M&D Deep Duck: "when the world was yet feudal"

[Mark Kohut]

And we should assume Pynchon knew it fer sure....so your phrase on
the national creation myth is the Lie Cherrycoke was spinning.....
so unreliably as reality, as history. .....

On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tangentially interesting....Becker "knew" this for his Declaration of
> Independence book, although surely not in the depth we know it today.
>
> So, his Overarching Ideas-Only book, Heavenly City does not know it,
> so to speak.
>
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is EXACTLY the kind of thought without much substance--and ne'er
>> so well-expressed---I had when I read the word 'feudal"
>>
>> That word makes it almost seem as if Cherrycoke expresses an abrupt
>> leap from the Middle ages to his present. Again, that undisciplined
>> scholar manqué in me would suggest in a footnote---were I annotating
>> the Arden edition of Pynchon, so to speak, that P shows Becker's
>> HEAVENLY CITY influence because he, dealing with Zeitgeist history,
>> does do that. I.e. contrast the 1700s with the Middle Ages
>> in...'climate of opinion"----from Whitehead and not precise enough for
>> me these days...(that is over 80 years from Becker's book now).
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So on p. 5 Cherrycoke characterizes 1632 (when Charles I issued the charter
>>> for Maryland to Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore) and 1681 (when Charles
>>> II issued that for Pennsylvania to William Penn, Esq.)
>>>
>>> It's interesting that from a century later and a newly-forged American PoV,
>>> the whole span -- encompassing the English Civil War(s), Commonwealth,
>>> Protectorate, and Restoration -- is "feudal." Historically, the political
>>> thought and rhetoric of US independence was by no means all from the
>>> 18th-century Enlightenment: a lot of it had been in play since those
>>> 17th-century Parliamentary challenges to the monarchy, and the constraints
>>> on royal power (explicit and tacit) that the restored Charles II and his
>>> successors had been forced to accept.
>>>
>>> Naturally, the rebellious colonists cast George III as an absolutist tyrant,
>>> and their own divided government, checks & balances, etc. as a wholly new
>>> thing in the world. That's what national creation myths do. But in fact, the
>>> rebels borrowed ideas and arguments wholesale from 150 years of decidedly
>>> post-feudal British political evolution.
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