Walker Percy - Lancelot

There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won’t have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won’t have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I’d rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn’t blown it: the old Catholic way. I Lancelot and you Percival, the only two to see the Grail if you recall. Did you find the Grail? You don’t look like it. Then we knew what a woman should be like, your Lady, and what a man should be like, your Lord. I’d have fought for your Lady, because Christ had the broadsword. Now you’ve gotten rid of your Lady and taken the sword from Christ.

I won’t have it. I won’t have it your way or their way. I won’t have it your way with your God-bless-everything-because-it’s-good-only-don’t-but-if-you-do-it’s-not-so-bad. Just say whether a sweet hot cunt is good or not. I won’t have it your way and I won’t have it their way, the new way. A generation stoned and pussy free and devalued, pricks after pussy, pricks after pricks, pussy after pussy. But most of all pussy after pricks. Christ what a country! A nation of 100 million voracious cunts. I will not have my son or my daughter grow up in such a world. When I say I won’t have it, I’m serious. I won’t have it. I won’t have my son … Very well, I will make another confession: My son is a homosexual now and I can understand why. He told me he was terrified of all the pussy after him. All the girls want to fuck and it scared him. Think of it: all those hot little cunts waiting to see if he was up to servicing them. Well, he couldn’t, he was too scared. He found it easier, the scared little prick, to be with other scared little pricks. And I can’t say I blame him. Now there are four of them, four nice scared young men living happily together in the French Quarter needlepointing Louis Quinze chairs.

So you fucked it up good and we’re going to have to pull it out for you. We? Who are we? You will find out soon enough. It is enough for you to know how it is going to be, for we are the new Reformation, which is to say we are going to tell you something and show you something you should have known all along.

We are going to set it out for you, what is good and what is bad, and no Jew-Christian waffling bullshit about it. What we are is the last of the West. What we are is the best of you, Percival, and the best of me, Lancelot, and of Lee and Richard and Saladin and Leonidas and Hector and Agamemnon and Richthofen and Charlemagne and Clovis and Martel. Like them we might even accept your Christ but this time you will not emasculate him or us. We’ll take the Grail you didn’t find but we’ll keep the broadsword and the great warrior Archangel of Mont-Saint-Michel and our Christ will be the stern Christ of the Sistine. And as for your sweet Jesus and your guitar-banging and ass-wiggling nuns, and your love feasts and peace kisses: there is no peace.

If I were a Jew, I’d know what to do. It’s easy. I’d be in Israel with the sabras. They’re my kind. The only difference between them and the Crusaders is that the Crusaders lost. Ha, isn’t that a switch, come to think of it — that the only Crusaders left in the entire Western world are the Israelis, the very Jews who huddled and shrank and grinned and nodded for two thousand years? The Jews are lucky. They know who they are and they have Israel. We have to make our own Israel, but we know who we are.

We know who we are and where we stand. There will be leaders and there will be followers. There are now, only neither knows which is which. There will be men who are strong and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake but for their own sake. There will be virtuous women who are proud of their virtue and there will be women of the street who are there to be fucked and everyone will know which is which. You can’t tell a whore from a lady now, but you will then. You will do right, not because of Jew-Christian commandments but because we say it is right. There will be honorable men and there will be thieves, just as now, but the difference is one will know which is which and there will be no confusion, no nice thieves, no honorable Mafia. There are not many of us but since we are ready to die and no one else is, we shall prevail.

Women? What about women? You heard me. A man, a youth, a boy will know which women are to be fucked and which to be honored and one will know who to fuck and who to honor.

Freedom? The New Woman will have perfect freedom. She will be free to be a lady or a whore.

Don’t women have any say in this? Of course. And we will value them exactly as much as they value themselves. They won’t like it much, you say? The hell with them. They won’t have anything to say about it. Not only are they not strong enough. They don’t care enough. Guinevere didn’t think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods.

No more fuck-up about who fucks and who gets fucked. The best of women will be what we used to call ladies, like your Virgin. Our Lady. The men? The best of them will be strong and brave and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake, but like an Apache youth or a Lacedemonian who denies himself to be strong. The others can whoremonger and screw whom they choose. But we will prevail.

No, it is not you who are offering me something, salvation, a choice, whatever. I am offering you a choice. Do you want to become one of us? You can without giving up a single thing you believe in except milksoppery. I repeat, it was your Lord who said he came to bring not peace but a sword. We may even save your church for you.

You are pale as a ghost. What did you whisper? Love? That I am full of hatred, anger? Don’t talk to me of love until we shovel out the shit.

What? What happened then? Don’t look so fearful. Nothing. I saw a dirty movie, that’s all.

Friday afternoon at the movies. That’s what I should call my own little film or videotape, which Elgin, my cinematographer, made of our little film company resting from their labors.

It was all very simple. Elgin came to my pigeonnier after lunch, entered as briskly as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, too briskly, with a large valise-like box and a case of reels and, without looking at me, set his suitcase on my desk, opened it, plugged it in, clipped two wires to the back of my TV, showed me how to put the reels in, and, without once having raised his eyes, made as if to leave.

“Elgin. Wait.”

He stood in the doorway, freeze-framed, waiting for me to push a button and set him going.

“Elgin, the film company is pulling out tomorrow. So you might be able to pull your equipment out today. I’ll let you know after I’ve seen these.”

“I done already pulled it out,” said Elgin not briskly at all but sullenly, as if I had violated some unspoken agreement. What agreement?

“Then you—”

“You won’t need to do any more taping.”

I looked at him.

“I see. That’ll be all. Go put your tour-guide coat on.”

He looked at me strangely, at first I thought sullenly, then I saw he was ashamed. I felt a sudden anger. Later, to my astonishment, it came over me why I was angry. Again a confession which does me little credit but it is important I tell you the truth. I had to admit I was angry because he had looked . Looked at the videotape. Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in others. For I had expected Elgin to do what I told him, to be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not listen or look. More than that: I had expected that somehow he could not look — just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white woman in the same hotel room. Cannot even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible.