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

[RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>]

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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