why we (the LIST) welter in the parching winds of words

[public domain]

Second, anti-Americanism if two different but equal
kinds. 

One is the American who hates his own nation and 
what it has become. He hates it so much he can no
longer imagine what it may yet be. 

The other is the non-American who can't imagine that 
Thomas R. Pynchon is really an American author and
that all of his novels are about America. 

M&D is more like Melville's C-M. 

GR is not a Marxist tract but an American novel like
Moby-Dick. 

Doug wnats to argue that there is lots of TRP in 
the RC's moral vision and Jbore that the RC's 
politics/religion are riduculed by the author. 

Both are correct in part, but they have such a 
polarized dominance of this list that we can't 
quite get aord in  edgewise. 

The Puritans provided the framework for what
we have come to call the myth of America. This is the
Puritan grain in American life and thought. It appears
most clearly in the extraordinary persistence of a
rhetoric grounded in the Bible, and in the way that
Americans keep returning to that rhetoric, especially
in
times of crisis, as a source of cohesion and
continuity. This speaks to only one aspect of the
culture, but a very significant one, with far?ranging
implications. Just where the significance lies ?- what
those implications entail ?- is the main theme of my
remarks today.
          Probably the most direct way to state my
theme is by reference to a familiar biblical text: In
the beginning was the word, and the word was with the
New England Way, and the word became "America". And
let me open the text by citing two very different
views of America, neither of these in the Puritan
grain, and both written some thirty years after the
Revolution. My first example comes from Washington
Irving, surveying the new republic in the guise of a
visiting Muslim:
 
I find that the people of this country are strangely
at a loss to determine the nature of their government.
Some have insisted that it savors of an aristocr­acy;
others maintain that it is a pure democracy; and a
third set of theorists declare that it is nothing more
nor less than a mobocracy.
[Yet] the simple truth of the matter is, that their
government is a pure unadulterated logocrac­y, or
government of words. In a logocracy, thou well
knowest, every offens­ive or defensive measure is
enforced by wordy battle and paper war; he who has the
longest tongue is sure to gain the victory.
[Then], without mercy or remorse, [he will] put men,
women, and children to the point of the ?? pen! [Or he
will send] them a long message, i.e., a huge mass of
words, all meani­ng nothing; because it
only tells them what they perfectly know already;
[whereupon, they will be] thrown into a ferment, and
have a long talk. Nations have each a separate
characteristic trait, by which they may be
distinguished from each other. [For example], the
Italians fiddle upon everyt­hing; the French dance
upon everything; and the windy subjects of the
American logocracy talk upon everything.

http://www.facli.unibo.it/Materiali/Materialididattici/Minganti/HowthePuritansDiscoveredAmerica(Bercovitch).htm


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