PKD Otaku Issue 27 - Philip K. Dick Fan Site

tled “The Men’s Club,” decrying the pervasive influence
of elite sodomites on American society, penned by one
“Hawthorne Abendsen,” connection or paean to Van Vogt
and PKD unknown.)
In the fragments of a sequel to the “Man In the
High Castle,” never completed, Dick used the singular
phrase, “Die Stille Im Lande.”
That German phrase, usually
translated “the quiet in
the land,” has been historically
applied most often to
strict Mennonites and Amish,
supposedly to refer to their
quiet public demeanor. Like
the term PlattDeutsch, is
not widely known. Although
there is no exact translation
its meaning may also be partly
captured by the translations,
“The Covert in the Land” or
“The Hidden In the Land.” The image that comes to me
is of the hunted yet potent “stillness” of the Von Trapp
family hiding in the convent graveyard prior to escaping
Austria. (The Sound of Music is not a story about Mennonites,
but it is the first movie that many film-shunning
Mennonites ever thought acceptable to see.)
The influence of Mennonites and their brethren
on early American ideology and politics is not well-known,
but there are facts which suggest a role greater than acknowledged
in standard historiography, a subject that is
also beyond the scope of this essay. Prominent among
the original European settlers of pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania
were a mix of Quakers and Mennonites; Dutch
Mennonites were among the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam,
later to become New York; Mennonites were affluent
merchants and shipbuilders in the Golden Age of
Holland, which produced the powerful Dutch East India
Company which in turn influenced the British East India
Company. Reputedly, the nickname for the CIA, the
“Company,” derives from the latter. A number of Mennonites
were active in early North German and Dutch secret
societies and some had direct communications with early
American revolutionaries.
While “Baptists” are often credited with the
American invention of the separation of church and state,
English Baptists may themselves have derived from Dutch
Mennonites; and certainly in a historical sense, Anabaptist-Mennonites
were among
the earliest to champion the
idea of institutionalized freedom
of conscience. The political
ideology of “Communism”
has likewise been traced by
certain enemies of the free
church to the communitarian
Anabaptist-Mennonites.
Juxtapose this information
with the fact that some
writers have written of America
as one vast Masonic social
experiment, and some other
curious and even less-known connections between Masonic
and Mennonite history, and the reputed involvement
of individuals in both groups in drug trafficking (query:
when is a farmer also a pharmer?), and one has even
more food for thought when considering the complex life
of Philip K. Dick.
The creator of Horselover Fat seems to have been
totally without genealogical interest, which is anomalous
for a man as intelligent and self-aware as he was. Can this
be explained by a desire to guard secrets, or by an aversion
to his own history--and are the two interrelated?
In one of his now well-known early stories, “Imposter,”
Dick wrote about a man who had been programmed
with a particular mission, oblivious to his own
programming. Was Philip K. Dick himself the subject or
instrument of a complicated and troubling social experiment,
and a deep-rooted Germanic one at that?
Bruce Leichty, a lawyer, lives in Escondido, CA.
14
Under the blanket of drugs his personality had receded to diffusion.