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

["Wade Riddick" <wriddick AT usa.net>]

Well said.

Thank you for sparing me the time and effort to address this.

There is no punishment in the South quite like knowing too much history.  I
suppose Faulkner was right about the past not even being past yet.

Wade Riddick

P.S., it is quite related to Percy.  This glass grinding in the brain is the
source of the self-rightious anger in Lancelot.  And on the far "Left."  I
seem to remember this being a plot point in _Love in the Ruins_, the source of
commonality between the Knotheads and swamp-dwelling black radicals who hated
each other.

------ Original Message ------
Received: Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:57:12 PM EDT
From: "Karl M. Terrell" <kterrell AT stokeswagner.com>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
<percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] A response to Janet Cantor


Well said, Karey.  To your first point, the equivocation fallacy — that
Civil War & Reconstruction-era Republicans are not the same as the GOP of
today — it should be pointed out also that the ardent segregationists in the
Democratic Party were almost exclusively Southern. In 1948, Strom Thurmond ran
for President as a Dixiecrat, and then after 1964 he became a Republican. The
rest of the Southern Democrats followed him out the door. This was an act of
shameful protest in response to the passages of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964,
1965 and 1968.

These newly minted Republicans then joined forces with the Goldwater / Nixon
(Southern Strategy) / Reagan wing of the GOP.  From that point forward, we
witnessed the steady destruction of the moderate wing of the GOP (Rockefeller,
Lodge, Ford and others).

This leads me to respond to another erroneous point by Ms. Cantor:

“Tax cuts were never designed to drive up the deficit, but to spur growth of
the economy which would bring more money into government, not less. When JFK
passed his tax cuts, the economy got a big push and the government made more
money.”

Sorry, but ... this is just flat wrong (apart from her comment about JFK,
addressed below). Two points:

(1) I am sure Ms. Cantor is familiar with Grover Norquist, the influential
architect & firebrand of GOP tax strategy. His mantra — his guiding
principle — was “starve the beast.” The promoted idea was smaller
government, passed off as a bromide, but what really was afoot was an attack
on the legitimacy of government. This attack was perfected by Reagan, who
famously quipped the so-called “most terrifying words” are (paraphrasing)
“I’m here from the government to help you.” In saying this, Reagan was
playing crudely off the simplistic notion that government operations are
perceived (generally) as not as efficient or as effective as for-profit
businesses — a fair enough observation, but one that wholly misses the point
of the proper role that government, in fact, must play, if we are to have a
just society that provides for all.

It was all a front. The clear intent was to enrich the fat cats, and to
undermine the social progress which had been set in motion by the Civil Rights
Acts that the GOP Southerners despised, and that were perceived by the fat
cats as too expensive. The end result, over the last 4 decades, has been wage
stagnation and the near-virtual destruction of the middle class (as
constructed in the 1950s). The resulting wealth inequality is staggering, and
offensive.

(2)  So-called “trickle-down economics” have been proven time and time
again to be a failure. Yes, JFK’s tax cuts — from the Eisenhower era of
very high taxes — benefitted the economy, and so did Reagan’s. But,
regarding the latter, what current Republicans always ignore is the fact that
Reagan subsequently raised taxes several times. The GOP, instead, has simply
turned “tax cuts” into an unthinking religion.

Trump’s tax cut perhaps provided a brief sugar high for the economy, but his
tax cut never delivered on the selling point — that it would lead to job
creation and better wages. There is simply no evidence of this.

Yes, the economy grew from 2017 until the pandemic, but this growth (apart
from the afore-mentioned ‘sugar high’) was simply a continuation of the
corrections made by the Obama administration to the failed economy of G.W.
Bush. Obama’s improvements to the economy took clear hold in 2011 — six
years before Trump took office!

The Trump tax cut simply enabled the big corporations to go on a binge of
stock buybacks, and the uber-wealthy pocketed their windfall. The rich got
rich and the poor — maybe they didn’t get poorer between 2017 and 2020 —
but, to be sure, there were no advances in opportunity, nor any advances over
the sad reality that huge numbers in this country live two paychecks away from
bankruptcy.

