re re Re: MDDM Washington

[Doug Millison]

Mackin :
>What's the point of all of this. There
>must be a hidden meaiing somewhere.

When you find the key, please let us know.   ;)

Meanwhile, Pynchon offers plenty of material to support a multifaceted
reading of Washington and Gershom, although I do think it's fairly easy to
sketch the outlines of a general approach that M&D supports with regard to
racism, genocide, and what the "Revolution" did or didn't do with regard to
both.

I think coming down one way or another on this question-- Washington as
"benevolent" or Washington as practitioner of an institution that caused
untold suffering even in the best of cases, or somewhere in between the two
extremes -- *might* depend on the degree to which a person sees the US as a
racist society today, and how far into the individual psyche that racism is
seen to penetrate, and how to interpret various social and cultural
expressions of racism; I expect that's why Pynchon deals with this material
as he does here in M&D, such that it supports a broad spectrum of meanings,
refraining from a definitive black or white answer, but always leading his
readers to understand the painful human condition for all involved.

Having said that, we do know that the historical Washington kept slaves,
that he was castigated by contemporaries for doing so, that he contributed
some of his slaves to the Dismal Swamp Land Company project (22 years of
back-breaking labor digging that canal -- I'm sure that was a picnic for
the slaves who did the work ), that he advertised for the return of escaped
slaves instead of letting them go free.  I do wonder why, if they had such
a good thing going with Washington, why any of his slaves would ever want
to escape in the first place.  I guess they were just ungrateful.

Pynchon puts these historical facts in a context that pulls us right into
the racial politics of the 20th century, with Gershom bringing into play
all of the complex baggage of black-face minstrel shows and Jim Crow, the
role of black entertainers in contemporary markets dominated by global
capital, the American hankering to believe that slavery and slave masters
weren't as bad as we must, if we are to be realistic, believe them to have
been, the tendency to just want to get stoned (literally and figuratively
-- Sammy Davis Jr. as part of the Rat Pack on 1960's TV is pretty
hypnotizing, too) and joke about it to defuse the anger and resentment that
might otherwise lead to a real revolt.