roger Mexico, do end up learning more, in part by their search for Slothrop; Slothrop could be said to have spawned the Counterforce.

After Part 3, Slothrop is largely scattered as a character. Throughout Parts 3 and 4, we continue to learn more about the interlocking corporate histories of the cartel from the narrator, and through other characters, such as the Andreas, Enzian, Pökler, Tchitcherine, Lyle Bland, and Roger Mexico.

Andreas from the Schwarzkommando, like Slothrop, suspects a cartel made up of both the victors and vanquished:

Perhaps it’s theater, but they [US and USSR] seem no longer to be Allies . . . though the history they have invented for themselves conditions us to expect “postwar rivalries,” when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared…. (326)

Enzian, the Schwarzkommando leader experiences what seems to him an “extraordinary understanding” about the corporate interlocks before and during the war:

This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on …modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of the plan both sides—“sides?” —had always agreed on…

…yes the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks… (520)

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all 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…I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more…The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite… (521)

Admittedly, Enzian’s revelation is fueled by “surplus Pervitins” (an early form of methamphetamine), but Slothrop and Roger Mexico experience similar revelations, and the narrator himself confirms them by relating copious facts of industrial liaisons.

During Pökler’s story, we are told of the great dream that started organic chemistry and made the IG, and its unquenchable demand to grow, possible:

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the Word. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim it to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the world can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. (412)

Major Marvy is an agent of the great corporations: “You ain’t got General Electric breathin’ over your shoulder, fella. Dillon, Reed . . . Standard Awl.” (565) These corporations also have interlocks with German corporations.

When Tchitcherine asks Marvy what GE is doing chasing the rocket, Marvy explains: “Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance, remember—” (565).

Shortly after, Tchitcherine, who is in many ways a foil for Slothrop, also has a revelation into the Rocket Cartel.  He thinks:

Oh, Wimpe. Old V-Mann, were you right? Is your IG to bethe very model of nations? ... “Say there.” It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. [...]

F A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it. Even to Russia . . . Russia bought from Krupp, didn’t she, from Siemens, the IG ….

Are there arrangements Stalin won’t admit . . . doesn’t evenknow about? Oh, a state begins to take from 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. IG Raketen....Tchitcherine is certain. (566)

Later:

“He’s been trying hard not to believe too much in the Rocket-cartel. Since his illumination that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover, Tchitcherine has been watching for evidence. Gerhardt  von Göll, with his corporate octopus wrapping up every last negotiable item in the Zone, must be in it, consciously or otherwise.” (611)

Gerhardt von Göll (“der Springer”) is indeed, the Milo Minderbinder figure, viewing everything as fodder for the market. Although he directed the fake Schwarzkommando documentary for the British, he also has ties to the IG natürlich:

That’s how Gerhardt von Göll is, anyway. Graciela knows the man: there are lines of liaison, sinister connections of blood and of wintering at Punta del Este, through Anilinas Alemanas, the IG branch in Buenos Aires, on through Spottbilligfilm AG in Berlin (another IG outlet) from whom von Göll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow-moving “Emulsion J,” invented by Laszlo Jamf … (387)

Lyle Bland, whose names Slothrop discovers in Jamf’s dossier, serves as an important point man for the cartel in America. The narrator confirms that it was Bland who arranged to keep an adolescent Tyrone Slothrop under surveillance (using Bert Fibel, who works variously for Vereingte Stahlwerke, Siemens, GE, as the agent) (587). Bland himself, after taking part in some Masonic rituals, begins to experience out-of-body episodes (and so will ultimately move to the next world, and no longer be a captain of industry).

Another scene that Slothrop never sees is the final passage of Part 3, where the narrator relates the conversation of Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony:

Labour wants the American [Slothrop] found as much as we do. We sent him out to destroy the blacks, and it’s obvious now he won’t do the job.[…] Slothrop was a good try at moderate solution, but in the end it’s always the Army, isn’t it? (615)

This short final scene in Part 3 further confirms the extent of the conspiracy ranged against Slothrop. Thus, the rocket cartel does not exist only in the imagination of the (rightfully) paranoid Slothrop. Other characters suspect its existence or take part it in.

Part 4 – The Counterforce

Part 4 concerns itself very little with Slothrop, who famously scatters as a character. Instead, the Counterforce that his odyssey engenders makes further discoveries about the cartel, along with some more tantalizing suggestions from the narrator.

In this passage, Roger Mexico expresses skepticism that V-E day really meant peace:

But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s spring. We’re at peace.”

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted. Now gentleman as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’ grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’39. […]There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone done a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago…but Their enterprise goes on. (628).

The mention of getting our “Ruhr interests back on their feet” suggests that Mexico suspects an international industrial liaison.

His fears are almost immediately confirmed by Milton Gloaming, as he learns that IG Farben had a department devoted to Slothrop surveillance:

He’d found himself on a taskforce with one Josef Schleim, a defector of secondary brilliance  […]. He’d heard of Slothrop, yes indeed … recalled him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there’d been Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop surveillance, now that Bland was gone. […]

In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being assigned to a newly created “Sparte IV” under Vermittlungstelle W. […] IV handled Slothrop and nothing else, except—Schleim had heard tell—one or two miscellaneous patents acquired through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzerland.”” [Impolex G] (630)

[…]

“Surveillance?” Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie, ears, nose, knuckles, “IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Before the War? What for, Gloaming.” (631)

Roger Mexico then makes the connection:

IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming almost exclusively with these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has cartel arrangements with Farben. The bastard. Why he must have known about Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for . . . well say what the hell is going onhere? (631)

Mexico is outraged, and decides to find Mossmoon (known to be one of Pointsman’s backers) and confront him. Even while running the gauntlet of Mossmoon’s secretaries he sees further evidence of the cartel:

In runs a short but spunky secretary, bit of a chubbette here, and commences belting Roger in the shins with the excess-profits tax records from 1940 to ’44 of an English steel firm which happened to share a patent with Vereinigte Stahlwerke for an alloy used in the liquid-oxygen couplings for the line running aft to the S-Gerat in A4 number 00000.” (632)

The fact that Mossmoon’s secretary is German (Miss Müller-Hochleben) further suggests the strange collusion.

Mexico then barges into Mossmoon’s office and leaps onto the table, and begins to urinate on it. While Mossmoon is an executive for ICI, the other executives Mexico is urinating on come from many countries, including Germany:

“...actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by .... slashing up and down starched fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Iron Crosses, V.C.’s retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins....” (636)

Improbably, Mexico escapes in one of Pynchon’s beloved chase scenes, but Part 4 continues with further confirmation that Slothrop’s discovery of the rocket cartel was not (just) some paranoid fantasy.

Mr. Information echoes Roger Mexico’s concerns about the war going right on even after V-E day:

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. (645)

In the famous “Byon-the-bulb” passage we are introduced to another multinational trust, the Phoebus cartel:

There is already an organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29%, and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel....) (649)

The Phoebus Cartel, led by GE, carefully weighs how much tungsten to add to each bulb, so that other industrial concerns maximize their profit, although it seems it will give Germany an advantage during the war:

Too many tungsten filaments would eat into available stockpiles of the metal—China being the major world source, this also brought in very delicate questions of Eastern policy—and disturb the arrangement between General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten carbide would be produced, where and when and what the prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37-$90 a pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly governed the production of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War came, some people thought it was unpatriotic of GE to have given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any power. Don’t worry. (654)

We get a last look at the industrial collusion when Jeremy invites Roger to a party by a Krupp (leading German arms manufacturer) manager.  When Roger Mexico and Pig Bodine crash the Krupp party, they find his servants burning “scrap paper (old SHAEF directives, mostly)” (714). Since SHAEF is the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, this suggests that Krupp (or at least one of its executives) was regularly being fed top-secret SHAEF directives. Since the party is attended also by “reps from ICI and GE” Pynchon is drawing a picture of industrial collusion that crosses the wartime alliances and continues during war and peace.

Anarchy Over Monopoly

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon depicts major corporations of both Germany and the Allied powers working together before the war, during the war and after the war. The war itself is a product of a conspiracy, because They know that the war will boost Their profits and speed up technological development of the key industries: oil, steel, military technology, pharmaceuticals. War accelerates research as well as redistributes wealth.[5]

In contrast to the concentration of power seen in the rocket cartel, Pynchon seems to favor local markets (usually impugned as black markets by the taxing authorities).

...The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars." (105)

Some of the heroes are people making “arrangements” in the Zone (Säure Bummer, Pig Bodine, Geli Tripping, Slothrop himself) alongside so many others (Frau Gnahb, Blodgett Waxwing, Gerhard van Göll).

Geli Tripping explains it to Slothrop soon after he enters the Zone:

“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized our here. There have to be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed he will—he’ll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. (290-91)

Schnorp, who gives Slothrop a ride to Berlin in his hot air balloon, from which they throw pies at Major Marvy’s plane, reassures Slothrop about the loss of his pies:

“No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We’re back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Market.” (336)

The Zone lies in a state of anarchy, but for Pynchon this doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing. “No zones but the Zone.” (333) This state of anarchy is actually sought out, to be briefly enjoyed by the Argentinean anarchists, and by Slothrop, to some extent, before control is re-asserted. Ironically enough, Slothrop finds the closest thing to freedom in The Zone, after a lifetime of being under surveillance by the multinational cartel.

Conclusion

While Gravity’s Rainbow is in the end a multi-faceted work, and cannot be reduced to single plot strand, Slothrop’s (and other characters’) discovery of the international rocket cartel is perhaps the main storyline. It is the central mystery to unfold. Because the discovery is so improbable, and because of Slothrop’s admitted paranoia, there is a cloud of uncertainty over what actually transpires in Gravity’s Rainbow. The depiction of uncertainty appears to be deliberate, itself even one of Pynchon’s themes, that history is indeterminate, but you can never be certain how far to take revisionism. Characters in Gravity’s Rainbow entertain some disturbing ideas about an international corporate cartel, playing both sides in the war. Pynchon himself can expose his readers to such ideas, without going fully on a limb and making specific claims as in a historical work. His fiction reminds us that industrial collusion happens.

Further reading on Gravity’s Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Penguin) 1995 edition.

Some Things That "Happen" (More Or Less) In Gravity's Rainbow, Michael Davitt Bell, Williams College,http://web.archive.org/web/20021114233427/
www.williams.edu/Individuals
/mbell/RAINBOW.HTM. This is an excellent summary of the action that helped me clarify or confirm my own reading of certain passages.

Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow, Kathryn Hume (Southern Illinois University Press) 1987.

A Companion's Companion: Illustrated Additions and Corrections to Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, Donald F. Larsson Department of English, Minnesota State University, Mankato,http://www.english2.mnsu.edu/larsson/grnotes.html.