And stop calling the American left “Marxists.” It’s just plain stupid to
do so.

The American economy has long been a mix of both capitalism and socialism,
with capitalism plainly dominant — and this will remain the case.
Progressives are simply calling for a heavier thumb on the socialism side of
the scale. This is necessary, and a clear majority of Americans agree — on
an issue-by-issue basis, as polls consistently show — in order to correct
the current injustices in our economy, and the current absence of opportunity
for the betterment of vast numbers of Americans.

The chickens are coming home to roost, Ms. Cantor.

****

I recognize this has little to do with Percy —as least not directly. That
said, Ms. Cantor chose this forum for the spewing of her uninformed opinions.
Inasmuch as she chose to swim here, she should not be surprised that critical
thinkers will provide a swift counter current.

Karl Montague Terrell
Brevard, N.C.

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 7, 2020, at 1:42 PM, Karey Perkins <kareyperkins AT gmail.com> wrote:

 First of all, thank you once again, Wade, for your brilliant and
comprehensive analysis of what’s going on.  Each of your paragraphs could be
expanded into an entire essay in and of itself.  I’d like to respond but the
scope of your topics and analysis make it so overwhelming that I just will
say, kudos to you.

Janet, there is much to respond to in what you wrote, but overall, you are
very misinformed. Your facts are just plain incorrect. I cannot address every
single point, so I will only address just three of your erroneous points, in
order to make my point about your misinformation.  I will also refer you to
links that will help you to become more factually and correctly informed.

#1, the Equivocation Fallacy:  Republicans of the 1800s have absolutely
nothing to do with the Republicans of today.  That the past and the present
Republican party bears the same name indicates absolutely nothing about its
content nor its character nor its policies.  To wit: The parties switched
sides in the early 1900s.  The Republican Party today foments and campaigns on
racist policies and practices against both black and brown people, to the
point that it has innocent children in concentration camps at the border, in
horrific, inhumane conditions, more concerned about tracking raped girls
periods to prevent them from having abortions than providing basic hygiene or
tracking their parents to reunite families.  (That’s just one example; there
are literally hundreds of thousands more.). As for the early twentieth century
switch and why, I’ll just leave a couple of links here to educate you as to
the general historical background of the switch; there are far more out there
for you to read if you’d like to pursue this research:

  *  
https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html
  *  
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south
  *  
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a26985261/trump-administration-abortion-period-tracking-migrant-women/

#2, the Koch brothers decades-long stealth takeover of the United States
government:  Read Jane Mayers' Dark Money:  The Hidden History of the
Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

  *  
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html
  *  
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south

#3, that BLM, antifa, and other leftist protesters are inciting violence: 
Almost all of the protests are peaceful demonstrators exercising their first
amendment rights.   Nor are these groups in any way at all “anarchist” -
they just don’t like the fascism and racism that is rising in our country. 
Antifa literally refers to being “anti-fascist” and is “a moniker, not a
single group with an organizational structure or leader.”  It is an
adjective, not a noun.  Right wing social media and right wing media are
propagating the myth that these are groups are violent, yet evidence shows
that white nationalists and opportunists have infiltrated the protests to
instigate violence. Trump's failures on the economy and the pandemic has
caused him to move to campaign as the “law and order” president, but this
too is failing as his “secret police” (for example in Portland, where
federal agents were unmarked and unnamed) are attacking and hooding and
capturing unarmed peaceful protesters, pulling them into unmarked vans, and
the federal agents are the ones causing the violence themselves, against moms
and Catholics.  (They’ve since been driven out of Portland, and guess what?
No more violence.). These feds are just another photo op for Trump, akin to
his tear gassing peaceful protesters in order to walk across the street and
raise a Bible (which I doubt Mr. Two Corinthians has ever opened) upside down
outside of the Episcopal church in front of the White House.

