ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

[Dave Monroe]

--- robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:

> I'm sure that Dave can find that M&D quote that
> starts: "How could it happen here. . . .", with
> such promise of liberty for all....

Let me know ...

  "'Ev'rywhere they've sent us,-- the Cape, St.
Helena, America,-- what's the Element common to all?'
   "'Long Voyages by Sea,' replies Mason, blinking in
Exhaustion by now chronick.  'Was there anything
else?'
   "'Slaves.  Ev'ry day at the Cape, we lived with
Slavery in our faces,-- more of it at St. Helena,--
and now here we are again, in another Colony, this
time having drawn them a Line bewteen their
Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom'd to
re-encounter thro' the World this Public Secret, this
shameful Core....  Pretending it to be ever somewhere
else, with the Turks, the Russians, the Companies,
[...] they're murdering and dispossessing thousands
untallied, the innocent of the World, passing daily
into the Hands of Slaveowners and Torturers, but oh,
never in Holland, nor in England, that Garden of
Fools...?  Christ, Mason.'
   "'Christ, what?  What did I do?'
   "'Huz.  Didn't we take the King's money, as here
we'retaking it again? whilst Slaves waited upon us,
and we neither one objected, as little a we have here,
in certain houses south of the Line,--  Where does it
end?  No matter where in it we go, shall we find all
teh World Tyrants and Slaves?  America was the one
place we shoud not have found them.'"  (M&D, Ch. 71,
pp. 692-3)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706

Cf., e.g., ...

"Does Brittania, when she sleeps, dream?  Is America
her dream? [...] serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for
subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true."
(M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)

"Could he have been the fork in the road America never
took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way
from?" (GR, Pt. III, p. 556)

"She had heard all about excluded middles; they were
bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it happened here,
with chances once so good for diversity?" (Lot 49, Ch.
3, p. 181)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0311&msg=87369

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0405&msg=90546


 
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