MDMD: Dixon's nonviolence

[Doug Millison]

Try as you may to change it, Pynchon clearly writes that "Dixon places his
fist in the way of the oncoming Face"), he  holds his fist stationary, does
not throw a punch.  (My interpretation:  Dixon absorbs the force of the
slave driver's charge with his body, in a manner similar to the way a line
of protesters might passively await the charge of a line of police.) You
reverse what Pynchon wrote, when you say " a punch
lands forcefully in the slave-driver's face"  when Pynchon is unambiguous
in writing that the motion belongs to the slave driver, "the oncoming
Face." You're changing Pynchon's phrase, replacing his passive sentence
structure with your own an active sentence construction.  Call my
interpretation what you will, at least I'm dealing wth the text Pynchon
wrote, I'm not rewriting it to make my point. You can make it mean whatever
you want it to mean if you want to start changing his verbs and sentence
structure, but I prefer to deal with the text that Pynchon writes.

jbor:
>I'll also note that there was much bloodshed and violence, and many lives
>were lost, in each of the "nonviolent" struggles and campaigns you list
>above, and that both Mahondas and Martin Luther fell to assassins' bullets.

Right, the nonviolent protesters being injured and killed by the powers
that be, which nonetheless did not stop the success of their nonviolent
struggles.  India thus freed itself, and African-Americans won a great
victory, too.  And the forces of violence showed how pathetically lame they
are, ultimately, when they face men and women of conscience:  they can kill
individuals, torture them, jail them, injure them in so many ways, but they
can't, finally, stop a determined, nonviolent struggle.

That nonviolent campaigns often dissipate and find themselves overtaken by
violent tactics is a sad truth, and testimony to the power of violence in
the world.