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Thomas Pynchon's presentation of World War II as the creation of an international corporate conglomerate, a way to keep the monetary blood flowing in its veins, may seem a little paranoid (which would only be fitting in Gravity's Rainbow, really), and in the 1940s it probably was not the real-world history state of affairs. The idea, though, has gradually become more and more believable as the world has become better-wired and -interconnected. There is, of course, still no hard evidence of a Jamf-driven secret group in the real world, but there are hints that need no Pynchonian recreation of present history.
 

Gravity's Rainbow does plenty of creation of past history, of course, and recreation of its own history. Pynchon plays, obviously, with the details of undeniably true events. Peenemunde did exist, the V2 was designed in Nazi Germany and deployed on London, and Germany really was a Zone without a political head for a brief period after the war, in which all kinds of interesting things were surely going on. Weissmann, Pointsman, and Slothrop probably were not the people they are for Pynchon, if they even were at all. But these characters fit comfortably into the real world, and the details of their lives are what Pynchon creates, muddling real history only in passing and in ways that we can find totally believable.
 

Was there really some white boy fishing for a jew's harp in Malcolm X's toilet? Was there really a British Pavlovian digging through V2 ruins for test subjects? Was there really a Nazi rocket brigade commander with experience under von Trotha and a disturbingly personal desire for the rocket? Hey, it all could plausibly have happened and just not been details any historian whose work we have around today saw or chose to note. The point is not that Pynchon's seen into some crystal ball and brought us real events, but that he's seen into the kind of details and perspective that gets left out of conventional history in favor of a full summary of the larger details. (Neither Churchill nor Hitler figure as even minor characters in Gravity's Rainbow, which we would never accept from one posing as a "true" historian.)
 

But Pynchon has not embellished just the life details of individuals living through the Greater War, he's done some creating off the opposite end of the usual historical attention spectrum as well. We get a synthesis of the forces pushing behind the whole conflagration as well. These forces are not strictly political, nor strictly economic, and, while not exactly characters, They have the same presence in Gravity's Rainbow that dark matter does in the physical universe. They can not be seen, but the effects of Their actions definitely can.
 

The global corporate entity which Pynchon suggested during World War II is easily and publicly recognizable in the present day's World Trade Organization. Just as the IG Farben conglomerates did, the WTO seems to be not all bad; it is interested in furthering the international economy and in raising a global standard of living by way of global capitalism. There have, though, been some wholly justified concerns raised about the methods by which such an organization would do its work, and the struggles between WTO organizers and picketers have been all too prevalent in the late '90s Western media.
 

Pynchon probably saw where all of this was heading in the 1970s, and probably knew that it was a bit of a stretch to set the whole thing in the middle of the twentieth century, but he had his reasons. The '40s are a nice midpoint for the cultural myths that, according to Joseph Andriano, Pynchon spends much of his time debunking or just satirizing through recreation. Andriano points out how, for Pynchon, "Illusory myths ... illustrate relative truths." (14) From small details like the way in which the King Kong myth, based around the idea that a gentle species is ferocious, to larger themes like the assimilation of humans into machines, Andriano shows Pynchon taking a fresh look at common societal presumptions.
 

In the King Kong case, Pynchon saw the basic fallacy in the story (apes, even giant ones, are not the sort of beast that needs be satiated by human sacrifice) and turned the situation around. In Gravity's Rainbow, King Kong is a misunderstood victim, a "scapeape," and any damage he causes is by way of a strike back against humans in revenge for the mistreatment his race has endured. (Andriano, 16) By association, we can see the same desire to fight back in the reference to Malcolm X and, more centrally, in the Schwartze Kommando and Enzian's quest. This latter, of course, is somewhat twisted by the Herero's goal of their annihilation which Weissmann/Blicero began years ago in Sudwest Afrika. Their struggle is still one of defiance, though. They seek to usurp control over the European man's newest weapon of destruction in order to fulfill what they see as their destiny.
 

The mechanization of humanity is a far more important theme in Gravity's Rainbow. It shows up in Tchitcherine's plausibly cyborg nature, and in many characters' actions to become one with the rocket. (Andriano, 16) The Schwartze Kommando desire destruction through the rocket, Weissmann is obviously obsessed with joining someone (Gottfried will do, since Blicero himself cannot fit, physically or metaphorically) with the S-Gerät, and even Slothrop runs around the Zone dressed as Rocket Man (among other costumes). Even more, though, Andriano suggests a background force working towards the systemization (a form of mechanization) of human society at large. Pointsman would have the human mind be a pure stimulus-response machine, and initially seems to have proof of his theory in Slothrop, whose sexual exploits seem to mimic, in advance, the V2's attack pattern.
 

