From this Sunday's front page NYTimes Book Review review of book on Pres Obama

[Mark Kohut]

"America is different, or used to be. It was founded on the older idea that human beings have a fixed set of natural rights and that the fixed role of government is simply to secure those rights, otherwise leaving people to take care of themselves. This is not to say that young America was some libertarian Eden. It was bound together by common ideas of the best (Christian) life, the public good, democratic duty and good manners. It was also bound together by Abraham Lincoln — the great hero of Claremont conservatism — who preserved the Union by defending the inflexible moral idealism of the Declaration of Independence. Abe bequeathed to us a nation like none other, not a State like every other."
 
Please turn in your papers of 25 to 2500 words on this notion dealt with in the collected works (so far) of Thomas Pynchon by the end of time, please.
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