National Disgrace


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 opportunity to mystify and clarify.  Time, psychological or philosophical disposition, language  and situation  establish crucial difference(s)  in the management of the real and the actual. The language we use in setting terms of engagement determines the quality of what we claim to know.

A good example or spectacular instance of how American citizens are called upon to know something in  making  sense of political affairs is the phenomenon of hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee to determine whether  a  person should be confirmed as a justice of the United States Supreme Court.  What are the actual components of the hearings?  What are the real aspects of the hearings? What can be known about the person?  What shall never be known?  What precisely does an allegation of sexual impropriety expose?

 Oddly, knowing may necessitate  a collapsing of fiction and non-fiction in order  to speak of the hearings as a national disgrace that maximizes national division.  In 21st century American politics, disgrace and the absurd  are normal, and confusion may be the road to knowing. Let us consider that the testimonies of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee  on September 27, 2018 constitute the text of a tantalizing novella framed by the equally tantalizing contexts of what we accept as the news. It is germane to use the very procedures that allow us to make sense of "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James and "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville to make sense of what was almost objectively recorded by C-SPAN 3.  The fact that we must deal with this text as partisan political theatre, an entity performed in the swamp of our nation's capital, authorizes profound uncertainty. We can only know what the text means within the limits of empirical aesthetics. Somewhere in another country of time, history will tell us that this text was a laxative for all American citizens.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 28, 2018

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