IG Farben at http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=IG_Farben. A summary of notes from the book IG Farben by Richard Sasuly, Boni & Gaer New York, 1947. This piece makes a convincing case that Sasuly’s (now out-of-print) work was an important source for Pynchon’s IG Farben historical material.

http://www.thesatirist.com/books/GravitysRainbow.html

Fragments pour une Poétique by Raoul Vaneigem

Poetry is the shadow of man. It extends him; increases him; diminishes him; deforms him; sticks to his body by an invisible hinge; follows him; precedes him; or walks at his side. At least from the perspective of the gods, because, for man, it is his actions that create his worth, that are the roots of being in him, and that surround him. Which only shows how the poetic work, with a malaise equal to its lucidity, offers to us a laughable reflection of our own gestures, ancient gestures colored by magic, everyday gestures, new gestures, sacrilegious gestures, bizarre gestures, gestures by which makes and unmakes himself in the intertwining of his myths. Poetry opposes the pure and useless scraps of its inconsistency to the attempts of the Faire. Nevertheless, this is the moment in which philosophy effaces itself to allow room for an art of living, for a style that demands analysis, the slow analysis and revalorization of the Forms and Shades. Faced with the decline that menaces it, poetry is ready to be made concrete and, through a return to its sources, to be crowned a new force and form of action so that its magical virtue, long veiled, is rekindled in the fire of the sciences. The will to be done with the individual as a point of comparison doesn’t cease to affirm itself in innumerable attempts at collective expression. From Lautréamont to the situationists, the same urge pushes personal awareness to surpass itself, to get free of itself and to re-find itself in the flux of the tides, among the unanimous swelling of the waves and the always-singular crests of foam. Concrete poetry, by simultaneously joining together action and philosophical meaning, claims to renew the previously broken links of grand communication and to open itself to the human under the sign of liberty, disalienation, and the totality. How could such a poetry – an integral (or totalitarian) poetry, a poetry that simultaneously covering thought, dream, fantasy, magic, awareness and action, simultaneously multiple and singular, limited and unlimited – how could it avoid a fundamental ambiguity, an imperfection, something uncompleted or an oversimplification in its presentation (dependent on the bookish form and writing), which, here, is its own? What are these fragments? In no case are they works of traditional poetry or theory. If one must situate them, it would be somewhere between coded messages, magic formulae, work songs, revolutionary hymns and literary agitation. Reading them is like reading a musical score whose meaning and value come from its performance. One must bring to these texts lives that only audio-visual technology can kindle in the hearts of the masses; one must bring them into collective action, which, by transfiguring them, will assign to social praxis its veritable measure, which is that of man-become-world. If their critique can be reduced to this simple assessment, essentially tied to the comprehension by and collaboration of a large number of people, they were the work of a single one.

The Presidents Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchons Vineland by David Thoreen

     Against the prevailing view of Pynchon's texts as exhibitions of postmodern discontinuities, this Article posits a radical continuity, contending that Vineland reflects not only the history of executive aggrandizement which has accompanied American expansion, but also the concomitant threats to Americans' civil rights, including the imposition of martial law, mass detention of civilians, and asset seizures. The context of executive aggrandizement through emergency power brings several features of the text into high relief. It is the fear and fervor surrounding the War on Drugs, for instance, which would allow the imposition of martial law to go unchallenged. This context also explains details of Frenesi Gates' family history, Brock Vond's PREP (Political Re-Education Program) camps, and the novel's veiled reference to "half a million urban evacuees," as well as several set pieces: Moody Chastain's career as an MP; the predictions of Mirage, the 24fps astrologer; and the Chipco episode.

  "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."¹--Henry Kissinger

     Given the seventeen-year publication gap between Gravity's Rainbow  (1973) and Vineland (1990), many Pynchon critics were dismayed by what they perceived as a rather slender volume with a comparatively narrow historical compass. Even several of the critics represented in the special issue of Critique wrote of Vineland's "shallow historical draft."² A related cause for disappointment was what Joseph Tabbi called "the absence [in Vineland] of the deferred apocalyptic moment,"³ an opinion echoed in various ways by a number of usually perceptive critics. Brad Leithauser would assert that "there is little 'behind' all the clatter in Vineland, nothing transcendentally spiritual or beautiful or numinous--or even overarchingly malignant."⁴ Alan Wilde, citing Leithauser's remark, assented: "It may well be the absence of some glamorously threatening force--something on the order of V., Blicero, or the inscrutable Tristero--that accounts for the absence of a persuasive, compelling Counterforce."⁵ And Louis Mackey, writing in 1993, long enough after the publication of Vineland to get some view of the novel's overall reception, offered a similar assessment, complaining that the then new novel "does not have the dense texture and rich language of Gravity's Rainbow, none of its awesome glimpses of the sublime and the demonic."⁶

     But such appraisals are the result of these readers' failure to apprehend the historical depth the novel offers, and their refusal to take seriously the endpoint of the history it relates.⁷ There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once,"⁸ the continuing pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the exposition of Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any in recent fiction. To answer Leithauser, Wilde, and Mackey, there is in Vineland something "overarchingly malignant," "some glamorously threatening force," an "awesome glimpse of the sublime and the demonic"; it has simply gone unrecognized. 

     The endpoint of this history of executive aggrandizement, the apocalyptic moment around which Vineland is structured, is presented (ironically in a flashback) when, late in the novel, Hector Zuniga, the tubally addicted Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent, attempts to forge a connection between the grand jury in Hollywood, Brock Vond's presence in Vineland, and "all these other weird vibrations in the air."⁹ At the top of Hector's list of weird vibrations are the "red Christer pins" worn by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) higher-ups, followed by:

[L]ong lines of civilians at the gun shops [..]. and the pawnshops, and all the military traffic on the freeways, more than Hector could ever remember [...] troops in full battle gear, and that queer moment the other night around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., right in the middle of watching Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story, when he saw the screen go blank, bright and prickly, and then heard voices hard, flat, echoing.
    "But we don't actually have the orders yet," somebody said.
    "It's only a detail," the other voice with a familiar weary edge, a service voice, "just like getting a search warrant."¹⁰

When an "Anglo in fatigues"¹¹ appears on Hector's screen and begins to read an announcement, it is as if the man has not learned his script--he keeps looking off camera for direction: "The man was handed two pieces of paper clipped together, and he read it to the camera. 'As commanding officer of state defense forces in this sector, pursuant to the President's NSDD #52 of 6 April 1989 as amended, I am authorized--what?"'¹² Since we never find out, in Vineland, what the man has been authorized to do, it is not surprising that this conclusion to the history of executive aggrandizement has gone unrecognized by critics who, understandably, have not known what to make of such terms as "NSDD #52," much less what such terms might portend. As at the end of The Crying of Lot 49,¹³ we teeter here on the edge of revelation. Unlike The Crying of Lot 49, however, Pynchon, in Vineland, allows us out of the locked room, provided we use the historical keys he has included in the novel. 

     Postmodern assertions aside, historical trends do exist, and they are not merely the manufactured cabals of subjective and subjectivizing personalities. Nowhere is this more clear than in the history of executive aggrandizement in this country. In theory, this trend is a two-way street, whereby the legislative and judicial branches are capable of redirecting or even reversing the flow of power to the executive. In practice, however, the traffic along this street during the twentieth century has been conspicuously one-way.¹⁴ 

     Pynchon is acutely aware of the steady encroachment in the twentieth century of the executive branch on the legislative, and, in Vineland, he has documented some of the attendant threats to our individual civil liberties. Seen from this perspective, the scope of the novel is considerably larger than previously recognized, reaching back to arguments over the separation of powers made before and during the Constitutional Convention and looking forward to the present day, the late 1990s, a period in which an increasing number of city and county governments balance their budgets with proceeds from the auction of assets seized in the War on Drugs, and in which an increasing number of police departments across the United States have established paramilitary units deployed with increasing frequency.¹⁵ 

     Given this devolution of American political practice, it is fitting that Vineland opens not only with echoes of Orwell and Kafka, but with an extended parallel to a short story by an early American writer. Like Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Zoyd Wheeler and the contemporary American voter have slept through a change in governments. In addition to other parallels, Pynchon counters Rip's "naturally ... thirsty soul"¹⁶ with Zoyd's once regular marijuana use and tubal intoxication, physiological manifestations of the political apathy displayed by the majority of Americans since the 1970s. 

     That there are reasons for that apathy is beside the point: Pynchon is not interested in excuses, but effects. As Pynchon himself puts it in Nearer, My Couch, to Thee:

    In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind.¹⁷

Neither is Rip's invocation of the tyrant George III irrelevant, considering the Reagan administration's systematic attempts to extend its authority while avoiding accountability. The message sent to Zoyd "from forces unseen"¹⁸ is that Johnson is no longer in the White House, and it is time to start paying attention.¹⁹ 

     For all of its focus on the sixties, seventies, and eighties, then, Vineland is as historically grounded as V. and Gravity's Rainbow, reaching back to federalist issues regarding the separation of powers, the proper role of the various branches of government, and the intent of the Constitution's framers to guarantee individual freedoms. Pynchon's focus on the threat to those freedoms that arose during the Reagan presidency is a natural extension of his interest in (and dramatization of) imperialism (V.) and the concentration of power (Gravity's Rainbow). The historical and technological developments Pynchon traces in V. and Gravity's Rainbow, especially the series of geopolitical crises chronicled in V., have been replaced in Vineland with pervasive references to Vietnam and Nicaragua, which in turn summon the U.S. government's series of undeclared wars in the second half of this century: Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Angola, Lebanon, El Salvador, Grenada, Libya, South Africa, Panama, and Iraq. The pandemic frequency of such military activity is one result of the redefinition since 1947 of "National Security," which is itself a direct result of, among other things, the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems at the heart of Gravity's Rainbow.²⁰

We did not go from Newton's observation of a falling apple to the ICBM all in a day, nor overnight from Lincoln's responsible and necessary exercise of extra-constitutional power²¹ to Reagan's secret and potentially arbitrary exercise of more dictatorial power.²² Since this historical trend is the subtext of Vineland, a more complete explication of the trend will add to our understanding of the novel and its relationship to Pynchon's earlier work.²³

James Madison, the other framers realized that "[w]ar is ... the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,"²⁴ and they took care to limit the executive's war-making power.²⁵ Though in theory the executive's war-making powers are limited, in practice those limits have been stretched since the first administrations.²⁶ One broad avenue by which Presidents have often sought to increase their authority has been the conduct of foreign affairs.²⁷ But broad claims of authority have also been based on the president's sworn duty "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution," and as resident in the president's position as leader of the military. When Lincoln issued his Final Emancipation Proclamation, he did so "[b]y virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States."²⁸ Later in the century Grover Cleveland would use that power to meet another kind of emergency, a strike by organized labor.

According to Rossiter, "President Cleveland's dispatch of federal troops to Chicago during the Pullman Strike of 1894" was the "most conspicuous use of emergency powers" between 1865 and 1917.²⁹ The relationship of this exercise of emergency power toVineland is central and instructive. The American Railroad Union declared a sympathetic strike with the Pullman strikers; its co-founder and first president was Eugene V. Debs. A few years later Debs would help found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an organization which figures prominently in Frenesi Gates' family history;³⁰ Frenesi's grandmother, Eula Becker, meets Jess Traverse at the IWW hall in Vineland,³¹ and it is while "trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte," that Jess suffers "an accident arranged by one Crocker 'Bud' Scantling for the Employers' Association."³² Cleveland's precedental³³ use of federal troops in the Pullman strike affects the political activity of the Traverse family's successive generations. For Sasha, the first effects came during the Roosevelt administration, when "[t]he war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration."³⁴ 

     FDR depended in large measure on delegatory statutes to resolve the two great crises of his administration. The Great Depression was a new kind of situation demanding executive use of emergency power. That Roosevelt was concerned about extending emergency powers to resolve a peacetime crisis is amply illustrated by the rhetoric of his first inaugural address:

    I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems... [I]n the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. 

 I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis-- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.³⁵

FDR's inaugural address would not be the last time the executive employed such rhetoric to secure the exercise of emergency powers to address domestic problems. 

