Jerry Ward's Blogspot

NATIONAL DISGRACE :   A tantalizing novella Although we ought not confuse the news (daily, fact-checkable,   non-fiction stories and commentaries) with literature (combinations of the news and imagined possibilities for which there are no facts to check), it is often tempting, even impossible, to avoid doing so. Narratives excavate passions; they implant ideas.   People who give scant attention to classifying and evaluating narratives seem to get on with life better than people who are preoccupied with   literary and/or cultural criticism. It is wrongheaded, however, to   assume they are innately inferior to people who delight in theorizing everything.   They are not. They simply abuse visual and verbal fallacies differently. We are not omniscient.   Our critical thinking can be compromised by ideology and the magnet of common sense. As Barbara Christian suggested   in her famous essay "The Race for Theory "(1987), language has equal op...

SOME HUMANISTS SHOULD NOT GO TO PRISON The title Why All Humanists Should Go to Prison    is ambiguous and ironic, a good match for the argument Alex Tipei made in The Chronicle of Higher Education , September 25, 2018.   Tipei is a liberal idealist who wishes to convince academics that "humanists can at once help reimagine the prison as a space of reform and reaffirm the humanities as a relevant mode of learning."   Her argument is provocative.   It reminds us that outmates can learn a great deal   from volunteering to teach inmates, can learn what the art of teaching might be in the panoptical confines of a jail or prison.   Nevertheless, Tipei fails to specify which humanists are fit to have face-to-face conversations with inmates.   We know that a substantial number of humanists have difficulty in communicating their expertise to outmates in public settings. Ought we not have   second and third thoughts about how effectively th...

SMALL CRAFT WARNING In the market of ideas, wisdom and stupidity coexist without enmity . The historically omnipresent secrecy and silence regarding male violence is linked to its social construction as a private problem sequestered behind impermeable domestic walls, rather than a social problem deserving political attention. Angela Y. Davis. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism . New York: Vintage, 1998):28. The impersonal unchanging divinity of which Aristotle speaks, the metaphysical   contemplation of which furnishes man with specific and ultimate telos , can itself take no interest in the merely human, let alone in the dilemmatic; it is nothing other than thought timelessly thinking itself and conscious of nothing but itself. Alasdair MacIntyre.   After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981):158. Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, thei...

THE CHALLENGE OF NOVEMBER 6, 2018 The October 2018 issue of The Atlantic poses a tricky YES/NO question: Is Democracy Dying? How a voter or potential voter replies to such a question is equally tricky.   Should you respond by considering that "democracy" refers to one of several options for naming an American   social contract, an abstraction, or by pondering your lived experiences of what has transpired in your exchanges with your fellow citizens and your thinking about   or refusal to think about American history as a complex story of practices and motives?   Whatever the case might be, arriving at a conclusion you are willing to live with is not easy.    Whatever might be the case, you are existentially enslaved to make a choice. People in Louisiana, especially in Orleans Parish, ought to be fully "woke" regarding choices. Matters are as serious as that.   And theatricals predicated on a gnashing of teeth come November 7, 208 shall be no...

THE TIME OF TRUMP Remote from nature, time so flush with fools can drink the water's fire. September 20, 2018.

VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES Our constructions of "reality" convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as "natural" as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation.   The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men.   We are socialized in the United States   to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies.   This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit . We can imagine relatively violence-free   male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored   and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so.   The American majority   has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire   and the lurid patterns of blood leaking...

MORAL CRISIS REVISITED Floyd Hayes and I share a strong interest in Richard Wright's legacy, especially in how Cross Damon, the protagonist of The Outsider (1953),   often articulates philosophical ideas in the novel more powerfully than   Wright could in his non-fiction.   It seems that fictive propositions which can't be fact-checked have greater appeal than those refuted by evidence of what has happened in reality or actuality.   For this reason, several million Americans believe in 2018 that   Donald Trump tweets "the truth" daily as he propagates tiny segments of the great American novel. Does fiction confirm the death of the Truth and the immortality of the Lie? I will not stay for an answer.   I'll just assert that fiction enables Hayes and me to enjoy   productive disagreements about how the human mind constructs knowledge. The brief email exchange we had about my blog on "Moral Crisis in New Orleans" ( see Appendix A ) is a capital ...