Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  WHAT AMERICAN PUBLISHERS SALIVATE TO PUBLISH   Patina Laughter by Ida Howannabe   Bob David Deveaux has been out of federal prison for twenty years, but a White man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.   He did not anticipate hearing that his only son Philip had been murdered along with Philip's Black trans-gendered husband Martin. Bob David had never forgiven his son for being twisted, but he is devastated. Martin's father   Joseph Lee Smith was almost as ashamed of Martin's sexual challenges as Martin was ashamed of his father's being a felon.   Joseph still has contacts in the thugworld and he wants to know who killed his son. Bob David and Joseph Lee make common cause in their quest for revenge. They resolve their racial prejudices as they purge those who killed their sons.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             June 27, 2021  

  ITEMS   Liberty and freedom are not givens. They can only be possessed when inevitable battles are fought and won.   This has been the case for 140 billion years.   Can the weight of human knowledge crush rationality?   Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a friend I have known for 50+ years. For   people who have known one another that long, the   talking is easy.   They trust each other.   They have developed ESP and control the flow of ideas better than the Army Corps of Engineers controls the flow of a river.   If the speakers are black males from Mississippi who graduated from Tougaloo College, they have convictions about social justice, criminal justice, why equity is a better notion than equality , and why representations of slavery   usually avoid discussion of the bloody hands that picked the cotton.   You do not find the bloody hands in Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices or in James Agee's   Now Let Us Praise Famous Men . Representations of

  USCCR   Among all the words devoted to "LIFE MATTERS," few of them deliver tributes to Dr. Mary Frances Berry, a social activist who possesses fierce intelligence and courage.  As chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1993-2004), Dr. Berry served her nation and  global communities   well.  Our typical ingratitude rewards her life and service with relative silence.  Our nation cultivates silence and reluctance to say "Thank you"  to people who work endlessly for the good of the commonweal.  The nation awards them with disdain and hyperactive forgetting.   Starshine, moonshine, and sunshine, being more morally authentic than American citizens in general, do not forget Dr. Mary Frances Berry.  Nor do they fail to remember Dr. Berry's sorors in the schemes of histories. On the first day of summer 2021, vow to transmit vital information about the life and work of Dr. Mary Frances Berry to the young and the yet unborn.  Transmit the same inf

  "K" IS PERSIAN NOW   Khamenei, Khomeini, any "K" will do said King, Kafka, Kennedy   Any "K" will do in dystopia   But when the third "K" assumes the catbird seat a dread thing will be complete   As "K" does in dystopia   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             June 19, 2021

  A POEM TO MOTIVATE A MIND   In the Sankofa sonnet "Frederick Douglass" Robert Hayden created a motive as needful then (1966) as now (2021) for navigating the treachery of world affairs and unstable conditions.   How "superb in love and logic" was Douglass's mind.   It was and remains one model of how a person must quest for "this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful/ and terrible thing, needful to man as air/ usable as earth, when it belongs at last to all…"   Liberty and freedom are not givens, nor does man own the Earth.   The Earth owns all its inhabitants.   In the testimony of one enslaved woman, earth is airth . Perhaps the visual sound of airth can help us to remember our intrusions in air and dirt, the dust of human presence. To remember also how exceptionally reluctant the human mind to assume ownership of guilt in the eyes of Nature. Man follows "the science" and denies the obvious.   Liberty and freedom are not giv

  EXERCISES FOR A SUMMER DAY It is normal to analyze and explain biocultural dynamics of human life; when the analysis is properly connected with the contexts of time or duration, the explanation may be impressive; when theory and theorizing are the motivating drivers, analysis and explanation become the object of doubt.   One instance is the desperation of Svetlana Radtchenko-Drailland's   essay " The Fates of the Human Factor in Science and Contemporary Society at the Era of Digitization."   The premise demands pause:   "The emergence of the discourse of science, the industrial economic   revolutions and then the taylorization have led to the systematic search for human efficiency on the merits of profitability. They allowed from digitized and serialized data to calculate trends and statistically exploit the digitized data of the results of human efficiency and of this cognitive performance."   The sentences communicate Germanic style better than the

  ICONIC GIN AND TONIC   Blame.   Blame and burn.   Blame and burn and disrupt the systemic. Blame the Other. Burn the cities. Disrupt the terrorism of cyberspaces. The life you kill may be your own.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             6/12/2021 4:21:02 AM  

