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

[marcus AT loyno.edu]

Here's a Percy trace on Wikipedia:

>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to Rod Dreher and Steven Greenhut, the Knotheads
are one of the three emerging factions, along with the
traditional Republican Establishment, and liberal
Republicans, that will fight for control of the United
States Republican Party following 2008 election. The
Knotheads are by far the most right-wing of the three
factions. In Dreher's words: "The knotheads believe that
Obama's victory came thanks to the treason of some
conservative intellectual elites and McCain's failure to be
more like Reagan, whatever that means 20 years after the
Gipper left the White House. Sarah Palin is the
standard-bearer for the talk-radio faction within
knotheadism."

The term knothead first appears in a political context in
Walker Percy's 1971 novel Love in the Ruins. Although a
Catholic conservative himself, Percy satirized hard-core
rightists in the following passage: "The Knotheads had their
unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood
pressure, and large bowel complaints." It is not known
whether Dreher had this passage in mind when he used the
term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knotheads