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 <strong>PKD</strong> unknown.) In the fragments of a sequel to the “Man In the High Castle,” never completed, <strong>Dick</strong> 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 <strong>Philip</strong> K. <strong>Dick</strong>. 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,” <strong>Dick</strong> wrote about a man who had been programmed with a particular mission, oblivious to his own programming. Was <strong>Philip</strong> K. <strong>Dick</strong> 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.
A review from a British Newspaper Circa 1988 15 He hammered the book with his fist. ‘This tells. Everything’s here.’
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