[percy-l] AND...just one more post...
Mike Frentz
mfrentz at bbn.com
Sun Jan 5 08:45:27 EST 2003
Karey,
You (or Newsweek rather...) presented a classic Peicean Triad of the sort:
Republican (Representamen)
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
Conservative (Semiotic Object)------- "ill-dressed, unintelligent
and slinking --
the
sort of people who lynch Negroes,
attend
revivals, and fight and fornicate
in the
bushes afterwards (Interpretant)
Whether Will Percy "meant" it *that* way or not, that's how it was
presented now (Mahh Deahh,
that trahangle was from the sixties, but..., come to think of it, it
*does* appeah to be in
pretty good shape, Ah think ah'll just use it anyway...) -- Wade's
earlier comment about
not getting a balanced view on FOX struck me curiously -- no argument,
it's just that I would
have put the NY Times, Wash. Post, NPR, ABC-NEWS, CBS, etc. *at least*
no lower on his list.
If you've ever attended a non-PC event (or, equivalently, watched it on
C-SPAN [Yaay for C-SPAN!!]),
and then seen how it was reported by the talking heads afterwards, you
have no problem seeing how
prevalent media bias is. Case in point: the pro-life march in
Washington -- typically ~100,000 of the
nicest people you'd ever want to meet vs. 199 multi-pierced/tattooed
strange-ohs [that you'd blanch if they
showed up to babysit your kid..] + 1 "normal person" as a frontman.
Normal person gets more air-time
than the 100,000. Consistently.
Second case in point: I'll bet you that the number of votes that Alan
Keyes got in the Republican primary
correlated very strongly to the number of Republicans who actually
watched the debate on C-SPAN. Phone calls
afterwards were running 2 out of 3 enthusiastically in favor of Keyes.
When you read about the debate the
next day, it was hard to believe anybody but McCain and Bush actually
particpated (but then the media were
mystified by the "surprising showing" of Keyes in the actual primary).
My 2c on Percy: people trying to "understand" Percy without first
trying to understand THE Catholic view of the world must
be fond of fool's errands -- it would be very hard to be successful with
that approach, IMHO (and the Catholic
viewpoint is *probably not at all* like what you think it is --
especially if you're still believing in NY Times' type fairy tales).
An excellent primer on the Catholic worldview is Frank Sheed's "Theology
and Sanity". Distilled Aquinas and Augustine. It
may be a good study aid for students of Percy.
I'm sure your brother-in-law is very bright, but he also has the
distinct advantage of having a media without nearly as much built-in agenda
(that's why things that are obvious to him, many Americans are still in
the dark about..)
Mike
Karey L. Perkins wrote:
> Mike --
>
> I wasn't talking about politics, or Republicans, or Democrats --
> Newsweek was. I was talking about RACISM, and Percy's attitude
> towards that. I agree Percy was interested in justice and not
> labels. But Percy, and his family, are well-born, wealthy, Southern,
> aristocratic and interested in preserving the interests of that world
> -- which seemed liberal on race because it wanted to keep the black in
> Mississippi, and happy to be in Mississippi, but had a kind of
> paternalism that was, in the end, self-interested. While there was
> certainly altruistic, compassionate, and "justice" motives in the
> Percy family's fight against the KKK and those of that ilk, it was
> also mixed with self-interested motives -- nothing (and no one) in
> REAL life is plain, simple, and purely black and white. We're all
> shades of gray.
>
> Read Tolson's biography, Ch. 3, "Uncle Will," and what great-uncle
> LeRoy asked Uncle Will to do to the black refugees in the flood of
> 1927. Percy was more progressive, but if you are equating my terms of
> progressive/liberal with the Democrat then that is a mistake. A
> liberal from Mississippi is hardly a liberal.
