M&D context: new book

[pynchonoid]

Reminds me of the hustlers in Pynchon's vision of
Colonial and Early America...


[...] McDougall [....] unabashedly writes of Americans
and assumes throughout that there is something called
an American character. Only the character he describes
may not be what many Americans would want to admit
about themselves. Unlike other national narratives,
which he says tend either to celebrate or to condemn
America -- and in righteous seriousness -- his book
aims to do neither. Instead, he wants to tell the
truth about ''who and why we are what we are,'' and to
tell it entertainingly. His is thus a ''candid''
history. Its major theme is ''the American people's
penchant for hustling.'' We Americans, he claims, are
a nation of people on the make. [...] Of course, he
admits that there are many hustlers in a ''positive
sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard
workers, inventors, organizers, engineers and a people
supremely generous.'' These qualities are what justify
Americans' faith in themselves and their destiny in
the world. But the negative connotations of hustling
and swindling are very strong and dominate much of our
literary and popular culture, and, indeed, our entire
history. ''If the United States . . . is a permanent
revolution, a society in constant flux,'' then,
McDougall writes, we would expect all periods of
American history at all levels of the society ''to be
washed by turgid, overlapping waves of old and new
forms'' of what he calls ''creative corruption.''
[...] , and McDougall does not flinch from describing
the violence created by the dynamism of white
Americans, including the elimination of hundreds of
thousands of native people, mostly from disease, and
the enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Africans.
Other historians have graphically described the
chicanery and greed of white Americans in their
scramble for power and profit in early America. But
these historians have usually written out of anger and
righteous indignation. Not McDougall. He cynically, or
he would say realistically (since cynicism suggests a
moral judgment that human nature might be different),
accepts, even celebrates, all the bribery,
land-jobbing and double-dealing as the consequence of
Americans' having so much freedom. [...] 

... read it all:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/review/28WOODLT.html>

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