     The emergency practices of the New Deal government of 1933 "wrought several lasting alterations in the constitutional structure."³⁶But it was during the second great crisis of Roosevelt's administration that civil liberties were most dramatically affected; a total of 112,000 Japanese- Americans were evacuated from their homes and held in relocation camps for the duration of the war, and 70,000 of these people were American citizens. Their internment was effected by President Roosevelt's February 19, 1942, signing of Executive Order 9066. This order, aimed at "protection against espionage and against sabotage," invested "the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate" with broad discretionary authority to "prescribe military areas ... from which any or all persons may be excluded."³⁷ But Congress, too, played its part in this infringement of rights. An Act of March 21, 1942, codified Roosevelt's order by making it a misdemeanor to knowingly "commit any act ... contrary to the restrictions" laid out by the Secretary of War or his designated military commanders.³⁸ 

     The framers' system of checks and balances had introduced a third, independent branch of government. But the judiciary did not challenge the constitutionality of Roosevelt's executive order,³⁹ although Justice Jackson, dissenting in one landmark case, did issue a stern warning:

A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.⁴⁰

     The Japanese-Americans were released at the end of the war, suggesting that the eighteenth-century's "implicit assumption that emergency rule is aberrational" continued to hold.⁴¹ This conception of emergency rule appears to be supported by Roosevelt's address to Congress on September 7, 1942: "When the war is won, the powers under which I act automatically revert to the people--to whom they belong."⁴² Despite such statements, however, and whether he realized it or not, Roosevelt's mode of governing, which was to proclaim every situation a crisis,⁴³ was the overture to the continuous state of emergency ushered in by Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

     In Gravity's Rainbow, Truman is presented in terms redolent of Gatsby's Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, surveying his valley of ashes. Slothrop learns with surprise that the "bespectacled stranger who gazed down the morning Friedrichstrasse"⁴⁴--which has itself been so transformed by the allied bombing that "[i]nside is outside"⁴⁵--is Truman, who is now president, since "Roosevelt died back in the spring."⁴⁶ What is left unstated is that the gutted Friedrichstrasse, which serves here as Truman's valley of ashes, must look habitable compared with the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁴⁷ 

     More significantly, Truman, who depended less on delegatory statutes than FDR, is parodied in a later passage evocative of Truman's flight to Berlin, en route to the Potsdam Conference:⁴⁸

What it ... is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked P-47, on route to Berlin.
    ... The plane seems permanently out of trim to him, though he still fiddles now and then with different tabs. Right now he's trying the War Emergency Power to see how it works, even though there seems to be no War, no Emergency, keeping an eye on the panel, where RPMs, manifold pressure, and cylinder-head temperature are all nudging their red lines.⁴⁹

Pirate is piloting an allegorical ship of state, reconstituted in the postwar world as an airplane--and not just any airplane, but one that is specifically military, and therefore "more or less" under the direction of the president as Commander in Chief. Like Truman, who was steering American policy without consulting Congress,⁵⁰ Pirate has "more or less hijacked" the P-47. The President's Emergency War Powers are only one of the different "tabs," or controls, that can be used by the pilot to steady the ship of state (which, in this immediate postwar period "seems permanently out of trim"). The fact that "there seems to be no War, no Emergency" is immaterial to Pirate. The red-lining instruments serve as Pynchon's warning that there is no quicker way to destroy the ship of state than through the continuous circumvention of constitutional process. Pirate wisely "eases it down and flies on."⁵¹ 

     But the real butt of the joke may be Nixon, who later in the novel can be found driving a Volkswagen like a mad fuhrer down the Los Angeles freeways. When asked in 1970 whether there was still a need for the emergency powers triggered by President Truman's 1950 declaration of national emergency, the Nixon administration asserted their belief that "the said authority made available by virtue of the 1950 proclamation has been needed during the past two decades and is still needed."⁵² Much to the dismay of the Senate Special Committee on National Emergencies and Delegated Emergency Powers, that national emergency was still in effect in 1974, when the Committee issued its findings and made its recommendations.⁵³ According to the Committee's report:

[P]roclamations of national emergency, together with the authority delegated by emergency powers statutes, have provided the President--any President--with extraordinary powers, among others, to seize property and commodities, organize and control the means of production, call to active duty 2.5 million reservists, assign military forces abroad, seize and control all means of transportation and communication, restrict travel, and institute martial law, and, in many other ways, manage every aspect of the lives of all American citizens.⁵⁴

     Truman had declared that national emergency as U.N. troops were being overrun at the North Korean border. When a strike during the Korean War threatened to interrupt the production of steel, Truman, ordered his Secretary of Commerce to "take possession of all or such of the [steel] plants" as was necessary to maintain production.⁵⁵ When the case came before the Supreme Court, the Court ruled that President Truman's takeover exceeded his authority, including his "military power as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces."⁵⁶

     In his concurring opinion, Justice Jackson pithily observed that "[e]mergency powers ... tend to kindle emergencies."⁵⁷ The steel mills Truman had seized were within the United States; regardless of the extent to which executive actions were said to be predicated on foreign policy or national security interests, the domestic repercussions were considerable. 

     More importantly, two of Pynchon's concerns in Vineland, the history of organized labor in America and the Vietnam War,⁵⁸intersect in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. "Even though 'theater of war' be an expanding concept," wrote Justice Black in his majority opinion, "we cannot ... hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production."⁵⁹ 

     This connection between foreign expansion and domestic repression is reflected in Vineland via Moody Chastain, DL's father. Having enlisted in the army just before the American entrance into World War II, Moody soon finds himself aboard ship, "mid-Atlantic," seasick, scared, and stuck: "It was the first time in his career he couldn't climb in the truck and head for some borderline."⁶⁰Pynchon's use of the word "career" to describe what would at first appear to be a career change tips us off to the continuities illustrated by this character. Moody's violent nature is established well before his enlistment ("[h]e'd once been a junior Texas rounder, promoting bad behavior all over the Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen area")⁶¹--in fact, it is his violent nature that leads directly to Moody's enlistment. Significantly, enlistment is presented to him as a chance to continue his violent ways without "nearly the legal problems."⁶²Now, aboard ship, cut off from the gang he used to run with, Moody is afraid. In a parodic moment of epiphany--"he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding Jesus"⁶³--Moody "sees" that he must become an MP; the irony of his conversion is that he will be the same as he was, only worse. As an MP, he will be "using everything he knew from those [Texas rounder days,"⁶⁴and he will continue to bash American heads, even on his tours of duty abroad. At the heart of Moody's career choice, then, is an elaborate pun which only becomes clear when we discover that he brings his work home with him, and in the most literal way possible, by beating DL's mother. Because it is so characterologically consistent, it may take us a moment to recognize the significance of this behavior: both on the job and at home Moody engages in domestic violence.

     That Moody has his government's sanction to rap heads is by no means incidental in a novel wherein FBI sting specialists are granted governmental immunity from the "warrants and charters" which define the behavioral parameters of the American democracy's other citizens.⁶⁵ But Moody also provides Pynchon with a means of referring to undeclared war and domestic repression. 

     The complex relationship between the two is distilled in Pynchon's two- sentence exposition of Moody's postwar career:

[DL] respected Norleen's love of Jesus even though she'd had her own way to go since she was a girl, even before the Department of Defense, that well- known agent of enlightenment, ever thought of cutting Moody's orders for Japan. 

    This was during the lull between Korea and Vietnam, but the troops on R and R could still keep Moody plenty busy.⁶⁶

The passage is an excellent example of the multiple levels on which Pynchon's fiction works: both religious-missionary and military-imperialist history are involved here. Norleen's fatalism regarding her marriage to the violent Moody is connected to her "love of Jesus"; as she tells DL, "I know that something-- Somebody--was lookin' out for me."⁶⁷ The essential passivity such a belief can engender is pointed up again in an explicit contrast to DL, whose dedication to the martial arts has allowed her to avoid it: "The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her."⁶⁸ But Norleen's "love of Jesus" also recalls early missionary efforts in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia--indeed, even as she is victimized by her own belief, staying with Moody years longer than other women might have, Norleen offers DL a series of "Christer commercials" during their telephone calls, thus acting the missionary herself. 

     Just as the missionary enterprise is ongoing, so too the imperialist enterprise continues, as evidenced by the juxtaposition of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. And so Moody, the American democracy's representative agent of enlightenment, finds himself in Japan.

 Pynchon's paragraphing in this passage is significant as well. Japan, as a theater of operations from World War II, our last declared war, is rightfully set off from the next phase of American imperialism in Asia, the undeclared wars of Korea and Vietnam referred to in the following paragraph. But despite the paragraph break, the shared geographical locale implies a continuity, reinforced when we realize that Moody has been sent to Japan between the two later wars. This continuity is reinforced still further when what the narrator first identifies as a "lull" turns out to be something very different: Moody will be kept "plenty busy." Doing what? The same thing he has been doing all along, banging the heads of American troops on R and R--for Moody, there is no break in continuity whatsoever. Thus, in Pynchon's description, Korea slides into Vietnam, which in turn slides into an image of Americans being beaten by another, uniformed, American, one who is, moreover, known for engaging in "domestic violence." This latter image is a critical one inVineland, a familiar component of many labor strikes and anti-war protests during the late sixties and early seventies. 

     As one who has been "licensed" by his government to crack heads and dislocate shoulders, Moody foreshadows the domestic use of force, as captured on film by 24fps:

Strikers battled strikebreakers and police by a fence at the edge of a pure green feathery field [....] Troopers evicted the members of a commune in Texas, beating the boys with slapjacks, grabbing handcuffed girls by the pussy, smacking little kids around, and killing the stock[...]. Suns came up over farm fields and bright-shirted pickers with the still outlines of buses and portable toilets on trailers in the distance, shone pitilessly down on mass incinerations of American-grown pot, the flames weak orange distortions of the daylight, and set over college and high school campuses turned into military motor pools, throwing oily shadows. There was little mercy in these images, except by accident--backlit sweat on a Guardsman's arm as he swung a rifle toward a demonstrator, a close-up of a farm employer's face that said everything its subject was trying not to [....]⁶⁹

The "pure green feathery field," now fenced off, offers an image of a primordial America with its dreams intact, of a Jeffersonian democracy now out of reach. 

     A number of critics have noted that Pynchon's description of the unspoiled Vineland environs is a replay of Fitzgerald's description of Long Island as "the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes."⁷⁰ Both writers are careful to emphasize the temporality of the past. Fitzgerald's Long Island "flowered once." Pynchon prefaces his description of "primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay" with a reference to the "Eureka-Crescent City-Vineland megalopolis" that Zoyd's own arrival is already helping to bring into being.⁷¹ But Pynchon offers an even more detailed lament in his description of DL's drive along the Ventura freeway during the 1984 Olympics:

So the bad Ninjamobile swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.⁷²

We have come a long way down the road Nick Carraway took to West Egg, from those "wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light."⁷³ When the wind came up on the Sound and blew away the rain clouds, Nick could see the stars. Here, at the other edge of the continent, the stars are overwhelmed by the fluorescent spill of urban sprawl and nocturnal smog. 

     Nick's meditation on the Dutch sailors and their first view of the "fresh, green breast of the new world" contained a look into the future, a retrospective prophecy of our relentless, westward march across "the dark fields of the republic."⁷⁴ Pynchon's description encompasses the entire continent as well, but in the opposite manner. Beginning on the West coast, it looks eastward, into the past, to imagine a world unbroken, unspilled--a new world. It is in this context that the "distant fireworks" take on symbolic force, for the fireworks are "distant" not only geographically, but temporally. Those fireworks can be traced to the beginning of our history as a republic; recalling the original thirteen colonies clinging to the edge of the Eastern seaboard, they represent the basic American freedoms won in the Revolutionary War, written into our charter as the Bill of Rights. But by 1984, those freedoms have been trampled on so often, nibbled away by so many "incrementalists,"⁷⁵ that we no longer register a complaint; the most perfunctory claim of "National Security" is enough to silence all but the most ardent defenders of civil liberties. Worse, we have become so conditioned by television cop shows that "[nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the routine violations of constitutional rights these characters performed week after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American expectations."⁷⁶ The "smell of distant fireworks" refers, then, not only to the dispersing sulfur that accompanies the fireworks' snap, crackle, and pop, but also to those original freedoms, now relegated to the distant past. 