>
> I visited my sister's family (in England) for Christmas. My
> brother-in-law is British (and a professor at Cambridge
> University and quite bright) and he said he was thoroughly confused by
> the Newsweek article. I asked why, he said because the American
> parties switched in the middle, (as did the Brits also with their
> parties), so Republicans and Democrats became something different than
> what they were -- hard for him to follow. Read the article -- it's
> good. And worth reading, if only in that it describes the world,
> culture and values that Percy, and Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott were
> given. The Republicans HAD to get rid of Trent Lott -- regardless of
> whether he still believed in the "Dixiecrat" platform of 1948 that
> Strom Thurmond was running on -- because he propagated the image of
> the racist Republican that would be the death toll of the party. I
> personally happen to believe Trent Lott is a racist and meant what he
> said -- as you see in the next week's news, where Lott said he learned
> a lesson from this -- that he needed to change -- though wished he
> hadn't had to learn it that way.
>
> By the way, on a personal note, I vote against Republican on pretty
> much anything. That does not mean I think Percy would at all, nor was
> I implying that. But I differ from Percy on a lot of things,
> including a lot of political issues, including also his attitude
> towards women, but not at all on his attitude toward race.
>
> Karey
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mike Frentz <mailto:mfrentz at bbn.com>
> To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org <mailto:percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 6:01 PM
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] AND...just one more post...
>
>
> Karey L. Perkins wrote:
>
>> In this case, Newsweek quotes from Will's Lanterns on the Levee to
>> describe the liberal/progressive part of the state in contrast to the
>> more conservative/backwards northern Mississippi, with which Lott
>> associates himself. Will Percy describes, and the article quotes
>> him, that part of the state as "ill-dressed, unintelligent and
>> slinking -- the sort of people who lynch Negroes, attend revivals,
>> and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards."
>>
>> However, Newsweek misses the better quote in capturing a Percy
>> opinion -- Walker Percy's himself. His Signposts essays dwell
>> considerably on racism and segregation -- timely of course
>> considering the era of their writing -- and the Life in the South
>> section was immensely illuminating to me, as a non-Southerner, on the
>> problem Southerners had with integration (which Percy was for, of
>> course). His discussion of the fact that the South had no public
>> space probably goes as far to explain the problem as any I've heard yet.
>
>> I think the South's history of racism, his family's political
>> heritage of political activism and "noblesse oblige" as he himself
>> calls it, northern Mississippi's "backwards" political agendas that
>> his southern-born relatives spent their lives battling, the fact that
>> just a few years ago the Germans just barely failed attempt to
>> decimate an entire race (and the U.S. did not enter the war to save
>> the Jew, but for other interests), the heated racial conflicts and
>> out-and-out riots of the 50's/60's, and the fact that much of this
>> was playing out on his home state's front yard, such as James
>> Meredith entering U. of Miss. -- all of this caused Percy to be
>> intensely concerned about racism.
>>
>
> Hogwash. I can't help but feel sometimes that peopleon this list
> believe that if Percy were alive today he would be a Democrat. Even I
> was a Democrat (Deathocrat, Damnednocrat..) around the time Percy
> died. Percy certainly did not fit the demographics of the current
> Democratic party if you can believe the color chart from the 2000
> election (big city, Northeast or Pacific coast). And his beliefs were
> adamantly pro-life (e.g. Signposts 340) (which is why I had to finally
> switch parties in '92, also flushing 100+ years of still rabid
> Democratic heritage down the potty).
>
> I think Percy was most interested in justice, not political labels
> ("If you want peace, work for justice" JP II). That's why Catholicism
> was so important to him. Catholicism is about the pursuit of truth,
> wherever it goes, rather than wherever it "was". (BTW, most fervent
> Catholics are now Republicans if you believe the polls)
>
> The Republicans also did not start the Civil War to free the slave,
> yet they did. Go figure on Lott's remark, it is certainly not
> representative of the Republican party. Good riddance if there was
> any truth to it. Nor are the Democrats symbolic of progressive
> thinking (anymore) -- they now represent the special interests that
> are the same bigoted special interests that Percy's ancestors fought.
> Only the color has changed.
>
>
> Mike
>
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