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

["Karey" <karey AT kareyperkins.com>]

Title: Message

 

See below: 

----- Original Message -----

From: Robert_Pauley AT oxy.com

To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org

Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 8:23 PM

Subject: Re: [percy-l] U.S. : Terrorist SuperPower?

Karey:  I’m not sure what your preamble on Hitler Youth Corp means, except perhaps as an attempt to bring Walker Percy into the discussion. I suspect it is a technique of invidious association, though in what sense our country has found a like _expression_ among our youth or in some other sector, escapes me. I would enjoy some clarification on what our current version of the “Hitler Youth Corps” may be.   

 

It is a direct reference to Julio Rivas-Pita's comment "that Mr. Bush, à la Hitler, invades countries using fake arguments" and to the fact that what, in retrospect, seems obviously misguided and even evil (Hitler's cause), often, at the time, seems to have many good points. 

 

The comparison is that WE are the Hitler Youth, not the youth of our country.   Has anyone seen the movie, "The Wave"? 

 

As for The unjust war doctrines are unscientific formulations from the good-faith debates of ethicists.

 

Ah, science is the foundation of our ethics and thought?  

 

We can all find one to our liking.

 

Logical fallacy - just because other options are present, doesn't provide a logical refutation of the argument just presented.

 

I’ve found a few who endorse the war in Iraq, as I do. It may just as persuasively be argued that military action to remove an international crime lord with the equivalent of 17 warrants for his arrest,

 

What?  No other international criminal leaders in other countries?  No other genocidal maniacs?  In fact, there are dozens.  Why don't we take THEM out?  Why Saddam Hussein?  Think about it.

 

who had invaded an ally,

 

Ten years ago, that war was over.

 

refused to honor the terms of his surrender from that unprovoked invasion, directed fire against allied planes in a buffer zone designed to protect the northern Kurdish regions of his own land from continuing genocide with toxic weapons, killed more than 250,000 of his own people, some likewise with toxic weapons (a conservative estimate), provided sanctuary to the first bomber of the twin towers, as well as the current second most notorious terrorist in the world,

 

Again - no less than what has been done by dozens of dictators of less politically important countries.  When did Sudan become important? When oil was found nearby. 

 

Did anyone see Dateline NBC's special on Uganda a couple of nights ago?  If we want to help, there are far worse and more chaotic places to help. But, oh wait, Uganda doesn't have any valuable national resources or political importance to the U.S.

 

and, if you are to believe the testimony of his chief physicist, had every intent to develop an atomic weapon,

 

Read "Follow the Uranium" before commenting further.  July 17 New York Times.

 

and indeed was in negotiations with North Korea as late as the winter of 2003 to purchase one “off the shelf.”

 

And, what are we doing about North Korea by the way?

 

That is plenty of reason to me. In fact, we were 10 years too late in acting.

 

As for the Pope condemning the Iraq War, I’m afraid that doesn’t have much moral heft to me.

 

If I’m correct, the Catholic Church went out of its way to comfort the Nazis. If the Catholic Church lacks the moral clarity to recognize that the serial and grotesque rapacities of a dictator demand forceful interdiction, I’m sorry, but I have no intention to wait around for them to catch up to me. Anyway, I believe such catch-up is inevitable; I’m sure Catholicism is not too far down the “to-do” list of Islamicist fury.

 

As for Abu Ghraib, I believe you are incorrect.

 

I am not incorrect - evidence abounds and I'm fairly certain any information I have is not classified - it's common knowledge.  In addition, my father was in charge of the Reserves in the South ten years ago and wrote a paper on their "unreadiness" to go to war that was roundly ignored.  The things that were done in Abu Ghraib were done also in Guatanemo Bay, and other places - and the ways they were done were similar in fashion and type to each other.  And if you don't want to accept that at face value, common sense tells you that is how all scandals work - and military scandals as well, and other than the fact that the Geneva Convention was denounced by the administration as "antiquated" and Senator Joe Biden chastized similar comments in Congress - saying his son was in the military - were he to become a prisoner, what would happen? 

 

It was isolated and was not connected to a higher chain of command. If I am wrong, I would be interested in proof. It was brutish and obscene of course but hardly characteristic of our treatment of prisoners, there or elsewhere. Obviously it cannot be compared to how “prisoners of war” are treated by Islamicists, as those poor souls get their heads sawed off -- something perhaps closer to “a gross and unapologetic abandonment of the Geneva Convention”? Moreover, our incidents of abuse are followed by swift remediation. We are now constructing a new holding facility in Guatanemo Bay, Cuba.

 

After many years and many lawsuits filed and much publicity - that has been no swift remediation, it has been a reluctant and forced change.

 

It is one of the most salutary aspects of our nation that we learn from our mistakes.

 

Vietnam?

 

 Anyway, in the historic scheme of wars, Abu Ghraib barely amounts to a scandal.

 

You are talking out of both sides of your mouth - one, you say it is horrible and not characteristic, then you say it really wasn't much of a bad thing at all.  The problem is people were trained and condoned, then blamed, for this when it became known and political.  Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"?

