M&D pg 329-330

[Greg Montalbano]

While re-reading this passage concerning the debate on the Great Sugar
Menace taking place in Janvier's...

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   ---no table that does not hold some sweet memento, for those it matters
to, of the cane thickets, the chains, the cruel Sugar-Islands.
   "A sweetness of immorality and corruption", pronounces a Quaker
gentleman of Philadelphia, "bought as it is with the lives of African
slaves, untallied black lives broken upon the greedy engines of the
Barbadoes."
   "Sir, we wish no one ill, -- we are middling folk, our toil is as great
as anyone's, and some days it helps to have a lick of molasses to look
forward to, at the end of it."
   "If we may refuse to write upon stamped paper, and for the tea of the
East India Company find tolerable Succedaneum in New-Jersey red root, might
Philosophy not as well discover some Patriotic alternative to these vile
crystals that eat into our souls as horribly as out teeth?"
   Every day the room, for hours together, sways at the verge of riot.  May
unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a
habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new
sort of European?  less respectful of the forms that have previously held
Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he
chooses, and to defend his position as violently as need be?
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... I was struck, not only by the subtle power of it, and its
appropriateness to contemporary USA, but by what a perfect description it
is of the Pynchon list.

No?

~G~