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

[Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>]

I forgot to elaborate on one more parallel.  Perhaps instead of selling
drugs at the local truckstop, More would be a mortgage broker selling
people dreams of consumer paradise paid for with an impossibly rickety
adjustable rate home equity line of credit.  Perhaps there would be an
emphasis on the literal meaning of 'More.'  Instead of withdrawal, reentry
would look like stock market crash and "Depression" - both figurative and
literal.  Instead of war, Percy would write about how at least in a
Depression everybody feels alive because death is so close at hand (from
starvation if not from Nazi guns).

Before the crash perhaps the Knotheads would be out there accusing forensic
accountants and Warren Buffet of supporting terrorists with their
criticisms of the emperor's wardrobe.

And for a bonus, at the FDA - in addition to fluoride (which screws up some
thyroids, causes skeletal fluorosis, causes some cancers (while inhibiting
others), makes tea-drinking dangerous and may cause autoimmune conditions
like anorexia by damaging our gut flora - just like every other
continuously-used broad-spectrum antibiotics can) - we'd be debating adding
lithium, SSRIs and statins to the water supply - which, by the way, we're
already basically doing because none of our water filtration systems are
designed to purge pharmaceuticals from waste water and as a society we're
all on so many different drugs they're impossible to avoid at the tap.  (If
you're gonna advocate better living through chemistry you ought to at least
study a little chemistry...)

Hey, wasn't the original Thomas More a liminal figure who burned people at
the stake for heresy to the Catholic Church and then got caught halfway in
the middle of the Reformation, endorsing Henry's supremacy in England
without conceding the invalidation of his marriage - and then he got the
same compassion from the King he'd shown others on the King's behalf?

Wade Riddick