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

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  • From: RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
  • Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:37:03 -0500

Nice to "hear" from you Wade. Nice evisceration of Rand Paul!

When I was an undergrad I had a great history professor for a class on the
Holocaust. I don't remember his name now, as it's faded along with lots of
other things, into the murkiness of the past. However, I will never forget a
point he emphasized: if society goes too far right or too far left, it ends
in the same place--with thugs in jackboots.

Rhonda

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 25, 2014, at 9:21 AM, "Wade Riddick" <wriddick AT usa.net> wrote:
>
>
>> The Knots ARE the Tea Party, envisioned 30 - 40 years before they ever
>> came about.
>
> The knotheads - and thus the Tea Party - are not very new. They are, in
> fact, very old. They represent a strain of Southern self-righteousness
> that goes back well beyond the outbreak of the Civil War and trace
> themselves to the imagined courtliness of the planter classes who secretly
> believed confiscating the private property of black people by making them
> slaves was really a form of liberty. These were enemies to the
> Constitution.
>
> Rand Paul is a perfect example of the anti-liberty libertarian streak still
> alive in the neofeudalists among us. He believes,
>
> 1) Defending the value of the dollar is one of the most important jobs of
> the federal government. This is why he's mad at the Federal Reserve. He
> believes they're devaluing money by printing dollars (ignoring for the
> moment that he's been wrong about imminent inflation for six years now;
> money behaves differently in a depression, as Keynes proved). The simple
> fact is money is a good like any other in that its price (the interest
> rate) can fluctuate due to demand. This is not "devaluation" per se.
>
> 2) Paul believes it's anti-property rights to force businesses not to
> discriminate on the basis of race (or sex or religion) when doing business
> with their customers. He's against the public accommodations provisions of
> the civil rights era laws. This is a David Duke-esque message of "reverse
> discrimination" or well-cultivated white Southern Christian victimhood
> designed to appeal to the militantly overprivileged rightwing Pharisees who
> now constitute his base. This is why all these guys talk about succession
> and state's right and nullification and other imaginary concepts that never
> survived the 13th and 14th Amendments. They're the sons and grandsons of
> the white citizenship councils and sovereignty commissions that Walker
> Percy loathed in the '60s and '70s and targeted squarely in _Love in the
> Ruins_.
>
> Combine 1 + 2: Paul believes it's a top job of the government to defend the
> value of the greenback except when the hand holding it is black and then
> corporation can infinitely devalue it to zero.
>
> What sense does that make?
>
> It makes plenty of sense when you realize there's a long tradition in the
> South dating back to before _Dred Scot_ declaring that black people can't
> be American citizens and thus they're free targets (Obama's citizenship
> "controversy" fits into this pattern; they don't think he's a citizen for
> no other reason than the color of his skin, even if they can no longer say
> so openly). I think this is why Percy was fascinated with Nazi death camps
> and the culture of death. American racism in the South fit in a literary
> sense with religious and class warfare in Europe.
>
> Rand Paul got his political theory from Ayn Rand who believed Christianity
> was for rubes and altruism was a form of delusion. She literally
> worshipped psychopaths for their "will" - i.e., lack of conscience.
> (Wouldn't that just tickle Goebbels who said, "Intellectual activity is a
> danger to the building of character?") It's an irony but no mere
> coincidence that so many white Evangelical Christians now believe the same.
> They're not Christians as much as they are Southern Nationalists in the
> stripe of Thomas Jefferson (an historical figure I've come to loath the
> more I age and read).
>
> The modern Tea Party pushes for voting restrictions when the original Tea
> Party stood for no taxation without representation.
>
> The fact is the modern Tea Party hates liberty. Liberty isn't just the
> freedom to do something like speak your mind - it's also the obligation to
> use that freedom responsibly on behalf of a better society. Liberty, to
> paraphrase the founding fathers, is the responsible exercise of
> self-government. Tea Party anger is nothing but incoherent id,
> barbarian-yawping like Jim Bond. (Oh, God. Stop me from having another
> Faulkner episode.) A true conservative stresses social responsibility. A
> true conservative doesn't lie about science. These people aren't
> conservatives. They're radicals hell-bent on overturning campaign finance
> laws so they can turn America into a newly reborn plantation economy where
> we're all corporate serfs. Since the Civil War the South has had one
> central, consistent response to economic development which is to drive down
> the cost of labor - (infinitely to zero, in the case of slavery). This is
> the "moonlight and magnolias" economic strategy that focuses on tax
> credits/giveaways to rich businessmen because apparently they are lazy and
> have to be paid to make money and create jobs whereas workers have to be
> punished because they work for a living and thus are, well, in need of
> punishment. (Refusing to accept matching Medicaid funds is a great example
> of believing it builds character to ration medical care to the sick.)
>
> Percy pointed to the power of irony to rescue us from this condition. It
> highlights hypocrisy and contradiction for us[1]. It gives us a
> perspective outside of ourself to see ourselves and therein lies the
> possibility of freedom. Listen to John Kyl on the floor of the Senate
> saying with a straight face, "This may not be a factually true statement,"
> and tell me the Republicans aren't so lost they no longer have even irony?
>
> Being lost is the human condition. It's when you think you've found
> yourself all on your own that you are truly in the dark. Anyone who's ever
> understood grace knows that.
>
> Wade Riddick
>
> 1. Without this tension, "meaning" itself would be impossible; things have
> to be different or "contradict" to fall into he same category and define a
> term. You must have different colors like red and blue to have a concept
> of "color." Percy was probably thinking of all of these linguistic
> currents and eddies as he was manipulating old Southern contradictions and
> ironies for his novels.
>
> --
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>
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>
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> when addressing email)



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