Gravity's Rainbow - Part 3 - Chapter 30: The Origins of Modern Power

Analysis of Gravity's Rainbow, Part 3 - Chapter 30: Lyle Bland's Influence in Industry and Politics, the Great Pinball Difficulty, Bland Becomes a Freemason, Astral Travel

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Lyle Bland was Slothrop’s uncle on his father’s (Broderick Slothrop’s) side. We’ve briefly heard about him in the context of Jamf’s experiments with young Tyrone Slothrop. Lyle facilitated the deal between Broderick and Laszlo Jamf, ensuring that Jamf’s experiments on Tyrone Slothrop could be conducted. Bland, who had major economic interests in the Weimar Republic, also had major ties to various industries. This is how he came to know Jamf which led to the facilitation of the deal. He went on to promise Broderick Slothrop a fully paid scholarship for his son, Tyrone, to go to Harvard, ‘outracing’ his family’s typical middle/working class place in the world.¹ Therefore, Bland acted as what seems like a ‘middleman’ to broker the deal which would in turn teach the Elites how to seize and perfect Their methods of control over America and the Western capitalist nations. But though it may appear he was only a middleman, he was more; he was the one with the money, purposefully ensuring — using his immense wealth and notoriety among certain groups — that this goal could be achieved. He was, therefore, not merely a pawn like Pökler, Pointsman, Pirate, or even to some extent, Jamf. He was one of Them.

Bland was someone who "got so much money he don’t know what to do with it all" (580). Like most modern-day billionaires, the wealth someone like Bland possesses is not an amount that could ever be spent. Typically, those in lower strata want this wealth to be redistributed among the people, stating that wealth should not be so concentrated in the hands of one. However, in regard to his wealth, "He’s given it to you, though in roundabout ways you might need a good system of search to unsnarl" (580-581). So while he may say that this desired redistribution has occurred, a system of research would reveal its sinister nature. It is done through his eponymous institutes and foundations, similar to many of the ‘foundations’ owned by billionaires or those with immense political power: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Clinton Foundation, or those owned by others like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and so on. These institutions will often hide under the guise of charitable foundations which give money to good causes such as the eradication of diseases or assisting in ‘excessive’ birth rates among very specific populations. In reality, these ‘charities’ are used for two means: first, the obvious tax write-offs, and second, to distract from the other doings the foundations are performing. In Bland’s case, one of those ‘things which They would not want you to see them doing’ would be working to destroy the patenting of "that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor," (581) for They certainly would prefer you to have to fill up your tank every week or so as opposed to every month; the public’s necessity for oil is one of the things Their Empire thrives off of. Another would be the funding of "the great Killer Weed advertising campaign of the thirties," (581) a large anti-immigration campaign which accused Mexican-Americans and immigrants of distributing marijuana (which they stated led to violent and deadly crimes) to the youth. This type of campaign would clearly not be about saving our youth, but eradicating, imprisoning, or at least deporting a large portion of Mexican Immigrants.

On top of this, he was able to become an antecedent to the modern-day lobbyist. In these cases, Bland would find a well-liked and -respected politician such as FDR² who were believed to be working solely ‘for the people,’ allowed them to enact certain policies which would benefit the people, all while making donations to bribe these politicians to also enact policies of Their desire. The allowance of publicly beneficial policies is comparable to the donations which the previously mentioned ‘charitable’ foundations gave out (which in turn were distractions from their true purpose) while the real actions (the ‘true purposes’) of the foundations were like the hidden political policies which would benefit the Elite.

Next, Bland infiltrated other offices such as the Business Advisory Council of the Swope Plan and the Alien Property Custodian’s (APC) office. The former was a plan for worker benefits and compensation which would eventually be presented to FDR. This plan is one of the distractions which a lobbyist would want passed as policy to take the focus off of the latter, the APC. The APC specifically obtained the assets of German Industry after WWI in order to redistribute them among American industrial and political lines. These seizures included companies like IG Farben and a number of its branches, Psychochemie AG likely being one of them (which itself is a tie to Laszlo Jamf). So, similar to how modern-day foundations and institutes have their own hands in politics and industry (both domestic and foreign) in hopes of giving the Elite more power and control, Bland was doing the same since the early 20th-century.