  *  
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-caused-violence-protests-its-not-antifa/
  *  
https://www.voanews.com/usa/four-extremist-groups-suspected-involvement-protest-violence
  *  
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-the-law-and-order-candidate-thats-a-laugh/2020/07/14/17037e86-c610-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html
  *  
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/508597-the-memo-trump-struggles-to-get-traction-with-law-and-order-message
  *  
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/trump-getting-what-he-wants-portland/614635/

Your gross misinformation is because of the what’s happened to the media
today — which was supposed to be the fourth estate, part of the executive,
judicial, and legislative branches’ checks and balances on each other —
but has failed miserably at its job ever since the FCC Fairness Doctrine was
repealed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine#:~:text=The%20fairness%20doctrine%20of%20the,honest%2C%20equitable%2C%20and%20balanced.

Because of that, news outlets of any source - TV, newspapers, magazines,
internet — can report anything they want.  So we now have two completely
different realities, and half of American live in one reality conveyed by one
side of the aisle, while the other half lives in an entirely different reality
conveyed by a different side of the aisle.

Oh, wait, who said, fifty years ago, that that would happen?

It has never been more important that Americans today have to be critical
thinkers to evaluate news sources and information they come across to find out
what the truth really is.  But critical thinking and civics classes no longer
exist in our high schools, so few Americans have any idea how to evaluate the
media.  Hence the great divide that Percy writes about - not just two sets of
attitudes about the same set of facts, but completely different sets of facts,
completely different realities entirely.

My hope is that you will find better, more accurate sources, and become a
better critical thinker concerning the constant bombardment of lies and
misinformation that propagate in America.

As for Lauren’s poem, I have another poem (there are many versions, here’s
just one):

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

America is in a crisis.  Percy would not have been quiet, and he wasn’t. He
spoke out in his novels, even before this happened.

Karey



Karey Perkins, M.A., M.A.T., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
296A Turner Hall, South Carolina State University
Orangeburg, SC 29117
kperkin1 AT scsu.edu<mailto:kperkin1 AT scsu.edu> | 803-536-7016
www.scsu.edu<http://www.scsu.edu/>
Member, Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX  79409-0002
kareperk AT ttu.edu<mailto:kareperk AT ttu.edu> |
http://www.pragmaticism.net<http://www.pragmaticism.net/>




On Aug 7, 2020, at 6:36 AM, janetcantor37--- via Percy-L
<percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org<mailto:percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>> wrote:

You opened so well. Federalist #10 is my favorite of the Federalist Papers.
Then you fell into conclusions that do not match mine.

I agree that pluralism as you describe it - belief in the ascendancy of our
attachment to factions instead of love of the whole, patriotism, love of
country - is not good.

The trouble is when I look up the definition of pluralism, it is the opposite
of how you describe it.

So I am going to tell you how I read #10:

Our country needed a strong central symbol, the flag, a president, so that our
individual interests (factions) could never get big enough to disrupt or bring
down the whole. If we wanted to be a "country", able to defend itself against
outside mischief from other countries, we had to be unified. Pluralism
entailed allowing individuals as well as states and individual interests to be
protected from meddling or destruction, as long as those individuals did not
break the country's laws.

The colonies were worried that they had just left the King and wanted no parts
of a president. So #10 tried to explain all about the protections we would put
in place so individual interests and minorities would not fall prey  to a new
kind of tyranny. They would put in place protections of each state by having
representations in a Senate where every colony - eventually state - would get
the same representation no matter how small it was compared to the others.
They would put in place a Court to interpret the law. And the constant tension
among all of these entities would prevent a president from having too much
power and individuals or groups with they interest from inciting confusions to
bring down the whole, the U.S.
The central power in the hands of a president having to contend with these
safeguards against its controlling all the power would help keep all
individual Americans safe.
The larger the country, the more diverse the separate states, the more
difficult it would be for a dictatorship to arise.
The colonies became convinced and stopped fearing having a president.


 Again, you were doing so well, It is true that leftists of recent history
love chopping us up into groups with grievances so they can better control
us.

Where you went astray is when you began describing the "seething resentment "
of the right and its origins.

