It's hard for me to believe that the entire Navy was crippled due to the fact that it was such a powerful force not that long after Pearl Harbor. The carriers and submarines were not taken out, but the battleships were reduced in number significantly. I imagine Roosevelt and the military complex went to work very soon after that to reinforce the Navy.

Btw, PK Dick in no way even mentions this scenario. What he does do in his book, however, is offer some intriguing alternatives, writing as though Roosevelt were assassinated in 1937, at which time Garner took over the Presidency and adopted an isolationist policy that resulted in defeat for the USA. Dick also has Hitler making some alternative tactical decisions, and he has all the major Nazi government officials and generals surviving the war to become big shots in the new Nazi global empire. In the new and remade USA, divided between Nazis governing the East and the South, and the Japanese governing the West, history is written from their point of view so that a general like Rommel becomes an idol and a legend, and the process of the war is told in a whole new way. Also, gasp, Churchill and the Brits are not good guys.

I sometimes wonder whether Dick was on the cutting edge of using metafiction techniques which give his novels such a complelling and absorbing complexity, while also affording a new insight into the workings of the psyche and society. As in A Scanner Darkly, where Dick created a metatext showing the way damage to the brain and the corpus callosum causes leaking from one side of the brain to the other, in TMiHC he imagines a man like himself, named Hawthorne Abendsen, writing a book .. titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.. as if the USA had won the war, and the description of this metabook, its author and contents forces the reader to step back from the magnetism of the story and examine both its truths and the nature of Truth and reality. Abendsen claims that the book was written "through him" by the I-Ching, that the title comes from Ecclesiastes (though definitely not a direct translation), and that it represents a way through illusion to true reality. The title contains within it both allusion and paradox, and it provides a path into seeing the yin and the yang, the good and the evil, as opposite sides of the same coin and as both illusion and reality. The grasshopper can be viewed both as a burden and as burdened, while it is traditionally thought of as light and capable of easy flight... though not necessarily in an oppressive swarm. That the yin of each human heart and mind has the potential of a single grasshopper to fly and light swiftly and easily, yet finds itself both burden and burdened in the mass contaminated by the contrapuntal forces of the yang of work, selfishness, power, and control of others, makes marvelous analogy. Ultimately, it's another kingdom that provides real life and solace, whether that be the kingdom of the eastern mind or that of the western god.

It's Hawthorne Abendsen, author of the underground, banned Nebenwelt novel about the alternative view of the world as it would have been if the USA had won the war, who is the man in high castle, though by the time the character Juliana meets him he is living in a sensible stucco ranch house, living a life totally inverse to what she expected... another irony and path through illusion to a higher reality. The man in the high castle is the symbol of the potential of every human to rise through the world of illusion and disenchantment to the other kingdom which we are all meant to achieve and experience through the altering and raising of consciousness.

Now, on a side note, lets look at the name Hawthorne and the nature of irony as defined by Colbert, an irony that can be seen as a kind of impressionistic realism. According to Colbert, the ironist is one who is always aware of the possibility of perceptual error. A mistake in perception or vision is always possible. This ironist is aware of incongruity, conflict, human frailty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was the great prototype of this ambiguous view of the world and the potential of humans to view it in different and often mistaken ways. He uses terms like "if," "seem," "appear," etc., and even the point of view of the narrator or important characters can be unreliable.

Hawthorne as a prime representative of the irony of ambiguity simply reinforces the idea that Hawthorne Abendsen, as the writer of the metabook within the book, provides the real view of the world in the most mind bending way. I love this kind of literature.

Sue

I read TMitHC a long while ago, so long that it was well before I'd ever even visited SF.

<I asked her why the Japanese didn't land and take Hawaii and she answered that "given the state of communications and the lies that our administration got out right away, even our own people and the Japanese did not know our Navy was so hurt." She went on to say, "Philosophically is that a good reason to tell a lie???? I suspect it is and I have always felt that not all lies are bad." Interesting. >

The problem with this conclusion is that the feds knew the attack was coming. I read one that from about 1930 on The Japanese Naval Academy's final exam had been a question of tactics in mounting an attack on Pearl Harbor. US intelligence had to be aware of the potential. Is the lie justified when it's employed to cover up previous lies? There is even evidence that the US had been goading the Japanese through blockading their fuel supplies for some years. The industrialists who had backed Hitler throughout the 30's, essentially ensuring there would be war, were determined to get the US involved, no matter what it took. If our Navy was that vulnerable afterwards, it illustrates in my view that the elites were willing to put US sovereignty itself in mortal peril, in other words commit treason, in order to pursue their profits. It's always prudent to keep in mind what Smedley Butler wrote:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. "

In a speech in 1933, he went on to say:

"I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

And what does that tell you about the truth behind all subsequent events, especially the phony war on terror...