Blog1.25.2021

 

January 25, 2021

 

 

Vicious divisions among American citizens multiply from one day to the next.  If we know some basic facts about the evolving narratives of what we glibly call American and world histories, we do not beg ignorance in bad faith. We do not delude ourselves into thinking the narratives speak for all the Constitution-protected American citizens.  Actuality delivers a mean punch. We erupt in despair, even if we think despair is an apt name for what Maximus Wright calls "soul damage." The time-walking wretchedness so eloquently voiced by David Walker and Frantz Fanon is a legacy to be argued with.

 

Emerging technologies and the suspect whims of journalists who manufacture the "news" from many angles do an excellent job making awareness of division inevitable. "News" consumes us more than we consume it. In a special philosophical sense, the news is a covert agent of enslavement. Ultimately, we become enslaved to the existential imperative of endless resistance.  Do not take my words as sufficient.  Believe nothing other than the intimate conversations  you reluctantly have with your psyche.

 

 Fine words ancient and modern  do little to relieve the anguish some of us feel.  All the current talk about reconciliation, reunification, transforming palpable injustice into viable justice, robust hope, transcendent faith, and selfless charity or compassion ----all this talk amounts to a debilitating pandemic of noise. Never in all my 77 years has the notion of a unified American population been exactly real for me. Since the early months of  2020, the idea of unification as become a most surreal fiction. I think political language and the uncertain ideology for which it stands are cognitive death-traps.

  

The reason upon which one could depend, with ample qualifications,  in time past has been either minimized or abandoned by large numbers of Americans. The American democratic experiment is not dead, but it is rapidly falling in love with the colors of fascism. Culturally different versions of this phenomenon are global.

 

 It is rare to have any cross-ideological conversations for which the common ground is reason.  The prospect that reason might vanish in some ill-lit digital space is repulsive, because the prospect is a forecast for the loss of humanity as we once knew it. We are shrouded in dread.   Yes, we will continue to be human in some sense and to yearn for the abstract ideals of freedom, but 21st century humanity will have all the properties of a  bitch monster. Humanity will become more profane, more willing to express its diverse frustrations in acts of terrorism and a surplus of unfettered profanity. Obama's audacity of hope has become Hughes' raisin in the sun. I do not think the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense is equipped to manage fruitcake American citizens, to restore the fictive rules of law and order which have evaded our nation for almost 300 years.

 

 I am always too aware of the potholes, fault lines, and cognitive walls in American history/herstory, and of how the gendered descriptions his/her + story highlight divisions.  It might be argued that WWII was a period of approximate unification, but even then the fact of segregation in the American military gave the lie to the myth of unification. The lies constituted by systemic whatever are exceptionally powerful.  During the current pandemic, the telling of lies is stronger than efforts to speak truth.  We are severely limited  by the rhetorical motions we make.

 

My reading and writing and thinking have become double-edged activities, obvious instances of paradox. They cut me twice.  They give me some relief from total anxiety.  They provide information that confirms discomfort.  It is a no-win situation.  My recent blogs and poems are so akin to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, although my motives contrast strongly with those of Dostoevsky's unnamed narrator.

 

We have seen the world's cruelty, its face devoid of cosmetics.  Let us try to be safe and sane as we cultivate our gardens which can't ever be Eden, cultivate them with a pragmatic economy of ancestral wisdom.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

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