Re: Very little goes well (was: Re: OK, etc.)

From: David Dreith (SrCoyote@AOL.COM)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 17:28:57 EDT


Dear all reading,

First, yea to Jim for beginning this dialogue. However, I, too, will
disagree with the passages in Thanatos Syndrome as being anti-Semitic or even
insensitive. Having just read this for the first time (don't know why I
didn't read it earlier having read all other Percy works), my understanding
of the passage was that it was to serve as a warning to those on the edge of
judging for others as to the quality of life. It was clearly linking the
idealists of the Papasan compounds to the scientists of the Weimar Republic.
It is all too easy for us to villify Nazis (and they certainly deserve their
condemned place in our history books), and certainly it is even easy to
villify Hitler (he also deserves(d) it), but I think Percy was trying to
point out the blind idealism from which that situation arose.

In reading the interviews with Percy at the time of publishing, I saw that he
admitted a certain subversiveness in writing that led me to believe that he
might have been attempting to get the reader to see the benefits of the Na24
experiment in the book. Then, perhaps, just as the reader saw value in the
idealism, he pulls the carpet out with his description of the German
experience in which scientists who would even later separate themselves from
the Nazis actually assisted in giving rise to it.

Finally, I would add that simply seeing the Jews as "The Chosen People" does
not necessarily make one free of anti-Semitism. Growing up in the some
Southern Baptist churches, I repeatedly witnessed multitudes proclaim the
choseness of the Jews and even believe it, yet they were some of the most
anit-Semitic people I've ever known. While I don't believe TS was
anti-Semitic nor even insensitive, I don't think the work makes any attempt
to address the Jews as being chosen (though Father Smith stated that he
believed so) and should not be read as pro-Jewish either. Rather it is
understood that the Holocaust is in the realm of the worst possible human
events and therefore it is used as a platform for describing events that are
not as horrific leading to such an event.

David Dreith



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