Southern Studies


PRE-TRUTH SPLINTERS

                According to recent reports from humanists, the new scholarship in studies of the U.S. South/souths is a strange fruit of amazing grace.  As the trend is projected by the Modern Language Association's group LLC Southern United States, we find that students, teachers, and random blueneck intellectuals are being urged to suspend disbelief.  Or maybe they are being implored to add pre-truth splinters to their diets.  Making sense of things is an arduous chore for Southerners born before 1968.

                The South is no longer a state of mind to be misrepresented  by bloody romance and mythology.  It is a matrix of crime and punishment, a confederacy of artificial intelligence, a digital plantation.  Folklore and fakelore have begun to spawn and swarm.  People in the South are condemned to be actors in the theatre of the absurd.  The absurd is the neo- norm.  Please do not sing or hum "Amazing Grace,"  because peace has no intention of being still.  People are subjects and objects of geoslavery, the peculiar institution of emerging technologies. Snapchat, for example, is a whip "in conversation" with a colorblind back.  People no longer talk to or with one another.  They "text."  They are separate and equal entities.

                The human mind is truly Pandora's box of inventions, and the new scholarship which is constructed of pre-truth splinters is not disappointing.  It is worthy of applause.  It is useful to know that Southern sexuality is a hologram.  And we may all become better American citizens as soon as we swallow and digest the alternative political fact that Democrats are whiteneck figments of Republican imagination.  Rednecks are drunk with the moonshine of revenge as they riot on the grounds of Academe.  In the Age of Trump, the United States of America is suddenly Southern.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 2, 2018

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