January 15, 2018


JANUARY 15, 2018

                In a mind-grabbing  monologue, Hamlet considers the monstrous difference between what is performed on a stage and what he must perform in his life.  Admitting that he is "a rogue and peasant slave," indeed an ass who " must  like a whore unpack [ his ] heart with words," he concludes:



I'll have grounds / More relative than this --the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King. (Hamlet II. ii, 603-605)



Does the Age of Trump demand that a few of us imitate Hamlet and try to catch the conscience of a person who devotes his life to sound and fury?  Yes. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2018 is as good a time as any to do so.



                Elsewhere I have suggested that we have a conversation with David Walker and Ida B. Wells, so that we will better understand what we may choose to celebrate on January 15, 2018.  The conversation can prevent our becoming drunk and stupid with hope for things that shall never come to be.  The conscience of the President cannot be caught.  One can't catch what apparently does not exist.  While I respect our need to remember and honor the sacrifices of Dr. King and local people fifty years ago, I find that meaningful work and critical thought  wherever we live is better than yet another celebration.  Since the death of Dr. King, change in our nation has been cosmetic.  The horrors of system and the systemic that we knew in 1968 are yet with us.



                Consider that celebration is related to an idea Thomas Carlyle had when he lectured on heroes and hero-worship and the hero in history on May 5, 1840:



Some spectators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion: mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did believe it, ----merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the name of sane to believe it!  It will be often our duty to protest against this sort of hypothesis about men's doing and history; and I here, on the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism and to all other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in this world.  They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up.



After finding one's way out of the maze of Carlyle's Victorian prose, one may have a surer understanding of from what quackery, priestcraft, and dupery in contemporary American life comes.  It comes from the mindlessness of the hero-worship ( intense admiration) Carlyle spoke of 178 years ago, a habit still championed by his many ideological heirs, our fellow-citizens who adamantly refuse to see the monstrous difference between dramatic celebrations and quintessential necessity of keeping it real.



I am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be.  I heed the warnings of David Walker, Ida B. Wells and hundreds of ancestral spirits who chant on January 15, 2018: BE WARY AND BEWARE OF THOSE WHO WEAR A LION'S MANE FOR HAIR.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 9, 2018

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