I've made it to the end of Patriotic Gore. Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker, calls attention to this single-sentence paragraph, at the end of a long section in To the Finland Station detailing the tribulations of the Marx family: "Such pain and such effort it cost to build a stronghold for the mind and will outside the makeshifts of human society." An almost identical moment is, for me, one of the finest things in Patriotic Gore. Wilson has finished describing, patiently and with evident sympathy, in a chapter on "diversity of opinion in the South," the views of several relatively obscure southern writers who attempted to place the institution of chattel slavery in the best possible light. The discussion has proceeded by means of long paragraphs made of long sentences in Wilson's elegant, heavily subordinated, yet somehow conversational style. Now he is done and indents for the last sentence of the chapter: "To such mental and moral confusion were the thinkers of the South reduced by their efforts to deal rationally with the presence among them of four million kidnapped and enslaved Africans of a different color of skin and on a different cultural level from their own."
The introduction isn't bad, either--recommended for the times.
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