A Choice


COLD WAR DIRT AND FASCISM'S FERTILIZER



Understanding why fascism is thriving in the United States of America in 2019 pivots on inquiry about the human will for power, especially its manifestations in ideological compacts which reinforce vulgar ideas regarding social order and disorder.  The will for power functions also in American practices of democracy and communism, in the totality of narratives created in the name of history. 

Inquiry is not easy and neat.  It is messy, as messy as the entanglements that characterize the actual, the real, and the fantastic. Thus, we must hold fast to doubts about the capacity of language to provide us with "truth."  Language  provides data, information that is either instructive or deceptive, prompts for laughter and cause for tears.  Neither foe nor friend, language (an array of American English with grace notes from non-English languages) in the USA is more or less a necessary, convenient, demonizing and enthralling instrument .  The instrument is amoral.  American citizens are complicit and culpable in its usage. There's the rub that endlessly delays access to more than relative, provisional "truths." And one of those "truths" is this: the pre- and post-Cold War dirt is at once soil and fertilizer for fascism.  Like our 1950s ancestors, we are existentially constrained to pledge allegiance to abstractions, to "democracy," to "communism," to "fascism."

From my perspective, the most attractive albeit temporary  escape from the constraint for African American peoples  is to think and behave aggressively as did Cross Damon in Richard Wright's The Outsider and to eschew the defensive posture of Bigger Thomas in Wright's Native Son.  That choice is the catalyst for an authentic revolution in a pre-future.  Dislocate language in the space of action.  Dismiss love. Intensify our will for pure power, not for boundless  freedom or compromised liberation.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            June 23, 2019

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