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Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion on Walker Percy

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  • From: morticia7 AT juno.com
  • To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] PLEASE IGNORE FORMER EMAIL FROM ME RE REMOVAL FROM SUBSCRIPTION. THANK YOU.
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:55:32 -0400

PLEASE IGNORE FORMER EMAIL FROM MORTICIA7 -- I NOW REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE
AND WISH TO STAY ON MAILING LIST -- SORRY FOR ACTING WITHOUT THINKING.
MORTICIA7 AT JUNO.COM.
=================================================================
On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:51:11 -0400 morticia7 AT juno.com writes:
>
> <excerpt><fontfamily><param>Verdana</param>Percy-L:
>
>
> We all know what Percys thoughts were about the impending, if not
> exhilarating doom of a fast-approaching hurricane on its way to
> ravage the Gulf Coast. I am wondering what his thoughts might be
> about
> the slowly encroaching destruction upon the shores of the Gulf
> Coast
> today from millions of gallons of crude oil, including, directly in
> the
> path, Louisiana. Presumably, one can reason there are no Hotel Oil
> Parties being planned or staged (though you can imagine parties
> might
> include abundant cases of Fosters Beer Oil Cans and frequent and
> plentiful use of Motor Oil Shots knocked back neat...see enticing
> recipe below).
>
>
> The potential for Oil Parties aside, I wonder how Percy might
> have
> used the present human-made catastrophe as an inspired metaphor for
> representing the darker side of human intentions and fallibilities,
> if
> not humanitys tendency toward its own self-destruction, and the
> world.
> For instance, how could such a disaster, had it occurred in Percys
> time, been useful in the imagery of Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, or
> Thanatos Syndrome? Which might have provided the best forum for
> that
> exploration? I would think Percy also would have a very personal
> response to the crisis as one who lived in Covington, La, and so,
> perhaps less literarily, might he have something to say, in an
> essay
> for example, about the motivations and values of trans-nationals
> such
> as BP in their influence and impact upon the destinies of so many
> as
> the present situation so amply demonstrates?
>
>
> Anyone have any responses or thoughts to add to this important
> current
> topic, hopefully not crudely expressed?
>
>
> </fontfamily></excerpt><fontfamily><param>Verdana</param>
>
> </fontfamily>Sickness unto death.
>
>
> I think Percy would zero in upon the BP spill as a metaphor for
> original sin. Oil is always seeping into the Gulf. We went and let
> a
> largely unregulated company drill a huge hole thinking they would
> follow their own self-interest. They didn't.
>
>
> Once blood - or oil - is spilled, you can't get it back in the
> bottle.
> That's entropy for you. It diffuses out into the environment.
>
>
> On the night the health care bill passed, I gave serious thought to
> writing a post here about the death of the South. I believe it
> represented the high water mark of a political realignment dating
> back
> to Nixon's Southern strategy in his 1968 appeal to Segregationists
> disaffected with the civil rights movement. For the last forty
> years,
> the Republicans have cultivated a paranoia about Federal action.
> Remember when Reagan told us government wasn't the solution to any
> problem, it was the problem?
>
>
> During the March health care debate the "paranoid style"
> (Hofstadter's
> term) reached a zenith not seen since the civil rights movement.
> It
> was almost identical to rhetoric the white sovereignty commissions
> and
> citizenship councils used during the 1960s. My parents noticed this
> as
> well. It was like the children and grandchildren of hard core
> Democratic segregationists had grown up around the anti-Federal
> paranoia, moved into the Republican column, forgotten the racism
> involved but continued to rant and rave with it in their family
> blood.
>
>
> Obama was accused of thwarting democracy and being fascist -
> because
> the bill passed with majority votes in both houses of Congress.
