Jerry Ward's Blogspot

A DYING DEMOCRACY Lynch, Michael Patrick. Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture .   New York: Liveright, 2019. We live in paradox.   It is a "truth," universally recognized and universally denied in contemporary American society, that democracy is dying.   Recognition that this "truth" is not a "false-truth" can be enhanced by reading Lynch's book in tandem with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) in order to behold what prism refracts conservative and liberal ideologies simultaneously.   What Lynch explores at length   in Know-It-All Society is illuminated with greater brevity in Peter Pomerantsev's "The Info War of All Against All," NYR Daily, August 23, 2019 ---https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/23.   The prism is constituted by use of language...

AFTER SHAKESPEARE winter discontent makes summer glorious a season for sweat where language doesn't so, what sponsors classification of color red/black/yellow/brown/white stains, tragic traces fearing life, loving death metaphors of spring and fall most eloquent all that that's all, that's all. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             August 26, 2019

Yakich, Mark and John Biguenet ,eds.   Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversation about Writing and Resistance.   New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Two keywords caught my attention.   Conversation.   Resistance .   Decent conversation is hard to come by in the Age of Social Media and other technologies designed   to keep people remote from one another even as they connect them.   A real conversation can have immediacy   and be focused on now as much as a tweet, but a conversation is not to be rushed.   Decorum prevails.   Two or more people, in proximity to one another, gradually   work through problems or seek to refine ideas or kill time with memories.   Whether comic or serious or somewhere in between, a conversation is an act of communion. An interview, on   the other hand,   is a probing, an interrogation; it can invade privacy and occasion confessions. Lacking the animation of body...

THE ART OF TIME They achieve notice and wealth, take post-modern license in instant languages, and age into fat Raggedy Ann/Raggedy Andy and poise or pose themselves for the obese brush of Fernando Botero, the baroque Catholic obsessed with cabbage patch padding of bodies so awkward for burial. Thus, they, the painted and the painter remain the grave stuffing of art, the expense of another world. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 15, 2019

THE POVERTY OF EXPLANATION (expanded version) I listen to many hours of "news" on various television stations, especially MSNBC , and quickly realize the visual components of how content (subject matter or topics) is treated is as important as sound elements.   How questions and opinions are presented in the name of informing the public deeply affects what we believe and what use as guides for choices in our daily lives.   Who performs the analysis of content is crucial, because I listen more carefully to anchor persons who suggest they are reasonably serious and "objective" than to those who betray themselves   with body language and voices, with sly grins, choked laughter, and dramatized emotion. Give special notice to the word "suggest" as I use it above, because role-playing and performance are dominant in 21st- century speech acts, assisted by the complexities of social media.   Perhaps communication as always been theatrical or dramatic ...

NOW THEY NORMALIZE Insanity of insanities, the sacred in cultural domains once secular, once peopled with cotton thumbs, cane-slashed backs and bottoms, tobacco eyes and indigo tongues, once unknown but supremely knowable. Yes, those who lied the terror tales once more employ moth-balled reasons to trump their unguarded dread of God and truly false- fake-holy artifacts   which money up the mind locking the bowels of broadcasted souls. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             August 4, 2019

"Democratic Debates" and Four Horses In response to my question I must learn to resist American neo-fascism and survive, must I not? my cousin Michael wrote: The debates seem rather daft, robotic.   I really don't know what to make of them.   I listen to Trump rallies.   Impressive, not that I agree with what he says.   I'm sure he loathes those people who come to his rallies in places like North and South Carolina.   But that's his base, and he certainly puts on a show. There's something blatantly honest about Trump. [Michael Cola, August 1, 2019, email to Jerry Ward] My cousin's words strike me like a revelation that's always been a part of the totality of the histories of the United States of America, like a vision that radio, television, and other technologies help many of us to underestimate.   American citizens are enslaved and tormented by the imperfections of politics.   And what seems deeply painful is t...