Slothrop, though, ends up being a true antithesis of this view of humanity. Not only is he set at odds with They who are trying to control him (and everyone else), he actively works to break the cohesion of that group down (or, at least, thinks he's figured out a way to do so). More than that, his eventual literal dissolution is absolutely contrary to a system of humanity. Rather than progressing on as a cog in a machine, Slothrop is spread across the Zone (and across humanity) in an unpredictable, non-deterministic away. His is the existence, within the system that Pointsman and his ilk try to describe, that simply cannot be proven by anything within that system.
 

Relatedly, Andriano aims his paper mostly at Pynchon's treatment of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, sort of a mathematical Murphy's Law. Gödel states that in any sufficiently complex system, there are implicit truths which cannot be prove based on facts strictly within that system. Gödel is interested mostly in irrational numbers, but both Pynchon and Andriano take some justified artistic license applying this to systems of people rather than numbers. Andriano also suggests that, because of this, Slothrop's Counterforce is not necessary; that Pointsman's system must capsize itself in trying to account for everything in the natural world. But perhaps Slothrop himself is the manifestation of the system's assumptions failing to explain something within it.¹
 

Pynchon leaves us with the scare of an ICBM strike on a US city (centering, appropriately enough, on the media outlet he seems to like most, the movie theater). This warning, quite ripe with reality in the '70s, is eclipsed in current events by a more subtle, and more frightening, warning layered into Gravity's Rainbow: that of a Pointsman- or Jamfian control of humans through stimulus/response and behavioral modification. According to Andriano, these forces are defeated in the novel not by the bumbling Counterforce of Slothrop and friends but by the fact that such a system for control of humans is mathematically impossible, as proven by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. The state of affairs in the United States at the end of 2001, though, is desperately in need of some inconsistency in the government's formal system.
 

Rather, in late 2001, a terrorist strike on New York City justified the United States government's declaring a nebulous "War on Terrorism." Just as the "War on Drugs," the terms are vague and ever-changing. This is drastically distinct than the war fought by states in World War II (arguably, puppet states for Gravity's Rainbow), as there can be no clear end with as unspecific a definition as terrorist seems to have for the US government. In a move reminiscent of McCarthyism, Attorney General John Ashcroft seems to be suggesting that unity behind this war is not only good for the United States, but mandatory. Those who dissent are to be labeled terrorist sympathizers, and any Arabic male is to be suspected of terrorism. All this in defense of the US's lauded personal freedoms.
 

As Christine Smallwood and Jeane Gardner state, arguing with or poking fun at this kind of national (arguably, international) action is not worth the effort. The government and media have shaped what they want public opinion to be, and enough citizens are willing to go along with it that taking any contrary stance will just yield an assault (whether physical or metaphorical) from the mob. (Smallwood, 21-23) The whole process has created a system by which some They has control over a large population. There are definitely opposing forces, but it is not yet clear whether, in the real world, they will succeed. Certainly, the physical dissolution of some individual in order to thwart Them seems unlikely outside of a novel, in which the Fantastic is an acceptable explanation.
 

Perhaps the most worrisome consideration is that, for Pynchon and unlike the real world, there was always some cognizant entity to Them, some insidious planning group involving Jamf on a number of fronts and supported, whether consciously or not, by the actions of people like Weissmann. Even if the pawns were unaware of the hand moving them, it was there. This is a classic paranoiac conceptualization of the state of affairs, one which Slothrop even contemplates specifically in Proverbs for Paranoids 1: "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures." (Pynchon, 237) It would be an easily dismissed (and impossible to prove, since any single member of Them whom you pin down can deny it or foist off some smaller conspiracy as the real thing) suggestion that this They necessarily exists concretely in any history, Gravity's Rainbow or that in which we live.
 

This kind of group, which attempts to systematize the universe fully, as Andriano sees Jamf and Pointsman doing with the human psyche, can be defeated as They were in Gravity's Rainbow. Their system cannot be complete; according to Gödel, there will always be some component of it that is unprovable by the rules of the system. But Gödel may not really be necessary. That is, there could be no regular, cloaked meetings of Ted Turner, Henry Kissinger, and John Ashcroft to plan military actions against Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan with appropriate media spin to keep the US citizenry behind it precisely because there are enough paranoids to notice.
 