     Also relegated to the past are the values associated with FDR's first administration. In the Oregon courthouse where Frenesi first meets Brock Vond, we find her "just trying to shoot some old WPA murals about Justice and Progress if she could figure a way to compensate for the colors, which had darkened with the years since the New Deal."⁷⁷ How well she succeeds in compensating for the darkened murals cannot be determined, for she is distracted by Brock Vond, "a compact figure" in her viewfinder, himself in a nearly colorless ("beige") suit.⁷⁸ Justice and Progress, the ideals of an earlier era, have darkened, and Brock, who has "convened his roving grand jury ... to look into subversion on the campus of a small community college," has taken their place.⁷⁹ 

     Thanks to FDR's many Supreme Court appointments, those earlier ideals darkened slowly. They were still visible in 1952, visible, at least, by the six justices who ruled President Truman's seizure of the steel mills unconstitutional.⁸⁰ Observers such as Clinton Rossiter, whose Constitutional Dictatorship had been published just a few years before Truman's attempted seizure, must have found theYoungstown decision heartening. And yet, even this apparent victory helped to erode the clear distinction between emergency and non-emergency power.⁸¹ 

     Congressional attempts to restrain the executive have been no more successful.⁸² The War Powers Resolution, intended to place strict controls on the President's ability to engage in undeclared wars such as those in Korea and Vietnam, is widely acknowledged a failure.⁸³ Thus far, at least, Congress has been unable to counter the fundamental changes brought on by technology since World War II. As Jules Lobel notes, "American dominance altered our notion of national security. Every challenge to United States can hegemony anywhere in the world began to be perceived as a threat to national security."⁸⁴ 

     This growing concern over national security led to the creation of the NSC and CIA in 1947. While these agencies' contributions to security may 

be questionable, their effect on civil rights is more certain. The same inverse relationship between security and civil rights applies to the policies of a third federal agency, one that is central to Vineland. References in the novel to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are scattered, but it is clear that FEMA and the Department of Justice are working in confusingly close cooperation. When, early in the novel, Zoyd asks Hector about "that army up at my place [...] who is that?" Hector tells him that "[it's a Justice Department strike force, they got military backup, and it's bein led by your old pal himself, Brock Vond."⁸⁵ As Zoyd recalls by way of exposition, Brock Vond "was a federal prosecutor, a Washington, D.C., heavy."⁸⁶ Later events in the novel reveal an uncanny resemblance between operations set up by Brock Vond in the early 70s and those arranged by FEMA in the 80s, and indeed, Pynchon seems to have modeled Brock after FEMA's real-life director under Reagan, retired National Guard General Louis Giuffrida.87 The close cooperation of these agencies--and the potential for renegade activity that such large scale operations provide--is pointed up late in the novel when Special Agent Roy Ibble, one of Flash's old handlers, confesses that "[n obody ... knew what Brock Vond was up to, beyond some connection with Reagan's so-called readiness exercise, code-named REX 84."⁸⁸ 

     The key operation in Vineland, Rex-84 Bravo, is not a paranoid fantasy of Thomas Pynchon's; it was real, and it was made possible by the foregoing history of increasing executive emergency power. Under the Reagan administration, FEMA and DOD began a series of joint exercises "to test civilian mobilization, civil security emergency and counterterrorism plans":⁸⁹

    The Rex-84 Alpha Explan (Readiness Exercise 1984, Exercise Plan), indicates that FEMA in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies conducted a civil readiness exercise during April 5-13, 1984. It was conducted in coordination and simultaneously with a Joint Chiefs exercise, Night Train 84, a worldwide military command post exercise ... based on multi-emergency scenarios operating both abroad and at home. In the combined exercise, Rex-84 Bravo, FEMA and DOD led the other federal agencies and departments, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, the Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Veterans Administration through a gaming exercise to test military assistance in civil defense.⁹⁰

   The consolidation of so much emergency authority into one agency, and the apparent promise of a six-month period without congressional oversight prompted Howard J. Ruff to write that "[the only thing standing between us and a dictatorship is the good character of the President and the lack of a crisis severe enough that the public would stand still for it."⁹¹ The challenge to an administration bent on broadening its power was clear. 

     Three elements of the exercise plan are reflected in Vineland: FEMA's coordination of other agencies; the plan's anticipation of "civil disturbances, major demonstrations, and strikes"; and the "arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial rule."⁹² First, Hector refers to the coordination between FEMA and other law enforcement agencies in the exercise in conversation with Frenesi:

Brock has taken over the airport in Vineland with a whole fuckin army unit, and he seems to be waitin for somethin. Now what do you suppose that could be? Some think it's the dope crops, 'cause he is coordinating with CAMP and their vigilantes.Some think it's more romantic than that.⁹³

Hector's speculations as to what Brock might be waiting for constitute an effective meditation on paranoia. We should notice, too, that the reader is included along with Frenesi in his second-person question, "[n]ow what do you suppose that could be?"⁹⁴ Hector presents us with two possible explanations; the first, that Brock is waiting for the dope crops, holds out the comfort of a known narrative. But the true paranoid will hardly be satisfied with such a simple explanation. Equally unsatisfied with that explanation is Hector himself, who offers the second, ominously undefined possibility, which is somehow "more romantic than that." 

     Second, the Rex-84 Explan's anticipation of "civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes" recalls not only the 1894 Pullman strike, Roosevelt's ban on labor strikes for the duration of World War II, and Truman's attempted seizure of the steel mills, but also civil unrest on many campuses during the Vietnam War (condensed for purposes of the novel into activities at The College of the Surf). 

     Third, the "arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial rule" recalls two notorious measures from World War II, not only the internment of Japanese-Americans, but also the imposition of martial law in Hawaii. These two measures are given extensive, though apparently parodic, treatment earlier in Vineland, via Mirage, the astrologer from 24fps, who has maintained occasional contact with Zipi Pisk, Ditzah's sister. As is so often the case in Pynchon, however, what first appears parodic turns out to be not only thematic, but factual. 

     By the time Mirage's information reaches Ditzah, DL, and Prairie, it is already a week old. What little exposition Pynchon provides concerning Mirage at first seems to be simply another part of the parody, but in retrospect, her background suggests that she has a real gift. After the 24fps debacle, Mirage had "[d]etermined to deny all she had learned by way of the stars, ... to resubmerge in the simple meat suffocation of ... [her] family."⁹⁵ But Mirage has since learned that "it was the stars that had chosen her, and her fate after all would be to read them to others":

This summer something secret and momentous was turning beneath the visible everyday ... Pluto, which had been retrograde, was making a station, appearing to pause before going direct again. For most planets this would be a change for the better, but for the ruler of the Land of Death, retrograde was the best it ever got--then, people with power, instead of using it for short-term and sooner or later harmful ends, had a chance, at least, while Pluto soared backward against the ground of stars, to learn mercy and wisdom in applying it[....] But this summer all that, according to Mirage, was ending. Pluto was about to get back to its ancient underworld and nihilistic ways, also known as Business As Usual.⁹⁶

The parodic element of this sequence is clearly aimed at Nancy Reagan, whose trips to her astrologer prompted speculation about who was really directing U.S. policy. Such speculation would have obvious appeal for a writer who detailed a Nazi seance with Walter Rathenau in Gravity's Rainbow.

 But it would be a mistake to construe either sequence as merely a joke. After providing additional "evidence" of Mirage's ability to read the stars for predictions of events on earth, the narrator summarizes "this curious Pluto alert":

 After two and a half centuries of wandering--though not exile--out in the zodiac, the grim overlord was about to return to Scorpio, its home territory, the sign it ruled jointly with Mars and which, as DL was quick to point out, also happened to be Brock Vond's birth sign.⁹⁷

That the anomalous period of Pluto's "wandering" is aligned with the beneficent exercise of power suggests a link to the new Enlightenment government that sprang up and flourished in this same period, the American democracy. Hence, these "two and a half centuries" during which "people with power ... had a chance ... to learn mercy and wisdom," encompass the entire history of the United States--from the birth of the generation that would frame the new government, to 1984.⁹⁸ But "this summer all that, according to Mirage, was ending." Pluto's return to its home territory, and its realignment with Mars, suggests that the Republic will come to an end with the impending declaration of Martial Law. 

     Even Pynchon's characters begin to suspect that they are "probably just being paranoid," but they nevertheless regale Prairie with stories of "the last roundup.... The day they'd come and break into your house and put everybody in prison camps."⁹⁹ Pynchon anticipates his reader's skepticism and gives voice to it through Prairie: "You've seen camps like this?" she asks incredulously.¹⁰⁰ DL and Ditzah greet the question with an uncomfortable moment of silence. We might recall that the narrator of Gravity's Rainbow urged readers to "Check out Ishmael Reed";¹⁰¹ Pynchon uses the same technique here, this time crediting DL with the exhortation: "[Better than us reminiscing and boring you," she tells Prairie (and the reader), "go to the library sometime and read about it. Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go. Reagan's got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out."¹⁰²

As Hector will slowly discover, the planned invasion of Nicaragua will be accompanied by repressive domestic policies. The topping irony is that he will ponder these matters en route to Las Vegas, having "obtained a confiscated Toronado," itself a prize of such policies.¹⁰³ Slothrop- like, Hector pieces together parts of the Brock Vond puzzle:

[A]ccording to a rumor sweeping the film community, a federal grand jury was convening to inquire into drug abuse in the picture business [.... Hector assumed parallels were being drawn to back in '51, when HUAC came to town [....] But why right now? What did it have to do with Brock Vond running around Vineland like he was? and all these other weird vibrations in the air lately, like even some non-born-agains showing up at work with these little crosses, these red Christer pins, in their lapels [....]¹⁰⁴

The federal grand jury convening to look into drug use in the movie industry is a metaphorical invocation of Hollywood blacklisting, a reminder of the infectious patriotism that can be drummed up by a good witch hunt. It seems at first merely a tongue-in-cheek jab at the reruns of American history--until we recall (and Pynchon himself reminds us) that Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild during this period.¹⁰⁵ The "red Christer pins" are another reference to FEMA and Rex-84. According to Ben Bradlee:

There had been considerable anxiety within the agency about the legality of the Rex-84 exercise. [One FEMA] official said he had never seen such security around any other activity inside FEMA, and that agency General Counsel George Jett had ordered the installation of a special metal security door into the hallway of the fifth floor of the FEMA building in Washington where all planning for Rex-84 was conducted.... FEMA officials with the highest security clearances had been prevented from going into the restricted area.... only Giuffrida, Jett, and FEMA Deputy Director Frank Salcedo--all of whom were inexplicably reported to have been wearing red Christian crosses or crucifix pins on their lapels--were allowed in.¹⁰⁶

These red crosses appeal to Pynchon for several reasons. Like the "silver lapel-swastika[s]" worn by prominent Nazi sympathizers and mentioned in Gravity's Rainbow,¹⁰⁷ the red crucifix pins identify their wearers as having fascist impulses. More importantly, the crucifix pins are a parody of the puritan belief in predestination, for what are they but the outward and visible signs of election? Secure in the innermost inner circle of FEMA, these men--Giuffrida, Jett, and Salcedo--can count themselves among the saved. Hunkered down in the FEMA-administered Continuity of Government (COG) complexes, they will be safe from all worldly harm.¹⁰⁸ Pynchon's pun hinges on the fact that these men have been chosen neither by God nor the American voter; they have been appointed. 

