pynchon-l-digest V2 #7241

[Monte Davis]

Mark Kohut sez:

> America has become an addictive society since the sixties in so many ways we 
> are still discovering and dealing with...

Ummm... you DO know what crop made Jamestown, VA viable, right? (Its original sponsors and settlers had had gold in mind.) The slave-tended crop that accounted, more than anything else, for the prosperity and predominance of Virginia among the colonies for the next 200 years, until cotton took over?  The one we're still heartily subsidizing and promoting for foreign sales, even as we officially deplore and discourage it at home? 

For those less attuned to smoke, of course, there were the sugar islands of the Caribbean -- the slave-tended crop which represented even more trade and profit to Great Britain than pipeweed. IIRC, about three times as much in the late 1700s as ALL trade with ALL the mainland colonies together. (Which is one reason GB grudgingly acquiesced to our independence: they feared that carrying on the war would give the Frogs and Dagoes a shot at the REAL crown jewels like Jamaica.) It's arguable whether sugar is "addictive" in every sense, but as it became cheaper and more abundant, Europeans sure consumed it as if it were.

One might even view slave-holding itself as an addiction, a view more than hinted at in Mason & Dixon. I've noted here before that over the span 1600-1820, 70% or more of ALL those crossing the Atlantic westbound were African slaves. (The only reason they didn't dominate the colonial New World demographically was that so many of them died and/or failed to multiply on those Caribbean sugar islands, which made the harshest Simon Legree cotton plantation on the mainland seem benign by comparison.) Our comfy conventional story makes that 70% an unfortunate footnote to the REAL narrative of the best and bravest, coming from the Old World to clear the wilderness and feed their families with their own brawny melanin-challenged arms. In fact, an awful lot of them responded to a triple siren call: cheap land to steal from Native Americans (and mark up for sale to the next wave, cf. young George Washington and the Ohio Valley)... addictive crops to sell back to Europe... and slaves to do the work. In that perspective, the Civil War looks a bit like a withdrawal symptom, no?

I don't disagree with your point above: just sayin that the Tubal, therapeutic and psychotropic addictions burgeoning "since the sixties" are fresh frosting on a big ol' cake.

-Monte (may I help you to one more wafer-thin slice?)