"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.
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
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.
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....ROSSITER, supra note 14, at 236-38.
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.
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.
[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)).
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.
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.
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).
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.
[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.
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.
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:BRADLEE, supra note 106, at 133-34 (emphasis added).
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.
[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).
