Sunday, October 26, 2014
Random Percy thought
I was thinking (yet again) of Walker Percy's perfect 1971 prediction of modern America. He pinned Al Sharpton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Toyota Priuseseses, along with nearly all of the idiocies and evil that brought those people and things into prominence. He pinned down the misuse of science to justify political insanity. Near the end he has iPhones creating chaos through fiendishly dirty autocorrects.
One character that I hadn't been able to match was the Satan type, a pharmaceutical salesman named Art Immelmann. The name is rife with metaphors, the ethnicity is obviously accurate, but who is his modern equivalent? Big Pharma is a fairly dirty business, but it does some actual good along with the dirt. Not Satanic. Immelmann isn't a lawyer or banker, which would seem like better choices.
Got it. The iPhone connection leads to the proper correlation. He's a tech magnate like Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or ... Jeffrey Immelt. He stole the protagonist's invention, which was a portable diagnostic tool for physical and character ailments, and turned it into an iPhone.
He's Apple.
Immediate update: Just after writing the above, I went to find some local news about last night's storm, and bumped into this piece on Elon Musk. He's warning about the danger of letting software control our lives. Though he's not quoting Percy, he's envisioning exactly the same final scene I just mentioned, and he's TAKING PERCY'S SIDE! Amazing. Even a techie can see the light sometimes.
So I need to remove Musk from the above list!
¶ 5:10 PM 
