Americans transcend decline

[Terrance]

In the early days of colonization, every new settlement represented an
idea and proclaimed a mission. Virginia was founded by a great, liberal
movement aiming at the spread of English liberty and empire. The
Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Boston, the Quakers of
Pennsylvania, all avowed a moral purpose, and began by making
institutions that consciously reflected a moral idea. No such character
belonged to the colonization of 1800. From Lake Erie to Florida, in
long, unbroken line, pioneers were at work, cutting into the forests
with the energy of so many beavers, and with no more express moral
purpose than the beavers they drove away. The civilization they carried
with them was rarely illumined by an idea; they sought room for no new
truth, and aimed neither at creating, like the Puritans, a government of
saints, nor, like the Quakers, one of love and peace; they left such
experiments behind them, and wrestled only with the hardest problems of
frontier life. No wonder!  that foreign observers, and even the
educated, well-to-do Americans of the sea-coast, could seldom see
anything to admire in the ignorance and brutality of frontiersmen, and
should declare that virtue and wisdom no longer guided the United
States
To a new society, ignorant and semi-barbarous, a mass of
demagogues insisted on applying every stimulant that could inflame its
worst appetite, while at the same instant taking away every influence
that had hitherto helped to restrain its passions. Greed for wealth,
lust for power, yearning for the blank void of savage freedom such as
Indians and wolves delight in, -- these were the fires that flamed under
the cauldron of American society, in which, as conservatives believed,
the old, well-proven, conservative crust of religion, government,
family, and even common respect for age, education, and experience was
rapidly melting away, and was indeed already broken into fragments,
swept about by the seething mass of scum ever rising in 
greater quantities to the surface. 

--Henry Adams, American Ideals 1800


So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of
it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then,
but slowly, drawn toward the closing vortez. When I reached it, it had
subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of the slowly wheeling
circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
center, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of
its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea like a black
rocket carrying me to America. 

--Moby-Dick

Man in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing
creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows
should run to throw their costliest robes. The immaculate
manliness...this august dignity...is not the dignity of kings and robes,
but that abounding...democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates
without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The center and
circumference od all democracy! His omnipotence, our divine equality!  

--Moby-Dick

But whip  a man or force him to dance like dog & pony show and he may
curse your democracy with reason. 

"For him our Revolution was in vain; to him our Declaration of
Independence was a lie." 

--Melville, White Jacket

But the treatment of flogging in White Jacket, like the Dixon whip scene
in M&D  is not quite as uncomplicated as it might appear at first. Oh
no, Melville, like Pynchon and the great Americans, is never
uncomplicated, but is playing that unique American role, the Confidence
Man and projector of tall-tales, always trying to amuse us out of folly
and lift us ever higher into divine equality.