There is no resentment in Republicans and other rightists here from having
Civil Rights legislation shoved down "their throats".
It was the Republicans throughout our history who instigated and helped bring
about the end of slavery against the Democrats. It was the right which fought
for integration.
The KKK, those who fought to preserve slavery and prevent integration of
schools were always in the Democrat Party.
LBJ got lots of attention when he passed the Civil Rights act, but without the
votes of Republicans in Congress, it would never have come to fruition.

Tax cuts were never designed to drive up the deficit, but to spur growth of
the economy which would bring more money into government, not less. When JFK
passed his tax cuts, the economy got a big push and the government made more
money.

Yes, both sides promise heaven on earth. But if you look at the history from
1976 until today it is a series of democrats pulling the country away from
capitalism and Republicans correcting their mistakes and fixing the country
and then the sliding again when democrats win again.
 Taking power away from the central government to give us goodies or manage
things is a good thing.
 Reagan fixed Carter's disastrous economy.
Under Clinton we were headed back to catastrophe again until the 1994
Republican congress came in and fixed everything again, and then Clinton took
credit for it, and that's okay, because at least he didn't get in the way. And
I don't want to ruffle feathers, but recently the pattern began again.
And until the plague hit us, we were coasting along in the best economy ever.

Too much federal spending is terrible, I agree and both sides are guilty of
that. Dismantling private property protection is lethally bad. We agree there.
Oligarchs stealing from private citizens is a disease, yes. Taking power from
individuals is dangerous. But we get more of these bad things every time we
elect Democrats and this time the contrast couldn't be starker.

I don't know about the Koch Brothers, but George Soros and the teachers unions
have them beat when it comes to stealing power from individuals and placing it
in the hands of government operators.

Wages were going up, unemployment was virtually disappearing, and minorities
of all kinds benefitted from these things the most. And then the pandemic
struck and we were told were have to close down the economy.
If this hadn't happened, we would have been in excellent economic shape.

The chaos of now is a left wing phenomenon. These destructive mobs are avowed
Marxists by their own definition. the graffiti and bringing down of statues
and buildings and chaos and murder is all a left wing phenomenon these days -
and BTW, occurring in cities run by progressive democrats.

As for the left abandoning claims on material wealth and economic justice,
where do you see that? It is in the Democrat party where you find the most
rich who came into government with modest savings and left multi
millionaires.

Hillsdale College, which I would describe as closer to conservatism than
liberalism as defined these days, does not deconstruct, does not elevate
personal revelation above law or enable will to power movement. Hillsdale
encourages individual responsibility.
 Lovers of safe spaces where nobody has to be overruled is a leftist
phenomenon.

Where are you finding in your George Zimmerman narrative that those three
points you name are being forgotten by the Right? I call myself a rightist and
those points seem just fine to me.

Look how easy it is for two sides to see the same facts and come to completely
different readings of what is going on.

Of course, the big question is what would Percy make of it all these days?
I am guessing he would hate what anarchist Marxists are doing to our cities,
and attempting to do to our history, and our culture. We all should. I know
that Percy would despair that things are not better. And I suspect he might
find it very difficult to write those crazy fun house novels of his with their
gorgeous endings.

I suggest that each of us should settle down and set aside time to read the
beautiful book by Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope. It clears up a lot of the
confusion between Wade Riddick and me. And, borrowing from Ariel in The
Tempest, it is so inspiring, it will make any reader cry if he is human.

Janet Cantor












On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 3:47 AM, Wade Riddick
<wriddick AT usa.net<mailto:wriddick AT usa.net>> wrote:
What many people fail to understand is that both the Knotheads and the
NOT-heads (i.e., "cancel culture") spring from the same toxic stew of sins:
pluralism.

Pluralism is the belief that we have rights not as citizens of countries but
through the groups we belong to - race, gender, etc.  The pluralists think
democracy is useless and unless we bind together into our "group" we can't be
represented.  Leaving the group for another or disagreeing with your assigned
"interest" is the deepest betrayal and provokes a backlash imminently
Freudian
in its ferocity.  I haven't seen anything like it since I argued with the
Communist Party cult remnants in graduate school about the value of money.
They don't accept that "interests" cut across these boundaries.  They don't
want to see, for instance, that women have an interest in men graduating from
college so they can have marriageable mates.  They're an extension of the
Zuckerberg computerization of our lives that wants to chop us up into
interests so they can monetize us when we connect that way.

