Tantalizing Tragedies


TANTALIZING TRAGEDIES AND USA LIFE

Were we sufficiently informed about the classified  designs of the NIH,  FBI, CIA, CDC, NSA and a few other government agencies, we would flavor each meal or snack with dread.  Each tick of the clock would be the noise of a bullet or of an eardrum shattered by a massive explosion; each ballot, an opportunity gone wrong.  How normal it would be to burn our absurdly priced garments and footwear and  baptize ourselves with those ashes.  Without discrimination among genders, ethnicities, and economic status,  the posture of Job would be the only posture.  Neither "The Star-Spangled Banner" nor "Lift Every Voice and Sing" would ever be heard.  Either Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," Curtis Mayfield's "Underground," or Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" would be the anthem of choice. The most revolutionary patriots among us would protest and sing praise hymns for the salvation of death.

 Our minds would be our metaphors. Our nation would be the simultaneous hell and heaven of  nowhere.
 
We are not informed.  We are sentenced to suffer  enslavement to hope!  Despite our common sense and better selves, we demand (and get) illusions of progress.  We are condemned to rob, bad mouth, murder, hate, and rape our fellow citizens with glorious alacrity.  We are confused and confusing.  And we are decidedly uncertain about to whom the pronoun "we" might refer.

Laugh. Do not panic. Laugh. Find solace in memories of  once upon a time before the advent of the Age of Trump. Laugh. The patron saint of the USA is Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade.  The Bible is Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo." Laugh. Our manifested destiny is a single grape of wrath.  Laugh. Tulajit.  Laugh. Tikkun Leil Shabbat. Laugh.


Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 30, 2018
 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Tell Them We Are Rising

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                       Scene: Ash é Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA Act:   PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities" Purpose:   To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ash é Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018) Brief report on TAKE ONE                 My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them fo
Read more