Jerry Ward's Blogspot

July 31, 1943 How indifferent the day is, its great physicality ignoring natural divisions of nothing bearing deceit of numbers and names as rural vices make urban virtues escape your mouth to dance inside your ears. Integrity is all/so more important as wise knowing elects time's gravity, opts for finitude, steals eternity from a star. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. July 31, 2017

END OF JULY NOTES FOR VOTERS IN NEW ORLEANS As we account for ourselves to ourselves as voting citizens of New Orleans, we might keep in mind that the history of our location is a tale of two cities, one richly seasoned with poverty and the other flavored with degrees of wealth.   Who we vote for or against entails many considerations.   We have to think about power from angles of class, heritage, ecology, race, religion, gender, and some abstractions that defy precise language.   Or language fit to print.   As Mayor Landrieu recently reminded us, our city is the music capital of the USA.   Joy and pain are the parents of music.   But enough of fantasy and culinary dreams.   Take up the practical burden of making "good" decisions when we vote on October 14, 2017. Sponsored by EngageNOLA on July 27, 2017, "A Talk with the Mayor: A Civic Engagement Social" at Peoples' Health New Orleans Jazz Market was a necessary learning moment.   I thought it wa

Youth and Politics Hashim Walter is the youngest candidate in the mayor's race.   His running for office isn't a joke or a whim.   As a man who represents a future for politics in New Orleans, he is making   a serious gesture. It is reassuring that he has chosen to carry an enormous burden. Despite his youth, Walters can provide valuable insights about priorities and new directions in governing.   We must give him respect.   We must also hold him to the same standards of honesty we demand of more experienced candidates for presenting a vision, convincing us his sense of duty is genuine, and answering questions about policies. Before he discloses more about himself, I request that he answer one question we might not pose for other mayoral candidates.   How will he build a coalition of Native American, African American, Caucasian American, Latina/Latino American, and Asian American voters to support his candidacy ?    His answer should provide candid and cr

SHORT STORY In the exhausted language of the academic world, President Donald J. Trump was PUT IN CONVERSATION WITH Janie Crawford, whose eyes knew how to watch God when she put truth in her mouth. On a national, ultra-conservative news program, Crawford said to Trump: "When you pull down yo' britches, you look like de change uh life." Hearing only what inflated his ego, Trump heard: "When you pull down your bitches, you look like you changing her life." Trump rotated his eyes 45 degrees, grinned, and said: "That's a great statement!" Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             July 26, 2017

Imagining Partial Reality James Boyd White ends Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) with an eloquent remark about Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela as writers: None of these writers thought he lived in a just or perfect world.   Everyone saw evil , in himself and in others;   everyone saw defects of mind and language, in himself and in others.   Yet each found a way of living in an unjust world by imagining an ideal into a partial reality. (307) Such neoliberal sentiment might encourage fresh thinking among voters in New Orleans, voters who will elect a mayor and seven city council members on October 14, 2017.   Each voter knows the city is neither just nor perfect.   Each witnesses major and minor evil on a daily basis.   Each is aware of defects of thought and language in the city's economic and political dialogue, in how priorities are triaged.   Whether each voter has a

IMPERATIVES 2017 The mask wears a face --- deceptive, canonical, beatific, abysmal --- a satin doll face Frankenstein stitched and starched. Obviously, the mask needs no music ---suffered to be played, no 45 record of demise. Obviously, the face --- anthropocene, branded curated, daemonic --- maps territory so familiar it fails to ground governance. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             July 20, 2017

HAND LABORERS ARE IMPORTANT PEOPLE They risk their health each week to improve the quality of life in New Orleans.   According to government statistics, the median annual wage for these workers in May 2016 was   $24,880.   They are not required to have formal education, but they must "be physically able to perform the work" according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.   Unfortunately, the Bureau doesn't mention that these people who are classified as "hand laborers   and material movers" must be psychologically able to endure being thought of as untouchables are thought of in India. Class and caste are integral features of American democracy. The workers   are human "things" in the economy necessary for maintaining a relatively decent urban environment.   In the bad old days when we were still capable of using plain English, the workers were called garbage collectors. We rarely think about how hard they work or about how abjectly mis

