MDDM Ch. 50 Golem

[David Morris]

I've read pecious little Thoreau, but this essay so nicely fits with Pynchon 
that I have no doubt he knew it by heart.  Thanks Dave, and glad you're 
still around.

David Morris

>From: Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
>    "It would be only a few decades, however, before
>Thoreau wouyld expose the synecdochic confaltion of
>machinery and state as tyrranical and therefore
>essentially un-American.  The rhetoric as well as many
>of teh arguments presented in his celebrated essay
>'Resitance to Government' (1849) seem to respond
>directly to Rush's technotopia.  Voicing his disgust
>about the degree to which the heirs of the great
>Revolution have been turned into corrupt little
>machines, Thoreau dismisses the 'perfect' citizen as a
>republican golem, an artificial monster that
>'command)s) no more respect that men of straw or a
>lump of dirt.'  As he writes in his classic protest
>against the government's interference with individual
>liberty: 'the mass of men serve the State thus, not as
>men mainly, but as machines with their bodies.... They
>put themselves on a level with wood and earth and
>stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured
>that will serve the purpose as well.... Yet such as
>these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.... A
>wise man will only be useful as a a man, and not
>submit to be "clay."'" (pp. 24-5)
>
>See ...
>
>Thoreau, Henry David.  "Resistance to Civil
>    Government."  Reform Papers.  Ed. Wendell Glick.
>    Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973.  63-90
>
>http://eserver.org/thoreau/civil.html
>
>http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/civil/
>
>... a.k.a. "Civil Disobedience."  Didn't want to leave
>y'all high and dry, is all.  Okay, back to work ...
>
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