Living Against the Times


TO LIVE AGAINST THE TIMES



On Wednesday, April 4, 2018, I shall remember an assassination on April 4, 1968.  As I fly from New Orleans to Chicago, the finality of death will monopolize my thinking.  The end is promised, and it never fails to deliver.  I shall remember and protect myself against the cultural amnesia that the Tribe of Trump bids our nation to embrace.  I shall not forget.  And I have yet to arrive at a point from which I can forgive our nation for its dedicated barbarity.  Although my mother's name was Mary, my conception was not immaculate.  My name is Jerry not Jesus. I am not obligated to perform salvation on a cross.



To the extent that I embrace a fluid, Roman Catholic understanding of how sin is constructed and why it flourishes within the operations of capitalism, I am aware that I belong to a sin-saturated Church , that I have citizenship in a nation wherein sin is a palpable virtue.  There is small profit in being orthodox by any measure. Or, as I informed an audience at the 2018 Tennessee Williams Festival, no one is entitled to claim that she or he is innocent. All Americans are complicit in the production of a United States "history"  (a speculative narrative at best) that rewards sin (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) with delusions of goodness.  Blessed is the American who is ignorant in the name of patriotism and who is capable of sinning without a twinge of conscience.  She or he will be justly rewarded with Biblical blindness until death brings the shock of vision.



I survive what is casually called "the times" by living against them, choosing my terms of engagement with calculated discretion, and trusting no one without first spending decades in reading the person's character.  I survive by assuming that human beings are fundamentally evil  and that they have the potential  to be just and decent and to do good things for the benefit of humanity.  Unlike a few of my friends who still hold fast to dreams of a better future, I gave up the will to dream on April 4, 1968 when I heard Duke Ellington announce, at a Tougaloo College concert in New York, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead.  His death enlightened me about the hype of American hope.  After fifty years, I refuse to be bamboozled by it.  I live against the times in a spiritual location of actuality rather than in a secular address of reality. A death is a death is a death.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 31, 2018

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