MDMD Ch5: "an act of Him"

[Paul Nightingale]

I thought the reference to mining highlighted the nature of working-class
communities in the north-east. In the early-1970s the miners were credited
with doing more than most to bring down the Conservative Government of
Edward Heath after a series of strikes that disrupted power supplies and
reduced industry to a three-day week. A decade later, the Miners' Strike
(1984-5) was 'one of the last great industrial disputes' in Britain. What
happened depends, as always, on your point of view: the left would argue
that the Thatcher Government provoked the strike in order to break
trade-union resistance generally, all in the interests of a modernised
economy. Policing wasn't always respectful of civil liberties, to put it
mildly. And then, English writing has often used the coal-miner, or collier,
as an exemplar: Lawrence's novels, Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier, most
obviously. One reason has clearly been the nature of their way of life. In
Industry And Empire, EJ Hobsbawm writes: "The miners were - and have largely
remained - villagers, and their ways of life and struggle were strange to
the non-miners with whom they had little contact". Consequently, miners
always had an understanding of class solidarity that would often set them
apart from other sections of the working class. Perhaps Pynchon is
juxtaposing this camaraderie to the fellowship of the Quakers: he then
emphasises dissent among the Quaker community when Dixon explains that he
was expelled.