NOT-heads aren't "almost angry" at the Constitution; they're in outright
contempt of it because the founders were explicitly against this form of
thinking.  In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison warns that giving organized
groups of people the same rights as actual individual citizens will destroy
real rights for those citizens and enable factionalism.  This type of group
behavior has to be controlled or it will destroy the community of democracy.

The knotheads are simply a different side of that tribalism - the Confederacy
tribe.  This other great enemy of democracy has been engaged in its own long
war against federalism going back to the days of the first Confederacy.  The
anger you see on the "right" is seething resentment from having civil rights
legislation shoved down their throats.  Since the '70s, the Republican Party
has been fueled by vendetta Dixiecrats fishing for ways to make the Federal
government fail - first with Nixon's failed budget impoundment, then with tax
cuts they hoped would drive up the deficit so high one day they could use it
as an excuse to gut spending.  ("We're finally bankrupt.  Yay!")  But every
escalating disaster caused by their sabotage of government action - 9/11,
credit default swap implosions, Hurricane Katerina, S&L crises - only
increased demand for government action - because, as you see today, there's
no
other central actor in America that can handle crises of this magnitude.

These two sides resemble one another because racism - tribal revenge - is a
communicable disease, quickly mutualizing contempt when unchecked.  Social
media has brought us into one another's lives like never before and many of
us
can't stand what we see. (Maybe better digital fences would make better
digital neighbors.)  Contempt breeds contempt and without tolerance for one
another, democratic compromise is impossible and we can't govern ourselves -
which suits the short-term interests of the oligarchs just fine.  They need
to
dismantle property protections (i.e., the justice system), if they're going
to
steal from us.

What does this have to do with anything?

When you leave groups on their own to organize, those with the most money
oraganize the best.  Sick people are probably the most important group in the
country because when you become sick, you lose your autonomy and become
dependent upon others.  Sick people also have the least influence on the
political system because all our time and money is tied up in being sick.
Ditto for groups like the poor and unemployed - because you need resources to
organize yourselves.  Some interests can't organize themselves like this.
That's the function of government - to organize and address the concerns of
all citizens.

What the NOT-heads fail to acknowledge is that their attitudes towards
politics benefit the very oligarchs paying for us to hate each other.  The
insidious idea underlying pluralism is that these groups somehow "compete"
with one another for "influence" over the government.  That is, they bribe
officials.  This is what I mean when I say a coup took place at the Supreme
Court level in the 1970s when unelected judges equated bribery of politicians
with "free speech."  If you want to see what the Koch Brother's perfect
market
in politics looks like, go visit Mexico today where every official is
available for a price (or soon shot).  That's the future that awaits us.

So these two groups, lacking any pragmatic influence on positive agendas,
can't govern.  They can only veto, fume and fulminate.  That's where we find
ourselves.  They both promise heaven on earth but can't even stop graffiti,
much less a pandemic.  Reality collides with these delusions and knocks
followers into the same fatalistic flights of fancy that all failed
charismatic cults descend into.  Donald Trump becomes the Stokely Carmichael
of white power and the Abbie Hoffman of the pandemic - gonna levitate that
'ronavirus with the good feelings of his mind ray.

It's clear how the Confederacy keeps winding up in the same spot.  It's more
interesting how the Left fell into this heresy.  Basically, in the '60s and
'70s, Nixon destroyed the Left with targeted assassinations of Black Panther
leadership, the War on Drugs, Cointelpro and other programs.  The apparatus
developed against democracy in Vietnam and Indonesia was reimported to
"deradicalize" urban resistance to the new oil imperialist/banking oligarchy
that you now see coming apart.  This is why, today, we have such high
incarceration rates: Jim Crow Part II.