> Sarah
> Palin's assertion of a death panel in the bill was knee deep in
> psychological projection. Glenn Beck's propaganda ranted about
> FEMA
> death camps where Obama enemies would be gassed. I guess he forgot
> about the part where George Bush rounded up Katrina survivors into
> FEMA
> trailer camps and gassed them with formaldehyde. It ain't exactly
> Zyklon B but it was a gas and it was a trailer camp.
>
>
> Anybody notice the ironies piling up around here?
>
>
> I think Percy would have noticed. I think irony is God's way of
> telling us to pay attention; maybe we've screwed up something. Only
> a
> certain personality type with a flat perspective on the world could
> miss so much irony so often. I think maybe this is why Percy was
> drawn
> to the ideological blindness of the Nazis as a metaphor.
>
>
> With the oil spill, we have yet another disaster caused by the
> inability of government to protect us. It's not that government
> can't
> do it. Government has been prevented from acting. In this case,
> the
> MMS has - for years - inadequately overseen offshore drilling so as
> not
> to inconvenience campaign contributors. It's an effect of not
> having
> publicly funded campaigns.
>
>
> So what does the Supreme Court do?
>
>
> It dismantles what few controls we have on campaign spending.
>
>
> In a little-watched case on elected state judges, the Supreme Court
> declared that Massey Energy's multimillion dollar contribution to a
> candidate running against the campaign of a judge hearing the case
> was
> not enough to sway the outcome of the case. The judge they
> targeted
> lost and the new judge came in and ruled in favor of Massey Energy
> on a
> potentially very costly suit. Remember the Massey coal mine
> disaster?
> That happened this year.
>
>
> The Supreme Court also dismantled all limits on corporate political
> spending in the _Citizen's United_ (while still allowing said
> corporations to slander anybody they'd like; the _Sullivan_ case
> makes
> it practically impossible for public figures to sue people who libel
> or
> slander them). I wrote comments on this at the New York Times
> website,
> if you're interested. The strict interpretationists on the Court
> concluded that corporations had to be treated as persons - despite
> the
> fact that nowhere in the constitution are corporations equated with
> individuals. At the time the constitution was ratified
> corporations
> were even limited to a set number of years' existence. (I guess if
> the
> founding fathers were alive today they'd all be convicted of mass
> murder.)
>
>
> Is it me or in the end are all literalists revealed as
> fundamentally
> illiterate?
>
>
> In the most recent incident, the court issued a stay against
> public-funded political campaigns in Arizona. I think they've
> concluded campaign fairness tramples on the natural rights of rich
> people to spend their money lying about anybody anyway they'd like.
>
>
> Time and again, this court - and the right in general - have
> increasingly equated government action to redress economic
> injustices
> with per se unconstitutional deprivations of liberty. If a guy lies
> to
> you and steals your money and you try to get it back - well, it was
> stolen fair and square. What Madison described in Federalist #10 as
> a
> perfectly legitimate need for government to control the pernicious
> "effects of faction" is seen more and more as trampling on basic
> rights
> *per se*. This interpretation is something far different than the
> constitutional authors intended.
>
>
> Liberty, which flows from God under natural law, is both the freedom
> to
> do something and the obligation to do it well on behalf of others
> in
> your community. The freedom to speak is also the obligation to
> speak
> truthfully. When someone supplies you with bad information, they
> are
> oppressing your freedom of speech because it is also the freedom
> *to
> hear*. A car salesman is stealing money when he rolls back the
> odometer on a used car he sells. Fox News is stealing votes when
> it
> lies about basic political facts. It does this to keep you from
> having
> the appropriate information to make a rational decision.
>
>
> Free markets don't work when economic actors are allowed to supply
> bad
> information. Markets have to be transparent. These markets also
> require property rights which require courts which require taxes
> and
> effective governments to run them. Free markets don't work when
> certain actors can steal from you - like BP destroying your fishing
> stock with an oil spill. Yet contemporary right wing ideology
> equates
> all government action with the original sin of the Civil War while
> all
> private market action is assigned limitless virtue. In this
> distorted
> lens, all government action to address economic injustice takes on
> the
> taint of this original sin of Abraham Lincoln.