     Although Jules Lobel credits The Miami Herald with breaking, on July 5, 1987, a "national news stories" revelatory of FEMA,¹⁰⁹organs of the populist press had been offering undocumented versions of the story as early as April 1984. A story by James Harrer inThe Spotlight¹¹⁰ would attribute its facts only to "two trustworthy confidential sources--patriotic career Army officers--stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas," while alleging that "on April 5 the White House issued a highly classified National Security Decision Directive (NSDD)¹¹¹ which sets forth urgent instructions for the 'activation' of 10 huge prison camps at key defense commands located across the nation."¹¹² The story claimed that "[e]ach one of these camps is being laid out to hold 25,000 civilian prisoners,"¹¹³ and went on to name ten locations. Two of the camps were in California: Oakdale ("reportedly for 15,000 detainees"),¹¹⁴ and Vandenburg Air Force Base. Although the tone ofThe Spotlight article, filled with more than its share of inverted commas ("measures against political opponents, resisters or even outspoken critics whom the administration considers 'dangerous"'),¹¹⁵ is somewhat paranoid, it does mention the code name "Rex 84,"¹¹⁶ and the broad outlines of Harrer's story were later confirmed.¹¹⁷ 

     These plans for "detaining" civilians reverberate with Brock Vond's Political Re-Education Program (PREP) camp, which is "just about to be put in as a rider to what would be the Crime Control Act of 1970."¹¹⁸ Brock's proprietary attitude toward the rider is a perfect index to the amount of personal power with which it will endow him. Fairly intoxicated with power, he gloats that "[t]he law,his law, would provide that detainees in civil disturbances could be taken to certain Justice Department reserves and there examined for snitch potential."¹¹⁹ The as-yet unauthorized status of the camp is so important that Pynchon emphasizes it again a couple of pages later: "So far, officially, with the enabling and money bills still making their way through Congress, this place didn't even exist."¹²⁰ 

     Brock's unwillingness to wait for authorization for PREP foreshadows the climax of executive aggrandizement as it is presented in the novel, Reagan's approval of National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) #52, authorizing Rex 84. Ben Bradlee explains that the exercise:

was predicated on [Reagan's] declaration of a state of national emergency concurrent with a mythical U.S. military invasion (code-named "Operation Night Train") of an unspecified Central American Country, presumably Nicaragua. While the FEMA exercise was in progress the Pentagon staged its first annual military exercise involving U.S. troops in Honduras--blurring, for some, the distinction between exercise and the real thing.¹²¹

     But what if? What if NSDD #52 were not predicated on, but accompanied by, a declaration of a state of national emergency? And what if the already blurry military activities in Honduras were accompanied by a not so mythical invasion of Nicaragua? As Pynchon illustrates it, the United States was one auto-pen signature away from martial law.¹²² 

     An affidavit filed in a Miami court by a lawyer named Daniel Sheehan makes more detailed allegations about Rex-84, allegations which dovetail remarkably with the details referred to in Hector's extended recognition scene:

There was a weirdness here that Hector recognized, like right before a big drug bust, yes, but even more like the weeks running up to the Bay of Pigs in '61. Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention, arm local "Defense Forces," fire everybody in the Army and then deputize them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act¹²³ Copies of these contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn't much of a secret. [...] Could it be that some silly-ass national-emergency exercise was finally coming true?¹²⁴

     In Vineland, Brock Vond runs only one PREP camp, and Pynchon locates that camp earlier in time; this is the camp to which he takes Frenesi. By 1984, PREP has been cut, a victim of budget restraints and changing demographics; the increasingly conservative political attitudes of college-age students make the camps unnecessary. 

The physical infrastructure of the camp still exists, of course, though it has been assigned a new funding number and adapted to suit a new purpose. Though Hector does not delve into that purpose, he does tell Frenesi that "those ol' barracks are fillin up now with Vietnamese, Salvadorans, all kinds of refugees, hard to say how they even found the place...."¹²⁵ What appears inexplicable to Hector is easily answered by the Rex-84 Explan-- the refugees are being helped to the camp by FEMA officials. And it is not difficult to imagine that a few naturalized American citizens might get mixed in with the "undocumented Central American aliens," especially when the internment of U.S. citizens fit the publicly acknowledged agenda of FEMA officials; in 1983, Frank Salcedo publicly declared that "at least 100,000 U.S. citizens, from survivalists to tax protesters, were serious threats to civil security. Salcedo saw FEMA's new frontier in the ... prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion or a global audience in times of crisis."¹²⁶ The loaded gun that the dissenting Justice Jackson spoke of in Korematsu v. United States¹²⁷ had been primed and handed to Ronald Reagan, who in turn passed it on to FEMA. 

     But would a nation accustomed to the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights put up with martial rule? James Madison provided an answer to that question in a May 13, 1798, letter to Thomas Jefferson: "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions agst. danger real or pretended from abroad."¹²⁸ And Madison, wise as he was, could not have imagined the media blitz accompanying the War on Drugs. Here we have the answer to Hector's question, "Why now?" The rumors of a federal grand jury investigation into drugs in the movie industry are part of the government's attempt to instill the fear and fervor which, along with the war against drugs, will allow the declaration of national emergency and the consequent imposition of martial law without arousing the ire of American citizens.

The War on Drugs is the fourth non-war war of the century, after the  "war" on the economic problems of the Great Depression, the Cold War, and President Johnson's War on Poverty.¹²⁹ Having seen Roosevelt's first inaugural address, we can appreciate the rhetorical tradition on which George Bush drew when he named William Bennet to the new Cabinet post of Drug Czar: "We are at war. Drugs are a terrifying, insidious enemy. They challenge almost every aspect of American public policy--the law, our national security, our public health. And the threats they pose touch deep into the nation's soul."¹³⁰ Since the end of the Cold War, we have seen drugs and international terrorism increasingly cited as justification for new national security measures. Such reasoning was being offered by the Reagan Administration well before the publication of Vineland. According to Lobel, "In April 1986, President Reagan issued a secret directive authorizing the use of 160 United States Army troops as logistical support for the effort to uproot the drug trade in Bolivia, because the 'emergency circumstance' of a serious threat to national security was present."¹³¹ 

     Vineland documents some effects that the War on Drugs has had, and continues to have, on civil rights. A few pages after Hector tells Frenesi that Zoyd's house has been seized "under civil RICO,"¹³² Pynchon provides more information, tying the ongoing development of yet another threat to civil rights to the Reagan Administration:¹³³ "Under terms of a new Comprehensive Forfeiture Act that Reagan was about to sign into law any minute now, the government had filed an action in civil court against Zoyd's house and land."¹³⁴ Like Brock's establishment of PREP, the seizure of Zoyd's house is accomplished without authorization. Zoyd's lawyer, Elmhurst, whose philosophy is "Life is Vegas," explains to Zoyd the Catch-22 of Civil RICO: in these proceedings the burden of proof is reversed, so that "to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence."¹³⁵ "What about 'innocent till proven guilty'?" Zoyd wants to know. Elmhurst answers:

    "That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment.¹³⁶ You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land." 

    "Wait--I wasn't growin' nothin'." 

    "They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?"¹³⁷

     With the phrase "[d]uly sworn officers ... bound to uphold the Constitution," Pynchon directs us--just as he did in Gravity's Rainbow--to "[f]ollow the bouncing ball,"¹³⁸ this time from deputized to deputizing, all the way up the chain of command to the nation's Chief Executive and Commander in Chief. The man in the Oval Office has also sworn to uphold the Constitution, and should not be exempt. 

     By including the government's use of asset seizure in Vineland, Pynchon articulated a continuing trend. Between 1984 and 1990 (the year Vineland was published), the Department of Justice had "generated" over $1.5 billion for the Assets Forfeiture Fund,¹³⁹ up from $33 million in 1979.¹⁴⁰ From 1991 through 1996, additional deposits to the fund totalled nearly $3 billion.¹⁴¹ Predictably, the budget cuts which provided the impetus for so much of the action in Vineland have exacerbated asset seizures, since the proceeds have helped balance the budgets of state and local governments, which share the booty. David B. Smith, the former federal prosecutor who literally wrote the book on asset seizure (he helped draft the forfeiture provisions of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, is the author of the leading treatise, Prosecution and Defense of Forfeiture Cases, and testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the reform of civil forfeiture laws),¹⁴² explains that "in most states the proceeds of [asset forfeiture would go to the general Treasury or for some non-law enforcement purpose such as funding state libraries."¹⁴³ But provisions of the 1984 Act allowed state and local law enforcement agencies to benefit directly. By putting their seizure cases up for "adoption" by federal law enforcement agencies, state and local agencies could receive "up to 90% (later reduced to 85%) of the forfeited assets."¹⁴⁴ Between 1986 and 1993, "more than $1 billion [was transferred to more than 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies."¹⁴⁵ According to Smith, "Forfeiture has become an institutionalized part of Government.... Once anticipated forfeitures get earmarked for certain budgets, they become hard to stop, regardless of the quality of the cases."¹⁴⁶

Abuse of the civil asset forfeiture statutes by law enforcement agencies is well-documented and, since 1991, has been a steady target of media muckraking.¹⁴⁷ But identifying the problem is easier than effecting the cure. Legislative attempts to redress the problem have proceeded glacially. Representative Henry Hyde's proposed Asset Forfeiture Reform legislation, originally introduced in 1993, has at last drifted into the Senate, as the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 1997 (H.R. 1835), where it is scheduled for a 1998 conference.¹⁴⁸ Nor has new leadership at the Department of Justice proven a match for the forfeiture juggernaut. Despite early promises to "review ... the asset-forfeiture procedures,"¹⁴⁹ Attorney General Janet Reno has continued the inimical memoranda traditions of her predecessor Dick Thornburg, whose "Go get 'em" memorandum of August 15, 1990, was cited by the Supreme Court as evidence of the government's "financial stake in drug forfeiture" and the lack of the "requisite neutrality that must inform all governmental decision making."¹⁵⁰ On February 12, 1996, Reno, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh and DEA Administrator Thomas Constantine, sent a joint memo to U.S. Attorneys and DOJ law enforcement officials, urging them to "reinvigorate the use of asset forfeiture as a law enforcement tool."¹⁵¹ Recent judicial opinion also appears less than promising. Despite the Court's landmark 1993 ruling in Austin v. United States¹⁵² that most civil asset forfeitures are "subject to the limitations of the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause,"¹⁵³ its 1996 ruling in Bennis v. Michigan¹⁵⁴ prompted one commentator to conclude that "a majority of the Supreme Court has apparently lost its interest in reforming the forfeiture laws."¹⁵⁵ 

     For some Americans, the loss of civil liberties during the Reagan-Bush years can be assigned a definite cost indeed: the value of their seized assets. Because federal, state, and local budgets are now dependent on policies such as asset seizure, because of a slew of NSDD's,¹⁵⁶ and because the majority of the justices now sitting on the Supreme Court are conservative Reagan and Bush appointees, it may be a generation or two before our civil rights are restored to their pre-Reagan status--if they ever are. Pynchon, in Vineland, has reversed the familiar commandment from the Wizard of Oz, encouraging Americans to "Pay Attention to that man behind the curtain," before it is too late.