With both parties now locked down by bribery, unions getting dismantled and
wages driven down, there was no room anymore for the Left outside academia
and
to succeed on the Left there, you had to abandon claims on material wealth
and
economic justice or you'd be dealt with too.  Courses on Locke, Rousseau and
Madison were shunted aside and restricted to graduate school - if available
at
all - so no uppity undergrads would ever have the gall to attack undemocratic
militarism with democratic theory ever again.  That forced the Left into a
peculiarly sterile conversation about race and sex - not the underlying
sources of injustice there that could never be questioned but rather on
personal experience - to a fatalistically myopic degree.  The end result of
this is something called, bizarrely, Boasian antiracism
<https://policytensor.com/2019/10/10/what-in-the-name-of-the-lord-is-boasian-antiracism/>.

A similar defenestration of Christianity occurred on the right.  It's
considered "heresy" now to discuss the fact that Jesus wanted debt
cancellation - when in fact the heresy is failing to point out that he did
and
that led to the crucifixion.

Blame it all on the "Me Decade" of the '70s.  Both the right and the left
turned toward the personal, especially personal narrative and confessional -
and new forms of communication gave them this power.  Both sides fell prey to
exaggerated doctrines of Deconstruction, elevating personal revelation above
law, constitution and Gospel truth enabling the "will-to-power" movements
common in fascism.  Out went universal meaning and in swept wishy-washy
relativism with "safe spaces" where nobody has to be overruled.

Charismatic evangelicals (read: segregationists) substituted personal
confession for Biblical truth.  Witness George Zimmerman claiming it was part
of God's plan he shoot an unarmed black boy walking home at night.  The Right
ate it up forgetting that

1)  No greater love has a man than he gives up his life to save another
(*not*
takes another).
2)  Do not be overcome by evil but rather overcome evil with good.
3)  There is no fear in love.  Love casts out fear.

Zimmerman got out of the car that night armed with a gun because he was
afraid
he might die and unafraid to kill - pretty much the opposite of a Christian.
But the anti-Christian charismatics ate it up in their culture war because he
hated the right people.

Of course, on the Left, these ironic contradictions abound too.

When I heard Bruce Jenner confessing happiness at no longer having to lie to
everybody, my first thought was, "He's admitting to cheating with steroids
like I'm positive almost everybody in track and field at the Olympic level
has
been doing since the '50s?"

No.

My second thought was, "He's apologizing for giving people cancer and
diabetes
by selling us Wheaties?"

Nope again.

He's transgendered.

Oh.

How was that ever my business?

What about all the people harmed by the cheating?

Oh, well…

In the future, we did get our fifteen minutes of fame and now we're all
trapped in our own personality cults.  We're one big self-published, unedited
echo chamber of one.  Ours is an era of personal narrative devoid of genuine
readers.  Reading takes kindness.  Reading takes reflection and reflection is
the enemy of sensationalist tweets.  (Got to move those ads.)  Bridging these
islands of self presupposes an objective reality that can sustain us while
we're "at sea" off your own island.  I think Percy referred to this as the
"intersubjective."

But politically speaking, no man is an island.  We can't be our own subjects
of one, which was Madison's point.  Substituting mob gangs does not give you
a
better form of government.

We all fall prey to different heresies of perfection.  Tech bros seem to
think
the world will become a perfect place with enough microchips thrown at it.
(I've debugged too much code to believe that one.)  The flip side of that is
nasty too.  Nostalgia is the enemy of forgiveness, which was a major theme of
Percy's.  Nostalgia imagines a perfect past.  If the past was once perfect -
or at least better - then the screwed up way things are today is unnecessary
and we need no forgiveness.  We just need to travel back in our memory to get
there.

But there's no one left showing us how fallible that memory is.  Those
critics
disappeared in our flattened new perspective on life.

We shouldn't idealize the past or despise it.  Nor should we idealize the
future.  We should be, in our dire time of need, raging Pragmatists and
radicalized moderates.