>
>
> We can't take over failing banks because that's interfering with
> the
> private market. Yet we can't regulate the banks either because
> markets
> are perfect and the government will only screw it up. This type of
> thinking leads the neoclassical economists to conclude that all
> unemployment is voluntary. After all, markets are perfect and
> actors
> are all rational. If they don't have jobs, they must not want
> them.
>
>
> This is the kind of lunacy you come to when you have no theory of
> fraud
> (outside of government action). Concluding that man is always a
> saint
> in his free market state really hamstrings your thought processes.
> This is something the "libertarian" types don't understand. You
> can't
> simply mutilate liberty into a set of individual freedoms. It's
> not
> divorced from civic virtue in a republic. They are the same. You
> have
> freedoms *and* you have obligations.
>
>
> You see this pathology in the deluded views expressed by Rand Paul.
>
> Paul thinks it's somehow permissible to be against racial
> discrimination but to allow businesses to continue to discriminate
> against blacks. He thinks forcing racists to sell food to black
> people
> is an intrusion on private enterprise - which is just unacceptable
> to
> his libertarian views in any terms.
>
>
> But it's the government's job to regulate the value of money. If
> the
> value of money changes simply because of the color of the hand
> holding
> it, then government has failed at a very basic economic task -
> regulation of the money supply, fixing the value of the dollar.
>
>
> We see this situation with the oil spill. Like the New Orleans
> levee
> failure in 2005, the spill was caused by lax regulation, too few
> inspectors and too little forward planning. *Less* government
> isn't
> going to fix anything now and it certainly won't stop future
> disasters.
> Yet even before we know what went wrong in the first place, every
> Republican governor in the Gulf states is pounding the table for an
> immediate return to drilling. And they're still campaigning
> against
> stricter carbon taxes and more environmental standards.
>
>
> It's ironic. The Republican governors campaign for less federal
> government action and when Obama finally gives them exactly what
> they
> asked for, they're furious at him.
>
>
> For many of these problems, government is the one actor that could
> make
> a difference in our lives and yet we keep shooting it in the foot
> and
> wondering why it limps.
>
>
> What was Walk Kelly's old saying? "We have met the enemy and he is
> us?" How's that for your self-destruction, Henry?
>
>
> The government is *us*. *We* go to the polls and constitute it.
> This
> is us running ourselves down.
>
>
> I don't think government can make man perfect or bring about Heaven
> on
> Earth but I do think government can make it easier to behave well
> and
> harder to behave poorly. There are worlds of difference between
> America and Haiti and much of this has to do with the pragmatic
> political philosophy of American government. Lately some of us seem
> to
> have abandoned that heritage from the Enlightenment.
>
>
> The founding fathers thought man was a sinner and rather than try
> to
> perfect him, government had to deal with the cards it was dealt and
> make the best of it. Instead, the right has recast homo economicus
> as
> perfect in every way. Unfettered capitalism is our new utopia and
> it
> perfects man after all.
>
>
> How utterly French of you, Newt.
>
>
> Isn't utopia also the goal of Bin Laden?
>
>
> I think if you have to cling to any idea as infallible, best cling
> to
> that of our own fallibility.
>
>
> I feel horrible for a lot of people in the disaster zone (which is
> where I'll wind up if Baton Rouge is hit by another hurricane).
> Those
> people are about to suffer through the same autoimmune problems I
> have.
> Mercury and some of these complex hydrocarbons detoxify through and
> clog up some of the same pathways in the body with many of the same
> effects. Gulf War Syndrome for all and all a good night. (With a
> side
> of Pelagianism too, perhaps?)
>
>
> If only there were heavy sodium in them thar' salt domes...
>

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  • Re: [percy-l] PLEASE IGNORE FORMER EMAIL FROM ME RE REMOVAL FROM SUBSCRIPTION. THANK YOU., morticia7, 06/17/2010

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