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

["Tommy Armstrong" <tfa AT brickengraver.com>]

Title: Message

Agreement = 100% 

 

Tommy Armstrong

PO Box 484

Lillington, NC   27546

http://www.brickengraver.com

 

...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.

 

Walker Percy

Signposts in a Strange Land

From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert_Pauley AT oxy.com
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 12:55 AM
To: juliorivas AT gmail.com; percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] hurricanes

You have seen through my clever and condescending manipulations of surnames, Mr. Rivas-Pita. Hat’s off. Or may I call you Julio? I don’t wish to exclude you from the “fraternity.”

But really you may be assured these surnames you find so troubling are either an excess formality on my part, ignorance or uncertainty about what to call people I’ve never met. So I admit to inconsistency. In any case, you may call me Robert.

“Third-world” was used as a synonym for inefficiency and corruption, not as a defamation of unnamed countries. I agree that such conditions may obtain anywhere, including the United States, as we have seen in New Orleans. This is to be deplored. What may be even worse here, however, beyond the breakdown of efficiency and transparency, is a “first-world” phenomenon involving a sick collusion between the media and those skilled and audacious enough to exploit it, that is to say, when the corrupt make preemptive attention-grabbing attacks in order to distract from their own corruptions and derelictions, and the media lap it up. They lap it up because it serves their need for antagonism and controversy as a "substantive" narrative to their ghoulish and pandering images (a narrative they’re perfectly happy to see degenerate a la Maury Povich). Once this narrative departs from the course they would like to see it follow, they lose interest. This collusive spectacle serves the ulterior political agenda of both.

Mostly I lament the slow death of Good Faith. I mean the spirit to unite in the aftermath of a disaster, the resolve and stamina to examine thoroughly and fairly, but at the proper time, what went wrong and who failed their civic charge, and the collectively apolitical determination to make things right no matter the public relations consequences. I think this did exist once, to some extent. The reason this should exist is because corruption and incompetence are very bad for free society, far worse than any storm.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a return of good faith for now. Instead I have a dismal vision of how this all will play out: a deepening mire of recrimination, with shrill charges and counter-charges, each citing one or another “official report” as evidence of their own righteousness and the other's malfeasance. Meanwhile, corruption and incompetence will whistle merrily along.

 

, OSB, 1924-1996)