Taylor's Laws

Note: Taylor's Laws--or variously, Rules, Principles, Axioms, Whatevers--are a series of Laws of Nature and Life as promulgated by yours truly (a la Stephen's Dictionary for words and phrases). I hope to make this a semi-regular feature of Malchats Matters, and possibly to produce a compendium when I have enough Laws formulated.

Taylor's Principle of Pizza Purchasing

Always buy as much pizza as your available funds will allow.

Explication: You always want to maximize the value of your money. Buying as much pizza as your available funds allows will accomplish this. Pizza, in any amount, will always get eaten. Cold pizza is almost as good as fresh out of the oven pizza, so leftovers are always welcome. It will not go bad, even if left sitting in its box for a couple of days (it will rarely achieve that long a shelf life). Thus, every dollar you spend on pizza goes to making a meal--usually a couple of meals. Whatever is the best 'buy in bulk' price that your local pizza joint offers, go for it.

Recently Read

Into the American Woods
by James H. Merrell

Into the American Woods:
Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier

by James H. Merrell

I was completely deceived by this book's title. I put it on my reading list under the belief that this was a work of natural history about the great forests that covered the American continent back in the day. It would have helped if I had kept reading until I came to the subtitle...

But this turned out not to be a problem. What I accidentally discovered was a book on colonial history that I would not have otherwise selected, and that happy accident led to an enjoyable reading experience I would not otherwise have had.

Author James H. Merrell tells the intriguing story of the "negotiators on the Pennsylvania frontier"--those souls who, for one reason or another, straddled the worlds of the native Indians of mid-Atlantic river valleys and the early British colonists who were the first founders of "Penn's Woods." As the author tells it, trying to bridge the gap between those peoples was an enormous undertaking, one so fraught with difficulty that even those involved in the task were often in the thick of it against their will. That motley mixture--of half-breeds, inter-marriers, and hustlers on the make for trade and land speculation--proved to be invaluable for the peoples in the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys in the years from (roughly) 1680 to 1760; it was only through the shrewdness and diplomatic skill of the go-betweens that William Penn's original vision of a "peaceable kingdom" of mutual brotherhood between the natives and the colonists ever came close to being realized.

Except, of course, it never really was realized. By the end of that eighty year span, despite the best efforts of the negotiators, the fits and starts of peace and aggression between the two parties had degenerated into brutal frontier war. That conflict, played out as one theater of the wider Seven Years/French and Indian War, helped set the archetypal course of American history--Indians fighting for their lives and land before ultimate dispossession by the ever-growing hordes of European immigrants.

Merrell's history provides an interesting perspective on all elements of this archetypal story. The characters on display run the full gamut, from noble stalwarts to foolish clowns and everyone in between. Occasionally, the story moves towards high comedy, as vignettes about some drunken Indian leader or peevish colonial official bring moments of true mirth. More often than not, though, this is a sad tale, one that tugs at the soul of the reader, who is confronted by tragedy again and again in the slaughter of families, the sacking of homes and fields, the dispossession (often by fraud) of the natives of their longtime birthrights, and the slow erosion of peoples and their way of life. Reading Into the American Woods can be an especially sobering experience for someone, like myself, who is a native of Penn's Woods (though the Philadelphia where I was born bore hardly any resemblance to the place known as Shackamaxon, where Penn held his famous council with the local Delawares back in the day). Again and again, while reading this book, I felt a longing to live up to Penn's dream and do something to bring that dreamed of harmony closer to reality. But whatever actions I or anyone else may take now, the sorrows of the past cannot be undone.

It is, then, the least we can do, to remember what was and move forward with that knowledge. Merrell's work helps move us towards that goal, and thus should be read and appreciated. Certainly, readers with a hunger for historical knowledge should pick up Into the American Woods. And though it is a scholarly work, and perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, it wouldn't hurt even the casual reader to give these pages a look as well. If nothing else, reading this book might drive home a point that has widespread application in all places and times: it is communication, or the breakdown thereof, that can decide the fate of peoples, nations--almost everything. If we all learn that lesson, maybe the "peaceable kingdom" will finally come to pass.