Charbonnet and the NOPD Consent Decree One of the most serious of the 18 candidates for mayor, Judge Desiree Charbonnet (Ret.) issued a "Comprehensive Crime Plan" on July 17, 2017.   By doing so, Charbonnet sent a serious message to citizens about the kind of mayor she would be if elected.   There is much in her plan that would please the FORWARD NEW ORLEANS coalition, especially regarding public safety as a priority.   The coalition argues that New Orleans needs a "top-tier police superintendent."   Charbonnet avoids the ambiguity of the wording "top-tier" and suggests, in one immediate action item that we need to "conduct a nationwide search for the best Police Chief…We must have the best available Police Chief…and give her or him the latitude to run the department without daily interference and micromanaging from the mayor's office ."   Question: Is Michael S. Harrison, who has headed NOPD since October 14, 2014, who has much ex

HYPE Hype matters. In his foreword for    Didion, Joan. South and West: From a Notebook ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) Nicholas Rich asserts that   Didion's prose has "cool majesty" as well as "an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain" (xi).   The assertion and the subject of the assertion invite scrutiny.   Truth be told, the sentence "Everyone in the place seemed to have been there a long time, and to know everyone else." (29) is neither immaculate nor intimidating.   It might refer as much to several restaurants in New Orleans or a now defunct restaurant in Oxford, Mississippi   where everyone used to have breakfast as to a café in downtown Biloxi in the 1970s.   Rich's exaggeration is like a Donald J. Trump tweet, a desperate move. But its banality excites no one who knows red beans and rice about public relations in the Republic of American Letters.   Inflation is the hot air that keeps a reputation aflo

TOM DENT AND THE NEW WAVES   OF SOUTHERN STUDIES On July 11, 2017, I had the pleasure of reading the uncorrected proof of Title:   New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader Edited by Kalamu Ya Salaam Retail Price: 28.95 Publisher:    University of New Orleans Press Format:   Paperback Page Count: 446 ISBN: 978-1-60801-149-0 Trim:   6 x 8.75 in Publication Date: 12/01/17 Distributed by Hopkins Fulfillment Services Media Contact:   G.K. Darby, gkdarby1@uno.edu 504-280-7457 Dent was one of my closest friends from 1973 until his death on June 6, 1998.   Our shared interest in literatures, cultures, and histories shaped, and continue in part   to shape, my commitments social,   academic and otherwise.   Dent introduced me to many of his friends in New Orleans, the vernacular intellectuals who have given depth and breadth to a unique city in our nation.   As I read the proof, I was blessed by the African connectedness of the spirits of then

On Poems by Clint Smith One of my friends who protests, much to my amusement and my dismay, that poetry should be plain enough for lumpenprolitariat   readers to understand would like Smith, Clint. Counting Descent .   Los Angeles: Write Bloody Publishing, 2016. He and Smith are natives of New Orleans, and they share cultural kinship from the angles of tradition and attitudes.   Smith's poems would seem at first glance to satisfy my friend's demands for transparency and easy recognition. Smith and my friend seem to be brothers.   "Seem" is the operative word, because Smith's poems are not scripts for greeting cards. They do not confuse respect for integrity with deceptive sentiment.   What my friend would assume is the inviting easiness of Smith's work is the complex simplicity that informs the genuinely American   poems of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Smith's poems, like those of Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hughes and Gwendolyn Br

INVISIBLE WORMS IN ROSES There's a bit of relief to be had from the intense heat of Trumpism by coldly reading The Death of White Sociology (New York: Vintage, 1973), edited by Joyce A. Ladner.   It is a matter of common sense.   Conflicting premises, murky motives for doing one kind of research rather than another, blind spots sprawling in humanistic and social science projects in 2017, the rainbow colors of methodologies ----these all highlight the rightness of Ladner's claim in 1973 that "sociology, like history, economics and psychology, exists in a domain where color, ethnicity, and social class are of primary importance.   And as long as this holds true, it is impossible for sociology to claim that it maintains value neutrality in its approaches" (xix).   It is equally impossible for humanities to possess value neutrality. As Trumpism ups the ante for indigenous knowing as well as convoluted theoretical interrogations and interventions, being cold

Out of its infinite wisdom, Google has destroyed my old blogspot.