Jerry Ward's Blogspot

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME (some words stolen from Clint Smith's Counting Descent ) We are also always being reborn, unnamed and pushed away. There is a watchtower too certain of its own authority. I remember the first time and refuse not to ask "is anything built for what it ultimately becomes?" The wheels of a child's first bike can travel into unearthly seasons. I remember the first time. The wheels want people to remember that they once existed beyond this place, that they still do. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 31, 2017

    Ramcat Reads #14   & #15 Benforado, Adam.   Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice .   New York: Crown, 2015. Whether we are trying to make sense of vice or holiness, innocence or guilt, stupidity or intelligence, we are condemned to think with rather than against the tides of media.   Our contemporary fascination with social networking positions us to be complicit.   We resist, then discover resistance does not suffice.   The labels or ideological stances we adopt ----independent, conservative, liberal ---eventually collapse under what both David Walker and Frantz Fanon understood wretchedness to be.   Our souls may escape to elsewhere, but our minds cannot.   Given this scenario, Adam Benforado's work should be required reading for the temporary relief it offers.   The book should be required reading   for members of Congress (especially for those who pretend to be Democrats), for public schoo...

SEEKING REDEMPTION ( for Stefan M. Wheelock ) Parents of recovery sleep in the snow with pearls of wrath and swine. Truly, in a barbaric culture, as a wise man saw while inspecting locks of law, "the possibilities for excellence may come from anyone," or anything or anywhere --- a rotten apple in a diamond, a trump card in a tower, a body beheaded and splayed on an underground railway. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. August 28, 2017

Kalamu ya Salaam's Questions Regarding American Character Questions :   The fundamental issue is simply: can we, as human beings, control ourselves; specifically, can we Americans control ourselves?   Is violence so deeply and indelibly enmeshed into our character that there is no hope of our society existing without egregious acts of social violence against ourselves and others?   Can we control ourselves?   Can anyone or any force control us?   Thus far, our government has not [ done ] so, nor has our religion.   Is there any solution or must we perforce of the American character just have to learn to live with and tolerate violence? From Salaam's   email ("some quick thoughts on violence") to Jerry Ward, dated 8/13/2017 Responses when answers do not suffice :   An unorthodox belief drives my responses: the human animal is fundamentally evil and violent but endowed, by virtue of " relatively free will" with remarkable po...

TASTE AND FEAR OF LEARNING Taste has created an abyss between African American novels which are canonized by teaching in college classrooms and those canonized by normal reading practices, and we are damned lucky the abyss exists. Consider the novels that won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) Literary Awards between 2007 and 2017: Marita Golden , After Stephan L. Carter, New England White Diane McKinney-Whetstone, Trading Dreams at Midnight Pamela Samuels Young, Buying Time Bernice McFadden, Glorious Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow Martha Southgate, The Taste of Salt Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie Leonard Pitts, Freeman James McBride, The Good Lord Bird Lolita Tademy, Citizens Creek Toni Morrison, God Help the Child Jacqueline Wood, Another Brooklyn Only Toni Morrison might be discussed in an African American literature course at a HWCU. Poetry was not a BCALA award category u...

DAMAGED JEALOUS THINGS At the apex of summer, they ---the spiders --- they had   a hard time of it, of coming through the wax in his ears to reach the lush desert , the site and throbbing tissue of madness in the brain of the Janus Messiah. At the apex of summer, his left-leering compass jazzed and polarized them to rite-riots. Blondes ---so it seemed to them ---the spiders -- tend to reign by elections , to rain in a sand castle burned in 1812. As American vodka is damned to do, he cursed the media bitches at the apex of summer for raping his witches, ravishing his patriotic jelly-roll. Militant, the Janus Messiah tweet-muscled himself. Consubstantial with his father and his sons, thrice divisive, he noise-slapped the opioid enslaved at the apex of summer, and they --the spiders --- slender-threaded neurons and synapses in the lush but deadly desert of his mind. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   ...

Crisis of the Caucasian   Intellectual Scholars of WHITE STUDIES have shirked their responsibility   to do objective research and publish books entitled Mainstreaming White Power The Souls of White Folk Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in White America Confederate Memorials and the Calculus of Memory The Ancient Crow: Selective Incarceration in the Age of Universal Madness The Confessions of Karl Marx and   Leo Strauss Homer's Nubian Epics White Power and Freudian Discontent Policing the White Woman The Islamic Body in Pain A Theory of Injustice Shakespeare's White Nationalist Plays and Poetry What White Fathers Refuse to Tell Their Sons The Limits of Anti-Hamitic Literary Critiques Faust and Frankenstein Gone Wild Terrorism as an Act of Love Scholars of WHITE STUDIES try to nurture intellectual hegemony and confirmative action by denying that WHITE...

TRUMP'S MAGNIFICAT (in praise of Putin the Red Dragon) My heart does magnify your wind And my head rejoices in you my savior. For you have annotated the low esteem of your apostle; for, it is great, from henceforth all hysteria will call me blasted. For you who are haughty have done to me naughty things; and ghostly is your name. And your mendacity resides in them who hear you from her story to history. You have sown despair with your hands; you have scattered hubris in the imagery of my soul. You have desecrated the mighty in their seats and rescued me from prevarication. You have brained the rich with good things; and the hungry, you have sent to the garbage pails. You have exalted me, your most obedient serf, in remembrance of your mercy; as you preached to my father, Judas in the chariot, and to my spawn forever. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.          ...

