Tuesday
Journalist Josh Marshall recently said of Russia’s Monday attacks on civilian centers,
It may be an over-optimistic analog but I get a strong V1/V2 vibe about these cruise missile strikes in Ukraine.
As I interpret the comment, he thinks Putin bombing Kyiv recalls Hitler’s desperation in the final months of World War II when he targeted Antwerp and London with his V-1 and V-2 rockets. My own association with those rockets, however, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
The novel is set in 1944 England when Hitler’s rockets are raining down on London’s civilian population. Protagonist Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant working for British intelligence, contrast Hitler’s old buzzbombs with the new supersonic variety. After a while, he recalls, one got used to the former: buzzbombs:
A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe dropped came near him. But this last summer they started in with those buzzbombs. You’d be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops—if it just keeps on, rising to a peak and then passing over why that’s fine, then it’s somebody’ else’s worry…but if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson—it’s begun its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away, from the engine burner, and you’ve got 10 seconds to get under something. Well, it wasn’t really too bad. After a while you adjusted—found yourself making small bets, a shilling or two, with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk, about where the next doodle would hit…
At this point, Slothrop is like the resilient Ukrainians, who keep on bouncing back. Reports were that the cafes of Kyiv filled once again no long after the early morning bombing, which was targeted at a playground, a university building, and a historic city bridge.
The V2 rockets, on the other hand, are something else:
But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this..
Fortunately, so far this has not seemed to be the general Ukrainian response.
At this point in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon veers from reality, albeit in a way that is thematically interesting. Slothrop has a long string of one-night stands, which he assiduously keeps track of on London map. It so happens that where he has his trysts coincide exactly where the rockets later land, with a mean lag time of 4 ½ days. British intelligence becomes aware of this and starts following him around.
To British intelligence officer Pointsman, Slothrop is a mystery. He could imagine Slothrop’s love life mirroring conventional rockets. But what about supersonic rockets, where the explosion occurs before people hear it?
[A]ny doodle close enough to make [Slothrop] jump out to be giving him an erection: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the cutoff and silence, suspense building up—then the explosion. Boing, a hardon. But oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens in reverse. Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.
Rocket as phallus, incidentally, is the central trope of Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. And I think the Russian rockets are Putin’s attempt to regain his manhood after being humiliated by the Ukrainian military. Of course, if you think you can prove your alpha male bona fides by killing city dwellers, you’re on very thin ice. In fact, by overcompensating for your failures, you further reveal your insecurities, and Russia went all out in targeting Kyiv. There are reports that Russia used a billion dollars worth of “air-,sea- & land based missiles; ballistic missiles; surface-to-air missiles; reconnaissance & attack UAVs of Shahed-136 type.” With not one military target hit.
Slothrop himself doesn’t appear to male insecurity issues. But Putin, along with many of his supporters and cheerleaders, have them in spades.
Further thought: I omitted the opening paragraphs of Pynchon’s novel, which captures, as nightmare, some of the terror that accompanies a missile strike:
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall–soon–it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.