fantasy televised


Fantasy Televised

Wesley Morris' article "The Reconciliation Must Be Televised" (New York Times, August 2, 2020, Section AR) is indebted to Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 song poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," but Morris neither tips his hat to Scott-Heron nor to The Last Poets who judiciously criticized people who would "party and bullshit" before a revolution occurred.  Listen to Scott-Heron and to the Last Poets performing "When The Revolution Comes."  And do read Morris's article to gain a sense of the return of the defensive posture and regretful begging to the arenas of racial discourse.

Morris (b. 1975), like many thinkers in his generation, is fascinated with the hegemony of the visual, and it is "normal" ( a word to be used with caution) for this younger generation to assume reconciliation is normal and that it can be televised.  Television is reality, is it not?  Of course it is.  But television is not actuality, My  generation consists of folk born in the 1940s, folk who came of age with the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts and  Black Power Movements. It is difficult for some of us  to entertain the hypocrisy of American reconciliation. Some wounds never heal.

 We have an acute consciousness of what the founding  fathers, the want-to-be gods sundered. They shredded  the color-marked dignity of being human . Once the much-acclaimed brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity is torn apart, reconciliation is impossible. As a technological servant of capitalism, television would betray its purpose if it dared to (re)present  unfiltered actuality, or provided raw, unsweetened  cultural critiques.

Conversations about reconciliation are distractive fantasies. Perhaps it is appropriate that Morris portrays the multi-layered demonstrations in the USA as "the Moment."  He is focusing on a temporal entity endowed with passionate spontaneity and bereft of astute organization.  While television might be a good venue for entertaining us  about the Moment, it is poor instrument for  enabling us to deal with complex historicity.  Moments seem to appear and disappear rather quickly, movements prevail for centuries and mask themselves with hundreds of faces. Discriminating among so many bogus and genuine faces often proves to be a mission impossible.

Morris does not address in as much detail as one might wish how the root causes of American systemic racism preclude authentic reconciliation. He may be too optimistic to acknowledge the viciousness and vacuity of cause and effect modes of thought.  Those modes have successfully delayed meaningful conversations about what it means to be an American.  Given crucial demographic changes in the USA, those conversations have an ice cube's chance in Hell of ever occurring. What little I know about global  truth and race and  reconciliation hardens my lack of optimism.  I am not disposed to chatter on or off any screen about reconciliation that is as death-bound as the systemic  racial contract that shapes social experiments and leaves  democracy in ruins. Reconciliation will not ever  be televised.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 2, 2020

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