re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

Monte Davis wrote:

> >It's tough for a lot of people to face the truth that Washington and the
> >rest of the Founding Fathers, despite some good intentions, recreated the
> >same kinds of inequality and oppression they sought to escape in Europe;
> >it's much easier to grasp at the myth that somehow they managed to avoid
> >doing that.  But that's a myth that Pynchon shatters in M&D.
>
> Some cutting-edge radical thinkers (Aristotle, Avicenna, Bacon, Bentham, et
> al) have come up with a popopomo notion they call _per genus et
> diffferentiam_.
>
> They say it makes it possible to consider that the FF might have created
> something that was the same in some important respects (slavery, patriarchy,
> marginalization of women and indigenes, etc.)
>
> ...and different in other important respects (no monarchy, written
> constitution denying some powers to government, disestablishment of
> religion, wider franchise than anywhere ever before, etc.)
>
> Crazy stuff, eh?

Not crazy at all, Monte.  The differences were crucial. The overthrow of the
monarchy and the power of government were very important 18th Century type
changes.(they did not of course include 19th and 20th Century type changes) The
FFs provided, among other things,  the documents that legally separted the
American colonies from the Crown. This was an important step in freeing up
thinking sufficiently to enable the social changes that had occured by early in
the 19th Centruy. These social changes were not limited by the ideas and wishes
of the FFs. These rather elite gentlemen rather tended at times to be appalled
at the demands of the lower orders. It is surely incorrect  to assume, as the
Doug statement seems to do, that the FFs in any encompassing sense were the
creators or recreators of the society American had become by the beginning of
the 19th Century.

P.