But those were just his early doings. Bland, before joining the Masons but after getting tied up with the loads of money involved in his ties with the APC, found himself "embroiled in the Great Pinball Difficulty" (581). This embroilment occurred when Bland got tied up with Laszlo Jamf through the purchasing of an American dye and chemical company known as Glitherius which was eventually repurchased by IG Farben. Glitherius, similar to how IG Farben developed its own subsidiaries in companies like Psychochemie AG, formed their own subsidiaries in Germany after the IG Farben accumulation. It was here, in Germany, where one of these Glitherius subsidiaries was run by Pflaumbaum. This Pflaumbaum was a Jewish man who we heard of back when we first learned of Franz Pökler’s early history (1.19). He owned the paint factory that Pökler worked at which we now know would have been a Glitherius subsidiary. Pökler’s initial impression (in 1.19) was that Pflaumbaum burned the plant down himself in order to cash in on the insurance. However, we now see that Bland had a hand in the disaster, likely finding a way to burn it down himself so he could cash in on the insurance, given he was also a part owner, and so that Pflaumbaum would be the one to be blamed. Even if Pflaumbaum should have received some amount of this insurance payout, it would not last long given he would soon be "sent east along with many others of his race" (582).

Not only this, but Bland also had connections with the movie distribution company which used Pökler to help advertise Gerhardt von Göll’s Alpdrucken through the posting up of movie posters. His work for this company led him directly to the rocket testing site where Mondaugen brought him onboard to further the development of the V-2 rocket (1.19). And even further, Bland had his hands in the movement of various other members who helped work on the Schwarzgerät such as Achtfaden (the man who hallucinated himself on the Toiletship while being interrogated by the Schwarzkommando in 3.13) and Närricsh (the man who Achtfaden mentioned and who Slothrop met during his quest with von Göll in Swinemünde and Peenemünde in 3.19 and 3.20). The fact becomes quite clear here: that Bland, or men like him, have had Their hands in every aspect of the rewriting of this world — all the way back from Slothrop’s youth to the literal development of the V-2 Rocket and companies like IG Farben, even to the movements of minor individuals who would go on to assist in the formation of a new Empire without knowing it. And to his advantage, in the 1940s, there were not enough reliable data retrieval methods to prove this high number of connections. Bland is a singularity meant to represent Them, the Elite. He is a precursor to those we would see rise up after him and remain here today. A literal symbol for the power, influence, and evil contained in these absurd levels of wealth.

But back to the ‘Great Pinball Difficulty.’ All of these scattered connections led Bland to a ‘renegotiation’ of power, ultimately leading him to St. Louis, Missouri. Here he met with a member of a high-end country club, Alfonso Tracy, who helped run the Veiled Prophet Ball.³ This country club was a part of the Elite society, though not one as incredibly high up as Bland or his peers. Instead, Tracy would be akin to a family who has had power in a smaller region for some time.⁴ This man came into the possession of a number of dysfunctional pinball machines which he takes Bland to see at a warehouse in Mouthorgan, Missouri.⁵

First of all, the pinball machines themselves represent the trajectory of a person’s or a society’s history, both from the initial ejection from a start point through to the end. Along this path, there will be the possibility to accumulate points which can be obtained by a level of skill and a large amount of luck. Now, when the malfunctions come in, many of the issues would actively work against the player, for instance stating TILT — a function that typically only comes up if the player tries to cheat — when there was no real tilting of the machine to be seen. This, or other negative malfunctions, penalizes the player unnecessarily, taking a game already largely based on luck and rendering it impossible to win. However, while this could be read as a purposefully built in fault to society made to ensure the unfair oppression of an individual, there also happen to be machines that do the opposite. Some of them elevate the player’s score to unheard of levels, showing how other individuals have had their place in society rolled out for them from the beginning, readily elevating them without much, if any, effort being put forth. Or could it be less pessimistic? Could it be interpreted that there happens to be more randomness and chance built into the world than we initially believed, or that even They can control? Or that the board/machine we are dealt isn’t pre-ordained with luck or misfortune, but is simply one of the many fate-derived errors and chances that can determine our journey from birth to death? For now, though, we see these pinballs knock back and forth across the space in which they exist, their collisions and falls being equated with many aspects of life and especially with war. The one thing that is certain with each ball is that they are "always at the mercy of gravity" (584). They will rise, forces will act against them throttling them back out into the atmosphere, but eventually they, like the Rocket, will succumb. In the end, the black markets are what control these lives. They (those like Lyle Bland) buy and sell the ‘pinball machines’ and thus the trajectory of human life in order to keep the market running: “That ever-lovin’ War goes on and on, ya know” (585).

