The Workermonkey

Thursday, February 12, 2004

Read it a couple times... 

# posted by Brancibeer @ 2/12/2004 11:56:00 AM

I think i would get along well with this guy. He might just be as stoned as i am.....

Begin transmission:

Department of The More Things Seem to Change the More They Really Don't Change Because They're Pretty Much the Same Anyway Even If It Looks as If Things Changed (But They Didn't, or Haven't) (I think the French put it better):---

An important component of the American psyche is the recurring terror that furriners are twisting our innocent minds (Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"): commies, bolshies (late1920s), Ayrabs, Catholics, Jews (I pick these at chronological random), and so on (I myself worry about those Norwegian bachelor farmers in Lake Woebegone).
At the end of the l8th century, we were of course as unsure of ourselves--who we really are--as we are now. The perceived threat then came from a mysterious (& probably nonexistent) European group, The Illuminati, based of course in France, and filled with revolutionary and vaguely Catholic notions. Politically the group was useful, especially in New England, because it could be used by us Adamsite Federalists against them free-thinkin' Jeffersonian Republicans. (Note that less than 2 decades later, and after Jefferson's election, New England seriously considered secession.)
So: In an article ( New Engl. Quart. 76: 356377, 2003) on the New England Illuminati, C.C. Bradshaw quotes the Connecticut Congregationalist Minister Jedidiah Morse as boldly claiming "that he possessed a list of names exposing dozens of Illuminati in Jefferson's home state of Virginia" (p. 360).
And what does that bring to mind?
-carl
P.S. As far as I know, there's been no further mention of the list.

Carl W. Schaefer
Dept. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Univ. Conn. U-3043
Storrs CT 06269-3043 USA
860 486 4455
FAX 860 486 6364

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