Speaking of money...re: gold and silver standards in Pynchon's work

[Ian Livingston]

I think it's safe to infer that the economic inequities so prevalent
in the contemporary two-way monologue can be traced back, in
Pynchonian terms, to the grievous feng shui of the M&D line.

Also, according to Howard Zinn in The People's History of the United
States, gold was discovered in Arkansas in the early years of the
westward expansion and used as a part of the lure to white settlers to
move into land contractually ceded to the Creek and Cherokee nations
"as long as grass grows", thanks to the illustrious A. Jackson, who
aside from all his nefarious dealings with Indians and as regards
black slaves, also forebad the creation of a central national banking
system, as I recollect reading somewhere. I'll leave it to better
educated minds to discuss whether central banking has delayed or
enhanced the contemporary crisis, as, I believe, the gold and silver
issue is a question of banking as much as of speculative profiteering.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 7:53 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We have talked here on the plist of Pynchon using gold and silver as
> economic tropes
> (with real world allusions) in some novels.....(mostly ATD and IV, I
> remember)
>
> About the Rebellion Between the States that TRP only alludes to, leaves as
> major
> wound in the history of the Republic of the United States. .......
>
> I just read this in the beginning of Greenback Planet by HW Brands: two
> months after Lincoln signed
> the Emancipation Proclamation to start 1863, "he signed a revision of the
> Legal Tender Act,
> freeing the American dollar from its dependence on gold and silver. ...[this
> second signing] "signaled
> the launch of American capitalism toward global dominance."
>
> i apologize if my plist self-education is already known and has been
> discussed here and I did not listen.
>
> In a nod to Joe Allonby's recent post on BIG CAPITALISM [my reductionism;
> correct Joe, if too facile]
> I want to just add this to the above re one of my ongoing thematic readings
> --or projections---of P's 'meanings' :
> That such growth created lots of suffering-- still is---beyond an America
> that might have 'grown'
> on a more human scale.
>
>
>
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant