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

[Lauren Stacy Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com>]

and who says we are any better or any worse???


Jim Crow was old, very old news in a new bottle...

 there are many ways we humans have used to say "we are better than others"......
 
Even the Doctor did battle with that devil Pride

The Good Doctor is calling us all out......... ALL OF US to look our own selves.......... Love in the Ruin is the background noise to our foreground.
We are messy and getting messier (sp) the further we fuel ourselves from thinking and our ways of knowing and thinking that thought(s) is the answer it aint!!!.

We then move  away from our hearts  and what makes us humans humans. To notice one another?

I have drank deeply of this man work and the one thing I  want is for us not to frame him and explain him.
 Keep the ambiguity, keep the mystery alive! and Laugh at ourselves
that's our melting our peeling.............its our best signal  to notice ourselves???  its what he noticed and I really believe its why LITR is so funny?

Now there is something to explore Laughter and how it touches us in this book?

All this knothead stuff has already been masticated the question is........when are you a knothead??

Remember the very best way to change someone is to begin by your own example.

Onward!

On 6/28/2014 11:06 PM, Wade Riddick wrote:

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Well put, I say. I have had Percys 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 Stampps revisionist history (written in 1965) of Reconstruction. Woodward teaches that Jim Crow didnt 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 Souths 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 Fergusons 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.

I had forgotten about this part of Southern history and you're right to put your finger on it. You might be interested in V.O. Key's masterwork on Southern politics and there's also a recent work on modern Jim Crow and the harsh drug sentencing laws and the way they're used to strip black voting power. The names of both escape me at the moment. Blacks use marijuana at the same rate whites do yet get sent to prison far more often and lose their voting rights when they come out. The sgregationists have used a million little ways to dilute black voting power in the South (and it's got many similarities to methods of minority control in China and the old Soviet Union; if you put someone in prison and then out on parole you can keep them from voting in many of these states and require written permission from the authorities to move).

It's a function of money, really. Cotton profits and the tariff drove most of the myth of the Caveliers built up before the Civil War. These were deliberate, artificial cultural distinctions that were carefully constructed. _The New York Times_ ran a number of interesting articles on the subject back in 2010 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the way.

Government provides justice. You can't steal from voters if you can't pervert government in some way. It's not a surprise that the rebirth of Jim Crow occurs at the dawn of the age of large railroad trusts. These movements need money and the best distraction for thieves is to get the victims to attack one another (racism, sexism and other bigotry).

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