MDDM Ben Franklin

Otto o.sell at telda.net
Wed Apr 24 08:14:32 CDT 2002


Rob:
> But between Dixon's sarcastically cool response and the fatalism it
> conceals, and the way the text describes the "perpendicular streaks" of
> lightning which "step across the Landscape" like some "miles-high
> Electrickal Insect, whose footfalls are Thunder-Claps" (462-3),
> I doubt very much that Pynchon intends to convey any such
> confidence whatsoever about
> Franklin's experiments with electricity, nor about what has followed
> therefrom, the directions in which American technology has moved to
> satiate the global desire for its production:
>
> http://www.co.ha.md.us/EOC/EmerPlan/peachbottom.html
>
> The way Pynchon has blended his source data here - the quote from Mason's
> journal (462.26), the camp's specific location near "Peach Bottom Ferry",
> Franklin's experiments - is very revealing.
>

Hi Rob,

to hear that siren I love. Methinks great discovery this is . . .
(I've seen "The Phantom Menace" on Sunday for the first time)

But seriously, of course I knew "Three Mile Island," but how in the world
did you get to Peachbottom? Really great and not only revealing but truly
Pynchon-like!

>
> Anyway, this rather vigorous polemic about where the American spirit of
> "independence" really originated from throws up some familiar names and
> issues from _M&D_, and from Pynchon's work in general:
>
> http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/leiblock.htm
>

from that url:
"(...) paved the way to two world wars, economic depression, and the
continuing genocides of the Twentieth Century."

-- this indeed seems to be rather polemic, indicating that the USA could be
in a way responsible for the two world wars, but much of the information
given further in the article is very interesting.

"Locke (...) managed to amplify simple-minded populist nostrums--such as
``balanced budget,'' ``free market,'' and ``free trade''--into shameless
justifications for each and every crime of the British Empire."

-- but those three expressions in brackets sound very familiar even today,
don't they? For the "balanced budget" our governments are dropping many
social achievements gained in the past thirty years.

>
> But I'd say that the general inclination of Pynchon's work, and its
> attitudes towards history and politics in general, and towards the notion
> of "American Exceptionalism" in particular, are about as far removed
> from this sort of rabid pamphleteering as they are from anything else.
>
> best
>
>
>

This is a very general way to put it, isn't it? Pynchon seems to be very
much concerned with commerce in general, and arms trade, slavery and the
death penalty in particular, which made (and still makes) the USA not
exceptional at all.

What's more interesting to me is not the "pamphleteering" but the bits &
pieces telling me that the crime of slavery has been seen as a crime in
those days already, the contemporaries of Mason & Dixon *knew* that is was
wrong, unlawful and an offense against the God they were all believing in,
regardless of Protestant, Puritan, Roman Catholic, Jesuit or whatever:

``He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.
This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of
the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where
MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing
every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce;
and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die,
he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people
upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed
against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to
commit against the lives of another.''

I agree to the author of the article on Locke that it's been "a fateful
compromise" for America's history to have dropped this piece from the
constitution.

Otto





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