Jerry Ward's Blogspot

SAVAGE SALVATION   (New Orleans Version) Does your faith have fangs? Does your faith coil, slither and confess coonass delusions in the sweatbox of a French-flavored church? Is your hope a worm who deflowers his sons to toughen them to bump stock patriotic   dreams with ammo fleur de lis? Does your charity forage with abandoned   mothers in Galatoire garbage bins and suck the climax of a pagan prayer, the pimp sign of Confederate despair? Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             October 30, 2017

IN THE DEN   To spite conservation of chaos, the whiskey, beer, wine rituals, Homeric   remembered death as a many splendid thing, a drug-laced funk of power cycling through thirty-five trillion visions of primate lust, bereft of sanctuary or environmental   love or tailored liberty the deer couple listen, being avatars of American Gothic evidence, they listen, despite the dreadful   comedy of   their eyes once stymied by headlights now become myth mirrors for the swish of paint on skin; the deer couple listen, anxious buck and angry doe do listen. To spite the beautiful lie that spirits die, the deer couple survey the true grit of greed, the   rise and fall of thirty-five trillion versions, record the negative progress of human truth. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                     ...

TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT                 Terms of endearment and engagement matter as greatly as the sanctity of Black Lives,   indeed as much as the sanctity of human life. The single words, phrases, or complete sentences we speak and write have weight in our presentations of self and our constructions of what we designate "reality" to be. The language we take for granted is central in struggles for social justice as well as in scientific propositions regarding the nature of Nature. Our endangered Constitutional   rights to enjoy liberty,   to speak with unconditional honesty, and to maximize our innate value must be rescued from people who, in the words of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., idolize a value gap that deforms humanity and American democracy. Diagnosis of illness and health, critiques of vampire capitalism,   scrutiny of business contracts and the rule of law ---all of these ...

IMPERATIVES     The discipline whispers nary a syllable regarding the marriage of bird feathers and moss, is damned, Lord knows, to descant and once again descant on phallic cigars and virgin roses. That's anthropology for you, ever casting buckets of mercy into water thrice threatened, pulling up ice cubes that sizzle under the heat of the unknown, knowing the answer before the advent of the question. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. October 19, 2017

Epiphany at Crabby Jack's The question about the poem was legitimate and aesthetic in the sense of what is always aesthetic outside of the philosophy of art;   the answer was judicious and aesthetic in the context of American race-drenched conversations.   The poem, Clint Smith's "Counterfactual" ----- Counting Descent (Los Angeles: Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), page 25 ---illuminates the aboriginal darkness that ensures the racial question shall never transcend its history in the United States of America. The psychiatrist, Counting Descent in hand, obviously aware of his New Orleans whiteness, remarked that he found the poem to be sensitive.   He asked Clint Smith's father to explain the provenance of the poem, to explain how Clint Smith overcame the fear affirmed by his father's having "the talk" with him and deriding him "for being so naïve" and telling him he "…couldn't be out here   acting the same...

BEDLAM REVISITED His wife's a trophy whore; his daughter's a piece of ass; his demon son's the Devil's spore, bereft of human DNA and class. A.             To the extent that the pronoun "we" refers to the number of American citizens, "we" are not a nation divided.   We are a nation fragmented.   We are millions of pieces of angry candy.   Each piece is frustrated, mystified by events that signal the amorality of Nature and by the baroque rhetoric that pretends to explain something. B.             Logical statements about people, cultural phenomena, poverty and wealth,   moral goodness, pragmatic prudence, justice, compassion and civility, faith and redemption,   and respect for the dignity of human life are compromised.   In the Age of Trump, these statements can't avoid being transparently surreal. C.   ...

ABSENT EVIDENCE Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Whitest White House" ( The Atlantic , October 2017) is a substantial essay on the ascent of Donald J. Trump to the presidency and on the progress to date on   tragic reshaping of the Office of the President.   Coates's tone is satiric, rich with all the audible and obvious   tropes native to neo-liberal discourses.   His prose, to borrow words from the poet Sterling D. Plumpp, is ornate with smoke.   And it needs to be said the smoke is a bit stronger than the fire. It is an illustration of why the claim that many self-identified white American   readers are charmed by Coates's writing has merit: he speaks with authority to and for them , affirming the vacillating   status of their deeply frustrated whiteness.   Their tongues are as tied as their minds are knotted. They hear in his work the lamentations of Hamlet, the admonitions of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. , the faint echoes of R...

EXISTENTIAL NEWS His wife's a trophy whore; his daughter's a piece of ass. Bereft of DNA and class, his demon son's the Devil's spore. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                             October 6, 2017