ENDNOTES

*  Assistant Professor of English, Assumption College; B.A., St. John's University, Minnesota; M.F.A., Bowling Green State University; Ph.D., S.U.N.Y., Stony Brook. The author would like to express his thanks to John Krafft, Co-Editor of PYNCHON NOTES, who suggested a line of thinking that led to the development of this essay. The author would also like to thank Carol Maksian, Larry Spongberg and the other reference librarians in the D'Alzon Library, Assumption College, for their patient assistance during the preparation of this Article.

1. The Sayings of Secretary Henry, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 28, 1973, § 6, at 91, 95 (DuPre Jones comp.).

2. David Cowart, Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon's Vineland, in THE VINELAND PAPERS: CRITICAL TAKES ON PYNCHON'SNOVEL 3, 11 (Geoffrey Green et al. eds., 1994) [hereinafter VINELAND PAPERS. The essays published in 32 CRITIQUE: STUDIES INCONTEMPORARY FICTION (1990) were republished (in slightly different form) as VINELAND PAPERS, a volume which also includes essays by a number of critics not represented in the special issue. See Cowart, supra, at 3, 11- 12 ("Vineland ... looks backward" to "the Summer of Love," tracing the nation's movement "from Yippies to yuppies" in "a single generation"); N. Katherine Hayles, "Who Was Saved?": Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon's Vineland, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra, at 14, 15 (Vineland "gives voice to the bewilderment that the generation formed by the sixties felt upon finding itself in the Reagan eighties"); cf. Elaine B. Safer,Pynchon's World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra, at 46, 47 (Pynchon "develops traditional themes and myths in a highly allusive manner and then uses such patterns from the past" in the creation of black humor of the absurd).

3. Joseph Tabbi, Pynchon's Groundward Art, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra note 2, at 89, 95.

4. Brad Leithauser, Any Place You Want, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS  (1990) (reviewing THOMAS PYNCHON, VINELAND(1990)).

5. Alan Wilde, Love and Death in and Around Vineland, U.S.A., 18 BOUNDARY 2 166, 174 (1991) (reviewing THOMAS PYNCHON, VINELAND (1990)).

6. Louis Mackey, Thomas Pynchon, 13 REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION 268 (1993) (reviewing JUDITH CHAMBERS, THOMAS PYNCHON (1992)).

7. Happily, a few critics have discussed the novel's forays into earlier decades. Molly Hite, for instance, remarks that Frenesi's return to the Becker-Traverse reunion at the end of the novel "is not a restoration; it does not bring back the sixties--or the thirties, or the teens. But it does reconstitute a community of resistance in a widened historical context." Molly Hite, Feminist Theory and the Politics ofVineland, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra note 2, at 135, 148. And Solomon goes a good deal further in this regard. See Eric Solomon,Argument by Anachronism: The Presence of the 1930s in Pynchon's Vineland, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra note 2, at 161-66.

8. THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW 165 (1973).

9. THOMAS PYNCHON, VINELAND 339 (1990).

10. Id. (Since Thomas Pynchon is known for his use of the ellipse, the ellipses inserted by the Author are in brackets [....]).

11. Id.

12. Id.

13. THOMAS PYNCHON, THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966).

14. Enumerating the dangers of constitutional dictatorship, Clinton Rossiter writes: "No constitutional government ever passed through a period in which emergency powers were used without undergoing some degree of permanent alteration, always in the direction of an aggrandizement of the power of the state." CLINTON L. ROSSITER, CONSTITUTIONAL DICTATORSHIP: CRISIS GOVERNMENT IN THE MODERN DEMOCRACIES 295 (1948).

15. See Peter B. Kraska & Victor E. Kappeler, Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units, 44 SOC. PROBS. 1, 6- 7, 12 (1997). According to a recent article in The Boston Globe, even a town like Harwich, a Cape Cod community with a population of 11,000, calls out its Emergency Response Team members "about once a month to handle emergencies involving everything from domestic crises to drug dealing." Ric Kahn & Zachary R. Dowdy, "Iron Fist" of Policing: SWAT Team Use Questioned, BOSTON GLOBE, May 11, 1998, at A1, B12. Another commentator notes that:

    Fifteen years ago, city [police] departments called out their tactical units little more than once a month on average, usually for rare events such as hostage situations or barricaded suspects. By 1995, tactical units were being called out, on average, seven times per month, most often for no-knock drug raids.

Peter Cassidy, Police Take a Military Turn, BOSTON GLOBE, Jan. 11, 1998, at C1, C2.

16. Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, in 1 THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT. IN HISTORY, TALES, ANDSKETCHES 776, 769-85 (James W. Tuttleton, ed. 1983). For a further discussion of the parallels between these texts, see David Thoreen, Thomas Pynchon's Political Parable: Parallels Between Vineland and "Rip Van Winkle," ___ ANQ: A QUARTERLYJOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES AND REVIEWS ___ (forthcoming 2000).

17. Thomas Pynchon, Nearer, My Couch, to Thee, N.Y. TIMES, June 6, 1993, § 7, at 3, 57 (book review).

18. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 3.

19. The Great Society and the Civil Rights Movement notwithstanding, Johnson occupies no idealized (or even privileged) position--in either Pynchon's political reckoning or the history of executive aggrandizement. I invoke Johnson's administration not because he represents the high point of civil libertarianism in America, but because Zoyd's lack of attention and political responsibility can be traced to Johnson's years in office. The earliest flashback dealing with Zoyd takes us back to when he lived in Gordita Beach, "shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California," which would be 1966. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 22.

20. For a concise summary of the redefinition of national security and the increased waging of undeclared war in the postwar era, see Jules Lobel, Emergency Power and the Decline of Liberalism, 98 YALE L.J. 1385, 1400-07 (1989). See generally EDWARD KEYNES, UNDECLARED WAR: TWILIGHT ZONE OF CONSTITUTIONAL POWER (1982).

21. See ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 234-38. Lincoln's actions were potentially tyrannous, but any tyranny was mitigated first by his appeal to Congress (and that body's subsequent ratification of his actions), and second by the fact that the emergency was unquestionably real; the Confederate States had, after all, adopted their own constitution. But the Supreme Court, interpreting the Constitution from an absolutist perspective, refused to accede to Lincoln the right to the power he had claimed. See Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 120-21 (1866). Jules Lobel explains:

Milligan, an Indiana citizen, was tried and sentenced to death for disloyal activities during the Civil War by a military commission established by President Lincoln. After the Civil War ended, the Supreme Court unanimously held that President Lincoln had acted unconstitutionally in creating military commissions to try civilians where the civil courts were still functioning. The majority opinion written by Justice Davis went even further, stating that the rights contained in the Constitution with the exception of the writ of habeas corpus, could not be suspended by either the President or Congress.... The Court's absolutist decision has been severely criticized by some scholars and viewed by others as a "political maneuver rather than as a constitutional homily."

Lobel, supra note 20, at 1387, n.7 and accompanying text (quoting Roche, Executive Power & Domestic Emergency: The Quest for Prerogative, 5 W. POL. L.Q. 592, 600-01 (1952)). Still, Lincoln's actions were exemplary in that the civil liberties of most Americans went almost unchanged. As Rossiter writes:

    The possibilities of widespread martial law ... were never realized, and ... little injustice resulted....
    Freedom of speech and press flourished almost unchecked....
    ....
    In other respects the relations between the people and their government were equally normal. Although the individual citizen faced stiffer and more comprehensive taxes, and although a young man who lacked $300 might be conscripted to fight in the army, otherwise he went about his business saying and doing what he pleased, and need hardly have known that a fateful war was in progress. Moreover, he was given full opportunity on November 8, 1864 to vote his "dictatorial" President right out of office....
    As far as business and industry went, it was only in the matters of transportation and communication that the government went outside its usual sphere of activity. The President took over the railroads and telegraph lines on the basis of congressional authorization.

ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 236-38.

22. For an excellent discussion of the history of executive emergency power in America, from its roots in the eighteenth century liberal tradition through the Iran-Contra Scandal and the "contingency" plans drawn up by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which came to light in 1987 and which animate the plot of Vineland, see generally Lobel,supra note 20.

23. At the risk of committing Heresy in Pynchon Studies, I propose that we view Vineland as an evolutionary advance in Pynchon's political philosophy. In contrast to the anonymous, pandemic, and corporate "They" of Gravity's Rainbow, a construction which minimizes the hope for real agency on the part of individuals (since "They know how to use nearly everybody"), and so tends to deny free will and personal responsibility--in contrast to this "They," Vineland focuses on a political (as in governmental) and ultimately singular (as in presidential) source of power. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 155. Although that power can be more properly located in the President's "office," that is, in the Cabinet (or in what one commentator calls "the institutional presidency") than in the President himself, and although the increasing consolidation of executive power cannot be attributed to any one party or to any one President,Vineland's focus on an identifiable source of power does translate to a renewed investment in free will and personal responsibility. Harold H. Koh, Why the President (Almost) Always Wins in Foreign Affairs: Lessons of the Iran-Contra Affair, 97 YALE L.J. 1255, 1307 n.237 (1988). 
  And we should notice the novel's insistence on personal responsibility. Whether or not Congress is controlled by PACs, whether or not the President is in the pocket of some group of individual or corporate manipulators, our democracy is predicated on a chain of command that leads up to the President. While power may be diffuse, responsibility is not. When Pynchon writes that "Reagan had officially ended the 'exercise' known as REX 84, and what had lain silent, undocumented, forever deniable, embedded inside," we should not fail to hear his indictment, an indictment not so much of a system of governing as of a personal ethic aimed at obfuscating personal responsibility and maintaining deniability. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 376. 
  At more preterite levels, for instance that of Frenesi and Flash, that ethic quickly degenerates further, into one aimed not simply at obfuscating personal responsibility but of avoiding it altogether. Frenesi's freedom from cause and effect is hardly to be taken as desirable. While granting that various deterministic forces may influence us, Pynchon argues that we make a mistake if we willingly allow ourselves to turned into "the sort of mild herd creatures" favored by Brock Vond. Id. at 269. Frenesi, it will be remembered, surrenders personal responsibility for what she thinks will be a lifetime of "federal empowerment and one-phone-call conflict resolution," but "even in 1970 dollars--it was way too cheap." Id. at 90, 373. 
  Though occasional references to "Them" do occur in Vineland, such references are usually tongue-in-cheek, as when the night-manager at the supermarket where Frenesi tries to cash a government check comes back from making a phone call and tells her, "They stopped payment on this"; the joke here is in the disjunction between the manager's innocent and idiomatic "they," and that larger, more ominous, institutional "They" which will be recognized by so many of Pynchon's readers. Id. at 91. 
  Although our individual attempts at responsibility may, like those of DL and Takeshi, never amount to more than an "Act, with its imitations of defiance, nightly and matinees," Pynchon argues that it is important for us to make such attempts. Id. at 384.

24. James Madison, "Helvidius" No. 4. (Sept. 14, 1793), in 15 PAPERS OF JAMES MADISON 106, 108 (Thomas A. Mason et al. eds., 1985).

25. For a full discussion of this debate and the framers' intent, see Charles A. Lofgren, War-Making Under the Constitution: The Original Understanding, 81 YALE L.J. 672-702, (1972); FRANCIS D. WORMUTH & EDWIN B. FIRMAGE, TO CHAIN THE DOG OFWAR: THE WAR POWER OF CONGRESS IN HISTORY AND LAW 17-31 (2d ed. 1989); ABRAHAM D. SOFAER, WAR, FOREIGNAFFAIRS, AND CONSTITUTIONAL POWER: THE ORIGINS 25-60 (1976); KEYNES, supra note 20, at 2-59.