If these miracles of chance could lay outside of Their grasp, then maybe we do have a chance. The issue lies in the fact that all of this uncertainty and possibility lies locked up in a warehouse owned by one of Them, taking away that which They could not control and allowing them to do so in possibly more subtle ways:

No way to tell if someplace in the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints telling exactly how all these pinball machines were rewired—a randomness deliberately simulated—or if it has happened at real random, preserving at least our faith in Malfunction as still something beyond Their grasp . . . a faith that each machine, individually, has simply, in innocence, gone on the blink, after the thousands of roadhouse nights […] . . . have players forever strangers brought about, separately, alone, each of these bum machines? believe it: they’ve sweated, kicked, cried, smashed, lost their balance forever—a single Mobility you’ve never heard, a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have blandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us from finding them again . . .”

(586)

So, while these purposefully altered lives have ‘sweated, kicked, cried’ through their existence, attempting to succeed in something that may lead to happiness, they have been predestined by those like Bland to fail. Their focus will be on agencies named by initials such as the CIA or the FBI, by spokesmen for these organizations and by the Western governments. And while these agencies do bear much blame and do deserve the hatred that they receive, it is people like Bland or Tracy who influence these groups to enact the evils that they do; our focus on the agencies and initials stops a step short, leading us to attempt a hopeless fight against an entity who is not even crowned at the top.

Bland contacts his friend, and ‘expert,’ Bert Fibel. This man had ties with many of the organizations who Tchitcherine realized, in his epiphany (3.27) were running the war and the rebuilding of the world — Siemens and General Electric. Remember that when talking with Marvy and Chiclitz, Tchitcherine saw how General Electric was forcing their hand in attacking the Schwarzkommando which led him to recall a man named Carl Schmidt who was from IG Farben and who sat on the board of directors at Siemens. Thus, with Bert Fibel now well before WWII, we can see that these specific corporations were tied together from the start, proving that the outcome of the War and likely the War itself was planned from the beginning — especially since his placement at General Electric in the Berkshires was purposefully chosen in order to look over Lyle Bland’s project, young Tyrone Slothrop, also known as America itself.

Fibel, after Bland brought him over to Mouthorgan, was able to ‘fix’ the malfunctioning machines. Why would the Elite desire to fix what They had already manipulated into malfunctioning (or at least had some control of through mere possession)? It is hard to say, and while there is no explicit textual evidence for proof of this theory, there is the possibility that he took these machines from being obvious malfunctioning systems to ones that malfunctioned in more subtle and less observable or provable means, ensuring that Their control could not be explicitly condemned — in ways that would appear to the conditioned viewer to be simply ‘how life works’ with all of its uncertainties and inequities while in reality still having been built to favor one side.

Through his contracting of Fibel to ‘fix’ these machines/systems, Bland is then inducted into the Masons for his deeds. The Masons, or the Freemasons, are an organization purportedly under the Illuminati — another organization with tenuous existence in the minds of the people. Many believe this organization known as the Illuminati is at the head of control structures within the Western World. For instance, entities like Pökler would lie below those like Pointsman who would be below Blicero who would be below Lyle Bland who would be below those within the Illuminati. All of this is similar to a ‘chain of command’ in an Army where orders are given from the highest of the structures and are passed down as far as they need to go in order to be executed properly. Obviously not every single order would need to be passed down from the ‘highest’ entity, and many of these ‘lower’ groups would often work in their own interests until told otherwise by those more powerful than them. But the chain of command still remains. Now, the explicit existence of the Illuminati (at least as an all-powerful entity who controls the world) is not what is being stated here, nor is it stating that they are the group in control if they were to exist. But the Freemasons do exist. To many, the Freemasons are largely thought to be a group acting under the Illuminati as foot soldiers, for lack of a better term. And the Freemasons are an organization who has historically had much power, including members like “Some of the American Founding Fathers,” (587) other American and international political leaders, oil pioneers, military leaders, and wealthy businessmen, actors, athletes, philosophers, and so on. It was an organization for the wealthy and powerful which allowed these members to fraternize and conduct their odd rituals that often had gnostic undertones. Pynchon thus calls to mind Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972)⁶ which itself condemns the Masons and their ritualistic practices for bringing about the purposeful whitewashing of religion and power, stripping those of African descent from as much freedom, prerogative, history, and religion they may have held onto. Thus, whether or not the Illuminati exists, or whether the Freemasons are a literal entity which controls the world or if it is merely a place for those who have the power to do so to simply fraternize with others, the fact remains: these groups have existed in some form throughout history and have imposed their will on the people they deem lesser than them. Even in “this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay’s atomic clit,” (588) Harry Truman, a Freemason himself, used his own power to exterminate an entire city of people who he deemed unimportant in the grand scheme of things. For, if they were worth saving, or even worth not murdering, they would be a part of his little fraternity as well.

