American Crises

 

 

A PERMANENT SENSE OF AMERICAN CRISES

 

The unholy trinity (COVID-19, chaos, and climate change) and various forms of instant communication maximize our sense of crisis in minds and bodies.   Crisis has a long, vexed history in the U.S.A.  It was, is, and will be inevitable in our daily lives.  American alacrity for believing that crisis is "normal" ought to give us pause.

 

When MLA President Judith Butler tells us that "[t]he crisis of the humanities is all around us, proclaimed by the popular press and suffered perhaps most acutely by our graduate students in their bones" (MLA Newsletter 52.1 (Spring 2020): 2, I immediately think of how government  divides and conquers the humanities and the sciences, how the State works 24/7/365 to keep the American public in confusion and to maximize animosity among citizens.  Graduate students do not suffer more acutely than the unemployed or  elders or the  people targeted by demonic systemic racism. I have no reason to attach Butler's person, but I do attach her  comment on the grounds that I am post-weary of crying in the humanities.  My early education in the sciences positions me to be less than sympathetic with institutionalized weeping.  Many of our crises would be less severe if a race of women and men would "rise and take control."  They would not be resolved.  They would become slightly less painful.

 

Constantly expanding discussion of COVID-19 makes health, illness, the necessity of healing, and the inevitability of dying the subjects for self-analysis of pathology.  Pathology is reflected variously in all forms of American writing.  We are saturated with  pathology, especially in the growing number of ZOOMs devoted to contemporary social  issues.  That fact ought to support bold efforts in education higher and lower to train students outside and inside  disciplines to critique crisis and to move beyond mere critique into positive actions to retard a rather obvious disintegration of global humanity in the 21st century.  Such training may require another century of resisting policies and invisible enslavements which are designed to make genocide one of many crises.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      10/13/2020 10:45:51 AM

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