Yes! As soon as I read that scene I couldn't help but think about Gravity's Rainbow. Actually, it seemed like there were a lot of connections between the last 200 pages and GR, and paranoia is definitely one of them. The scene with Lenny--the comedian, I think he is--screamed of a kind of paranoia to me. He talks about Cuba (590) and being American (591) and test missiles (594) and how "'we're all gonna die!'"(594), all of which certainly contain elememts of paranoia given the context. Maybe encyclopedic novels find paranoia an easy (and universal?) subject to work with?

Although, he wasn't unusual at that time. People really thought they were all gonna die during the Cuban Missle Crisis...thus it was called a Crisis. Perhaps the governments were full of BS, but the common person had every reason to believe they were going to get blown up....I think Lenny doesn't sound paranoid as much as simply scared. I think DeLillo does make a distinction.

"megadeath hardon"
I was going to write a post on that, too! For a moment, I had to double check what book I was reading.
Also, that scene in which Matt is given a random drug at a party and is paralized reminded me of the drugs Slothrop was slipped (though his was more planned, I realize). the drug-induced ramblings were very similar, though. A lot of the motifs are similar (waste, paranoia, media (movies especially)) is this just random, or do these themes work well in this time period?

I don't think that Matt's fears are degraded or silly. If anything, I think his drug induced state brings his actual fears to surface. From the previous parts of the novel, it seems as though people have this general/vague paranoia, but they don't know what exactly causes it. On 422, though, Matt realizes that it is the threat of nuclear bombs that he fears.

It's really interesting how the characters relate sex and war/weaponry. It definitely reminds me of Gravity's Rainbow. I was especially thinking about the way that Slothrop views the rockets. He is turned on as a child by fireworks in the sky and he gets hardons from the rocket. On page 615-616 when Louis Baker and Chuckie are in the plane the conversation is as follows:

Louis said, "I want pussy, Chuckman, and I want it now. But she's got to respect me and what I do."
"And what you stand for"
... (too much to type)
"Because if she don't respect me," Louis said, "I feel empty when it's over."
"I know the feeling."
"First we fuck them."
"Then we bomb them," Louis said.

It was really interesting to me that their conversation switches so easily from women to weapons. Sex is supposed to be this beautiful connection between two people and an act of creation, whereas bombs and war are supposed to be destruction. Here, it's less like they are turned on by war, and more that sex is now an act of war.

Also, this line really caught my attention (more rocket-like Gravity's Rainbow references).
Page 514: "Nothing shrouded or secret except for young Eric, , who sat in his room, behind fiberglass curtains, jerking off into a condom. He liked using a condom because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile with a warhead that carried yields up to forty kilotons."

Is the cold war causing children to fantasize about weapons instead of girls? Is this the new generation of masturbators? It also seems like theirs some sort of power in jerking off to weaponry... I mean, he's holding a weapon sort of. I'll stop here.

Also, the whole PigPigPigPigPigPig thing somehow reminded me of Slothrop in the pig suit (and I still don't really understand what was going on with the repitition of this word).

This may be stretching it, but reading about Eric on this blog I suddenly drew parallels between Imipolex G and the latex that makes the condom that Eric uses to masturbate.

Am I too absorbed in GR or could these actually make sense?