"Then What's America's Excuse?" M&D.307

[Terrance]

Wicks interrupts his tale to explain the meaning of "Liberty" to the to
the children. 
He says it is now something Sacred, but it wasn't always so. He argues a
bit with Mr. LeSpark about the use of biological warfare (LeSpark being
something of an expert on the subject).

He says, 

Unlike our own more virtuous day, no one back then was free from Sin. 

(This is Wicks the ironist, and while its a mistake to confuse or
conflate Pynchon and Wicks, this sounds to me like the applied author.
The boys are off to bed and Brae is offended by Wick's editorial, there
is an adult  political discussion, but why does Wicks slip into the
Peggy Shippen story? 



By the way, yes, Washington was a Mason. 

Welcome to the George Washington Masonic Memorial

http://www.gwmemorial.org/default.htm




    "Despite all the elegant rhetoric about the Pilgrim
fathers...Amerian has not set an
        exemplary record in the area of religious freedom. The English
Calvinists who
        settled in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay did not come to found
a society
        where spiritual liberty would reign supreme. They came to found
a theocracy, as
        the four Quakers...who were hanged on Boston Common between 1659
and
        1661 soon found out. Unpopular and unconventional religious
beliefs and
        practices were not only unwelcome, they were not tolerated.
Roger Williams, a
        Baptist, was hounded into the frozen wilderness. When Henry
Dunster, the
        president of Harvard College, decided not to have his fourth
infant baptized
        because he had come to accept adult baptism, he was forced to
retire. Later on,
        in other parts of the country, Mormons, Jews, Masons, Jesuits,
and ordinary
        Roman Catholics felt the hard edge of harassment and
discrimination because of
        their religious convictions. A couple of generations ago,
Jehovah's Witnesses
        were the main target of prejudice. Now we have the 'cults.' It
seems Americans
        are never really happy unless there is some unfamiliar religious
group to abuse.
        The spirit of theoracy lingers on."

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/lectures/anticult.html

These three -- 'clowns' is perhaps the best word for them -- in their
research for a book entitled The History of Metals, advertise for
manuscripts about the diabolical histories of secret societies. If the
story so far seems to veer a bit, just wait -- it gets better. They
decide as a game to feed all the hermetic plots that ever were into
their computer. The results go beyond even paranoid fantasy: the
unexplained phenomena of history, they find, can be fitted into a
single, cosmic plan that embraces
opposites, provide better interpretations than orthodox history has of
certain past events, and reveals the greatest secret of history. What
every major society of Europe, from the thirteenth century onward, has
wanted -- Templars, Rosicrucians, Masons, Jesuits, even Nazis, we
discover -- is control of the Earth's 'telluric currents,' the psychic
forces which control the land, seas, and skies.

http://www.2think.org/pendulum.shtml

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/index.html