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percy-l - [percy-l] Oil as original sin

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

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  • From: Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [percy-l] Oil as original sin
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:25:20 -0600


Percy-L:

We all know what Percys thoughts were about the impending, if not exhilarating doom of a fast-approaching hurricane on its way to ravage the Gulf Coast. I am wondering what his thoughts might be about the slowly encroaching destruction upon the shores of the Gulf Coast today from millions of gallons of crude oil, including, directly in the path, Louisiana. Presumably, one can reason there are no Hotel Oil Parties being planned or staged (though you can imagine parties might include abundant cases of Fosters Beer Oil Cans and frequent and plentiful use of Motor Oil Shots knocked back neat...see enticing recipe below).

The potential for Oil Parties aside, I wonder how Percy might have used the present human-made catastrophe as an inspired metaphor for representing the darker side of human intentions and fallibilities, if not humanitys tendency toward its own self-destruction, and the world. For instance, how could such a disaster, had it occurred in Percys time, been useful in the imagery of Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, or Thanatos Syndrome? Which might have provided the best forum for that exploration? I would think Percy also would have a very personal response to the crisis as one who lived in Covington, La, and so, perhaps less literarily, might he have something to say, in an essay for example, about the motivations and values of trans-nationals such as BP in their influence and impact upon the destinies of so many as the present situation so amply demonstrates?

Anyone have any responses or thoughts to add to this important current topic, hopefully not crudely expressed?


Sickness unto death.

I think Percy would zero in upon the BP spill as a metaphor for original sin. Oil is always seeping into the Gulf. We went and let a largely unregulated company drill a huge hole thinking they would follow their own self-interest. They didn't.

Once blood - or oil - is spilled, you can't get it back in the bottle. That's entropy for you. It diffuses out into the environment.

On the night the health care bill passed, I gave serious thought to writing a post here about the death of the South. I believe it represented the high water mark of a political realignment dating back to Nixon's Southern strategy in his 1968 appeal to Segregationists disaffected with the civil rights movement. For the last forty years, the Republicans have cultivated a paranoia about Federal action. Remember when Reagan told us government wasn't the solution to any problem, it was the problem?

During the March health care debate the "paranoid style" (Hofstadter's term) reached a zenith not seen since the civil rights movement. It was almost identical to rhetoric the white sovereignty commissions and citizenship councils used during the 1960s. My parents noticed this as well. It was like the children and grandchildren of hard core Democratic segregationists had grown up around the anti-Federal paranoia, moved into the Republican column, forgotten the racism involved but continued to rant and rave with it in their family blood.

Obama was accused of thwarting democracy and being fascist - because the bill passed with majority votes in both houses of Congress. Sarah Palin's assertion of a death panel in the bill was knee deep in psychological projection. Glenn Beck's propaganda ranted about FEMA death camps where Obama enemies would be gassed. I guess he forgot about the part where George Bush rounded up Katrina survivors into FEMA trailer camps and gassed them with formaldehyde. It ain't exactly Zyklon B but it was a gas and it was a trailer camp.

Anybody notice the ironies piling up around here?

I think Percy would have noticed. I think irony is God's way of telling us to pay attention; maybe we've screwed up something. Only a certain personality type with a flat perspective on the world could miss so much irony so often. I think maybe this is why Percy was drawn to the ideological blindness of the Nazis as a metaphor.

With the oil spill, we have yet another disaster caused by the inability of government to protect us. It's not that government can't do it. Government has been prevented from acting. In this case, the MMS has - for years - inadequately overseen offshore drilling so as not to inconvenience campaign contributors. It's an effect of not having publicly funded campaigns.

So what does the Supreme Court do?

It dismantles what few controls we have on campaign spending.

In a little-watched case on elected state judges, the Supreme Court declared that Massey Energy's multimillion dollar contribution to a candidate running against the campaign of a judge hearing the case was not enough to sway the outcome of the case. The judge they targeted lost and the new judge came in and ruled in favor of Massey Energy on a potentially very costly suit. Remember the Massey coal mine disaster? That happened this year.

The Supreme Court also dismantled all limits on corporate political spending in the _Citizen's United_ (while still allowing said corporations to slander anybody they'd like; the _Sullivan_ case makes it practically impossible for public figures to sue people who libel or slander them). I wrote comments on this at the New York Times website, if you're interested. The strict interpretationists on the Court concluded that corporations had to be treated as persons - despite the fact that nowhere in the constitution are corporations equated with individuals. At the time the constitution was ratified corporations were even limited to a set number of years' existence. (I guess if the founding fathers were alive today they'd all be convicted of mass murder.)

Is it me or in the end are all literalists revealed as fundamentally illiterate?

In the most recent incident, the court issued a stay against public-funded political campaigns in Arizona. I think they've concluded campaign fairness tramples on the natural rights of rich people to spend their money lying about anybody anyway they'd like.

Time and again, this court - and the right in general - have increasingly equated government action to redress economic injustices with per se unconstitutional deprivations of liberty. If a guy lies to you and steals your money and you try to get it back - well, it was stolen fair and square. What Madison described in Federalist #10 as a perfectly legitimate need for government to control the pernicious "effects of faction" is seen more and more as trampling on basic rights *per se*. This interpretation is something far different than the constitutional authors intended.

Liberty, which flows from God under natural law, is both the freedom to do something and the obligation to do it well on behalf of others in your community. The freedom to speak is also the obligation to speak truthfully. When someone supplies you with bad information, they are oppressing your freedom of speech because it is also the freedom *to hear*. A car salesman is stealing money when he rolls back the odometer on a used car he sells. Fox News is stealing votes when it lies about basic political facts. It does this to keep you from having the appropriate information to make a rational decision.

Free markets don't work when economic actors are allowed to supply bad information. Markets have to be transparent. These markets also require property rights which require courts which require taxes and effective governments to run them. Free markets don't work when certain actors can steal from you - like BP destroying your fishing stock with an oil spill. Yet contemporary right wing ideology equates all government action with the original sin of the Civil War while all private market action is assigned limitless virtue. In this distorted lens, all government action to address economic injustice takes on the taint of this original sin of Abraham Lincoln.

We can't take over failing banks because that's interfering with the private market. Yet we can't regulate the banks either because markets are perfect and the government will only screw it up. This type of thinking leads the neoclassical economists to conclude that all unemployment is voluntary. After all, markets are perfect and actors are all rational. If they don't have jobs, they must not want them.

This is the kind of lunacy you come to when you have no theory of fraud (outside of government action). Concluding that man is always a saint in his free market state really hamstrings your thought processes. This is something the "libertarian" types don't understand. You can't simply mutilate liberty into a set of individual freedoms. It's not divorced from civic virtue in a republic. They are the same. You have freedoms *and* you have obligations.

You see this pathology in the deluded views expressed by Rand Paul. Paul thinks it's somehow permissible to be against racial discrimination but to allow businesses to continue to discriminate against blacks. He thinks forcing racists to sell food to black people is an intrusion on private enterprise - which is just unacceptable to his libertarian views in any terms.

But it's the government's job to regulate the value of money. If the value of money changes simply because of the color of the hand holding it, then government has failed at a very basic economic task - regulation of the money supply, fixing the value of the dollar.

We see this situation with the oil spill. Like the New Orleans levee failure in 2005, the spill was caused by lax regulation, too few inspectors and too little forward planning. *Less* government isn't going to fix anything now and it certainly won't stop future disasters. Yet even before we know what went wrong in the first place, every Republican governor in the Gulf states is pounding the table for an immediate return to drilling. And they're still campaigning against stricter carbon taxes and more environmental standards.

It's ironic. The Republican governors campaign for less federal government action and when Obama finally gives them exactly what they asked for, they're furious at him.

For many of these problems, government is the one actor that could make a difference in our lives and yet we keep shooting it in the foot and wondering why it limps.

What was Walk Kelly's old saying? "We have met the enemy and he is us?" How's that for your self-destruction, Henry?

The government is *us*. *We* go to the polls and constitute it. This is us running ourselves down.

I don't think government can make man perfect or bring about Heaven on Earth but I do think government can make it easier to behave well and harder to behave poorly. There are worlds of difference between America and Haiti and much of this has to do with the pragmatic political philosophy of American government. Lately some of us seem to have abandoned that heritage from the Enlightenment.

The founding fathers thought man was a sinner and rather than try to perfect him, government had to deal with the cards it was dealt and make the best of it. Instead, the right has recast homo economicus as perfect in every way. Unfettered capitalism is our new utopia and it perfects man after all.

How utterly French of you, Newt.

Isn't utopia also the goal of Bin Laden?

I think if you have to cling to any idea as infallible, best cling to that of our own fallibility.

I feel horrible for a lot of people in the disaster zone (which is where I'll wind up if Baton Rouge is hit by another hurricane). Those people are about to suffer through the same autoimmune problems I have. Mercury and some of these complex hydrocarbons detoxify through and clog up some of the same pathways in the body with many of the same effects. Gulf War Syndrome for all and all a good night. (With a side of Pelagianism too, perhaps?)

If only there were heavy sodium in them thar' salt domes...




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