If enough respond, I’ll be in for a chapter.
Thank you.
Karl
From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]
On Behalf Of RHONDA MCDONNELL
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 1:42 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
My understanding of a slow read is that we (the list) divide the novel up into sections (using Percy's divisions is natural). Someone volunteers to be a "discussion leader" of sorts for each section. We discuss one section a week (hence
the term "slow read"). The discussion leader starts each week off with an initial post reflecting on that section. As long as we remain connected to the text, I think it's fair to say that anything goes--connections to contemporary politics, politics in
the 1970s, philosophy, science, Percy's other fiction, Percy's non-fiction, etc.
It looks like (based on my kindle edition) that the sections are as follows:
So over a period of six weeks, we'd engage in a spirited discussion of Percy's novel without straining those of us busy with other projects, academic or otherwise.
I'd happily take the first section and have an initial post up by Monday, June 30.
Then if five others would be willing to lead sections, we'd look for initial section posts on Sunday/Monday of each following week: Section 2 on July 6/7; Section 3 on July 13/14; Section 4 on July 20/21; Section 5 on July 27/28; and Section
6 on Aug. 3/4.
To me, it seems like a brilliant way to spend July during a time when the center is not holding.
Is anyone else game to take on a section?
In Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy described an imagined America in which we “have turned against each other.” He wrote, “There are Left states and Knothead states, Left
towns and Knothead towns, but no center towns.”
I agree certainly with the comments that Percy skewered both left and right, and that it was not his intent to make a political statement, per se. I agree with you that,
if here today, he would skewer (for example) Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to regulate the cup sizes of our favorite sugar beverages (and I would laugh right along).
Percy’s intent, at the political level, was to describe the potential for the disintegration of our “beloved USA.” This is reflected in his borrowing from Yeats’ The Second
Coming, when first describing the situation of the LeftPapas and Knotheads: “The center did not hold,” Percy described. (As Yeats spot-on put it, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate
intensity”).
I know we shouldn’t drag the discussions on this list into a political-bickering fest. But, Percy did create his imaginary America out of the cloth of the country in which
he lived, and so some degree of political comment, I think, is fair game. He described, for example, the Knothead Party as derived from the “old Republican Party,” and which initially called itself the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party (until someone
pointed out the acronym – CCCP – is the same as that for the USSR in their alphabet). … And so, Percy pretty accurately foresaw the rise of the Tea Party, and the center failing to hold.
I perhaps fell victim to my own passions of the present era when describing my personal disagreements with the current-day Knotheads. I did not mean to offend, or drag this
list into a political discussion. And I can certainly agree not all Tea Partiers are racist – but I can’t avoid my ability to observe (being old enough to remember Jim Crow and the attitudes then openly expressed, and knowing that such attitudes don’t just
disappear) that there are still plenty of racists out there. Unfortunately, for the Tea Party, it’s hard to deny that a lot of them have aligned themselves in your camp.
You’re obviously an intelligent and thoughtful person. I accept your denial of racist motives on the part of the Tea Party you know, and I respect the fact you took offense
at the suggestion of being lumped with racist cretins. But to deny those cretins are out there is a mistake.
Someone made the suggestion of doing a “slow read” of LITR on this list. I don’t know how that works, but it sounds like a good idea to me. I think spirited comment and
comparison to present-day political realities would be appropriate, but I agree ‘name-calling’ should be avoided, and agree again that it was not Percy’s intent to advocate any particular political viewpoint.
Karl Montague Terrell
From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]
On Behalf Of janetcantor37--- via Percy-L
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 11:07 AM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
I have taken to answering some things in personal E-mails rather than sullying the Lists with the mere political.
But, sir, you go too far.
I am a Tea Party member. I know dozens of other Tea Party members. I have NEVER met or known indirectly one member who, to use President Obama's phrase, has a
smidgeon of racism in choosing to be a Tea Party member.
When the president was elected, my liberal friend asked how I felt. I told her, "He is my president. I hope he does good work for the country and may G-d be with
him."
If it makes you feel better or superior to state what you have said here, it is a free country and I would be the last one to try to stop you because as a Tea
Party member we are about protecting individual freedom and remembering and honoring the Constitution and thus the Bill of Rights.
Please, everybody, cease and desist from this name calling. I am no liberal in my political persuasion. But I do not impugn the motives of liberals. I like to
think liberals want what is best for this country and I would sincerely enjoy it so much better if the left would stop impugning my motives, because, believe me, sir, I have the best motives in the world.
I want a return to Constitutional government, a return to smaller government that does not make up new rights everyday.
I do not believe Walker Percy would be pleased with all of this business of telling us what to eat, how to live, what the government has the right to do to us
to keep us in line. And I will best Percy would not describe the knot heads as those who believe in an overweening government. I think that would disturb him no end. Read Father Smith in the Thanatos Syndrome warning us that "All tenderness leads to the gas
chambers." I could write reams here.
But I will just ask, please, stop calling others you disagree with names. It always amazes me that liberals love to consider Tea Party people closed minded and
savage. But do they ever listen to themselves? Listen to yourself, for example, Mr. Terrell. I do not insult you or your motives. Please stop insulting mine.
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)
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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