The media is too varied, and the citizenry contains too many ready to question, for such a society to remain successfully secret, especially when any fool walking into a public library can read (and verify the legitimacy of by way of a third party) Southeast Asian or Palestinian news sources out of the immediate control of any western cabal.² This is, perhaps, the flaw in Andriano's suggestion that They are defeated solely by Gödel's updated Murphy's Law: the Counterforce of Gravity's Rainbow maps onto the collection of individuals in the real world all too ready to see conspiracy and, having seen it, expose it. Without such a Counterforce, a governo-economic junta could go right ahead building its systems of the world. Individuals within the group may go straight-up insane, as Pointsman, or megalomaniacal, as Weissmann, in the attempt to systematize everyone else, but any secret bureaucracy worth its plans of world domination would find no difficulty replacing (and silencing) cracked members. With the Slothrops and Enzians of the world running around, things like Pointsman's insanity and Weissmann's barbarity can not just be swept under the rug.
 

If one can infer a They in the "real" world, They would not be some group who all had full knowledge of what as going on, but rather a continuous meme. For such a secret, bureaucracy is an ideal mode. Instead of just keeping the populace in the dark and certain leaders of the group in the light, the way the meme survives is that no individual has knowledge of the full set of ideas. There is no human to crack under the flaws in a complete system. Relative leaders of such a Them could control a subset of the ideas, but never the whole. We see Slothrop wondering if They are controlling him this way, wondering if everything he thinks he does to escape and befuddle Them is actually precisely what They want him to do, but for Slothrop there always is a Them holding all the cards, "Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel." The kind of cabal one can see operating in the real world is not one with anyone in full knowledge, with even those involved, to the extent that they can be said to be, not quite conscious of the whole.
 

It is also one that seems to have sprung up recently... around the time Pynchon was writing Gravity's Rainbow, in fact. As Jonathan Rowe points out, people living in the '60s still knew how to be outraged at events like the US presence in Vietnam, "young people still thought that things could be--should be--different." According to Rowe, this comes from a memory of what was Right (in the real world) during World War II. The advertising engine then extolled thrift, making do with what one had. The quite logical and obvious point, of course, was that scrimping on the home front meant that there were that many more supplies for a war effort. (Rowe also notes that, during World War II, it was Hitler who refused to cut back on the home front for fear he would lose support for his war.)
 

This is in sharp contrast with how the media and the US economy has responded to pretty much every military action since, especially exemplified in the current "War on Terrorism" being carried out in Afghanistan. It is suggested instead that people should consume ever more than before, should spend their money ever more extravagantly, that this will somehow support a war effort better than reserving supplies for it.
 

So, how the real world will behave in, around, and after a Zone in Afghanistan is unclear as yet. The fact that there is neither a specific enemy to be defeated in this "war," no Hitler or Weissmann to destroy, should probably be worrisome. This continued effect of the system after catastrophic events can perhaps be noted in the search for the S-Gerät, which continued unabated in Gravity's Rainbow after the cessation of World War II and the onset of the Zone in Germany. The true lack of a They, even a shadowy indistinct They, in the real world is the profoundly disturbing difference. Without a systematizer, who is there to be defeated by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem?
 

¹ Andriano pegs Pointsman's descent into insanity as a manifestation of the same; the two suggestions are not mutually exclusive. (Andriano, 16-19)
 

² Certainly, one could simply extend the cabal to include the leaders and journalists of every nation, working together to support the fiction of dissent in order to throw the incredulous off the track of the real plot. But as any "everyone against me" paranoid fantasy, this is self-defeating and, as a result, uninteresting. It is not valid logic to prove one's assumptions by virtue of their being assumptions. Such a statement can end an argument, but only because it is not worth arguing with one who reasons so.
 

Works Cited
 

Andriano, Joseph. "The Masks of Gödel: Math and Myth in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow". Modes of the Fantastic, ed. Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
 

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1995.
 

Rowe, Jonathan. "Our World War". Adbusters, number 39. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/39/, 2001. (In print, Jan-Feb 2002 issue.)
 

Smallwood, Christine and Jeanne Gardner. "This Means War". Spike, volume 9 number 1. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore College, 2001