Wade Riddick


------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:43:12 AM EDT
From: Ernest Hutton
<ehutton AT huttonassociates.com<mailto:ehutton AT huttonassociates.com>>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
<percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org<mailto:percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Percy-L Digest, Vol 162, Issue 11


Hazel Motes (in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood), searches for God by
railing against organized religion. But in doing so, he prophesizes the
authoritarian end-state pushed by today’s cancel culture:  ‘Where you
come
from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where
you are is no good unless you can get away from it.’

O’Connor had it right, and is now a victim of her own perspicacity. This
reign of terror is destroying us all!

Ernie Hutton






Sent from my iPhone
Ernest W Hutton Jr. FAICP Assoc AIA
Hutton Associates Inc.
New York/ Westhampton
917.836.7902

17 Woodbridge Lane, Quiogue
Westhampton Beach NY 11978

>> On Aug 6, 2020, at 4:55 AM, Plemmons, Gregory
<gregory.plemmons AT vumc.org<mailto:gregory.plemmons AT vumc.org>>
wrote:
> 
> Patrick Connelly, a Percy scholar, spoke on Percy and race at one of the
former Walker Percy Weekends. He commonly referenced a quote from Percy (I
wish I knew the original source) about the eternal “problem of human
frailty
trapped in historical circumstance”. That quote has stuck with me. It has
echoes of Pompeii, especially as we seem to be entering a whole new era of
cancel culture. The extreme left’s iconoclasm frightens me almost as much
as
that of the Knotheads. I wish people could devote more energy inward toward
themselves and the current state of things. While dissecting the past will
always have some merit, what are we ourselves going to be judged on, fifty
years from now? Even five years from this pandemic? Percy was imperfect as
the
best of us, but he and his family also slept in their attic for two weeks
after a bomb threat from the local Klan in 1969, after defending the removal
of the Confederate flag from the principal’s office of the local high
school.
>
> Zadie Smith took a stab recently attempting to answer the question of the
purpose of fiction. “Does it seem at all surprising in 2019...that we
should
have this hypersensitivity?... Whereas many more material issues—economic
inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration—prove frighteningly
intractable, language becomes the convenient battlefield.”
>
> Apologies for the long-winded rant. I read the New Yorker article. It
taught
me nothing new. Flannery was trapped as anyone. Her poor physical health is
often overlooked. Lupus is a horrible disease and there were little options
for treatment or even simple relief in her time. Again, “historical
circumstance”. I like to think if her disease hadn’t claimed her at 39,
her views might have evolved, too. I guess we’ll never know.
>
> Gregory Plemmons, MD
>
>> On Aug 5, 2020, at 7:17 PM, Charles Cowherd
<charlescowherd AT hotmail.com<mailto:charlescowherd AT hotmail.com>>
wrote:
>> 
>> Just to weigh in on the Flannery O’Connor/ Paul Elie scrum.
>> At the seminary (Episcopal) that I attended, a professor had included the
short story “The Artificial N____” in his compendium of short stories
matched up to the preaching lectionary. (Flannery O’Connor fiction is VERY
popular in Episcopal circles.)
>> A draft copy somehow was made available to my fellow students, who opposed
the inclusion. There was a big townhall meeting, a student petition,
eventually the professor/author agreed to remove the story.
>> This was about 3 years ago.
>> I offer that up merely as another tiny data point in whatever this
particular moment is all about. I know that Walker Percy spoke on that short
story specifically but cannot find it, it’s in CONVERSATIONS with WALKER
PECY.
>> I do think that it’s a topic that we can discuss on this forum with care
and concern and kindness for one another.
>> Also, I have been reading THE NEW YORKER all my life (“a wonderful
Yankee
magazine”- my Dad always would say!). Only with this article the magazine
it
reveal how detached it is, as a source of journalism, from the world. It
reminded me of Percy’s dislike (too soft a word?) for Descartes. Instead,
Percy believed we are all embodied creatures, fallen and stumbling in the
world. Whereas the New Yorker writes an article with the title:  “How
Racist
was Flannery O’Connor?” without any source of social location of time and
place.
>> All my best,
>> Charles Cowherd
>> [ WARNING : This email came from an external source. Please treat this
message with additional caution.]
>> ----------------------------------
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