 

And then of course, there is the same old claim that we are all being “spun” as a part of a "fascist" fear-mongering. We are manipulated by Karl Rove and “swept along” by vulgar mob sentiments. I can only speak for myself, but I am not. I wonder why it so bewildering to so many to think that people can reasonably and on their own arrive at the decision that a war against terrorists,

 

But wait, the terrorists weren't basing their camp and cause in Iraq!!  If there was an association there, it was only secondary or tertiary - after Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.  You have been "spun" if you are still associating the Iraq with 9/11 terrorists intent to wipe us from the face of the earth!

 

who have declared their intent to wipe us from the face of the earth, makes basic sense? Somehow we must be “influenced” to believe this? Anyway, I’m curious who is being swept anywhere. More than half of the population currently opposes the war in Iraq. The overwhelming majority of the media opposes it. Most of the free world opposes it. The president has collapsed in the polls. That’s a pretty poor job of fascist brainwashing, if you ask me. Karl Rove should be fired.

 

If you ask me, yes, I completely agree, Karl Rove should be fired.  For different reasons.

 

As for Ernest Becker’s meditations on the neurotic roots of war, nothing better underscores, with all due respect, the abstractions of academia.

 

Read the book, then we can discuss it.  Before you determine it to be a postmodern rumination on gender deconstruction or some abstract navel-gazing, read it.   And it in fact relates to Percy's concerns and pursuits more than anything else in this conversation - the meaning of life - and key to the psychological motivations of most humans.

 

If I have a neurosis it is to guarantee that I and/or my fellow citizens don’t get our heads chopped off. And my fear or concern doesn’t spring from any dark, Freudian recess of anxiety responsible for phantasmal projections of psychosis. It springs from people chopping our heads off. If killing my enemy gives me meaning and purpose, it is a good meaning and purpose, and reflects total sanity, and I am glad of it. Becker belongs high on the bookshelf in this conflict.

 

And to Julio: I would read Orwell a little more closely, especially his essay on wartime England, “The Lion and the Unicorn.”  You might find his scorn for pacifism rather interesting. 

 

Nowhere in your disquisition on our "fascist" state do you address this fundamental question: what do we do in the face of a nihilistic, barbarous, and genuinely fascist movement that wishes both literally and figuratively to decapitate us.

 

If we become like them, by engaging in their tactics and arguments, the problem multiplies.  This is true of individuals as well as nations.

 

A movement which has no interest in sharing this planet with us, and will accept massive self-immolation as a price for our destruction. 

 

You discuss, you talk, you converse, you deal, you understand, you listen, you meet needs on both sides.  Look at how we handled the end of WWI  vs. the end of WWII. And one determination of a "just war" is that it is always as a last resort.  The Just War doctrine you would like to portray as some abstract ineffective liberal agenda, but in fact, it is a reasonable and effective and practical way to determine when to go to war. 

 

Until the anti-war movement can address, even admit this, I cannot take any of these arguments seriously – any protests against Don Rumsfeld or Karl Rove or Dick Cheney man nothing to me. They are merely ideological fulminations -- elegant and theoretical and nugatory.

 

No one at a top level in the Bush administration ever served time in combat - not Bush, not Cheney, not Rumsfeld, not Rice.  (Colin Powell did, but he is gone - I think for a reason.)   So, having never seen war, they can easily send other's sons and daughters to war - for abstract causes.  Who is the abstracted one now?  I imagine many or most of us teach in college - and many of our students have been soldiers.  I have many in my class who tell me what it is like over there - one woman retired after 25 years (why 25?  you retire after 20, for 1/2 your base pay, or 30 or 2/3 your base pay, but not 25) because of changing military polices and the situation in Iraq now (very dangerous, and more so every day.)

 

They do not help me understand the real threats to my culture or how to answer them.

 

This has been said to be a war of "non-sacrifice" by America's citizens.  In WWII, we gave up things, and lifestyles, and people, to help the war.  We feel it not one bit here.  How is your life different from before the war, other than the content of your daily news (unless of course you have a son, daughter, or relative there).  What are you going to do to help preserve your culture? 

 

I guess the major “cognitive” divide is simple. Either one takes the position that we are at “war” or we are not at war.

 

Either-or fallacy.  Oversimplification.  (You can tell I teach logic and critical thinking!!)

 

I believe we are at war.

 

With whom?  Or is it an abstract?  Terrorism?  The comparison of Iraq has been made with the Vietnam war - both were wars against abstractions - the one, communism; the second, terrorism.

 

I believe we will be for many years to come.  I also believe that within the next five years most of the world – with the possible exception of academia -- will understand this, to the point at which there will simply won’t be too many articles about Abu Ghraibs, or WMDs, or fascist propagandists, or anything of the like. Not to say that there should not be. But it will be widely understood that we are in a war for the survival of all that we value and cherish in western civilization.

 

REALLY??? 

 

This is the first stages of that war. That is simply my opinion.

 

Now, as for what Walker Percy would say to our current problems? I do not know. I only know that he prized and defended western liberal values, science, art, education, freedom of speech, “truth and beauty and suchlike.”  I can’t help but think he would have had some form of intelligent and forceful response to a barbaric movement dedicated to snuffing them all out. It may very well be that he would have opposed the war in Iraq as either impracticable or stupid. But he would have offered some kind of alternative.

 

Exactly what the Bush administration did NOT consider. (Alternatives, that is.)  And exactly what a Just War demands.