World Gone Mad; and a moment from GR

[Terrance]

glthompson wrote:
> 
> One of the local sports hereabouts seems to involve trying to read current
> events through the lens of selected passages from the texts of Thomas
> Pynchon. Let me offer one of my own.
> 
> Context: Lyle Bland (of the Bland Foundation) has been introduced as the
> funding source for NRC studies on sexual anxieties, suppression of the
> 100-mpg-carburetor, etc. (BTW, anyone who thinks of such figures as Pynchon's
> own fictional/paranoid inventions might want to check out Trudy Lieberman,
> _Slanting the Story: The Forces that Shape the News_ [New York: New Press,
> 2000], on the role of groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato
> Institute, u.s.w., in getting a particular conservative / business agenda
> into the mainstream press.) 

Agreed. 

Pynchon lays a tantalizing trail of Bland links
> (Laszlo Jamf, the IG, on down to Franz Pokler's employer Pflaumbaum) to
> suggest but not conclusively prove a Conspiracy. [You'll have to provide your
> own umlauts . . .]

Yes, and Bland is Slothrop's "uncle."  And Slothrop's Father sold
Slothrop like a side of beef to pay for his Harvard tuition. Slothrop's
mother wants him to die in the war.
This conspiracy is over 500 years in the making, it includes Slothrop's
religion, his family business, the Morgans, GE, SONJ, IG Farben, Shell,
ICI, the President of the USA, Walter Rathenau, the USA and German
economies, the governments of several Nations. And it's all connected to
Slothrop. To his dreams, his fantasies, the films he's seen, the girls
he loves....and the Rocket and Nixon and the cold war and the
denial/love of mortality...and the newspapers...and music, songs, like
God Bless America GR. 444, and the war that is over and the war that
rages in Vietnam and the war that never ends. 

> 
> "We would also have to show some interlock between Bland and the Ufa
> movie-distribution people who sent Pokler out with his advertising bills to
> Reinickendorf that night, to his fateful meeting with Kurt Mondaugen and the
> Verein fur Raumschiffahrt--not to mention _separate_ connections for
> Achtfaden, Narrisch, and the other S-Gerat people--before we'd have a
> paranoid structure worthy of the name. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was
> nowhere near adaquate to that kind of data retrieval. Even if it had been,
> Bland, or his successors and assigns, could've bought programmers by the
> truckload to come in and make sure all the information fed out was harmless.
> Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth,
> were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies,
> drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction,
> absurdity" (582).

UFA is connected to Bland and the Germany/USA  economy and Hollywood and
so on, both  
in GR and in facts of history.