The newswatcher
Desmond, John F.
WALKER PERCY: A TRIBUTE THE NEWSWATCHER THE TUBE & THE COSMOS Just before dinner a friend called to report the news that Walker Percy had died (May 10) of cancer at his home in Covington,...
...And I think about Percy's deep sense of wonder at the little things in creation, and how he had taught us to truly see them...
...Percy was seventy-three...
...Then, when I had finished, I did something completely Percyean, something so ordinary and yet so momentous that its momentousness is lost daily in its very ordinariness...
...The shattered leavings of a meal of crabs, or an abandoned burnt-out shopping mall...
...Watching the tape of the desecrated graves, I remembered Fr...
...Yet as I watched ABC's Peter Jennings recount the day's "major" events, the presence of Percy kept superimposing itself on the news stories, almost like one of those orbiting spirits that moves through his novels...
...I ate my dinner in silence, thinking about him all the while...
...Instead, Bush announces to his college audience a goal to put Americans on Mars early in the next century...
...There was nothing for me to do, of course, except to say a prayer at his passing...
...And again it is Fr...
...I watched the six o'clock national news on TV...
...An ordinary news day, as they say...
...In Love in the Ruins, Dr...
...Smith's dire warning to Dr...
...I thought about Percy's obsession with the meaning of the Jews, their significance as a people and a sign in history...
...Segment One: President Bush on his way to Texas for a commencement exercise speech...
...The funky drabness of old moviehouses and drive-ins...
...Segment Five: Environmentalists fighting to protect the red squirrel as an endangered species against developers planning to build a giant telescope (to better "see" the cosmos...
...The muted four o'clock afternoon sunlight on a bayou...
...California took the brunt of much of Percy's satiric wit...
...A body mutilated...
...WALKER PERCY: A TRIBUTE THE NEWSWATCHER THE TUBE & THE COSMOS Just before dinner a friend called to report the news that Walker Percy had died (May 10) of cancer at his home in Covington, Louisiana...
...That specious dream founders on the rocks of racial violence in Love in the Ruins, where Percy shows with darkness and humor that no plan of economic and social "equality" will solve our problem unless our hearts are changed...
...President Mitterand warns his countrymen against a new wave of anti-Semitism...
...Segment Three: Jewish graves desecrated in cemetery in France...
...And his infallible gift for creating that greatest human mystery people talking making words to name and locate themselves in this most dislocated of centuries...
...Close: The six o'clock report was over and I started to turn off the TV...
...At least not on prime time, the six o'clock report...
...Perhaps $25 billion...
...sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middleaged daydreams...
...Percy loved to muse upon the sorry state of American religion in our times, especially Christianity in all its stripes...
...How badly it has failed us and we it, especially when we become shouting ideologues deaf to the simplicity and wonder of the gospel message...
...Tom More is reminded that Jesus warned us not about dirty books but about "high places...
...He would have nothing to say about new taxes, the reporter on Air Force One stated, though the national debt is growing by millions every day...
...Segment Two: Jennings reports on racial and ethnic gang wars in Los Angeles, Many gang members, refugees from Latin America, laugh at "drive-by killings" (what would Percy the semiotician have done with that bit of Americanese...
...It turns the acorn busily, inspecting it with care, giving it a tap here and there with its teeth, its eyes bright and scrutinous as a gem inspector's...
...Not that I expected to see an obituary on Percy...
...Estimated cost of this future venture...
...Segment Four: Reports claim that evangelist Oral Roberts may buy the PTL televangel ministry, formerly run by Jim and Tammy Bakker, for $6 million...
...I stare at the tape of a tiny red squirrel perched on a fallen tree trunk...
...Nothing spectacular...
...The single blooming geranium, splendidly healthy, in the cell where children were exterminated by Nazi scientists...
...The unsentimental, funny, yet compassionate portraits of the maimed in body and spirit which he drew in novel after novel...
...JOHN F. DESMOND John F. Desmond, professor of English at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, has written on Percy for a number of reviews, including the Southern Quarterly.he Southern Quarterly...
...Certainly nothing about the Good News Percy so joyously celebrated no message in the bottle or strange sign from a voice of authority beyond the seas...
...The darting flight of robins, hawks, and martens...
...Now it seems Jews are not even safe in death...
...He saw it as the far edge of American nuttiness, the burnt-out hulk of the delusory American Dream, the end-all of the gnostic vision of Utopia that is engrained in the American soul...
...A giddy thing indeed is this creature man, as Percy knew so well...
...Smith who warns Dr...
...It sits on its haunches, broad tail pulsating up and down, tiny front paws holding an acorn...
...Or was there...
...As the news credits rolled past, in the background the tiny red squirrel was still perched on a tree trunk, carefully inspecting the minute and intricate pattern of the acorn's crown, as if beholding a mystery still to be tapped...
...because they're so accustomed to street shootouts, rocket and mortar attacks, planted bomb explosions, etc., from their own villages and cities back home...
...Not to mention finding ways to help humanity deal with its real "lostness," our situation as dislocated journeyers in space, unmoored travelers whose spiritual hunger is so desperate that no amount of technical knowledge about space can ever appease it...
...More about "showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people, particularly our own families unkindness to those close to us is such a pitiful thing doing what we can for our poor unhappy country things which...
...I kept thinking of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, that wonderfully sardonic and brilliant prophecy of our times...
...The severe metallic sculpture of the Holy Ghost roosting atop a New Orleans church...
...We spend billions of dollars, Percy had shown, searching the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial life and engaging in all sorts of "space exploration" (a phrase he would have laughed over), when in fact we know almost nothing about what it means to be a human being who must live in the world and die...
...Tom More in The Thanatos Syndrome that if the "enlightened" scientists have their way in promoting a Utopian "purified" society at all costs, they would "end up killing Jews" like the Nazis...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 12