  BLAME RUM AND COKE   Despite traditional admonitions to segregate Literature or art in general   from psychology , sociology, and other soft sciences, many consumers defy the advice.   Film, for example, is a source for clues regarding the spectrum of humanity.   From watching the film Camille (1936)   a viewer can gain insights about why and how certain European women are complicit in their enslavement and the enslaving of others.   The fact that the film is based on the 1848 novel La Dame aux Cam é lias by Alexander Dumas ups the racialized ante. Similar films are Gigi (1958J) and Pretty Woman (1990). These films involve nuanced distinctions between a courtesan and a prostitute, but they preclude forgetting a whore is a whore. That isn't a moral judgment.   It is a clue about the origins of selective white morality.   The films invite speculation about the historical construction of the white male mind, speculation that has value in the current rage for re-examining the

  THE LAST STAGES OF A READING/WRITING LIFE   "My joy shall be full if I shall be able to give a right direction to any one mind…." Frederick Douglass 1854     In the last stage of your life, fantasy invades your imagination---   I CAN READ 767,269, 148 words per minute I CAN WRITE 670, 616, 629 words per hour   Fantasy is fit for nothing other than itself, although writers and reader secretly entertain it.   It remains the "untold" in autobiographies and other kinds of life scribbling. In some instances, dwelling in fantasy is a good defense against the troublems of the world,   You do not assume the fetal   posture of despair from which recovery is impossible. In other instances, it is a slick road to damnation.     If by chance you are a person immune to fantasy, count your blessings. You are more fortunate,   according to expertly designed disinformation, than obscenely wealthy people. When THE END arrives, you and they can be the best

  Poem 78 (for July 31, 2021)   Pious readings spoil things.   This summer  afternoon a dry sweat walks down and up my back, pondering  catholic isolation, so as to be an Irish bull to remind somebody to remember that some Popes give birth to bulls.   On bloody sidewalks the young dance the blue bottom; the old dance tears to confirm fear blooms forever.   In the hot heart of holy cost do kinfolk say mi culpa mi culpa mi grave falta to imitate a more ancient, god-stricken  noise: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ?   Beware of the languages that imprison life. Until you die, if you should live so long, an iron cage shall be a halo of your debatable sanctity. Your poverty, of course, is beyond dispute, as you linger in cupidity.   In the fruition of elderhood, blame not your kin; you have a monopoly on flaws.   On bloody sidewalks the young dance the blue bottom; the old dance tears to confirm fear bloo

  SOFT HUMANITIES AND HARD SCIENCES   The buzz imperative "follow the science"   associated with COVID-19 pandemic is vague.   Which science is to be followed?   The imperative is a mantra, a formula for belief.   Few people ask which science is to be followed. Science or "normal science" as described in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions   is an evolving complex of experimentation and observation; the process has limits; it is not absolutely objective . In the current practice of everyday thinking, the science is accorded magic authority. It locates faith where scrutiny ought to prevail.     That is a clue about our rarely, if ever, being instructed to "follow the humanities."   C. P. Snow's 1959 treatise The Two Cultures ( which is justly discredited) still haunts the American mind as much as Allan Bloom's   1987 elite critique The Closing of the American Mind . Bloom's subtitle "How Higher Education Ha

  NOTES OF THE DAY     Some tropes punish --- a cat-of-nine tails snapped by an invisible hand --- lash after parallel lash liberating the mind/body to embellish pain with invisible blood. The ritual is commonplace, a normality in human   histories. When you recognize the hand that is killing you is your own, do not surrender. Celebrate yourself with the irony of wrath.   This is one of many aesthetic responses to Camille Rankine's poem "Ways to Disappear" as you process this   question ---- "Invisible to whom?"   Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed : A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America .   New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021.   Smith's book should be read by all the people who read in New Orleans.   "We have no excuse for our vast historical ignorance of our own culture." Cleophus Thomas, Jr.   "The recognition of self, or self--reflection, assumes the prese

  A NATIION OF LIARS AND OUTLIERS   The wounds of human history cannot be healed.   They may over several thousand years seem to disappear, but they break open and bleed afresh and do not announce their reappearance.   People who pray, arm themselves with the myth that hope springs eternal, and go about trying to be good and intimate with diversity deserve a modicum of respect.   Stress modicum.   Throughout   human history, people who dwell in doubt have had the advantage   of   getting attention and surviving.   Mr. David Walker was one such person.   Truth is a bitter cocktail. A   glass of milk reinforced with toxins. Human history is the special property of liars and outliers who worship chaos.   How otherwise explain our failure to confirm, without doubt, that peace on Earth has ever existed?   My friends   are alarmed by my pessimism.   So too are my enemies. It is cool that they should be so moved.   Their alarm is a signal they are not   sleeping in reprehensible ignor