re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Monte Davis]

> Not crazy at all, Monte.  The differences were crucial.

Exactly. Much of the social history of the US, and a fair chunk of the
political history, can be seen as how we came (and are still coming) to take
seriously, and make real, the words of the Declaration of Independence.

I understand Doug's excitement at seeing through the myth that the FFs were
saints of equality and democracy, untainted by self-interest or hypocrisy or
blindness. Its cruelest lie -- the "3/5 of a citizen" finesse on slavery --
required the Civil War to correct; its biggest -- votes for half the
population -- wasn't corrected for 140 years. Most of us share Doug's
attitude at some point, as we move beyond a 4th-grade, 4th-of-July-pageant
PoV. But it's still possible to feel gratitude that the [flawed, limited]
system the FFs inaugurated *did* allow, *has*  allowed, *does* allow so much
scope for improvement.

To me, the strongest recurring theme in Pynchon is a passionate
cultural/historical version of Haldane's "the universe is not only stranger
than we imagine; it is stranger than we *can* imagine." There are wider,
wilder, barely-dreamed-of possibilities of human connection -- both in the
everyday (in any sailors' bar on any Street, in any mailbox in San Narciso,
in any burned-over hippie haven in Humboldt County) and in the Big
Historical Moments (in the brief equipoise of forces in the Zone, in the
about-to-grow-rebellious colonies).

Of *course* we fail to see and realize the best of those possibilities. Then
the next generation tells itself in a comfortable Philadelphia parlor that
the lame, lying, historically constrained version they got instead was (a)
just swell, and (b) inevitable anyway. Where Doug and I differ is that he
seems to think that's a peculiarly American condition, while I think (and
suspect Pynchon thinks) it's the human condition.

-Monte