antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

Doug Millison wrote:

> 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.

All right, it's INTERESTING even though irrelevant. And for your information, like
General George Patton in the movie, I read  the Bible every goddamn day.

>
>
> 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.

You DO love to argue from myth, fiction, and the movies.

>
>
> 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.

It wasn't a private (or hidden) belief I was talking about, so your contention
whatever it is based on is pointless.

>
>
> Mackin:
> >This was normative 18th C. thinking.
>
> Not all of Washington's peers thought the way he did.

Don't  suppose everyone thought alike. The examples I gave in my follow on post
suggest GW's estimate of the worthiness and self governablity of the herd was
pretty widespread among the elite.

>
>
> 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."

Passing judgement on eighteenth century persons by current day standards is OK in
the sanctimony department (where you hold forth)  but poor practice in historic
analysis.

>
>
> 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.

What's this got to do with the mind set of the FFs and the aristocracy of the
eighteenth century?

In conclusion I can only say that like Doug I think its a shame the slaves weren't
freed earlier.

Doug's probable rejoinder: So you think slavery is funny, you slavery justifier
you!

P.