THE RULE OF LAW versus THE ROLE OF MADNESS (revised) One   conception of politics, according to Paul W. Kahn, involves "a commitment to both history and territory" (time and space), and "the rule of law is an organization of institutions, practices, persons, and objects with the ongoing historical and spatial project that is the state. The state occupies time and space not as an object in the natural world, but as an imaginative construction of temporal and spatial meanings.   The state's time is history; its space is territory.   These are the subjects of a legal aesthetic" [ The Cultural Study of Law ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 40].   It is unfortunate that few of us were ever taught that the United States of America as a state is actually a work of fiction upon which we are obligated, as citizens, to impose a patriotic sense of something possessing four dimensions, celebrated in flags,   song, pledge, and prayer.   It is unf...

Interview answer, August 12, 2017 Wang :   Would you please elaborate briefly on the impact of Donald Trump's triumph in the presidential election over the ethnic groups and the ethnic literatures.   Will Trump's presidential triumph produce a dramatic difference for African American literature and literary criticism? Ward :   What you call Trump's triumph is one part of a dramatic change in what many American citizens believe and think about the political ecology of our democratic experiment, our identity as a nation in the world order.   One of the reasons for Trump's debatable "triumph" is the resurgence of ethnic hatred, a probable backlash against President Barack Obama's eight years of trying to promote the audacity of hope.   President Trump and those American citizens who "love" him unconditionally are creating an environment in which nonsense is normal and despair is necessary.   Thus, it is logical to speculate that the new...

Red Flags of Accountability VOTE Two words we may use frequently before and after the October 14, 2017 elections in New Orleans are accountable and accountability .   Simple definitions from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary --- accountable --adj. 1. subject to giving an account: answerable.   2. capable of being accounted for: explainable.   Syn   see responsible accountability --n. The definitions in Black's Law Dictionary are likewise blunt---- accountability .   State of being responsible or answerable.   See also Liability. accountable .   Subject to pay; responsible; liable. It is reasonable to demand that candidates be accountable and to question whether there is sufficient accountability in the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board. It is fairly transparent what we are doing when we demand something; when we raise a question, it is not exac...

1981 Questions In Search of 2017 Answers ( Thirty-nine writers answered the original questions in 1981. Some of those questions have been revised .) Which writers influenced your decision to write?   Rank them in order of importance. Do you feel that significant aspects of African American   experiences in the USA have been either   ignored or insufficiently explored in black writing? Have black writers given sufficient attention to new directions in non-print art? Have international liberation struggles inspired you to reinvestigate history? Have black writers created enough literature for children?   Have they created a body of materials that might be used in alternative education systems? Has black writing served to increase the literacy rate in the USA? Has gender in the USA had a permanent effect on writing? Do black readers support black writers? Have black critics created   a sustainable   environment for...

Mrs. Dinah Talks about Her Kitchen (after a poem Clint Smith leaked from Uncle Tom's Cabin ) Honey , let me tell you.   That cat-haired Ms. Ophelia had the gall ---- the gall I swear ---to duck-walk her behind into my kitchen with question and jingling keys.   Not knowing how to address a lady proper-like, she   Yankee-screeched: "What's the drawer for, Dinah? why is the nutmeg in conversation with the Baptist hymn book?" Ain't got the sense God granted the goose. Don't know nutmeg can keep company with garlic, being as how herbs and spices is all God's children. Don't know pinto beans from coffee and poisoned cognition about the sacred, that shall ---mark my language -- finally end the enslavements. Soon and very sooner they will see how Africans role down South. Likewise up North. What audacity to ask why my hair grease be talking to onions. Tain't none of her busi...

Death of the Post-colonial/Birth of the Post-Responsible                 The Swedish scholar Stefan Helgesson makes a timely intervention in a recent issue of PMLA .   His comments   in "Post-anticolonialism" (PMLA 132.2 (2017): 164-170) is quite what is needed to characterize   our global swamp of academic pretensions in the face of palpable human suffering.   We all pretend.   We   might ask the question "Why Write?" in our time and location for reasons akin to Jean-Paul Sartre's asking Qu'est-ce que la litt é rature   in the twentieth century. And we need to answer our question with reference to the impossibility of our totally rejecting   joy, pain, and thinking. Even if we contend it is possible (and ,for whatever reason, desirable) for a human being to be not-human, to be a thing, a machine, a linguistic sign or a figment of another's imagining,   com...

PIMP POLITICS AND THE LOWER NINTH WARD Approximately ten weeks remain before the mayoral election occurs in New Orleans.   Voters have a much checking of conscience and gathering of facts to do before they vote early or cast ballots on October 14, 2017.   The gravity of our situation was dramatized on August 5, when the Lower 9th Ward Voters Coalition sponsored a forum at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, 5300 North Rocheblave Street.   The impressive school building mocks the surrounding   environment.   Although it has been reported that vast sums were allocated for recovery and restoration in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area is still an eye-shocking reminder of the devastation caused in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent breaking of the levees.   It is a visual accusation, an index of race relations and severe inequity in the Crescent City. Voters who attended this forum may have been scorched   by   justified residua...

Photograph of a President as a Thing Alone and aloof the object sits in epic meditation where panic inhabits a pen. Yes, the rule of law is unhinged in bright moments of life that shadow the roles of madness. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 3, 2017

The NOPD and the Consent Decree:   An Election Issue VOTE If a candidate for mayor or a city council seats says that the 2013 Consent Decree hampers the efforts of police officers to maintain law and order in the city, listen politely and request that the candidate provide a written explanation of the reasoning that validates the statement.   If you want something to play with, esteemed candidates,   please know the Consent Decree is not a toy. VOTE VICs (very important citizens) need to know the lead headline for Crime Safety Report 1.3 (August 2017) announces:    " Consent Decree CAUSES Crime ."   The logic of this cause and effect proposition is suspect. Nevertheless, it is aided and abetted by a statement attributed to Captain Michael Glasser, head of the Police Association of New Orleans---- "The decree is extremely restrictive.   It's   labor intensive.   There's a great deal of scrutiny, and there's a p...