M & D and ATD, thematic homage, parallels, etc.

[Monte Davis]

Keith links to massacres of Native Americans in connection with Tore's:

> "The Fish jump into your arms. The Indians know Magick."
> "We'll go there. We'll live there."
> "We'll fish there. And you too."
>
> That's a beautiful ending, full of hope and possibility - until one  
> realizes what happened to this original promise.

In a crucial sense, it had already happened centuries before M&D.

It does not excuse any subsequent massacre, betrayal, or displacement of 
Native Americans to point out that by far the worst thing Europeans ever 
did to them was simply to breathe, piss, and shit in the New World. By 
the mid-18th century, wave after wave of epidemics had reduced the 
Magickal Indians beyond the frontier, from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, 
to a tattered tenth or less of their pre-Columbian numbers. (Indeed, the 
devastation could have started in Vineland for all we know.)

Nor does it excuse anything to point out that a remarkable number of 
large New World species went extinct in the millennia when the 
not-yet-Native Americans were spreading across N and S America with 
their shapely Folsom points.

Despite Guns, Germs and Steel, 1491, and other efforts, the persistent 
weakness of the New World "contact" narrative is to Eden-ize what we 
found. Not only were the Native Americans we encountered radically 
changed by diseases that had  moved farther and faster than our 
explorers; they'd had the effrontery to be engaged in their *own* 
history, to be inventing cities and empires and hegemonies on their own, 
long before the plagues began.

Pynchon is not exempt from this weakness. Much as I admire the passages 
Tore cites, they tell me more about Anglo-European bad conscience (not 
that it wasn't richly earned), and about the mythic power of *all* Eden 
stories, than about the Americas as a unique Last Blown Chance to be 
Better Than Human.