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

["Karl M. Terrell" <kterrell AT stokeswagner.com>]

Well put, I say.  I have had Percy’s Knotheads on my mind ever since the emergence of the Tea Party, and the ‘birthers,’ and all the others viscerally at odds with the image of a black man in the White House. **  These folks are careful to avoid (most of the time) obvious racist comments, but racism is clearly driving them.

I am currently re-reading (after 30 or more years) the Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, and Kenneth Stampp’s revisionist history (written in 1965) of Reconstruction.  Woodward teaches that Jim Crow didn’t erect himself until the 1890s, following a period in which – relatively speaking – there was a real progress in race relations.  Stampp points out that the South’s retrospective loathing of Reconstruction was distorted to an unwarranted extreme by histories written in 1890 – 1910 sympathetic to the fantasy of the patrician South.   

There was, at that time in 1890 - 1910, growing sympathies in the North to the situation of the white man in the South vis a vis the Negro, prompted by (among other factors) xenophobic reactions in the North to immigration from southern and eastern Europe.  The sociology, anthropology and psychology popular at that time supported a racist view, as did the law (e.g., Plessy v Ferguson’s imprimatur of the demonstrably unsound and intellectually bankrupt notion of ‘separate but equal’).  Racism was its height then.  The KKK re-emerged, the movie Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, etc.

These things come in waves.  Maybe the waves are weaker each time, but the Tea Party wave is very real.  It is full of people who, at its most nakedly obvious, are like that fellow out West, Clive Bunden I think is his name (“Now, let me tell you another thing about the Negro …”).  This wave could grow larger – particularly if the GOP takes the Senate in November.   Or maybe they’ll just make bigger asses out of themselves, and it will all blow over.  That’s usually what happens.  It is, after all, what happened the last time around, mid-century, when the segregationists made their last stand

In any event, we need Walker Percy, and his vision of the Knotheads.  I like, therefore, what you said: “ Percy pointed to the power of irony to rescue us from this condition.  It highlights hypocrisy and contradiction for us.  It gives us a perspective outside of ourself to see ourselves and therein lies the possibility of freedom.”

 ** I bet Percy would have loved Randy Newman’s ironic song released during the 2012 election, I’m Dreaming of a White President (sung to the tune of White Christmas)

 Karl Montague Terrell

 

From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Wade Riddick
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 10:18 AM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War

 

 

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.