On the Square Today

Micah Mattix considers the legacy of novelist Walker Percy :

Along with Flannery O’Connor, he is often considered one of the leading Catholic writers of the South in the twentieth century. His work—from the National Book Award winning The Moviegoe r to the fast-paced The Thanatos Syndrome —captures the malaise and potential absurdity and horror of a post-Christian America with compassionate aplomb. Yet, while interest in O’Connor continues to grow, interest in Percy has plateaued somewhat. There is, of course, the new Walker Percy Center at Loyola University in New Orleans, and, hopefully, the soon to be completed film by Win Riley, but according to these and other measures—works of criticism, biographies, and collected works—the day clearly belongs to O’Connor.

But why?

Also, David Goldman asks, ” Who Will Bail Out the Bailer-Outers? ”

Just when we were told that the governments and central banks of the world had put the financial crisis behind us, the governments of Europe found it necessary to commit more than a trillion dollars to support of the financial system – a $962 billion facility to support the weak periphery of the Eurozone, plus an unspecified volume of outright purchases of government bonds by the European Central Bank as well as Germany’s Bundesbank, not to mention an emergency swap facility by which the Federal Reserve will lend Europe all the dollars it requires.