Saturday, December 21, 2019

"They did indeed weave and flitter, dip and soar, and they did indeed correct the cave of the ideological origins."

Professor Bailyn is too correct the scholar to completely omit, that would result in hagiography and this is history, and so he elides, he elides like that fucking bat in that mindless cave flitting over mental illness (sixteen pages) dipping and soaring around, under and over slavery (fifteen pages), weaving into the fabric, as in the finest Persian carpet, the minute error that only demonstrates the perfection of the whole:

"6...On the successful opposition to the clause condemning the slave trade in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, see..."(footnote page 237)1

1 Let us not footnote that as Professor Bailyn does. Let us not minimize that in small print. Let us not elide over it. Let us put that in the text proper of this here post and in a font size that attracts, rather than distracts, attention, rather as John Hancock affixed his signature to that document in a size that he was sure King George III could read. It is this which was successfully opposed in "the Original Rough Draught" of the Declaration of Independence, thus omitted entirely from the Declaration to which John affixed his Hancock. King George III:

has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, and murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Tom, take that shit out.























Oh okay.