antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Doug Millison]

Mackin:
>The "argument" was over the meaning of archaeology not scipture but no matter.

I thought it might be interesting to recall Pynchon's place in a literary
tradition that includes a long line of people who criticized the Egyptians
for their slave-holding practices, something you seemed to suggest was
unheard of.  You may have no use for the Bible but Pynchon clearly does.

More generally, it is not at all uncommon, or particularly reprehensible,
to look back and put past behavior in the context of current practices;
Pynchon does it all the time, in the way he juxtaposes elements from
different historical periods, and in other devices he uses to create irony
in his fiction by exposing disconnects between what a character knows and
does and what the reader knows.

Mackin:
>There is no evidence that Washington pretended to worship
>personal liberty for the classes below the lower gentry, the class to which he
>belonged.

Whatever Washington privately believed, some of his contemporaries did
point out a gap what he said (stood for, symbolized) and what he did as a
private individual.

Mackin:
>This was normative 18th C. thinking.

Not all of Washington's peers thought the way he did.

http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/slavery/index.html
" There is no reason to think that either man [ Jefferson or Washington]
thought that Africans, if free and given opportunities to advance, could
have become the intellectual equals of whites. At least a handful of
Americans saw that as a possibility, including Alexander Hamilton and
Benjamin Franklin.  [...] In 1796 George Washington received a letter from
Edward Rushton, a prominent English antislavery advocate.  [...] My
business is with George Washington of Mount Vernon in Virginia, a man who
not withstanding his hatred of oppression and his ardent love of liberty
holds at this moment hundreds of his fellow being in a state of abject
bondage--Yes: you who conquered under the banners of freedom--you who are
now the first magistrate of a free people are (strange to relate) a slave
holder. . . . [...]  Ages to come will read with Astonishment that the man
who was foremost to wrench the rights of America from the tyrannical grasp
of Britain was among the last to relinquish his own oppressive hold of poor
unoffending negroes. In the name of justice what can induce you thus to
tarnish your own well earned celebrity and to impair the fair features of
American liberty with so foul and indelibile a blot."


Mackin:
>The freedom
>and liberty proclaimed by the founding fathers did not technically exclude any
>free white males but a lot of white males were not free and what the FFs were
>talking about was property owners not indentured servants and the like.


Pynchon points to a broad spectrum of class divisions in M&D -- a point I
made early in this thread -- in addition to the slavery and black/white
racial politics that emerge as major concerns of the novel.