Back to the point: Lyle Bland, because of his finding the solution to ‘fix’ the pinball machines, was inducted into the Freemasons. This organization had “degenerated into just another businessmen’s club” (588) instead of the mystical and frightening entity which it had always been. But, while he did not initially find fascination within the Masons due to it just being that ‘businessmen’s club,’ Bland somehow tapped back into the old magic.

Upon returning from the Freemason meetings, “He would lie down in his study on the davenport” (588) and find himself having numerous out of body experiences, each one taking him further and further ‘out.’ At first, he would be above his own body, then eventually he would be looking down at himself. During this time, likely because he was telling his fellow Freemasons that he had tapped into the old magic, many men came to visit him, observing him during these experiences, instructing him in his journeys, and questioning him afterward. Bland states that “he has found out there, members of an astral IG” (589-590) and has found the mind and body of Earth itself. Earth has taken its history and compressed it down into oil and coal — has “hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species” (590). So, if these members ‘out there’ who he is communing with are one-time Masons, it seems their work has continued on ‘beyond the veil.’ They too have found Earth’s carbonic history and have sought means to rework its excrement back into something real, tangible, and alive. The molecules would be reworked and recombined, transformed into various forms of new plastics all meant to distract the people from reality: meat packages in supermarkets hiding from our eyes the gory scenes in slaughterhouses, prizes in Cracker Jack or cereal boxes giving us momentary entertainment.

Bland knew there was something more that could be done with this oil and coal. It could be transformed further. The substances were permanent markers of death through the history of the planet, but as Walther “Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa,” (590) “The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured” (1.19, pg. 166). Bland realized this: that all he had accomplished on Earth — the conditioning of Slothrop, the connections between international corporations which would run the world, the lobbying of politicians and industries, the ‘fixing’ of the pinball machines, the joining of the Freemasons — is miniscule in what he could accomplish in the astral plane. He could rework death into a new means of control, could take these useless dead masses pooled below Earth’s mantle and perfect his lifetime goal. So, this is what he did. He called his family to say his good-byes, assured them they would be cared for, and rose out of his body for the final time to join Their ghostly ranks working beyond the Earthly hindrance of gravity — beyond the zero.

---

The next chapter is a long one, so it will be split into two parts.

Up Next: Part 3, Chapter 31.1 (ending at the top of page 602 with the line of dialogue "‘Wow, Rocketman. . . .’")

1. Check out my post on Part 3 Chapter 1 for a fuller account of what we know about Lyle Bland so far in regard to his relation to the Weimar Republic, Laszlo Jamf, Broderick and Tyrone Slothrop, and various industries.

2. One of Slothrop’s idols.

3. Worth looking into on your own.

4. If you’ve seen it, this would be like the Tuttle and Childress families in True Detective Season 1. Here, these families hold vast amounts of power over the government and martial forces within Southern Louisiana. They ran and participated in rituals involving kidnapping, rape, child/sex trafficking, pedophilia, and various other crimes of the sort. However, while they could get away with these crimes in this region, their power only extended so far. Tracy and his country club also conducted ritualistic traditions of the sort such as the Veiled Prophet Ball, making them a part of a smaller Elite class within the region they were a part of, but not one of the Elite who could alter the historical trajectory of the world such as Bland.

5. Another section involving dysfunctional pinball machines occurs in Thomas Pynchon’s next novel, Vineland (1990), which covers the Reagan-era 1980s.

6. Which, like Pynchon advocates for, you should read. It is a fantastic, revelatory, and often hilarious novel.