26. The specific means by which the executive has extended his war- making power is beyond the scope of this discussion, but see Abraham Sofaer, who details, among other means available to the executive: the control of expenditures, Congressional delegation of discretionary power, the control of information, the conduct of undeclared war, and the use of executive agents. SOFAER, supra note 25.

27. As Harold Hongju Koh explains:

    [T]wo ... sources of constitutional authority ... have proven historically more important than the President's enumerated constitutional powers: his broad unenumerated powers as "the sole organ of the nation in its external affairs," identified in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., and the various foreign affairs powers that Congress has delegated to him by statute.

Koh, supra, note 23, at 1306 (quoting United States v. Curtis-Wright, 299 U.S. 304, 320 (1936)).

28. Abraham Lincoln, Final Emancipation Proclamation (Jan. 1, 1863), in SELECTED WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF ABRAHAMLINCOLN 199, 200 (T. Harry Williams ed., 1980).

29. ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 240.

30. Several critics have noticed the importance the novel attaches to the IWW. Eric Solomon, for instance, notes that "the IWW hall in Vineland, [is] the novel's moral center." Solomon, supra note 7, at 163. For Solomon, the IWW hall is identified with "conscience," "that element of morality starkly lacking in later generations." Id.

31. See PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 76.

32. Id. at 75.

33. Rossiter refers to the actions of Presidents Hayes and Cleveland (in the railroad strikes of 1877 and 1894) as "equally instructive and precedental." ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 240 n.1.

34. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 77.

35. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (Mar. 4, 1933) in THE YEAR OF CRISIS: 1933, at 11, 14-15 (Samuel I. Rosenman ed., 1938) (emphasis added).

36. ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 264.

37. Exec. Order No. 9066, 7 Fed. Reg. 1407 (1942).

38. Act of Mar. 21, 1942, Pub. L. No. 503, 56 Stat. 173 (1942).

39. "In seeking to avert a war powers confrontation with the president," Christopher May explains, "courts ... may be tempted to engage in a purely ceremonial exercise, the foreordained outcome of which is to approve the executive conduct in question." CHRISTOPHERN. MAY, IN THE NAME OF WAR: JUDICIAL REVIEW AND THE WAR POWERS SINCE 1918 260 (1989). May calls the three cases involving the internment of Japanese-Americans, Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu, "[t]he most egregious example of abdication in the form of ritualistic approval [that] occurred during World War II." Id. at 261.

40. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

41. Lobel, supra note 20, at 1389.

42. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress Asking for Quick Action to Stabilize the Economy (Sept. 7, 1942) in HUMANITY ON THE DEFENSIVE, at 356, 365 (Samuel I. Rosenman ed., 1950). Roosevelt's sentiments, whether sincere or mere cant, were clearly intended as an echo of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"). U.S. Const. amend. X. When this emergency is past, Roosevelt seems to say, he will surrender the extra-constitutional powers he has usurped.

43. "Rep[resentative] Bruce Barton issued a list in March 1939 (New York Times, March 17) showing that, according to the President, the country was in its thirty-ninth emergency in six years!" ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 256 n.2.

44. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 381. This "bespectacled stranger" appears on a poster, one of three "giant photographs ... faces higher than a man," thus recalling the billboard left by that "wild wag of an oculist," Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 373; F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY 27 (Matthew J. Bruccoli ed., Collier-Macmillan 1992) (1925).

45. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 373.

46. Id.

47. Truman's responsibility for Hiroshima will be considered explicitly in the roster of prominent Masons that appears later in the novel:

    We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay's atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland Sea....

PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 588.

48. In Truman, David McCullough recounts the President's many-legged journey to Potsdam. After crossing the Atlantic on the Augusta, Truman was met by Eisenhower at Antwerp. From there he was driven in a caravan to an airfield at Brussels. "At the airfield, the presidential plane, The Sacred Cow, plus two other C-54 transports were waiting to take him and his party on the final leg, a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Berlin. Beyond Frankfurt he had an escort of twenty P-47 Thunderbolts." DAVID MCCULLOUGH, TRUMAN406 (1992) (emphasis added). According to The Illustrated History of Fighters, the P-47 was an American-made, single-man escort fighter. It was used widely in the Pacific, and its great speed made it an asset in daytime bombing runs over Germany. Eight hundred thirty of these planes were supplied to the R.A.F. Bill Gunston, P-47 Thunderbolt, Republic, in THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OFFIGHTERS 106, 109 (Bill Gunston ed., 1981). 
  In A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, Steven Weisenburger notes that "Pirate flies an east-southeasterly course over towns situated just north of the Harz mountains"; this is indeed the route described by Pirate's various aeronautical maneuvers over Celle, Brunswick, and Magdeburg. STEVEN WEISENBURGER, A GRAVITY'S RAINBOW COMPANION: SOURCES AND CONTEXTS FOR PYNCHON'S NOVEL265 (1988). What is curious, however, is that in this short segment--which is the only part of Pirate's journey that Pynchon deigns to plot for us--Pirate has already crossed over "a set of surprise points," that is, he has passed the point at which one would expect him to change direction and bear directly east. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 619. Why would Pirate, "on route to Berlin," fly so far south? Id. One possible answer is that he wishes to approach Berlin from the west-southwest. Not coincidentally, this is the vector of approach taken by Truman, flying from Frankfurt to Main with his escort of P-47s.

49. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 619 (emphasis added).

50. For an account of Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb without consulting Congress, see DENNIS D. WAINSTOCK, THEDECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB 59-79 (1996); MCCULLOUGH, supra note 48, at 436-44.

51. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 619.

52. Lobel, supra note 20, at 1401 n.76 (quoting Hearings Before the Senate Special Comm. on the Termination of the National Emergency, 93rd Cong., 1st Sess. 83 (1973) (statement of acting Assistant Secretary of State, H.G. Torbert, on behalf of the Nixon Administration)).

53. The Committee recommended legislative action "at the earliest opportunity," noting that "[a] majority of the American people have lived all their lives under emergency government. During this period of four decades, the President, through what is now over 470 legally delegated powers, has had at hand the power to rule the United States outside of normal constitutional processes." S. REP. NO. 1170, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 1-2 (1974).

54. Id. at 2.

55. Exec. Order No. 10340, 16 Fed. Reg. 1407 (1952), reprinted in App. to Opinion of the Ct. in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 591 (1952).

56. Youngstown, 343 U.S. at 587.

57. Id. at 650 (Jackson, J., concurring). For a discussion of the implications of this opinion, see Koh, supra note 23, at 1285.

58. The labor history in Vineland begins with Jess Traverse "trying to organize loggers in Vineland, Humboldt, and Del Norte," and runs through a contemporary strike of airline maintenance workers, including the picket line's "[u]nanimous" vote to allow Frenesi, Flash, and Justin to catch their flight. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 75, 352. 
  Vietnam is present largely through the persistence of memory, the memories in question being those of the Thanatoids, "victims ... of karmic imbalances-- unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty." PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 173. The Thanatoid connection to Vietnam is made explicit by Ortho Bob, who "had been damaged in Vietnam, in more than one way." Id. at 174. 
  While not much has been written about the presence of organized labor in Vineland (Solomon and Slade being the two notable exceptions), even less has been written about the presence of the war. See Joseph W. Slade, Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland, in VINELAND PAPERS, supra note 2, at 68. A corollary to Khachig Tololyan's "War as Background inGravity's Rainbow," perhaps entitled "The Vietnam War as Background in Vineland," has yet to be written. See Khachig Tololyan,War as Background in Gravity's Rainbow, in APPROACHES TOGRAVITY'S RAINBOW 31-67 (Charles Clerc ed., 1983). One reason may be that the average age of Pynchon's critics makes written consideration of the Vietnam War as background unnecessary; there is no felt need to uncover a background which is, for these readers, so much in the foreground. A number of critics mention the novel's reflection of the war in passing, but none has given it extended treatment. 
  Rather more attention has been paid to the role of 24fps, the novel's representative radical sixties film collective. Even here, however, where the war and the protests it engendered were often the raison d'etre for such collectives, the war itself has received little attention. Critics have clearly felt themselves to be on firmer ground with the film collectives, since such considerations are sanctioned by the traditional reaches of Pynchon criticism. In contrast, little has been said about Pynchon's stance toward Vietnam. Indeed, until recently, relatively little could be inferred. But that has changed with the publication of the Hirsch letter and, more dramatically, of Vineland. See Letter from Thomas Pynchon to Thomas F. Hirsch (Jan. 8, 1969) in DAVID SEED, THE FICTIONAL LABYRINTHS OF THOMASPYNCHON 240 app. (1988). In addition, two recent essays gesture toward extended considerations of Vietnam in Pynchon's work. See Eric Meyer, Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices: Gravity's History and "The '60s", in 24-25 PYNCHON NOTES 81-104 (1989); Frederick Ashe, Anachronism Intended: Gravity's Rainbow in the Sociopolitical Sixties, in 28-29 PYNCHON NOTES 59-75 (1991).

59. Youngstown, 343 U.S. at 587.

60. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 119.

61. Id. at 118.

62. Id. at 119.

63. Id.

64. Id.

65. Id. at 71. This "exemption" is seen most conspicuously in Gravity's Rainbow (where Pokler constructs a mental labyrinth that precludes awareness of Dora). In Vineland, Frenesi and her husband Fletcher ("Flash") are the primary examples of those who have secured exemption, though Moody is "licensed to use life-threatening come-alongs, to crack heads and dislocate shoulders." Id. at 119 (emphasis added).

66. Id. at 121.

67. Id.

68. Id.

69. Id. at 198-99.

70. FITZGERALD, supra note 44, at 189. See Leithauser, supra note 4, at 7; Safer, supra note 2, at 50.

71. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 317.

72. Id. at 266-67.

73. FITZGERALD, supra note 44, at 25.

74. Id. at 189.

75. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 127.

76. Id. at 345.

77. Id. at 200.

78. Id.

79. Id. at 199-200.

80. At the time of the Steel Seizure Case, five of the nine justices had been appointed by Roosevelt; the other four, by Truman. Four of the six justices who held the seizure to be unconstitutional were Roosevelt appointees: Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, and Jackson. The two Truman appointees who concurred were Justices Burton and Clark. 
  Two of the three justices who upheld Truman's seizure--Vinson and Minton--had been appointed by Truman himself. The only dissenting justice to have been appointed by Roosevelt was Reed.

81. See Lobel, supra note 20, at 1410-12.

82. Several commentators discuss the failure of the 1970s reform movement that included passage of the War Powers Resolution (1973), the National Emergency Act (NEA, 1976), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA, 1977), and the Intelligence Authorization Act (1981). See Yonkel Goldstein, The Failure of Constitutional Controls Over War Powers in the Nuclear Age: The Argument for a Constitutional Amendment, 40 STAN. L. REV. 1543, 1569-72 (1988); Koh, supra note 23, at 1300-04; Lobel,supra note 20, at 1413-18; ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY 433-36 (rev. ed., 1989); WORMUTH & FIRMAGE, supra note 25, at 190-92, 219-23, 301.

83. See Lobel, supra note 20, at 1414.

84. Id. at 1400.

85. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 50.

86. Id.

87. Like Brock Vond, Giuffrida was active in suppressing civil rights protests in California during the early seventies. Keenen Peck,The Take-Charge Gang, THE PROGRESSIVE, 1, 23 (1985). Brock Vond and Giuffrida also appear to share certain attitudes about race. "In 1970, when he was an Army student, Giuffrida wrote an elaborate hypothetical plan for rounding up black radicals. In seven pages of a larger essay on racial discrimination, he described how to design and operate detention camps." Id. at 23. Pynchon describes Brock Vond as a "devotee of the thinking of pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso," informing us that although "[b]y Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint, undeniably racist spinoff [..]. it seemed reasonable to Brock." PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 272.

88. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 353 (emphasis added).

89. Diana Reynolds, FEMA and the NSC: The Rise of the National Security State, 33 COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN54, 56 (1990).

90. Id.

91. Id. at 54 (quoting HOWARD J. RUFF, HOW TO PROSPER DURING THE COMING BAD YEARS 150 (1979)).

92. Id. at 56. According to Reynolds,

 [Rex-84] anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial rule.

Id.

93. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 349 (emphasis added).

94. The moment is reminiscent of the often-discussed Christ-in-the- manger passage in Gravity's Rainbow. In that passage, the narrator ruminates on a meeting between "the War" ("the real king, foxy old bastard") and Christ ("the infant prince"). The narrator's leisurely ruminations shift suddenly to address (and implicate) the reader directly: "What message, what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?" PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 131. Is the Christ child smiling, acknowledging God's collusion--at some deep level--with evil? Or is it "just gas," a random effect of human physiology, an option which downplays divinity and implies a universe all the more frightening for its essential uncertainty?

95. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 262.

96. Id.

97. Id. at 263 (emphasis added).

98. Hamilton was born in 1755, Jay in 1745, Madison in 1751, and Jefferson in 1743.

99. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 264.

100. Id.

101. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 588.

102. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 264.

103. Id. at 338. Recalling that Hector works for the DEA, we can assume that the car was confiscated under the U.S. policy of "zero-tolerance." The repressive quality of this policy is seen most clearly in the trumped-up seizure of Zoyd's house under Civil RICO.

104. Id. at 338-39.

105. See id. at 289.

106. BEN BRADLEE, JR., GUTS AND GLORY: THE RISE AND FALL OF OLIVER NORTH 134 (1988) (emphasis added).

107. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 163.

108. The bunker from which DL rescues Frenesi is modeled on a COG complex. For a description of the complexes, as well as the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (JEEP), which provides for the evacuation of sixty-three key officials, see Steven Emerson,America's Doomsday Project, U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REP., Aug. 7, 1989, at 26. Riffing on JEEP in Vineland, Pynchon gives us "Federal Emergency Evacuation Route," (FEER) which leads to a site "intended as a holding area able to house up to half a million urban evacuees in the event of, well, say, some urban evacuation." PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 249. Is it that the narrator cannot bring himself to say "Nuclear War," or is it the possibility of "the last roundup" that leads to this sudden reticence?

109. Lobel, supra note 20, at 1385.

110. A New York Times article detailing Timothy McVeigh's habits as a frequenter of gun shows describes The Spotlight as "the newspaper of the extremist anti-Semitic group Liberty Lobby," explaining that it can be found at such shows. John Kifner, The Gun Network: McVeigh's World, N.Y. TIMES, July 5, 1995, at A1.

111. National Security Decision Directives are different from executive orders and presidential findings in that, "[u]nlike executive orders, which are listed in the Federal Register, or presidential findings, which are made known to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, N.S.D.D.s do not have to be revealed to any other branch of government." Eve Pell, White House Secret Powers: The Backbone of Hidden Government, NATION, June 1989, at 847-48.

112. James Harrer, Reagan Orders Concentration Camps, THE SPOTLIGHT, Apr. 23, 1984, at 1.

113. Id.

114. Id.

115. Id.

116. Id.

117. The Miami Herald story set The Spotlight story in a larger context, revealing that:

Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ... had drafted a contingency plan providing for the suspension of the Constitution, the imposition of martial law, and the appointment of military commanders to head state and local governments and to detain dissidents and Central American refugees in the event of a national crisis.

Lobel, supra note 20, at 1385.

118. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 268 (emphasis added).

119. Id. Brock uses the camp to recruit people like Flash and Frenesi, "independent contractors" to be used in his Justice Department sting operations. Similarly, the O.S.S. recruited agents from Japanese internment camps during World War II. See, e.g., Tim Weiner et al., C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50s and 60s, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 9, 1994, at 1. Weiner traces the relationship between the CIA and the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan's postwar leading party. One operation involved "Kay Sugahara, a Japanese-American recruited by the O.S.S. from a[n] internment camp in California during World War II." Id. at 14.

120. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 270. In fact, PREP is the first of three  "policies" in Vineland to be carried out--or almost carried out--before receiving official authorization. The declaration of national emergency accompanying Rex 84 is the second, and the seizure of Zoyd's house under the not-yet approved Comprehensive Forfeiture Act is the third.

121. BRADLEE, supra note 106, at 133. It is in this context, of an exercise blurring with the real event, that the Chipco accident becomes more than just a goofy passage plugged into the novel. Takeshi, we will recall, had been sent to investigate "the mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging to the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco.... From an insurance point of view, the place was totaled, though free of fatalities, the event having occurred precisely during an evacuation drill. Strange!" PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 142. For another treatment of this postmodernist theme, see "The Airborne Toxic Event" sequence in DON DELILLO, WHITE NOISE139 (1984).

122. See Pell, supra note 111, at 853 (evidence suggests some NSDDs may have been signed by auto-pen, not by Reagan's own hand).

123. Peter Cassidy notes that "Legislative changes in 1983 and 1989 helped bring military and police institutions together, formally and legally. Amendments to the Posse Comitatus Act allowed the military to provide information, materiel, transport, and training to aid domestic drug interdiction efforts." Cassidy, supra note 15, at C2.

124. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 340. Bradlee reports:

    The affidavit says Rex-84 Bravo was designed to test FEMA's readiness to assume authority over Department of Defense personnel, all fifty-state National Guard forces and a number of "State Defense Force" units which were to be created by state legislative enactments. FEMA would "deputize" all DOD and state National Guard personnel so as to avoid violating the federal Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids using any military forces for domestic law enforcement. Then, the affidavit continued, the exercise was also designed to test FEMA's ability to carry out a twofold mission:
    The first was to find and take into custody some 400,000 undocumented Central American aliens throughout the United States and to intern them in ten military bases around the nation. The second was the distribution by FEMA to the state-created Defense Forces of hundreds of tons of small arms and ammunition, ostensibly for use by the law enforcement "deputies" in keeping the peace during the president's declared state of national emergency.

BRADLEE, supra note 106, at 133-34 (emphasis added).

125. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 347.

126. Reynolds, supra note 89, at 55-56 (quoting Frank S. Salcedo & Richard Fierman, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Civil Security During and After the Unthinkable (Mar. 5, 1983) (speech transcript, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting)). If we add these 100,000 U.S. citizens to Bradlee's "400,000 undocumented Central American aliens," we get Pynchon's "half a million urban evacuees [evacuated in the event of, well, say, some urban evacuation." PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 249.

127. 33 U.S. 214 (1944).

128. Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798, in 17 THE PAPERS OF JAMES MADISON 130 (David B. Mattern et al. eds., 1991).

129. David Cowart notes that Pynchon "invites the perception that the war on drugs is being waged to distract the populace from a desire for some more worthwhile war--perhaps on the economic and social injustice that fills ghetto streets with juvenile crack pushers." David Cowart, Continuity and Growth: Pynchon's Vineland, 12 KENYON REV. 176, 180 (1990).

130. Bernard Weinraub, Bush Completes His Choices for Cabinet, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 13, 1989, at D17.

131. Lobel, supra note 20, at 1418 (quoting Have We Really Gone to the Source, L.A. DAILY JOURNAL, July 21, 1986, § 1, at 4).

132. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 347.

133. For an account of asset seizures during the Reagan Administration's War On Drugs, see DAN BAUM, SMOKE AND MIRRORS: THE WAR ON DRUGS AND THE POLITICS OF FAILURE 171-72, 241-42 (1996). For a broader historical and less stridently political view see LEONARD W. LEVY, A LICENSE TO STEAL: THE FORFEITURE OF PROPERTY (1996).

134. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 357 (emphasis added).

135. Id. at 360.

136. See Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213 (1983); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984). For a narrative discussion of these cases and the "gutting of the Fourth Amendment" during the War on Drugs, see BAUM, supra note 133, at 177-85, 202-03. Justice Brennan's dissenting opinion in Leon is especially noteworthy: "It now appears that the Court's victory over the Fourth Amendment is complete."Leon, 468 U.S. at 928.

137. PYNCHON, supra note 9, at 360.

138. PYNCHON, supra note 8, at 760.

139. Both the euphemistically productive verb and the dollar figure appear in DAVID B. SMITH, 1 PROSECUTION AND DEFENSE OFFORFEITURE CASES 1-16 (21st release, 1997) (quoting Annual Report of the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program (DOJ 1990)). See also Andrew Schneider & Mary Pat Flaherty, Forfeiture Threatens Constitutional Rights, in PRESUMED GUILTY: THELAW'S VICTIMS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS, PITTSBURGH PRESS, Aug. 11-16, 1991, at 33,34.

140. See Stephen Labaton, Seized Property in Crime Cases Causes Concern, N.Y. TIMES, May 31, 1993, at 1; BAUM, supra note 133, at 321.

141. Figures for 1991 appear in SCHNEIDER & FLAHERTY, supra note 34. Figures for 1992-1995 appear in SMITH, supra note 139, at 1-17, n.43.2 (quoting testimony of Stefan D. Cassella, Deputy Chief, Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, Dept. Of Justice, Hearing on the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, H.R. 1916 Before the House Judiciary Comm., 104th Cong., 2d Sess. 217 (1996)). The 1996 figure was obtained from SMITH. Id. (quoting figures "provided by Mike Perez at the Justice Management Division").

142. Smith argued that "[i]t would be difficult to imagine a more egregious deviation from the American commitment to the rule of law, or one more dangerous to citizen rights and liberties, than the civil asset forfeiture statutes." Hearing on the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 1997, H.R. 1835 Before the House Judiciary Comm, 105th Cong., 1st Sess. (1997) (statement of David B. Smith).

143. SMITH, supra note 139, at 1-8.

144. Id.

145. Labaton, supra note 140, at 10.

146. Id. at 10. For a more complete discussion of the federal "asset- sharing" program, see SMITH, supra note 139, at 1-8 to 1-8.3, 1-15 to 1-18; BAUM, supra note 133, at 241-42, 282-83.

147. See SMITH, supra note 139, § 1.02.

148. Representative Hyde's own book on the issue deserves mention here. Hyde argues:

[A] drug 'war' has been perverted too often into a series of frontal attacks on basic American constitutional guarantees--including due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to own and enjoy private property. Foremost among the invasions we now witness are unrelenting government assaults on property rights, fueled by a dangerous and emotional vigilante mentality that sanctions shredding the U.S. Constitution into meaningless confetti.

REP. HENRY HYDE, FORFEITING OUR PROPERTY RIGHTS: IS YOUR PROPERTY SAFE FROM SEIZURE? 1 (1995).

149. Labaton, supra note 140, at 10.

150. United States v. Good, 510 U.S. 43, 56 n.2, 55 (1993).

151. SMITH, supra note 139, at 1-17. Smith notes that Reno's  "extraordinary memo was expressly written to "reverse the current trend' of declining forfeiture statistics." Id. For other excerpts from Reno's memo and a discussion of the forfeiture program during the early years of her tenure, see id. at 1-17, 1-21 to 1-22.

152. 509 U.S. 602, 622 (1993).

153. Id. at 602.

154. 516 U.S. 442 (1996).

155. SMITH, supra note 139, at 1-3.

156. More than 200 NSDDs from Reagan's tenure alone remained classified as of 1989. See Pell, supra note 111, at 853.