Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Implacable Violence, Part One The death of Senator John McCain quickens our   interest in how to deal with contemporary   narratives of life history.   McCain's touchstone story pertains to American conservative values, the consequences of trauma,   military and public service, violence, and   a sense of honor.   Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence, the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of "race."   Narratives about McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of sexism, constipated values,     inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism, sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service.   Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set. Violence is a common denomina

LEARNING AGAINST THE GRAIN As a sponsored ministry of the Congregation of St. Joseph, People Program in New Orleans is an opportunity for senior citizens to participate in learning communities during   fall, spring, and summer sessions. The absence of a winter session may be a psychological advantage: the elderly and near elderly can enjoy leaves, flowers, and one another's company and give scant attention to ice or nude branches.   They can experience again what many of them took for granted in childhood and youth ----unfettered joy in acquiring knowledge.   Offering an eclectic range of courses   ---Lost Gospels,   Reading and Playing Music: Beginners,   Ukrainian Egg Design,   Zumba Gold, Bridge, and so forth,   People Program is a site for fun.   Many of the participants are retired teachers, and they value the life of the mind. On August 20, 2018, I amplified the simple   email message I'd sent to "students" who signed up for M402: Five African American

KRAZY KATZ KATAZTROPHY   Mother Wit and imagination can sometimes force the most devout believers in racial superiority in the United States of America to eat   their errors. Consider George Herriman and Ron Stallworth. Their life histories     are   instructive examples of how much can be accomplished through the agencies of silence and sound.   Herriman, one of the nation's most gifted cartoonists, remained silent about the African dimensions of his Creole heritage, perfected his art, and passed into American cultural literacy.   Stallworth, a police officer in Colorado Springs, spoke" whitely" enough to fool David Duke's ear in 1979 and   published his memoir BlacKkKlansman (2014), which Spike Lee has translated into the film BlacKkKlansman (2018). Time revolves mysteriously, its goodness to perform.   C. Liegh McInnis, an astute critic, suggested " BlacKkKlansman is evidence that " Spike Lee is at the top of his game. The writing, acti

LETTER TO AN INMATE IN NEW ORLEANS                                                                                                                                                 August 18, 2018 Dear Mr.___________,                 The older I become, the more receptive I am to believing that life is a matter of simplexity:   complex questions that beget simple answers or responses.   I accept the limits of our human minds.   I reject, however, the notion that our human will should become, to quote Langston Hughes, a raisin in the sun.   We are not immune to periods of depression.   We can't avoid them.   We can defeat extreme depression through prayers to a Supreme Being and by discovering and exercising our talents, by rejecting platitudes about hope and dreams and taking actions that enable us to overcome the absurdity of life!                 You ask what you are "going to do with a GED at the age of seventy five (75)?"   You will write! You w

RUBBER SHEET LANGUAGE America.   Great. Make again. Make great America again. America make again. Great, Again America great make. Great make again America, So beautiful, America, for burning skies. So angry, America, for waiving gains. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 15, 2018

AN INDIGENOUS MOMENT Each day the POTUSA tries, with energetic desperation, to make our nation's flawed social/racial contract worse and to suggest that he is empowered to ignore portions of the United States Constitution which don't dovetail with his whims.   2018 is a year for sorrow .   On the other hand, we can still smoke the Sacred White Buffalo Pipe of the Lakota. Dakota & Nakota Great Sioux Nation. "After the fulfillment of the Mending of the Sacred Hoop Prophecy," according to Chief Arvol Looking Horse, "we understood that a recognized day of Global Healing must occur in order to teach the Global Community the inescapable need to heal and unite in the name of Peace."   Reaching out to the spirit of my Choctaw great-grandmother, I beg permission to speak. Sage and cherry branch. Reaching inward to the spirits of my multi-ethnic West African ancestors, I apologize to the descendants of   indigenous peoples for the genocide where

MORAL CRISIS IN NEW ORLEANS New Orleans is "celebrating" 300 years of moral crisis, but many of its citizens, elected officials and the tourists they host daily assume otherwise.   Their ideas are Trump-flavored rather than properly seasoned with the holy trinity of Creole/Cajun cuisine.   They simply transgress.   Thus, Timothy David Ray's   recent plea for support of City Council Resolution R-18-344 can appear to be a poignant supplement to prayer to Our Lady of Prompt Succor for help in dealing with violence, murder, and racism.   Or it may appear as a supplement to admonitions from Lloyd Dennis and the Silverback Society. It is easy to forget the gravity of Ray's plea as you get out there and listen to live, local music. "The psychological trauma of constant violence witnessed by young children," Ray contends, "does not only breed an inclination to violence in them, but also an apathy towards human life and respect for one's own

PARALLEL PARADOX Yes.   Word was in the bright bland narrow broad streets law's violence; violence's law. Warn Lex.   Warn Dice. Yes.   The mass destruction of a gun rives love, brain matter, and life until from a splash of blood a rose arrives. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 8, 2018

THE STUPIDITY OF ABSOLUTE BELIEF The stupidity of absolute belief is an opiate that undermines the power of critical thought.   It is better to err in excessive disbelief than to be numbed by faith, an example of belief taken to extremes.   While the irrationality of faith is innocent enough in matters of religion and spirituality, it is diabolical in matters of American political life in 2018.   This hypothesis, of course, must be tested by   gathering of empirical evidence.   Otherwise, a person marinates in bad faith. As I waited for a conversation between Representative Cedric Richmond and Senator Elizabeth Warren to begin at Dillard University on August 3, I read several chapters of Chaim Perelman's The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982).   His philosophical arguments about rhetoric could possibly put iron in my resolve to avoid being deceived by talk, however progressive the chatter might be.   Warren and Richmond were obligated to a

THREE AMERICAN POETS                 When writers speak with one another, ideas come into being.   In a conversation I had with C. Liegh McInnis a few months ago, he mentioned William Henry Holtzclaw and Booker T. Washington.   His comments triggered a bit of memory about Holtzclaw and Edward Smyth Jones( 1881-1968), about Holtzclaw's extending aid to Jones in his time of need. Giving a helping hand to someone is not a literary act.   But in this instance, it is a small act of compassion that gives birth to a certain literary brightness and radical commenting on the black writing we understand African American literature to be. We may refer to a few of us who swim with deliberate purpose against the tides of literary and cultural studies.                 Sterling A. Brown swam with the tides of his time, noting in Negro Poetry and Drama (1937) --- "Edward Smythe Jones' The Sylvan Cabin is pompously literary, none of his verses being a poetic as