Let Us Lament

 LET US LAMENT ON TUESDAY MORNING

 

I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.

Lamentations 3.1

 

Pandemic is the rod; so too is our language; we are distracted by tantalizing desire for an ending. Like absurd characters we are waiting for perdition.  Media torments us as we wait. The New York Times conducts daily interrogations of the actual and the real. Whether it is in print or online, the newspaper signs, seals and delivers us to fascist confusions. Cancel culture afflicts us with cognitive cancer.  We hang between Kraft durch Freude and Kraft durch Freud.

 

On May 17, Michelle Goldberg, an NYT opinion columnist, offered "Kushner's Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed."  She tried to persuade readers that "the Abraham Accords, the ersatz Middle East peace plan," which Kushner helped to construct, was a bribe.  The United States wanted Arab and Muslim nations to believe Israel and Palestine were having nothing more than "a real-estate dispute."  They have been having a deadly, inhumane  dispute since 1947.Goldberg bothers not to expose the historical grounds of dispute, but she does make one stunning claim about America's role in fomenting a world-threatening crisis.  The violence between Israel and Palestine "in recent days makes clear something that should never have been in doubt: justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace.  And one reason there has been so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the United States.."

  [[ Reason is because? Goldberg , you must use a noun or a noun clause instead of "because" in this expression .  An English teacher deplores your carelessness. ]]  Despite the faux pas, Goldberg does make a valid point.

 

In a gesture of providing its readers with balance, the NYT juxtaposes Goldberg's opinion with the opinion of Bret Staples in "If the Left Got Its Wish for Israel."  He bids us to imagine "an alternative universe in which an enlightened Israeli government did almost  everything progressive America  demanded of it."  Stephens envisions a dystopian nightmare that would disadvantage Jewish Israelis as Hamas replenished "its arsenal with more powerful guided munitions, able to reach any target in Israel." That is so unnecessary, according to Staples, because "plenty of licit goods reach Gaza today."  Where is the evidence that his claim is true?

 

Both opinions warrant fact-checking.  They are both reminders that we live in a neo-fascist nation that has imperial longings, that has a Right which uses pandemic and cancel culture to drive citizens into obedient madness.  Such preconditions for concentration camps on American soil we do not need. We need more civility and less fascism  in our uses of political languages.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 18, 2021

 

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Musings, February 8-9, 2021

    MUSINGS OF THE DAY   The mother- and father-ships of sanity have landed   Let our enemies of whatever color they be know this as we eradicate them with the tools of insanity.   Mr. Ramcat informed me this morning that I need to tie up loose ends and thank all the people who have made my life a rich and satisfying experience of 77+ years.   If you deserve my gratitude, you know who you are.   Four quotations to brighten the day------   "I don't regret my years as a prosecutor assigned to juvenile court.   In some ways, I think it is why I was put on this earth." ---Daphne R. Robinson   "While there are books and articles concentrating on young black men in the social sciences and education, thee has been comparatively little input from scholars in the arts and humanities/" Howard Rambsy II   "The hashtag 'black lives matter,' which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and int
Read more