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

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  • From: Lauren Stacy Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
  • Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 14:23:44 -0400



Sent from my iPad

On Jun 25, 2014, at 12:37 PM, RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>
wrote:

> Nice to "hear" from you Wade. Nice evisceration of Rand Paul!
>
> When I was an undergrad I had a great history professor for a class on the
> Holocaust. I don't remember his name now, as it's faded along with lots of
> other things, into the murkiness of the past. However, I will never forget
> a point he emphasized: if society goes too far right or too far left, it
> ends in the same place--with thugs in jackboots.
>
> Rhonda
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On Jun 25, 2014, at 9:21 AM, "Wade Riddick" <wriddick AT usa.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> The Knots ARE the Tea Party, envisioned 30 - 40 years before they ever
>>> came about.
>>
>> The knotheads - and thus the Tea Party - are not very new. They are, in
>> fact, very old. They represent a strain of Southern self-righteousness
>> that goes back well beyond the outbreak of the Civil War and trace
>> themselves to the imagined courtliness of the planter classes who secretly
>> believed confiscating the private property of black people by making them
>> slaves was really a form of liberty. These were enemies to the
>> Constitution.
>>
>> Rand Paul is a perfect example of the anti-liberty libertarian streak
>> still alive in the neofeudalists among us. He believes,
>>
>> 1) Defending the value of the dollar is one of the most important jobs of
>> the federal government. This is why he's mad at the Federal Reserve. He
>> believes they're devaluing money by printing dollars (ignoring for the
>> moment that he's been wrong about imminent inflation for six years now;
>> money behaves differently in a depression, as Keynes proved). The simple
>> fact is money is a good like any other in that its price (the interest
>> rate) can fluctuate due to demand. This is not "devaluation" per se.
>>
>> 2) Paul believes it's anti-property rights to force businesses not to
>> discriminate on the basis of race (or sex or religion) when doing business
>> with their customers. He's against the public accommodations provisions
>> of the civil rights era laws. This is a David Duke-esque message of
>> "reverse discrimination" or well-cultivated white Southern Christian
>> victimhood designed to appeal to the militantly overprivileged rightwing
>> Pharisees who now constitute his base. This is why all these guys talk
>> about succession and state's right and nullification and other imaginary
>> concepts that never survived the 13th and 14th Amendments. They're the
>> sons and grandsons of the white citizenship councils and sovereignty
>> commissions that Walker Percy loathed in the '60s and '70s and targeted
>> squarely in _Love in the Ruins_.
>>
>> Combine 1 + 2: Paul believes it's a top job of the government to defend
>> the value of the greenback except when the hand holding it is black and
>> then corporation can infinitely devalue it to zero.
>>
>> What sense does that make?
>>
>> It makes plenty of sense when you realize there's a long tradition in the
>> South dating back to before _Dred Scot_ declaring that black people can't
>> be American citizens and thus they're free targets (Obama's citizenship
>> "controversy" fits into this pattern; they don't think he's a citizen for
>> no other reason than the color of his skin, even if they can no longer say
>> so openly). I think this is why Percy was fascinated with Nazi death
>> camps and the culture of death. American racism in the South fit in a
>> literary sense with religious and class warfare in Europe.
>>
>> Rand Paul got his political theory from Ayn Rand who believed Christianity
>> was for rubes and altruism was a form of delusion. She literally
>> worshipped psychopaths for their "will" - i.e., lack of conscience.
>> (Wouldn't that just tickle Goebbels who said, "Intellectual activity is a
>> danger to the building of character?") It's an irony but no mere
>> coincidence that so many white Evangelical Christians now believe the
>> same. They're not Christians as much as they are Southern Nationalists in
>> the stripe of Thomas Jefferson (an historical figure I've come to loath
>> the more I age and read).
>>
>> The modern Tea Party pushes for voting restrictions when the original Tea
>> Party stood for no taxation without representation.
>>
>> The fact is the modern Tea Party hates liberty. Liberty isn't just the
>> freedom to do something like speak your mind - it's also the obligation to
>> use that freedom responsibly on behalf of a better society. Liberty, to
>> paraphrase the founding fathers, is the responsible exercise of
>> self-government. Tea Party anger is nothing but incoherent id,
>> barbarian-yawping like Jim Bond. (Oh, God. Stop me from having another
>> Faulkner episode.) A true conservative stresses social responsibility. A
>> true conservative doesn't lie about science. These people aren't
>> conservatives. They're radicals hell-bent on overturning campaign finance
>> laws so they can turn America into a newly reborn plantation economy where
>> we're all corporate serfs. Since the Civil War the South has had one
>> central, consistent response to economic development which is to drive
>> down the cost of labor - (infinitely to zero, in the case of slavery).
>> This is the "moonlight and magnolias" economic strategy that fo
> cuses on tax credits/giveaways to rich businessmen because apparently they
> are lazy and have to be paid to make money and create jobs whereas workers
> have to be punished because they work for a living and thus are, well, in
> need of punishment. (Refusing to accept matching Medicaid funds is a great
> example of believing it builds character to ration medical care to the
> sick.)
>>
>> Percy pointed to the power of irony to rescue us from this condition. It
>> highlights hypocrisy and contradiction for us[1]. It gives us a
>> perspective outside of ourself to see ourselves and therein lies the
>> possibility of freedom. Listen to John Kyl on the floor of the Senate
>> saying with a straight face, "This may not be a factually true statement,"
>> and tell me the Republicans aren't so lost they no longer have even irony?
>>
>> Being lost is the human condition. It's when you think you've found
>> yourself all on your own that you are truly in the dark. Anyone who's
>> ever understood grace knows that.
>>
>> Wade Riddick
>>
>> 1. Without this tension, "meaning" itself would be impossible; things
>> have to be different or "contradict" to fall into he same category and
>> define a term. You must have different colors like red and blue to have a
>> concept of "color." Percy was probably thinking of all of these
>> linguistic currents and eddies as he was manipulating old Southern
>> contradictions and ironies for his novels.
>>
>> --
>> An archive of all list discussion is available at
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>>
>> Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>>
>> Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @
>> sign when addressing email)
> --
> An archive of all list discussion is available at
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>
> Visit The Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
> Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign
> when addressing email)




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