Psychological studies became, in fact, a Bland specialty. His probe into the subconscious of early-Depression America is considered a classic, and widely credited with improving the plausibility of Roosevelt’s “election” in 1932. Though many of his colleagues found a posture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through the motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail, Harriman and Weinberg: an American synthesis which had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities—all grouped under the term “control,” which seemed to be a private code-word—more in line with the aspirations of Bland and others. A year later Bland joined the Business Advisory Council set up under Swope of General Electric, whose ideas on matters of “control” ran close to those of Walter Rathenau, of German GE. Whatever Swope’s outfit did, it did in secret. Nobody got to see its files. Bland wasn’t about to tell anybody, either.

He had gotten to be buddies, after World War I, with the office of the Alien Property Custodian. Their job was to dispose of confiscated German interests in the U.S. A lot of Midwestern money was involved here, which is what got Bland embroiled in the Great Pinball Difficulty, and so into the Masons. Seems that through something called the Chemical Foundation—cover names in those days had no style to them—the APC had sold Bland a few of Laszlo Jamf’s early patents, along with the U.S. agency of Glitherius Paint & Dye, a Berlin firm. A few years later, in 1925, in the course of being put together, the IG bought back 50% of American Glitherius from Bland, who was using his end of it as a patent-holding company. Bland got cash, securities, and controlling interest in a Glitherius subsidiary in Berlin being run by a Jew named Pflaumbaum, yesyes, the same Pflaumbaum Franz Pökler worked for till the place burned down and Pökler went back out on the streets. (Indeed, there were those who could see Bland’s hand in that disaster, though the Jew got blamed, fucked under by the courts, attached till he was bankrupt, and, in the fullness of time, sent east along with many others of his race. We would also have to show some interlock between Bland and the Ufa movie-distribution people who sent Pökler out with his advertising bills to Reinickendorf that night, to his fateful meeting with Kurt Mondaugen and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt—not to mention separate connections for Achtfaden, Närrisch, and the other S-Gerät people—before we’d have a paranoid structure worthy of the name. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was nowhere near adequate 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.)